TJ fell on the bed and rolled over on his back, howling. His cap had fallen off and slid down his skinny ponytail.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, TJ?” Griffin shouted. He had been afraid of what TJ would do to Cheyenne, but he wasn’t as worried about what TJ would do to him. TJ always knew when to put his tail between his legs. And right now, Griffin was ready to kill him.
Cheyenne scrambled off the bed. She tried to run for the door and fell when the cord around her ankle yanked her back.
Griffin leaned down to help her up, and she clawed him. “It’s me,” he said, but Cheyenne still pushed him away and then got to her feet without anyone’s assistance. She squeezed herself between the bed and the desk until her back was against the wall. She was panting, but she wasn’t crying. Griffin suddenly thought that if he had brought the knife into the room, Cheyenne would have sunk it into both of them, in turn. Without a second thought.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“Look at her, all shiny,” TJ whined. “I just wanted to take a little bit of the shine off. It’s just like Jimbo says. She’s so rich she probably wipes her ass with twenty-dollar bills. She probably thinks her crap doesn’t even smell. I was just going to teach her a little lesson. Make her understand how the other half lives.”
TJ was saying all this with snot running out of his nose.
Griffin’s hands were clenched into fists. He wanted to hit TJ again so bad. “Say that again. What did Jimbo say?”
Something like hope played across TJ’s face. He half sat up. “Oh, you know, he was going on about how she probably thinks she’s too good for us. And that she needed to be taken down a notch.”
“And you listened to that BS?” Griffin rubbed his fist. His middle knuckle was swelling. “Get out. Before I change my mind.”
After TJ scuttled out carrying his hat, Griffin locked the door behind him. He pressed the button more for Cheyenne’s benefit than anything else. He walked back and stood in front of her. She was trembling.
“It’s okay. He’s gone. I’m sorry I left you alone. I won’t let that happen again.” With the tip of his index finger, he touched her cheekbone. “I’m sorry.”
Her shaking intensified, and he was afraid he had frightened her all the more. But when he tentatively reached out his arms, she put her face against his chest. Her breath smelled like orange juice. He held her tight and rocked her back and forth. It reminded Griffin of the one school dance he had gone to, when slow dancing just meant shuffling your feet.
Just as he was getting used to the feel of her in his arms, Cheyenne stepped back. She pulled her coat into place. “He was going to hurt me. Rape me, maybe kill me. And I think he would have, too, if you hadn’t come in. What kind of person could feel like I deserved that?”
Griffin sighed. “Jimbo got him riled up. He likes to wind TJ up and watch where he goes. Out in the real world, nobody pays them any attention. To them, rich people aren’t real. They’re people in magazines and TV. Those two aren’t around rich people very much.” He let out a little self-conscious laugh. “Of course, I’m not either. But just like rich people would probably look at us and see white trash, those two don’t think rich people are human either.”
Cheyenne’s next words were a surprise. “What happened to your throat? The skin felt different there.”
Griffin kept his answer short, letting his tone make it clear that he didn’t want to talk about it. “It got burned.”
“How?” It was like she wanted to make him feel as vulnerable as she did.
“In an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“My dad was cooking, all right?”
“Cooking?” He could hear the disbelief in her voice. Even Cheyenne had figured out that Roy would never cook anything.
“My dad was making some meth, and a little of it spilled on a burner.”
“Meth?” She didn’t seem sure about what it was.
Griffin envied her innocence. “Crystal, Tina, crank, ice. Basically, it’s speed. Amphetamines. You used to be able to make it with stuff you could get at the grocery store. That’s how my dad made extra money before they started locking up some of the ingredients. Then he lost his job and switched to stealing cars.”
“So to make it, you have to cook it?”
“Yeah. It smells terrible. Like cat piss. I went out to the barn to ask him something and then, when it flared up, I got burned on my throat and chest.”
Griffin remembered how at first it had felt either really, really hot or really, really cold. He hadn’t been able to tell which, and then suddenly it was hot, red hot, eating through him. He managed to rip off his shirt or he would have been burned even worse. The pain had been so great he had wanted to die or pass out. After a few seconds, he narrowed his choices down to just one: He wanted to die.
He did neither.
It was his mom who took him to the emergency room, his mom who made up some story about the woodstove. The doctors asked her to leave the room and then questioned Griffin about it again. He knew they didn’t believe her.
Griffin stuck to the same story. Not out of love for Roy, but because he was afraid his mom would get in trouble, too.
He had spent a month in the burn unit. IVs in the backs of both hands and a tube in his throat to help him breathe because the mucous lining had been burned, too. Even with the tube down his throat, he had still been able to smell. The burn unit had been full of smells. The strongest came from the Silvadene salve, which was the color and consistency of lard and smelled like peppermint. Twice a day, the nurses spread it over his oozing burns. And underneath the Silvadene was another stench, sweet and rotten.
Every night Griffin lay in the dark and listened to monitors beeping, ventilators whooshing, machines monitoring the thin threads of life. He heard other patients pleading, praying, screaming. Most of them frightened him. One was a homeless man who had been set on fire by bored teens. Another was a boy only a few years older than Griffin who had tried to kill himself by soaking his clothes with gasoline and lighting a match. And there was a little kid, two or three years old, who had tugged on the cord of a deep-fat fryer and pulled it over on himself. One woman had been burned in a car accident. She had died on the third day he was there.
In Griffin’s nightmares, the nurses in their blue plastic gowns, rubber gloves, and paper bonnets were again wheeling him to the debridement room to scrub off his dead flesh with wire-bristled brushes.
Even after his burns healed, he was reminded of them constantly. Every morning, his fingers traced the red, hairless scars when he soaped his chest and neck in the shower, or touched the shallower scars on the insides of his thighs where they had taken the skin grafts. Strangers stared at the shine of tight skin on his throat. Every touch, every stare, brought it all back: the lights, the screams, the whispers, the smells.
When he was out of the house, he wore his shirts buttoned up to the neck, but people still noticed the scars. His shirt collar didn’t hide everything, and once people noticed, most of them couldn’t stop staring, whether it was in a movie line or at the grocery store. Some looked at him and quickly looked away. Some pretended not to look — and then stared if they thought he hadn’t noticed. And a few made a point of meeting his eyes and smiling, like he was some kind of a retard or a dog who might turn on them.
He hated the smiles worst of all.
Every day Griffin was in the hospital, his mother had visited him. And then one day, right before he was released, she didn’t come.
“So I’ve been kind of wondering — where’s your mom?” Cheyenne asked. It was spooky, like she could read his mind.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you live here with your dad, but you obviously had to have had a mom, so where is she?”
“She and my dad didn’t get along,” Griffin said shortly. “So she moved back to Chicago. That’s where she grew up.” She used to tell him stories about Chicago, about the lake in the summer and the wind in the winter. Roy didn’t like to hear them, so she only told them when he wasn’t around.
When Roy finally came to visit Griffin in the hospital, he had told Griffin that his mom had left. She had fought
