Ember Boys (Flint and Tinder Book 1) Read online

  When the techs charged, I got Jonas and helped him down the hall. We ran away. Both of us.

  4 | JIM

  I stayed away from the hospital for three days. I did a few jobs. I walked. The last few months had taught me that an abundance of time didn’t make me feel free; instead, somehow I felt even more rushed. Chunks of time would vanish, and I’d come back to myself sitting on a park bench, or halfway through a crosswalk, or with the blast of a semi making me shudder on the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway. For three days, I thought about Emmett putting his hand over the flame, burning himself. I thought about what I owed him—the last kid I was responsible for, before I could be . . . whatever I’d be, after.

  On the fourth day, I woke and knew I was leaving San Elredo. The thought of Emmett’s hand, the spot where he had burned himself, made the decision for me; he couldn’t let go of the past as long as I stayed here. And, to be honest, neither could I. I lay under my blanket and could see my breath inside the tent. It was time to move on.

  Rosie squatted in the sand, two more wieners spitted and roasting over the flames. When she passed me one of the sticks, I accepted it. She held up a Thermos; I shook my head. The marine layer was thick today, woolly fog stitched so close to the cliffs that I could hear the ocean but couldn’t see it. I had read somewhere that fog isn’t about what you can’t see; it’s about what you can. I could see Rosie. I could see the fire, its orange glow reflecting in layers of the fog like a nimbus. My breath streamed out, like I was part of this cloud that had washed ashore. Tiny tracks made a ring around the fire pit; something had visited us during the night. A fox. A feral cat.

  The thing about being transient, which is a nicer word than homeless, was that I missed running water to brush my teeth. First thing in the morning, all I could taste was the inside of my mouth. I dry-brushed with a little tube of Crest, spat into the sand, and shook my head when Rosie offered coffee again. But when the wieners were ready, I ate.

  “Ok,” I said. “Today’s the day.”

  “San Francisco?”

  “God, no. Santa Barbara. Maybe San Diego.”

  “Hitching?”

  “No, I’ve got my car.”

  “Good luck.”

  Fire crackled; I poked at the driftwood, and embers flaked up and away.

  “It’s about time,” I finally said. “I’ve been here long enough.”

  Rosie nodded. She was eating the wiener in slow, careful bites; the grease shone on her fingers and trickled down to her elbow.

  “And Emmett will be fine.”

  “Course.”

  “I didn’t even mean to stay this long.”

  “It just happens.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it just happened. I was driving. I heard Emmett was here. So I stopped, and we talked, and I stayed a night, and I guess I stayed longer than I intended and. . .”

  “And now it’s time to move on.”

  “Yeah.”

  A seagull swept low, dive-bombing out of the fog, pulling back sharply as though startled by the sudden appearance of ground. It veered off at the last minute; the tip of one wing drew a vee through a tide pool.

  “God, I can’t tell him. That’s ok, right? I can’t. It’s better if I just go.”

  “Lots of people just go,” Rosie said; she’d finished the dog, and now she was licking each finger in turn. “Sometimes you just gotta go.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to go.”

  I packed my tent. I lugged my gear up the steps. I said goodbye to Rosie, who was trying to put on a sweater and got caught, so I helped her get her head through the neck, and she kissed me on the cheek. An Oscar-Mayer kind of kiss. I could still smell it when I got to the top of the steps. I stood there, hands over my eyes, my face wet, and wondered if this was it, if I was finally having a breakdown. Or maybe I’d had the breakdown weeks ago, months ago, when I’d driven away from a job and a mortgage and a life and just . . . kept driving. Because I couldn’t stop, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t breathe until I got here and a pair of very dark eyes made me feel like the world was finally holding still.

  “All right,” I said to the fog, to the street, to the damn seagull who wouldn’t stop talking, and I wiped my face. “So I’m going. He doesn’t need to know; better if I don’t even see him.”

