Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  Then I see it: A Garfield cartoon desk calendar near Pake’s computer. May 12.

  I stop breathing for an instant. I left for Trinity on April 14.

  “What’s the date today?” I ask quickly.

  “May twelfth,” Mr. Pake says slowly, like I’ve got a head full of concrete.

  The poster of the fuzzy chipmunk that’s plastered on the wall behind Mr. Pake’s head starts to look even fuzzier. In fact, the entire room looks blurry now. The feet of the wooden desk become mushy and soft. Officer Wagner’s scuffed brown leather shoes look like big puffy raisins. The lines in the oatmeal-colored linoleum floor disappear. My ears begin to ring in a high-pitched hum that reverberates through me, starting at my head and slowly dripping down to my toes. That sickeningly sweet vanilla scent hangs in the air.

  I look to Gram, standing stiff with arms crossed, hoping for an explanation. “You do realize you’ve been missing for four weeks,” she says.

  “That can’t be,” I say shaking my head. “I was gone for one day.”

  Gram opens her mouth to talk, when Officer Wagner places a hand on her forearm. She nods and sinks into a seat next to me. I begin to stand up, but Gram latches a thin hand around my wrist, locking me down so I can’t run away. I want to yank her off me. Instead, I take a deep breath and relax.

  “I left Saturday afternoon and went to Trinity Forest. The next morning, I met these kids. And we stayed at a house. And I was gone for just that one day.” If I repeat it, it will be the truth.

  “Her mother pulled the same crap when she was in high school. She disappeared and then blamed it on that stupid forest,” Gram tells Officer Wagner, shaking her head. Then she looks directly at me and points a finger. “Ember, if this is just a way to get back at me—”

  “What?” Get back at her?

  “We’ll get you help,” Officer Wagner says, flipping through the notepad and glancing over at Gram. “In cases like this, we usually have court-mandated mental health services.”

  The idea of talking to a shrink about my feelings in some stuffy, ornate office makes me want to vomit. I glance at Gram. She pinches her lips together. She doesn’t believe in therapy, either. Thank God. Maybe she can get me out of it.

  The ringing in my ears. It’s louder. Gray. Milky gray, like the color of Mom’s favorite sneakers. Not thundercloud black-gray. Not smooth, fluffy, white, cloud-gray. But flat, like a dull piece of construction paper. God, maybe those pills really did jack me up. My head has been nothing but mashed potatoes the last week, or what I thought was a week.

  I put my hands to my temples and shut my eyes.

  Four more police officers file into the room. Too many people in this broom-closet office. My face flushes. It’s way too hot. I shed my fleece jacket. Then my long-sleeved T-shirt. An invisible belt tightens across my chest, and I fold my shoulders over my boney knees. I clench my jaw and dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands. The ringing now fills my vision and every inch of the stuffy air in here.

  I was one of those missing girls in my notebook. Did I do this on purpose?

  The ringing gets louder. The color and sound distort everything else. I must have dreamed up Trinity Forest. I must have completely been tripping on drugs—those pills that Zach and JT gave me. I wonder how long the effects were supposed to last. But I was so comfortable with those kids in Trinity. I was so whole. I was me again. In Trinity, people looked at me differently. I should really just go back there, and ditch the pills. It’s the pills that messed me up. That last hit with JT this morning. Maybe I was on his couch for four weeks. Maybe that’s why his mom was yelling. Or maybe I’m just losing it.

  I realize that everyone is still talking. Their voices move in murmurs and waves, as if the volume on a TV is being turned up and down. I catch words that float along the ringing gray sound. Therapy. Hospital. Media. Press conference.

  “She needs a physical examination and a complete psych workup.”

  “Parents passed away.”

  “Mother had depression.”

  “Withdrawn.”

  “What time did you come to, Ember? Do you remember where you were this morning?”

  I hear the question but can’t answer. I can’t talk about this anymore. I cover my eyes. Then I cover my ears and duck my head into my lap.

  I always wondered what it would feel like to lose your mind, to feel like you were going insane. This is what it must feel like.

