I was in a car with a boy talking about his favorite tree and his brother’s camping trips and his old home, and we were still zooming away, away from my home, into Silverado Canyon, and my breath felt short in a way I’d never felt before. I’d never felt any of this before.
“You know,” he said, “I would have talked to you regardless of what Grace and Quinn said. If anything, their intrusion made me hesitant to sit on that bench—the dare-like quality of it. And I wanted to sit next to you, because, you know, you’re beautiful, and I was intrigued.”
I looped my fingers through the drawstrings of my pajama pants. “Yeah?” I asked, never knowing how to say thank you.
“Yeah, Audie,” he said. “One hundred percent yeah.”
My pulse skidded when Brooks pulled over beneath a canopy of live oaks. I thought he might kiss me. It dawned on me that some rumors claimed he was dangerous, that I didn’t truly know him, not yet, and that he’d just driven me through a maze of ridges and valleys. But it also dawned on me that perhaps I wouldn’t mind if Brooks kissed me, which felt so foreign—for so long I was afraid of being touched, never comfortable with my own body. But I trusted Brooks even then. My first real kiss, me only fifteen, him eighteen, nearly a high school graduate.
Kiss me. Ignore the squirrels on my pajama pants and kiss me.
But Brooks only turned in his seat so that he faced me and—just as he had back when we were sitting on the bench at school—he grasped my hand again and lifted my knuckles to his lips.
“This has been a fantastic night,” he said.
“Fantastic,” I said, my habit of echoing him already ingrained. “Yeah.”
Brooks didn’t kiss me that night. He didn’t even try.
* * *
* * *
We were almost out of the canyon and to the bridge that climbs to suburbia, to our waiting homes in Coto de Caza, when Brooks turned into a small parking lot of a terra-cotta-roofed building. It was dark, and I couldn’t make out the words on the sign, but I recognized the large garages. The simple design.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
Brooks cut the engine. “Until I get back up north, this place is my home.”
“A fire station?”
“I’m a reserve,” he said, grinning so wide I could see his sharp tooth. “Or, I will be, officially, in a few weeks.”
“A what?”
“A firefighter.” He grinned. “Joining forces with good old Smokey.”
I watched Brooks. His smile. The passion. Fireflies swooped in my chest, behind my ribs. They tingled in my hands and toes. It was then that I decided I wanted to join forces with him.
10
7:02 A.M.
I’m right where Brooks left me. The abandoned ashy patio of Starbucks. I’ve been standing here for too long, because if I don’t move maybe I can pretend that Brooks was never here, that there isn’t a fire burning so near, because if I acknowledge any of it—anything that’s happened this past week—I’ll break.
And I need to be able to put myself back together.
I chuck the croissant in the trash. My brain is fried, my lips peeling, my hands electrified. I failed at evacuating and forgot my toiletries, and I need to brush my teeth. I cross the street to Pavilions Grocery. The smoke has thickened with the morning light, and the air tastes like burnt toast. The sun is a blood-red smear. It’s just 7 A.M., but the grocery store parking lot is packed with cars dusted with ash, like it’s Thanksgiving Eve. An anthill inside. A hushed mob of evacuees.
Tense smiles, slow tears, the shuffling of slippers and whispers. The commotion buffets me. I’m the only solo grocery store wanderer. I never realized my corner of Orange County was so interwoven with families, so many families—
It is so quiet.
I want to scream.
I pick up face wash, a toothbrush, toothpaste, face lotion, lip balm, ibuprofen, peppermint gum, and Vaseline for my palm. The metal handle of my basket digs into my arm. The main checkout lines snake through the aisles—yoga pants, workout shorts, pajamas—carts filled with cases of water bottles and fruit and boxes of cereal.
Should I be buying water too?
Thank the smoky sky for self-checkout. Only eight people waiting. A woman with matted hair and a baby on her hip disrupts the peace, breathing sorrow onto a ghost of a checkout boy.
