Page 42 of Pieces of Ash
How in the fuck isthisher best option?
Who is she?
And what exactly is her deal?
I grimace because the headlines of her story—the easy parts—start materializing as I think about what little I know about her. I didn’t do all that training for nothing. Plus, I have good instincts. I could practically smell it on her—the fear, the desperation, the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes except to insist that she was an adult.
God, what a joke. If she’s an adult, I’m a French poodle.
It was Jock’s boyfriend, Gus, who gave away the most important part of her story.
She has nowhere else to go.
And then something else occurs to me, and I wonder,Is she in hiding?
This girl—what’s her name? Amber? Audrey?—is in trouble.Bigtrouble. The kind of trouble that gets other people in hot water when they were just trying to live their lives and mind their own business. And she’s been dumped on my doorstep. Literally.
Not my business. Not my problem.
I take off my glove and hang it and its mate on a nail over my workbench. I never fired up the oven today, and after this morning’s shit bomb of irritating developments, I don’t have the patience to work on figurines anymore.
I put my hands on my hips and frown.
Nowhereelse to go?
How is that even possible?
My mom left when I was twelve and Noelle was eight, and my dad died eight years later, when I was a junior at Granite State College and Noelle was a junior in high school. No way my mother was interested in disrupting her new life to take care of us, so I left my room at the dorm and came home to live in Quechee with my sister. I looked after Noelle, commuting to college for my final two years instead of living on campus. I got Noelle up for high school every day and made sure she had money for lunch before I got in my car and headed to class. I signed her permission slips and helped her buy a prom dress. I didn’t start my FLETA training down in Georgia until Noelle had started her freshman year at Saint Michael’s.
This girl over in the house doesn’t have a mother? A father? A sibling? A grandparent?Someone?That doesn’t seem possible to me. It doesn’t make sense. It seems suspicious and puts me even more on edge.
While I’ve been sitting here thinking about my new and extremely unwanted housemate, I’ve been toying with a piece of blue glass—a solid tube about twenty centimeters long and half a centimeter in diameter. That it’s approximately the same color as her eyes is a fact I try to ignore as I turn on the torch in front of me and pull a pair of safety glasses from a hook to my right.
Holding the tube in the fire, I twist the glass back and forth, watching it melt, creating a blob at the end. When I have a nice, rounded marble, I press it against a cool metal slab, flattening it a little at the end of the tubing. Before it cools, I press the flattened blob against a few small white crystal pieces still lying on the metal from a previous project. They’re picked up by the hot glass, and I heat them again. I do the same with a few granules of green, and now my flat blue blob is embedded with flecks of white and green. I hold it up to the flame again, twisting it into a blob again, watching as it transforms back into a smoothsphere, with white and green flecks of melted color trapped inside the light blue glass marble.
I turn off the torch, clip my marble with glass scissors before it cools, and then, as gently as possible, clasp it with tweezers and dunk it into a metal cup of water.
When I lift it out, I have a perfect marble, about the same diameter as a quarter; and when I hold it up to the light, it’s like I’m looking at a tiny, distorted version of the world.
Huffing softly, I whistle at Bruno, putting the marble in my pocket and closing the barn door behind me as we head back to the pasture for a long walk in the woods.
ASHLEY
From the window of my new bedroom, I see Julian and his dog leave the barn, locking the door before slipping around the side, back toward the meadow.
I don’t have much to unpack, but I hold a folded T-shirt tight to my chest as I watch them go.
The sunlight glints off his golden hair, which brushes his shoulders, and he reaches up and binds it into a short ponytail. His strides are long and even, and I can see a strip of tan skin between the waist of his jeans and the hem of his T-shirt with each sure step.
“Whew,” I murmur, reaching up to fan my face as the duo disappears into the woods at the property line. Even though I can’t see them anymore, I linger at the window, as if hoping for one last glimpse.
Finally turning back to the bureau between the two windows, I add the shirt I’m holding to the one in the drawer. Beforewe left New Paltz, Father Joseph handed me a plastic bag from Target that contained three pairs of size four jeans; a three-pack of T-shirts in white, black, and gray; a three-pack of white camisoles; a three-pack of white cotton underwear; a three-pack of white socks; and a pair of simple white tennis shoes. I found his Mets cap in the bottom of the bag when I used the train lavatory to change out of my school uniform, and his unexpected kindness made me cry. It was the hat he wore whenever the juniors played the seniors in softball. All the girls would tease him about being Coach Joseph instead of Father Joseph, which he accepted with good-natured chuckles. I will cherish it above all things. I need to remind Gus to get it back from the cleaners for me ASAP.
I close the dresser drawer and sit down on the edge of the bed. With the window cracked open, fresh scents of the countryside breeze into my room—dark soil, fresh-cut grass, sweet flowers, and lighter, perhaps farther away, manure. I stop picking them apart and let them blend together seamlessly, inhaling until my lungs are full.
Rest here, lil’ Ash. We’ll help you figure out the rest.
I lie back on the bed, looking up at the white ceiling fan, and realize there are clouds painted on the ceiling. A tear rolls from the corner of my eye as I muster a smile. Heaven. I pull my legs onto the bed and let my tired eyes drift closed.
