The Truths we Burn (The Hollow Boys Book 2)

Rook

“No, no, you have to finish it. This is the best part!” Her hand grabs at my forearm, pulling me back down to the makeshift pallet on the floor piled with blankets she insisted she needed.

“I’m developing cataracts the longer I sit and watch these,” I grunt, hoping when she says it’s almost over she’s telling the truth.

The mob is going about it all wrong. If they want to torture people, they don’t need to do it with rats and knives. Black-and-white films without sound are more than enough to make someone talk, just so they could put an end to it.

For two months, I’ve watched more movies than I have in my entire life. I’m so close to telling Sage we could watch Sixteen Candles for the third time if she turned off Charlie Chaplin.

“Wait for it, wait for it,” she says, sinking her nails into my skin as she gets more excited. “Tomorrow the birds will sing. Be brave. Face life.” She reads the words as they appear on the crackling screen.

The old film camera was a breath away from falling apart and hadn’t been made for clear pictures apparently. The entire time I felt like I was looking at it through a static TV.

“That’s what we were waiting for?” I ask, raising my eyebrow with bored eyes, teasing her.

She grins, smacking me on the chest with some force behind it. “You’re such an ass! This is golden! If only one of Charlie’s movies could be played in history, everyone would agree, City Lights is it!”

“Quentin Tarantino would possibly disagree.”

“Ugh, men and their bloody movies with explosive cars.” She rolls her eyes, turning her body to face me as she crosses her legs, and I prepare for what is about to come. This is a thing I’ve noticed she does, and truthfully, it isn’t the movies that bother me. I’m frustrated by the fact they don’t bother me.

How I’ve allowed myself to sit through these, not paying attention to a single thing, just so I can watch what she’s about to do now.

I’ve allowed myself to care.

“This is real satire, the ability to move people without even using words, Rook! Period films didn’t need to rely on the emotional impact of color to invoke emotion, to captivate an audience. They didn’t need the crimson blood or the golden jewels. They had soft candlelight reflecting off glossy silks and satin dresses. Old Westerns, where I swear you can taste the sandy dust blowing in the wind, the sun glinting off shiny spurs, sepia-filtered cigarette smoke, and passionate embraces. People were enthralled with the motion picture, with the feelings…” She drags off, waiting for her next thought about the cinema to hit her, moving her hands in tiny circles as if she’s trying to show her brain how to speed up the process of collecting thoughts.

“So you’re saying you’d rather watch these than The Outsiders or that one with all the school delinquents?” I offer her a line, giving her another thought to run away with.

The bun in her hair had been tossed in is falling down her head, loose pieces bouncing as she speaks.

“The Breakfast Club. You’d think you’d remember it by now. I’d rather not choose—I love both. But that was a different time for film altogether. The fact that up until me you’d never even watched some of these is a tragedy, an actual tragedy. Old Hollywood is the foundation for every movie made since the age died out. They can change lives and shape societies. I mean, Jaws birthed an entire generation terrified of the water and gave them a fear they’ll carry with them forever. A low-budget horror movie made one of the greatest directors of all time a household name. Speaking of low-budget, Rocky, a monumental franchise to just about anyone with eyeballs, was only made for a million dollars and went on to win Best Picture! Do you not see the power of a great story? Of a great movie?” She waits for me with bated breath to answer, not even realizing how she is rambling. Behind this lake house, she’s spoken more about the things she’s passionate about than she has in her entire life.

I take my bottom lip into my mouth, tasting the dried blood from earlier with my father, and look her over in my t-shirt and stripey leggings.

Her usual fashionable skirts and matching blouses are nowhere to be seen. In their place is whatever shirt I’d worn that day. I love getting to strip her down out of those statement pieces to a matching panty-and-bra set.

I’d spent all of this time noticing little things about her. Learning her.

Still not understanding the reason behind having her nails the same color for a whole month before changing it.

“So movies, the scripts, that’s the future for you, yeah? LA? Hollywood?”

She breathes, looking over at the rolling credits. “The scripts are for theatre, which is an entirely different love for me. I adore being onstage, embodying a character’s emotions. Chameleon myself into whatever the play needs me to be. I’d love to do that in college, ya know? Get my degree, then graduate and maybe shift to on-screen acting, eventually reaching the point of making my own films or at the very least directing.”

There is a sadness in her voice, one I’ve come to recognize every time she speaks about what lies ahead of her in the future. Like she’ll never do it, like she isn’t capable.

This place had taken her and clipped her wings before she even knew she had them.

“Sure, I could go to New York, fall in love with Broadway. Make a career directing in the concrete jungle. But no matter how hard it tries, New York isn’t Hollywood. There is no Walk of Fame or years of history embedded in the golden ages. Everyone is an actress or a filmmaker there, but actually doing it? Succeeding at it? What other dream could you have?”

