Burn Our Bodies Down(13)

“Oh, you know.” Tess straightens up, strands from her ponytail sticking to the door of the freezer. She smiles when she notices me watching. “Middle of nowhere. Boring. But I guess it’s not boring if you’re here for Fairhaven.”

I go still. “For what?”

“Oh, come on,” she says. “Really?”

Is it that obvious who I belong to? If not for our ages, Mom and I could be sisters, could be twins, and maybe it’s the same with Gram, but I didn’t expect anyone to recognize me.

I could tell her. I was ready to when I got here, with no reason to hide. But the panic that wrapped around me as the pharmacy clerk reached for the phone—I can still feel it. Not safe, not safe, over and over in my head.

“Have it your way,” Tess says, when it’s clear I won’t respond, and I can see the interest leak out of her, see her summer smile sliding back on.

So she doesn’t care. If I’m not going to entertain her, I’m worth less of her time. But I still need to find Gram. And I know Tess can tell me how, if I can only find a way to ask that doesn’t mean giving her something in exchange.

I should talk about her. She’ll open up that way.

“Your family own this place too?” I say, grabbing a bag of chips from the rack. She frowns, and I wave it off. “I heard you before. Landlord’s daughter.”

“That’s me,” she says, giving a wide, sparkling smile for a moment before it drops and she’s rolling her eyes. “Yeah, they bought up half the town.”

The storefronts, maybe. Or the land I passed on the way in, flat and dry, furrowed from long-ago planting. “Are the fields yours too? They looked pretty wrecked.”

Tess takes the chips from me and opens the bag, fishes for a handful. “Out east? If it’s wrecked it’s not ours. Everything else is, though. It’s all a mess. Phalene used to be a big farming town when the Nielsens owned it, but after the drought, the land went bad and nobody could afford to grow anything.”

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.”