After another moment of silence, the coach uncrossed her arms. “It’s pointless telling you how bad smoking is for your lungs and stamina. But you know it makes your lips thinner, right?”
“And gives you yellow teeth, puffy skin, and wrinkles around the eyes,” Ariel recited. “That’s why I don’t smoke.”
Coach narrowed her eyes and came closer, until they were face-to-face. Ariel tried to keep from staring at the red claws sneaking out from beneath the T-shirt.
The woman sniffed. “Is that smoke I smell?”
“Yeah, but it’s not cigarette smoke. I built a fire this morning . . . to warm up.”
The coach raised an eyebrow. But Ariel wasn’t lying, and cigarette smoke didn’t smell at all like an honest fire.
It had only been a small one. Ariel had indulged on the way to school, in an already burned-out oil barrel behind the Shop ’n’ Save. Someone had left a bundle of three-foot cardboard tubes in a Dumpster, impossible to ignore. She’d arranged them into a pyramid balanced on the rim of the barrel, and it had taken only a few minutes before the burning structure had crumbled, spitting a galaxy of sparks into the air.
“Whatever you say, Flint. Follow me.”
Ariel trailed her toward the girls’ locker room, boots in hand.
The locker room smelled as it always did, like old sweat and cheap soap. Coach Dale opened the door to the Cage, which was what everyone called her office with its walls of metal grating. She slid open her desk and pulled out an eraser the size of a cigarette lighter, pink and new.
She tossed it to Ariel, who caught it with her free hand.
“That should do the trick. Use spit if you need to.”
Ariel stared at the eraser for a moment, and Coach Dale sighed and reached across the desk. She plucked the boots from Ariel’s hand, slid open a file drawer, and dropped them in. She shut the drawer and turned its lock.
“You get those back when I can’t find a single mark on my court.”
“Okay, but—” The blare of the first bell cut Ariel off.
Coach Dale sank into her desk chair, picked up a clipboard and pen, and kicked up her feet. “Fifteen minutes till first period. Better get erasing, Flint. Just remember to rub with the grain of the wood.”
Ariel started to protest again, but tasted defeat before the words left her mouth. She sighed, turned, and walked out of the Cage, through the locker room, and back to the court. Her heart was no longer racing from her escape from Peterson, nor with the dying dregs of her crush on Coach Dale.
This sucked.
She knelt at center court, counting black smudges until her tally reached twenty. She rubbed at the smallest mark with the eraser, spitting on it once or twice, until it had completely disappeared.
Then Ariel looked up at the big sweep-hand clock over the door. Twelve minutes left till homeroom, more than nineteen marks to go. She doubted Coach Dale would be writing her a late pass.
That was the hitch with getting caught. One infraction led to another until you were certified a bad kid, unsalvageable. But all Ariel could do was keep erasing little black marks and ignoring how cold her feet were.
She was less than halfway done when the first-period late-bell rang. A moment later a crowd of girls surged from the locker rooms, already suited up in field hockey uniforms.
Coach Dale followed them out, yelling, “Four laps, ladies! No cutting corners!”
Ariel made the mistake of looking up, and caught the eyes of the first runners in the pack. She saw their expressions switch from momentary confusion to a mix of amusement and pity.
She stared at the floor again, at her pink eraser rubbing hopelessly at the black marks. Ariel was an expert at keeping her head down, but that didn’t do much good here in the middle of the gym, a score of girls running circles around her with nothing else to stare at. Her face grew as hot as her feet were cold.
“Any time now, Flint,” Coach Dale called from the sidelines. “I need my basketball court.”
“Sorry,” Ariel muttered, just to be saying something.
She heard her last name repeated by the runners, like a whisper traveling through the gym. She closed her mind to her surroundings, narrowing her focus to the black marks in front of her. . . .
Then she felt it happening—the friction kindling beneath the pink tongue of the eraser, the growing heat at her fingertips. Her awareness expanded, not outward to the titters of the girls around her, but down into the materials of the gym itself. She felt the pine under her hands and knees, sensed the oxygen trapped in the tiny spaces of the wood’s grain, the resins and oils that gave it color. Then farther out to the dry wood of the bleachers, the banners hanging from the walls. She could smell the iron oxide in the half-disintegrated eraser, and the hot filaments of the lightbulbs overhead.
The school was full of volatiles, wood and plaster, cloth and plastic, cans of paint and stacks of paper.
All of it waiting for a single spark. . . .
* * *
Darcy heard a bang and looked up from her screen.
But it wasn’t Carla and Sagan in the other bedroom, just a truck rattling over a manhole cover down on the street. Darcy stretched her arms. The laptop had grown hot against her thighs, and her shoulders were tight from reading.
She let them relax, breathing out the words, “Thank f**k.”
Pyromancer didn’t suck, not even remotely. And more important, she could feel Imogen in its diction, in the rhythm of its prose, even in its hesitations, the quirks of commas and ellipses.
Darcy knew that she should get up now, shower and dress and ready herself for a day of museums with Carla and Sagan, of prying questions about Imogen, and of blowing her budget for at least a week.
But she wanted more Pyromancer. Not just because the sentences tasted like Imogen, but because the story had pulled her in.
These were pages that she needed to turn.
“My girlfriend’s got the juice,” Darcy whispered, and bent her knees to read some more.
* * *
“So what’s she like?” Carla asked out of nowhere.
The three of them were at the Metropolitan Museum, in a vast gallery built around the Temple of Dendur, an ancient shrine to Osiris that had been shipped from Egypt in pieces and put back together stone by stone. The room’s northern wall was made entirely of glass, and late-morning sunlight filtered through it to bathe the ancient sandstone. Sagan was inside the temple, reading centuries-old graffiti carved by soldiers. Carla had stayed outside with Darcy, who found the temple’s interior claustrophobic—too many millennia crammed into such a small space.