  And then, instead of getting in the car, I walked the mile and change to the hospital. I signed in at the visitor’s desk. I waited until they cleared me and sent me in. The day was cold and dreary; no one was in the garden. But the rec room had twenty or twenty-five people, and one of them was Emmett.

  For the first time in the months that I’d been visiting him, he wasn’t sitting alone. He sat at one of the window tables—our table, I thought briefly before drawing a thick black line through the thought—with a girl. Ashy-blue hair, thick-framed glasses, pretty, but the kind of pretty like she’d want you to stop using deodorant and maybe move into a commune before she could take you seriously. They had chutes and ladders set up between them, but they weren’t playing. They were talking. It took me a minute to realize that Emmett was smiling. He even laughed once.

  I was so caught up in watching them that I didn’t notice at first the boarded-up window. Something ugly had happened.

  The realization jogged me out of my daze. I looked back and saw, again, that Emmett was happy. That he had someone to talk to. Someone his own age, or close enough. I realized I had been right: better not to say goodbye. Better to just go. He’d get well faster without me around, dragging him down, reminding him of everything he was trying to leave behind.

  As I turned to go, though, I heard him say, “Jim.”

  Done. Finished. Dead. Just the sound of my name, and I never had a chance. I turned back toward him.

  He was grinning, the real one that didn’t stretch all the way and made him look a little like an asshole and a little like a doofus. He waved. Cool. Always so cool.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  After a moment, when I didn’t move, he spread his hands: what gives?

  I walked over to their table.

  “Jim, this is Chloe. Chloe, this is Jim. He’s a friend from home.”

  She eyed me up and down. Then she looked at Emmett. “Are you two fucking?”

  “What?” A hint of a blush crept into his cheeks. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Uh, he’s like, thirty.” The way somebody else might say fossil.

  “Oh.” The way somebody else might say gross.

  “Where have you been?” Emmett said, looking up at me. Still blushing, I noticed. He nodded at the plywood over the broken window. “Shit got real for a few days.”

  “What happened?”

  “Chloe threw a TV through the glass.”

  She shrugged, but she also paled and looked way. “That fucking quiet time is no fucking joke.”

  “What’s quiet time?” I asked.

  “It’s fucking abuse,” she said. “That’s what it is. This is not what I fucking signed up for.”

  “Abuse?” I asked.

  “No,” Emmett said. “She’s just worked up. Right, Chloe?”

  “Emmett, what is going on?”

  “Nothing,” Emmett said with a hard look at Chloe. “Grab a chair. We’re just talking.”

  I tried to decide whether to press the issue or not, but I recognized the set of Emmett’s jaw. I said, “Actually, I only need a minute.”

  “What? Why?”

  I looked at Chloe.

  After a few moments, she pushed her chair back. “I guess I’ll go pee or something.”

  When she walked away, I dropped into her seat.

  “If you want to hang around,” Emmett said, “I can get Grubhub. We can eat in the garden.”

  “No, I just—I needed to talk to you.”

  “What’s going on? You’re acting super weird. Even for you.”

  It hurt more th
an I expected; it hurt so much that I took too long, and realization swept across his face. He leaned back in the chair. His arms folded across his chest.

  “You know I never meant to stay in San Elredo. Not this long.”

  He rolled his head on his neck and looked out the window.

  “It’s time for me to, I don’t know, move on. I need to find somewhere I can get settled. I need to get a life, I guess. At the very least, get a job.”

  “I thought you had a job.”

  “Yeah,” I said, scrambling for another lie, “but it’s not permanent. I’d really like something more stable.”

  “Ok.”

  I tried to laugh. “Maybe go on a date.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Emmett, come on.”

  “What? Go get a job. Go get a fuck. I hope it’s a good one.”

  “You’re not being fair.”

  “How am I not being fair? It’s cool you could stay this long. That’s great. Good luck. I mean, I get it. You need to get a job. It’s not like there’s no fucking places you can work in San Elredo, but whatever. You want to leave. I’m not stopping you.”

