Nothing Left to Burn

by Heather Ezell

  Turn right on Oso Parkway. Make an immediate left at the stoplight and follow the steep hill down into the valley. Welcome! You’re at Tesoro High School.

  Bonus points if your Psychology partner is in the passenger seat saying, What happened what’s going on what are you doing why aren’t you answering me for once answer me. If he’s nearly hyperventilating, even more bonus points, because it adds an extra layer of excitement.

  Is it nighttime? Are you lost? Confused? Well, usually, the only marker for the entrance is a gaudy red sign with a cartoon Titan, but tonight you’re in luck.

  You’ll know you’re in the right place if you see red and blue and white flashing lights; a barricade blocking the left turn, the only road in and out of the school, because—duh—authorized vehicles only; vans from every news station in the county and newscasters touching up their lipstick, smoothing their hair, pointing at my school, at the glow beyond, along with their cameras and microphones and sound sheets and floodlights because this is it, this is happening, we’re on live TV; brave South Orange County citizens standing on the sidewalk, as close as they can get, observing the chaos, waving their hands for the TV, holding handmade signs for the firefighters camped out down below on the sport fields, declaring their support and appreciation.

  Oh, and the final indication of your location? Down and out—past the stucco single-story buildings and courtyards, past the blacktop and portables, past the football, baseball, and track fields, past the stadium bleachers—take a good look, because there’s Caspers Fire swarming bright and hot, spilling out from the hills into the valley.

  At this point your Psychology partner will be shocked into silence.

  At this point you’re obviously well aware of your location.

  Welcome to Tesoro High School. Home of the Titans.

  * * *

  * * *

  Every semester, the school holds a fire drill. We line up with our homerooms on the football field and wait for the okay under the splintering sun. It’s idiotic. There’s always been a running joke that if there were a fire on campus, we’d be toast. Nowhere to escape. All of us trapped in the valley with only one road out, twirling our thumbs like dimwits on the parched grass.

  Because here’s the thing: If there were a fire during the school day, chances are it wouldn’t be the school alight, but the land—flame sizzling across the valley brush, racing toward us. Like I said, there’s only one street down into the school, only one street out. An endangered beetle prevents the district from pouring more concrete on the surrounding hills. As it is, there’s only enough room for faculty and seniors to park on campus. Juniors like me resort to parking on residential streets a twenty-minute walk away.

  That’s where I park my truck now.

  68

  8:02 P.M.

  I park the truck, keeping my hands on the wheel for five too many seconds.

  “What are we doing?” Hayden asks.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” I say, for me, not for him.

  Mom texts me, asking for an update. She tells me Maya is watching a show on her laptop. Mom doesn’t mention our house burning, but she asks if I’m okay, and I’m not lying when I write back and say:

  Running on adrenaline . . . maybe another hour or so?

  “Audrey, look at me,” Hayden says. “What is going on?”

  I already announced the change of plans during the short drive over—that I’m officially not up to completing any schoolwork tonight—but I’m not entirely sure where to start, so I push my door open against the wind and climb out. Hayden follows my lead.

  “Let’s go to the cops,” he says. “I heard you say something about going to the cops. That’s definitely a better option than whatever you’re thinking.”

  I could beat Brooks to the punch. Indict him. But I won’t. That’s his job.

  “I need to get to school first,” I say.

  Hayden laughs. “You’re joking, right? It’s blocked off. Audrey, it’s on fire—”

  “The school isn’t on fire. The firefighters are camped out there, so clearly it’s not on fire.”

  “Well, the fire is close,” he says. “Who do you know who is at the school right now?”

  “Brooks.”

  “Great,” Hayden says. “That’s just great.”

  “He’s a firefighter, remember.”

  “A volunteer firefighter,” Hayden says.

  “I can drop you off at the Jack in the Box,” I say, nodding to the truck. But then I shake my head. I’m running out of time and the smoke is tight in my lungs. “Or can you walk? It’s fifteen minutes, tops.”

  Hayden stares at me. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks.

  “What?” My already-winded pulse takes race.

  “I am an idiot,” he says.

  “What?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” he asks. “You’re more than my sister’s friend. But you’re so obsessed with trying to fix Brooks. You act like he’s all you have.”

  I wrap my arms around myself and watch Hayden rub his glasses on his shirt. The sycamore trees that line this street are bending, nearly snapping, in the gusts.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, always too quick to apologize.

  But it’s too late because I say, “Well, for the record, you’re selfish. You didn’t even attempt to be my friend until I had a boyfriend. That sucks. That really sucks.”

  “I know,” he says.

  I close my eyes against the smoke, needing a break, needing this day to end. I don’t want to think or feel for another second, but there’s still so much to face. And I don’t know what happens next. The fire could move too swiftly for us to outrun it. I could be handcuffed. And so I know I need to be honest with Hayden. He deserves the truth, and this might be my last chance.

  So I say, “Friday. I tried to open up to you on Friday.”

  He laughs. “That’s not what you were doing.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Hayden looks up to the smoke. “Audrey.” His voice is strained. “It’s fine. Let’s just forget it. I don’t need to be placated. I get it. We’re cool, okay?”

