by Wendy Heard
I gestured toward the wildly tossing trees, to the leafy tornados. “What if the fire spreads to the state park? It’s enough to just surround the tent with trees. You made your point!”
He gesticulated angrily. “We don’t have time for this. I need you documenting!”
They were done dousing the trees. Mick appeared at my elbow. She had pulled the ski mask up to reveal her face. She lifted her head to look up at the wind.
Lily grabbed two tiki torches from the duffel bag and brought them to Nico. Nico lit the torches, and the flames flaring to life made his eyes terrifying behind the ski mask. I couldn’t help it. I lifted the camera and took his picture.
“Good girl,” Nico said.
“Fuck you,” I yelled over the wind. “What if all those people get trapped in there? What if the tent isn’t fire resistant?”
“God, Mom. They don’t make tents that aren’t fire resistant. Just take the fucking pictures!”
Mick dropped the ski mask on the ground and stepped toward Nico. She looked like she was in a trance. He pulled off his mask and looked down at her, his face like a cat’s watching birds through a window.
“Do it,” he said.
She reached for the flaming torch, and he gave it to her easily.
“Mick?” I yelled. “Mick, what are you doing?”
I felt like I saw entire novels fly through her eyes; she opened and closed her mouth like she wanted to say something, and then she turned away from me.
She stepped toward the nearest Christmas tree and touched the torch to its trunk.
Flames shot up through the needles in a hot, angry whoosh. The tree exploded with light. At its base, the gasoline ignited, spitting a serpent trail of fire to the next tree. That tree ignited, and then the next, and the next.
She turned to face me, the torch still clasped in her hand. Behind her, trees flamed to life, whoosh—whoosh—whoosh.
Her hair flashed and flew around her face. Her eyes were feral, glinting with reflected firelight.
Beside her, Nico murmured, “Awesome.”
What I did next—I don’t know why I did it. I knew it was incriminating and reckless. But I lifted my camera, framed the shot, and took her picture.
That click of the camera—that was the sound of it all going dark.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MICK
The flames are hot and wild. I feel powerful. I feel like I control the wind.
This is for you, I think to the dead little boy. This is for the life you lost.
A trio of trees bursts into flames at once, spewing a volcano of sparks into the eucalyptus grove, and I can almost feel that boy’s whole soul screaming out in rage with mine. We’re fire and night; we’re fury made flesh.
From inside the tent, someone screams.
Across the clearing, on the other side of the tent, people begin running out of the clubhouse. Panicked cries echo around the peaceful golf course.
“That’s our cue,” Lily says as Nico pulls the ski mask down to cover his face. My mask is lost somewhere in the ring of trees, probably burning. Suddenly terrified, I toss the torch into the branches of the nearest Christmas tree and run after Lily and Nico into the dark grove, away from the tent, heading south under cover of night. Above us, the eucalyptus branches toss in the heavy wind.
“Where’s your truck?” Veronica yells to Nico.
“At the warehouse. Lily drove us here.”
A fresh burst of screaming echoes behind us. We turn, and Veronica gasps.
The wind is whipping the Christmas trees, tipping them over, rolling them around the clearing like flaming tumbleweeds, driving them into the eucalyptus grove. As we watch, stricken, three of the burning trees are blown to the base of a tall, papery eucalyptus. The bark catches fire, sending flames up the tall tree faster than I’d imagine possible.
“Give me your camera,” Nico says, his voice vibrating with energy.
“No.” Veronica’s answer is a furious growl.
“Give it.”
“No!”
He tries to wrench it away from her. The camera strap wraps around Veronica’s throat. Nico pulls harder. She’s choking, her eyes panicked.
“Stop!” I scream. I throw myself between them. He shoves me aside hard, and I trip and land on my butt. He yanks the camera off Veronica at last, and she puts her hands to her throat, gasping. He lifts the camera to his eye and messes with the focus, and then I hear the soft click-click against the screams of the partygoers.
