Torched (6 page)

When I walked past my parents’ room, I saw Matt lying on his back on the bed, his eyes closed. His arms were by his sides, and he was absolutely still. When I was thirteen, Matt had had a heart attack. So I stood for a long moment in the doorway, watching to make sure his chest still rose and fell. My head felt like it might split in two. How could my parents have been so selfish?

In the kitchen, I found Laurel. She was making a stir-fry. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, but it was like she was pretending it was still dinnertime, that nothing had happened.

“What am I going to do now?” I said. My voice was hard and harsh.

Laurel put down her chef ’s knife and put her finger to her lips. “Shh! I don’t want Matt to hear us.”

“I don’t want to do this,” I said. My voice wasn’t much softer than it had been before.

She tried to put her arms around me again. For a second, I wanted to close my eyes and lean into her soft warmth. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. And it was Laurel and Matt who had gotten me into this mess, with their stupid reluctance to admit that it was no longer 1972. I shook off her hands and took a step back.

“How could you do this to me?” I crossed my arms.

“We didn’t do it to you. The Man did.” I heard the capital letters in Laurel’s voice, as if she were speaking about a real person.

“For once, couldn’t you have done what ‘the Man’ said? Couldn’t you follow the rules?”

“Even when the rules don’t make any sense?” Her tired eyes pleaded with me. “In a lot of countries, pot’s legal. Cigarettes are a lot more harmful.”

“But we don’t live in other countries,
Mom,
” I said sarcastically, watching her flinch. “We live here. Where it’s not legal and where they can use it as an excuse to get the MEDics.”

“Look, we’ll figure out something,” Laurel said again
,
turning away to slide some chopped onions into the wok. “But our first priority is to keep Matt out of jail. He couldn’t hack it, not at his age. With his heart, and the sentences they give out now, he could even
die
there. You saw how bad he looks tonight. I want him to call his cardiologist, but he won’t.”

Laurel picked up her knife again. “Besides, it’s the lesser of two evils. Whatever the MEDics are, it’s up to them to prove it. If Richter is wrong and they aren’t turning to violence, he promised me they would drop the investigation.”

“But what if he’s right?” I had to ask. “If he’s right, then what?”

“Then,” Laurel said as she brought her butcher knife down with a thwack on the green tops of a bunch of carrots, “then they’ve made their bed. And they’ll have to lie in it.”

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what Richter had said. So I got up and Googled MED. One article said that MED was “dedicated to taking the motive out of environmental destruction by causing economic damage to businesses.” But most of what I found called them ecoterrorists.

In Oregon alone, MED had claimed responsibility for seven “actions” since September. Like Richter had said, they had firebombed a helicopter used to spray weeds, as well as burned down a wild horse corral, a logging truck and a ranger’s station, for a total of more than five million dollars in damages.

I also read about a reporter who had infiltrated a group of MEDics in England. After he published a series of stories about them, he had been abducted by four masked men. They let him go—after branding the letters
M-E-D
on his back.

I went back to bed, but just tossed and turned until the sheets were wrapped suffocatingly tight around my body. I kept trying to think of a way out, but found none.

In the morning, Matt, who was usually up early, stayed in bed. Bustling about the kitchen as if nothing had happened the night before, Laurel made me oatmeal for breakfast. She set it down before me, and it was just the way I liked it—with lots of maple syrup, raisins and almonds. I ate two spoonfuls, but when I tried to swallow a third one, it wouldn’t go down. I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up in the sink. When I lifted my head, my eyes looked like two bruises in the mirror.

At school, I didn’t hear a thing the teachers said that day. My head ached, and I kept my eyes down so no one would call on me.

When the last bell rang, I met Marijean outside the front doors. For the first time that year, I was glad that we didn’t have a single class together. Because as soon as she looked at me, Marijean knew something was up.

“What’s wrong? You look terrible.”

“Nothing.” I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t tell anyone.

“It’s something to do with Coyote, isn’t it? Did he call you? Is it that other girl?”

“What other girl?” I barely heard her.

