Nothing Left to Burn

by Heather Ezell

  We were at the final crest before the turn into the slope that runs down into my subdivision. Far out in a back valley—but not too far, not that far at all—flames glowered, a violent pool of light. I thought of Brooks’s cell phone on Derek Sanders’s parents’ floor. Silent. Not yet wailing. Was he still lying there, his face in the rug?

  “Man,” Hayden said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think started it?”

  “Lunatics,” I answered. “Or the wind.”

  “Whatever happened—” A beat passed. “You can talk to me.”

  “Hayden.”

  “I at least deserve that,” he said. “Your trust.”

  It hit me in throat, how Hayden’s never asked anything of me. He’s never demanded my attention. He’s simply been there, accepting my growing proximity, letting me do as I please—as if he always knew it would happen on my own terms.

  Until I made a mistake yesterday—pushing too fast, too hard, in the totally wrong way.

  And he does deserve to know I trust him, because I do.

  But I didn’t respond, didn’t react, didn’t speak. My heart broke. I bit into my tongue, and he focused on driving. Five minutes down the street and the fire was hidden. Only the brown smoke that veiled the night sky was evidence that something wasn’t right.

  “How about we go back to my house?” Hayden stared at my dark house, at the pepper trees bending in the wind, the black of the high foyer windows. “Grace would be elated to find you when she gets home.”

  “It’s fine. I’m okay.” I pushed open the door and stepped out. “Thanks again for the ride.”

  He tossed me another water bottle. “Drink it.”

  I raised the bottle in salute, kicked back the door, and turned up the drive.

  Hayden rolled down the passenger window, and so normal, so everyday, like nothing had happened, he yelled out, “See you tomorrow, my Round Table Lady.”

  16

  8:37 A.M.

  Grace meets me on her doorstep, squinting in the smoke and twisting her hemp bracelets around her wrist. I can’t stop coughing. Ever since Dad’s call: cough, cough, cough.

  “This is insane,” she says. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Fantastic.”

  I think of the framed photos on the living room bookshelf and my grandma’s paintings in the office. I think of my favorite hoodie in my dirty-clothes hamper—a maroon zip-up I bought from the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival when Mom took us up for a girls’ trip last year while Dad was abroad for work. I think of the pillow Brooks gave me, and my heart hurts. I think of a kitten meowing in Maya’s closet. I follow Grace into her air-conditioned, tiled foyer, shivering.

  The grandfather clock chimes the quarter hour.

  My eyes swell. It feels so nice, so pathetically nice to be here. With Grace. Safe. The familiar. My best friend. I’m okay. It’s okay. Her house is clean, all in order, even the smell of burnt eggs normal. Her parents’ and Hayden’s voices echo from the kitchen, where coffee always drips and newspaper pages crinkle and flip like clockwork. The TV is on too, a low hum, a reporter listing the devastation only a few miles away at my front door. But here, in this house, it’s a normal Sunday—close to the disaster, yet blissfully far enough away.

  I bound for the stairs and Grace’s room before Hayden can see me.

  “So, what happened?” Grace asks.

  “Some firefighters knocked on my door and said I had to go.”

  I collapse on her bedroom floor. Grace has the best carpeting—purple, plush, put in specifically for her. It matches the hemp bracelet she gave me on my birthday.

  “I meant what happened last night.”

  “Last night?” I yank my bracelet around my wrist.

  “You sent me a text at one in the morning. Mayday, mayday, mayday.” She throws me her phone, our stream of messages on the screen.

  I swallow back a knot. “I just drank too much,” I say.

  “I’d assumed it was about Brooks,” she says. “That summer is finally ending for you two. As it probably should.”

  I roll over on my stomach and pick up a novel I loaned to Grace back in September. I ignore her comment and fan through the pages.

  “FYI,” Grace picks at the ends of her bleached hair. “When I set you guys up, I never thought it’d go beyond a weekend fling.”

  “You didn’t set us up.”

