But I had no doubt she would tell her mother, and that was worse than her calling the cops.
“The mums by your front porch looked ratty,” I said.
“So?”
I sighed, undid the flap of my messenger bag, and turned it upside down. Flower trimmings scattered to the sidewalk along with a few crumpled geometry worksheets, an empty light bulb package, and a handful of pens. I picked up the pens, the worksheet, and the cardboard packaging and shoved them back into the bag.
Artemis’s eyebrows knotted in confusion. “You pruned our mums?”
“They looked ratty,” I repeated, glancing around. Almost all the ghosts were gone. “Will you leave me alone now?”
“But—why—” Then her expression lifted, and a manicured finger shot out to point at me. “It’s you! You’re the one who’s been going around fixing things for people and cleaning their yards and—”
“Keep it down!” I darted toward her, hoping to shut her up; my sudden movement seemed to do the trick. The old Victorian houses on her street were all far back from the road and hidden by trees, so at least there was no one around to hear us. “Don’t tell anyone! You’ll get me arrested.”
Artemis’s brows furrowed again. “Is this supposed to be somekind of repentance?” she asked, head cocked with a historian’s curiosity. “For what? You didn’t set the fires a year ago. And besides, people won’t forgive you if they don’t know you’re the one doing all the nice things for them.”
“I tried asking,” I said, “but surprise, nobody wants help from a Novak. Is that enough explanation for you? Go away.” I flicked my hand, peppering her with the garbage water, and started east again.
Bootsteps clopped up the sidewalk behind me.
“Zora, wait! The hunting—Addamsville needs more help than just pruned mums—”
I spun, the old anger bubbling in my throat. She didn’t understand how this worked, between her family and mine. She didn’t understand what hunting firestarters took from you. And she didn’t understand me.
The northeast sky stopped me. A pillar of smoke curled into the air, visible only because of the floodlights of the distant junkyard polluting the dark behind it. Artemis stopped, too, her hand inches from my arm.
“What is that?” she asked.
There was only one thing it could be. I had never set a fire that gave off that much smoke, but I’d seen it on television and in pictures. It spilled black and angry from the doors and windows of houses while their roofs caved in and their walls cracked. It was the fire of buildings being devoured. My heartskittered into the lowest reaches of my chest. The blistering heat. The deadly light. The stumps on my ring and pinkie fingers of my right hand ached under their prosthetics.
The wail of a fire truck started on the opposite side of town.
I took off. Away from Artemis, away from the wide-open spaces where I might be seen. Had I been thinking straight at the time, I might have turned to Artemis and calmly confirmed her as my alibi. I might not have immediately run away from her. I might have paid more attention to the ghosts, because for them all to disappear as they had meant there was something very wrong going on in their world. It meant there was a firestarter nearby.
But I never thought straight when it came to fire. Losing two fingers because of it will do that to you.
So I ran until I was alone, until I met the protective covering of the trees and hills of the east side, where the trailer park nestled quietly in the early morning. There were no dead here, though there should have been. They’d made themselves scarce. I hiked up the curving trail to the top of the bluffs to find the Novak trailer sitting dark and still. Artemis hadn’t followed.
The trees hid the town from here, but sirens still rang in my ears. They’d rattle in my head until six a.m., when I pretended to wake up and found my sister Sadie watching the news. Milk from her cereal spoon dripped unnoticed ontoher thick afghan. The reporter standing before the blackened ruins of Masrell’s house detailed the two-and-a-half-hour struggle of the firefighters who extinguished the inferno and the unfortunate scene they’d found inside.
George Masrell was dead. The fire had burned too fast and too hot to have started accidentally. The police were now looking for an arsonist.
The people of Addamsville would know what this meant. Who had a record of setting fires? Who had shown disregard and even outright disdain for other locals in the past? Who might have had a slight beef with George Masrell because he yelled at her for dumping cold coffee in the school trash a couple of times?
I’d been the center of an Addamsville story before, but never like this.
2
Addamsville was a small town where everyone knew everyone, and everyone’s parents knew everyone else’s parents, and grandparents, and great grandparents, and all the way back to the founding of the town at the dawn of mankind. We were big enough for our own movie theater, a CVS pharmacy, and a dog park, otherwise known as the Happiest Place on Earth. There was a poor part of town and a rich part of town, and one part never let the other forget where it stood. If you had been here long enough, your last name was a status symbol. It was currency.
I was a Novak, and we paid in blood money.
Our trailer was the only one in town not in the trailer park. Sadie told me it was once, before I was born, but then Mom got tired of our neighbors and worked some magic to get it movedto the bluffs, where we could hide in the trees and on clear days look down at Addams Lake. When the town council tried to get Mom to move it back, they found Dad standing by the front door, leaning on his wood axe and chomping what looked like a lot of tobacco but was actually a cheek of Sour Apple Big League Chew, and Mom squatting on top of the trailer.
I like to imagine that was what frightened them off: Mom on the roof like an evil crow, dark hair damp with early spring mist, black eyes flashing in the gloom of the trees. Maybe they didn’t see her until she moved.
It was only a scare tactic, of course, but Mom was known around town as a weirdo anyway, so the story grew. She was a witch. She saw ghosts. No one really believed that, and she didn’t want them to, because it was true. I used to walk with her to Momo’s General Store at town center, where she’d explain the dead to me and buy me fresh-sliced Colby cheese to eat on the way home, and the owner, Maurice Moseley, looked at us like we’d crawled out of the sewers. There and back, passersby stared at Mom as we walked.There’s that Dasree Novak,they’d say.Get the children away before she steals their youth.
