Sitting next to me, Lilly rests her arm on the back edge of the sofa, nearly encircling me. “You can be here, Emby, and just not smoke. Pete does because, well, he’s Pete. But you’re free to just be here.”
I shrug, pretending I don’t have anything to hide. Shake it off, Ember. I kick the memory into the back of the closet in my mind. Lock the door.
“That was cold, Lil,” says Pete, smirking with one eye open.
Lilly sticks her tongue out at him. “Weed isn’t doing much for you, Pete. You should see your face. Totally stupid. You need to do something else. Like take showers,” she says, giggling. He moves his head from side to side and then sinks deeper into the chair. They remind me of two people who have been friends for years. I want that. I miss that.
Pete’s eyelids remain shut and his face slowly wilts.
“Out for the count,” Tre says. “Couch-locked.”
“Never,” Pete says. After a moment, his body quakes as if enjoying some sort of internal comedy show.
“What’s so funny?” Lilly asks.
“I’m just thinking about which animal could take over the world,” he says.
“Really,” Zoe says, slightly amused. “And which animal would that be?”
“Pigeons,” Pete says. “Definitely pigeons.”
“Pigeons,” Tre repeats. A small smile meanders onto his face. “Explain.”
“They’re everywhere,” Pete says. “Go to any city, and there are thousands of these birds. Now imagine a pigeon with some ninja skills and killer nunchucks. They attack in swarms. Claws. Beaks. Nunchuck throws. Then whoosh, they fly away. Pigeons with nunchucks would dominate. It’s a fact.” He sits there with a professorial look on his face, as if he’s just solved the world’s biggest problems.
“That makes total sense,” says Lilly. Then without warning, she explodes with loud giggling and her knuckle folds into her mouth. The rest of us glance at each other before busting out laughing, too. Zoe’s laugh is musical, high-pitched, and it makes her shoulders tremble.
When the laughter peters out, Lilly flops her head back dramatically on the sofa. “I’m starving,” she says.
“You and food,” Tre says. His eyes roll skyward as he leans back in the chair.
“I dream of meatballs and ice cream,” Lilly says dramatically. “Not together of course. But two of my most favorite things. Ever.”
“Me too,” I say. My stomach grumbles. I inhale to see if I smell anything cooking. Nothing. It might be a long time.
Lilly touches my arm and her face becomes serious. “Okay, Emby. Pick. If you had to, would you choose food or clothes?”
“Um,” I say. The question is the most random thing I think someone has asked me in months. Of course, I haven’t really talked to anyone in months. I think about my mom’s lasagna and the big sandwiches I would make in the trailer with my brother. “Food. Most definitely food. I live for it.”
“I like them both so much,” she says, nodding slowly. She stares ahead with her mouth slightly open for a couple of moments. I’m just about ready to ask if she’s okay when she finishes her thought. “I may have to go with clothes, though.” She nods. “I love my walk-in closet. The smell of it. The fabrics. The way they make me feel so… glamorous. But meatballs are a close second.”
Her answer makes me smile.
“Only chicks would talk about food and clothes as an either-or,” Tre says. He shakes his head. His leather jacket opens as he leans back and puts his hands behind his head.
“And you talk about what?” Lilly says indignantly. “What’s your fabulous either-or?”
Zoe’s eyes, highlighted by shimmery gold shadow, linger on me for a moment, and her lips turn up into a small smile. She exudes the coolness of a movie star.
“Well,” Tre says, “for most guys it’d have to be a choice between sex and playing video games. But for me, because I’m such a fine gentleman with a clean mind, well, my two favorite things would be feeding the poor and going to church. But it would be a toss-up. Two of my favorite things. Wouldn’t be able to choose.” His kohl-lined eyes crinkle.
“What?” Lilly screams in a high-pitched voice, leaning forward.
“What can I say? I’m pure.” He shrugs. Tre does not at all look pure with that eyeliner and hair.
Lilly shakes her head and grins at him. “Of course you are.”
“Obviously,” Tre says. He nods, blinking with feigned innocence. His eyes meet mine for a millisecond and the smile falls from his lips. He casts his eyes to the tile floor.
