Burning September Read Free Page A

affecting your sleep.”
    I’d never been good at sleeping.  She knew that as well as I did, since she was the same way.  
    “I’m glad you’re here, though.  There’s a few things I need to go over with you.  You have my debit cards, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Good.  The landlord automatically debits my account for rent, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
    “It will be when the account runs dry.”  Breakthrough didn’t offer work-release programs, and I doubted the magazines she wrote for would be dying to run an in-depth piece on insane asylums. 
    “That won’t happen.”
    I arched an eyebrow.  Maybe she was insane, forgetting how money and debit accounts worked.  “Caroline, you’re not going to be out of here in a month.  Even if they release you, they’ll send you straight over to jail.  I’m not a little girl anymore.  I can handle this.  I’ll get a job.”
    “It’s handled.  Your job is school.”
    “Well, I can do both.” 
    “I don’t want you doing both.  School needs all of your effort and attention.”
    I leaned forward, turning my head so she wouldn’t see my eye roll, and rested my elbows on my knees.  “You’re not my mother.”
    “I might as well have been.”  She snapped her fingers in front of my face so I’d look at her.  “You’re not getting some bullshit dead-end minimum wage job.  There’s no need, and you’re under enough stress as it is.”
    Is that what you’d call this oxygen-less freak show?  Stress?  I always thought it was something only bored housewives complained about. 
    Stress was as good a descriptor as any, though.  The enormity of the issue at hand and all the variables that would crop up as its bastard children would certainly cause some discomfort. Or stress . 
    Stress .  The word felt foreign, twisting on my tongue.  Stress . 
    Whenever I learned a new word when I was little, I’d write it over and over.  Bunny bunny bunny bunny.  Caroline would feed me reams of paper to continue my written repetition. 
    Suddenly I couldn’t believe I’d said she wasn’t my mother. 
    “Do you ever regret it?”
    “What, school?”  Her eyebrows contracted.  “Not for a second.”
    “No.”  I ran a hand over my face.  “Do you regret me .  Being forced to take care of me when there were plenty of better things to be doing.”
    A shocked Caroline isn’t one I’m used to seeing, but she recovered in a second.
    “That is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and—” she inclined her head at the guy who passed his days screaming about ferrets, banging his head against walls, “—I hear Mr. Ferret’s crap 24/7.  Nobody forced me.  Foster care was never an option.  I wasn’t going to lose you to the system.” 
    She waited for a few beats.  Expecting some kind of response, but I couldn’t dream one up. 
    “Where is this coming from?”
    “I don’t know.  You had so much responsibility so young.  I wondered if you hadn’t gotten the chance to experience normal dating and stuff people your age do.  Your whole life’s been about taking care of me.  And maybe you couldn’t get over your first broken heart because you’d never learned how.”
    Her lips twitched from side to side before settling into a deep frown accented by narrowed eyes.  “I’m only going to tell you this once, so you need to hear me.  You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.  Brian was the worst.  I didn’t do it because he broke my heart.  I did it because he was an asshole who deserved it.”
    Did he?  I wasn’t his biggest fan, but he taught me how to play guitar.  That counted for something. Of course he could have taught me simply to win points with Caroline, but why quibble?
    Pointing out that in my personal opinion he absolutely broke her heart didn’t seem politic.
    “His whole life he’d treated all women like shit.  Lying, cheating, juggling four at a time.  Not to mention the drug-dealing side