Two months I’ve spent sitting here, watching her, learning her, listening to her. Hating myself for every second I enjoy it. Why do I deserve to enjoy anything? Especially someone like Sage.

When I met her, I had the preconceived notion that she was as cruel on the inside as she was on the outside. A fun little challenge to roll around with in the sheets, a girl who would hate me as much as I hate myself.

Instead, I found a girl who’d been buried alive in the expectations of others, and every day we spend together, she uncovers herself more and more.

She’s turning into what I don’t need, making me feel things I have no right to feel.

What right do I have to see her like this? Happy, babbling on, and vulnerable. I’ve done nothing good in my life to merit this.

I did not earn happiness like this, and taking it feels wrong. It doesn’t feel right.

But giving it up, saying no to it? That feels fucking worse.

“What? What are you looking at?” she asks me, making me realize I had been staring.

“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Just selfishly glad I’m the only person who sees you like this.”

She arches one eyebrow, her freckles shifting, hundreds of them that I’d once tried counting as she fell asleep on my lap after eating an entire pizza on her own. She’s one of those people who enjoys pineapple on it, which is disgusting, but something about salty-sweet combinations is what she likes.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

I lean forward, grabbing the back of her neck and licking the chocolate from her bottom lip that she hadn’t noticed, sucking it into my mouth to clean it. A moan comes from the back of her throat.

“Because I’d become a serial killer trying to fend off men falling in love with you.”

Those blue-flame eyes could heat an entire village with how bright they are glowing, her mouth slightly gaping at me.

It’s true—people would have to be stupid not to love this version of her, and I feel like shit that she’s giving it to me, and I’ll never be able to feel that way.

I’m not allowed to love people.

But thinking of anyone else trying?

It makes my blood sizzle.

This is mine. Her truths. Her quirks. They’re mine.

She is mine. Unable to love or not.

Her fingers press into my skin, and I hiss, “Goddamn, why are you always so cold.”

“So you can warm me up. Ya know, I’m cold, and you’re hot. It just works.”

Her phone buzzes before I can kiss her again, eyes averting to the screen. Something in her dies when she reads the text, immediately telling me it’s Easton or her parents.

“It’s just stupid shit I read on the internet, nothing important.”

She pulls away from my grip, standing up and grabbing the empty bowl that had earlier been filled with popcorn, heading to the kitchen.

My jaw sets, tension building in my chest. I watch her as I grab my Zippo, flipping it across my fingers and watching as the flame dances through.

“What did he want?” I ask, knowing it’s him.

My mouth fills with a nasty-tasting bitterness. It makes me want a smoke, to cover the annoyance building in my body.

“Wanted to know where I was. We’re supposed to meet for dinner tonight with my parents.”

I look at the blank screen, the sound of the film camera starting to itch the inside of my brain.

“You going?”

I turn my gaze back to her, and the refrigerator light illuminates the guilt on her face. She doesn’t need to say anything to give me my answer. My gut twists and turns with rage.

“Of course you’re going.”

I lift myself from the ground, grabbing my hoodie and the beanie lying on the couch before throwing them on my body, then walk to the door to shove my feet inside my shoes.

Sage and I had these moments when everything seemed to halt in the outside world. We would leave Ponderosa Springs, come here, and lock ourselves within the walls of this house. Moments when she was who she wanted to be and where I was a person who had hope.

But there’s always something that pulls us right back into the toxic sludge, reminding us of the truth, of our fate.

“That’s not fair,” she mutters, shutting the fridge. I hear her bare feet pad through the kitchen towards my back.

“What isn’t?” I snap, turning to face her as she approaches, her body jumping from my sudden movement. “Is it the fact I’m sitting here with you reading scripts, watching movies every other day, and making your cunt squirt on my cock, all the while he gets to parade you around school like you’re some piece of glorified meat?”

My voice is red-hot, a searing slap to her delicate skin. When we’re good, we’re good. We’re electric. An addictive, warm fire during the holidays that you could cuddle around for heat.

But when we’re bad, when we argue, almost always having to do with Easton, it’s bad. A storm of smoke and flames. An unmanageable wildfire that consumes everything in its path. She never backs down from my anger, and I don’t coddle her.

“You know I can’t break up with him! Not yet, I told you! I have to wait till graduation, Rook. You have no idea what my parents will do if I don’t wait. We have to wait.”

“Whatever. I’m out of here.” I reach for the door while she grabs at me, trying to prevent me from being responsible and stopping this fight while we are ahead.

