The View From Who I Was by Heather Sappenfield

Author:Heather Sappenfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: young adult, ya, ya fiction, young adult fiction, teen, teen fiction, teen novel, native american
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2014-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Angel kept the flashlight off till we were away from the campus. Even then, it cast a wan light the size and shape of a soccer ball. The trail descended steadily, sometimes dropping into a draw and climbing steeply out. It was hard to gauge when the rocks or sticks or whatever Corpse saw in the flashlight’s beam would arrive underfoot, so she tripped about every twentieth step.

After an hour the air turned strangely warm, conjuring Chateau Antunes’s warm air as she’d wobbled, in that mask of bandages, down the hall toward Gabe. The night sky glowed, and a roaring sound filled it. Ahead of them reached a wall of white smoke. Shouts sounded, faint against the roar. The smoke made Corpse blink and take shallow breaths.

The highway appeared a hundred yards down a graded hill. On its far side, weirdly enticing flames took over the night. Sheriff cars, state patrol cars, fire trucks, and trucks with Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management emblems filled the inside lane, their strobe lights slicing the dark. The roaring came from the fire, but it reminded Corpse of a river’s sound. And something else she couldn’t place.

Angel and Corpse settled behind a clump of sagebrush. A thwapping consumed the air, and their hair swirled. A helicopter, its light a knife of daylight, dropped water from a huge, dangling sack onto the fire’s length. It turned and passed again. In its path, Corpse saw firefighter after firefighter step back and look up.

The breeze toward us stiffened. A tall pine exploded, sending a spray of orange branches and bark. The tree swayed and fell, an arc of yellow against the night, and a scream pierced the fire’s roar. Corpse scanned the scene frantically: one firefighter lay trapped beneath the trunk, another beneath its branches.

Firefighters rushed forward, hurling dirt onto the tree with their shovels, able to safely reach only the branches. They pried out that firefighter from a web of flame. Angel glanced at Corpse, but Corpse was fixated on the body trapped beneath the trunk.

In Bio, during our cellular respiration lab, Mr. Bonstuber had told us that when organic things combusted, they rose as carbon dioxide and steam, invisible but for suspended soot and ash. Before her eyes, that firefighter was evaporating.

Within minutes the fire was gnawing the highway’s edge. Two paramedics and two firefighters shot onto the pavement through a gap in the flames, carrying a yellow stretcher. The injured firefighter was jostled along, but his eyes stayed closed. Angel rushed toward the stretcher, but Corpse froze and touched the top of her head, where Ash’s crown had been.

I was right there with her, and in our mind’s eye, that guy’s brown jacket and pants transformed to a pink dress, his bearded face to ours. Something about how he lay wasn’t right; we peered at death.

The back of an ambulance opened, a bright geometry, and Angel returned to Corpse’s side as the stretcher slid into it. The doors slammed. The paramedics raced

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