  “I told him to go talk to you!”

  I move onto my back and stare up at the ceiling, at a photo of Grace and me, freshman year, dressed up like malicious fairies for Halloween, adorned in red tutus. Not even a full month after walking offstage, I’m perfectly posed in an arabesque. But Grace is the focus of the photo. A hand on her hip, the other held above her head, eyelids painted black against her perpetually tanned skin, courtesy of track. She is two steps forward, towering over me, loose and confident with a filled-out body, while I’m rigid in the back with little girl bones—too pale from primarily existing in the dance studio.

  “Quinn was the one who dared him to make me smile,” I say. “So if anyone gets the credit, it should be her.”

  “Oh hell no. I initiated the whole relationship!” She points a finger. “Just like I initiated me and you—you always forget that I approached your skinny ass.”

  I burst into laughter. I’m so tired and raw and now so idiotically giddy. An almost drunk happiness. Shock. Something like shock. It must be shock, because how else can I be laughing after this morning, after last night? But then Grace has always been the balance to my melancholy—usually breaking through even my lowest of moods.

  I laugh until I hiccup, and it makes me ache for Maya, wonder how she’s doing, how she’s feeling. It’s 8:58 A.M., and in two hours she’ll be at the audition barre. Will she be thinking of Shadow? And now I laugh harder, because it’s all so absurd, and I hiccup and Grace throws me her water bottle, just like Hayden did last night. And, honestly, per the norm, she’s right about her initiating our friendship, way back in the fourth grade.

  “You okay?” Grace asks. “I expected sobbing, not laughter.”

  “This day. This fucking day,” I say with a hiccup, coughing on a mouthful of water.

  Grace and I met in tap class. Back then she was all about tap, a tap diva queen with a loud stage presence paired with a horrific inability to master patterns. But together, we made it work. I’m prime with beat and rhythm, the meticulous necessities of dance, but I lacked—and still lack—the voice and courage to move with alluring bravado.

  We taught each other our strengths, practicing at recess, after school, after class. We went on to the intermediate course in middle school and—in our minds—all the other girls envied us for our perfect friendship, our dancing partnership. But then she left tap in the seventh grade, when she discovered her true love of track—her speed, her own pace, her own rhythm, similar to her zest for cooking and abandoning recipes with ease.

  And I left tap to focus on ballet, only to ultimately leave that too.

  I wish I liked running. I wish I liked something that adequately filled my life.

  And, last year, when Grace came out as bisexual and joined the Gay-Straight Alliance, I was even more jealous. She knew herself. And then, last December, she asked Quinn to be her girlfriend. And I initially didn’t know what that meant for me: how I would fit into the equation.

  But it’s no different from when Grace dated James. She has a girlfriend who sometimes takes priority, whom she loves in a different way. It barely changed a thing. And now it’s no different from my dating Brooks—except Quinn actually likes hanging out with me, makes an effort to include me, and Brooks can’t handle more than ten minutes around my friends.

  So regardless of our communal breakup with tap—the thing that initially bonded us—and Grace having Quinn and me having Brooks, she’s still
my best friend and I’m hers.

  “Did you see Hayden last night?” Grace asks. “I think he was covering Safe Ride.”

  “He was around. Doing the Hayden thing.” I hide my face in the carpet. “Brooks said I was too afraid to go down the pirate-ship slide.”

  “He’s right.”

  I practice it in my head: Grace, there is a cat in my house, and we need to go on a rescue mission to save it. She’ll think I’m losing it, that I’m making the cat up. She thinks I made up the last one. I play with my phone. It’s almost 9:06. I’m wasting time. I need to get to Shadow, to my house.

  “When are you and Quinn leaving?”

  “Around one,” Grace says. “I think I even convinced her to let me drive, so I officially have a blindfold at the ready.”

  “You’re going to blindfold your girlfriend on her birthday for seven hours?”

  She stares at me. “It’s five hours to Big Sur.”

