Chapter One: TINDER FIRE
Isa
Ash flakes collect on the windowsill outside my bedroom on the first day of junior year. I rub the sleep out of my eyes with a sigh. Will these wildfires ever end? We've had so many this summer, and, of course, they're still burning for the first week of school. The smell of smoke wafts in with the breeze through my window, open just a crack.
I roll onto my back, reaching for one of the vibrant turqouise streaks in my hair. Mom, Kat, and I worked so hard on them, and the color is amazing. The brilliance of the blue-green mix makes me grin even in the dull light. But with the window open last night . . . I bring the curl to my nose and sniff tentatively.Crap. I smell like a campfire.
"Isa? You up, Bo?" Grandma's voice carries from downstairs. "What do you want for breakfast? We've got pears in."
I sit upright, my skin sticky with sweat. The antiquated fan in the corner does another useless swivel. For most of the last few weeks, we've been advised to keep the windows closed, but it's impossible to sleep without airflow. I pull the window frame down as quietly as possible. It squeals in protest. Outside, the sky is gray—smokey gray, not the gray I've come ot think of as normal-Pacific-Northwest-overcast gray.
Barefoot, I pad from the beige carpet of my bedroom out onto the hardwood of the upstairs hall. The door to Mom and Tama's bedroom is open. No signs of life. Down the stairs, I find Grandma's short figure walking through the open-plan living space toward the kitchen. She's still got her head wrap on.
"Smoky again today," she observes when I lean in to kiss the rich color of her cheek. She's put peanut butter puffs and soy milk out on the low counter that separates the kitchen from the dining area. "Will you show me the maps?"
I look around for my Chromeboik, spotting it on the sofa closest to the TV. It's a good thing Lakewood High School sends laptops to students; it's the only computer in the house. Dad had an iPad once, but no one's seen that in ages. Lost at sea and presumed dead.
Armed with a bowl of cerea, I settle in at the coffee table to assess today's situation. The NWC interactive wildfire and Washington smoke information maps are already open. Mom must have checked them before she and Tama left.
"How close are the fires?"
"Biggest one is fifty miles away," I slurp. Even though the peanut butter puffs stick to the roof of my mouth, I crunch them down hungrily. Grandma's still in the kitchen, so I speak up. "Only 13 percent contained. Snoqualmie's under evacuation orders, and I-90 is still closed."
"Lord have mercy."
I click and scroll, concentrating. "Nothing else close. The one along the Oregon border is more contained. The fires out east are massive." I swivel the laptop and point, but Grandma doesn't look up. She doesn't have her glasses on, anyway. I turn back to the laptop. "Want to watch the wildfire briefing? There's a link."
"No." Her voice is nearer. "Not if it's not close."
A bowl of pears materializes in front of me. I admire the mix of red and green slices, crunchy and sweet. The fans set up down here shift, and I look over to see Grandma's housedress shiver in the artificial breeze. Her shuffling steps round the recliner, pass the table, and take her back to the kitchen.
"Thanks." I click over to the smoke map, where the dots near Lakewood still glow dangerously red. The air quality index nearest our house points unrelentingly toward HAZARDOUS. "The air's still bad today. All advised to stay indoors." I pick up pear slices as I scroll down to the forecast. "The wind's supposed to shift and blow the smoke east, but looks like that won't be until tomorrow."
"Warm one again today, too?"
I laugh. "It's been more than warm, Grandma. High nineties again. The heat dome's supposed to last until the weekend, and there's still no rain in the forecast." I'm going to have campfire head forever. "Climate change is the worst," I gripe, gathering up my now-empty bowls.
"Heat dome." Grandma chuckles. "Who comes up with these names?"
"When did Mom leave?"
"She and your dad left early, before I was up."
"He's not working today?" It's both statement and question. I cross the room to the kitchen in hurried steps so I can rinse my dishes and stack them in the washer.
"No, but rumor has it a shipment of air conditioners came in. They went to check it out. You know you can't get those for love nor money these days."
"Maybe I can cycle down and meet them."
"It's a school day, Bo. You've got your own things to do." Her tone is stern. She glances out the window, then resumes filling a lunchbox with way too much food. Out front, I can just about make out the street. It's so hazy, though, that I have to squint to see the numbers on the town houses across it. "And no biking in the smoke," she adds. "You'll get hit by a car."
My phone buzzes from the kitchen counter. It's a text from Kat, who lives in a town house nearly identical to ours a few streets over. Kat and I are so close that Grandma and I don't need to read it to know what she's asking.
"You can go ahead and tell Katherine that you'll see her on the bus."
Kat is going to love that.
