Wildefire (5 page)

loose. A screech erupted from the back of Eve’s throat.

She cocked her other hand back and then struck her sister so hard that Ash went tumbling across the roof.

Disoriented and picking up speed, Ash attempted to reach out and grab the gutter.

The next thing she knew, the world had opened up underneath her and she was twisting and falling. After a stomach-churning plummet, Ash hit the ground back-first so hard that she thought her head would break right off her body and roll into the street.

Everything went still. She lay there, unmoving, watching the troubled night clouds billowing overhead, like the writhing gray matter of a brain come to life. Her vision grew bleary as a pool of rain and tears filled her eyes in a thickening sheen. There was a thud in the grass somewhere next to her, and the blurred image of Eve appeared in the foreground.

“I thought family meant something to you,” Eve said.

She spit on the ground next to Ash’s face. “You are no sister of mine. Don’t come looking for me.”

Perhaps it was Ash’s increasingly soggy vision, but in the moments that followed, it appeared as if the wind itself swept down from the trees and whisked Eve’s body away.

A few dazed minutes passed before Ash had the presence of mind to pull her cell phone from her waterlogged pocket. She dialed 9-1-1, mumbled her address, and then dropped the phone into the mud, while the tinny voice 36

of the dispatcher asked repeatedly for the nature of her emergency.

Even as the sirens picked up from the south, even as the red and whites flickered over the lawn soon after, Ash lay still in the grass, letting the rain cascade down around her, hoping her mind would take her some place—any place—other than here on the lawn with a dead girl.

37

SLEEPWALKER

Thur

sda

y

This certainly wasn’t the first time he’d been all over her, but this was the first time Ash recognized the feeling that had been growing within her all month: disgust.

Here she was, trying to get some rest before tomorrow’s chemistry test, and she’d stupidly allowed Bobby Jones to sneak into the girls’ dormitory after lights-out.

And now she was being groped.

Sure, Ash had invited him into her creaky little twin-size bed. Sure, she knew he might get ideas with her roommate home in Pennsylvania for her grandmother’s funeral. Sure, she kissed him back when he touched her face and pressed his lips to hers.

Six-one, long mop of dark hair, Italian features that made him look more twenty-one than sixteen—Bobby Jones was gorgeous. And, quite unfortunately, Bobby 41

Jones
knew
that Ash knew he was gorgeous. This was a disastrous combination.

“Ash . . . ,” he whispered. His lips traveled down her neck, and he pulled aside the collar of her polo. At the same time, she felt his hand, which had so coyly positioned itself on her waist, begin its not-so-stealthy ascent up her shirt.

His lusty fingers made it as far as her rib cage before she diplomatically intertwined her fingers with his and pulled his hand out of her polo, guiding it back to the bedspread. At first he seemed to get the point, and his lips retreated to her earlobe.

But then, like a zombie tentacle rising from a dark bog, his free hand slipped underneath the bottom of her polo again. Under the pretense of a back massage, his fingers rubbed in small concentric circles, tracing up her back, as if Ash were clueless as to their final destination.

Ash let them brush the tag on her bra before she clamped her elbows down on his hands. “That stays on,”

she said to him, firmly but with no condescension.

His teeth stopped nibbling on her earlobe. He pulled back and appraised her from arm’s length. “But . . .”

“The butt’s off-limits too,” Ash joked.

He didn’t smile. “It’s not like it hasn’t come off before, Ash.”

“Well, Bobcat,” she said. She enjoyed how he flinched at the nickname she’d given him. “That was one time in a janitor’s closet, and I’d had one too many ladles of punch.

42

This is the night before a chemistry exam, and quite honestly, I’m not feeling particularly frisky right now.”

He rolled his eyes and climbed off her, dropping onto his back. “Christ, make a guy feel like a creep because he’s attracted to his girlfriend.”

“No one’s calling you a creep,” she protested.

He sulked. “Yeah, well, even after two months of dating, I feel like if I even look at you a way you don’t like, you’re going to blow the rape whistle.”

Ash couldn’t help the sound of revulsion that bleated from her throat; she rolled up onto her knees. “Could you be a bigger baby? All this pissing and moaning because I wouldn’t let you round second base?” She squeezed her breasts for effect. “They’re boobs, Bobby. Grow up.”

He slipped out of bed and began to furiously tie his shoes—Ash could sense the rant coming before he even opened his mouth. “You know, Ash, you’re not in Westchester County anymore. You came to boarding school in NorCal, where everyone else knows each other already. It would have been easy for you to fly under the radar here, but you landed the captain of the soccer team.

