Page 8 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

“I didn’t mean for anything to happen,” he said lamely.

“You smoked a cigarette, I guess?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So this is your fault,” she said. “You started the fire.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said again.

“Do you think that matters, Kane? That you didn’t mean to? Do you think that changes anything? You can’t undo this. Their farm is destroyed. Their lives are destroyed. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean for it to happen, because it did happen. You never did learn this. You never understood that some things can’t be undone.”

“That isn’t true,” Kane protested. “It’s never too late to set things right. Isn’t that what you were just telling me in the shed? You said— You said you thought that you could help me get into college. I want to do that, Taylor.” He searched her gaze earnestly. “I want to fix my life. You’re right that I’ve made a mess of things, but it’s not too late for me to fix them. I want to do everything you said — apply, write good essays, fix my grades, all of it. And I know you’re the only person who can help me.”

“This is really what you’re saying to me now?” she asked. “You’re coming to me after this, asking me to do you a favor?”

“Did this change your opinion of me so much? You already knew that I was a mess,” he pointed out. “You already knew it was going to be a lot of work. But you thought I was worth the effort. Taylor, if I could get into college…”

“If you got into college, you would disappear into campus life,” she whispered. “You’d be at a frat party six months from now, and you would forget all about what happened here.”

“No I won’t. I won’t. I want to go to school so I can make something of myself. I want to make this right.”

“It’s too late for that,” Taylor said, brushing a loose lock of hair out of her face.

“I don’t believe that,” Kane protested. “And I don’t think you do either. Yesterday, you were the one trying to convince me that it wasn’t too late. You wanted to help me.”

“But I can’t do that now,” Taylor said. “Don’t you understand? If you went off to college because of me and spent the next four years partying, forgetting all about the damage you’d done here…”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“I don’t trust you, Kane. That’s all I’ve ever known you to do. I’m sure you feel like you want to make a change right now, because this just happened. But it’s like I say — six months from now, when it’s not so fresh in your mind, when you’ve gotten some distance from the whole thing… well, I bet you’re going to go right back to living the way you want to. And it’ll be my fault. I’ll be the one who enabled you to run away from what you’d done. I can’t live with that. Maybe you can, but I can’t.”

She turned away from him.

Kane didn’t even try to call her back. He couldn’t stand the idea of trying to convince her when she had made it so perfectly clear — Taylor, like everyone else, had now given up on him. This had been the last straw, and Kane had nobody left that he could turn to.

Something inside him seemed to snap.

He had to get out of this town.

He was tired of all these people who only expected the very worst of him. Even when he wanted to change, even when he wanted to make something more of himself, there was nobody who was willing to give him the chance. Now he had turned the whole town against him, irrevocably, and he knew there was only one way left for him to cope with it.

He had to run.

He had to start a new life, far away from here, where he wouldn’t have to look any of these people in the eye ever again.

CHAPTER 5

TAYLOR

School was never the same after that day, and Taylor was never sure exactly why.

The fire cast a long shadow, for one thing. Jeff and Donna Chesterfield had two children — Anna, the youngest, was away at college, in her senior year; her brother Paul was a barber, married with two young kids of his own. Taylor felt terrible whenever she saw any of the family members in town. How would their futures be impacted by everything that had happened?

Maybe the reason school was different was simply that their senior year was winding down. Everyone was more relaxed lately. A lot of teachers had given the seniors their final exams early, and with that out of the way, there wasn’t much left for anyone to do. Classes were spent having debates about current events — interesting, but ultimately low-stakes — or sitting in small groups chatting about plans for the future. Some teachers allowed the students to use their class periods as study hall time. Taylor tended to spend most of her in-class hours reading books, feeling as if she was passing the time between two more important activities. She was ready to move on, to go off to college, but there were a few weeks yet to spend here before she could do that.

But if Taylor had been asked to put money on the real reason school had changed, she would have said that it was because Kane was gone.

She had never dreamed that his absence could affect her so powerfully, but it had. She realized now that she had gotten used to having him in the halls of the school. She had gained a sort of internalized knowledge of where he would be and when, so that when she walked to her European History class and didn’t pass him in the hall on his way to his lunch period, it gave her a feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was missing. Lunch wasn’t a class that Kane had liked to skip — you could usually find him on campus for that one. The fact that he wasn’t here felt wrong.

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