  And maybe I’m wrong and what I’m feeling is the fire: this inexplicable flurry in my heart amid my grief, this subtle want for Hayden. Maybe it’s even the Santa Ana winds. They trigger passion, restlessness, stolen kisses on hills above high schools. Murder rates rise. Infidelity and shouts of anger are the norm. It’s why arson is so common during California’s driest season.

  But, nonetheless, I say, “I don’t want to forget it.”

  Because I know it in my heart, Hayden and me: We aren’t just the October wind, not merely desire and action fueled by the fire. And, in a perfect world, we’d have the chance to see what we can mean when the deserts cool and the air stills, when the fire is only blackened land, when I’ve learned how to stand on my own two feet. But that opportunity isn’t guaranteed.

  “You don’t want to forget it for my sake or yours?” Hayden asks.

  I level my gaze “Both.”

  I need to run. I need to get to Brooks and makes things right. I want to save this conversation for when things are simpler, but this might be my last chance with Hayden. My last chance to show him that our kiss wasn’t only an action aggravated by the fire, the wind, and what he’ll soon learn I did.

  “On Friday,” I say. “My kissing you wasn’t me trying to hurt myself. On some level, maybe, yeah, but it was also so much more. You mean so much more to me than you think, and I was trying to understand that space, understand my want.”

  Hayden fumbles with his glasses, still struggling to clean the lenses. I take them from him and meet his eyes. He’s nearsighted. He can see me just fine.

  “I kissed you because I like you,” I say.

  He doesn’t nod, only meets my gaze with a slight smile that
feels so out of place given the night’s circumstances, but then I guess everything is out of place.

  “Okay,” Hayden says.

  And he finally stills, and I tug on his shirt and press my lips to his cheek. He wraps his arms around me and holds me even tighter than when we hugged earlier. This is the best of hugs, his hand on the back of my head. And even if we simmer into nothing—even if all of this is simply a symptom of the Devil’s Winds—this moment will be enough.

  “I’m not trying to hurt myself through you,” I say again.

  “I believe you.”

  I nudge out of Hayden’s embrace and hand his glasses back to him, but there’s one last thing to say. I have to tell him even though I know he’ll never look at me the same.

  “I started the fire.”

  He recoils. “What?”

  But that’s not true. “Brooks and I started the fire.”

  “You’re confused,” Hayden says.

  “We did this.”

  “You did this?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, though it’s so far from enough.

  “Audrey.” He looks to the bright smoke beyond the hills. “Audrey, what the fuck?”

  “It’s why I have to find him.”

  His face shows sorrow, not rage. “How? And why the hell didn’t you tell someone?”

  “I’ll explain,” I say. “I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

  But I was wrong. Hayden isn’t looking at me like I’ve changed. He looks at me like I’m still the girl he knows, who was once only his sister’s best friend but now could be something more. He looks at me like I’m someone he cares about who just told him the devastating truth.

  “I have to find Brooks,” I say, because Brooks wants to give this fire solely to me and I won’t take it. “Before he—I don’t know. Makes a bigger mistake.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Hayden says.

  So I ask, “How are your shoes?”

  Hayden raises his leg, shows off his green Pumas. “Prime for an evening trek.”

  69

  8:17 P.M.

  We abandon the truck.

  I walk fast, but Hayden keeps up. We pass evacuated neighborhoods, where the absence of noise—kids playing in the streets, car engines and alarms, TVs echoing from homes—is louder than the wind. The stretch of the evacuation zones, how far this fire now threatens to reach, makes it even harder to breathe. Once we reach Oso Parkway, the main road, we sprint. The glare of the barricade comes into view. We keep to the shadows, away from the sirens and newscasters and onlookers. We cut through a border of succulents and into the tall weeds and shrubs of the bank that curves above our school.

  We can see everything.

  Our school is lit up. It’s like it’s a game night—the bright lights glowing over the football field—only instead of a stadium full of athletes and crowds of students in the stands, the field is a city of white tents and white trailers. It makes sense that they chose Tesoro, our concrete island in the middle of an isolated gulf, just a short drive away from the roaring inferno.

  An inferno that looks too close for comfort. It’s enough to send me to my knees, how fast the fire grew, how far it’s traveled. The raging orange swell is even more fixating at night, against the black sky and smoke. It’s hard to focus. I don’t want to look away.

  “And I thought Friday was hell,” Hayden says.

  I always wondered what that blocked-off road was for—the road that starts at the side of the school and snakes behind, past the barbed-wire fences, the road I assumed led to nowhere. What do you know? Nowhere Road leads to fire—a pulsing gold snake that ravels along the black ridge of the hills beyond campus. The sky throbs orange so bright, the ash falls white like thick pelts of snow. It’s so close. Is it supposed to be so close?

  “Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audr—”

  I spin to Hayden. “What?”

  His face is blanched. “This is very bad.”

  I shove my hand through my hair, and my palm is caked in dirt and ash. “Using my name as a curse word is not going to make it better.”