  “I can’t just . . . hang around. Not forever.”

  “I know. I mean, thanks. You can go.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I, like, really appreciate that you came to see me.”

  I ran my hands up and down the pebbled plastic of the chair. “I just don’t want to—what I mean is, I want to know you’re going to be ok.”

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing. “I’m going to be fine.”

  “Ok.” I ran my hands on the chair again. “Ok, that’s great.”

  “Yeah.” He swiveled toward me, his eyes dark and so full of hurt that I almost bailed right then. “It’s great. Everything’s great. I’ll be out of here in three months, tops.”

  “Can you write me? When you get out, maybe we can . . .”

  I couldn’t even finish, the words tasted so shitty in my mouth.

  “Oh sure,” he said.

  “Just—” I cleared my throat. “Just, whatever else, know somebody cares about you, ok?”

  “Is that it?”

  “I—”

  “You care about me?”

  “Of course, I—”

  “Great. That’s great, too, Jim. You care about me. Isn’t that great?”

  “Why are you being like this? This isn’t good, this thing between us; why can’t you see that? We both need to move on.” I blew out a breath, trying to control the heat building in my chest. “When I got here, it was ok. You needed someone who knew—”

  “Bullshit. You needed someone. Don’t turn this on me, you fuckhole.”

  “Fine. We both needed someone who knew what had really happened, who understood. That was important. But now it’s gone on too long. I’m holding you back; I need to go so you can move on. Get better.”

  “Let me get this. Just let me get this. Let me really, really get this fucking crystal clear: you’re doing this for me. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “I want you to get better.”

  “Oh my God,” he said, laughing again as he drew a hand across his mouth. “Why is every guy I meet a selfish fucking asshole with delusions of altruism?”

  “Hey,” I said, hearing my voice lurch into a shout. “Cool it, ok?”

  “You know what you are? You’re pathetic. You’ve got nothing. You’re nothing. You think you’re a good guy, but you’re not even dog shit. You did this for yourself; if you can’t see that, you’re even more fucking pathetic than I thought.”

  “I did this for me?”

  “Obviously.”

  “I lived in a tent on a shitty stretch of sand, going hungry most days, doing shit jobs so I could have a few bucks, and I did it for me?”

  The shock on his face was nice, but it wasn’t a hundred percent. A part of him, at least, had suspected. “So,” he said, “you lied to me. That’s good to know. You’re not just selfish. You’re a fucking liar.”

  “Forget you, Emmett. What a waste. What a stupid waste of my time this has been. I’ve got a life to live, ok? I can’t throw it away waiting for a teenage junkie to get his shit together.”

  He was grinning at me, and it was the first time in my life I wanted to hurt him.

  “There it is,” he whispered. “You care about me. You want me to know somebody cares. Fucked up Emmett Bradley needs love and attention. And who better to give it to him than Saint Jim?”

  “This was a mistake.”

  “Sure.”

  “Months. I’ve wasted months trying to help you.”

  “Oh fuck off. You were here to stroke your own ego. And to give yourself a handjob every night, congratulating yourself on being oh so fucking good to poor little Emmett Bradley. You never did get to fuck Vie, did you? He’s a really good fuck, if you’re into crazy. But I’m better. Did you think about that at night, squeezing your little dick, how grateful I’d be when I got out of here? That I’d let you drill me just because you showed up and played a game or two of fucking parcheesi.” He swept the game of chutes and ladders off the table. “You’re so sad. You’re like a bad joke; no wonder you ran away. That’s what you do, right? Run away every time things get hard.”

  “This is why no one wants to be around you,” I said. I could feel my temperature rising; I could feel the plastic heating, growing malleable where my fingers gripped it. I let go and forced myself to stand. “This is why you’re alone: this is why Vie—”

  “Go on,” he said, but he’d gone bloodless. “Say it. This is why he chose Austin? Fuck you. You don’t know the first fucking thing about me.”

