Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  I try again to stand, pulling myself up slowly as the pain shoots through my entire body. Grimacing, I slip off my pack and slowly lean on my good foot. But standing again proves too much for me.

  The wind whistling through the trees plays like a warped record in my head. It’s the color of sunburnt grass and comes in gel-like ripples lacking any kind of pattern or rhythm. Rocks melt, and pinyon trees waver like water. The world is all wrong.

  I blink a couple of times. “Where am I?” I mumble as my head lolls around on my neck.

  The canyon is like a jigsaw puzzle that’s been torn apart. A big jumble. Everything becomes gray and wobbly, and I collapse again sideways onto the ground.

  That’s when it hits me: I am going to die out here.

  “Mr. Rock Wall, you win,” I mumble quietly. I’m delirious; my surroundings are real, live villains now. Out to get me. Out to rule me.

  I remember walking into Mom’s bedroom one evening, just before the accident. She was curled up in a ball on the floor in her powder blue snowflake pajamas, her eyes closed, her curly dark hair wild and falling across her cheek.

  “Mom, wake up,” I said. “It’s seven o’clock. You’ve been asleep all day. I made you dinner.”

  She didn’t even open her eyes to answer. “I can’t, Ember,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. Everything is just too much. Be a good girl and leave me alone.”

  I hated her for wanting to give up. For lying there, immobile. For not being enough for her to open her eyes and want to live. Now, in this moment, I get it. Yes, just leave me alone and let me sleep right here. Under the sun, on these pine needles, on these rocks, I decide I can’t do this anymore. Whether I like it or not, I am just like my mother.

  But a small voice inside me shouts, Hang on, Ember! You’re the determined one in the Trouvé family.

  My eyes blink open, and I wonder whether or not it was a real voice in the real world. My body attempts to respond to the demand, flopping a reddened arm onto the smooth, hot boulder next to me. But as I rise, it’s clear the ankle won’t hold me, and my legs collapse like those of a newborn colt. I sink down low as my heavy head melts into the prickly comfort of dust and pine needles.

  I’m ready to give in to the heat and what might happen next when a dark figure emerges in my field of vision. It gets bigger, closer, almost floating, with bright light behind it.

  Oh this. I must be dying.

  31

  I see pink banana shapes, the sound of crinkling paper. A candy bar wrapper.

  I sit up slowly and through blurry eyes, I realize I’m not dead. Instead, I’m resting on my fluffy down sleeping bag on the ground. A bandage covers my ankle, and a jug of water sits next to me.

  My body screams with every move. Everything hurts, like ice picks are shredding my skin, plunging into my muscle, twisting. The knot on the back of my head feels raw and my brain swollen, as if my skull shrank two sizes. My throat, that’s raw, too. Like an animal, I grab the water bottle and rejoice as the cool liquid runs down my throat, a rainstorm quenching a bone-dry and cracked desert floor.

  “Hey, you’re back with the living.” The sound of Tre’s lovely chocolate voice snaps me out of my underwater place. He sits on a rock a few feet away. “I figured you might want some company out here,” he says, standing up and moving toward me. He holds up a granola bar, the wrapper half-removed.

  An involuntary smile crawls across my face, but then I feel the dried tears and dirt stuck tight to my skin. I’ve been a complete mental case, stinky and dirty and seemingly near death, and I blurt the opposite of what I want. “Um, no,” I say, my voice hoarse.

  He freezes. Uncertainty registers on his face. “Uh… okay?” he says, readying to turn back up to his place on the rock. “You don’t want me to stay with you? Sure. Sure. No problem.”

  But I realize that was a stupid thing to say. I don’t want him to go away. He might be the only person in Trinity that is somewhat sane. Seeing him standing there, dressed in black like some sort of dark rock star, sends a thousand bees flying around inside my abdomen.

  “Never mind,” I blurt, waving my hands in front of me. I gulp more water and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Sorry. Confused.” I move slightly, and my rib cage creaks and a ripping feeling slices through my ankle, making me gasp.

  “You took a pretty good fall.” He nods and takes another bite of his granola bar.