I turn to look at the tent. People are running toward the fire, away from it, toward the clubhouse and beyond. Far away, sirens wail.
“We have to go!” I yell.
Veronica screams, “Give me my goddamned camera back!”
He’s totally unconcerned. He lowers the camera from his eye and examines it. “This roll of film is cashed.” He presses a switch, and the back of the camera flips open. He takes the roll of film out, snaps the camera shut, and hands it to her. “I’m only getting started with her. Just wait.”
Her faces goes slack, stricken. She looks at me too, like I’ve morphed into something horrible. She snatches the camera from him, shoves it into the camera bag at her shoulder, turns, and marches away toward the scrubs, back in the direction we’d parked her car.
Nico’s eyes are trained on the fire, which is creeping higher and higher into the eucalyptus trees. It moves from one tree to the next, like liquid made light. The air is thick with smoke and wind.
I didn’t do this. This can’t be real.
I turn away. My legs move faster and faster, and then I’m sprinting through the knee-high shrubs, running to catch up with Veronica.
The night is noisy. On my right, the ocean waves roar at the base of the cliff, the Pacific a dark, glinting carpet stretching to the horizon. On my left, the eucalyptus trees are burning brighter by the moment, the golf course flickering with bonfire light. Sirens scream, closer now. I run faster. “Veronica, wait!” I’m close enough to see the angry set of her shoulders as she picks her way through the succulents.
“Veronica!” I call again, out of breath. I leap over a cactus and grab her arm. “Wait. Stop.”
She yanks her arm away. “I can’t even look at you.”
Red lights flash in front of us, on the street where we left Veronica’s car. I think it’s a fire truck, driving along the road heading toward the golf course, but then I see it’s a pair of police cars. The red light flashes white. It’s a searchlight, coming from the roof of the squad car in front, illuminating the cars parked there, and then back, toward the field we’re standing in the middle of.
We drop to all fours. The light sweeps over us.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Shit, shit, shit!” Her eyes are wide and full of panic, and I’m sure mine are too.
“They’re looking for us,” I say.
“No shit, they’re looking for us! You started a massive fucking fire! It’s going to turn into a wildfire that destroys the whole state park!”
“We should go down to the beach. It’s better for us to get caught down there. We can just say we’re normal people who went for a walk. There’s no good reason for us to be hiding in an empty field, is there?”
Her face is grim. “Okay. Come on, let’s find a way down.”
The searchlight has swept away, but we stay in a crouch anyway as we scuttle to the edge of the cliff. It’s a fifty-foot drop to the beach, a steep incline, and I search until I find a little ravine we can use as a path. I wave Veronica over. “We can get down here.”
“Hang on, I don’t want to damage my camera.” She tucks her camera bag into a little hollow between rocks.
I lead the way down, mapping my steps carefully and holding on to the sides of the ravine. It’s not hard, and I’m on the beach in less than a minute. Veronica picks her way down, slower than me. She stumbles at the bottom, creating a cloud of dust. I help her to her feet, and she snatches her hands back from me
as soon as she’s up.
She glowers at me and stomps through the fluffy dunes toward the water. I follow her to the wet sand. The waves are calm but choppy, the whitecaps blue-gray in the moonlight. If this were any other moment, I’d be struck by the beauty of the dark, lonely beach. To the north, lights twinkle on the cliffs, fancy houses owned by people rich enough to buy the rights to this view for life.
Sirens echo behind us. Up on the cliffs, the searchlights flash white.
I put my hand in hers. “I’m scared. Please don’t be mad at me.”
She snatches her hand away from me. “You wouldn’t have anything to be scared of if you didn’t commit felony fucking arson.”
The sand flashes white. We look behind us again. The lights are closer now. “Are they driving off-road?” I ask.
“Not in regular police cars,” she says doubtfully.
Far down the beach, smaller white lights flicker and flare.
Flashlights. They sweep back and forth, up the soft sand toward the cliff and along the wet sand at the water’s edge. It’s five people or so, moving in our direction.
