Burn: A Novel Read online

“Are you okay?” Margo asked as Jenner slipped into place. “You look kinda green.”

  “I just got too hot.” The instinct to keep everything quiet was too strong for her to ignore, even with a good-hearted soul like Margo.

  “Yeah, this heat is miserable. You need to drink more water.”

  Somehow she made it through the rest of her shift, somehow she managed to drive home, though she gripped the steering wheel of the Blue Goose so tightly her hands ached. She was breathing too fast, gulping in air, and her lips were numb, her head swimming. She blew out a big sigh of relief when she finally steered the Goose into her driveway, cut the headlights, killed the engine. Just as if her heart wasn’t galloping a hundred miles an hour, she got out and carefully locked the Goose’s doors, went up the steps to her creaky little porch, unlocked her own door, and stepped inside the safety of home. It wasn’t until then, after re-locking the door behind her and she was safe, that she pulled the ticket and the piece of newsprint from her front jeans pocket, laid them side by side on the coffee table, and forced herself to look at the numbers again.

  7, 11, 23, 47, 53, 67.

  They were the same on both pieces of paper.

  She checked them one more time, then did it again. She got a pencil, wrote down the numbers on the ticket, then checked that against the piece of newspaper. Nothing changed. Her heart began to race again.

  “Holy shit.” She swallowed hard. “I’ve won the lottery.”

  Chapter Two

  SLEEPING WAS IMPOSSIBLE. THE CLOCK TICKED INTO the small hours while Jenner paced back and forth, stopping occasionally to look at those numbers: 7, 11, 23, 47, 53, 67. They didn’t change, either on the ticket or the scrap of newspaper, no matter how many times she checked them. Maybe the newspaper had made a typo in one of the numbers; maybe there’d be a correction in the next edition. And maybe she was crazy, for almost wishing the numbers were wrong, but … holy hell, two hundred and ninety-five million dollars!

  What was she supposed to do with that kind of money? Five thousand, yeah. She could handle five thousand. She knew exactly what she’d do with it: pay off the Goose, buy some new clothes, maybe go to Disney World or something like that. She’d always wanted to go to Disney World, no matter how hokey that sounded. Five thousand bucks would be easy.

  Even twenty thousand, she’d have no problem with. Fifty thousand … she’d buy a new car, sure, maybe find a small house that was fixable, but run-down enough that she could afford the payments, and use the rest of the money as a down payment. She was okay with renting—she didn’t have to do any repairs, though getting the landlord to do anything was a pain in the ass—but owning her own place would be kind of nice, too.

  Beyond fifty thousand, though, was scary territory. She didn’t know anything about investments or crap like that, and while she didn’t have any experience with extra money, real extra money instead of just a twenty here and there, she was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to stick it in a bank and just let it sit. She was supposed to do things with the money, move it around according to the mysterious ways of the market, put it to work.

  She didn’t know how to do any of that. She knew what stocks were, sort of, but had no real idea what a bond was or what it did. Scam artists would be waiting in line to take advantage of her—good old Jerry, her dad, would be first in line—and she was lost as to how she could protect herself.

  After yet another look at the ticket, nausea overwhelmed her and she ran to the bathroom, hanging over the cracked old toilet for a long time even though nothing except hot water came from her mouth. Finally she took some deep breaths, and bent over the sink to splash cold water on her face. Then she braced her hands on the cool porcelain and stared at herself in the mirror, knowing that the reflection she saw was a lie. According to the mirror, nothing had changed, yet she knew that everything had changed, that the life with which she was comfortable no longer existed.

  She looked around the bathroom, at the dingy tile on the floor, the cheap fiberglass shower, the flyspecked mirror, and she almost collapsed under the overwhelming sense that what she saw wasn’t real. All of this stuff suited her fine. This was where she belonged. She was comfortable here, in a run-down, aging duplex in a going-downhill neighborhood. In another ten years this area would be a slum, and she’d have moved on to some place that was pretty much on the same level this one was now, and she’d have been okay with that. This was her life. She scraped by, she managed to pay her bills, and she and Michelle had the occasional blast at Bird’s. She knew where she fit in this world.

  But this was no longer her world, and the sickening realization was enough to make her bend over the toilet once more, her stomach heaving. The only way she could keep things the same was to never claim the winnings, and, yeah, like that was going to happen. She wasn’t stupid. Nervous and nauseated, maybe, but not stupid.

  She would be saying good-bye to almost everything from this life. She thought of all her friends, both casual and close, and of them all she thought only Michelle would stick. She and Michelle had been friends practically from the day they’d met, back in high school. She’d spent as much time at Michelle’s house, probably more, than she’d spent at her own home—wherever that had happened to be, with Jerry dragging her from place to place and always leaving behind a couple of months of unpaid rent. The way he figured it, he paid rent for only two or three months out of the year, and the rest of the time he got to live in a place for free because it usually took the landlord a couple of months to kick them out. In Jerry’s world, only fools paid rent every month.

  Jerry was going to be a problem. It wasn’t a question of if he’d cause trouble, but how much.

  Jenner had no illusions about her dad. She hadn’t seen him in months, didn’t even know if he was still in the Chicago area, but as sure as the sun rose in the east he’d turn up as soon as he heard about the lottery, and do whatever he could to get his hands on as much of the money as possible. Therefore, she had to take steps to protect the money before she claimed it.

  She’d read about people setting up plans and stuff that sheltered the money, sometimes waiting weeks before going public that they’d won. That’s what she would do. She’d keep working at Harvest until she actually got the money, but as soon as possible—today—she’d find someone whose job it was to know what to do with this kind of cash.

  By three a.m., she was exhausted, both physically and mentally. She stripped down and climbed into bed, then set her alarm for eight just in case she was able to doze off. She had too much to do to risk oversleeping. Around dawn, she fell into a fitful sleep, waking often to check the clock, and finally getting up before the alarm went off. After taking a shower, she nuked a cup of instant coffee and sipped it while she blow-dried her hair and put on makeup.

  At eight thirty, she was watching the clock as she flipped through the phone book’s advertising pages. There was nothing under “money handlers,” which was frustrating, because how the hell else would it be listed? Maybe there was something under “banks.” What she learned was that there were a lot of banks in the Chicago area, and most of them advertised themselves as “full service” banks. What was that? Maybe they pumped gas for your car and checked the oil. Banks cashed checks, right? What else was there? Unfortunately, the ads didn’t say what those services were, so she was still in the dark.

  She slammed the phone book shut and angrily paced the kitchen. She hated feeling ignorant, hated that she couldn’t look up what she wanted in the yellow pages, because she didn’t know how things were listed. But she’d never had a bank account, mostly because she never had much money and a bank account seemed stupid. She paid her bills either in cash, or by money order. That wasn’t the wrong way to do things, was it? Lots of people handled their bills that way—most of the people she knew, in fact.

  Already she was running into that wall she’d sensed—the wall between the life she knew and the life all that money would automatically bring with it. Other people had m