Tommy
Bax and Remy jump over to the Shaggin’ Waggin’ where Lucy is waiting for us. Brown curtains hang over the window, and the van has a lingering smell of reefer, since Bax spends his time on the couch he has in the back. It’s where he bangs chicks since he technically doesn’t live with us.
Lucy is Talia’s housekeeper, only a couple of years older.
Remy started seeing her a month ago to help him get over what happened last spring.
He barely talks anymore, not that he talked much to begin with, and Lucy seems to help him forget.
Lucy’s mother works for Talia’s father, and she and her grandmother live in Talia’s family mansion on the outskirts of town.
The mansion where I live now.
The house is one of many gifts her family gave her for making the sacrifice she did—as savage as it was. It’s perfect there, far enough we can do whatever we want without the watchful eyes of the town.
Talia saunters over to my blue Camaro and jumps into the front seat. Ignoring me, she grabs the rearview mirror and fixes her hair, letting it part in the middle with wisps hanging down the sides of her face. She grabs some lipstick from her bag and puts it on, making her lips pop red.
I give Bax a nod as I walk around the car, pausing before turning toward campus.
Black smoke rises from what’s left of Smith Hall, and the light from the flames flicker beneath it.
I sit in the driver’s seat and glance at Talia, the smoke’s reflection swirling in her eyes, mirroring the surrounding darkness as she looks at the insanity she caused. Her pupils flare at the sight of it.
I run my hand through my hair and try to calm my heartbeat.
Jesus.
I lit that damn match.
I knew what the outcome was going to be before I lit it. Bax expertly left splashes of kerosene in strategic parts of the room. He made it so it would burn slowly and any attempts at thwarting it wouldn’t end well.
I hope everyone got out safely, but I doubt it.
Bax loves fire, obsessed with it, so it wasn’t surprising that Talia drew him out of his shell and involved him in all of this, even though his family isn’t technically part of it. Fire is cleansing, fire is art, and his desire to burn shit is his muse singing to him.
She explained that to him in a way that only Bax’s drug-infused brain would understand. Only Bax would take such precautions to set the kerosene up in a way he thought would be beautiful.
Girls like Talia Vital don’t follow rules; they forge their own path. Talia is sitting much like a cat who is staring at its food right before it retracts its claws and pounces.
She has something to say, but I don’t let her say it. I put the key into the ignition, and the engine rumbles to life.
Down kitty.
The power of the car has her tight body pulling into the seat. She always shuts right up when the car is running. She purrs when the engine is roaring.
Talia is drawn to power.
I peel out of the parking lot, and as soon as we get onto the treelined road, I let her rip.
The windows are down, and L.A Woman by The Doors blazes out of the stereo. Such an amazing highway song, as I drive through the only place I’ve ever called home.
Jim Morrison hits the chorus, and I can’t help but pat the wheel and scream the words. Even Talia has a hard time not smiling as she watches me sing my heart out.
I can’t help it, music excites me. It excites me more than anything…even sex. I have a lot of sex. Just not with the girl I constantly dream about.
I rake my gaze over Talia, remembering her little promise earlier, before images of Didi rush back into my head. Even though I’ve tried so hard to erase her, to annihilate her from my memory, it doesn’t seem to work. I couldn’t save her—I failed her.
Once we get to the popular party spot in the woods, I pull onto the side of the road. There is a fire going, and half the school is already here since classes were canceled for the rest of the day.
More people trickle behind us, and a line of cars pull up on the dirt road deep in the forest.
Talia continues to primp herself with a compact mirror pointedly, wiping ash from her face, ignoring me as she applies more lipstick.
I step out of the car, leaving her to fume, and walk up to Bax, Remy and Lucy, who are waiting for me.
There are five of us total, including Lucy, all just friends who have lived in this town forever.
Nothing suspicious about us.
“Dude, that was radical, man.” Bax does a funky dance, his wavy hair down to his ass.
“Bax, dude, shut up. People can hear you.” I twist my neck around to make sure no one’s alerted. He’s wearing dark round sunglasses, but I can tell by the way he smells that they smoked a joint on the way here.
He leans into me. “Hey,” he whispers with a lopsided grin.
My body bristles. “What is it?” I turn my head in all directions and wipe a bead of sweat off my forehead.
“We’re all gonna call you the burning man from now on. You better run, man. The cops are gonna catch you.”
“Dude…are you serious?”
He and Remy burst out laughing.
I shrug my shoulders, composing myself when I realize he is joking, and no one is paying any attention to us.
I grimace at him. “Dude, shut it.”
Remy walks up beside me, adjusting the collar of his leather jacket and presses a cup of beer into my hand. “Tommy, man, you’re being all jittery. No one knows anything, so don’t act so weird.”
I chug the beer and clench the cup. I am acting weird, but oddly, it has nothing to do with the fact that I just burned down Smith Hall. I act cool as a couple of girls walk by and smile.
