Burn for Burn (Burn for Burn #1)

Rennie pops out of the bedroom and hops her way over to the glass door I’m leaning against. Her cheeks are flushed, and her smile practically fills up her entire face. “Okay, Lil! Let’s go!” she sings.

Rennie always gets what she wants. But not this time. Not when it matters the most.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

KAT

I’M SITTING IN BED WATCHING A MOVIE ON MY LAPTOP when I hear the knock at my window. For one crazy second I think it could be Alex. Shep, who is curled up on a pile of my laundry, barely even lifts his head. Dumb dog. I hop off my bed and go to open it. It’s not Alex. It’s Lillia. “What the hell?” I say, heaving the window open. “I have a front door.”

She climbs inside, her cheeks pink. “It’s one in the morning,” she reminds me. “I didn’t want to wake up your dad. But I knew you’d still be awake.” Lillia’s got on a short puffer coat even though it’s barely cold outside. She gasps when she sees Shep. “Shep!”

Shep jumps up and bounds over to her. She bends down and hugs him and strokes his back and ears. “Shep, I missed you!”

“His breath probably stinks right now,” I say. “He just had a bone.”

Lillia ignores me. “Shep, you remember me! I can tell you do.” My dumb dog is drooling all over her, panting and wagging his tail.

She gives him one more pat and then walks right over to my dresser like she owns the place. “I remember this!” she exclaims, picking up the porcelain doll my mom gave me for my seventh birthday. “Her name is Nelly, right?”

Yeah, her name is Nelly. So what. I sit back down on my bed, my arms crossed. “What’s up?”

“Will you please close the window first? It’s cold.”

I want to tell her to see a damn doctor, because something is seriously wrong with her body temperature. But I need to be nicer, so I just do it.

“Thanks,” she says, and blows on her fingers. “So, I have an idea for how to get your revenge on Rennie. It’s perfect.”

I’m having major flashbacks, the way she keeps touching my stuff, picking up candles and sniffing them, winding up my jewelry music box. Lillia used to love poking around Rennie’s and my rooms when she came back for the summer. Like, she wanted to see what parts of our life she’d missed out on when her family left each school year.

She turns back around, a flash of gold dangling from her hand. “You still have it,” she says, her eyes wide and surprised. It’s that stupid key necklace she gave me the first day of school freshman year.

I leap up and snatch the necklace out of her hand. “Quit touching my shit,” I snarl.

“I’m just surprised you kept it,” Lillia says with a toss of her ponytail.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I just haven’t gotten around to pawning it yet,” I say, tossing it back into the jewelry box and slamming the top shut.

Under her breath Lillia says, “Since the ninth grade?”

*    *    *

Lillia’s mom called Rennie’s mom and asked for a playdate. A playdate, for God’s sakes. We were eleven years old, not six. Rennie’s mom said yes, and then Rennie begged me to come with her. She wanted us to ride our bikes over, so we could leave in case it was boring, but my mom said no, White Haven was too far away. Lillia’s house was on the other side of the island—only a ten-minute drive, but still. Our friends lived within walking distance; we ran in and out of each other’s houses all day long during the summer. Lillia’s house felt a world away.

That first day we played out in the pool for the afternoon. Rennie and I practiced swan dives and cannonballs while Lillia splashed around the shallow end and pretended to be a mermaid. Her mom brought her little sister, Nadia, out and she had swimmies on her arms. Her mom said, “I’m going to fix you girls a snack. I’ll be right back. Lillia, you watch your sister.” Not long after she went inside, Nadia floated too close to the deep end, and Lillia started to scream. Nadia got scared and burst into tears, so I quickly swam over and pushed her back to Lillia, who was practically crying too. She was, like, “Thank you so much.”

That’s when Mrs. Cho came outside with a tray of Brie and crackers and Orangina. I perked right up. My mom never bought Brie. She only bought American cheese for sandwiches and Velveeta for macaroni and cheese.

As soon as she saw her mom, Lillia jumped out of the pool and ran over to her and put her arms around her waist. “Nadia went over to the deep end, and Kat saved her life!” Then Mrs. Cho kept gushing over what an amazing swimmer I must be, and I felt embarrassed but also kind of proud, even though I didn’t really do anything.

When we were over at the deep end and Lillia was still sitting next to her mom, Rennie whispered, “Let’s call your dad soon. I think Reeve’s brother is taking the boys out on his boat to go tubing today.”

In a low voice I said, “We can’t leave now. That would be rude.”

Later, when Mrs. Cho and Nadia went back inside and it was just the three of us again, Rennie started talking about how she couldn’t wait for school to start. “I hope we both get Miss Harper for science,” she said. “Also PJ told me that his sister told him that Mr. Lopez is the easiest math teacher.”

I remember feeling awkward, because Lillia was quiet. She didn’t know any of these people. I asked her, “What’s your school like?”

She said she went to a private all-girls school, they had to wear uniforms, and it was boring. Rennie made a face and said, “I don’t know what I would do if there weren’t boys at school.”

When the sun went down, Lillia’s mom asked us if we wanted to stay for dinner. She was making a fish called mahimahi with some sort of pineapple salsa. She said we could make s’mores for dessert on the fire pit outside. I was all Hell yes, but before I could say it, Rennie lied and said she had to go home.

In my dad’s car Rennie told me she wanted to come over to my house for dinner. We wouldn’t be having anything nearly as good as mahimahi and s’mores. My mom was sick, so my dad was in charge of dinner those days. Frozen pizza, hot dogs, or hellfire chili. I could’ve killed Rennie for making me miss out on actual food.

Later, Rennie was stretched out on my bed, shuffling a deck of Uno cards. Shep was dozing in her lap. He was a puppy back then, and Rennie loved coming over to play with him. Her condo didn’t allow pets. “I mean, why would anyone need three refrigerators? Her family isn’t even that big! Plus, they only live there three months out of the year!”