Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  She had somehow burned her handprint into the chest of her would-be boyfriend, and they’d parted on such awkward terms—a few uncertain words, a friendly kiss on the cheek—that Ashline wasn’t sure she’d ever see him again. She had a little sister that until this week she had known nothing about, the lab rat of some experiment gone awry, who was now terrorizing villages in Central America. And her psychotic older sister was off lurking in the shadows.

  For a few hours at least, she could just be Ashline Wilde, the number one tennis player at Blackwood and the only hope her school had to reach the top of Coastal Conference Athletics. Forget championing the school, she decided; she was going to win this one for herself. God only knew she needed a victory now more than ever.

  When the final school bell chimed in F-block British Literature, she knew she should head to the locker room and suit up, take some warm-up shots, maybe convince 296

  the trainer to put some heat on her knee, which had felt stiff and swollen since Monday’s practice. But she had one detour to make first.

  After she forged through the sea of last-minute well-wishers and shouts of “good luck,” she navigated a course up the stairwell to the third-floor room where she had fifth-period history every day. Fortunately, Mr.

  Carpenter was still there, erasing some final notes off the chalkboard. His freshman class must have been covering the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, because he was just polishing away the words “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” when Ash sidestepped a few stragglers who were heading out the door.

  “Ms. Wilde.” Mr. Carpenter set down the eraser and clapped his hands together to rid them of chalk dust.

  When he ran his hand through his receding hairline, he left a smudge of white chalk on his forehead. “Did you forget something?”

  “No, I . . .” Ash took a hesitant step into the room. “I actually came to ask you a few questions.”

  Mr. Carpenter gestured to one of the desks in the front row as he slid down into his overstuffed chair, which, with its bandages of masking tape, had seen better days. “I hope you didn’t come to ask advice on tennis techniques for your big match today.” He prodded at his wiry arms apologetically. “Never exactly been the athleti-cally inclined type, though I’ll have you know I was on the golf team in my day.”

  Ash laughed and settled down into one of the desks.

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  “Don’t worry. My serves and my backhand are just fine.

  But I know you’ve mentioned in class several times that you were a classicist before you were a historian, and that you have a particular soft spot for mythology.”

  “Indeed.” He folded his hands on the desk. “I’ve never heard you express any interest in mythology before.”

  “I was wondering,” she said, searching for neutral ground, “if you knew anything about Polynesian mythology.”

  He leaned toward her suspiciously. “Are you just trying to humor an old man? Maybe hoping for some boring lecture to distract you from the match you have in two hours?”

  “Listen,” Ash said. “I grew up a Polynesian chick raised by white Jewish upper-class parents in a white Jewish upper-class neighborhood, and they weren’t exactly overflowing with information about my heritage.

  Let’s just say I’ve finally taken an interest.”

  “A commendable answer,” he praised her. “Now, what do you want to know? Any specifics?”

  She glanced at the clock—Coach Devlin would rip her a new one if she didn’t make it locker-side by half past, so there was no time to beat around the bush. “What can you tell me about—” In her mind she flashed back to two nights prior, watched herself from above the bed, her body surrounded by flames but not once burned. “About the goddess—” It was last night, and Colt was writhing on the floor, his flesh still sizzling from her touch, the handprint on his chest simmering. “The goddess of fire?”

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  His eyes lit up. “Not fire,” he corrected her. “The volcano goddess—the goddess Pele.”

  “Pele,” Ash whispered, repeating it as if the name itself were ablaze. “Pele” spoken like “pay-lay.”

  She was hearing her name for the first time.

  “Easily one of the most fascinating figures in all of Polynesian mythology,” Mr. Carpenter was saying whimsically.

  “And what was her story?” she asked. “Was she at least . . . good?

  Mr. Carpenter made a thoughtful sound. “Hard to say, really. I confess that I’m no expert when it comes to the mythology of the oceanic peoples. It would certainly depend who you asked, and where you asked it. We’re talking about stories that have as many versions as there are islands in the Pacific.” He must have noted that his pupil’s face had collapsed with disappointment. “But I will say this. What Pele giveth, Pele can taketh away.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?” I really just want you to tell me that I’m not a beacon of evil like my misguided older sister.

