Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  My face scrunches up trying to comprehend this information and why Pete acts like it’s completely normal. He treats it like Lilly was offered a free hamburger or some sort of extra extra-credit points at school for showing me around. Rebirth? New life with more power?

  I am ready to hunt her down, jump on her, and yank out her yellow hair. And I want to slap him, too, for acting like it’s so normal. I jut my jaw and start breathing my anger like it’s fire.

  “Hold on, werewolf girl,” he says, patting my knee. “You should know that Lilly had a rough life. I mean—everyone… you know, everyone does. Wait a sec—” Pete stands up, swings the door open wide and calls down the hall. “Yo, Lilly!”

  I can hear her voice call back from downstairs, but her words aren’t clear.

  “Pete, what are you doing? I don’t want to talk to her.”

  He holds up a finger to quiet me and leans out the door. “Lil, come up here and bring some chips or something, okay?”

  I roll my eyes and pick at the plush carpet. I don’t want to talk to either of them. But after a minute, Lilly pops her head through the doorway.

  “You alive, chickadee?” she asks.

  “She’s mad at you,” Pete informs her. “Your deal with Zoe is out in the open.”

  She looks sheepish. “Oh… Sorry?” she says, and after a pause, she thrusts a bag of corn chips toward us. “Want some chips?”

  I stare at my bare feet nearly touching the smooth wall across from me, and through my peripheral vision, I can see her hesitating, timid before wedging between us to slide down the wall and sit. She tries to hand me the bag of chips. I ignore her and she hands it to Pete. The three of us sit in the tiniest space possible, the little hall of the doorway, when we have this enormous bedroom.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that… I like you. And we had fun, right? We can still have more fun together. We’re all in it together. Right?”

  I don’t say anything, biting my lip, staring at the chipped green polish on my big toe. I am still mad, but I’m also afraid of her. She held a rock over my head yesterday.

  Pete pats my leg and leans around me to talk to her. “Lil, tell her how you got here. Make her see.”

  I glance at her, shooting spears from my eyes into her perfect cream puff face. She twists her lips, bouncing her eyes between us and the floor.

  “Lilly likes it here because she gets the childhood she never had,” Pete says slowly, stirring his arm to motion for her to continue the sentence.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that. I was an actress, but not really by choice. My momster—”

  “Momster?” I ask with a grimace.

  “My mom. I called her that later because, well, she was a red-lipped monster. I wasn’t her daughter. I was a product she was selling. You know?”

  I shake my head, not wanting to hear her story. Or her voice. I stare at my feet again.

  “I mean, well, she just thought I was, like, so cute when I was little and thought I was going to be a big star. She put me in pigtails and hauled me to auditions. And you know, when I was good… and when I did a great job and scored parts… she loved me. She squeezed me and told me I was everything, I was the world, a star. It was…” Lilly breaks off, the words choking in her throat. Her lips form a pout and her brows knit together, holding back emotion.

  My eyes fall to the floor as my fingers mindlessly pull out more pieces of the carpet. Boo-hoo for Lilly. Why should I care about this?

  “Lilly felt like her only value was her looks and her ability to act—which, like I said, was not Oscar worthy,” Pete says. “Right?”

  Through my peripheral vision, I can see Lilly glance up at him. Her body shrinks from the criticism.

  “Sorry, Lil. But your mom would do anything, right?”

  “Yeah,” she says softly.

  “Do anything?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, she conveniently looked the other way when my manager locked the door and took me into his office. For years…” her voice trails off into a whisper. It’s almost like I can see her memories coloring her face gray, haunting her. Something bad happened to her, and her mom didn’t protect her.

  My whole body softens, and surprisingly, compassion flows out of me like water, wanting to wash away her pain. “Bad?” I whisper.

  “Bad. He owned every part of me. My body. My future. And my mom—she just gave me to him, looking for her reward in fame and cash. And then… I got super down. Really down. It’s better since I got here.” She stares at her lap. A strange detachment overtakes her.

  It pretty much kills my hair-ripping rage.

  A memory of Zach’s body on top of mine inside the truck flares in my mind. I had whispered no. Hadn’t I? I wouldn’t have let him do that if I were sober.