“You do this every time. You don’t get to just walk out of this!” She raises her voice. “It’s the same thing—you get upset, and instead of talking to me about your feelings, you shut me out, you leave! You did the same thing last week with the college applications! How am I supposed to understand why you’re upset if you never talk to me about it.”

My body becomes rigid, my relaxed nature fading, turning into stone.

“I never asked you to do that. I never asked you to do anything for me, Sage. You’re the one who came looking for me.” I pull the doorknob, only for her to shove her hands into the door, the slam echoing in the empty house.

My heartbeat thunders in my ears, and my skin crawls. I never asked her to send out fucking college applications. I never asked her to do anything, not to care about me or my goddamn future. I never asked for any of that.

She had no right to give me hope, to believe in a person who didn’t want it.

I always knew I was leaving Ponderosa Springs when I graduated—that wasn’t a question. I’d just never thought about what it was I would do outside of that.

But then she comes along, with plans, talking about opportunities in chemistry departments, ideas, poking around shit she has no goddamn business being a part of.

She comes along trying to give me hope for a future that I know good and damn well will never happen for me.

This is why I avoided relationships at all costs. This is why I trusted the boys and only the boys. Because they understand how paralyzing false hope can be. They understand that good things aren’t meant to happen to people like us.

“So I’m the bad guy? I’m the one in the wrong again? If I’m so fucking terrible, Rook, for not leaving Easton yet, then what about you? Have you even mentioned to your best friends that you’re messing around with the mayor’s daughter? Or are you still lying to them?”

Now I know she’s upset, so she’s hitting where it hurts. She’s digging for something to make me react, and she knows exactly where to find it.

I shift, spinning so that we are facing each other, and step closer.

“I haven’t told them because you’re still fucking the enemy, Sage, and if they find out about us, if they find out that you still dating him pisses me off, they will kill him.” My tone is bone-chilling, riddled with nothing but honesty. “Don’t ever question my loyalty to my friends.” I pause, grinding my teeth, my nostrils flaring with wrathful breaths.

If she thinks what her parents will do is awful, she has no idea what she’s in for if the boys know.

They don’t care about us fucking or whatever it is we are doing. They wouldn’t care about who she is—unlike most people here.

“I haven’t had sex with him since before Halloween, I told you that!”

“Yeah.” I lick my bottom lip. “He still kiss your mouth?” I taunt, stepping closer while she steps back, a dance of sorts. “Touch your skin? Hold your goddamn hand like he owns you?”

Her ass hits the back of the couch, trapping her in front of me, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

My mind is my worst enemy as it plays highlight reels of what I’ve had to endure these past two months. Watching them together in the halls, seeing him lay hands on her and knowing I can’t rip them off.

“The guys don’t care that you’re the mayor’s kid. Telling them isn’t about that. It isn’t about me. It’s about protecting you,” I emphasize, poking my finger into her chest, “from what they will do. They care about me. Even if I said it didn’t bother me, even if I lied through my fucking teeth and told them seeing him with you doesn’t make me”—even saying the words makes the taste of blood bubble in my throat—“want to burn the entire damn school down after I’d ripped his hands off his body, they would still know, and the end result would not be good for you.”

Through the darkest of shit, we’d seen each other through it. Saw each other battle things no person should ever have to see. Bore witness to what Hell on Earth really looks like.

We protect each other at all costs.

Nothing we wouldn’t do for each other.

No length too far.

Including, but not limited to, skinning her preppy-ass boyfriend alive.

“So this is what it takes to get you to open up to me? Talking about how Easton makes you jealous? You do realize this is the first time you’ve even spoken to me about your friends.”

I don’t need this shit. To be poked and prodded by her so that she could try and understand me. I don’t need to be understood. I don’t need to be saved or fixed.

For the last time, I turn, wanting to leave. I’m done with this conversation, but she just won’t give it up. She won’t quit.

“I’ve told you everything! You know me, Rook, and I trusted you. You won’t even tell me where you go when we aren’t together! Why won’t you do the same for me?”

“You should have thought of that when you started confessing sins to someone like me. I don’t play fair, Sage. I told you that.”

“No, you’re not leaving,” She steps in front of me, blocking the door with her body, one I would have no problem throwing out of my fucking way, but she knows that. “Not until you give me something. Why do you always show up with bruises? Why is your lip split?” She continues to push me.

My flesh and bone burn, this overwhelming fire building inside my chest, growing higher and higher the more she pushes.

“Move, Sage,” I grit out through my locked jaw.

“No!”

I raise my palm, slamming it forward into the door behind her head so hard it shakes one of the picture frames loose, knocking it onto the floor.

“Stop trying to get inside me! You don’t belong there!” I yell, my chest stinging with the force.

