Lies Like Wildfire

by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

  Luke’s trailer is at the edge of the dusty Red Cross compound, so we bypass security and roll up alongside the chain-link fence. Drummer texts Luke: we’re here.

  From inside the trailer, we hear shouting: “You are a No. Good. Piece. Of. Shit. Like your father!” Each word is punctuated with a strike and a grunt from Luke.

  “Fuck,” Drummer says, and his breath comes faster with each muffled blow, and his face engorges with blood. He leaps out of the car and paces.

  “Don’t go in there,” I warn him. “Luke wouldn’t want that.”

  Drummer spits on the ground, Mo wrings her hands, and Violet covers her mouth.

  Luke’s the strongest of the monsters. He could grab any one of us, twist us into a pretzel, and squeeze the life out of us and we couldn’t stop him, but he doesn’t fight back when his mother loses her shit. He can’t risk CPS taking Aiden, and he won’t move out either. He won’t leave his brother alone with his mother.

  His trailer door bangs open, startling a flock of sparrows that wing out of the trees, and Luke tumbles down the steps. His mother looms behind him, wielding a broom. Her face is bright red, her hair in disarray. She whacks him like she’s trying to kill a rattlesnake. “That’s right, run, you little pussy!” she screeches.

  Luke scrambles to his feet, climbs over the chain-link perimeter fence, and dives into Violet’s car. “Go!” he cries. “Get out of here!” His voice is tight, as if he’s being throttled, and tears drip from his eyes. Drummer leaps into the Trackhawk with him, and Violet spins her tires as she speeds onto the main road, leaving behind a cloud of dust.

  “Drive to the bridge,” says Drummer.

  Violet nods and throws back her huge sunglasses, resting them on top of her shiny mane of hair. “That was—Luke, are you all right?”

  He puts his arm over his eyes. His body shakes, and we hear sniffles. I don’t expect him to speak, but he surprises me and does: “My mom saw the text from Mo about investigators at her house. She said if I had anything to do with that fire, she’s going to kick me out.”

  “God!” Mo wraps her arm around him.

  Violet pulls her sunglasses back down with shaking hands. “Guys, maybe we should just come clean and tell the truth.”

  “Jesus, Violet, did you hear what he just said?” Mo asks. “His mom will kick him out.”

  Her lips twist into frown. “Yes, I heard, but it’s getting out of control. Does anyone else feel that way?”

  “You were the first to lie,” I remind her.

  “Ugh, the turn!” Violet whips the steering wheel to the right and bounces over the suspension bridge that crosses the river. She parks at our usual spot near a path that leads to the water.

  We find a shady area on the shore and watch the pebbled river sparkle in the afternoon light. Groups of teens have commandeered spots up and down the shore, and several kids wave at us. They’re blasting music, sunbathing, and laughing. Some wear face masks due to the air quality; most don’t.

  Fat trout swim lazily by as Luke collects himself. I notice a welt forming across his cheekbone, and my stomach clenches at the thought of his mother striking him with the stick end of her broom. I can’t help but bring it up again. “Are you okay?”

  He shifts his dark eyes away. “Never better.”

  I take the hint to shut up about it and turn to Mo, who’s chewing on a lock of her hair. “What did you tell the investigators?” I ask.

  “Nothing! I told them it was an old photo, one taken earlier this summer that I just felt like posting.”

  I rub my face. “Good, but did they take your phone? If they did, they’ll figure out that you’re lying.”

  “Jesus, Han, no. I still have it.” She throws a rock into the river. It lands with a splash, and the ripples expand toward us.

  “They can’t take it without a warrant anyway,” Luke says.

  I groan. “True, but if my dad or Cal Fire requests a warrant in relation to this fire, they’ll get it. Then they’ll use Mo’s GPS and the geolocator on the photo to pin her at the Gap right when the fire started. You’re not going to like this Mo, but you need to lose your phone.”

  Luke nods. “Han’s right, and you should destroy it first. Just in case.”

