Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

  I scrabble backward and the hook spins out of my grip. Before I can find it he gets his hands around my throat—no longer worried about marks. He crushes my windpipe in his fist.

  I feel along the filth of vomit and blood until the fish hook bites back in response.

  This time I aim more carefully.

  His eye makes a slight popping sound, like a grape bursting, when I drive the metal through it.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  I tumble over the side of the boat and plunge beneath the surface of the water. Even then I can hear him screaming. My ankles are still bound, and my clothes are so heavy I nearly don’t make it up for a breath. I struggle out of my father’s vest and let it drop. But I can’t get my ankles free, not with my fingers half-numb and my body still heavy with drugs.

  When I surface, I see the bonfire blazing in the distance, and not a single person standing there to watch. Like I thought. No point in screaming. The stereo is blasting “Sweet Caroline.” I’ve always hated that song.

  Brent has stopped screaming. I can’t see him at all. The boat rocks on the wind-ruffled water, its silhouette dark against the sleek reflection of the moon in the water.

  I slip under the water again and come up coughing. I try to fumble off my shoes but this takes me under again. Each time it’s harder to break through to the oxygen above, so I give up.

  I start to swim toward the shore. For a second I imagine I see a flashlight blinking through the trees. But the light blinks out again as soon as I try and focus on it.

  My heart feels like it, too, is swollen with water. Head down, head up. My jeans weigh a thousand pounds. The shore seems to be getting farther, not closer. I’m gasping for breath, choking on my fear, wishing for things I haven’t wished for in forever: for my mother to hold me, for my father, for God to save me—for anyone.

  I sink. Fight for the surface. Sink again. Up and down. Barely making any forward progress. If I can just make it, I can hide in the woods. I can lose him; I know these woods better than he does, better than anyone does.

  But even as I think it, an enormous amount of light dazzles the surface of the reservoir, illuminating even the logs floating in the shallows a hundred feet away.

  I turn around and am blinded by floodlights: Brent has powered them on, lighting up a clear path between us. The hum of his engine grows to a roar as he wheels around.

  And points the boat straight at me.

  “Help!” There’s no point in screaming but I do anyway, taking in another mouthful of water. “Help!” The boat comes so fast it cleaves a wake behind it. Thirty feet away. Fifteen.

  I’ll never make it. I have no strength to swim anymore.

  It’s the craziest thing: just before I drop, before I let the water take me, I swear I see Kaycee Mitchell step out of the trees, almost directly on the place my father and I buried Chestnut. Not Kaycee as she was the last time I saw her, but Kaycee the child, Kaycee my best friend, skinny and long-legged, just a flash of blond hair and a strong, urgent message she sends out across the water.

  Swim.

  Brent’s boat sends a surf of water up to meet me, and I fall down under its weight, tumbling. The underside clips my shoulder, missing my head by inches.

  Underneath the water, sound becomes vibration: a shudder, a distant boom that makes the whole reservoir shiver. I open my eyes. The floodlights have cut their way down into the depths. A peaceful place to die. Green with old growth. Weedy and silent. There are letters embedded in the silt, large white letters, a hieroglyph I understand intuitively, a message that fills me with a strange joy.

  I have learned how to see.

  —

  “Abby. Abby. Can you hear me? Abby.”

  A whirl of lights and color. Fireworks. Explosions of sound.

  “Just hang on, okay? You’re going to be okay. I’m right here with you.”

  A web of branches above me.

  I’m a child again, bundled in a white sheet, rocking.

  “Keep the oxygen coming.”

  “Radio the bus to come down Pike Road, it’ll be quicker.”

  My mouth is made of plastic. My breath mists inside of it.

  “She’s trying to say something. She’s trying to speak.”

  A stranger touches my face. She looses my mouth from its plastic cage.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” the stranger says, “you’re going to be just fine.” She has a smile that reminds me of my mother’s.

  It takes a second to work out what my tongue is, how to move it in the right direction.

  “I found her,” I whisper.

  “What’d she say?” I know that voice. Condor. “Abby, what’s the matter?”

  She frowns. “Found who, sweetheart?”

  “Kaycee.” I close my eyes again. I see the letters written at the bottom of the lake: the white of her bones, so clean, so fine, almost glowing. “She’s been waiting for us to find her. She’s been waiting for us in the reservoir.”

  Epilogue

  It’s September before I finally pack my car with my suitcase and my duffel bag, my mother’s jewelry box, and a cardboard box of my dad’s belongings I’ve decided, after all, to save.

  Why not? The past is just a story we tell. And all stories depend on the ending.

  And for the first time in my life, I truly believe that the ending is going to be just fine.