  “Oh gosh,” I say. “It is not.” All Quinn knows is that Grace is taking her somewhere cool, and she needed to have an alibi for her parents, as she won’t be back until late tomorrow evening. “It’s a seven-hour drive, if you’re lucky,” I say.

  Grace picks at her bottom lip. “Shit. Are there any closer redwoods?”

  “Um.”

  “Maybe we’ll stay until Tuesday—”

  “You two are so getting busted,” I say. “Especially considering that my being evacuated is going to screw up your story.”

  “Whatever.” She huffs. “Hayden will cover me, and if not, it’ll be worth it.”

  “You’re definitely rocking the surprise element,” I say. “Quinn texted me yesterday. She has an appointment at the salon this morning for an epic ball-worthy hairdo.”

  Grace grins. “That’s my beauty.”

  “Hopefully she hasn’t bought a gown for your camping trip,” I tease.

  “Hey, a gown would contrast fabulously against the beach and trees,” she says. And then, so unexpected, Grace asks, “Think your house burned down yet?”

  “Grace!” My pulse jumps. Shadow. We’re actually going to save Shadow.

  “Wanna shower and go check?”

  Still, I hesitate. “Don’t you need to get ready for the trip?”

  “It’s still early.” She shrugs. “And I want to go with my BFF to see if her house is on fire.” She raises a brow. “You game?”

  And this is why Grace is my best friend.

  17

  Rubber Band

  Back in June, when Brooks called two weeks after we met, he didn’t say hey or hi or hello or what’s up or it’s Brooks, you know, from senior prank night. He skipped all pleasantries, as if we were old friends, and he responded to my hello with, “You figure out your favorite tree yet?”

  I was at the kitchen table, spoon in my abandoned oatmeal, phone clutched to my ear. I was wearing dance shorts and a tank top, my hair up in the bun I’d slept in, bare feet on the cool wood floor. The air conditioning hummed, but I was hot, suddenly so horrifically hot. His name on the screen of my cell phone. His name on the screen of my cell phone at 9:21 A.M. Brooks.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Because when you didn’t offer to share your favorite, I assumed you didn’t have one yet, that you hadn’t even thought about it before.” His voice sounded different on the phone. Lighter, slightly higher. “I didn’t want to embarrass you, so I didn’t push it.”

  I laughed. “Should I be embarrassed that I don’t have a favorite tree?”

  Maya stretched on the floor. She looked up at the tease in my throat. “Is that a boy?” she sang in a whisper. “A booooooooooooy!”

  I stuck out my tongue and motioned for her to go away, but instead she started a swan arm variation with her middle fingers up in response. I turned toward the window, my cheeks hot.

  Brooks continued. “And now I’m assuming that you’ve spent the past two weeks in tree contemplation. Every minute dedicated to the pursuit of your beloved species.”

  “Beloved species,” I said. “You really just said that.”

  “It’s why I waited so long to call.” There was a lift in his words, the ever-so-slightly higher pitch that comes through whenever he’s talking through a jaw break of a smile. “To give you time.”

  I switched my phone to my other ear. “Time to research my favorite tree?”

  “And?”

  Okay, so I had wasted an hour or so in the attempt to find my tree. I scoured through pages of oaks and sycamores and pines, weeding through nursery and forestry websites. But there was no way I was going to tell Brooks that.

  “Well, my mom’s pepper trees are nice,” I said.

  He laughed. “You’re so not off the hook,” he said. “Make note, you’re a bad liar, even over the phone.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But take note that you’re mean.”

  “Second question.” He didn’t even skip a beat. “Did you lose a hair tie in my car?”

  “A what?”

  “A hair tie. The thing chicks use to keep their hair up.”

  “You mean a rubber band?”

  “Yeah,” Brooks said. “That.”

  “You’re asking me if I lost a rubber band in your car two weeks ago?” I glanced over my shoulder. Maya was still in the splits, middle-finger swan arming, giggling—having too much fun with her newly invented profane move. “That’s even more ridiculous than the favorite-tree question.”

