Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

  In the bathroom I touch my lower lip, as if Condor might have left an impression. Instead, the Bordeaux has left a black stain. Weak spots. The words float suddenly to my mind. He kisses just how I thought he would, as if he needs it.

  And yet it went no further than that. As soon as I started to take off his belt, he stopped me.

  Wait, he said. I should get home.

  I shower, and dress—the sky has turned gray and heavy, I notice—and as I wrangle with my hair I think about weak spots. Being a lawyer is a little like being a doctor in reverse: you look for the damage and try to grow it, try to push in, dig a little deeper, open up the festering places, like how I used to scout the woods for soft soil, spaces where I could easily bury my belongings—little things I didn’t want my dad to find, like the cigarette stub Kaycee and I split in fifth grade, the one and only time I tried smoking, or the orange blush and shiny mirrored compact, obviously stolen, she gave me for my birthday.

  Carolina Dawes has confirmed we’re right about the water, but she isn’t enough: she’s not credible, and Optimal will no doubt be able to show that Coop comes in contact with a number of things that might have caused skin irritation. And Optimal’s public image is as sturdy and slick as the plastics they make. Still, there must be a weak spot, a break, a place I can crack with a little bit of pressure.

  Luckily, there’s only one Brent O’Connell in Barrens, and it seems he’s an early riser.

  —

  Woody’s is just clearing its breakfast rush when I arrive an hour later. I check my reflection in the rearview mirror one last time before getting out of the car. My dark waves—one good feature I inherited from my mother—have already expanded in the humidity, but I look alert and sharp and, shockingly, not at all hungover. If I’m not beautiful, I’m still nothing like the girl I was when he knew me.

  The sky darkens overhead, and I wonder when the clouds will tire of holding back the rain and let go.

  Before I get a chance to open the door, it swings open from the inside, and there’s Brent O’Connell, smiling, motioning me inside. I was hoping he might have gotten fat, or lost some of his hair.

  He looks just the same as he did in high school—blue eyes, blond hair, a boy-next-door, but all grown up. The only thing that’s changed is his clothing. He has abandoned the ripped jeans and V-neck T-shirts of our high school years for khakis and a collared shirt.

  And even though I’m wearing tailored jeans and a decent blazer, I have a brief flash of panic: It’s an act, and he’ll know it. All the seams will come apart.

  I remember his skin, warm despite the chill of the lake water that dripped from his hair. I remember voices in the distance, the smell of house paint and wood smoke. How he reached for my hair, how he left me, wordlessly, lifting a finger to his lips. Shhh.

  “Abby Williams,” he says. “God. You look fantastic.”

  “It’s hindsight,” I say, and Brent laughs. “Looks good on everyone.” I stop myself from saying that Brent looks good too—not because it isn’t true, but because it is. Upon closer inspection, Brent has changed. He’s just as handsome, but in a softer, more accessible way. His muscles have relaxed and he looks just tired enough to be real.

  He shakes his head. “If I’d been smarter in high school…” Real, fake, fabricated. Maybe everyone in Barrens has trouble telling the difference. “Come in, before it starts dumping on us.”

  I have to squeeze myself past him and for a second I smell his shampoo, and I remember that night in the woods and the water left on my skin from his hair after he kissed me.

  I follow him to a booth in the corner and slide into my side, clutching a menu like it’s a life preserver. In high school, Woody’s was huge: when there were no parties, nowhere to go or no one to buy beer or no money to buy it with, everyone would go to Woody’s for the free coffee refills, shouldering up next to old-timers playing cards in their usual booths and groups of giggly girls pitching in for a plate of curly fries. I used to come by myself, after everyone else had cleared out, just to avoid being at home. It smells like the fryer and maple syrup just like it always did.

  “So?” Brent leans forward, as if he can’t stand to leave any distance between us. “How is it to be home after all these years? Just like you remember it?”

  “Hard to say, since I’ve spent half my life trying not to remember,” I say, and Brent laughs. Of course, he has no way of knowing how hard I’ve tried to put Barrens behind me. And how badly I’ve failed.

