Torched (2 page)

My God,
she thought,
we did that. Three kids did that!

Even across the street, it was like standing in front of an open oven. The three fires had grown into one, its long orange flames licking the sky. Above it, a pillar of thick, black smoke floated up to blot out the stars. The whole thing was strangely beautiful.

All Sky’s fear was now gone. She soaked in the sensations, the heat tightening her skin, the hungry growl of the fire, the bright flames, the dusty taste of ashes and the mingled smells of gasoline, plastic, leather and rubber, all of it burning.

“Run, Sky! Run!” Meadow shouted. She jerked Sky’s arm, breaking the spell. They bolted away from the dealership. The long blank buildings ahead of them glowed as if lit by a summer sunset. They cut through parking lots, keeping close to the edges of buildings, and then through another dealership, zigging and zagging. Behind them, Sky heard sirens.

They threw themselves into the car. Meadow grabbed the shotgun seat. Coyote shoved the key in the ignition, and they took off.

“Woo-hoo!” he shouted. “We did it!” In his excitement, his voice broke, but he didn’t seem to notice, or care. It was the kind of thing that had made Sky fall in love with Coyote.

Meadow turned in the seat and shot Sky a look from underneath her straight black bangs, one that Coyote couldn’t see.

“What took you so long, anyway, Sky? I was worried you were going to be toast. Literally.” As she spoke, Meadow pulled off her dark sweatshirt. In addition to their shoes, the top layer of their clothes had come from thrift stores and would now go into a grocery store’s Dumpster.

“I couldn’t get the lighter to light,” Sky said. “The glove made my thumb too smooth. Finally I just took it off.”

“You took off your glove?” Meadow pulled her T-shirt down into place. “So where’s your lighter?”

“I left it there.” As soon as Sky said it, she realized this was the wrong answer.

Meadow’s mouth fell open. Coyote turned to stare, whipping his head back when a police car came barreling toward them.

The cop car passed without slowing down. “I had to take it off,” Sky said. “I couldn’t get the lighter to work.”

“You better hope it got burned up,” Meadow said, looking half scared and half triumphant at Sky’s mistake. “What if the cops pull your fingerprints off it?”

Sky tried to look worried, but she knew it wouldn’t matter.

Because it was the cops—really, the FBI—who had asked her to be part of this in the first place.

I stood in the hallway and listened at the closed living room door. It was my turn to cook dinner, but I didn’t know how many people to make it for. There were too many voices to count.

The doorbell had rung an hour earlier while I was upstairs doing my English lit homework. Now it sounded like Laurel and Matt were having some kind of meeting. I wondered what they were involved in this week. Saving the whales, expanding gay rights, lobbying for universal health care? Every week there was another cause.

It wasn’t that I disagreed with their choices. I mean, it was a lot better than if they were picketing abortion clinics. But it never really seemed like any of Laurel and Matt’s signs and petitions made much of a difference.

Laurel and Matt were my parents, but they didn’t like to be called Mom and Dad. They believed the terms “Mom” and “Dad” were “constructs of a hierarchical society.” Or something like that. The way they said the words, you could tell they had quote marks around them.

There were times when I secretly wished they were like normal parents. That they both wore suits to their office jobs and on Friday nights we went to the Olive Garden for dinner. But instead of a job in an office, Laurel volunteered for various causes, grew most of our own food in the backyard and put in stints at the food co-op. Matt was a freelance computer programmer who dressed in flannel shirts and jeans and worked from home. Both of them wore Birkenstocks, and Laurel never wore a bra. We never had much money, but according to them, we didn’t need much.

Years ago, my parents had lived in a commune, and they still believed in sharing whatever they had. Our dinners usually felt like a casual church potluck or a communal table at a vegetarian restaurant. There might be an antiwar activist at our table one day, or some people Laurel had met at the food co-op the next.

I slid open the pocket door to the living room. “Excuse me for interrupting. How many should I make dinner for?”

