Fire with Fire (Burn for Burn 2)

Kat, looking skeptical, takes her fingers off her nose and gives a sniff of the air. Then she starts to gag. “I’d stop telling people that if I were you.”

“Fine. There’s a trail that runs down by the coast that’s pretty. No one else is out riding. We can walk it.”

“Sure, whatever,” Kat says, gasping for breath. She turns and runs back for the barn entrance.

I put Phantom’s finishing brush away and give him a kiss before I leave him. Outside, it’s practically dark, and kind of cold, but Kat and I start walking anyway.

“I called Mary,” I tell Kat. “But I’m not sure she got—”

“Guys! Wait up!”

We turn and see Mary, running toward us. “Sorry I missed your call, Lillia. I fell asleep. I always take a nap after school.”

“Aww,” Kat says.

Delicately I say, “Is everything okay at home? Your aunt was kind of weird when I called. I didn’t think she’d give you the message.”

Mary sighs. “Aunt Bette’s on some kind of New Agey tear lately. She’s more into books and crystals and stuff than interacting with actual people.” She shakes her head. “So what’s up? Is everything okay?”

I guess the three of us have only ever hung out when we were scheming up revenge plans. Or when we had urgent business to discuss. Except all that’s over with now.

“Nothing much,” I say. “I just missed you guys.”

Kat eyes me. “How’s things with Ren?”

“Not great,” I say. And that’s all. I mean, I want to let it all out. I want to tell them how much it sucks right now, but I can’t. Kat went through exactly what I’m going through. Even worse. So who am I to complain?

But Kat is surprisingly sympathetic. She pats me on the back and says, “Don’t worry. Someone else will piss her off and she’ll forget about it. Hey! It might even be me!”

“And you’ll always have us,” Mary says.

I smile at them both. “Thanks, guys.”

After that it’s kind of quiet. It’s not uncomfortable silence, exactly. More like we don’t have much left to say to each other anymore. Which maybe we don’t. It’s still nice being with them, though.

CHAPTER SIX

When the bell rings at the end of third period, I head to the library instead of to calc, because the guidance office is offering a workshop for seniors to help them fill out their college applications.

I’m almost positive it’ll be a waste of time. I’m going earlydecision Oberlin, and the materials are pretty straightforward. A basic application and a personal statement about who I am and why I want to go there. It should be a cakewalk.

But after my less-than-awesome SAT scores this summer, I need to pull out all the stops. It’s a f**king broken system. With the SATs, there are tons of tricks about how to answer questions that can bring your score up hundreds of points. That’s why rich kids end up doing so much better than poor kids, because they can afford special classes that shit where they teach you those secrets.

It’s not like I could ever afford a private tutor, so I got a bunch of books out of the library. Some of them were super outdated, and some dumb-ass had actually filled in the practice tests in pen. I did the best I could, which clearly wasn’t enough. I plan on talking about that in my personal statement, actually. Oberlin is a super-liberal, progressive place. I feel like they’d jive on my lower-class angst. Regardless, I’m going to have to take them again next month, and hopefully improve my score by a couple hundy.

If there are any secret guidance counselor tricks I can learn, anything that will make my application to Oberlin rock freaking solid and stand out over all the others, I need to know them. I’ll do whatever it takes to get off Jar Island forever. Ohio might not seem like the coolest place, but it’s definitely where I want to be for more than a few reasons.

The library is dead, so dead I wonder if maybe this thing is happening in the guidance office instead. I walk over to the reference desk. The librarian there is on the computer. I hold my yellow pass up and say, “Do you know where the—” but she cuts me off with a big fat “Shhhh” even though there’s no one in here but her. Then she points to the conference room next to the computers.

There aren’t a lot of kids in the conference room. Maybe five other seniors, some I recognize and some I don’t. I take a seat in the back, unzip my bag, and pull out the application to Oberlin. You fill it out online, but I printed a copy out so I could plan all my answers beforehand.

Ms. Chirazo, the head of guidance, comes in as the bell rings, in the flowy black pants and yarn neck scarf that seems to be her unofficial uniform. I swear, the woman has nothing but that shit hanging in her closet.

She frowns, I guess because she’s disappointed with the lack of turnout. But then she sees me and her face brightens. “Katherine DeBrassio! How are you, dear?”

I mumble, “Fine,” and stare down at my papers.

“We should arrange a time to sit down in private and properly catch up!” She says it way too cheerily, and it basically confirms my worst suspicions.

I had to talk with Ms. Chirazo when my mom died. Not because I needed to. I wasn’t acting out in class or crying in public or anything like that. But Ms. Chirazo saw the obituary in the newspaper. She actually showed up to one of my classes with it clipped out and asked me in this weirdly calm voice, “Would you like to talk?” She wasn’t even a guidance counselor at the middle school. She worked in the high school. But I guess grief is her specialty.

I told her, “Nope. I would not.”

And then bitch made it a mandatory five sessions!

I know she loved it, getting to counsel a kid over the death of a parent. I’d come in and she’d be smiling like a kid on Christmas morning. Parental death is like gold to a school counselor. That, abusive relationships, teen pregnancies, and eating disorders. I barely said more than two words to her each of the sessions. At our last one she gave me all these grief workbooks and crap that I chucked in the Dumpster as soon as I was dismissed.

“Well, this might be it for today,” she says, turning her attention back to the room. “Hopefully, you’ll spread the word to your friends and classmates how valuable this resource is.” She’s about to close the door, but someone stops her.

Alex Lind.

He’s wearing a pair of dark jeans, and a black-and-whitechecked shirt underneath a hunter-green sweater. “Sorry I’m late.” Even though there are plenty of empty chairs, he slides into the one next to me. “Looks like we’re officially losers,” he whispers and laughs.