Bax grins, clearly unaffected by the depths of his handy work today. “Later, dudes,” he mumbles and chases after them.
I cut a look at Remy. “Yeah. Okay, you’re right, man.” Everyone is more concerned about shot-gunning beer and trying to out chug each other than the blaze that just happened. Not one person lays eyes on me. But still, I can hear the whispers of the mask sightings.
Remy’s stone eyes narrow in on me. Like Talia, he knows me too well, and he’s not buying it. “What’s wrong, man? Sick of Talia already? She’s just getting started with you,” he chuckles.
I make sure Bax is not in ear shot, and I shoot a glance over at Talia, who’s still sitting in the car, waiting for me to come back. “I saw her again.”
Remy tilts his head, but he doesn’t ask who. He doesn’t need to.
I lose him for a moment, his memories of her taking over. He loved her just as much as I did—maybe even more.
“Where?”
“In Smith Hall, right before I burned it.”
He’s quiet…contemplating before his lips twitch. “Do you not see the irony in that?”
My jaw clicks. I don’t find it funny, although he doesn’t, either. “I know what I saw. I know who I saw. Never said I could explain it.”
His eyes are haunted as he brings his beer to his lips, briefly glancing over at Lucy, who is chatting with a few others from school. Their eyes meet for a moment before she squeezes her brows together and frowns.
He turns away from her, squaring his body. She crosses her arms around herself as she always does when he dismisses her. It would suck loving someone who could never love you back.
He says in his low, deep voice. “She’s gone, Tommy. You didn’t see her in class today, or at FreshMart last month, or on Main Street. You saw her body, man—we both did. You know where she is right now.”
Her body is rotting in the well behind the Sheffield house where we left her. Her soul is probably fighting to get out, getting chased around by the batshit crazy hillbilly who lived there before her.
His eyes follow mine as he glances at my car.
“My sister’s waiting for you,” he says and takes another swig.
“You remember, the girl who’s still alive and needs us.
” He’s right. As strong as Talia is, she’s vulnerable, too.
He walks over to Lucy and puts his arm around her, and I head back to the car, slink into the front seat, and finally face her.
She’s staring right at me, her eyes burning into my soul. “You hesitated.”
Shit. She noticed…
I grab a smoke from the pack sitting on my dash, light it up, and take a drag before passing it to Talia. I rarely smoke, but everyone else seems to, and right now, I need to calm the hell down.
She takes it and pulls it to her lips, turning her head from me to glare out the window. The window is down, and a fresh breeze flows through the car. “You can’t be distracted, Tommy. I need you.”
I lean my arm over the back of her seat and play with a lock of her dark hair.
“I know.” She glances over at me, a circle of smoke curling up from her fingers, and she flicks the ash through the window.
I arch my eyes and pout at her. “I’m sorry, baby.
I did it in the end, though. Just like you asked me to. ”
I lit the match.
How do I explain to her the true reason I hesitated? That I saw a ghost?
Her angular, delicate features soften, and she shifts closer to me and smiles. Sometimes I forget that she’s a vicious killer. Sometimes, like right now, she’s just Talia—the tiny spitfire of a girl I’ve had a crush on my entire life.
Her hand finds my knee, causing my dick to twinge. “You did good, Tommy. You did really good. Did you see the fear radiating out of their eyes? It was beautiful.”
Hell, she’s a psycho.
My dick throbs now as she blows smoke from her lips, giving me a sultry look. I love that look; I need that look. I unbutton my trousers, pulling out my dick, not giving a shit that more people are arriving or can see us.
She smiles and pulls out a vial from her pocket and scoops a healthy size bump onto the spot between her index finger and thumb and pulls it up her nose.
She sniffs it before pouring some for me, too, which I greedily inhale. I’ll be turned up all night now. This shit makes me horny as hell.
I lay my seat back as Talia leans her head down and deep-throats me. She takes me in so deep, I grip the side of the seats.
My eyes roll to the back of my head—damn can Talia give some good head. I run my hands through my hair as the drugs kick in; my senses sharpen, then dull, and my heart races.
We don’t kiss—we never kiss. We don’t have that kind of relationship.
She’s made it clear that she will fuck whoever the hell she wants, whenever she wants, but she always seems to want to fuck me. So I’ll take it.
I drop my head back as my hand finds her hair, fisting it, nudging my cock further into her mouth. Her eyes water, but she takes it as I shove it in further, hitting the back of her throat. I’m not overly gentle about it, either.
My eyes drift outside to someone walking by, wearing that burlap mask that’s become a part of my identity. He disappears behind a tree, and I lurch up.
What the hell?
Whoever’s got it on isn’t one of us, but that’s the point of all this. The fact people wear it means it’s working. Whether they know it or not, they are part of a movement. They recognize power when they see it and understand the end is coming.
I close my eyes and enjoy Talia’s soft lips slowly teasing along my shaft. But it isn’t Talia I think of when I come inside her mouth. For months, every damn night, I see my firefly.