  Hayden and I walk single file, following the chain fence that divides what the school owns and what the government has saved. The glare of the fire and the glare of the school and the glare of the camp are so bright, it makes the hillsides gray. It’s so strange. It’s so grotesquely strange to see my school crawling with firefighters, echoing with the sputter of radios and orders shouted and the buzzing of the media up on the hill. My campus bucketed with smoke.

  I didn’t think I cared that much about my school, but now I realize I do.

  “If Brooks is a firefighter, why are we sneaking around to meet him?” Hayden asks.

  “He ran away.”

  “Well,” Hayden says. “That’s great.” I hear him trip on a branch or a rock behind me. “A runaway firefighter who committed arson,” he says. When I say nothing, Hayden asks, “Are you going to tell him we kissed?”

  “Not the best time for that,” I say.

  Hayden fumbles behind me, tripping over debris again. I peel off Grace’s hoodie. It’s damp with sweat. I tie it around my mouth, breathe in my own dirt and smell, like I did this morning.

  “This is illegal,” Hayden now says. “How much did you even sleep last night? You need sleep. There was a mountain lion sighting in Coto last week. If there was a mountain lion over there, there’s probably a mountain lion over here.”

  A helicopter is above us, beaming lights on the hillside. We’re on the wrong side of the fence, the side with a sign that says NO TRESPASSING. The helicopter—the shock of it, the shared fear of being spotted—sends Hayden and me to our knees. We’re facing each other.

  For a fleeting second, the light finds Hayden’s face.

  “Did they see us?” he whispers.

  “No.”

  The helicopter isn’t looking for us. It leaves us in the shadows, swings toward the fire and then back around, lands on a makeshift helipad in the valley. I look at my phone. 8:41 P.M.

  I stand up, offer Hayden my hand. We start walking again.

  We hike until we’re above the athletics fields, where the main portion of the fire camp is set. White rusted trailers. Tents. Trucks on our beloved football field. It smells like a distorted summer. Hot dogs. Chili. The scent of burning land.

  I figured firefighters would be fighting the fire, but so many are milling around. There are too many of them, and I know from Brooks that this means the winds are making it too dangerous for them to work. And then I realize—I look closer—they’re not lining up for hot dogs. They’re deconstructing the camp, orders shouted, tents broken down.

  I’ve become nearly immune to it. The wind. The smoke and the ash. The heat. All day, I’ve been pushing my body through the conditions, and I have to stop to realize that this is the worst it’s been yet. The gusts pull up roots from the hillside, yank at the nylon covers of the tents below, push down newly planted sycamores in the parking lot with greater ease than Grace in her mom’s Land Rover. The fire is raging closer as the winds change, and the carefully chosen fire camp is at risk of being engulfed.

  The fire is on its way, swarming toward us like a dust storm of blaze.

  Is that what’s happening?

  “Audrey,” Hayden says. “Audrey, we need to get out of here. They’re leaving. You see that, right? The firefighters are leaving.”

  I glance at him. “I have to do this.” I point to a truck headed toward the fire, filled with people in uniform. “And they’re not leaving. It’s fine. It’s totally fine.” But I know that the crew is speeding to complete a last-minute trench, a throw-out hope to save the school, to delay what is seemingly inevitable.

  “This isn’t safe,” Hayden says. “I’m freaking out. How are you not freaking out?”

  “I don’t have the time to freak out.”
And I think that’s the truth.

  I focus on finding a route across campus. It’s easy. There’s an alley between the portables on the blacktop and the athletics fields—this is how we’ll get to the other side, to the T, to Brooks.

  First we have to jump the fence. The metal is cool in my hands. I’d expected it to be warm. I climb, coil by coil, and swing myself over to the other side and land on my feet.

  “How did you do that?” Hayden asks.

  “Ballet,” I say. “I didn’t think I could do it, but I figured I’d try. That’s how I used to approach ballet choreography.”

  He tosses his backpack over, wipes his hands on his jeans, and climbs. He isn’t as graceful as me. He makes it halfway and then slips off and falls back, swearing a lot. He tries again and this time pulls himself over the wire, snags his T-shirt, and falls face-first on the slope.

  “Can you erase that from your memory, please?”

  Somehow, despite what we’re doing, I laugh. “Are you hurt?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I help him up. “We have to run, Hayden.”

  We need to run. Can you run?

  * * *

  * * *

  We run from one end of campus to the other. The wind tunnels in between buildings, trash spiraling, trees threatening to snap, forgotten graded papers crunched under lockers. We hear shouting and radio orders, and we hide behind a dumpster when a truck rumbles by, but otherwise, this is way too easy.

  And it’s weird because it feels like it’s a Friday night and a football game is still in progress and we’re on some bizarre scavenger hunt with friends. We pass the skinny palm trees that line the entrance of the stadium, and I don’t let myself turn for a closer look of the fire camp because if I can see them they can see me—that’s the rational explanation. We cross the utility road that leads to the fire, and—so quickly—we’re back on brittle wild land, back in the shadows, and I know we’ve made it.