“They’re searching the beach on foot,” she says. “Oh, shit. They’re going to see us.”
“So they find us. We’re just teenagers hanging out at the beach.” I step toward her and wrap my arms around her. She’s stiff with anger and stubbornness. “I’m sorry,” I say into her hair.
“You smell like a campfire.”
“So do you.”
We step back from each other, staring with huge eyes. “No, like, you reek,” she says. “Someone could smell it on you from just standing near you.”
“So do you!”
“Shit!” She clutches the sides of her head. “And, like, forensics. You probably have gasoline residue on you. And I’m sure they can test our skin somehow and match the smoke to the fire.”
My mind races. This is like last night with Nico but worse. I wish desperately for the other night, for the pool to hide in.
The pool.
“We have to hide in the water!” I pull her toward the waves. “It’s the only place they won’t look!”
“No! Mick, no!” She yanks her hand away from me. She looks genuinely frightened. “What about sharks? Or the riptide?”
“Veronica, look at the waves. It’s low tide, and they’re one foot tall. There are no sharks. We just need to go in deep enough to get our heads underwater for the two minutes it takes them to walk by. Do you want to get caught or not?”
She follows me then, into the waves that chill first our knees, then our thighs. We both gasp as the water gets up under our shirts and tickles our ribs with freezing fingers. The flashlights flicker in my peripheral vision. “Hurry!” I cry. “Get your head under!” I duck and let myself be submerged in the dark, cold, salty waves.
The ocean isn’t like a swimming pool. A pool is a clean, controlled place. The ocean is wild and fierce.
I let the current buffer me. My feet are planted on the ocean floor, and I feel calm despite the cold seeping through my skin into my joints and guts. The ocean is in the mood to play nice tonight.
I lift my face from the water. The flashlight people are closer. They’re wearing uniforms. Cops. They’re shining the lights left, right, up the sand and up the walls of the cliffs.
Veronica’s face emerges a few feet to my right. Her teeth are chattering, and she looks miserable, like a drenched cat. The roar of waves in our ears drowns out anything the people in uniforms might be saying.
The flashlights are already past us, heading south back toward the parking lot.
Veronica yelps like she’s been stung.
“What happened?” I cry.
She thrashes, reaches into the water, and pulls out a string of kelp. “It touched me.”
I can’t help but smile. I reach out and find her hand underwater. We’re both freezing, shivering, our feet pulled from the sand by the waves and then returned with the swells. Her teeth and lips vibrate in a constant brrrrrrrrrr.
This is my fault; if I hadn’t started the fire and we’d driven away, leaving Nico and his friends to it, we’d be home by now. We’d be warm and cozy, maybe even in bed together.
Those people with the flashlights are moving south fast. They don’t look like they’re running, but maybe they are.
Or wait. Maybe the current is pulling us north, away from them. We’re in a cove, which means the current is going to be calm in places, but as you get closer to the points, the waves will start going different directions, which is when you have to be careful of rip—
Just as I’m thinking the word riptide, my feet are yanked out from under me and I’m sucked down into the dark, ruthless ocean.
CHAPTER TWENTY
VERONICA
One second, she was treading water next to me. The next second, she was gone.
“Mick?” I cried. “Mick!”
Something grabbed my ankle, something strong. I kicked against it.
It seized me. My head went under. It was the ocean itself, pulling me out to sea.
Riptide.
The word snapped inside me, and then I was upside down, crushed under a cold mountain of water.
My lungs were already burning. I couldn’t tell what was up and what was down. My head banged on something soft. The seafloor? My fingers raked through soft kelp, and I grabbed for it instinctively, just to have something to hold on to. I’m going to die, I realized, the thought blazing neon against the dark, whooshing ocean.
