Read Online Burning by Elana K. Arnold - Free Book Online

living parents who wanted to give me presents, who wanted to hide plastic eggs full of candy for me? The reality of them seemed to me clearly better than the fantasy of a magical crew of creatures that snuck into my house.
    God, too—nope. Not for me. On Sundays most of the families in Gypsum filed into one of the two churches on First Street, but not the Stanleys. I guess my parents, as much as they wanted me to believe in Santa Claus, didn’t themselves totally swallow the God thing, because the only time we ever went to church was for Pete’s dad’s funeral.
    Things don’t just happen. Things don’t magically appear, or disappear, or transfigure. You make things happen through hard work. End of story.
    I wasn’t a good runner because God was more interested in me being fast than Hog Boy, and it wasn’t because of the fancy sneakers Santa Claus put under the tree. I ran fast because of my lucky genetic makeup and I ran fast because I ran hard, and consistently, even when there was something better to do, even when it was too hot to run, even when I hated running.
    And yet here I was, wedged between Pete and Hog Boy in a tent that hadn’t been here last week on the side of Highway 447, across from a girl who seemed magical to me, who seemed able to look inside my soul.
    I couldn’t think straight. That was the problem. I couldn’t think straight enough to figure out how she knew these things about me, how she seemed to
know
me. She was bewitching me.
    I’d never seen anyone like her. As she straightened the cards that had been shifted by the gust of wind, I had a minute just to stare at her without her looking back. Her gaze was on the table and her lashes, long and dark, hid her eyes.
    Her hair—a mess of dark curls—had settled since thewind had stopped, but even so it made her seem like she could take flight at any time. It was wild, tumbling around her shoulders and down her back, and occasionally she tucked a strand of it behind her ear. It would spill forward again, as if even she couldn’t control it.
    I tried not to look at her chest, but her white shirt split at the neck and I could see the edge of her lace bra—white, like her shirt—and the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed.
    The cards all arranged to her satisfaction, Lala looked up at me. I pulled my gaze up away from her chest, but she smiled a little as if she could read my mind.
    Maybe she could. That was why we were here, right? To have my fortune told? Of
course
the guys would bring me here—they knew how I felt about all that mumbo jumbo stuff, and they wanted to see me squirm.
    And any other day, in any other situation, I would have refused to play their game. But this girl—she paralyzed me. As long as she wanted me there, across the table from her, there was no way I could move.
    Her eyes were almost as dark as her hair. Maybe they were the darkest brown imaginable, or maybe they were black.
    “We begin with this first card,” she said, tapping a card in the center of the table, one that was half-covered by another. “Here is the situation you find yourself in.”
    She slid the card from the table and held it up for me to see.
    THE TOWER . On it was a tall, spiraling tower jutting up out of a black sea, set against a raging storm. Lightning hadstruck the top of it and it was on fire. People were jumping from it to their deaths; the base of the tower was ringed with craggy, pointed black rocks. The tower itself was cracking.
    “Does this have meaning for you?” Lala asked, and suddenly I felt angry. She couldn’t make me say it out loud—that the Tower was our town, Gypsum, and that the people diving to their deaths were my friends and neighbors.
    I shook my head, my mouth tight.
    “It reminds me of the Twin Towers,” Pete piped up. “You know, on 9/11? How all those people jumped out the windows after the terrorists crashed the planes into the buildings? It looks like that.”
    Yep. It did look like that. But come