Wildefire Read Free

catch up then.”
    Eve narrowed her eyes, like some sort of menacing ice witch with the snow collecting on her brow. “Why?
    Why do you just content yourself to go along with the status quo when you know you’re intended for much greater things?” She jabbed her finger roughly on Ash’s sternum. “I know that you feel it in you, the same way I did when I gave the middle finger to this place and rode off into the sunset. Do you really feel like you belong in this Wonder Bread town? Have you ever felt like you belonged here?”
    Ash dropped her eyes to the pavement.
    “Then, why don’t you stop acting like you do! Do you really want to waste your time sitting for hours in some vomit-colored detention hall, just because”—Eve leveled a finger at Mr. Davis—“this miserable unmarried tyrant is angry that you”—and she pointed her thumb back at Lizzie—“showed this whorish man-stealing bottom-feeder, who has terrible split ends, a little bit of street justice?”
    12

    “Are you kidding me?” Lizzie screeched behind her.
    “Shut it, cupcake,” Eve snapped. “It’s called conditioner—use it sometime.”
    Mr. Davis took a step toward Eve and pointed to her motorcycle. “You have sixty seconds to leave school grounds.” He tapped his imaginary watch.
    “Just go home,” Ash said to her sister, more firmly this time. “I can take care of myself.”
    The wind picked up with increasing ferocity from the west. Ash’s hair billowed around her like a sail. Eve held out the biker’s helmet. “Get on the bike, Ash,” she ordered her sister. “I’m not leaving this parking lot without you. It’s for your own good.”
    “No,” Ash replied.
    “Get on the back of the damn bike!” Eve growled.
    Her face contorted with such vicious lines that even Mr.
    Davis took a few steps back. “Get on the bike, or so help me . . .”
    Ash was summoning the courage to refuse a second time when fate—in the form of Lizzie Jacobs’s stupid-ity—intervened. The blond girl snorted behind Eve. “I guess I wasn’t off target when I said that crazy runs in the family. But I can’t really blame you, Ash. If my older sister was a motorcycle-riding Antichrist, I guess I’d be a little rough around the edges too.”
    The wind died, and the only sound that could be heard throughout the parking lot was the distant call of thunder. Mr. Davis held his breath, frozen somewhere 13

    between mediating and wetting himself. Eve’s eyes were still fixed with smoldering fire on her little sister, and for one blessed, relief-filled instant Ash actually thought Eve was going to let the comment slide.
    Everything happened so fast. Eve whirled around like an Olympic discus thrower and, with her arm extended, smashed Lizzie Jacobs in the face with her motorcycle helmet. The already dazed sophomore spun around in an ugly pirouette on one foot, before collapsing to the pavement again, for the third and last time.
    The onset of violence spurred Mr. Davis back into action. “I’m calling the police,” he said, and his cell phone was already in his hand by the time he knelt down at Lizzie’s side.
    A vicious smile spread across Eve’s face, and she stepped forward so that she loomed over Lizzie. “I don’t know if it will be an improvement, but there’s certainly nothing I could have done to your face to make it any worse. Sweet dreams.” Eve flipped the helmet around in her hands. “Hopefully I knocked out another tooth and she’ll be symmetrical now.” She turned back to her sister, expecting Ash to look equally pleased.
    But Ash had tears in her eyes. “Why do you always do this?” she whispered. “You couldn’t have just come back to see me. You had to make it about destruction. It’s always about destroying something.”
    Eve stalked over to her with such intensity that for a split second Ash thought she might suffer the same fate 14

    as Lizzie. Eve leaned menacingly down so that she came nose-to-nose with her shorter