The conversation stopped in midstream. Eight heads swiveled in my direction. This wasn’t the normal group of ex-hippies my parents usually hung out with. A couple of them seemed about my age, sixteen, and the rest didn’t look that much older. I didn’t recognize any of them from Wilson High. Which was good. It would have been way too embarrassing.

The room reeked of pot. God, sometimes I couldn’t believe my parents. They grew their own weed in the basement and would light up with just about anyone—people they barely knew, old baby boomers like them and now kids
my
age. I kept telling them that someday they were going to get caught, but they said they had been smoking pot for thirty years and they weren’t about to stop now. Sometimes I felt more like I was the parent and they were the kids.

The only person from Wilson that I let come over was my best friend, Marijean. Kids at school thought my parents were weird enough as it was. It would be infinitely worse if they thought they could score off them.

“This is our daughter, Ellie,” Laurel said into the sudden silence. She waved her hand at the people in the room. “These folks are working on, um, an environmental campaign.”

“So is everybody staying for dinner?” I asked. “I’m making pasta, so it can get stretched pretty easy.”

Before anyone answered, they all looked at this guy with black hair combed straight back. Even from fifteen feet away, I could see that his eyes were a piercing blue. He was probably the oldest of the group, but still thirty years younger than my parents. He nodded and then Laurel said, “Of course everyone is staying! Thank you, honey.”

But I barely heard Laurel, because my eyes were caught by a guy with tight golden ringlets that just brushed his shoulders.
God, he was gorgeous!
He was tall and slim, but with wiry muscles. His tanned skin was set off by his white T-shirt. On the front, it said
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND
with a picture of a green recycling symbol. He looked a year or two older than me.

His eyes met mine, and then he smiled. It felt like a bolt of lightning flickered between us. My cheeks flushed, and I quickly looked away.

Telling myself to calm down, I counted heads. My parents and I made three. The gorgeous guy was four, the older guy was five, a girl with red dreads was six, a tiny girl with blond pigtails was seven (she grinned at me, and I returned it), a creepy-looking guy with eyes that seemed too big for his head was eight and a girl with black bangs cut straight across made nine. But it was the cute guy with the ringlets I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Remembering that old saying—the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach—I hurried into the kitchen. I diced some onions and started sautéing them, then got out our battered old
Joy of Cooking
. From the fridge, I pulled milk, butter, eggs and three pints of strawberries. I had planned on making pasta and a salad, but strawberry shortcake wouldn’t take that long.

An hour later, dinner was served. There wasn’t room enough for everyone around the table, so I got a folding chair from the closet and set my plate on my knees. My heart started pounding when I saw the cute guy pick up another chair and carry it in my direction.

He opened it up and set it down next to me. “So you’re Laurel and Matt’s daughter, huh? My name’s Coyote.” His eyes were a light yellow-green, like a cat’s. I realized that I was staring and looked back down at my plate.

“Coyote?”
Thank God my parents didn’t name me anything weird, like so many of their friends did with their kids.
“My name’s Ellie.”

“Coyote’s kind of my stage name,” he said.

“Are you guys actors?”

“All the world’s a stage,” Coyote said, and laughed. I laughed, too, although I didn’t really get the joke. I snuck a quick look at him again. One of his front teeth had been broken and mended, leaving a line of bright white in the center. Every time Coyote spoke, that flash of white drew my eye.

The girl with red dreadlocks opened up another folding chair and sat down next to Coyote, so close their thighs touched. She wore one of those hand-knit imported sweaters that you can buy at Portland’s outdoor Saturday Market from some Peruvian-looking guy who also sells panpipes. Was she trying to tell me something? Probably. Well, it had been nice while it lasted.

“This is Liberty,” Coyote said. “Liberty, this is Ellie.” Liberty tilted her head a teeny bit, looking bored, like a queen forced to meet the commoners. Coyote introduced me to the rest of them: Meadow was the girl with the black bangs. The friendly girl with the blond pigtails was Blue. The guy with the too-big eyes was Hawk. And the older guy that everyone had looked to when Laurel asked about dinner was Cedar. I noticed how everyone catered to him—making a place for him at the center of the table, handing him the first plate of food.