  Mo’s foot twitches, and her cheeks flame pink. “Wouldn’t it look bad if I suddenly lost my phone?”

  “It’ll look worse if the forensic lab gets ahold of it.”

  Violet stands and paces in front of us, her sun-darkened skin glowing in the filtered light. After a beat, she whirls around. “How far are we going to take this? Destroying phones? More lies? What’s next?”

  “Do you want to go to prison?” Luke asks her. “Because I fucking don’t.”

  She rolls her eyes as if he’s being ridiculous, and I feel sudden sympathy for her. Lying is hard and Violet is a good person. She’s generous, always pays our way when we go out. If there’s one bite of dessert left, she offers it to us. When I’m overwhelmed with chores, she pitches in to help, sweating and cracking jokes beside me until the work is done.

  Violet is a happy person, but this lie is changing her, twisting her into someone she doesn’t like—but it’s the price she has to pay, that we all have to pay, for what we did. For the people we killed.

  I shudder the thought away. “Look, guys”—I pause until they’re all facing me, my best friends—“we’ve already decided to save ourselves. There’s no going back now. Without the phone, no one can prove when Mo took that picture or where she was when it posted. And it doesn’t matter how things look. It matters what they can prove. Kids lose their phones all the time. There’s no law against it. Drummer, if you took any pics or videos that day, you should delete them from the cloud and lose your phone too.”

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t.” He swipes back his hair. “Let’s get our stories straight again, all right? I’ll die if they put me in a cage.”

  And this is how we circle back to lying, to covering it up. We do it for Luke, because he’s on probation and because his mom will kick him out. We do it for Drummer, because he’s too soft for prison. We do it for Mo, because it will destroy her mother. We do it for me, because it will wreck my dad’s career. And we do it for Violet, because she lied first.

  We spend the rest of the afternoon nailing down our stories and memorizing them.

  “What if one of us gets caught?” Mo asks, still spooked by the visit from the deputies and the fire investigator.

  “Monsters don’t rat on monsters,” Luke says.

  Violet smiles for the first time today, flashing her dimples. “Is that one of the silly pacts we made as kids? What were the others?” She turns her long-lashed eyes on me, her dark humor flickering. “You made us sign them in blood. God, we were weird.”

  Drummer nods as if he agrees.

  I look away because those two broke the only pact I care about: monsters don’t date monsters. I feel a chasm widening between the five of us, and I don’t like it, not one fucking bit.

  On the walk back to Violet’s car, Mo hands me her phone. “Will you destroy it? I don’t want to bring it home.” I nod and she continues. “Are you okay, Hannah? I mean, besides the fire, is something else going on?”

  I unclench my fists and lower my voice. “I think Drummer and Violet are dating.”

  “Seriously!” Mo slaps her hand over her mouth. “I would not put those two together—Violet and Drummer? Sorry, but we both know he’s going nowhere and she’s going to Stanford, and she’s so…”

  “Rich?”

  Mo sputters. “I was going to say innocent. I mean, Drummer has been around.” She nods authoritatively. “Besides, monsters don’t date monsters.”

  I smile, happy that Mo remembers at least one of our pacts. Her hazel eyes soften. “Are you jealous, Han?”

  My smile vanishes. “What do you thin
k?”

  She pulls me into a tight hug. “I think you’re beautiful and smart and strong and, no offense to Drummer, but you can do better.”

  I shrug. Maybe I can, but I don’t want better, I want him, and I feel my face flush with humiliation. As long as we had the pact, I could pretend Drummer didn’t date me because of it, but now that I see how easily he broke it for her, I have to face the truth: Drummer doesn’t like me that way and probably never will. “Thanks, Mo,” I say as we catch up to the others. “You’re a good friend.”

  She cocks her hand like it’s a gun and pretends to shoot. “A beer-drinking, lake-swimming friend.”

  I chuckle. “That’s right.”

  Back at Violet’s house, we hug and part ways, and my nerves coil in my stomach. The tension between the monsters is growing. One of us is bound to crack. Then what?

