Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  “Rich Lesley?” Eve scoffed, and swept the snow out of her bangs with a flick of her hair. “That gangly tennis twerp? Baby Sis, I thought I taught you better than that. You certainly didn’t inherit your taste in men from me.”

  Ash forced a laugh, waiting for the tension in the air to melt. Her mind was no longer fixated on the threat of school suspension. Now she was focused on getting Lizzie, Eve, and the vice principal to go in separate directions. Even Mr. Davis looked on edge—his fifteen years as a school administrator had no jurisdiction over the 11

  teenage blood feud he’d interrupted, at least now with Eve in play.

  Mustering up all the sisterly warmth she could for a sibling who was as frightening as she was unpredictable, Ash slipped an arm around Eve’s waist and guided her back to her bike. “Let me worry about all this,” she said.

  “I’m just going to go inside and collect my detention slip, and then I’ll meet you back at home. We can catch up then.”

  Eve narrowed her eyes, like some sort of menacing ice witch with the snow collecting on her brow. “Why?

  Why do you just content yourself to go along with the status quo when you know you’re intended for much greater things?” She jabbed her finger roughly on Ash’s sternum. “I know that you feel it in you, the same way I did when I gave the middle finger to this place and rode off into the sunset. Do you really feel like you belong in this Wonder Bread town? Have you ever felt like you belonged here?”

  Ash dropped her eyes to the pavement.

  “Then, why don’t you stop acting like you do! Do you really want to waste your time sitting for hours in some vomit-colored detention hall, just because”—Eve leveled a finger at Mr. Davis—“this miserable unmarried tyrant is angry that you”—and she pointed her thumb back at Lizzie—“showed this whorish man-stealing bottom-feeder, who has terrible split ends, a little bit of street justice?”

  12

  “Are you kidding me?” Lizzie screeched behind her.

  “Shut it, cupcake,” Eve snapped. “It’s called conditioner—use it sometime.”

  Mr. Davis took a step toward Eve and pointed to her motorcycle. “You have sixty seconds to leave school grounds.” He tapped his imaginary watch.

  “Just go home,” Ash said to her sister, more firmly this time. “I can take care of myself.”

  The wind picked up with increasing ferocity from the west. Ash’s hair billowed around her like a sail. Eve held out the biker’s helmet. “Get on the bike, Ash,” she ordered her sister. “I’m not leaving this parking lot without you. It’s for your own good.”

  “No,” Ash replied.

  “Get on the back of the damn bike!” Eve growled.

  Her face contorted with such vicious lines that even Mr.

  Davis took a few steps back. “Get on the bike, or so help me . . .”

  Ash was summoning the courage to refuse a second time when fate—in the form of Lizzie Jacobs’s stupid-ity—intervened. The blond girl snorted behind Eve. “I guess I wasn’t off target when I said that crazy runs in the family. But I can’t really blame you, Ash. If my older sister was a motorcycle-riding Antichrist, I guess I’d be a little rough around the edges too.”

  The wind died, and the only sound that could be heard throughout the parking lot was the distant call of thunder. Mr. Davis held his breath, frozen somewhere 13

  between mediating and wetting himself. Eve’s eyes were still fixed with smoldering fire on her little sister, and for one blessed, relief-filled instant Ash actually thought Eve was going to let the comment slide.

  Everything happened so fast. Eve whirled around like an Olympic discus thrower and, with her arm extended, smashed Lizzie Jacobs in the face with her motorcycle helmet. The already dazed sophomore spun around in an ugly pirouette on one foot, before collapsing to the pavement again, for the third and last time.

  The onset of violence spurred Mr. Davis back into action. “I’m calling the police,” he said, and his cell phone was already in his hand by the time he knelt down at Lizzie’s side.

  A vicious smile spread across Eve’s face, and she stepped forward so that she loomed over Lizzie. “I don’t know if it will be an improvement, but there’s certainly nothing I could have done to your face to make it any worse. Sweet dreams.” Eve flipped the helmet around in her hands. “Hopefully I knocked out another tooth and she’ll be symmetrical now.” She turned back to her sister, expecting Ash to look equally pleased.