  Hannah gives me a sheath of drawings bound up in a three-ring binder: a superhero named Astrid who wears a purple cape and a pair of leather boots and goes around rescuing kids drowning in ocean waves or stranded by mounting floods on the roofs of their houses.

  “I tried to make her look like you,” she tells me shyly, before briefly squeezing me into a hug and then darting off.

  “You didn’t say good-bye,” Condor calls after her, but she’s already vanished, disappearing inside the house.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t like good-byes, either.”

  It’s a bright day, full of classic Indiana colors: gold and green and blue. The month of August seemed determined to make up for the drought, as if twelve months’ worth of rain had just been piling up waiting to spoil everyone’s last bit of summer. But when the storms passed, they left fields wild and lush. The reservoir is approaching normal levels again, though it’s still testing too high for lead and other contaminants, and the people of Barrens are still drinking and washing in bottled water trucked to town by the state and various charitable organizations. Protesters even set up camp in the playground that, ironically, still welcomes visitors with an Optimal Cares! sign. (Though after a recent graffiti modification, it now reads Optimal Scares.)

  I never found out who sent me the envelope full of photographs that finally set me on a path to understanding the truth. But I suspect Misha might have had something to do with it, just as I suspect it was Misha who tried to run me off the road, though I doubt I’ll ever know whether she was finally sick of covering for Brent, whether she’d simply realized that he would never love her in the way she kept hoping he would, or whether she simply thought she could get me out of the way, even if it meant implicating herself. All I know is that she has been cooperating with the federal investigation into the nature of the Optimal Scholarships and the abuse perpetuated in their name. Maybe she’s cooperating in an attempt to redeem herself. Maybe it’s just an attempt to reduce her sentence, although, given the number of girls affected, it’s unlikely she will ever leave prison again.

  And then, of course, there is Kaycee’s murder, and the charges related to it. Now that Brent’s dead, Misha will stand trial, alone.

  I almost—almost—feel sorry for her.

  An awkward silence stretches between Condor and me—uncharacteristic, since we’ve spent weeks talking, eating dinner together almost every night, bonding over the strange and sudden bubble of publicity that made us into a makeshift family. It’s funny: through all of this, we fell into an easy intimacy, the kind of friendship I’ve always craved and have ha
d only intermittently with Joe.

  I’m not ready to leave him, or Hannah, or even Barrens.

  But I have to.

  We both know I don’t belong in Barrens. Condor has his whole life here; I have my little sterile condo waiting for me in Chicago. Who knows? Maybe I’ll hang a photo or two. Maybe I’ll make Joe buy me dollar oysters. Maybe I’ll let him buy me dollar oysters for a year, with a big side of groveling—he’s promised he owes me a lifetime supply.

  Maybe I’ll finally get through my inbox, and all the new complaints, environmental reports, and potential new cases awaiting my attention. You want a clean world, someone’s got to filter out the crap.

  Good thing I’ve gotten used to getting my hands dirty.

  I clear my throat. “She seems so much better,” I say.

  When he smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Kids are amazing, aren’t they? Resilient as hell.”

  I flip through the book of drawings again. She’s actually very good—she has a talent that reminds me of Kaycee’s at her age. “Not a spot of blood,” I say.

  “No loose body parts, either,” Condor says dryly. After that night on the reservoir, Hannah couldn’t stop drawing the terrible things she had seen: flames and blood, a body broken on the deck of a foundering boat.

  It was Hannah I saw in the woods, Hannah who in my exhaustion and terror I’d mistaken for Kaycee as a child. The crack I heard just before going under was a gunshot: a single rifle shot, aimed from the shoreline one hundred feet away at a target moving fast in a motorboat.

  Condor was born and bred in Barrens, and Barrens taught its boys how to play football, and how to aim a gun. One shot was all it took.

  He’d told me the whole story in the hospital the day after it happened—how he’d grown worried after seeing my calls, especially when I didn’t answer his. How, after several hours, he’d become so agitated he decided to drive to my father’s house to make sure I was okay. He hadn’t wanted to leave Hannah by herself—but she was a fussy sleeper, prone to nightmares, and he was worried she might wake up and discover him gone. So he’d woken her and packed her in the back seat of the car.

  “I was sure I was just being paranoid,” he told me. “I figured we’d find you tucked into bed, turn around, and go home.”

  “Then why did you bring your shotgun?” I’d asked him.

  He’d simply shrugged. “You ever gone camping without a flashlight?”

  I shook my head.

  He smiled. “Me neither.”

  Later, I heard the story repeated by the news channels, on websites, blogs, and late-night segments. Everyone was captivated by my narrow escape on the reservoir—and more than a little enamored of Condor, the gruff good-looking single dad who played the role of the hero.

