the last song (mileven au)

leave

≫ 17 ≪

Mike knocked heavily on the Hoppers' front door, his nerves increasing by the second. Lucas stood back behind him, taking in their surroundings, until the door opened.

Jim politely smiled, not expecting it to be him. "Mike? El's out with Sara, but they should be back any time now."

"No, I know. Uh, this is my friend Lucas and we're actually here to see you, sir."

"Oh? Well, come on in." Jim ushered the two inside, each of them finding a place to sit in the living room.

"So what's going on?" He asked, curious as to why Mike and his friend needed to speak to him.

Mike released a deep breath, realizing that once they told him the truth, there was no going back. "We have something we need to tell you, about the church fire."

Jim tensed up a bit, as he tended to do when someone brought it up.

The words quickly tumbled out of Mike's mouth. "We were there that night and we saw who started it."

Lucas chimed in, overcome with anger just thinking about the events of that night. "It wasn't you, it was Troy Harrington. He knew we were in there and I guess he thought it would be fun to almost fucking kill us by burning the place down." 

Giving him no time to respond, Mike continued explaining. "I'm sorry you believed it was your fault for all this time. I know we should've said something after it happened. We'll go to the cops as soon as we leave here, I swear."

"No." Jim shook his head, a stern expression on his face. "I don't want you to do that."

Mike and Lucas looked to each other in shock.

"But everyone blames you for it."  

"Yeah, they do and it's going to stay that way, okay? I don't want you two to get in trouble for this. I appreciate you telling me though, thank you. It makes me feel a whole lot better about myself."

The two boys sat speechless, not expecting him to react this way. They had kept the truth from him, from the whole town, all this time and he really didn't want them to tell anyone?

"I know the truth, that's the only thing that matters. This stays between us three. Got it?"

Lucas happily agreed to the man's request. "Sounds perfectly fine to me!"

"Thank you." Mike breathlessly replied. He was so glad that he no longer had to carry the weight of this secret. Jim finally knew the truth of what happened and it was gonna stay between the three of them. Nobody had to get hurt.

He felt so relieved, until he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

El stood in the door way, her face full of betrayal. She shook her head in disbelief at what she had overheard, then threw her bag down, storming off toward the beach.

"El, wait!"

Mike followed right behind her, until she had nowhere left to escape to. She whipped her body around, getting insanely close to his face.

"You knew? This whole time you knew what really happened. I told you how guilty he felt about it. You saw how hard he pushed himself every day to finish all that work. Yet, you said nothing. You just let him believe that he did it?!"

Mike rushed to defend himself. "I wanted to tell someone I did, but-"

"No! You can't make excuses for this. You could've told the truth if you really wanted to, but you obviously didn't. Let me guess, you felt bad that he's dying, so you thought it make you feel less shitty if you told him now?"