"Fire." I pout, texting back in a whirlwind of thumbs. Grandma's slow but constant movements stop. When I look up, she's wearing the glasses that were hanging from a chain around her neck. She studies my face.
"I've packed you some Pani Popo. Made them this morning."
I can't help smiling. "Really?" Grandma's baking is legend. She usually fuses my favorite Samoan coconut rolls with a southern touch. That's why it doesn't smell like smoke down here. It smells delicious. Like bread yeast, coconut—and did she add nutmeg? She's been through so much since we moved, and she still makes so much time for me.
I shuffle close and wind my arms gently around the soft middle she always complains about. Grandma says her curves have taken over, but even though she's constantly trying to lose weight, she never pulls away when I do this. "Thank you." I beam at her.
She kisses the top of my head.
"Will everyone be in tonight? Did Mom and Dad say whether they're taking shifts?"
"No. I'm sure someone will be around, though. Shouldn't you be the one who's out?" Her eyes glint behind her round glasses. "A wild sixteen-year-old hitchhiking across the country? Running off to Vegas? Boarding a ship to take you around the world?"
"Nope, not me. I'm never leaving." I wrap my arms a tiny bit tighter.
Grandma straightens me up, the side of her mouth pulling into a grin. We have the same beauty mark, a mole, tucked behind our right nostril. Hers is harder to see because her skin is darker than mine, but from this close I can see it move slightly.
"Trust your winds to fate and that God will bring you back one day."
"Sure." I shrug. Grandma's full of philosophical tropes like this these days. I don't want to think about why. All I want is for us to be together. I don't want anything to change.
Next door, baby Devon wails awake. Okay, maybe sharing a wall with a toddler could change. The newly built town houses in our neighborhood look nice, but the walls between apartments are thin. Outside is a mix of carefully harmonized roof slopes and wood siding painted in neutral hues of green, blue, and brown. Identical one-car garages, white-trimmed windows, and stamp-size squares of grass stretch down the line of town-house apartments on both sides of the street. Just like on most of the streets running this side of the freeway.
Grandma sighs. "You'd better get a move on."
She's right. The oven clock over her shoulder says the bus will be here in twenty minutes.
I dash upstairs to the bathroom I share with Mom and Tama to get the shower running. When I catch my reflection in the mirror, the state of my hair makes me laugh out loud: It's huge. Long, dark waves fall past my shoulders. I've got volume, too. When I pick it out, I can get it higher than Mom's. It's so much—with the turquoise accents, it's absolutely fabulous.
I gather it beneath a shower cap so I can at least scrub the sticky night off my skin. There's no time to attempt to wash the campfire smell out of my hair. After the shower, I rub my joints with coco butter and brush my dark eyebrows into place. I scramble to dress and grab my stuffl, and by the time the bus stops on the corner, I'm standing with a handful of other kids, T-shirts pulled up over our noses to keep some of the wildfire smoke out of our lungs.
At the back of the buss, Kat's petulant face waits to greet me. A bridge of summer f reckles sits glumly across her cheeks. She flicks her blond bangs in a futile attempt to keep them from falling to the left.
"The bus?" she grumbles before I've even sat down next to her. "We were supposed to make a statement this year. We might not have our own cars, but we were gonna rock retro and bike."
"Come on, would your mom have let you cycle in this?" I wave a hand toward the front window, where the bus's windshield wipers are on to keep it ash-free. "It's literally raining fire." The wildfires that have plagued Washington this summer are the largest in the state's histroy. Growing up at the end of the world blows.
"I wouldn't have asked. Your family's the only one that hast to talk about everything. You don't see my brothers on here, do you? They boarded."
"What?" I sit up to search for Liam, a senior who would definitely object to taking the bus, and Isaac, a freshman. I'm shocked to come up zero for two. "Isaac's got asthma!"
"He also has self-respect," Kat sniffs. She's worked through her petulance now and slumps over to rest her head on my shoulder. Then she twists a strand of turqouise around her finger. "Your hair still looks amazing, by the way."
"I can't bring myself to wash it and risk dulling the color. I'll crack soon, though. I smell like a campfire."
"A cool campfire." She lets the strand go and settles her slim frame against mine. At five foot four, Kat's shorter and thinner than me. Even so, she's not someone who's easily pushed around. I look down and suppress a laugh at the constrast of our intertwined arms. Her skin looks so white, even though this is the tannest she'll be all year. Her green eyes close.
I smile, stilll slightly unbelieving. This is my third consecutive year at Lakewood High School. Before Lakewood, we moved around a lot because of Dad's jobs. There was only one other place I'd stayed for three years, and it wasn't somewhere I had a best friend. Kat, who's spent the last several weeks complaining about going back to school, doesn't know what it's like. Getting to go back to the same place feels incredible.