  “Well, think about it. The Polynesian islands—

  Hawaii, for instance—were all created through the work of volcanoes. Here you have an expanse of ocean, but somewhere on the sea floor you have magma pushing up, up, laying over itself”—he rose out of his chair—“up farther until the cooling lava forms an island in the middle of the vast and sprawling blue.”

  Mr. Carpenter wandered around to the front of the 299

  desk. His patchwork chair had suddenly grown too small to constrain his imagination. “Then a traveling people settle on this new island, on the shores of the volcano that has risen out of the ocean on Pele’s shoulders.” His eyes darted to the windows and the milky light filtering in. He lowered his voice. “But every day you feel the rumbles of dissatisfaction coming from deep within the earth, and you see the summit of that volcano. And deep down you think— you know—that the same volcano that gave you life and land could, with one devastating explosion, take it all away again. Your house, your land. . . . Your life.”

  Ashline gazed into her open hands, tracing the life lines across her palms. Her fingers flexed in and out.

  “So you ask me if Pele was good,” Mr. Carpenter finished. “But my response is, What the hell is good anyway? ”

  “Did Pele have any family?”

  Mr. Carpenter clucked. “What mythology is complete without a dysfunctional family? It’s what makes them so much like us.”

  So this is what it meant to be a goddess—the creator and bringer of life, the harbinger of death, the source of a thousand stories on a thousand islands . . . and none of those stories could have predicted that a volcano goddess would wind up sitting in the classroom of a preparatory school, preparing to go to combat with a tennis racket in hand.

  “I’m losing you,” Mr. Carpenter said, misinterpret-ing her distant expression for disinterest. “You’ve gone to 300

  some faraway island of your own. Tell me, do you remember anything from the island where you were born?”

  “Yes,” she lied. She hoped her smile might help to dam the tears in her eyes.

  But that was the problem.

  Ashline couldn’t remember.

  She could barely feel her feet touch the grass when she left the academic building.

  “Pele . . .” She kept saying it out loud. Maybe if she repeated it enough, it might stop sounding foreign to her, or it might offer her whispers from any of her past lives.

  Or, maybe, it might at least restore for her some feeling of home and peace.

  But the name brought her none of these things. “Pele”

  wasn’t a stop on a journey toward understanding. It was a four-letter void.

  Still, she had to share her discovery with someone before her big game. She visited Raja’s room in East Hall first, only to find it empty. She knew Lily lived on her floor as well, but she wasn’t sure exactly where, so she scanned the dry-erase boards one by one for Lily’s name as she moved down the hall.

  She nearly walked right past the room. The door was wide open, and inside, Li
ly sat in profile on her mattress, upright and rigid.

  She wasn’t alone either. On the carpet next to her bed, Rolfe knelt in a scattered heap of books and binders.

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  From the irritation that had replaced his mellow funny-man demeanor, Ash couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d dropped all of his school supplies or whether Lily had shoved them onto the floor.

  “—never asked you to play therapist to my love life,”

  Rolfe finished saying to Lily. He was furiously stacking his books into a pile. Once he’d collected the last of them, he picked up the stack and started to pivot toward the door.

  Ash instinctively ducked off to the side just in time.

  Another second, and Rolfe would have caught her, framed in the doorway like an awkward third wheel.

  But Ash made no move to leave. Am I really going to eavesdrop on this conversation? she asked herself.

  Yes. Yes she was.

  “Rolfe, you can strut around campus like a peacock with a surfboard,” Lily snapped. “But when the honeymoon is over—and it will end—that girl is going to get bored of you faster than you can say ‘Cowabunga.’”

  “Right,” Rolfe said. “Because you know her so well.”