  After a long time, we stand. People shake hands. Hands pat my shoulders. Hands exchange brochures. I catch a couple titles: Understanding Runaway Youth and Lake County Mental Health Services. Someone places a blanket around my hot, sweaty shoulders.

  Finally, I speak. “Can I just go to class? I really want to go back to class.” I need normal. The kind of normal where you worry about the tardy bell and what earrings to wear in the morning and what’s on the lunch menu. I glance around. This could be really bad. They could seriously lock me up in some mental ward for the rest of my senior year. What if I don’t even graduate now? Graduation is just two weeks away. What’s even normal after that? For me, graduation is stepping off the ledge into the abyss. I stop breathing and the ringing wraps tighter around my forehead.

  Gram and I walk through the school office, past the scent of burnt coffee, into the bright fluorescent lights of the hallway. Gram calls Jared on her phone.

  “Yes, she’s fine. She’s home.” Pause. “No, you don’t need to come back again.” Pause. “Yes.”

  She puts the phone to my ear.

  “Hey, Ember,” Jared says. “God, the whole world has been looking for you. Where were you?”

  “Sorry,” I say quietly. No one believes me. Even I don’t believe me.

  “Don’t say sorry, Emb,” he says. “God. Oh shit. God. I’m so just so grateful.”

  Jared talks, but I barely hear him.

  Tre’s words from dinner echo in my head: “Reality is merely an illusion—albeit a very persistent one.”

  15

  Standing at my locker, I pull the notebook out of my backpack and instantly recognize the red faded cover of Mom’s Crazy Woman Notebook. I had tossed it in my backpack before I went to Trinity. Mom drew a bunch of Egyptian symbols and a large triangle on the red cover. I think again of how the triangle looks just like the pyramid on the Trinity coin I have. I wonder if Mom really went to Trinity Forest. Gram says Mom “pulled this crap, too.” Whatever that meant.

  I had to have made all this up because of Mom’s fascination with Trinity. Being lost in the forest, moving through that creepy fog, coming to some crazy gate, meeting cool people who eat fancy food: that all sounds like a trippy dream.

  I dig deeper in my backpack to find my physics book that I need to turn in and see my Missing Persons notebook. With a quick glance around, I lean in close to my locker and flip through the pages of it, scanning the faces of the lost people, half expecting to find a picture of my own face in there.

  I wish my version of Trinity were real. I think back to Pete’s laughter rippling in the soft breeze. To Tre’s ice-blue eyes locking with mine as he gazed at me from across the table, a small smile on his handsome face. I remember how, with that spiky hair, he seemed weird and dangerous and maybe even kind of a jerk—but he also had something more, a softer, deeper side that probably stretched for miles.

  I sigh. Trinity is just a cloud. Fluffy, white, beautiful, but it’s just air that slips through your fingers. The stories about Trinity are just that. Stories. And I made up my own.

  “What’s up, girl?” JT asks.

  I jump at his voice and shut the notebook quickly. Wearing athletic shorts and a Red Sox jersey, he opens a locker a few down from mine. I shove the notebook into my backpack.

  “You blowing me and Zach off or what? Haven’t seen you in three days—not since you bolted.”

  Zach? Yes. After finally remembering what happened in his truck, I want to vomit. JT? He seems okay, I guess. I glance at him as I zip up my green backpack and s
ling it onto my shoulder. He’s got that dopey look on his face with those raisin eyes. He’s a pudgy, sweet idiot who, like me, wants to forget stuff.

  “I wasn’t blowing you off. Because, well, apparently I was missing…” I throw up some air quotes with my two fingers. “Because of our little Percocet experiment.”

  “Naw,” he says shaking his head. “That ain’t it. You weren’t that messed up.”

  I shrug.

  “I heard Maddie say you talked about going to Trinity Forest. Did you go back after we were there?” he asks. “That true?”

  Is it true? “Yeah,” I say. “I went to Trinity Forest and met these kids. And we ate great food, and danced in this mansion. But I was gone only a day, not four weeks like everyone says.”

  He laughs, tossing his head back so forcefully that he bangs it on the locker. He frowns and rubs his head with his thick hand. “With that story, girl, maybe you were tripping.”