  The waitress shows up, and I can tell by the way she laughs that Brent is still the big fish in town. I duck my head and pretend to be absorbed by the menu.

  “You like omelets? Best in town. Two Western omelets, please,” Brent says. “And two coffees. You don’t mind if I order for you, do you?” His voice is teasing, and friendly, and happy.

  I snap my menu closed. “I’ll just have scrambled eggs. No coffee. Tea would be great.” As soon as she leaves, I’m not sure why I did it. Only that I don’t want to make Brent so happy.

  Or I do, which I can’t allow, either.

  If he senses a rebuttal, he doesn’t act like it. “Strong choice,” he says. “You know, I always liked that about you—how you did your own thing. You never ran with the pack.”

  I was too busy running from them, I nearly point out, but I don’t. He’s just being nice. But it’s Brent.

  “You must be wondering why I wanted to see you,” I say.

  “Come on, Abby. You haven’t been gone that long. You know how this town works. You hadn’t been back five minutes when Misha put out an all-points bulletin.”

  The idea stirs an old anxiety, the kind that comes from spending years as a bull’s-eye in a field full of arrows. “You’re still close with Misha, then?”

  “We became close, after…” He trails off, fiddling with his coffee cup, spinning it between his hands. “I guess that kind of thing bonds you pretty good. You know Misha’s vice principal at the school now?”

  I still can’t wrap my head around it, but I nod. “She told me.”

  “She’s doin’ good, too.” Then he clears his throat, looking suddenly embarrassed. “Well, I know you didn’t come back so we could take a stroll through memory lane. I know why you guys are here and I’m happy to help however I can. I figure I owe you that much, right?”

  “Owe me?” My pulse picks up. “What do you mean?”

  For a second, he falters. When he adjusts his position, the vinyl squeaks faintly again, like the sound of a new shoe. “Teenagers can be real assholes. I know we were. I know I was. And Misha, and Kaycee, and the others. Honestly, I have no idea why.” He puts his hand through his hair and it falls easily back into place. “What I’m trying to say”—he looks hard at me, as though seeing me for the first time—“is that I’m sorry.”

  The apology is so plain, so straightforward, I’m left wordless.

  He was with Kaycee, but he liked you, Misha had said at the Donut Hole. All that long hair…

  “I don’t need you to apologize,” I say, feeling suddenly angry: Misha, my dad, Brent. They’re all twisting my memories, making me doubt things I always counted on as true.

  “I know. But I want to apologize.”

  He wants me to tell him it’s okay—but I won’t. I refuse. I decide to cut to the chase. “So you’ve been at Optimal since high school graduation?” I hate the idea he might think I’ve come here to work through my past—or, at least, his part in it.

  “Well, you know my dad was there for years. I was already interning by senior year. Then I started loading trucks. Way fancier than it sounds. My cousin Byron had a buddy over there…kinda took me under his wing—and I’ve been moving up ever since.” He stirs his coffee carefully, just the way Misha did, adding sugars one by one. “Optimal really saved my dad back when he left the carpenters union. I’m not sure what he would’ve done. I never forgot that. It saved his life. Men need good work.”

  “Women, too,” I say, without missing a beat.r />
  “Women, too, of course.” It’s hard to stay annoyed when he smiles like that.

  “Optimal has done a lot of good for the town,” I say carefully. “We’re just here to make sure they haven’t done bad.”

  He scoffs. “Gallagher’s all fired up, I hear.” When the waitress arrives with the food, he pretends not to notice how she stares at him. “Remember the time he shot Grant Haimes? Got him in the knee. He had to drop varsity.” He shakes his head. “ ‘Goddamn ky-oats!’ ” He does a decent imitation of old man Gallagher.

  “I thought he nicked his ear. Grant, I mean.”