“You’re out of surgical masks?” she says. “There’s a fire, and you’re out of surgical masks?”
He blinks. “CVS should—”
“I already went to CVS.” The baby cries against her shoulder, and the woman bounces from side to side. “Is no one in this town prepared?”
Checkout Boy rubs his eyeliner-smeared eyes.
I want to tell her it’s okay. Brooks said it’ll be okay. I want to say I’m so sorry for what she might lose. I want to apologize to every last patron in this store. I want to hug her, but she’s already rushing away.
* * *
* * *
I head back to the allure of coffee.
I should call Grace, but it’s still early. She’s definitely not awake. And there’s a small part of me petrified by the possibility of seeing Hayden after what he witnessed last night. Starbucks is booming now. I’m not the only refugee who sought comfort in overstuffed chairs, caffeine, and mellow lights versus the fluorescents at Mission Viejo High School, the current evacuation center. Classmates. Neighbors. Total strangers.
So many. There are so many people uprooted.
I clean up in the bathroom—wash my face and brush my teeth.
Mom still hasn’t called me back. It’s 7:34 A.M. She has to be awake, the audition is in nearly two hours, but Mom likes silent mornings. She believes TV and cell phones trigger a cluttered mind, and a cluttered mind is not good for pirouettes. No TV or cell phones in the morning, especially mornings before dancing. The morning of my OCIB audition, she snagged my cell phone before I even woke up.
Maya will be wrecked when she hears we’ve been evacuated. One good thing has come from my mom’s cell phone–free obsession: Maya might not know yet; she surely doesn’t know yet.
Across from me, a woman braids a girl’s red hair. So small and pale, the girl can’t be older than seven. Bruises spot her shins, and I wonder if she’s sick. Seven. That’s when Maya first got sick-sick, when she dropped twenty pounds and bruised like a September peach.
I need to stop thinking and step into Mom’s deluxe washing machine. Option: whitest whites, the hottest of water, a dunking of bleach. Burn my body until my thoughts bleed clean.
I need to drive to OCIB.
But if I see my mom, she’ll smell the smoke on my skin, and I’ll have to tell her about the evacuation, and that’ll crack Maya’s calm morning zone. If I don’t go, there’s a chance Maya won’t learn about the evacuation until after the audition, if Mom’s careful. There’s a chance I won’t sabotage her big day, and maybe this will all actually end up okay and—
“Audrey! You were evacuated?”
The high squeal pitches in my head. It’s Sam, Maya’s friend from a few streets over. She’s in hot-pink pajamas, and her hair is pulled up in a messy bun. She looks younger than ever, her white skin sweaty, eyes glossy.
“Yeah,” I say. “You too?”
“It sucks.” She slurps on a Frappuccino. “It’s Maya’s audition day, isn’t it? Is she okay? Is she still auditioning?”
“She and our mom stayed up in Newport last night, so hopefully she doesn’t know,” I say, and then, just in case Maya manages to grab hold of her phone, I add, “So don’t text her or anything about it, okay? At least not until later—you know how she gets.”
Sam nods. “Oh yeah. I won’t text her.” And then she jumps. “Wait. Wait a minute. Did you get Shadow?”
I stare at her. “Shadow?”
“Maya’s cat.”
“
Her what?”
“Oh my God. She hasn’t told you.” Her eyes tear up. “Poor Shadow.”
The room is starting to blur, and Sam’s voice is too high, so I pull her down beside me and I hold her hand, and I speak very slowly. “Sam, I need you to be honest and totally clear. Who is Shadow? Where is Shadow now? Why does Maya have a Shadow?”
Tears run down Sam’s face. “She found her, this kitten. She followed Maya home one night from my house a week or so ago, like a shadow, so,” Sam explains. “It was sick. Really skinny. Maya snuck her into your house and has been keeping her in her closet. I let her borrow my old cat stuff. She was going to tell you, but she said you’ve been super busy and—”
“There’s no way.” This is some sick dream. “I would know if Maya had a cat in her room.”