  Crazy status confirmed by yet one more person. In the past three days, I have endured a blur of soft-talking therapists and frowning doctors and stiff, serious police officers. Numbly, I gave my obligatory statement to the press. I promised to show up for regular therapy starting after graduation. All week, teachers and kids have given me the Poor Drug-Addict Girl with Dead Parents look. Maddie even called and left a careful message with forced cheer.

  I think back again to that night she snuck us onto the roof of the Tabor House and I told her my life sucked. That was just when Mom was depressed. It sucks so much worse now. That night, Maddie put on her fake therapist voice and chewed her licorice, serious and slow. “Let’s investigate the level of suckiness,” she said.

  “Sucks so bad I think I may want to eat some lead paint chips at my house,” I responded.

  “Not a good sign. Hmm… after serious analysis of your Suckiness Syndrome, Ms. Trouvé, I think some licorice therapy might be in order,” she said. She tore off a string of candy and solemnly handed it to me.

  “Will it take away the pain?” I asked.

  “Always.”

  Then Maddie shook out her tangled headphones and pushed an earbud up to my head. She knew how music felt for me. “Next healing protocol, Ms. Trouvé. Music.” I remember the color of the notes, a rich mahogany and fuzzy sheep’s wool, as we listened together with the shared earbuds. Then suddenly, in the middle of the song, I stood up and walked along the weathered roof to peer over the flat metal edge.

  Maddie watched me. “Just don’t jump,” she called. Through the strands of my dark hair, I could see a grin explode on her freckled face. With a yank, she tore off more licorice with her teeth.

  “If I do, you’ll save me with your eight feet of licorice, right?” I said.

  “Of course. Unless you wait until I eat half of it. Then you’re on your own the rest of the way.”

  No matter how strong Maddie’s licorice is, no matter how hard she tries, she can never save me. I’ll only drag her down, too. No one knows what it’s like to have an elephant on your chest. I killed them. And I’m batshit crazy on top of that.

  Trinity wasn’t real. The thought is devastating. The one place where I could be old Ember.

  I shut the locker door and turn around and inhale the puke-like smell of sloppy joes from the cafeteria. I try to breathe through my mouth to avoid the disgusting odor.

  On the opposite wall, I catch a glimpse of a blue poster announcing Sexual Assault Awareness Week. My stomach lurches.

  Zach knew I was high and out of my head when he screwed me in his truck. I pretty much lay there on the seat of his truck like a giant blob. That really happened, didn’t it? I know it did. I know it in my heart. Isn’t that, like, date rape? Tiny maggots make their way through my abdomen, eating through my skin.

  Laughter rings down the hallway. Tall and regal, Sydney Morton uses two hands to sip from a can of Diet Coke with an eco-friendly glass straw she brings with her everywhere. For reasons I don’t fully understand, she takes up the space of anywhere she goes. Flanking her are her sidekicks, Emma, Taylor, and Hannah.

  And now, Maddie, too. She walks toward me, her eyes following me. “Hey, Ember, did you get my voicemail?” Her voice sounds like a mopey clarinet. It kind of breaks my heart.

  “Yeah, sorry, been busy,” I mumble and then turn back toward my locker, avoiding her. I want to run to her and beg her to take all this icky black heaviness away. But I can’t.

  It’s strange to see her with Sydney so often now. I never would have guessed that by the end of our high school career she would be a Sydney Clone.

  JT throws his head toward Maddie. He’s still standing here. “So how much does your bud over there even know about Trinity?”

  “Haven’t talked to her much,” I say with a single-shoulder shrug.

  JT nods down the hallway toward the exit. “Wanna party again? I’m headed to my uncle’s place now.”

  Sydney’s laughter distracts me. “Does anyone else think our graduation song sounds like we’re dying?” she asks all of her Clones.

  “The school band should spontaneously break into a cool song,” Emma says, twirling her blonde hair. “Like that ’80s song, ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’? It would totally surprise everyone midway through our walk onto the field.”

  “Oh my God, yes!” says Taylor, the girl who always wears a headband so tight it’s like her eyes are being stretched backwards. “Can’t wait for graduation. So. Awesome.”

  Graduation. Oh God, I need to be numb.

