My Marionette Lover novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: What Birdie Knows

I sat him on my desk chair and pulled the lamp close.

Burns were the one thing my grandmother had taught me to treat properly.

I found the tin of salve under my bed.

"This is going to sting," I said.

"Everything does," said Arlen.

I smoothed the salve over the welt with two fingers, slowly.

His skin was hot under my hand.

He kept his head down and his back straight, and neither of us said anything for a while.

"Does the other end of it always do this?" I asked.

"Not like this."

"It never punished you before?"

"It punished me when I fought it."

"Tonight I laughed." He breathed out.

"That's the first time I laughed in front of other people since I was nine."

My fingers stopped.

"It doesn't want you laughing?"

"It doesn't want me anything."

The door opened behind us, and Birdie stood there in her bunny slippers, with her hair flat on one side.

She looked at Arlen with his shirt off, then at me with the salve.

"I'm going to ask a question," she said, "and you're both going to answer it nicely."

"Birdie."

"Is there a boy in my room?"

"I'm leaving," said Arlen, rising.

"Sit down, Redfern. You're bleeding on my carpet."

He sat.

Birdie dragged a beanbag between us and dropped onto it with her arms crossed.

"I've known Hazel two and a half years," she said.

"She's the weirdest person I've ever met."

"Last spring I watched her make a wooden fox cross a stage with no strings on it."

"There were strings," I said.

"Not that I could see."

"They were silver."

"That's my point." Birdie jabbed a finger at Arlen. "I believe her. So tell me what you are, Redfern."

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