  Tre’s sleeping bag is spread out across from me. A little fire pit sits between us. The cliff wall isn’t far away, and from our nook surrounded by knotted bushes and juniper and pine trees, you can see the open, waving meadow below.

  “How’d I get here?” My throat feels like I swallowed acid.

  “I carried you.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “You’ve been out since yesterday afternoon.”

  The news hits me like a sack of flour in the gut. The sun is high in the sky. I’ve been here for at least twenty-four hours. That’s the same as sleeping through four weeks in the real world. Fuzzy memories move before me. Sucking on water from a hydration tube. The chill that made my teeth chatter and my bones shake. Gasping and hyperventilating into the slick nylon of my sleeping bag. The sharp and sudden cramping of my legs and stomach, like the hard twisting of a wet dishrag. A hand on my back. A hand pushing away my damp hair from my face. More water. A soft, low chocolate voice.

  Tre. He was there. The whole time.

  A mix of shock and thrill rises inside me. He came to look for me. He got me. Took care of me. He protected me from the nutso Lilly, too.

  “Wait, you were what I saw coming toward me in the sun? You set me up with this water and wrapped my ankle? You helped me through that awful—”

  “Dehydration? Yeah.”

  My gaping mouth and wide eyes must be a clear sign that I don’t believe it.

  “What?” he says, smiling. “You think I wouldn’t do that?”

  “Well…” I look away to a gnarled pinyon tree, raising my eyebrows in a smug expression. I am not sure what to say.

  He shakes his head. “Surprised you stayed out so long,” he says. “You don’t give up easily. Determined.”

  Those words make me glow inside. But I’m not sure they are true. I question whether a determined girl lies down to die in the canyon like I did yesterday. Whether a determined girl hangs out with losers like Zach Morrison and JT Studebaker. Whether a determined girl swallows a pill in some hairy stranger’s dank house on the edge of town. Whether a strong, determined girl gets carried away on a stretcher after her grandma finds her on the floor. Or whether a determined girl would really drive to a haunted forest alone because she has no direction in life. I swallow those doubts.

  “Thanks.” I decide to let him believe whatever he wants. “Are the others out here, too?”

  His expression falls and his mouth twists slightly. “No. Just me.”

  After hanging out with Lilly and Pete in my room the night before I left, you would have thought they’d be out searching for me. It’s slightly disappointing, but I’m glad to be here alone with Tre.

  “Zoe suggested I go find you and make sure you were okay.”

  Zoe. I know in my heart she doesn’t really care about me. If I jumped off a cliff, she’d probably file her fingernails. I’m disappointed that Tre helped me at her bidding, and it makes me trust him a little less.

  He adds the next part quickly, using his hands as emphasis. “But I was going to look for you anyway. I wanted to come.”

  He walks toward my sleeping bag, stumbles on a rock, and falls forward onto me, hands shooting out in front. I reach out and catch him, and his hands grasp mine. “Whoa, sorry,” he laughs, sinking down next to me.

  Keeping hold of my hands, he looks down at them for a moment. Despite my feeling like I was run over by a truck and left in the sun, electricity moves between our hands. Holy crap. Does he feel that?

  “Wow,” he whispers. “Did you run your hands through a l
awn mower out there?”

  I glance at my hands, burnt, chapped, and streaked with red scrapes, just like my arms and legs. I’m immediately embarrassed by the state of my skin, but I don’t want to let go of his strong hands.

  “Yeah,” I say, giving a half smile. “They are out of control out here. Lawn mowers everywhere.”

  When I look up at his face, his eyes are locked onto mine. It’s the first time I’ve been close enough and had a moment to really see why his eyes are so striking. Thick, dark lashes that look coated in soot. The blue of his eyes, like crisp water. Ripples of dark green and deep blue extend from his pupils. I’m truly swimming in them.

  “Feeling better?” he asks.

  He smells fresh, like soap. It’s then that I realize he’s smiling at me, raising his eyebrows, waiting for me to speak. So enraptured by his presence, I half forget what he just said. As if zapped by some kind of electric poker, I drop his hand, realizing we might have been touching too long. Now I’m fully embarrassed. My cheeks flush.