  But Ash had tears in her eyes. “Why do you always do this?” she whispered. “You couldn’t have just come back to see me. You had to make it about destruction. It’s always about destroying something.”

  Eve stalked over to her with such intensity that for a split second Ash thought she might suffer the same fate 14

  as Lizzie. Eve leaned menacingly down so that she came nose-to-nose with her shorter sister. The familiar tang of cinnamon and patchouli washed over Ash as Eve exhaled.

  “You hit her and it’s retaliation and self-defense. I hit her and it’s destruction. Where do you get off making that distinction?”

  Ash held her ground. “Because I don’t enjoy it.”

  Eve sneered and gave her sister one more look up and down. “Keep telling yourself that.” She backed away and straddled the Nighthawk, her face livid with disgust as if the pavement were covered with rotting eggs. “Last chance. Are you getting on the back of this bike, or are you going to stay here in Pleasantville?”

  Ash didn’t have the strength to reply. She could only shake her head.

  Eve popped the helmet onto her head, and the motorcycle grumbled to life, mimicking the thunder in the clouds. “Grow up, Ash,” Eve said, her voice muffled behind the helmet. Ash caught her own tattered-looking reflection in the dark visor before the motorcycle and its rider zipped off over the snow, the back tire fishtailing out as she rounded the corner.

  Ash crouched down beside Lizzie. The girl’s left cheek was turning purple, on its way toward a nasty bruise, and her eyelids were just starting to flutter open as she struggled to wake up from the second concussion. Ash was only vaguely aware of Lizzie moaning and stirring; of Mr.

  Davis’s panicked footfalls as he paced restlessly, waiting 15

  for help to arrive; of the distant wail of the approaching ambulance.

  Instead she channeled all of her attention into listening for the whisper that each snowflake made when it touched the ground. But no matter how hard she tried to concentrate on this impossible task, she couldn’t shake the awful vision she’d seen as Eve had ridden off school grounds.

  For one haunting moment, seeing her reflection in Eve’s helmet, it had looked as if it were Ashline riding away on that motorcycle, a path of carnage and ill intentions in her wake.

  When Ash arrived home after her meeting with Vice Principal Davis, the police cruiser was already waiting in the driveway. The female officer sitting inside the house with her parents looked alert and self-important, stoked at the prospect of finally being able to dispense some sweet justice. Ash couldn’t particularly blame her.

  With Scarsdale, New York having one of the lowest crime rates in the country, the cops rarely saw much excitement beyond serving tickets to drivers who tried to beat the light, or chasing high teenagers through the woods behind the school. The opportunity to serve a warrant for the arrest of a “dangerous outlaw” like Ash’s sister was a welcome change of pace.

  Of course Eve was nowhere to be found when the officer arrived. If Ash knew her sister, she was probably 16

  halfway to Buffalo on her motorcycle by now. It could be months before they heard from her again—if at all.

  After the officer departed, Ashline sat on the stairs with her knees hugged to her chest. Through the wrought iron balustrade, which felt like prison bars, she watched her father pull on his boots and her mother rifle through the closet. The Wildes, true to their endless fountain of good intentions, had decided to take the blue Rav4 to, hopelessly, search for Eve in the freez-ing
rain. As terrible as it had been for the police to present them with Eve’s arrest warrant, it had been a bittersweet reminder that after three months without so much as a phone call or postcard, their delinquent daughter was still alive.

  From this angle, under the hallway chandelier, Ashline could see how peppered with gray Thomas Wilde’s hair had grown over the last few months. Over the years, Ash had always remained oblivious to the gradual signs of aging shown by either of her adoptive parents. She even sometimes joked that since she and Eve had lived in the Wilde house all their lives, maybe they would inherit the good Wilde genes through osmosis. But in comparison to her father’s image in the large family portrait over the stairs, taken barely a year after the adoption, when Ash was only a toddler, it looked now as though the last fifteen years had finally ambushed the patriarch of the Wilde family.

  Her father scooped his keys off the foyer table and 17

  then fished around in the pockets of his khakis for the fourth time. “Wallet, wallet . . .”

