We Burn Beautiful

Chapter 1

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Then he created Kent Fox. When he said “Let there be light,” I hadn’t realized he’d meant the light that poured out of Kent, directly at me.

When he said “Let us make mankind in our image,” I realized just how stunning the Almighty actually was.

I was thirteen when the boy with tangled curls and big, brown, puppy-dog eyes joined my life’s trajectory. He was confusion. Chaos. Consumption. Kent Fox enveloped me, wrapping himself around my life like Jesus’ shroud. I am a man made up of regrets, but Kent has never been one of them.

The schoolhouse wasn’t like any schoolhouse I’d seen before. It was just a navy-blue home in a residential area. A repurposed three-bedroom house that had been gutted and shaped into the image Brother Blankenship saw fit. That’s what Momma told me, at least.

I hadn’t understood why my parents called him Brother when we didn’t know the man from Adam, but Daddy had explained that in the evangelical community, it was just how things were done. Brothers and Sisters in Christ.

“Hands,” my mother said as she rooted through her purse, looking for who knows what.

We’d been standing on the porch for over five minutes, waiting for someone to answer the door.

I’d asked her why, if it was a schoolhouse, we needed to knock.

Rather than answer, she’d done what she often did.

Turned her attention away from me. Instead of a simple ‘it’s the polite thing to do, Grayson,’ she’d ignored me the same way she did with the nonbelievers who lived two doors down, back home in Arkansas.

If she didn’t acknowledge them, they didn’t exist. And, in turn, if she didn’t pay me a bit of attention, she could pretend it didn’t exist. The little part of me that made me unworthy.

Heck, I didn’t even know what that part of me was, but it had always been there.

This invisible wall that kept her at arm’s length.

She wasn’t like that with my brother, Trevor.

She doted on him like he was the king of England or something.

After five minutes of uncomfortable silence, a woman appeared in the doorway, a smile cracked right across her face, bigger than any I’d ever seen before. It was warmth and sunshine and an overwhelming sense of joy.

The woman—Sister Thorpe, she’d called herself—traipsed through the home-turned-private school as if she were walking on air.

Her high heels clacked against the floorboards, each step reverberating around us through the narrow hallway.

Ahead of us, at the end of the hall, was an open doorway leading to what seemed to be a kitchen.

To the left, two doors were opened, and as we passed the first room, I spotted a pair of toddlers wandering around aimlessly.

One was holding a crucifix molded out of playdough, and the other had his hands in the air like he was praising God.

The next room housed the middle-schoolers.

Inside, there was a woman in a long denim skirt sitting at a desk, reading a book.

Makeshift cubicles lined the sides of the room, each cubby facing the wall.

Despite the overwhelming number of desks in such a small enclosure, there were only three school kids in the room.

Two boys were at their desks, scribbling in workbooks, and there was a girl standing in front of a long, rectangular table in the middle of the room.

She had two books in front of her and a red pen in her hand.

I wasn’t sure what she was doing, and I didn’t get a chance to ask, because Sister Thorpe took my hand and led me toward the room on the right.

Her hands felt like velvet against mine.

Soft and warm, not like Momma’s. Momma's felt like ice cubes most of the time.

Just like the classroom before, the door was open.

As Sister Thorpe turned around and spoke with my mother about scripture, I peered inside.

The room was just as big as the middle-schoolers’, the main difference being the amount of students.

Inside, roughly fifteen kids were sitting at their desks, and the only sound in the room was a CD boombox that was playing Flower in the Rain by Jaci Velasquez—one of my favorites.

The room was beige, both in color and in spirit.

Crucifixes were spread across the walls, none of which seemed to be placed with care.

A black cross that looked like it was made of iron was hanging low, right above a brunette girl’s desk.

For her sake, I hoped it had been securely fastened, because it looked heavy enough to crack her head wide open if it fell.

Sister Thorpe smiled down at me, waiting for an answer to a question I hadn’t heard. I stalled, shoving my hands into my pockets again, just needing an outlet for the bumblebees buzzing around in my stomach.