  14

  July 21

  Gap Fire: 30% contained

  Fatalities: 10

  Time: 8:59 p.m.

  I drive straight to Gap Lake after dropping Mo at her house, park at the trailhead, and climb out of my Jeep. The sun has just set, and the night bugs sing, the owls hoot. A bat whooshes over my head. I carry bear spray and a flashlight as I make my way up the trail toward the Gap. The moon is dark silver, and a gentle breeze sways the treetops, as if the canopy is dancing.

  It’s a mile walk to the clearing that opens to the lake. I tromp noisily, so the bears know I’m here. With my height, I cut an imposing figure in the dark, and thankfully bears don’t understand that humans are helpless, that we don’t have their three-inch claws and sharp canines. Still, their food supply has burned up, and the bears are starving and more dangerous than usual.

  As the trail widens, I reach the meadow preceding the Gap. Normally there might be a few night swimmers here, or couples making out, but the air quality and depressive mood have kept people away.

  I pause in front of the lake and inhale, marveling as always at its beauty and danger. The evergreen trees that ring the dark water are flocked with snow in the wintertime and bristling with green needles during summer, beautiful. The lake spans 160 acres and drops more than two thousand feet to a dark, cold bottom. There is no shelf, no gentle slope, just a sheer slide straight down.

  It’s eerie to know that if you were swimming and the water suddenly vanished, you would fall to your death, or maybe to the other side of the Earth, or maybe into another world, as Violet once told us.

  She likes to imagine the lake as a mirrored place where we live opposite lives. I ponder that as I observe my face reflected in the water—a mirror image—my eyes, my skin, and my hair a dusty shade of silver, devoid of color, my figure distorted, shorter, thicker. I’m the opposite of everything I am on land. It’s a watery world where there is no breath to speak a lie.

  A fish leaps and lands with a splash. There are creatures in this lake—giant trout and catfish and salmon and maybe ancient monsters. It’s our very own California version of Loch Ness. People claim they’ve seen serpent heads break the surface and felt scaled flesh bump their legs under the water. Sam’s Market even sells Gap Lake T-shirts that picture a huge whiskered catfish wearing sunglasses. The fish shoots toward an unaware swimmer with its big mouth agape, a whimsical spinoff of the Jaws movie poster. Large shapes have been recorded swimming near the surface, but scientists claim the photos and videos are hoaxes.

  What I know for sure about the Gap is that it’s the perfect place to lose a cell phone forever. I find a flattish stone, lay Mo’s phone on it, grab another rock, and smash it to pieces. When it’s good and mangled, I hurl it into the lake. Plop. Plop. Gone. The Gap swallows the evidence and looks as innocent as ever, its secrets sinking out of sight. I return home feeling a hundred pounds lighter.

  I park beside the barn, toss the horses a late dinner, and hear my dad dragging in our bear-proof can. I pocket my keys, skip toward the noise, and call out, “Dad? Want some help?”

  But it’s not my dad moving the can. It’s a bear.

  It rears up, as shocked as I am, and chuffs. Our bear-proof garbage can is tipped on its side.

  The bear is too close. If I run, it’ll catch me. “Easy,” I say, putting up my hand, my heart hammering. The bear drops to all fours, and its long, yellow claws scrape the gravel drive.

  “Easy,” I repeat, holding my ground. My eyes shift to the house. Why isn’t Matilda barking? I bite my lip. I left my bear spray in the car, and I don’t have my rifle or my air horn. Stupid!

  From his paddock, Pistol whinnies, and the bear pivots. Sunny and Stella canter nervously around their paddocks, and the bear glances from the horses to me, agitated. It swings its neck and sniffs the air.

  Sweat drips down my face as I take a slow step backward.

  Just then my dad drives up and slams to a halt. He honks the horn; turns his headlights on bright. The bear snarls and bumps into the garbage can, which clatters loudly.

  My dad leaps out of his cruiser and fires two shots over the bear’s head.

