by Laura Bickle
My arms slipped around him and tightened. His hands tangled in my hair. I craved the feeling of his hands and mouth on my skin.
And for the first time, I told him: “I want you.”
CHAPTER 14
HE PULLED AWAY, AND I could feel the heaviness of his gaze on me in the dark.
“What’s wrong?” I blurted, afraid. Was there someone else, despite what he’d said?
“You never...” He shook his head. I knew what he meant to say: You never wanted me before. “What changed?”
I lifted my chin. “Me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” My heart thudded behind my ribs, and my stomach churned. I took that for excitement, not doubt.
He reached for me, and his mouth covered mine before I could speak again.
*
Lying in my room in the early hours of the morning, I wondered if I should’ve said more. If I should’ve said:
I missed you.
Did you miss me?
Where do we go from here?
I love you.
I stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. I felt different. Not just sore—Jason had been very gentle with me. Something had changed, as if some secret rite of passage had been completed. I was euphoric, and also a bit afraid.
Not of Jason. I knew him, knew all he was capable of. He’d held me afterward, held my hand as we walked back, had kissed me soundly on the threshold of the house. I wasn’t afraid of getting pregnant or STDs—Jason had sheepishly fished a condom from his wallet and nearly dropped it in the dark.
I was afraid I’d changed, been transformed. I felt that I’d crossed that last bridge to adulthood. That there was no going back.
I couldn’t sleep with this knowledge. I rolled over and turned on my bedside light. Fishing the dragon book out from under my bed, I found my place:
Of all the colors of dragons, black dragons are the least predictable. They are made of bone and darkness. They are a far cry from their cousins, the white dragons, which are social creatures of light and sun. Black dragons are solitary creatures, creatures of earth. Their natural habitats are cave systems, valleys, volcanoes, and isolated forests where humans will not venture.
As creatures of earth, they are primarily focused on tangible things. They have the most spectacular hoards of any of the dragons. They can create and gather massive amounts of wealth—however the dragon defines it. It has been said that a black dragon haunted the catacombs of Paris, hoarding bones.
Black dragons do not gather in clans or tribes. They choose a territorial range for life, and will range outside of it only to mate. Once their young are raised, they leave the nest, never to return.
My finger stilled on the page. My eyes were growing heavy. I closed the book and tucked it under my pillow, wondering:
Was Afakos ever lonely?
And what would he do if his mountain vanished?
*
I’d see the truth for myself.
I arrived at the park the next day with more than a little trepidation. I peered through my new windshield at the nearly empty parking lot and clutched the steering wheel. I stopped at the far edge of the parking lot, closest to the road. My fingers paused on the key, tapping out a nervous staccato rhythm. I was unwilling to shut off the engine and leave the safety of the metal shell.
Finally, I cracked the door and stepped out, wobbly and unsure. This part of the park was remote, far from the water and the trailhead for hikers.
I hesitated. I jammed my hands in the pockets of my hoodie. I didn’t want to go looking for trouble. If it wanted to see me, it would have to come find me.
And it did.
Will sauntered up over a slope, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans. He approached the car. “You ready to go on a little trip?”
I tipped my head. “Where to?”
He broke into a smile. “You trust me?”
“No.”
He bounced forward on his toes and back on his heels. “Then why are you here?”
“Like I said, I want to see the truth.”
“It’s not here. But I can take you to it.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “And I promise you’ll be completely safe.”
I stared at him with narrowed eyes for a long minute. I thought about Julie’s Tarot reading. I didn’t feel he meant me any harm. I remembered that the Knight of Wands was attracted to shiny things. I wondered what made me shiny now. Was it the chance to see his own ego, his rightness, reflected in my naïve eyes?
“Okay,” I relented.
“C’mon. This way.” He turned and beckoned for me to follow.
And I did.
He led me down a slope, past a sign that said “Campground” with an arrow. We passed a restroom muzzy with wasps and a picnic area dotted with plastic coolers and overflowing trash cans. Beyond it, tents were arranged in a haphazard quilt of color.
“Home sweet home,” he announced.
My brow wrinkled. “You live here?”
“Well, yeah. For right now, anyway. Most of my fellow activists like to camp, so...” He shrugged.
I knotted my fists in my pockets, worried I’d see the guy who’d broken my windshield. I wondered if he’d recognize me. I wondered if he’d break me.
We wound past cold hibachis, strings of laundry, and a makeshift shower dangling from a tree. I heard the voices of people inside the tents, saw a handful playing with a dog and a Frisbee. I put my head down to avoid eye contact.
Will stopped before a blue nylon tent with a backpack resting against the side. He scraped a flourishing bow. “My humble abode.”
I shifted from one foot to another. “Nice tent.” I wasn’t going in.
“Thanks.” He headed to a shapeless lump covered by a tarp, and tugged the tarp away to reveal a motorcycle.
“Nice bike,” I said. I didn’t know anything about motorcycles. It was shiny, black, and looked expensive.
“Thanks. Motorcycles are actually really fuel-efficient transportation.”