  “Sure,” I say, looking again at JT. “Yeah, I’ll go to your uncle’s.”

  “Awesome. Know where his place is?” he asks.

  I nod. Having lived here so long, I know where everyone lives. Even people I don’t really know, like JT’s weird uncle.

  “See you there.”

  I begin to move toward the door when Maddie’s scratchy voice calls to me from behind. “Ember.”

  My throat closes shut. I know what she would think if she found out where I was going. But hell, I really don’t care anymore. I glance over my shoulder and play it cool. “Hey,” I say, not wanting to talk to her. Talk to anyone.

  “Where’re you going?”

  I don’t answer immediately, trying to think of a good response. JT disappears down the hall.

  A woman singing my name saves me from complete awkwardness. “Emmmmber.” It’s Bo Summers’s mom, Jennie, dressed in yoga pants and a bright turquoise fleece jacket, walking toward me down the hall. I dated Bo for a couple months freshman year but he never talked about anything besides basketball stats.

  “Ember Trouvé. How. Are. You?” She drops a large cardboard box beside her.

  I offer a thin smile. Jennie Summers drove me crazy, always showing up to perch on the edge of the sofa when we were hanging out, forgetting she was a mom and not in high school.

  “I’ve been volunteering here at school, you know,” she says, pointing down to the open box at her feet. “Donated books. We have to figure out what to keep for the library next year, but most of it is just weird stuff.”

  I quickly glance inside the box and see a book title that intrigues me: Egyptian Heka. I suddenly feel light-headed. It’s like Mom’s Crazy Woman Notebook. Maybe she wasn’t the only nut in Leadville. I think of my time in Trinity—or my hallucination of my time in Trinity—and my whole body warms.

  I’m sure it’s my Psycho Ember Brain, but I feel like everywhere I go in this town, I see someone with long red hair, and it always makes me think of the woman who dropped the coin. I thought I saw her outside the thrift shop yesterday. Walking by Gram’s house. Smoking a cigarette on the bench by the cookie store. Maybe she’s just a girl with red hair who happened to move to Leadville recently. It’s a small town, so of course I’d see the same person over and over.

  “We were all worried about you… I’m so relieved you’re back, safe, and nothing… you know… happened.” My attention returns to Jennie. She clears her throat and injects some cheer into her voice. “What are your plans aft
er high school?”

  That’s one question people should know to never ask. Most people fudge the answer, giving some line about getting ready for college, starting a summer job, taking the world by storm. But a couple weeks before graduation, the truth is, you should know. You should. And I don’t.

  I steel my gaze at Mrs. Summers and decide to just answer honestly: “I have no idea.”

  Maddie’s eyes burn into me, heating up my cheeks. “Girl like you? No college?” Jennie tilts her head. She offers a friendly frown, clearly taken aback by my answer.

  I bend down and unzip my backpack, pretending to be busy, hoping she’ll go away. But the Jennie Summers Inquisition will not cease. “Ember, everyone in town knows your résumé.”

  “My résumé?” I look up, confused. I have never even put together a résumé.

  “Sure, debate team leader, thirty-six on the ACT—isn’t that the highest you can get on that test?” Jennie asks.

  That was old Ember.

  I pretend to be extremely interested in papers in my backpack. Two or three seconds go by. I can feel her tall, thin frame close by, waiting for me to respond. It’s as if her body heat is radiating into my skin.

  “Bo told me you won that state science contest, and you used to sing with your dad. That’s stuff most girls don’t do,” she says. She looks around. “You know, we all worry about you because of your family, and”—she clears her throat—“if there’s anything we can do…”

  I shrug. Knowing the entire town knows and talks and judges… it just makes me want to run out the door of this school and never stop running.

  She waits for more from me. I can give her nothing. “But not going to college, Ember… well, that’s the biggest mistake of your life.”

  I nod, blown away by her bluntness, raising my cheeks in what tries to be a smile but fails. It becomes more of a grimace. “Thanks.”

  She turns her attention to Maddie, standing a few feet away with the Clones. “Ahh, you’re graduating this year, too, right?”

  “Yes.” Maddie grins. She was always so good at schmoozing with grown-ups. “I’m going to Colorado State to study nursing.”