  It rears and then bounces down to all fours, stamping the earth, confused by the noise and the rolling can. Its lips curl back in a roar.

  Matilda hears the gunshots and blasts out the open screen door. When she sees the bear, she breaks into furious barking and charges. My dad glides past the animals, grabs me as if I weigh nothing, and rushes me into the house.

  He sets me on the floor, and I race to the kitchen window, cupping my hands on the glass to see outside. “Matilda!” I scream.

  “She’ll be fine,” Dad says, breathing hard through his nose.

  Outside, Matilda lunges and barks at the bear, her tail high and wagging. She looks five years old instead of twelve. Sunny rears and bucks in his paddock, exciting the other horses. The bear makes some tentative swipes at my dog, then whirls around and gallops away.

  Matilda prances back to us with her head high and her eyes bright. “Good girl!” Dad says, and we both hug her. Then he looks at me and grimaces. “You have to be more careful, Hannah.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Matilda didn’t bark, so I thought it was you moving the can.”

  “She’s going deaf, Bug.” He feeds Matilda slices of cheese, her favorite treat. “I think it’s time to get a new pup. She’s getting too old for this.”

  My dad is right: we need a younger dog. They have always been our first alarms when a bear is on the property, but this one got past Matilda’s floppy, failing ears.

  My dad reaches for a beer, and before I can say a word, he asks if I heard about Mo’s photo. My body tenses and I try to hide it by petting Matilda. “Yeah, I heard.”

  He clears his throat, waiting for me to look at him. Then he says, “You need to tell me right now if you know anything about who started the Gap Fire.”

  I hold his gaze as my mind spins.

  “Hannah,” he prods, “you can’t protect your friends from this. If they did it, we will find out.”

  This is my absolute last chance to come clean, and I feel as if I’m standing between two eternities: one where my soul is redeemed and one where it is condemned to hell. Confessing is the right thing to do. It has to be! In every movie and every book, the good guys tell the truth.

  But besides disappointing my dad and possibly destroying his career, it will ruin mine too. My past flashes before my eyes—taking all the right courses in high school, studying late into the night, taking final exams, attending exam prep sessions, taking the SAT three times, hours of AP testing, college applications, referral letters, running varsity track for four years, and then getting those acceptance letters to schools (not Stanford, though) and leaping for joy and kissing Pistol on his big lips because he was the only creature near me at the time—and I think, fuck it, I’ll worry about my soul later.

  “I promise, Dad, I don’t know who started it, but I know it couldn’t have been my friends.
Mo took that photo weeks ago.” I add a dismissive laugh, as though he’s wasting his time.

  My dad rolls his cold beer across his forehead, and his flint-blue eyes squint at me, thoughts churning, then he lets out his breath. “Did you buy the new trailer tires yet?”

  “No, but I will.”

  “Hannah Louise,” he rasps, “I hope you’re more responsible in college.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, just handle your business.” He takes his beer to his room to change.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, I wake to the smell of coffee brewing and bacon sizzling. Dad’s been cooking more since the cleaning crew transformed our house into a tidy home. It’s kind of shocking we never realized how dirty it was before it became layered in ash. I pull on a pair of cutoffs and approach the kitchen, yawning. Dad is at the stove, scrambling eggs and tending the bacon in the pan.

  I was up all night watching Drummer and Violet on our location-sharing app. His avatar showed him at her house, right next to Violet’s avatar, until 4:00 a.m., asshole. I hold on to the only hope I have: that he’ll get bored with her. New girls always excite him for a few weeks, but then he starts coming back to my house to watch TV, eat my cereal, and hang out. Sometimes he uses me to hurt his girlfriends, snapping pictures of us in his hot tub and adding them to his online story, sending a clear message to whomever he’s dating: You don’t own me, you can’t control me, you can’t put me in a cage.

  But I let Drummer be Drummer. I keep the door open and food in the cupboard, and like a friendly tomcat, he keeps coming back. Violet won’t change that.

  Now it’s 7:15 a.m., and I feel about as lively as roadkill.