Burn by Suzanne Phillips

Patterson.
    More. Pinon watched him like he was an X-rated movie.
    Cameron’s going to get rid of them all. Then everything will be better. He can go back to thinking about normal stuff. He’ll even get his homework done.
    It’ll be like today never happened.
    Like in the movies, where they go in and cut out a scene that didn’t work. What happened today definitely isn’t working for Cameron. Cut and paste. It’s that simple.
    “Cameron, if you don’t open the door . . .”
    What, Mom? You’re going to break it down?
    He can’t do anything about the pictures, but the way Cameron sees it, people will forget. If no one’s around to remind them, people always forget.
    No one remembers the atomic bomb until someone comes along and says, “Remember Hiroshima.”
    It’s what the pictures don’t show that Cameron has to wipe out of existence.
    “You can’t stay in there forever,” his mom says. “I’ll be downstairs when you want to talk.” She pauses and Cameron feels the death in her next words before she even says them. “I saw the pictures, Cameron. Mr. Vega showed me the pictures and I want you to know the boys have been arrested. They’re in jail.”
    She saw the pictures. Vega showed her the pictures.
    An air pocket builds in Cameron’s throat, threatening to suffocate him.
    His mother saw the pictures.
    He unlocks the door, swings it open.
    His mother is standing at the top of the stairs, her hand on the banister. She turns toward him.
    “No! No, you shouldn’t have done that.”
    He’s crying. Again.
Crybaby.
    That fast, he’s back to being a girl.
    Cameron Diaz.
    He feels all that anger and the can’t-do-anything-about-it hopelessness build inside him until he’s sure he’s going to burst.
    “Why did you do that?”
    Her hand lifts and flutters in front of her throat. “Look at the pictures? I had to, Cameron.”
    “No, you didn’t. You didn’t have to look at the pictures. He could have just told you what happened. He could have just shut up and not said anything and not showed you the pictures.” He’s standing in front of her, his fists balled up and shaking. “You definitely didn’t have to
look
at the pictures.”
    “I’m sorry,” she says, like that’s going to fix it.
    “But you can’t forget them, can you? You can’t get them out of your mind. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
    “No.”
    “That’s what I want. That’s the only thing that’s going to fix this.”
    He’s screaming now. He hears it come back to him, high and sharp and nothing like in the woods when the fire was blazing and he was everything.
    “Hey!”
    Randy. Fuckin’ Randy in his uniform and his know-everything attitude.
    “What’s going on?”
    “Nothing!” Cameron screams. “Right, Mom?”
    “Cameron.” She reaches a hand out to him and he backs away.
    “Nothing!”
    He’s tired of being a nothing.
    Tomorrow he’s going to fix that. Tomorrow, for just a minute, the world will go black and when he opens his eyes everything will be white. Like a clean piece of paper. He can start over. It’ll be just like that.
    “Cameron.”
    “Don’t talk anymore, Mom. Don’t say one more word.”
    He pushes past them, takes the stairs two at a time.
    He shoves the kitchen door open, steps out onto the deck in his jeans and bare feet, and looks around him. Everything’s the same. The too-quiet houses, bikes, Big Wheels and play sets in the yards, the trees tall and full and growing like a thatched roof over the world, the dogwoods blooming with pink and white flowers. Life. Nothing’s changed.

WEDNESDAY
    10:00PM
    Cameron lies on his bed, above the covers, and flips through the stations on the TV. He refused to go down to dinner. Wouldn’t talk to his mother, or look at her, when she came up with a plate of food. She stood in the center of his room, telling him how sorry she was that the kids at school picked on him. Telling him he was probably right, she shouldn’t have looked at the