Lilly pauses for a moment, tilts her head, and gives him this sweet pout and lilting giggle. “But for real, Tre-boy, you are such a sweetie. Always thinking of other people. It’s what I’ve always loved about you.”
He smiles at her and tilts his head. “Yup. That’s me. Big teddy bear.”
I twist my hair watching the two of them. They definitely have a boyfriend-girlfriend thing going on.
Their voices become background noise as I take in the room’s high ceiling, the white fur rug spread across the floor, the etched glass bookshelves with minimalist silver vases. My eyes land on a gold pyramid on the top shelf. It’s small, the size of a coffee mug, and looks like the one on the coin that the girl dropped outside the convenience store. Maybe the owner of the property is someone in love with triangles—someone wealthy enough to make a bunch of coins as a lark. If anyone’s, it feels like this is Zoe’s house.
Chris sits next to Tre with a glass of clear liquid in his hand, his mouth turned down slightly. A swirling black cursive tattoo covers his right forearm—the name Taylor. I’ve always been fascinated how tattoos can reflect what’s important to a person.
The sight of it makes me blurt out a question to the group without thinking. “So where are you all from?”
“I’m from Oregon,” Pete finally says, raising his hand.
“Cool,” I say. I can’t help but notice that Lilly looks awkward for the first time all day. I nudge her with my knee. “How about you?”
She searches for an answer in the far corner of the room. “California.”
“Oh,” I say. “Cool.” I bob my head to try to look cool, unsure of what to say next. The only thing that comes into mind is how climate change is affecting the state’s salmon population.
Zoe slowly rises out of the chair. “I think the food is ready.”
Lilly throws herself dramatically back into the sofa. “Finally! Emby. You will never go home after this dinner.”
11
This is no ordinary dinner. No bandito burger at the Golden Burro. No Pop-Tart from the box stowed beneath my bed. This is the stuff you might read about in gourmet food magazines. I don’t even know what I’m eating. But I’m absolutely starving and so happy to be eating something other than bars from my backpack.
We sit at a long table with smooth gray wood and metal edges. Zoe brings out square black plates for us and, piled in a neat circle on them, salad with ingredients I’ve never seen before.
“Spring salad with dandelion greens and sorrel,” Zoe explains, daintily holding her fork. “That bowl over there is ricotta gnocchi with asparagus and peas and morels.”
“Morels?” I ask. It’s like a foreign language. I am the Leadville hick.
“It’s like a mushroom,” she says, cutting into her salad.
“Right.” I nod, flip my hair, and avoid eye contact. Better to fake it than be confirmed an idiot.
“It’s so yummy,” says Lilly, lifting a large batch of greens high on her fork. She’s right: the whole dinner is truly awesome.
I force myself to take dainty bites—despite my desire to lick the plate. The garlic cream and salty, earthy flavors scream happy in my mouth.
“You chew like a pig, Pete,” Lilly says.
Pete’s mouth is crammed with gnocchi. I wonder what my world would be like if I truly didn’t care what people thought.
“Yeah, like you’re Miss Manners,” Pete says, swallowing and waving his fork a
t Lilly. “Yesterday you were hawking boogers on the floor.”
“It was a grape! A green grape.” Lilly says. My head bounces between them. A conversational tennis match. Lilly’s contagious laugh prompts me to giggle.
“Pete told another one of his stupid jokes the other day, and when I laughed, I accidentally spit a grape out of my mouth,” she says.
“For the record, the joke was not stupid,” Pete says, waving her comment off with his hand. “And she shot a giant green booger on the floor. And denied it.”
“No! No! No!” Lilly laughs. “Grape. Swear it.”
Lilly’s hands are over her face as she shakes her head. When her giggling dies out, Pete whispers across the table, the corners of his eyes turning up, “It really was a booger.”
I smile, thrilled to be eating gnocchi and listening to stupid stories. I still can’t believe I packed cans of beans and hot dogs thinking I’d go to the forest and rough it, and here I am sitting at this dining room table with strangers and eating this amazing food.