But I remember yesterday, her secret, and my stomach knots up.
“Your house is big.” Sam sniffles. “It’s easy to keep things secret.”
Maya’s smile when she was going to tell me her secret—so excited, such love. I thought it was a crush, womanhood. But a cat, I never imagined a cat. Our house might burn with a cat inside. He used to burn cats alive. I close my eyes. I need to get Maya’s cat.
“Do you want to sit with my family?” Sam asks.
“I have to go.”
She stands, but before turning away she asks, “Do you think Shadow will be okay?”
“I hope so,” I say.
My little sister’s kitten is trapped in my house, and I refuse to let this cat burn alive.
11
Idolization of Roots
That first night in June, after the senior prank and the drive in the canyons—after Brooks asked for my number and I tapped it into his phone, after I said bye and he said goodnight and I tripped up Grace’s driveway—after all of that, I snuck into her foyer and was blindsided.
Hayden sat on the staircase, a textbook in his lap. He swung his gaze at me. A blast of light, the shock to my eyes, I stumbled back against the door. He wore a camping headlamp, like a child with a comic under a bed, because turning on a light apparently wouldn’t have been sufficient for his reading. The shadows cast his pale skin into a ghoulish shade.
“You’re back,” he said, looking me over, the jolt in my expression. He paused and asked, “Did something happen?”
I shielded my face. “You burned my eyes—that’s what happened.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Hayden yanked the headlamp off and held it so the light shone at the steps. “Grace asked if I wouldn’t mind waiting up for you. To lock up after, you know.”
I leaned against the bottom of the banister. “Waiting up for me required camping out on the staircase?”
His cheeks colored. “It’s a nice place to read. New settings help the mind retain information, and I can only spend so much time at my desk, so.” He gripped the edge of his book, peering up at me. “Grace said you were out with Brooks. Did you—” His words were clumsy. “Where did you go?”
Last June, Grace’s older brother was still just that to me: Grace’s older brother. He was Hayden, who—for the most part—seemingly avoided me around the house. He smiled when we passed each other at school, but otherwise he remained aloof. Like I was an allergen that he couldn’t fully avoid. Grace said it wasn’t me, that he was weird with everyone, but I was unconvinced. Everyone at school adores Hayden.
“Yeah, Brooks,” I said. “We drove around in the canyons. Not a big deal.”
“Oh. Cool,” Hayden said. “That sounds cool.”
I walked up a step past him. “Thanks for waiting for me,” I said. “Happy reading.”
He fastened the headlamp back over his dark curls and returned to his book. “Anytime.”
* * *
* * *
After the blast of Hayden’s headlamp, I was too wired to sleep, so I sprawled out on Grace’s bedroom floor and typed to the rhythm of her soft snores. I googled Brooks’s beloved tree, his quaking aspen. He was right: It’s a beautiful tree. You’d never find it in Orange County.
I typed too loud, fingers clacking across the keys. Grace rolled over, mumbled an obscenity. I typed some more. She chucked a pillow at me.
“Dude,” she said. “You writing a novel or something?”
“Tree research.”
She sat up, her hair sticking up in spikes. “You woke me up for tree research?”
I clicked on a government link. “Not my fault you’re a light sleeper.”
She turned on her bedside lamp and climbed out of bed, splat herself on the carpet beside me. “Might this tree research have anything to do with Brooks?”
I nodded. “He’s kind of fascinating.”
“I knew you two weirdos would hit it off. He a good kisser?”
“No idea.” I squinted at the screen. “How do you know Brooks anyway?”
“I don’t,” she said. “He was in Hayden’s stats class. They had some group thing.” She bit her thumbnail, and I thought over my conversation with Hayden on the staircase, his tentativeness to ask questions or offer commentary. “Brooks came over once so they could prepare beforehand, and I maybe hovered. He wasn’t what I expected. Weird, but probably because he’s a fellow loner like you.”