  “You don’t find it the least bit suspect that she waits until the day after she finds out you’re a god to start inviting you over for sleepovers?” A beat. “Oh, shove that surprised look up your ass. It’s a small hall, and if you expected her roommate not to talk after being sexiled three nights running—”

  “Keep your voice down,” he said to her in a harsh whisper. “Your door is open. What if she walks by?”

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  “You’re the one who left it open. You were never afraid to be alone with me before.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s because you used to know when to keep your mouth shut!”

  “That’s funny,” Lily said in a husky voice Ashline had never heard her use before. “Coming from the man who used to love how talkative I would get.”

  Rolfe growled, and his footsteps moved briskly for the door. Ashline started to back away frantically, trying to figure out whether she could tuck herself away into a door frame before he spotted her.

  “I bought a dress,” Lily said suddenly from inside the room. Her voice was so quiet, Ashline barely heard it out in the hallway.

  Rolfe’s footsteps stopped instantly, and it got so quiet that Ash could hear the whisper of a shower in the bathroom down the hall.

  When Rolfe spoke next, his voice was so crisp that Ash knew he must be standing right by the door, but she couldn’t help herself from sliding closer anyway. “We made that agreement two months ago,” he said. “Two months ago, and as I remember, the stipulation was only if we weren’t dating somebody at the time.”

  She snorted. “Good to know I was always the backup plan.” Bad Lily had returned. “Well, I’ll give it two days before she figures out the truth. That you’re a superman on the streets . . .” She paused provocatively. “And a dud in the sheets.”

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  Rolfe inhaled a sharp breath, and Ashline’s whole body constricted as she prepared to intervene. But then Rolfe let his breath out slowly. “Better a dud in the sheets,” he said coolly, “than a bitch who never had a chance.”

  He slammed the door on his way out, hard enough to rattle the wall Ashline had pressed her body against.

  Rolfe noticed her immediately. His jaw was tight and his chest rose in and out in hurried breaths. Ash just assumed he was going to berate her, deservedly, for lurking outside and listening to the whole conversation.

  Instead he managed a courteous—albeit fake—smile.

  “Knock ’em dead today,” he said, and wandered off down the hall.

  Ash walked the few extra steps to Lily’s door and raised her hand to knock. But the room was just so silent. . . .

  “Pele,” Ash whispered.

  She lowered her fist without knocking, and headed for the tennis court.

  Ash sat in the locker room on a bench, rocking back and forth. Her nerves were on fire. She had a wet towel, soaked with cool water, draped around her neck.

  Outside, she could just faintly hear the persistent hollow cluck of the tennis ball combined with the rhythmic grunts of the Alyssa Gillespie—clack, grunt; clack, grunt—steady like a metronome. From in here Ash could 304

  tell who won each point based on where the cheers came from—shouts from the right meant it was Southbound’s point; a massive wave of howls from the left, and Alyssa had scored.

  She dabbed at her forehead with the cool towel. It was pretty typical for her to vomit the day of a game.

  Usually purging her lunch soothed any jitters and kept her light on her feet, but today was different. Her anxiety sat in her stomach like a mud brick, and her body crawled with the heat itch.

  “You’re not looking too hot,” Eve said, leaning against a row of lockers.

  Just hearing the sound of her sister’s voice was like falling into a nest of angry scorpions, pinpricks shooting up and down her arms and all around her neck. “I’m going to pretend like you came here to wish me good luck.”

  “No, something even better.” Eve took a seat on the bench in front of Ashline. “You’ve been talking a lot about family lately, and I think I’m finally on the same page as you.”

  At first Ash experienced a glimmer of hope that her sister was talking about her parents, but the excited gleam in Eve’s eye said otherwise. “You had the vision last night too.”

  Eve smiled and seized Ashline’s hands in her own.

  “We have a little sister, Little Sister.”

  Ash retracted her hands. “Yeah, and that little sister 305

  is some sort of out-of-control goddess of war. Or did you miss the part where she ripped open the throats of some innocent villagers and blew up a house?” She shuddered.

  “She’s just a little girl,” Eve snapped.