  “Dad,” Ash called down to him. “Back pocket.” She pointed to the lump on the back side of his khakis, and his panicked expression softened a few degrees as his hand settled on the billfold.

  “You know, Ashline . . .” He slipped on his leather coat, which Ash had given him for his fiftieth birthday.

  “We could use a third pair of eyes out on the road. Your grounding doesn’t have to start until afterward.”

  Ashline’s hands tightened around the balusters.

  “Thanks, but I’ll gladly opt for house arrest over ‘search party of three’ in the rain.”

  Her father stepped over to the staircase so that they were face-to-face through the balustrade. “No one’s saying Eve hasn’t made enough mistakes for ten childhoods.

  But she was always a good sister to you.”

  There was some truth to that. Even after the poison of adolescence had set in and Eve had slowly grown carcinogenic to the people around her—her classmates, her friends, and eventually her parents—she had always retained her loyalty to Ashline. On days when Ash had returned home from school feeling trampled and down-trodden, she could always expect to find Eve in her bedroom doorway soon after. Some days Eve would even invade their mother’s liquor cabinet and have two mint juleps mixed and waiting for Ashline’s arrival home. The older they got, the more Ash could count on Eve to sense her moods from a distance, like a change in the wind.

  18

  That is, until Eve disappeared.

  Ashline stood up. “Good sisters don’t leave in the first place. They don’t make their little sisters hang up missing-person flyers on every telephone pole from Brooklyn to Albany . . . like she was some sort of lost dog.” She started up the steps toward her room. “I’ll be damned if I do it again.”

  “Ashline.”

  Ash stopped. This time it was her mother, perched on the bottom stair.

  “Ashline, please,” her mother repeated.

  Ash opened her mouth to say no, but then she spotted the jacket clutched in Gloria Wilde’s hand. “What is that?” Ash demanded.

  Her mother held it up. It was the orange and silver warm-up jacket that Eve had worn when she’d still been a gymnast. Ash hadn’t seen her wear it since she was thirteen, and it was at least a few years past fitting her.

  “I thought I’d bring it,” her mother said slowly. “In case she was cold.”

  Ashline didn’t know if it was the way the jacket trembled in her mother’s hands or the pleading look that she gave Ash, as if Ash were the only one who could bring her sister back. But she walked down the stairs, opened the closet door, and pulled out her own winter coat. “Here.” She delicately replaced the warm-up in her mother’s hand with the wool peacoat. “This will probably fit her better.”

  Her mother pecked her on the cheek. Ash was grateful 19

  that her mother didn’t cry until she was out the front door and walking to the car.

  Ash stood at the glass door for a minute, until the red taillights of the car disappeared beyond the trees that framed their yard. No doubt her parents would stop at every diner, gas station, and motel they could find within a fifteen-mile radius.

  Just like last time, they wouldn’t find her.

  Curled up in her bedroom window seat with the lights off, Ash watched the rain splatter against the glass. For the second time that day, the weather matched her mood precisely—first the freak afternoon snowstorm, and now this midnight thundershower. She left the window open just a crack so that the patter of raindrops against the leaves could wash over her. She hoped she could cull some sense of relaxation out of the white noise, be cleansed by it, but Eve’s absence and her own weeklong suspension loomed over her instead.

  Isolation. Ashline knew that being confined to the four cranberry-colored walls of her bedroom for the next month wasn’t the end of the world. The truth was that even if she had her run of the town she would still be numbingly alone. What few friends she had retained from middle school she’d lost quickly during the brutal transition from freshman to sophomore year.

  She’d been replaced like an old tube of mascara when the social tectonic plates had made their great shift.

  Rich Lesley, despite all his visible egocentricity, had served as a much-needed bandage, bringing with him 20

  an entourage of substitute friends in the form of his fellow tennis players and their plus-ones. But now the bandage had been ripped off with a single flick of the wrist—or, in this case, Lizzie Jacobs’s tongue—and the wound of loneliness had sprung open anew.

  And when romances and friendships went to hell, weren’t you supposed to fall back on family? She scoffed.