“The one with the red dreads.”

“No, it’s not that.” I tried to find something to say that wasn’t a complete lie. “It’s my dad. His heart was acting up again last night. He wouldn’t call the doctor, but he looked terrible.”

“Oh.” Marijean hugged me, then reached in her pack for her cigarettes.

I held out my hand. “Can I have one?”

“What?” She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “But you don’t ever smoke. You’re always telling me how bad it is for you.”

“Just give me one, okay?” Smoking
was
bad, which was why it was suddenly so appealing. Smoking would match how I felt inside.

“I’m just saying.” She put two in her mouth, lit them both with her lighter and handed one to me.

I took a deep drag, welcoming how it burned my throat, and then I started coughing. As I coughed and coughed, I imagined the smoke turning my lungs all gray and dirty, the way I felt.

That Saturday, I walked over to Multnomah Village to meet Coyote as we had planned. On any other day, my footsteps might have been slowed by nervousness. Now it felt like every step took me closer to the edge of a cliff.

I had barely stepped into the doorway of the bike store when Coyote ducked under the counter. “I’m leaving, George!” he called over his shoulder.

George was in the back, holding a small wrench between his teeth. He grunted in response.

Coyote grabbed two tall mugs. I tried to smile at him, but my face felt stiff.

He held the door open for me. “Hey, I like your bag.”

My messenger bag was made of green fabric patterned with sky-blue scribbles. Before I bought the fabric at the Bins, it had been a tablecloth. “Thanks. I made it.” The fact that Coyote noticed small things about me made me feel worse. I wondered if he had noticed that today I wasn’t wearing any eyeliner. My face felt oddly bare without it. But I figured wearing makeup was fundamentally incompatible with being a MEDic.

When we got a block away from Village Coffee, Coyote didn’t say anything, just flashed one of his mended-toothed grins and sprinted ahead of me. I stood there for a second, trying to figure out what he was doing. By the time I finally started running myself, it was too late. When I got to the counter, he was already handing over a bill to the barista.

“Hey,” I said, panting, “I thought I said next time it would be my treat!”

He shrugged one shoulder, trying hard not to look pleased with himself. “I was here first.”

The barista handed Coyote back one of his mugs, which Coyote then handed to me. “Twelve-ounce nonfat latte with a double shot, right?”

“Right.” I forced an even bigger smile onto my face. “Hey, it’s such a nice day—can we sit outside?” I didn’t want anyone to overhear us.

“Sure.” Coyote picked up his cup of tea. We went outside and sat at one of the two small, round tables on the sidewalk. He petted a yellow Labrador retriever tied to a parking sign.

“So how’s work going?” I asked, casting about for a neutral topic. I wasn’t sure how to get started.

“It’s real busy now.” He spread his grease-stained fingers out and regarded them. The nail on his right thumb was bruised. “Everyone’s getting ready for summer.”

“Do you like working there?”

“It’s pretty good. George is easy to work for. And I like working with my hands.” He took a sip of tea. “How are things going at school?”

“Okay.” Since the arrest, I had gotten a D on one quiz and a C-minus on the other. “In English, we’re reading
Othello.
”

“That’s the one where Othello thinks his wife is cheating on him, right?” I must have looked surprised, because Coyote said, “Just because I got my GED doesn’t mean I don’t like to read.”

“Yeah, Iago sets her up so she looks guilty.” That made me think of Richter. The coffee turned to acid in my stomach. I tried to ignore it and changed the subject. “Thanks for bringing the extra cup for me. Were you no longer willing to underwrite my profligate use of natural resources?”

He grinned. “Oh, you’re already damned to hell.” He took a sip of his tea, and when he looked up again, his face was serious. “Besides, if we don’t start doing things differently, it will be too late. That’s why I’m part of ”—he hesitated—“that group.”

I took a deep breath. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Can I be part of it, too?”

“Do you really know what you’re asking? It’s not a commitment you can make lightly.”