  Ash stood up and chucked her wet towel into the corner of the locker room. “Well, that little girl seems to have a lot more in common with you than she does with me.”

  Eve smirked. “I thought burning down things was your department.”

  “I don’t need this. I’ve got a tennis match to play.”

  Ash picked her racket off the bench and headed for the door.

  Eve intercepted her, blocking her exit. “Let’s go to Central America, you and me. We’ll track our little baby boom down and bring her back to the land of the living.

  The three of us together as a family.” She raised her eyebrows provocatively. “Maybe make a stop in Cancún or Cozumel on the way back.”

  “No,” Ash said curtly, and attempted to skirt around Eve.

  But Eve stepped to the side to block her again. “You have an obligation—”

  Ash grabbed her sister by the front of her black coat and with a fierce growl wheeled her around and slammed her against the nearest locker. Eve’s head snapped back and hit the metal with a heavy crash. “Don’t you say another word to me about obligation, Evelyn Wilde. In less than a month I have to go home to Scarsdale and 306

  sweep up all the pieces that you left when you took off on your cross-continental adventure. So please forgive me for laughing in your face when you pretend like you give a shit about anyone but yourself.”

  Eve glanced down at the hands on her lapel. “Says the girl who is choosing a tennis match and a friggin’ masquerade ball over her imperiled little sister.”

  Ash’s grip on Eve’s coat tightened, and before she could stop herself, she had whipped her sister around and thrown her forward. The momentum carried Eve back until her calves caught on the locker bench, and she dropped to the tile with a sharp thwack.

  When Eve sat up, she was massaging her head with a grimace of pain. “Well, I haven’t seen that Ashline since you took care of Lizzie Jacobs last year.” A smile bled through. “The real Ashline.”

  Outside, the audience roared, signaling the end of the previous match and Alys
sa’s victory. That put the current standing at Blackwood: 3, Southbound: 3, with Ashline’s game versus Patricia determining whether the home team was awarded the W.

  “Have fun trying to raise the little girl as a single mom,” Ash said as she bent down and picked her racket off the tile. “I’m sure you’ll win a mother-of-the-year award if she doesn’t blow up Vancouver first.”

  She didn’t look back as she headed down the hall.

  The chants echoed down the hallway, the words indecipherable but growing louder as she approached the 307

  courts. Still, the sentiment was clear. She was about to enter the gladiator arena, and the people wanted blood.

  Ashline was to be their champion. Her fingers tightened around the tape on the handle of her racket.

  Finally she passed over the threshold, and the audience erupted. In unison they rose to their feet, a sea of green and brown—the Blackwood colors—looking like a living forest, while the smaller but still potent crowd on the other bleachers, decked out in Southbound crimson, looked like a flame ready to cremate their opponents.

  There were easily four hundred spectators packed into the home team bleachers, an overstuffed suitcase of students and faculty. A few faces stuck out from the rest.

  Bobby Jones had persuaded the entire soccer team to go topless, with their chests and faces painted in forest camouflage. Their feet rumbled heavily against the bleachers.

  She noticed Headmistress Riley, tall as ever, in the faculty section; she was not participating in the chants, but Ash did notice that she’d traded her blazer and slacks for a superfan T-shirt and jeans.

  And not too far from where Ade, Raja, and Rolfe were sitting, she spotted a familiar ranger uniform. Her eyes locked with Colt’s across the court. He greeted her with a reassuring smile, but his hand unconsciously touched his chest.

  Ash approached the net at the referee’s instruction, and the sinewy Patricia joined her. The Hawaiian girl had a red tennis cap pulled down tightly on her head, but 308

  her eyes smoldered fiercely beneath the brim. Whatever heritage they shared, whatever colliding paths of fate had allowed two Polynesian girls to climb the ranks to become two of the best tennis players in California prep school athletics, there was no love lost between them as they shook hands. Patricia’s vise grip crushed her hand with the force of a trash compactor, but Ash wasn’t about to grimace.