Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

and come back home instead? Why haven’t you ever taken advantage of your freedom, whether you asked for it or not? Why are you acting now like it’s your duty to stay where you are, even if it means risking everything else, including Joe, including Rusty—” She bit her lip. Rachel had not asked them to stay in Belle Haven. It wasn’t her fault that Rusty had nearly died. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You weren’t the one who risked Rusty by staying here. I was.”

But Rachel knew she had played a part. She began to weep. Her tears mixed with the ash on her face. Her hands left black smudges across her cheeks. “I’m so confused, Angela. I miss them so much.”

“I know, baby. I know.” She stroked Rachel’s hair away from her face. “You don’t want to leave them, do you?”

Rachel pictured her parents’ ashes dissolving in the water of the creek. She told Angela that she had not buried them in Belle Haven after all.

“Then what is it?”

“What is what?”

“What is so important that you can’t leave it behind?”

Rachel grabbed her head in both hands. “I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t.” She dropped her hands. There was a streak of dried blood on one of her palms. She closed her eyes. “Joe said something to me once. He said it wasn’t the place that was important but what it meant to us. He said we should be able to take with us whatever mattered most about the places we loved.” She opened her eyes. “And that makes sense to me. It really does. But if that’s true, why am I so afraid to leave?”

Angela looked at Rachel and, for the first time since her son had gone nearly to his death, began to cry.

“Maybe because by staying here you’ve been honoring your parents, immortalizing them, insisting that your life here with them was always perfect. Somewhere along the way, you’ve convinced yourself that running away from Belle Haven means confessing to all the people you love, and who love you, and who have known you since you were a child that you might have been far happier somewhere else.”

When the doctor called to her, Angela ran down the hall and into the room where they were dressing Rusty’s burns. For the rest of her life, Rachel would wish that she had not followed. But she did, for staying alone in the too bright hallway that still rang with Angela’s words seemed worse by far.

“It was so terrible. So terrible,” Rusty was saying when Rachel walked into the room. Angela was leaning over the table where he lay, stroking the hair away from his face. “I was hanging on to some tree roots. There’s a great big oak right there where we went through. I was hanging on to those roots with my face pressed into a hollow spot between them, and the dirt was coming down over my head and it was awfully hot and all I could hear was a sound like the wind howling down below me and there was screaming from up above. And it all happened so fast that at first I didn’t realize that something was hanging on to my leg, and then I could feel that it was Mary Beth. I could feel her hands slipping down my leg and grabbing at my shoe. And I was trying to pull us up out of the hole. And then somebody grabbed my wrist and I thought I was going to be torn in half.” He stopped and opened his eyes, turned to look at his mother. “And then she let go of my foot and I started to come up out of the hole. I could feel the dirt sucking down under my feet as she let go and slipped away. Do you think she was dead already?”

Angela thought for a moment that he sounded like a much younger boy asking the kind of impossible question that little children always ask. Why is the sky blue? What am I going to be like when I grow up? Did you know that some people get old and die?

“I’m sure that she was, Rusty,” was all she said, laying her fingers on his lips.

But Rachel was not so sure.

She was still thinking pretty clearly when she left the room, remembered to call Ed Zingham to come over to the hospital to drive Angela and Rusty home, her truck too small to give Rusty room to lie down. But as she pulled up alongside her house, she realized that she could not remember driving home, not at all. When she took her hands off the wheel, they began to shake, and her legs, when she put her feet down on the ground, nearly gave way.

The sight of her house in the evening sunlight sickened her, hurt her eyes, so she walked around it and through her backyard, straight into the woods and up the gently sloping hill toward the tree house.

Joe was sitting on the little deck, his legs hanging over the edge, carving a small nugget of wood, when Rachel came out of the trees into the clearing below with signs of fire on her face and hands.

She opened her mouth, and a croupy sound came out, as if she had swallowed acid. She tried again but managed only a louder sound, much the same, and Joe dropped the knife in his hand, let the half-done swallow fall into the leaves below, nearly falling out of the tree himself in his haste to reach her.

She could not climb to the tree house, so he gentled her down to the leaves and sat down beside her, cradling her in his arms, holding her head tight against the side of his neck. Her whole body was limp and cold, though he could feel her shake minutely with every breath, and her fingers sometimes jerked as if she had fallen into an