Her smile seemed kind. Almost overly so. She pointed at an empty desk toward the back of the room. “Sugar, why don’t you go in and get settled? We’ve got your workbooks ready; pens and pencils and the like. I just need to go over a few more things with your mother.”

I turned toward my mother, seeking her approval.

She had that look in her eyes. The one she had before we moved to West Clark, two weeks ago.

It was anger and venom bubbling under the surface, waiting for me to make one wrong move.

She had that look a lot, back before my parents sat my brother and I down and told us everything was going to be normal again.

No more fighting. No more late nights at the dealership for Daddy.

No more feeling like it was all my fault, even though I didn’t know why.

“What do you say to Mrs. Thorpe, Gray?” Momma said with a twist of annoyance coating the words.

“Thank you Mrs.—I mean Sister Thorpe. I promise, I’m gonna be on my best behavior.

I ain’t gonna give you any trouble.” I looked up at Momma, wanting to make sure she was happy with my answer, but she was turned toward the wall, staring at a framed drawing of Jesus one of the students must’ve done.

In it, Jesus had these big blue eyes that almost seemed to be looking back at me—right into my soul.

Sister Thorpe leaned down, tapping the tip of my nose with her finger, and chuckled.

“You’re precious.” She had a genuine smile on her face, like meeting me was the highpoint of her day.

Her voice was soft and meek, with an almost childlike innocence to it.

“Why don’t you go and get settled at that desk in the back.

Your neighbor isn’t much of a morning person, so if he’s in a bad mood, don’t take it personally.

” Her finger tilted to the left, pointing at a boy who was slumped over his desk with his head down.

She was staring at me, but she aimed her next question at my mother.

“Has your family settled on a church home yet?”

Momma opened her checkbook and clicked the tip of her pen before scribbling across the paper. Without looking up, she said, “Martin took us to Harmony Methodist last Sunday, but we’ve always been Baptists.”

Sister Thorpe gasped, and if she’d been wearing pearls, I was sure she would’ve been clutching them.

“Oh, sweety, no. Now, I’m not generally one to push their beliefs on others, but that’s a line I’m going to have to cross today.

” She flicked her wrist toward the classroom and smiled down at me, ushering me forward.

I smiled back, because she seemed like a really nice lady.

As I made my way in, I overheard her telling my mother about a man named Reverend Thomas who had just been caught doing something called ‘fornicating’ with the church secretary.

I’d heard that word before, back when we were still in Arkansas.

For the Reverend's sake, I hoped his wife hadn’t cut up all his clothes the same way Momma had with Daddy’s.

Inside the room, the atmosphere felt robotic.

Each child was facing the wall, sitting in those same cubicles I’d seen in the other room.

The desks, it seemed, were just really long planks of plywood that had been secured to the wall by a nail and a prayer.

On each side, there were wooden dividers, separating students from their neighbors.

Some were painted dark mahogany while others looked like cheap, unvarnished knotty-pine slats.

The desk she told me to sit at was in the very corner of the room, toward the back. There was another empty desk toward the front, and I guessed that’s where my brother would be sitting when he got over his cold.

The boy sitting in the desk next to mine seemed to be the only person in the room who wasn’t taking the work seriously.

As the rest of the class scribbled away in colorful workbooks, he had his arms folded in front of him on the desk, resting his head on them like he was napping.

His fingertips tapped the cheap particle board desk, the beat sounding practiced and familiar.

I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t place it.

I walked to my new desk and set my backpack on the floor next to my chair, but the boy in the seat beside me didn’t budge.

Not when I sat in my chair. Not as I explored the items left for me on the desk.

Not even when I wheeled my chair back, turned to him, and said, “Hi. I’m Gray.

Well, Grayson, but everyone just calls me Gray.

” All that earned me was a slightly raised arm and a halfhearted handwave.

He wasn’t even looking up at me. “We just moved here from Little Rock,” I said, hoping that might get him talking, but he just groaned.

“Daddy cashed in his . . . I think he called it a forty-one-k, and he used the money to buy our new farm.”