I swallow my questions. Not yet. Not yet.
Tess bites a chip, bits of it falling to the floor. “Didn’t you see? On the way in?”
I nod. That could ruin a town. Acres and acres, wasted and barren all at once. Too many people. Not enough work. I wonder if that happened to Gram.
“I mean, we still plant,” Tess continues, “and I guess so does Vera, if you can really call it that. Her whole farm seems like an exercise in futility, but tell that to her.” She shakes her head. “God, why anyone stays in this town is truly beyond me.”
“So leave,” I say. Mom left Phalene. And I left Mom. You can always make it out of somewhere, if you want it badly enough.
“Yeah,” Tess says, a moment too late. Something’s there, moving under the tight mask of her smile, but she’s not about to let a stranger see it. “Anyway.”
She heads for the register, waving to the cashier as she fishes out another handful of chips. I hurry after her.
“One fifty,” the girl says, not looking up from the tabloid, which she now has open on the conveyor belt.
“Thanks, Leah,” Tess says, and then she’s outside, the chips still with her. I sigh, hand Leah my money and wait for change before following.
“Can I have some?” I ask, not waiting for an answer before I take the bag from her. “Listen, about Vera—”
“Tess!”
We both startle, and I follow Tess’s gaze to the park, where her friends were a few minutes ago. Now it’s just the boy, standing by the bike rack with one hand raised to keep the sun out of his eyes.
“Hang on,” she calls back. When she turns to me, she’s got almost an apology on her face. “That’s Eli,” she says.
I don’t bother looking at him again. I’ve seen enough boys to know he has the sort of face I think I’m supposed to like, but how can any of that matter when there are girls like Tess in the world? I clear my throat. “Are you guys…”
She laughs, shrugs one shoulder. “Depends who you ask.”
I’m asking you, I want to say. She’s gone before I can, crossing the road and stepping onto the grass, beckoning for me to follow.
Eli nods in my direction as we approach—that, apparently, is how boys say hello in Phalene—and then wordlessly holds his phone out to Tess. She takes it, biting her lip as she scans the screen, and then lets out a laugh.
“Holy shit,” she says. “Really?”
“Yeah. Will says he passed it on his way to work.”
I feel ridiculous standing here, watching them have their own conversation, so I reach into the bag of chips and come up with a handful. It crinkles so loudly that Eli looks my way just as I’m in the middle of shoving it into my mouth. So what. I’m hungry.
“We should go see,” Tess says. She’s practically bouncing, her smile real and shining. “If it’s happening again.”
If what’s happening again?
Eli takes his phone back, shoves it in his pocket and moves toward one of the two bikes propped up in the rack. “You know I hate when you get started with that.” I want to ask what he means, but he’s already waving Tess away. “Come on. Let’s do something else.”
“What’s going on?” I say.
“Oh, you’ll want to see this,” Tess says even as Eli makes a noise of protest. “Somebody lit the Nielsen farm on fire again.”
It sweeps over me, a panic so wild and sudden I don’t understand it. Gram. That’s Gram’s land, and it’s burning. “On fire?” And then, as the rest of Tess’s words sneak inside: “Again?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Just like before. A new fire for a new Nielsen.”
She says it like it’s a story she’s telling, excited and eager. But this is real, and it matters. It matters that she knows my name. It matters that somewhere out there, my grandmother’s fields are on fire. What if Fairhaven is burning? What if Gram’s injured?
“Is everyone okay?” I manage to ask.
She shrugs. “Will didn’t say.”
I’m too close for it to all disappear. I won’t let it.
“We should go,” I say. “Now. We should go now.”
seven
the sun is high as we follow the main road out of town, Tess riding in front, standing up on her pedals. Eli stays steady; I’m perched on his handlebars, his arms bracketing me. It’s uncomfortable, and I can tell he’d rather I weren’t here, but after the first block I stop holding my body so stiff, stop focusing so hard on keeping my skin away from his, and manage a look around.
Outside the town center it’s more of those houses I passed on the way in, identical and rotting. Paint flaking like shedding skin, beams at an angle, the whole place swooning in the summer heat. Some houses are shut up and dark, mail piled on the porch. Others I can see into the kitchen, can watch a woman pick at crusted food on her apron as her microwave runs, can watch a toddler scream and scream from their high chair, red-faced and alone.
Mom was here. I can picture it, can put her on any one of these porches, in any one of these houses. I wonder if she was born wanting to be anywhere else, or if this place put it into her. If there were already stories about her last name or if the stories are about her.
It’s three more blocks before the town ends. Just like that. One moment it’s houses and streets that might have been tree-lined once, cars scattered like litter, and then it’s gone. Land smothered with crops, and the almost painfully empty stretch of the sky.
“Oh,” I say, before I can help myself, and I feel Eli’s chest jump behind me, like he’s laughing.
Tess said her family still plants, and said my grandmother does too. Or tries. This must be the land, hers or mine. The earth, dark and gritty and dry as we pass, and everywhere the yellow rise of the corn. This time of year it should be chest high and a bright, new sort of green. I’ve seen enough of it around Calhoun to know. But it’s not. And I know what Tess meant when she described Gram’s farm. Because this is all wrong.
The corn is too tall, maybe eight feet, and a strange, flat yellow, like it’s dying even as it grows. I wait for it, for the moment when we hit just the right angle to see all the way down the paths reaching empty and clean between the planting rows. But it never comes. The ranks are long gone, and what’s left is a tangle, stalks knotted together, the smell strangely bitter and almost chemical. I want to shut my eyes, to pretend Phalene has something else to give me, but I can’t. Because there, pluming black and heavy. Smoke on the horizon.