I glance at Chris. He’s staring at the far wall, as if he’s not even here.
“So, Chris,” I say, “how do you all know each other?”
He laughs through his nose and stares into his plate. “Got stuck with them, I guess.”
“He did!” Lilly says. “We found him.”
I glance at Zoe. She can’t be much older than me, but her poise and confidence are striking. “Where are you from, Zoe?”
“I come from a long line of, well, powerful people,” she says. “My roots are in Ireland dating back to the Druids.”
“Wow. It’s so cool you even know that about your heritage,” I say, noticing for the first time a series of thin white scars on the underside of her forearm. I wonder if powerful means rich. Maybe this is her family’s house. “How’d you end up here?”
“In a way, I guess I’d been waiting for it,” she says with a shrug. “I found it. It found me. Here, I can finally breathe, you know?”
I nod. This place does make me feel like I can finally breathe. The elephant certainly didn’t follow me here.
I turn to Pete. “So you’re from Oregon… What’s it like there?”
“It’s great. Portland has got naked bike rides. Who wouldn’t love naked bike riding?” he says, chewing. “Awesome beaches. Other than that, it’s green. Wet. I was stoned most of my life, so it’s all a blur. Tre’s from Cali, but he still probably knows more than me. I call him the Source of All Knowledge.”
Tre shrugs off Pete’s compliment.
“Ask him, and he’ll probably drone on about the Ute tribes of Salem, Oregon,” Pete says.
“They weren’t Utes. They were the Kalapuyans,” Tre says quietly. I flick my eyes to him, happy that he’s kind of geeky smart. I have never met a guy in Leadville who had conversations outside of skiing, SportsCenter, or some dumb video game.
“Right! How could I forget?” Pete says sarcastically. Then he points at Tre with his fork. “Tre is the expert in the most random things—the other day you sat there rambling on about how the brain perceives time, remember?”
“An expert… so true,” Lilly says. “My sweet Tre-boy, tell us: Why does time speed up when we’re having fun, but slow down when we’re bored?”
Tre shakes his head and sighs. “Could you pass the gnocchi?”
“Come on, Tre.” Lilly swings her hand in the air to punctuate her words. He doesn’t respond. She sighs. Then she looks at me. “What do you think, chickadee?”
I know the answer, and I love being engaged in an intellectual conversation again.
“Because,” I say, “when we’re focused on something we like, our brain doesn’t keep track of the steady stream of pulses that it subconsciously tallies zipping through it. Researchers think that we actually have different internal stopwatches for different things we’re doing. So if you’re having a great time watching a movie, an hour will fly by. But if you’re waiting for a bus, it’s painful.”
My face flushes. That felt more like the old Ember. The one who talked. The one who knew stuff and wanted to know even more—about everything. I sit up straighter.
The edges of Tre’s lips turn up slightly, but his eyes stay averted to the table.
“Okay, so what about this one: Reality. How does the brain perceive that?” Lilly glances between me and Tre, her eyebrows dancing.
I know this answer, too. “The right hemisphere of the brain is all about the here and now, thinking in pictures and learning through body movement.” I take a breath to continue.
But Tre interrupts me quickly. “The left brain thinks linearly and methodically. It’s what makes you aware of your existence as you know it. As separate from this big energy field that your brain takes in.”
That’s exactly what I was going to say. Pete should not call him the Source of All Knowledge. He’s more like the Source of All Confusion. I don’t know how to make sense of him: Handsome. Weird. Intriguing. Rude. Smart. Know-it-all.
“Einstein once said that ‘reality is merely an illusion—albeit a very persistent one,’” he adds with a nod.
“Well, there’s been lots of debate over how the brain perceives reality,” I interject. I can’t help but try to keep up with his Google brain.
He gazes intently at me, waiting for more, but all of my thoughts become disjointed. Something about him makes me feel flustered. “One idea,” I continue, “suggests that there is no such thing as objective reality. Subjectivity taints every possible observation or interpretation. Basically, nothing is real.”
