Page 74 of June First

“Definitely.”

I force my pathetic, useless feet to move. Swallowing down a mouthful of bile, I stumble toward the bathroom and shove my way inside, taking a moment to catch my breath before turning on the shower until the water is heated to scorching.

I need to burn away this feeling. Singe it off my skin, then peel away every sullied layer.

Stripping down to bare bones, I step into the tub, planting both hands against the tile wall and letting the jets pelt me until my skin turns crimson. I think of June. I think of June, so innocent and good, twisted and tangled with some dumb kid who never cared about her heart, only cared about her body—only cared about bragging rights and a new notch on his belt.

She’s too young. Too sweet, too perfect.

It’s too soon.

Goddammit.

I shouldn’t care this much.

This was inevitable. I can’t protect her from sex. I can’t protect her from curious hormones or horny boys. I can’t hold her back from experiencing the bad and ugly parts of life, like crying her eyes out when she wakes up next to some guy one day, only to realize that he had no intention of giving her the whole world.

And I think…

I think that’s exactly why it hurts.

I never confronted June about what I heard that day.

Instead, I let it eat me up inside like battery acid, eroding my skin and gnawing at my bones. It felt like a disease. A cancer, rotting me from the inside out.

But I never let her know.

I couldn’t let her see.

I never scolded her, or demanded to know his name, or asked to a see a picture just so I could envision the son of a bitch who took something so precious from the girl I cared for so spectacularly.

She never, ever knew.

And I know now the real reason it hurt so goddamn bad—the painful, deep-seated reason that changed the course of my entire life.

Yeah…I know now.

But I didn’t know it then, and I’m glad I didn’t.

It was for the best.

Because the moment it hit me, one year later, I wished I had never figured it out…

15

FIRST-DEGREE BURN

BRANT, AGE 23

I burned myself today.

I was rushing out a table order, picking up the slack from a fellow coworker, and I grabbed the handle of a cast-iron skillet after it’d just come out of the oven.

Amateur move.

An angry, blistered burn mark has since decorated the underside of my palm, right above the heel where a jagged scar still lingers from when I took baby June on a late-night adventure to my old house of horrors.

After wrapping my hand in a few layers of gauze, I worked hard despite the pain for the next couple of hours, hissing through my teeth the whole time, right up until my lunch break.