  “When was that?” I ask.

  “Nineteen-ninety. Though really, it was less than a year ago here in Trinity,” she says. I glance down at the bleached jeans that come up high on her waist and the purple T-shirt with rounded holes. Certainly, I should have seen that her wardrobe clearly shows she’s frozen in time. Tre’s fashion sense, for that matter, is weird too.

  We three sit silent, gazing at the wall for several seconds. Then Lilly perks up.

  “So see, Emby…” She becomes that cheerful person from the first day at the lake. It must be easier for her to move on and forget. Or at least not deal and to pretend to forget and move on. I get it. “Here in Trinity, there’s none of that. No momster. No manager. No career. No pressure. Just fun. You’ll find it’s not bad here. And I get another chance at a new life. By you being here, you get to have a new life, too. It’ll be good.”

  “New life,” I repeat, my voice flat.

  “Zoe told me that I’ll come to the light as a woman and leave here a god,” she says, shrugging.

  “A god? Why is this not at all creepy to you?” I wait for an answer.

  She shrugs and flashes that gap-toothed smile. “I’ll finally have power? Over my own life maybe? A fresh start?”

  I look to Pete to see his response, but he simply sniffs and glances at me, waiting for us to continue.

  “It’s a total Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid kind of thing… I mean, right?” I say.

  “Who’s Jim Jones?” he asks with a quick glance.

  “Don’t you remember the story of the cult leader in the 1970s? Who convinced all of his followers to commit suicide with cyanide poisoning?” I ask, recalling it from psychology class. “Remember?”

  “Vaguely,” he says, nodding, frowning.

  Lilly taps her bare foot against the navy wall across from us. “Maybe I need that, Emby,” she says. “Well, without cyanide, though.”

  How can she be so stupid? I inhale to keep from screaming at her. “If not cyanide, then what’s Zoe’s plan? How are you supposed to have a new life, anyway?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure, but just the fact that this place is mysterious and so hidden makes me think there’s a force here that can make it a reality,” she says. “You’ll see. This place is powerful.”

  That scares me, makes me want to cry, jump out of my skin, and scream in anger all at once. After a moment, disbelief overrules all of those emotions. “I still don’t buy that there’s no way out of here. I left the first time.”

  “No gate, my friend,” Pete says. “Gone. Zippo.”

  “You don’t need a freaking gate to get out. There are other ways, I’m sure. Have you tried? Tre says he did.” My body tenses with frustration. “You guys looked, right?”

  The two of them shake their heads. “Naw,” Pete says.

  My words come out loud and fast. “No? Why not? How could you not try to get out? Don’t you want to eventually go home?”

  Pete raises his palms up and now acts like I’m the crazy one. “You kidding me? Took me a while, but you know, I see now that really it was best to be stuck. No pressure here. No lame job. No parents telling you you’re a lazy, stupid piece of crap. I don’t want hom
e. I don’t want the real world. No way.”

  I don’t get how they can be in such denial about what’s happening around us. I wonder if Tre wants to try again to get out. He doesn’t seem to be okay with this situation. Maybe I should ask him.

  In the silence, clouds pass over the sun, and the swaying aspen trees outside cast a dark shadow across the room. Like black ghosts yawning and stretching with the wind, they move across the silver bench that spans the foot of the bed. The wind whistles a high-pitched sound outside. It sets off my Color Crayon Brain to project pulsing deep blood red and mud brown. Again, sounds instead of music trigger it. The colors send a shiver down my spine.

  Finally I turn to them both. “I still want to try to get out. Don’t you guys?”

  Lilly bites at her fingernail then glances at me with her moon pie face. “It was better to go missing than to go back, you know… to life. I like it here. It suits me,” she says.

  “Right,” I say. I stare at my toes again, my face heating up with anger. “Of course. Shedding your skin and rebirth and staying until necessary sounds awesome.”

  I lean around her to look at Pete. “You don’t want to go home, either?”

  “It’s easy here and—”

  “Easy isn’t always good,” I interrupt him.

  He’s quiet, nodding his head, squishing his lips together. He winds up the string of his yo-yo quietly. I’ve never seen him speechless.