“Right.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “I’ve never heard that argument for buying a motorcycle before.”
“Ever been on one?” He began to walk the bike up the path.
“No.”
A grin spread across his face. “C’mon. You know you want to.”
I made a face. “Not really.” But I was lying.
He rolled the bike out onto the pavement. Straddling the bike, he put on a pair of sunglasses. “You coming?”
I shifted my weight back and forward between my feet. No helmets. And I had no idea where he was taking me. But I was curious as hell about what he had to show me. I’d come this far.
I awkwardly climbed on the back of the bike. I scooted to the rear of the seat, squishing my butt up against the chrome backrest.
He laughed. “You’re gonna fall off. Hold on.”
I reached behind myself to grab the backrest.
“Like this.” Will leaned back, grabbed my arms, and wrapped them around his waist. He smelled like wood smoke.
The bike started with a deafening roar that drowned out my squeak. It lurched forward, and I squeezed my arms tight around Will as the bike roared across the parking lot and onto the two-lane highway.
As we picked up speed, panic welled within me. My fingers knotted in Will’s flannel shirt, and my heart hammered. I couldn’t breathe—the wind was slamming too hard into my face. Black asphalt and green trees flashed past. My eyes teared.
“Relax!” Will shouted, his voice shredded by the air.
I pressed my cheek to his shoulder, gasping as he gunned the engine. My hair lashed around me, and I struggled to calm myself. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Just breathe, I told myself.
Just breathe.
I sucked in a bit of air, then a bit more. Slowly, I opened my eyes.
The motorcycle flew along the black track of road, barely seeming to make contact with the surface. We skimmed over a hill, and I shrieked. My stom
ach pitched out from under me, and I had a brief sensation of weightlessness.
“Holy shit!” I squealed.
Will laughed.
The road turned in on itself, curving like a snake. Will leaned right and left against the turns, and I leaned with him, beginning to feel the counterweight of the bike. It seemed as if the contact with the earth would be lost at any moment, and we’d be pitched to the road and torn open by gravel.
We flew, and I wasn’t in control of any of it.
Dimly, I wondered if this was what flying felt like to Afakos. Did he feel the stinging strike of a June bug against his body, the shear of air against his face? What was it like to have wings, to feel air slipping beneath them? I wondered if he calculated speed and trajectory when he flew, or if it was purely by instinct.
I loosened my grip on Will’s waist. I sat back and let the wind trickle through my hands like water. Slowly, I opened my arms. Wind whooshed through the arms of my hoodie, and the zipper rattled open like a wing.
Fear gave way to exhilaration.
I planed my arms, imagining what it would be like to fly. To be powerful, without attachment or obligation. Answerable to nothing but earth and sky, road and air. Free.
My arms fell back to my sides as the motorcycle slowed and Will pulled onto an unmarked dirt track in the forest. The bike bumped and jostled over the ruts in the path, and I clenched my jaw, feeling the impact in my spine.
“Is this where the serial killer part begins?” I shouted at him.
He shook his head. “No. This is where I show you the big picture.”
The track opened onto the crest of a field, but it wasn’t a field like any I’d seen. I was used to the rolling land, the gentle dips and valleys of thick grass—the lush landscape of home. This was disjointed, and desolate, and foreign. Large pieces of unweathered rock gnawed at the sky like jagged teeth. Spiky clusters of grass failed to take hold in yellow earth. The motorcycle kicked up gravel in a spray that rang off the broken stone.
The path became so uneven that Will shut off the motorcycle. My ears rang, anticipating the whine and growl of the engine. I heard no other traffic, just felt the yellow dust swirling around me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Ash Mountain,” he said. “What’s left of it.”
He pointed to the east. A line of mountains was green and thickly forested against the blue sky…except where we stood. Here, the land was leveled flat, rocky and barren. As if a giant had scraped the top of the hill clean. A few sickly pine trees had been planted in straight lines in the dirt. Half of them were dead.
“What happened to it?” I felt it the wrongness of it pressing against the inside of my lungs like a scream.
“It was blast-mined a few months ago. They blew up the top of the mountain in layers to get at a coal vein here, dumped the rock into the next valley. Once it was exhausted, they promised to ‘reclaim’ the land. Restore it to a usable condition.”
I frowned at the landscape.
“Let me show you more of the reclamation.”
I followed him on foot to the edge of the scraped field, where the land leveled off sharply. Large, serrated rocks covered the hillside. I had to watch my footing as we scrambled down them, because some of the stones were damp, despite the sun shining on them.
“This is where the rock was dumped?” I asked.
“Actually, we’re standing in what’s supposed to be a stream.”
I squinted skeptically at the damp rocks. I couldn’t see any evidence of fish, salamanders, or even cattails that one would find in a real stream. It just looked like rough rock from under a highway overpass.
“Use your imagination.” He laughed. “The blast mining destroyed the flow of the natural streams in the area, so the company was required to recreate them. This is a man-made one intended to replace the original.”
I followed him down the slope, picking my way in silence as he spoke.