  “Um…” I say, trying to recover, casually patting my hands together in my lap. Oh my God. Now I’m playing patty-cake? I sit on my hands. Even weirder.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  He laughs. “I said, are you feeling better?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I say.

  “Good. I can go filter some more water if you want.” He nods toward the thicket of bushes behind his sleeping bag.

  “Filtered water? From where?”

  “The lake.” He points. “It’s right over there. It’s a lot like the one we swim in near the house.”

  There was a lake right there. The whole time. Not forty yards away. I want to scream in frustration. I was dying of thirst. For days. I literally baked my skin raw, and now—now there are these trees and some level of shade and this lake. Like they were just placed here on purpose a moment ago, another mind game to torture me.

  “I got a water filter from Zoe. Just the fact that you were out here for such a long time, I knew it couldn’t be good.”

  Tears pop up unannounced, brimming in my eyes, so I avert my gaze to my lap. “That’s an understatement,” I say, but it comes out in a breathy whisper. “This place is a freaking nightmare.”

  “Total mind trip, I know.” He touches my shoulder and ducks his head down, his eyes reaching to see my face.

  My eyes lock with his for only an instant before sadness fully envelops me. The frustration and failure of my trek replay in my mind, and my stomach rolls like the sea. “I always end up in the same place. Over and over,” I say.

  “Yeah, I got in the same kind of a loop,” he says. “One time, I threw my bandana in a tree just to see if I really kept waking up in the same spot. The next morning, there I was, waking up to that freaking black flag waving in the tree.”

  I blink away my tears. “Have you heard any news about Leadville and the virus?”

  “It spread pretty bad across Colorado, but I don’t know much more than that,” he says. “We’ll know more when we get back to the house.”

  My whole body tenses. I dig into the ground with invisible stakes. He’s not tearing me away from here. He’s not taking me back to that house like a lost pet. “No. No way.” I shake my head swiftly.

  He gazes at me, frowning. “No way what?”

  “I’m not going back to that house.”

  “No, I didn’t mean right now. We’ll wait until the swelling goes down on your ankle and you’ve regained some strength,” he says.

  “I don’t need to rest only to go back to that prison cell,” I say, swinging my wild hair and scooting away from him. “I’m getting out. I am not going back.”

  I know I shouldn’t be angry with him. That it’s not his fault—he was the only one to try to warn me, after all. But now he wants me to give up and go back to that prison.

  “Come on, Ember. You’re on an endless loop,” he says.

  I grimace and stretch sideways from my seat to grab my hiking boot. I shove my right foot into the worn leather and lace it up. I can feel Tre’s gaze boring into me. I know this is stupid. I know that in the end, no matter how far I go, I’ll be set right back in this same spot. But I can’t just throw my hands in the air and say Oh well, tried. It doesn’t work for me.

  “Ember,” he sighs. I love the way he says my name. Chocolate syrup. But I can’t accept his message.

  I reach for my other boot, near the head of my sleeping bag. It unleashes a puff of dust into my face. I wipe my already filthy mouth with the back of my hand and put my boot over my swollen ankle, eliciting a pain so sharp it makes me gasp. I bite my lip to keep away the tears.

  Tre watches me, sitting with his arms hanging loosely over his knees. He inhales, looks at the ground, and runs his hand through that thick mess of hair.

  “Thanks for helping me yesterday or whatever,” I say, my voice bitter. My head pounds and my ribs ache, but I grit my teeth and tie the laces loosely.

  He scowls and then after a second, he kind of bobs his head. Clearly irritated. He stands, dusting his hands off on his pants. “Fine. Give it your best shot.”

  I roll my eyes. Standing there, dressed in black, with that spiked leather bracelet, the crazy hair, and the long tattoo visible beneath the sleeve of his ripped-up T-shirt, he looks more lost than I feel. He crosses his arms, leaning into the trunk of a gnarled tree.