  Brent shrugs, like it’s a minor detail. “Look. I’m telling you this because I actually give a shit. My grandpa was a farmer, and my dad loved absolutely nothing besides his .44 and his fishing rod. No one cares more about Barrens than I do.” He shakes his head, picks over his omelet. “Gallagher’s an anarchist looking for a reason. A conspiracy theorist. He’ll take potshots at anything—literally. But he’s misfired big this time. Optimal’s clean. We’ve had plenty of audits and passed them all. Flying colors.”

  “But Optimal did settle a case—” I begin.

  He interrupts me. “That was back in Tennessee.”

  I don’t blink. “They’ve had plenty of bad press. Rumors of violations across the board—corruption, getting in bed with local politicians, paying people to look the other way.”

  “Bad press isn’t a legal statute,” he says. “And rumors aren’t evidence. Every company has bad press, Abby, and you know it.” It’s a deft redirection, and he might actually believe it.

  I decide to go all in—if we’re going to remove the weeds, might as well get down to the roots. “I’ve been looking back at the Mitchell case.” I watch his reaction carefully, but he barely blinks. “You were with Kaycee back then. You must have an opinion.”

  “Opinion.” He repeats the word as if I’ve just asked him for money. “I don’t have an opinion. They made it up. It was typical Kaycee: act first, think never. She was so desperate for attention. I felt bad for her.”

  I don’t like how easy it was for Kaycee to slip away, and how willingly everyone in Barrens let her go—even if she was lying. Especially if she was lying.

  “Have you talked to her?” I ask.

  “No. She didn’t even tell me she was leaving. I had no idea.”

  “So you didn’t talk to her at all after she left?” Brent and Kaycee were together for nearly two years, which in high school is an eternity. And yet when she left, it was as if she stepped out of her old life completely, like shrugging out of a coat.

  “Misha talked to her, once or twice,” he says vaguely. His smile, this time, is very thin. “She made it obvious that her goal was to avoid speaking to any of us.”

  “Didn’t she say why?” I ask. “I never understood what she was after. Why did she lie about being sick?”

  He shakes his head and his voice turns unexpectedly hard. “I thought you were here to look at Optimal. Don’t tell me you’re a detective, too.”

  “She was Senior Queen. She painted her whole body for graduation.” I remember our last day of school seeing a comet-streak of paint left by her hand against the wall when she stumbled. Even sick, she had to be painted and worshipped. “She didn’t seem like she was on the verge of running away.”

  He folds his napkin carefully. When he looks up, he seems exhausted. “Everything she did was an act. Not just the getting sick but…other things, too.” He stares into the distance. “I don’t think she ever said a single thing that wasn’t a lie.”

  I think of the way she looked at me, the day I found Chestnut in the woods and knew what Kaycee had done to him. That’s sick, she’d said, lifting her chin, as if I were the rotten thing. How could you even think something as sick as that?

  I think of the day years later, when I found her hugging a toilet seat, with blood unspooling in the water behind her. What’s happening to me? Truly afraid. I would have sworn it.

  Brent clears his throat and leans back. “You want to look for the real violations around here? Check out the old construction, not the new. Can you believe the high school was basically crawling in asbestos when we were there? Optimal wanted to donate a new gym and convert the old into an auditorium, but abatement was half a million dollars. Made more sense to build out the new community center instead.”

  “Asbestos isn’t what we’re looking for,” I say.

  “I’m just saying, it’s the old Barrens that’s screwed up.” Brent holds up his hands as if in surrender. “Optimal turned this town around. Gallagher is just angry his way of life is going down the tubes. He wants someone to blame.”

  Brent O’Connell is certainly good at what he does: he’s a natural-born salesman.

  “You might be right,” I say. I keep my voice light, casual. “Or you might be wrong. That’s why I’m here. To figure out which.”

  “And I thought you just wanted to see me,” Brent teases. “Just do me a favor and don’t let Gallagher take off an ear—you’re too pretty for that.”

  Ten years ago I would have died if he said I was pretty; now I’m surprised to find that it irritates me.

  “I’m from here too, remember,” I say. “I know how to shoot back.”

