Ashes to Ashes (Burn for Burn #3)

Ashes to Ashes (Burn for Burn #3) Page 25

“I could have calmed him down!” she screams, cradling her arm. “You almost killed him!”

“He almost killed you,” the boy says, panting. “Is it broken?”

Lillia shakes her head. She has tears streaming down her face. She shrugs off her jacket. Her arm is bright red and swollen and already beginning to turn purple.

“He’s never done anything like that before,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I don’t know what happened.”

The stable boy runs off to get Lillia some ice. I hear her crying outside Phantom’s pen. I know exactly what she’s feeling. It’s terrible when a friend you trust turns on you.

*  *  *

A heartbeat later I’m at the Jar Island Yacht Club, standing in front of Judy Blue Eyes, the Catalina daysailer Kat named after her mother. I expected to be more tired than I am, from all the stuff I did to Phantom, but I’m not. I feel strong.

One of Aunt Bette’s books predicted this would happen as I grew more confident and increased my focus. The book phrased it like a warning, but to me it feels like something to celebrate.

It’s clear that my ties to Lillia and Kat are what made me weak. Worrying about them and their problems. If I hadn’t met them, maybe I would have come to these realizations a lot earlier. I’d already be free, in a better place.

Kat’s boat is closed up for winter, with a tarp stretched taut across it and the sail tied tightly to the mast. With the smallest wave of my hand, every knot comes undone. The tarp and the sail snap from their tethers, and the wind carries them away like ribbons.

I lift my hands up and the waves begin to swell. The other boats tied up along the dock bob in the water. But they are nothing compared to Kat’s boat. It’s as if all the energy in the ocean is being pooled underneath it.

Finally the boat lifts high enough. I lower my hand fast, and the thing launches into the air, like the water was a rubber band that I just snapped. The boat hits one of the rocks and is pulverized into wooden splinters.

The dockworkers come running. They can’t believe their eyes. I know one of them will eventually figure out whose boat that was, and they’ll call Kat and let her know it’s destroyed.

Sorry, Kat. But you knew what you signed up for.

Actually, I’m not sorry. Not one little bit.

They deserved to be punished.

Now, Reeve—he deserves way worse. He deserves to die.

Chapter Twenty-Two

LILLIA

REEVE’S TRUCK IS WAITING IN front of my house on Monday morning. I run up to it and jump inside. “What are you doing here?” I ask him. He didn’t say anything about picking me up when we were on the phone last night.

“Driving my girl to school,” he says, kissing me on the cheek. “How’s your arm?” I pull up my sleeve. I’m purple from my wrist to my elbow. “Damn.”

“It looks worse than it feels,” I tell him. That’s a lie. It hurts like crazy. But it wasn’t Phantom’s fault. He’d never hurt me on purpose. Something spooked him.

I climb in and notice immediately that Reeve’s truck smells good. Like, super good. Reeve passes me a white Milky Morning bag, and I open it. It’s monkey bread and an organic apple juice. “Reeve! My favorite things!”

He grins a pleased kind of grin. “Where’s Nadia?”

“She’s getting a ride with Patrice,” I say.

“Is she still mad?” Reeve puts the truck in reverse and backs out of my driveway.

I nod. “The only time she spoke to me all weekend was when my dad said he was thinking about selling Phantom for what happened, and then we both freaked out and begged him not to.” I take a big bite of the monkey bread. “Thank you for my breakfast. Want some?” I dangle it under his nose, even though I know he’s going to say no.

He makes a face. “Too sweet.”

The closer we get to school, the more nervous I get about seeing everybody. I guess Reeve can tell, because he reaches over and takes my hand without saying anything.

We walk into school holding hands too. I try to let go, but Reeve just holds tighter. “No more hiding, Cho. That’s a good thing.”

Then I spot Ash coming down the hallway, and our eyes meet, and she just keeps walking like she doesn’t see me. And all I want to do is run and hide. Reeve notices, of course, but he doesn’t say anything about Ash. Instead he starts telling me this story about some soldier who had a dog in Afghanistan. He was a bomb-sniffing dog, and this guy was his trainer. Anyway, the story goes on and on and on, and it’s hard to follow at points. Basically Reeve just rambles while I get my books out of my locker. Magically, the story ends just as I reach my homeroom door.

“You did that to distract me,” I say.

“Did it work?”

I nod. It did.

“See you later, Cho.”

But for Reeve “later” turns out to mean as soon as the first-period bell rings. He’s there to escort me to class. And it happens like that, all day. I don’t know how he does it, but no matter where his classes are, he’s waiting outside my classroom door when the bell rings, ready to walk me to my next period. He doesn’t leave me alone once.

At lunch it’s just the two of us at the lunch table. I don’t know where the rest of our friends are. But Reeve makes me laugh, he makes me forget, and the day isn’t so bad. It’s kind of good.

Chapter Twenty-Three

KAT

DURING MY FREE PERIOD I go visit my old earth-science teacher and play her the message that my boss at the yacht club left on my phone this weekend. His voice sounds frayed and choppy, like he’s distracted. Or confused. But he claims there was a weather phenomenon like they’d never seen before. He called it a “flash tide.” Apparently it was so worrisome, they radioed for the coast guard. Anyway, my boat was destroyed.

My boat was the only one destroyed.

“So what’s a ‘flash tide’?” I ask.

Mrs. Hilman shakes her head. “There’s no such thing. The tides are the most predictable natural phenomena on earth. They don’t have irregularities. You can literally figure them out to the minute.”

“That lying bastard. I knew it!”

I bet it was some kind of f**k-up with the off-season skeleton crew as they moved around boats to prepare for the summer people coming back to the island. Someone probably crashed a yacht into mine, and now they’re trying to cover it up. They must have been going way too fast, because there wasn’t anything salvageable. He told me as much, but I still wanted to see it for myself. I tried to pick out a few bits of wood, ones where Dad had painted the name on the hull, thinking maybe I could glue them back together. But there was no way.