“Even if you look at it from a Machiavellian standpoint, it makes sense,” Matt said, clearly continuing the conversation they’d been having in the living room. “We’re killing this world, but we depend on it to survive. If we ruin it, where will we live?” Some tomato sauce sprayed out of his mouth as he talked. I winced, but no one else seemed to notice.

“Exactly,” Coyote said, getting up to dish up more spaghetti from one of our chipped red Mexican serving dishes. “Most adults don’t even hear what we’re saying. All they think about is what they’re going to buy next. Or they say we’re not being practical, that they only have time to worry about paying the mortgage and getting their kids off to college.”

Liberty shook her head. “Except at the rate we’re going, their kids won’t be able to survive in this messed-up world, let alone go to college.” She was so intense that her red dreads looked like they could give off sparks.

Coyote sat back down. “This food is really good, Ellie,” he said.

Maybe the old saying
was
right. And he hadn’t even tasted the strawberry shortcake yet.

“Thanks.” I didn’t trust myself to look at his face for very long. What if I forgot to blink? I focused on his hands instead. Coyote had long, tanned, strong-looking fingers.

“Who wants dessert?” Laurel asked, beginning to dish it up. “If you think Ellie’s pasta is good, wait until you taste her strawberry shortcake.” She passed the first plate to Blue, who smacked her lips. She was so tiny she reminded me of a sprite or a fairy.

“No whipped cream for me,” Liberty righteously declared. “I’m a vegan.”

I decided to keep it to myself that the shortcake had an egg yolk in it for extra richness and passed her the plate Laurel handed me.

After dinner was over, everyone carried their dishes into the kitchen. While the rest straggled back to the living room, Coyote said, “Need any help with washing up?”

Is he just being polite—or is it something more?
“Sure. Do you want to wash or dry?” With shaking hands, I turned on the faucet and started filling the sink with hot water.

“Dry.” He started picking up plates that still had leftover food on them. I was proud to see there weren’t many.

“So you guys put on plays about the environment or something?” I asked as Coyote scraped the plates into the compost bin. “Back in middle school, this band came to assembly and sang about how we needed to save water and energy.” I didn’t mention that they were really hokey. One of them wore a suit of armor made from tin cans.

He smiled. “That was more of a joke.”

“Oh.” Suddenly I felt like
I
was back in middle school. “Then what do you guys do?”

Coyote’s expression turned totally serious. “You can’t tell, okay?”

I set down the plate I held. “Tell about what?”

Even though we were alone in the kitchen, Coyote leaned closer. He lowered his voice to a whisper and put his lips close to my ear. His breath stirred the hairs on my neck, making me shiver.

“We’re Mother Earth Defenders.”

I pulled back. I had read about them in the paper, sometimes seen them on the news. “You mean those people who sit in trees so the loggers won’t cut them down?”

“That—and a few other things. But we try to keep a low profile when we’re not doing an action. There are a lot of people who don’t like what we’re doing and would stop us if they could.”

Things were starting to fall into place. “A lot of my parents’ friends gave their kids weird names. But I kind of figured there were too many of you for that to be true.”

He shrugged. “It’s safer if we don’t use our real names.”

“Coyote’s cool, but if it
was
your real name, you’d probably get a lot of grief. At my high school everyone is into wearing the same clothes, having the same hairstyle, doing the same things. They want you to fit into one of their predetermined little groups, you know, the smart kids, or the jocks, or the drama geeks, or the people whose parents have a lot of money. They don’t like people who are different.”

“So where do you fit in?” Coyote asked.

“Me? I’m kind of in a group of one. Maybe two,” I added, thinking of Marijean. Because of a car accident, her dad used a wheelchair. Her mom left a long time ago. She knew what it was like to have parents you’re sort of embarrassed by at the school open house.

He nodded, looking thoughtful. I didn’t tell him that growing up with my parents guaranteed you had to march to a different drummer. I had pretty much spent my whole life feeling like I didn’t fit in anyplace.

“So where do you go to school?” I asked. He was still standing right next to me. I didn’t know if it was my imagination, but I thought I could feel the heat from his body.