  The story was embellished, edited, and exaggerated, but the basic facts remained the same: arriving at my father’s house, he’d found Brent’s car, and mine, but the door hanging open and tracks off the back porch, leading across the grass, suggesting something—or someone—had been dragged into the woods.

  He had commanded Hannah to stay in the car. He hardly ever gave direct orders, and she never disobeyed them.

  That night, she did.

  When I got out of the hospital, I tried returning to my dad’s house, which had been cleared by then of the police tape that for days had encircled it. But already, curious tourists were arriving. I would wake in the middle of the night to a sudden flash, only to see a stranger at the window and be pulled into a well of panic, replaying the entire event over and over in my head.

  When Condor suggested I stay with him, I agreed right away. I made coffee in the mornings. He made eggs. I slept in his bed. He took the foldout couch. Hannah and I drank warm milk at midnight when the nightmares had startled us awake. Condor and I sat on the couch, watching old episodes of sitcoms without paying any attention to them, after endless hours of giving evidence, interviews, help to a tidal wave of federal investigators and prosecutors, sexual assault survivors’ advocates, corporate watchdogs. It was as if exposing Optimal and its economy of teens used for entertainment, and nearly getting killed in the process, had all been part of some master plan to snag my fifteen minutes of fame. Barrens, and its dirty not-so-little secrets, was suddenly everywhere. The fall of a multimillion-dollar company, the exploitation, the corruption, the girls, the ten-year-old murder—it was a ratings jackpot.

  But the attention would fade—it already had begun to—and so would whatever this was between Condor and me. It was never meant to last, at least not in that way. Condor and I had already made lives in different places. That’s the funny thing about home: you’ve always arrived just as soon as you stop checking the compass.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Condor says now, his mouth all twisted up, like it always is when he has to say something serious.

  I give him a quick hug. Barely a squeeze—anything longer, anything more, and my thoughts spin down places too murky and lonesome to understand.

  He raises a hand. Framed by a huge billow of Indiana sky, he looks truly beautiful. I will always remember this moment, I tell myself, but already know that I won’t.

  He pivots just before he gets to the front door as I slide into the car. “Try to stay far away from boats.”

  “Try not to shoot anyone,” I call back. He blows me a kiss.

  I key on the ignition.

  Before heading out of town, I take a familiar turn toward my dad’s house. As I get closer I can see the same ever-so-slightly crooked split-level and the gravel driveway, but the brown and overgrown yard has been cleared of weeds. The house, with TJ’s help, shines with a fresh coat of pale blue paint.

  I hardly recognize it.

  This isn’t home anymore.

  A For Sale sign juts from the mown lawn at an angle, optimistic, and perhaps absurdly so.

  Eventually a new family will move into this house; a new child will run through its halls, stare out at the line of trees in the forest from her bedroom, ride her bike down the path to the reservoir, collect little items that are important to her, and maybe, sit down to dinner and hold hands with her parents as they say grace.

  Or maybe there won’t be any kind of grace in that house again.

  I roll down my window and breathe in the smell of the reservoir through the wood line for what I know will be the last and final time.

  A formation of crows pinwheels on invisible currents through the sky. Together, they form an arrow, pointing north.

  I turn my car to follow them.

  Barrens grows smaller in my rearview mirror until, at last, it disappears.

  Acknowledgments

  I have a lot of people to thank for helping and supporting me through the process of writing this book. Thank you to Lauren Oliver for working tirelessly with me on Bonfire from inception to completion. Thank you for your amazing ideas and every late-night pep talk—I never could have done this without you. I also want to thank Lexa Hillyer and the entire Glasstown Entertainment team, also Stephen Barbara at Inkwell. Thank you to Molly Stern, Jen Schuster, and everyone at Crown for believing in me and for this amazing opportunity. Thank you to Dave Feldman and the rest of my team for supporting my dreams, especially Kyle Luker and Steve Caserta, each of whom must have read seventeen drafts of the book as it evolved. I also want to thank my dear friend Gren Wells for her notes and feedback and for encouraging me along the way. Thank you to my adorable sister, Bailey, for taking my author photo. Thank you to my best friend, Lauren Bratman, for cheering me across every finish line. Thank you to Rachael Taylor for the incredible book recommendations. Thank you, lastly, to Adam and Mikey for all the love at home.

  About the Author

  KRYSTEN RITTER is known for her starring roles in the award-winning Netflix series Marvel’s Jessica Jones and cult favorite Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, as well as her pivotal role on AMC’s Breaking Bad. Ritter’s work on film includes Big Eyes, Listen Up Philip, Life Happens, Confessions of a Shopa
holic, and She’s Out of My League. She is the founder of Silent Machine, a production company that aims to highlight complex female protagonists. Ritter and her dog, Mikey, split their time between New York and Los Angeles.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.