Even though we were the only ones on the sidewalk, I lowered my voice. “You mean because you guys sometimes do things that are against the law, like freeing the minks? Well, I think there’s a higher law.”

He looked up from his tea, and I forced my eyes not to waver from his green gaze. “It’s fine to talk about higher law, but some of the stuff we do”—he lowered his voice even further—“means we might end up going to jail. And if you get caught, being a MEDic means no plea bargains, no deals, no selling out your friends.”

I didn’t drop my gaze. “You heard what Matt said. My parents brought me up to believe in fighting for what’s important.”

“Sorry, we just have to be cautious,” Coyote said. “Not everyone supports what we do like your parents. They get it. Even if they are a little too old and a little too mainstream to be MEDics, they still get it.”

Normally I would have smiled at the idea that anyone thought my parents were mainstream. Instead, I just took another sip of my bitter coffee.

Coyote stared at his tea for a long time. And then he said, “Let me talk to Cedar. We might be able to use you.”

I nodded and pretended to smile. But inside, I was dying.

“So why do you want to join us?” Cedar asked. His face was unsmiling, all angles and planes.

I was sitting with nine MEDics around a long picnic bench in a rundown park in North Portland. The sun was out, but we were the only ones at this end of the park. At the far end, some guys played basketball. They had tried to sell us dope when we walked by.

Even though I was with the MEDics, it was clear that I wasn’t part of the group. The only good thing was that Coyote was next to me. I wondered if he felt how my whole body trembled. Of the other people at the table, Hawk, Liberty and Meadow seemed openly hostile. Blue, on the other hand, gave me a thumbs-up when we first met in the parking lot. Even Jack Rabbit and Seed had smiled at me, although a little furtively. It was harder to tell what Grizz was thinking. And with Cedar, it was impossible. I wondered if he ever smiled.

I noticed Cedar hadn’t used the word MED. Probably playing it safe. Before we sat down, he had asked Liberty to frisk me. She hadn’t held anything back, either, her red dreads brushing against me as she ran her hands firmly down my legs and then up again, under my long denim skirt. The park was the kind of place where even frisking someone didn’t draw any attention.

I took a deep breath. If I could convince Cedar, then the others would fall in line. “If we don’t act now, it will be too late to save the Earth. It’s going to take more than recycling newspapers and reusing plastic bags. I want to be part of a group that’s actually doing something real.” Although my voice was confident, under the table my legs wouldn’t stop shaking. I prayed that no one else noticed.

“This isn’t a social club, you know,” Liberty said. Her lips thinned down to a line. “It’s a serious group. It’s not all filled with—with cheerleaders.” She spit out the word.

I got a quick vision of her in whatever high school she went to, dissed by the popular kids. Liberty must be way on the outer edge if she thought anyone would mistake me for a cheerleader. I gave her my best cold stare. “You heard what my parents said. I’ve been around protests all my life.”

“This is more than protests.” Meadow shook her head. “And this isn’t like joining a book club or the Girl Scouts.”

“Hey, I’m just as serious about this as you are,” I objected.
Serious as a heart attack.

“Probably more serious.
She’s
not rebelling against her parents,” Coyote said. “She’s not just doing this to get a rise out of somebody.”

His words had seemed aimed at Meadow, but it was Liberty whose cheeks turned the color of her hair. “She can’t just say she wants to be a member and waltz right in,” she said.

I sighed loudly. I was tired of people telling me what I couldn’t do. “Fine. What do I need to do?”

Grizz shifted in his seat and said, “Look, Ellie, okay, you have to prove yourself? Same as the rest of us?”

It was hard to tell behind his huge beard, but his expression seemed friendly. Looking at him, I started to feel like I might actually be able to carry this thing off. “How do I do that?”

Hawk said, “You have to pick a target, do an action by yourself and get away without being caught.” With his big, bulging eyes set in his bony face, he reminded me of some kind of insect. “You have to prove you are committed.”

By myself ?
I had thought if I had to do anything, it would be as part of the group, not acting on my own. I bit the inside of my cheek.
It’s for Matt,
I reminded myself.