The kelp was fine, silkier than seaweed, and then my fingers slipped and ran over the soft planes of what felt like a face. I screamed, sucked in water—this was Mick. I gripped her hair, animal-desperate. Dead. We’re dead. I kicked hard, her hair clutched in my fists, kicked toward what I thought must be the surface—
I broke through. The night air was icy. My lungs exploded with breath. The waves flung me forward, dunking me again. I yanked at Mick’s hair, kicking like I’d never kicked before. Her head broke through the water. “Mick!” I screamed. I wrapped my arms around her stomach and squeezed, instinctively trying to get the water out of her lungs. She weighed a thousand pounds. I got one good squeeze in, which made her cough-barf out a whole truckload of ocean water, and then my strength gave out and she slipped down, out of my arms.
“No!” I screamed, but I had no more breath; I was at the end of my exertion, and it just came out as a wheeze.
Her head bobbed to the surface. She was awake and blinking, wiping hair and water out of her eyes.
“V-v-v-v-v-eronica,” she said, shivering.
I couldn’t talk. My head went under. I just needed a break from kicking. I was out of strength.
Her arm wound around my chest. She pulled me to the surface. Over the waves pounding in my ears, I heard her croak, “No! Don’t stop kicking!”
I forced my legs to kick. “Keep breathing,” Mick panted. “We just have to make it to the breakers and then we can ride a wave in.”
I saw now that we had been pulled out past the waves, into water so deep for sure there were great white sharks. For sure.
“Oh God,” I heard myself say through chattering teeth. “Fucking sharks. Sharks.”
“There are no sharks.” She pulled me with one arm, swimming with the other. “Help me kick. I’ll be your arms.” She coughed violently and puked into the seawater.
“S-s-s-s-s-sexy,” I rasped.
She tightened her arm around me, and together we kicked, making our way toward the shore, away from the dark pit of sharks. At the wave break, she said, “Do you know how to ride waves? Have you ever been bodysurfing?”
“I’m from San Diego, of course I have,” I managed; my jaw felt frozen shut.
“I’m letting you go!” She had to scream this last bit, because the waves were loud and crashing, and then we were swooped up and I scream-choked as the ocean dragged me under. I thought I was doing the whole thing over again, heading back out to sea, but then I got my arms in front of me and my b
ody pointed toward the shore, and I was on my way. The wave spat me out into the knee-high shallows, and I limped and dragged myself to the flat, wet sand, where I flopped forward onto my face. I breathed and breathed. I didn’t care about flashlights or police or the freezing cold.
Mick got spat out a ways down the beach. I watched her crawl away from the water, coughing and retching into the sand. At last, she crawled toward me and, when she arrived at my side, she started examining me like a real lifeguard, pressing her ear to my back and taking my pulse.
“You’re okay,” she panted.
“You’re the one who almost drowned.” Our voices were both raw, like we’d taken up smoking at birth.
Her sand-smeared face was serious. “I know. You got me out right in time.”
“How did that happen? You’re a badass swimmer.”
“It just somersaulted me really fast, and I got a lungful of water before I could stop it. It can happen to anyone.”
I rolled onto my back—I was coated in sand like a sugar cookie—and we lay there side by side, looking up at the sky.
Mick pointed to a cloud, which was lit orange from underneath. “That’s smoke.”
“Yeah.”
“How big do you think the fire is?”
“Big.”
“I did that.” Her breath came in panicked gasps, and then she said, “That little boy is dead.”
“What boy? From the pool?”
She nodded. “Dead. I saw it, there was an article.” And then she was sobbing, crying so hard her whole body was shaking. I remembered telling her the boy was breathing. That false hope I’d given her was like poison.
“That kid dying was not your fault,” I said.
“The fire was my fault.”
“Yes. It was. You did a bad thing, but it’s okay. People do bad things.”
Tears leaked out of her eyes onto her cheeks, mingling with the other salt water that glistened all over her face. “I shouldn’t have suggested we hide in the water. That was another bad thing. We could have both died.”
“That was actually a smart idea. They’d have caught us for sure otherwise.”