  I can’t look at them. I can only see my feet. Green toes again. Why did I pick that color of electric lime anyway? They look like Shrek toes. Ugh.

  After a couple of moments of silence, it’s clear they won’t go with me to look for an escape, and I don’t at all trust them to tell them that’s what I’m going to do. So I don’t say anything. But inside my head, I know that I will get out. Tomorrow. The idea pumps a bit of strength into me, leaves me feeling a lot more like my old self.

  Lilly slowly stands. With her hand on the doorknob, she hesitates and turns back to look at me, delivering a forlorn smile. “The thing is, I mean, like no one gets out. So why even try?”

  In my mind, a metal coat of armor flies up and around me. My whole body tenses.

  “Got to run,” she says. “Zoe wants me downstairs.”

  “What for?” I ask.

  “Not sure. She just said we had work to do,” she says, shrugging. “She’s so sweet. It’s like I just want to be near her. Right?”

  That elephant plops down on my chest, strangling my breath.

  25

  The sky grows lighter now, but the sun is not fully up yet. The house is quiet. Now is the time. A rush of adrenaline flows through me, and I smile. Home.

  I stop to scavenge food on the kitchen countertop. Muffins, bananas, oranges, nuts—they all go into my backpack. As I fill up my hydration pack under the faucet in the stainless steel sink, a thought occurs to me: it makes no sense that they can have this house, this running water, and have no way to get out.

  I slink out the back door of the kitchen, sure any minute someone will stop me. No surveillance cameras in any of the corners of the rooms, yet still, my shoulders tense.

  Outside, there’s no movement, no sound beyond the honey-yellow rhythmic chirping of birds and the breeze swishing through the long grass and trees. Quickly, I hike down the hill and away from the house, trying to keep my breath quiet despite my nerves. My heart pounds so loud in my head, it surely echoes through the canyon.

  The open meadow welcomes me with red, purple, and yellow flowers and the smell of sage. It appears larger than when I came here that first day—even bigger than it did just yesterday. After a hundred yards, my fast-paced walk speeds up to a run. Then a sprint.

  When I get home, enough time will have passed that they’ll have found an antidote to the virus. The town will be healthy, and everything will be fine. I’ll walk up to the buckling walk of Gram’s house, and she’ll be hunched over in her flannel, digging in her garden. She’ll shake her head, wipe her brow, and say, “Finally. Where the hell have you been?” Then I’ll text Maddie and apologize. She’ll fly down 7th Street in her blue Honda Accord and throw a bag of licorice at me out the window. “Emby! Are you finally back from the dead?” I’ll laugh and we’ll listen to music on my bed and talk about all the summer concerts we’ll hit. I’ll go get my diploma. Maybe I’ll live with Jared in Boulder for a while. At first, I’ll probably have to sleep on the floor of his apartment, which would be super disgusting because he’s Jared. But I’ll get a job at a coffee shop while I apply for school, and we’ll share a bigger apartment then, and we’ll have cool posters on the walls. We’ll throw big parties and we’ll have Taco Bar Tuesdays. I’ll go to school for writing or music. I’ll work on lyrics to songs. I’ll learn how to play the banjo. I’ll travel the world. I’ll climb in Nepal and Bhutan and start a nonprofit. I’ll write about those adventures. I feel like I’m awake for the first time in years.

  At the edge of the meadow, the gate is still gone, and a steep mountainside looms like a wall, the top half of it covered in jagged rock cliffs. They stand ridiculously high, but I can climb them. I’ll get out. At least from the top of those cliffs I’ll be able to see everything—including the forest and a way home. I can run off and find my truck from there.

  “No problem, Ember, no problem at all,” I repeat out loud to myself. Trying to will myself to believe it as I begin my climb.

  By the time I take a break to eat some food and drink water, the sun is shining bright overhead, high in the sky, burning into my sweating skin. My boots chafe my feet, like a nail file scraping my skin with every step. Blisters no doubt are on their way, forming this very moment. This sucks. This totally sucks. I’m reminded of how Maddie genuinely attempted to make amends and reconnect. But I turned away from her because I was in a dark hole and she couldn’t help me. Now I’m in a real hole. Crap.