  “Hey, the tree question was a valid inquiry,” he said. When I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t say anything, I was smiling too wide—he added, “Well, did you lose it, the supposedly rubber hair tie band thing?”

  I grinned with a confidence I’d thought only existed in girls like Grace, this chatty banter, the sustained conversation. Usually my words fall flat. But there I was, at the kitchen table, my reflection bright in the window and my little sister listening behind. A somewhat gorgeous high school graduate soon to be firefighting boy had called me to ask if I’d lost my rubber band in his car two weeks ago.

  “Yeah, it’s mine,” I said. “The rubber band.” And maybe because of the endorphins, or the honey in my oatmeal, or the caffeine of my coffee, or maybe because quite simply I liked Brooks, I said, “I’m free today. Want to hang out?”

  “Damn, Audie,” he said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Brooks picked me up three hours later. We didn’t talk as he sped up the I-5 but instead listened to whiny hip-hop. He rapped under his breath, and I tried not to laugh. It was past noon, but gray fog still gripped the coast, thickening as we merged onto the 55 West.

  Brooks looked different in daylight. Tamer. His dirty blond hair was ruffled, as if he’d let it dry in high winds. He wasn’t really prepped for a day at the beach—black pants and a fitted gray tee—so I was surprised when he asked, “You’ve been to Balboa Island, right?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “How is it that I’ve lived here for a only a few months and Audrey Harper—a lifetime resident—is needing the tour?”

  Audrey Harper. He’d remembered my last name. The way he said it made me dizzy, like he was recalling a memory, or naming a tree.

  I bit my pinky nail, watching oaks give way to palm trees as we flew toward the sea, thinking of the studio mirrors and wood floors, how it’s easy to blame my childhood dancing for all of my deficiencies, but the truth is that it’s always been me. Beaches typically mean swimsuits, and swimsuits mean being seen. I miss the water, being submerged, floating, clean, but I hadn’t shed my clothes in public since I was thirteen.

  “I don’t get out much,” I said.

  “What did I tell you?” Brooks forced a frown. “You lie for shit. Your voice gets all wheezy.”

  It was an asshole thing of him to say, but he was smiling, green eyes looking stra
ight ahead, his voice somehow kind, presenting the sentence as if it were a compliment. No one had ever noticed my wheezy bullshit voice before. It felt good that he’d paid enough attention to notice.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  I pushed my hair behind my ears, still wet from my shower. How could I explain that I didn’t like stripping down to a bathing suit? “No, it’s not—I love the ocean, water, but—”

  “Exposing your psyche isn’t second-date material, eh?”

  A shot of euphoria. “This is a date?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond right away. I glanced at him and he glanced at me and I swear I maybe didn’t breathe and Brooks said, “Would you like this to be a date, Audrey?”

  I’d never been on a date before. I’d never had a boy talk so easily to me, pick me up, drive me to the coast, use my name directly. Even with the spotlight on me, a tiara on my head, my costume cinched in, even then, I’d never felt so significant. I’d never wanted to feel so significant.

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling so hard, feeling bright. “I think I would.”

  18

  9:51 A.M.

  Hair rinsed, my face rubbed raw, I’m still not clean and I’m far from content.

  “I love you,” Grace says, pulling on a pair of denim shorts. “But you look like hell.”

  I double knot my shoelaces. “I feel like hell.”

  “You should eat some bacon.”

  I force a laugh. “Bacon isn’t going to fix this.”

  “What if I do your makeup?” Her eyes are lined neon blue to match her hair. A natural disaster is as good an excuse as any to rock a dramatic Sephora-inspired look.

  “We don’t have time for makeup,” I say.

  “You sure?” she asks. “A fresh face always helps my hangovers.”

  “I’ll just sweat it off,” I say. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Okay, okay, didn’t realize we’re running on a clock here,” she says. But then, her hand light on my arm, “Are you sure you’re up to this?”