  If family was supposed to be her safety net as she walked the tightrope of life, then Ashline’s “support system”

  currently consisted of two parents appalled by the life choices of their children, and a sister who was wanted for assault and battery.

  Ash sighed and opened her window wider. Moisture spattered her face as the raindrops splashed through the screen. It felt good just to feel anything at this point.

  Considering that she had knocked out one of Lizzie’s teeth, there certainly were worse fates than a school suspension and a substantial grounding at home, but the loneliness was settling in.

  In hopes of finding someone to call— anyone—Ash scrolled through three quarters of her cell phone’s contact list before she resigned herself to the fact that all her

  “friends” were mutual through Rich. They were unlikely to be sympathetic, and even less likely to pick up the phone at all. With a growl Ash heaved the phone across the room. It landed, skittered, and remarkably remained intact even as it crashed into her metal wastebasket with a defeated clink.

  Soon her adrenaline levels faded, and Ashline’s eyes 21

  fluttered closed. She hugged her knees to her chest and placed her head near the window as she drifted off, lulled to slumber by the kiss of the raindrops against her cheek.

  She hadn’t been asleep more than five minutes when the sound of female laughter echoed in through the window from the front yard.

  Ashline’s eyes shot open. “Eve?” she said aloud, and peered through the window. The rain still came down in a steady drizzle, but she could see a silhouette at the end of the driveway, obscured in the darkness of the trees.

  “Eve?” she repeated.

  But then she heard a chorus of giggles and discerned two additional shadows darting among the bushes that lined the front walkway. It was the excited chatter of girls reveling in the thrill of doing something illicit and enjoying it far too much. And as one of the girls stepped into the halo of light from the nearest streetlamp, Ash caught sight of her battered but unmistakable mug.

  Lizzie Jacobs.

  As her vision adjusted to the dark, Ash observed that Lizzie was carrying something—a field hockey stick—that she tossed playfully from hand to hand. If Ashline’s ears could be trusted, then Lizzie’s partners in crime were her teammates Gabby and A
lexis.

  They probably weren’t there to sell Girl Scout cookies.

  With a shout of glee Lizzie pranced up to the Wildes’

  mailbox, an old wooden bird feeder that Ashline’s mother had refashioned with a hinge door and repainted in pastels.

  22

  Lizzie wheeled around, and the club end of the hockey stick struck the mailbox with a sharp crack that resounded across the yard. Channeling all of her rage from being knocked out twice in the same day, Lizzie made quick work of the refurbished bird feeder. Again and again her weapon came down, splintering the wood. Finally Lizzie launched a fierce kick that separated the mailbox from its post, and the already devastated bird feeder crashed to the driveway pavement.

  Gabby joined Lizzie in dancing around the fallen mailbox, but Alexis lingered back.

  Ash undid the clasps holding the screen window in place and pushed. It swung up and out, and she leaned out the window as far as she could without falling to the bushes below. If she filtered out the whisper of the rain against the leaves, she could just make out what the girls were saying.

  Alexis kept looking frantically in the direction of the road. “Let’s get out of here,” the redheaded freshman pleaded to her friends. “The neighbors probably heard that.”

  “Oh, grow some balls, Lexi,” Gabby said. “My mom just texted me to say the Wildes came by the inn looking for Eve. Nobody’s home here.”

  Lizzie tipped her field hockey stick up on to her shoulder like a soldier cradling her rifle. “I haven’t even begun to claim my revenge yet,” she said. “The Wilde girls brought this on themselves.”

  23

  “Ash and Eve both deserve the worst,” Alexis agreed, tugging nervously at her hair. “I just want to make sure I don’t get booted off the team if we get caught. And besides, their parents live here too.”

  “Their parents,” Lizzie snapped, “clearly raised two out-of-control self-entitled daughters from hell. They should be grateful that my dad is a dentist and I don’t need to sue.”

  She stepped forward and prodded Alexis roughly with her finger. “This is a mandatory team bonding experience, and if you bail now, I’ll make sure Coach glues your ass to the bench this season. So what’s it going to be?”