Sam
A month after Sam first sees the men in the restaurant, fire season in Angel City begins in earnest.
The Santa Ana winds rip through the mountain passes, breathing hot air on land scorched yellow by summer and drought, turning any spark into an inferno. A careless cigarette on the ground, not quite stamped out. A campfire not properly doused. A backyard barbecue left unattended for a minute. A single ember flies free, lands on dead grass, and roars to life with maw open, devouring everything in sight. One such ember sparked earlier in the week in a Bel Air valley, and that evening, it exploded into a line of fire sweeping from one hill to the next, orange and crimson clawing against the nightscape, leaving devastation in its wake. Two days later, the haze in the sky has turned the sun the shade of blood. Pale ash drifts in the air, piling like snow against cars. It looks like the end of the world, and yet people go about their lives, defying the apocalypse.
Sam finds herself staring up at the film of smoke and dreaming of what everything will look like in several months, when the rains break the fever and the scorched earth turns green once again. It is the alchemy of the seasons, this transformation of the land.
Alchemy.
Now that she knows the definition of the term, she tries to apply it everywhere. Wildfires into rainstorms, dead grass into new growth, seeds into flowers. Air cooked dry by heat into breath fogging in cold air. Sun-soaked afternoons into frost-laced evenings. Morning streets dotted with construction workers and people holding cardboard signs into night alleys illuminated by neon lights and fancy crowds. Alchemy, alchemy.
She sees the men in the restaurant twice more, although both times her mother sends her to the supply closet to wait, where Sam sits in silent frustration until the day is done, only able to guess at what the men might bediscussing. At home, Sam neglects her schoolwork and instead uses her mother’s laptop to hunt online for information about alchemy. She doesn’t have anyone to tell about her finds, and she’s certainly not going to risk stoking her mother’s temper about it, so she only confides in Rabbit as she sits with it in her lap, using her dear old friend as a pillow for her chin as she reads aloud hundreds of links about the ancient Western obsession with turning lead into gold, the Eastern obsession with achieving immortality. How it is a fake science. The precursor to modern chemistry.
But none of it tells her anything useful, about what it might meantoday.She only finds online groups that read tarot cards, consult psychics, and mix a bunch of chemicals together into phony alchemical elixirs. The more Sam searches, the less truth she finds. It all sounds as plausible as sorcery, make-believe nonsense. But the men in the restaurant hadn’t looked like the kind of people who indulge in mysticism—they’d looked like businessmen. And yet they had spoken about alchemy as if it were a known fact, as tangible as the boy they’d mentioned named Will, and his mother, Diamond Taylor.
As happens when you first learn about something, Sam soon starts to notice Diamond’s name everywhere.
There is the Diamond Taylor Center for Pediatric Cancer in Mid-City, its giant sign visible from the freeway. There is the mayor thanking her and a list of other donors at the city’s summer festival. There is the Associated Press photo from the Angel City Winter Gala of her and her son, Will. There is the recent article about her corporation, Grand Central, renovating their twin Winged Towers in downtown. There is her name on the local news about attending the premiere for the Odyssey Theatre’s newest show.
Sometimes, Sam overhears her neighbors gossiping about Diamond. They mostly talk about her astounding wealth and how much of the city she owns. One neighbor tells a story about a friend’s uncle who got a six-figure salary working for Grand Central, how another colleague’s sister got a business loan from her. She helped this person find a lawyer who would take their case. She helped that person get their hospital bills waived.
She can make anything happen.
The next time Sam rides the bus past the Odyssey Theatre, she wonders if Diamond Taylor might be there among the crowds gathered on the red carpet, as she often is on premiere nights.A patron of the arts,her neighbors had murmured.A lady with a heart.
But as far as Sam’s neighbors are concerned, Diamond Taylor is just asuccessful businesswoman. Nothing Sam finds online about her sheds any further light on what she has to do with alchemy or why the men in the restaurant might have been interested in her. So every day, at the end of Sam’s searching, she closes her search tabs in frustration, no closer to answers than she’d been before.
One smoky morning, Sam arrives to class before Ari does. As he rushes in after the bell, she sneaks a good look at him, admiring his head of black curls and his lovely dark eyes. Even on the first day of class, there had been something about her quiet classmate that snared her attention—an appealing tilt to his head and a curious pull to his stare, the pleasant surprise of his instant acknowledgment. And even though they’ve said little to each other since that moment, she finds herself constantly wondering things like where he lives and what he ate for breakfast, whether he has siblings and why he’s late today.
He sits down and immediately pulls out his notebook. He is more studious than her, and it makes her feel self-conscious about her own lack of motivation during class. She can’t help it. Her teachers never seem to care for her answers. Once, in kindergarten, a quiz had a picture of a car and the question:How many wheels does this have?Sam had answered5,to include the spare tire in the trunk, but had gotten it marked wrong. After many such incidents over the years, her confidence has dissipated. She simply can’t figure out how to give the correct incorrect answers that her teachers are looking for. So what’s the point of trying?
Now she watches Ari with a mixture of admiration and contempt, wondering if he feels rewarded for being so diligent.
As everyone settles down, their teacher yawns loudly. Sam stifles a smile and looks to Ari, only to find him already staring at her. She is so used to being ignored that Ari’s focus on her feels like a sear of light.
She whispers to him, “They should start school later. Even the teachers are tired.”
Ari smiles back and shrugs. “I like early mornings.”
Sam rolls her eyes. Studiousanda morning person. “Well, you’re the only one.”
The teacher starts talking, and the class hushes. Ari turns away to write something in his notebook. After a while, he rips it out of the binding, thenfolds it into thirds and tucks the end of it back on itself into a makeshift envelope. When the teacher isn’t looking, he passes it to her.
Sam looks at it in surprise, then at him, wide eyes blinking as if she’d just received a Christmas present. She opens it and reads:
So, Miss Sam Lang, let me clarify.
I like early mornings when the sun hasn’t come out yet. But you can hear the birds already, and even though it’s still dark, you know that the light is coming. Anything can happen, because nothing has happened yet.
What’s your favorite time of day, then? You like sleeping in?
Her stomach twists in a funny way, and she can’t stop the smile that spreads wide on her face. She reads the note a second time, savoring it, and then writes one back to him.
When does the night end and the morning begin? 2A.M.is my favorite because you can read in the dark and the entire world is quiet. I once saw an owl outside our window around then. Have you ever seen an owl in the wild? They’re enormous. I don’t understand how they can make no sound at all.
I’ve never gotten a letter before.
His handwriting is neater than hers, the curls on hisg’s andy’s easy and graceful. She feels a little embarrassed as she passes her note back to him, then waits, throat tight, as he reads it. Her gaze lingers momentarily on his thick, dark lashes as he writes a new note. Then he hands it back to her, casting her a sidelong smile that makes her heart jump.