  I stand and do a strange zombie gait back through the bushes. Each breath cuts into my rib cage, and the trees and rocks look blurry to me, like there’s a fuzzy filter over my eyes. I go a few more yards, willing myself to get to the cliff. I can do this. But with each step, the pain in my ankle is so real, so cutting, and painful white stars shoot through my vision. I shriek and sit down, shutting my eyes tightly and squeezing back the tears and emotion and frustration swelling inside me.

  “No way you can climb a cliff if you can’t even walk five yards,” Tre calls to me.

  I sniff and sit up straighter. Who am I kidding? I’m a mess. I clench my hair at my scalp and grit my teeth, wanting to scream. A tiny ray of sunlight shines directly into my eyes, forcing me to squint. Funny how I once lapped up that kind of white light, sitting on the grass with my guitar.

  On my way back, the bushes whack my face and scratch my sunburnt arms, and when I get to the sleeping bag, I flop back down on top of it and blink quickly to keep tears at bay. I’m stuck. I’m truly stuck until I heal. The thought ignites that flapping inside my chest again. I can’t sit here. I need to get home.

  Tre tips his water bottle up over his open mouth and takes a long drink before leaning his back into that stupid tree. “Sucks, huh?”

  “I’m not giving up,” I say.

  32

  While I heal, Tre tries to make things feel normal. He goes on about random facts, like how the cliffs are made of limestone, which I know. That the rock has been used in construction for thousands of years, and even the Egyptians used it to build the pyramids. He talks about how I could have used the white dust from a couple of those aspen trees as sunscreen, just like the Native Americans did. This fact surprises me, and I wish I’d known that when I was getting fried in the sun.

  Eventually he stops speaking because I close my eyes and don’t respond. He wants me to give up. He wants me to go back to the Trinity house. And right now, I hate him for that.

  When I duck my head into my sleeping bag, I get a whiff of myself: I seriously reek, after sweating and hiking and sleeping in the same clothes for days. I examine my body. Dirt is everywhere—under my nails, in my hair, up my nose, between my toes. I grab fresh clothes from my bag, stand, and limp through the bushes to find this mystery lake. I need to bathe big time.

  Tre watches me struggle for a few steps as branches whack my chest and a painful step forces me to hop on one foot, clutching a branch. He moves quickly to me. He puts his shoulder under my stinky armpit and wraps his arm around my sticky waist. “Here.”

  Together we walk, as if we’re in a two-legged race, Tre su
pporting me as I hobble through the bushes and over to the lake.

  “Thanks,” I exhale. The feel of his hand on my waist and his head next to mine feels wonderful and comforting, the way the smell of wood-burning fireplaces once made me feel.

  The lake is somewhat smaller than the other one we played in that first day, but it’s just as beautiful. The smooth water is the same crisp blue-green color, and it’s shrouded by aspen and pine trees.

  He takes me to the edge of the lake and hesitates, reaching out to ensure I don’t fall over. “Assuming you just want to… clean up?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I stand with my hands on the button of my shorts. I want to rip them off, maybe even burn them. I hesitate, considering saying To hell with it and stripping down in front of Tre. It’s no different than a swimsuit, right?

  But he flashes a brief, uncertain smile and then waves his hand toward the bushes. “You go ahead and I’ll be back at the camp if you need me.”

  I nod, grateful, and gingerly take off my shorts and T-shirt, balancing on one foot and wincing from the pain in my ribs and back. I sink into the frigid water. The icy temperature takes my breath away but soon becomes refreshing, soothing my burning skin. I dunk my head, scrubbing my ears and hair and face and body, and then float on my back, taking in the serenity of the place.

  Once I’m back at the campsite and wearing clean clothes, I lie down on my sleeping bag while Tre goes for a walk. The silence of his absence is deafening. Unnatural. No birds. No rustle of leaves from the chipmunks. The air doesn’t even move. The alarm clock bird watches me from the ground, ten yards away.

  I chew a granola bar that tastes like chalk and dig my hand in the outside pocket of my backpack to find a comb. My hand passes two notebooks—Mom’s Crazy Woman Notebook with the pyramid on the cover and my Missing Persons notebook. I have no idea why I brought them.

  I shove Mom’s notebook deeper into my bag. I don’t know why I brought her craziness with me.