  “Yeah, well, I know more than I want to.”

  “Are you going to hit me, Saint Jim?”

  I glanced down and saw my fingers curled into fists.

  “This was a mistake,” I said, turning and walking toward the door.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Keep saying that.”

  And he said it so well, so full of contempt, that I wanted to scream.

  5 | EMMETT

  I made it to my room before my shit came undone. I closed the door and stood there, arms wrapped around myself so tightly that only my shoulder blades brushed the wood. I felt like I was standing at the edge of the world, looking back on how far I’d come. I realized, with something like shock, that I used to cry about things like this.

  My last boyfriend—if you could call him that—had been the destructive type when he got angry. Lots of throwing and smashing. And, as Jim had pointed out, lots of self-harm. None of those was really my game.

  What I wanted, more than anything, was rubber tubing around my arm, the needle pressed right against the vein, the first hit when everything got softer, rounder, easier to handle.

  Instead, the part of myself that I hated came awake, reviewing the conversation with Jim. It was like an ESPN recap: a blow-by-blow, with every hit catalogued, ranked, and filed. He hadn’t liked it when I called him a liar, so remember that. He really hadn’t liked it when I called him selfish; put that at the top of the list. But the things that had really gotten him had been the jab about Vie and the last thing, about running away. I labeled those Code Red. When I saw Jim again, I’d use them. I’d use them over and over until he couldn’t think straight.

  Because the way to handle people was to make them want to fuck you or make them want to fight you. Anything in between, you couldn’t control.

  Thinking about Jim, about the buttons I’d figured out, brought my heart rate down a little. My hands weren’t shaking anymore. I got onto the bed, stretched out, and stared up at the ceiling.

  Three months. In three months I could get out of here. I could drive wherever I wanted to go. If Jim went to San Diego, I could go to San Diego. If Jim went to Mexico, I could go to Mexico. After that, the plan got hazy. I’d be thinking about one thing—walking right up to Jim, right while he was tipping back a bottle of Modelo, and punch him so hard he wouldn’t see
straight for a week—and then I’d be thinking about something else. I’d pick up the biggest stud I could find, fuck, I’d pay for the biggest stud I could find. And I’d suck his face off in front of Jim, just to see Jim go ballistic, so Jim would know he couldn’t—what?

  No, punching was better. I could wait until he put down the bottle. I could really line one up, knock half his teeth down his throat. Only what I really wanted, for some reason I couldn’t understand, was for some big Mexican guy to hate-fuck me while Jim watched. Or maybe I wanted to do the hate-fucking. Maybe I wanted a handful of that strawberry blond hair, and I wanted to pull and pull until all I could hear was him screaming my name.

  The knock made me sit halfway up; I was sweating.

  “Yeah? What? I’m sleeping.”

  “No, you’re not,” Chloe said as she came into the room. “Eww. Were you jerking off?”

  “For fuck’s sake. What do you want?”

  “Wanted to see how you were doing after that big fight with your boyfriend.”

  Lying down again, I said, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s not even my friend.”

  “Yeah.”

  I blinked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The only people I know who fight like that are either blood or they’re fucking. Is he your brother?”

  “No.”

  “Your dad?”

  “No.”

  “Your daddy?”

  “Gross.”

  She shrugged. “If you weren’t fucking, you should have been.”

  I covered my eyes with my arm.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  And that little part of my brain was awake again, the little fucking prick that I hated, with his rows and rows of buttons that he’d learned to press over the years. I thought about how she’d ignored me that day in the rec room until I got in a dig about boots and a leather jacket.

  “Yeah,” I said, my arm still over my eyes. “Yeah, thanks. I do want to talk about it.”

  “Ok.”

  “But first, maybe we can get our periods in sync. And then we can talk about if we have a heavy flow this month. And I’ll paint your toenails if you’ll braid my hair. I think I’ve got an Indigo Girls album around here, and then we can scissor each other while we—”