  Logs and enormous boulders form a cruel obstacle course. Branches of pine trees whap me in the face like prickly flyswatters. The red dirt seems to be everywhere—in my nose, under my nails, coating my lip, painting my hiking boots, and enveloping virtually every part of my skin. It’s like the entire world is painted in red dirt as I climb what is a never-ending steep ridge. I’m talking a ridiculous ninety-degree angle. So steep. So goddamn steep. I literally claw to get up the hill at one point, sending an avalanche of dirt down the hillside. Threatening to take me with it.

  My mind returns to the cliff that night of the crash. I remember how my fingers, numb from the cold and snow, scratched the snowy hillside as I scrambled up to the road to find help. I shouldn’t have left them. I should have pulled them out of the car. I failed my parents, not just once but twice. I felt so weak and helpless, rocking back and forth in the snow at the top of the dark, empty highway alone, the only survivor. The deafening silence of defeat.

  The memories and guilt pelt me, a hailstorm in my mind. I crumble, letting my forehead drop to the ground, the smell of dust and failure sticking in my nostrils. I reach for rocks and sticks and dirt—anything—and I throw them like a demon possessed. I scream. I wail. I can’t press rewind. I can’t even climb this hill.

  But I keep moving. Once I get to an easier incline, I switch to a zigzag, hiking forever until my side cramps feel like acid eating a hole in my gut—more painful than any side stitch in any cross-country meet.

  I collapse onto a rock and yank off my hiking boots, muttering under my breath about the stupidity of everything. The heat. The sun. The outrageously steep incline.

  Blindly, I fish my first-aid kit out of my backpack, find a tube of petroleum jelly, and squeeze a glob onto my fingers. I slather it on my heels, an old trick runners use to keep our blisters at bay.

  I sit there, breathing in the dry smell of dust and isolation. It reminds me of the hot day Jared and I rode our bikes up the washboard road to the old Matchless Mine, which made Horace Tabor rich in the 1800s. I was nine and he was eleven. I wore my favorite red sneakers with the sparkly pink laces—it was my v
ersion of Dorothy shoes for real girls. The ones who got dirty. We snuck in after the tourists left. Jared stood on top of a mound of dirt, brown sweat streaking his freckles. He handed me a bent garden shovel and promised me we would be millionaires if we found silver. I believed him. If anyone could find it, he told me, I would be the one to do it. I remember frowning and looking with doubt at the crooked wooden mine shaft that towered next to me. Then, I decided to believe him. “You,” he said, “are the determined one in the Trouvé family. The one who never gives up.”

  I wonder if that’s still true now.

  I pull out my white water bottle—the one with twelve tiny stars drawn on it in silver Sharpie, one for every hike I did over eleven thousand feet in elevation. All of them before my parents died. I gaze up at the cliffs above. They seem so much taller than I originally thought. Steeper. Rockier. Treacherous. Intimidating. I take a deep breath to shake off my doubts about whether I can really get out.

  “You can get out, Ember,” I tell myself out loud. “You’re the determined one.”

  I reach back to put my water bottle into the pocket of my pack. But something happens: it slips in my hands like it’s coated in butter. When I reach to pick it up off the ground, my foot moves too quickly, tapping it gently, sending it rolling down the rocky, steep incline below. It bounces over boulders, under trees, until it’s out of sight below me.

  “Noooooo!” I yell. Loud. My shoulders slump, and a small gurgling sob comes out of me. It’s gone. I blink again and then a hissing laugh rises in my throat. Of course I lost my water bottle off a cliff. Of course I would lose it. Off a cliff.

  26

  After some time, I spot a moss-covered crevasse in the cliff wall—bright green, like it’s radioactive. It’s not far away. The wall there is shorter—maybe forty feet tall. The prospect breathes a rush of energy back into my body and my mind—and I run toward it. Hope.

  Moving along the steep slope, I hold the wall for support. When I get to the crevasse, I take in the view of the canyon below. Shining in the sun, it’s a colorful portrait of spring. I’ve come so far. Everything is small. I’ve hiked all day to get here. I have no choice but to climb this wall.