Outside, I try to watch Lakewood come into focus. There's no hope of seeing Mount Rainier today. When the weather's clear, the mountain towers, beautiful and snowcapped, behind us as we drive west away from Interstate 5, the Pacific Northwest's largest highway. I-5 carries eight lanes of cars north to Seattle and extends all the way south to San Deigo. The lkaes and fir-shaded suburbs of town occupy the strip of land between the interstate and Puget Sound. School's close to the town center, which isn't all that far from our neighborhood. It only takes us fifteen minutes to bike there, when we can see (and breathe).
When the buss rounds the last corner, we pull slowly through the haze into the school's front parking lot. Lakewood High stands obscured in smoke. I can't make out the buildings at all—not even the aquatic center, which is the closest. It's even hard to read the WELCOME OTTERS! flashing across the digital sign. Ottey, our mascot, is painted on the front of the building. He's a waving otter, floating on his back in atranquil blue lake surrounded by green fir trees. If only.
Kat stretches, squeaking the pleather of our bus seat. "Here we go. Only three more days till Friday."
"You can't be counting down already? It's day one. Of the first week!"
"Yup. That means only a hundred seventy-nine school days until summer break and three fifty-nine until graduation, when I'll never have to see Mr. Hoffman or an algebra book ever again," Kat says as the bus stops.
Everyone runs through the smoke toward the school's double doors. When we cross over the air-conditioned threshold, a fewo f the boys ahead of us let out audible sighs of relief. They aren't the only ones.
"Thank God!" Kat says, breahing in the cool, unsmoky air. "I'm so sick of being sweaty all the time." She smiles at me, waiting for a response. Then she remembers. "You're not still stressing about greenhouse gases, are you?"
We've entered the big central atrium that opens straight through to the cafeteria. Four halls of classrooms branch out from this space. I take in the expanse, wondering just how much energy it takes to cool such a large building. Goose bumps are already forming on my arms. "It's so many emissions, Kat!"
She rolls her eyes. "Live a little," she says. "Anyway, weren't you going on the other day about how the state is powered by renewable energy? 'Member?"
"I knew you were up!" Kat is often on the receiving end of my late-night internet wormhole research.
"Yeah. And the next time you text me at one in the morning, the reason better be more exciting than dams. 'Did you know that Washington State generates over half of its electricity from hydro-power?'" Kat says, perfectly mimicking my accent. Then, in a dramatic sweep, she flips her hair over to one side like I do when I'm thinking.
I'm crying with laughter.
"Kill me!" She's laughing now, too.
"Isa!" I hear over the noise of students hurrying through the door. It's Susie—we were paired up for a couple of assignments last year, which neither of us did very well on. Still, it was nice having someone new to talk to about how terrible math is.
Her head of red curls is just as brilliant as usual. It's not every day that I get to meet someone with hair as striking as mine. As she bobs toward us, I realize that something about her looks different.
"I'm so glad we all have history together this year." She smiles at Kat and me.
"Me too," I say distractedly, trying to place what's new. "Oh! Your teeth look great!"
She beams. "Thanks! I was soooo happy when my braces came off this summer. I can't stop doing this." She runs her tongue over the outside of her teeth and laughs. "Trust me, if you hadn't done that in years, you'd understand. It feels amazing! You're so lucky that you didn't have to have them."
"I know. They seem pretty awful." I leave out how we could never afford them and suddenly feel self-conscious about the gap between my front teeth.
We push forward as more students come in. Still unsure of our new schedules and where we're meant to go, we walk straight through toward the cafeteria. The wall of double doors at the back of teh school would normally stand open—letting kids lounge on the grass or take the outdoor paths across campus. They're closed today. "Do you think the smoke will ever get better?" I ask.
Kat shakes her head. "Doesn't feel like it."
Susie folds her binder against her chest. "It's so scary, isn't it? My cousins live in Snoqualmie. They had to evacuate last night."
"Oh no," I gasp. "I'm so sorry. Are they okay?"
"Yeah, they're fine—well, they're physically fine. They're staying with my uncle in Seattle. But how crazy would it be to not know whether your house will be there when you get back?"
Kat shudders. "That's awful."
We've stopped walking and have tucked ourselves into a corner of the cafeteria, out of the way. "I'm so sorry," I say again. I can't help adding, "Shouldn't we be doing something?"
Susie looks perplexed. "The firefighters are doing as much as they can. . . ."
"Oh, no. I mean, do something about climate change. Do something about what's causing the fires."
"Right," Susie says, her face full of all the uncertainty I feel.
"I don't know, I struggle to explain. "It's like they tell us what climate change is, but then what? Like, what are we supposed to do about it? And the world's on fire! How is that not what we're learning?"...
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