“Problem with that is all kinds of bad stuff leached into the water. Extra iron. Toxic levels of selenium. It’s not safe for people to drink, anymore. Never mind the wildlife, who can’t buy bottled water.”
I cast a dirty look at his back. “You assume I only care about people.”
“Well, most of the people around here only seem concerned about their jobs. They don’t seem to care much what the fish or ducks are swimming in.”
“I’m not—” I began to say most people, but bit it off. I wasn’t a special snowflake. “I’m not uncaring about the wildlife.” Hell, I braked for butterflies and said silent prayers for roadkill.
“I hear a lot of shit about how money talks. How people think they’re owed a job, and owed a way of life, and should never have to move to find work. That it should all come to them.” He curled his hands into fists. “That’s not the way the world is anymore. Things change, and no industry lasts forever.”
“Is that how you see us? Too rigid to adapt to change?”
“Frankly, yeah. I think a lot of the mining guys have never expected things to be any different. They expected to be able to make a good living with a high school education, afford a house, and raise a family.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“That doesn’t happen anywhere else. Look at all the manufacturing plants that are closing. Things aren’t going to stay the same. College graduates barely make enough to afford rent, if they can even find a job.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand how complicated this can get. You’re a free agent. You have the time, and money, and lack of attachment to do as you please. It’s…a luxury.” I tried to control the contempt that was curling my lip.
“Maybe. Maybe I’m a privileged rich kid who thinks he’s got all the answers. But all ways of life change. Look at the much-romanticized cowboys. That era only lasted for about thirty years in American history, when a man could go out west and babysit cattle for a living. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
We clambered down into the valley. The water trickled into a ditch that ran along the foot of what remained of the mountain. Large boulders littered the ground. Above, the silhouette of Ash Mountain looked like a ground-down molar.
A house stood at the bottom of the field, far in the distance. I turned away from Will and walked to it. I would ask the people who lived there what they thought. They’d surely lived through the explosions, and the boulders, and the new grass. They could tell me the truth.
I waded through the wild mustard and tall grass, but as I approached, I could see that something was wrong.
The house was coated in that thick yellow dust. The rain had drawn it down from the roof and streaked it against the white wooden siding. The yard hadn’t been mowed. Crab grass grew in the gravel driveway, in which no cars sat.
I climbed up porch, knocked. No one answered.
I scraped dust away from one of the windows with my sleeve and peered inside. Nothing but empty floor.
Someone had abandoned this house in the shadow of the broken mountain. Someone who probably was like everyone else around here. Someone without an agenda or axe to grind. They’d left their home rather than stay in the noise, and dust, and shattered stone.
If a human couldn’t live in the shadow of the mountain, how could Afakos?
*
Will and I didn’t speak on the way back. I contemplated the unnatural silhouette of the mountain and the empty house over the engine’s roar. We’d spent hours climbing, picking up pieces of broken rock, and searching for severed streams. Darkness was falling, reducing the trees and road to black and white outlines in the motorcycle’s headlamp.
I wondered about my parents. Could they ever start over again, someplace else? I struggled to imagine it. Where would they go? They’d always been in the same place. They weren’t like my grandfather, who’d found a way to thrive in the rainy season in Vietnam. Was I simply not giving them enough credit? Or was I unwilling to stand and fight for a way of life I wanted to escape?
<
br /> The road led us back to the park. We pulled into the parking lot, but Will slammed on the brakes, the tires of the motorcycle squealing as we slewed and fishtailed. Red and blue strobe lights flashed ahead of us…
…and Will shoved me off the moving bike.
CHAPTER 15
I HIT THE GROUND WITH my hip and shoulder, slamming into weeds and dirt. I tumbled down a short embankment before I could stop myself. I clawed into the soft earth and lay still, tasting dirt and blood. And fury.
Gingerly, I sat up. My right side was sore, but I felt none of the queasy nausea and sharp pain that accompanied broken bones. My arms and palms were scraped, and I’d bitten the inside of my lip.
I was pissed.
That complete, utter bastard.
I crawled up the embankment to the edge of the parking lot then froze, pressing myself to the grass like a terrified squirrel in front of a car.
Strobe lights blazed in the darkness, creating jagged, shifting patterns of light on the trees. Radios crackled in the distance. A thick knot of police cars and vans were clustered near the path leading to the campground. Some of them had to belong to park rangers, but I couldn’t be sure. The environmentalists who’d been camping there were being led, handcuffed, to the waiting vans. They seemed to be going quietly—for the most part.
Downhill, a motorcycle engine gunned. The strobes illuminated Will. Stupid, reckless Will. He was astride his bike like Napoleon on a horse, zagging right and left, trying to elude two cop cars that had boxed him in. He zipped off-pavement, aiming for the main road.
My fingers knotted in the grass.
“Freeze!” one of the cops shouted, but Will didn’t obey.
Another car converged, bearing down on him at almost slow-motion speed.
I lost sight of the bike. I could only see a headlamp shining then bouncing crazily in the dark. I heard a sharp thump, and then the engine died. The light shone up into the trees, motionless.