Maybe you should count your blessings.”

Ash couldn’t help it—she laughed. “First of all, if you’re including yourself as a ‘blessing,’ then there must not be a God. And second, if you really knew me, or maybe even had half a gorilla’s brain, you’d realize that a girl who leaves her high school in the middle of sophomore year to go to a boarding school three thousand 43

miles away where she doesn’t know anybody probably
wants
to fly under the radar.”

“That so?” Bobby asked, and wandered across the room. He scooped his letter jacket off the back of the armchair and slipped it on in one practiced maneuver.

“See, word on the street is that you moved here to get away from your crazy sister.”

This effectively stopped their conversation.

Ash held her breath, and she felt the room around her tilt and spin. Bobby’s hand paused on the collar he had been attempting to fix when he’d said it. He seemed to be waiting in some combination of baited anticipation and fear for Ashline’s response.

“Who told you that?” she whispered.

“It’s called the Internet, Ashline. You’ve been acting shady lately, and I thought to myself, ‘You’re dating the girl. Why not run a little background check?’ Dead girl on the front lawn . . . Outlaw sister on the run . . . All I know,” he said, and moved for the door, “is that, if all that’s true, then maybe I better start worrying whether insanity’s hereditary.”

Ashline wrapped her hands around her bedspread and tightened them into fists. “Get out of here, Bobby.”

He whistled and reached for the doorknob. “Whoa.

Now
she gets passionate about something. Here’s a word of advice, Ash. Why don’t you start acting like you’re sixteen, and stop acting like such a bipolar freak?”

Ash ripped her alarm clock from its socket and hurled 44

it across the room. It struck the door frame right by his face, the plastic shattering on impact. Even in her unbridled rage she could enjoy the look of terror on his face as he covered his head and shrank back.

He pulled his hands away from his head and glanced once at the scuff mark in the door frame where the clock radio had shattered, before turning back to Ash.

“Maniac.”

With another roar Ash seized hold of the lamp on her nightstand and yanked that out of the socket as well, immersing the room in darkness. Through the black she heard Bobby shout, “Jesus Christ!” and heard the sounds of his hands fumbling for the doorknob. Finally he found it, threw the door open with a crash, and stumbled out into the hallway without looking back. Somewhere at the far end of the girls’ dormitory, the door slammed.

For a full minute Ash stood by the bed, the lamp still clutched in her hand, and her chest rising and falling in aggravated shallow breaths.

A familiar figure appeared in the doorway, eclips-ing the hallway light. The visitor’s hand groped the wall until she found the switch for the bedroom’s overhead halogens.

Jackie Cutter—Ashline’s best friend, who also happened to be the prefect for the floor—stood at the threshold looking stone-faced. On a perfectly normal day Jackie was always squinting, her eyes darting from side to side, as if she were trying to catch sight of her blond feathered 45

hair. Ash could never be sure whether Jackie’s eyeglasses prescription wasn’t strong enough or whether the girl was just a bit odd. But here, summoned three doors down by Ash’s tantrum, she was squinting so much that her eyes were practically closed. Her gaze traveled from the alarm clock on the floor, with its shattered faceplate, to the scuff on the door frame, and then over to Ash, wielding her reading lamp like a baseball bat and looking like a raccoon caught in the trash cans.

“Christ, Ash,” she said in her perky alto voice. “I’d have to double-check in my prefect handbook, but I think there’s some sort of bylaw about playing baseball with residence hall furniture.”

Even in her flustered state, Ash had to laugh. She lowered the lamp. “And I thought I’d broken all the bylaws by now.”

Jackie squatted and picked up the demolished alarm clock. She flipped it over in her hands. “I know not all of the numbers lit up, and it doesn’t pull in many radio stations, but did it really deserve to die?” She held up the electrical cord. The wires protruded out the end where Ash had yanked it out of the wall—the plug itself was still in the socket.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’ll pay for it, I promise.”

“Or we’ll just replace it with one of the forty clocks sitting unused in the supply closet and not say anything about this ever again.” Jackie held the destroyed clock like a basketball and, after eyeing her target, launched 46

it at the wastebasket. It clattered against the rim and dropped in with a
clunk
. She threw her hands up in the air victoriously. “Swoosh!”

Ash collapsed down heavily onto the edge of her bed.

“I. Hate. Boys.”

“Bobby Jones?” Jackie sat down next to her.

“Bobby Jones,” Ash repeated, and buried her face in her hands, half-screaming into them.