  The bill comes. Brent pulls out his card, but I get to it first. “On me. Please. For taking up your time.”

  “You’ll have to let me make it up to you,” Brent says, just as the first rain drums against the window. “Will you?”

  It takes me a second to understand that he’s asking me on a date. “I’m not sure—” I start to say, but he cuts me off.

  “Please, Abby. It’s really nice to see you again.” He sounds like he means it. I was prepared for deflections. Prepared, even, for his charm. But the apology, the compliments, the flirting, and now this…

  Memories of last night do a quick-shuffle through my head: Condor’s smile, the way he drums his thigh when he’s thinking, his hands, brown from the sun, pulling me closer to him. Brent’s hands are pale and well kept. I realize the difference between Condor and Brent. With Condor, the person I don’t trust is myself.

  “All right, screw it,” I say. Brent O’Connell, the Golden Child, football quarterback, hometown hero, wants to take me on a date. “Sure. Why not.”

  Brent smiles. “Welcome home, Abby Williams.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Barrens High School, a squat concrete-and-brick building, is smaller than I remembered and strikes me as surprisingly quiet. I guess I was expecting the raw energy and noise of restless teenagers to be oozing out through the windows and walls, to see kids perched on the hoods of their cars smoking pot, shoving each other into the Dumpsters, shouting to each other in the halls. But of course, it’s still raining, and everyone’s inside.

  Freak! I think I hear someone call out from far away. But there’s no one. The windshield wiper whines and snaps, whines and snaps. I shut off the engine, wondering if I have it in me to get out of the car. But there’s something drawing me here, one of those instincts. A hunch.

  I cover my head and hurry across the lot to the main entrance; the strangled cry of the front doors rips through me, feels like an old cut torn open.

  Survival instinct—that deep, anxious burn I practically subsisted on in high school—shoots adrenaline through my veins.

  But all is quiet and still inside, too. They say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory—this place smells like a hundred-year-old stairwell with no ventilation. I’m immediately transported back in time. I peer down the long empty hallway. First period classes must still be in session. The inside looks smaller than I remembered, too—why is that always the case? The ceiling seems lower, but I’ve been five foot nine since I was in the eighth grade so I know it isn’t because of a sudden growth spurt. The walls are still beige, but there is also a faint smell of paint. They must have attempted a makeover. It was a waste of time. The strangle of memories lessens somewhat as my wet boots slap aga
inst the tile floors; still, my whole body’s alert, ready to flatten itself against the rusted metal lockers in the event of a stampede, to perform its old magic trick and become invisible.

  Only a few days after I swore to myself I would never ask Misha for help, I’ve arrived to do exactly that.

  At the main office, I am told that Vice Principal Jennings is in with a parent. I still can’t reconcile the Misha who used to bring vodka to school in a water bottle during Spirit Week with the woman nominally in charge of the students’ education, and I can’t help but wonder what Kaycee would have thought.

  I remember the day Chestnut’s collar turned up in my locker, the sudden rage that overtook me, the way Misha slammed me against the lockers after I’d tackled her in the halls.

  Did you know what she did? I was practically choking on my own rage. Did you know all along? Did you think it would be funny to remind me?

  I’ll never forget how she looked then: scared. Truly scared, maybe for the first time ever.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about, she whispered.

  Is it at all possible that Misha was a victim, too?

  A bored-looking secretary shows me to a folding chair and hands me a copy of the school handbook. I flip through it—anything to keep my hands busy. Nothing seems to have changed: it’s all no drinking, no smoking on the premises, stuff like that. A zero-tolerance policy that I doubt is ever, or was ever, enforced.

  Finally the visiting parent storms off, clutching her pocketbook to her chest, and the secretary shows me in. Here among the clean angles of the modest office, surrounded by towers of paperwork, is Misha.

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” I say.

  When she stands up to give me a quick hug, I see that she’s wearing a skirt suit just a tiny bit too small for her. I focus on that visible flaw to counteract a surge of panic.