“So… what is reality then?” he asks quickly. “Is it an illusion? Are there parallel universes? Other dimensions that we don’t understand?”
Is he challenging me over the theoretical question of what reality is? I don’t even know what my own freaking reality is here and now, sitting at this table in the middle of the forest arguing with some guy who wears as much makeup as I do. Yet he makes me feel alive somehow.
“I guess our brains take in just one possible interpretation of reality,” I say.
Pete’s eyes glaze over. Lilly bites her lip as her eyes dart between the two of us. Geek debate.
“You and Tre must have a lot in common,” Zoe says, nodding to me. I almost laugh out loud because Tre is nothing like me, yet for some reason my stomach flips at the idea. “I’m assuming you’re something of an overachiever at school.”
“Overachiever? Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?” I joke.
“Compliment,” she says with a smile.
“Well, maybe at one time I guess I was. But I’ve kind of checked out.”
I used to love school. What I couldn’t learn at school, I would go online and teach myself. How to do magic tricks, random stuff like the mysteries of giant supernova explosions. I was a sponge for information. I was creative. I was alive.
“You checked out? Why’s that?” Lilly asks with her glass hovering at her mouth before taking a sip of water.
I shrug and stir my fork in the sauce on my plate. A memory sparks in my mind. Mom’s pained expression. The car skidding off the road. Dad’s deep voice ringing out in frightened staccato. Fingers clawing the snowy hillside.
My eyes lock on my plate and nausea whips through me. With a deep breath, I look up and focus my eyes on Lilly. “I don’t know.”
She nods, satisfied with my answer, and takes a bite of gnocchi.
“Checking out is what I do best,” says Pete. “I excel at it. In fact, I should have majored in something like that. Taught a class about it.”
Lilly laughs.
Dessert comes: chocolate cake dripping with gooey goodness. Heaven. Every year for my birthday, Mom made my favorite chocolate lava cake. I would leave her notes a week beforehand, requesting it, reminding her, begging her to make the cake. She always came through. That is, until a couple years before the accident. Back when she was so sad she couldn’t get out of bed.
“So, Ember,” Tre says, finally, truly looking at
me in the eye for longer than a second. My mouth becomes dry, parched. “When are you going to leave?”
Oh. My face flushes. I open my mouth to respond, not really knowing what will come out. But Zoe speaks up so I don’t have to.
“Aww, don’t listen to him, Ember,” she says, waving him off with her hand.
I scoop the chocolate frosting on the edge of my plate with my fork and glance back to Tre. He is not eating. He is not drinking. He’s gazing directly at me, challenging me. My heart skips a beat. I hate that he has this effect on me. I hate that he is so intent on sending me home.
My face grows hot, so I pull out my Hardened, Bitchy Ember Face. It’s seen me through plenty of hard times recently, and I’m sure it will work for me now. Step two: avoid eye contact. I circle the fork on my plate.
“Stay for a while,” says Lilly.
Something about this place is different for me than Leadville. At home, I could easily disintegrate and no one would notice. Here, the people look at me, they talk to me and laugh. I haven’t had that since I had a family. This mansion, this place, these people—except Tre—want me here. I need this.
I look at Lilly. She’s grinning with that beautiful gap-tooth smile. She’s nice—like a friendly Labrador who just desperately wants you to play fetch. Screw Tre, I decide. Lilly and Zoe obviously like me. So does Pete, I think. Chris, well, I have no clue what’s on his mind.
“Sure, Lilly,” I say. “Yeah, I think I will stay.”
12
Lilly takes a gulp of water, wipes her mouth with her napkin, and stands at the table.
“Up!” she says, throwing her hands in the air like she’s a football player trying to ramp up a crowd. “Get. Up. Tonight is a dance party.”
She walks over to Pete, stands before him with her hands on her hips. “Pete, my boy, it’s time to get your funk on.”
He flashes a coy smile and lets her pull on his arms. At first he’s dead weight. Then, standing on tiptoes and leaning back, Lilly raises his limp body up and out of the chair. She holds his hand, leading him to the back of the house, nodding for me to follow.
Ember Burning Page 6