Sage barely flinches, like she knows I won’t hurt her. Not physically anyway.

She trusts me. She isn’t afraid.

I think I’ve always known that she wasn’t afraid of me, and that was possibly what I found most interesting about her in the first place.

“You can trust me,” she says back to me with just as much passion, placing her hands on the sides of my face and forcing me to look into her eyes. How are they this pretty? They are begging me to give her something, anything. “You can trust me, Rook.” It’s gentler the second time, a girl trying to coax a wild animal from the corner without getting bitten.

No one, not a single soul, has done this to me before.

Forced me to open up.

The guys don’t need to ask, ’cause they understand it.

No one had done it before, because they didn’t care.

I’m sick thinking about my father, why I am the way I am.

“You’ve heard the rumors.” I bring my hands up, curling them around her wrists, pulling them away from my face. “You know why I’m bruised. You know why I’m bloody.”

Sadness builds in her eyes, tears lying on the surface of her irises. I can’t even bear to look at her when I’m talking.

“So your dad does hit you?”

“Hit, beat—he’s sometimes into whips on the weekends. Yes, Sage, my dad hits me. Big whoop. There are kids who are starving.” Classic Rook, make a joke of it. Make a joke so you can cope with what you’ve done to your own family.

What you could do to Sage if she gets too close.

“And the scars on your chest? That too?”

I nod, not wanting to say the words out loud.

“But, he, he’s always at Sunday mass, and he always seems so—”

“So what? Nice?” I raise my eyebrows. “A godly man whose wife tragically died? Sure he is, outside of the house. But inside, he makes me pay for being born. Masks are still masks, no matter how tightly glued on.”

Of all people, I would expect her to know that. No matter how much you know someone on the outside, you have no idea how twisted they can be internally.

What a person is truly capable of.

And my father is capable of just about anything short of murder. I’m just patiently waiting for the day he gives in to that.

Ends the pain for both of us.

Tears finally fall down her face, wetting her dark eyelashes as she blinks.

I shake my head, tightening my grip on her wrists. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t need it.”

“Wh-why don’t you tell someone,” she whispers, frozen in front of me, desperately trying to grasp what makes a father hate his son this much.

And there it is, the question that unlocks the real truth.

Why don’t I fight him back? Why don’t I tell someone?

Anyone else would be scrambling to get away from a parent like Theodore Van Doren.

But they don’t know him like I do. They don’t know what I did to him.

“Because I deserve it.” I drop my hands from her, staring down into her sad eyes. “I told you, I’m not a good person. My father used to be someone kind, someone nice. I made him into a monster, and I am facing the consequences of that. He is punishing me. Making me pay for what I’ve done. He’s the only one who can do it.”

I know she’s confused. I know she doesn’t grasp what I’m saying, not fully.

But it doesn’t stop her from speaking on it.

“I can’t believe you can’t see what he’s done to you. I can’t believe you actually think he is justified in abusing you! No one deserves that, no matter what you did. There is more to your life than being a punching bag for your father. More to your life than being angry or the black stain on a town that doesn’t take the time to understand you. You can have more.” She pleads for me to see that, as if her soft words will cure years of abuse or conditioning.

I admire her for trying, because it’s more than anyone else has done.

“You deserve more than that, Rook.”

“I don’t need more.” I slip my hand on her cheek, cradling her head as I wipe tears with my thumb that don’t need to fall for me. Knowing one day she’ll look back and see that those were wasted on a boy who didn’t deserve them. “I did something terrible, something disgraceful, and there is no coming back from that. I’ll never move past it. I am damned to lead a miserable life for my actions. I’m condemned. There are just some things that don’t deserve forgiveness, Sage.”

She’ll never be able to get me to see it any differently. Because the only person who can forgive me is dead. I’ll never find salvation until I’m six feet under.

“I don’t believe that, Rook.” She grabs for my shirt, pulling herself into my body, hugging me tightly. Trying to squeeze out all the suffering from me.

I gaze down at the top of her head, my heart doing this funny thing, beating faster but aching. Hurting. “I refuse to believe it. There is still good in you. I see it. I know it’s there.”

No one who knew me after the accident had ever said something like that to me. Shock waves go through me from the sentence, all of these feelings resurfacing. Things I’d buried.

There is still good in you.

Everyone else talked. They made rumors of my birth, calling me the Antichrist, a demon, the devil. They took what happened, a tragedy that lived inside my veins like poison, and made it worse.

They took a boy who already hated himself and made him hate the world.

I want to believe her, and maybe some part of me that was long buried did believe there is good in me.

That I could hope and dream. That maybe I could even have Sage permanently. That we would work out in the end.

But when you kill your own mother, all the good you are ever given dies with her.