“Did Hayden like him?” I glanced at the door that led to their Jack and Jill bathroom.
“Uh, he liked him enough,” Grace said. “But Hayden likes everyone. You know that.”
“He doesn’t like me,” I said.
“Oh hell no,” Grace said. “I am not playing that game with you. He likes you fine.”
I looked back at the screen. Native Americans and early Pilgrims extracted a quinine substitute from quaking aspen bark. Quinine—a substance used to treat malaria in the seventeenth century.
“Are the stories true?” Grace asked.
I opened a new tab and typed Brooks Vanacore into the blank space. I stared at the blinking cursor, only to hold my breath as I deleted his name, letter by letter. It felt too invasive. I wanted to learn who he was through him, not whatever the internet had to say.
“Audrey,” Grace said.
“I don’t know,” I said, clicking back on the tree web pages.
“Well, he’s graduating,” Grace said. “Perfect end-of-the-year hookup. He’s sexy, yeah?”
“I don’t do hookups.”
“Correction: You’ve never had a hookup.”
“Because I don’t do them,” I said.
She thought on that. “Well, Brooks probably doesn’t do hookups either.”
“He seemed like a charmer to me,” I said.
“Because he likes you!”
Quaking aspens make poor fire fuel. They dry slowly and rot quickly. Despite their yellow—sometimes red—leaves, they give off minimal heat. Nonetheless, the wood is frequently used in campfires. It’s supposedly cheap.
But here’s the thing about quaking aspens: They rely on fire for survival. By wiping out interfering brush, fire gives the trees the space they need to grow. So, Brooks’s quaking aspen can’t withstand fire, and yet without fire, it’d go extinct.
I’d find my own tree to idolize.
Grace chucked another pillow in my direction. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Right. Okay. I’m going back to bed.”
“Sleep soundly,” I said.
“Search softly.”
I cracked my knuckles. “I’ll try my best.”
12
7:56 A.M.
I’m walking to the truck when I call Grace.
“This is insane,” she says. “Bonkers-crazy insane. Your house—my dad said your area is screwed. Crap. Sorry.” She jumps over her words. “Is Brooks out there yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“I need your help,” I say. “And I
also need to shower.”
“Dude, what are you waiting for?” she asks. “Mi casa es su casa.”
13
SATURDAY
Derek’s house, last night’s party house, is an aspiring European villa—complete with ivy-blanketed terraces and lush rugs, a backyard flanked by towering palm trees, and rock waterfalls feeding into the massive pool. He wasn’t exaggerating on Facebook: An actual pirate ship borders the water’s end.
“My parents had the ship design based on the one at that resort in Cabo,” he explained, tossing Brooks and me beers from the pirate bar. “What’s it called? La Playa or something?” He nodded at me. “You know what I’m talking about.”
I cracked my can. “I’ve never been to Mexico.” The cool aluminum felt good in my hand.
“Dude.” Derek swigged from his beer, nodding at Brooks. “You need to take your girl south of the border. You’re depriving her! Need to treat the lady right, am I right?”
Brooks kissed my cheek. “I am depriving you, aren’t I?”
“Oh, absolutely.” I sounded breezy, but I was thinking of Thursday night, of Brooks’s brother, the fire. Leaning into his arms, grateful my insides weren’t open for public viewing, I sounded fine. “I’m totally deprived.”
A crowd of seniors emerged from the house, a roaring huddle of banter, escalating to a fight. Derek nodded at us, walking backward toward the hustle. “Make yourself at home, mi casa es—you know!”
Brooks’s arms encircled my waist. Ash drifted down like Nutcracker snow on closing night—deceptively white from the theater seats, but in reality dirty, almost brown, hot from the stage lights.
“How about we leave,” Brooks said. “Watch a movie at my place, you know, hang out.”
“I don’t want to go.” The party made it easier to ignore the raining ash. “Have you ever been to Mexico?”
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