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

the way she curled, catlike, in the unyielding chair. After a while, she had opened her eyes, taken a moment to decide where she was, and looked down at their clinging hands. When she had gained her bearings, she smiled at him uncertainly and yawned.

“Get dressed and follow me,” she’d said after a bit, and he had.

She had taken him back to her house on the hill where there was plenty of hot water, a good shower, and breakfast in her garden. They had not spoken of his father or anything else from his past. And, in part because of his reluctance to talk about such things, she had not revealed much about herself either. They would discover what was important, in their own good time.

By Labor Day, Rachel and Joe were the kind of friends who unabashedly tell each other when they have something stuck between their teeth. They played late-night Scrabble and outdoor cribbage, did the crossword puzzle every Sunday morning, read each other’s palms, cut each other’s hair.

Joe felt, with Rachel, as if he had been taken apart, bone by bone, and put back together again in a far less imperfect way. She felt, with him, as if she would live forever. They had each had good friends before, but neither of them had ever had this. They didn’t even know what to call it, so they didn’t call it anything at all.

It was Rachel who tried to convince Joe, as they sat on her front porch paring apples for a pie, to call his faculty advisor at Yale, for the fall semester was scheduled to begin in just a few days. He was no longer concerned about revealing his whereabouts: his phone call to his father had already left traces and had, furthermore, convinced him that no one was likely to seek him out. But the thought of calling Yale made him hurt. It made him feel unwell.

“All of that’s over and done with,” he told her. “Besides, I’d hardly qualify for a scholarship.”

“You’re just looking for an excuse,” she insisted. “If you want to go back to school, just take out a loan until your birthday. By then you’ll have money of your own. Loads of it. Good God, man, it would take you ten minutes to get tide-over money. Probably less. I don’t know why you haven’t already gone ahead and done it. You’re not worried about your father tracking you down anymore, so why not call up your banker and get some money?”

He looked at her carefully. “You’re a terrible actor,” he said, taking her hand and putting it to his lips. “You would go mad without me, and you know it.”

“Go take a flying leap,” she said and burst out laughing. “Pig.” She threw an apple peel at him. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m doing just fine on my own,” he assured her. “The money will still be there when I want it. And so will Yale.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I do understand how you might feel that way.”

And that was when Rachel finally told Joe about her parents: their lives, deaths, legacies.

Joe had already heard these things from Ian and Angela but had waited for Rachel to be ready to tell him herself. Like Angela’s story about her husband, and like Rusty’s gift of the carving knife, knowing about Rachel’s loss had so softened Joe’s heart that he now felt newly saddened. As she spoke about her parents, tears in her eyes, his own lips trembled. His own chest ached.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “How did you bear it?”

“I didn’t have any choice,” she said.

He didn’t ask her about the money she’d inherited or what she’d done with it. It wasn’t something he wanted to know about. It wasn’t something he envied. It was almost something he feared.

In the end he decided not to call Yale, not to answer the questions that were bound to be asked. He’d let his father worry about that. So he sent a postcard instead, requesting a last-minute leave of absence, not really caring much whether it was granted.

With his mind made up—not only to stay in Belle Haven but to make it his home—Joe felt himself lighten as if he had shed a heavy winter skin. He began to breathe all the way down to the cradles of his lungs again, for the first time in years. He woke each day with an appetite and a curiosity that was easy to calm with small things—like walking straight out into the morning to sample the weather, following whatever temptation crossed his path, and embracing every chance to pair the days of his past with better ones in this, his new life. There were many such days that fall, and the promise of more to come.

Rachel and Joe spent Christmas together, invited Angela, Rusty, Dolly, and Ian for dinner at Rachel’s house. That night, after the feast, they all went out to the Schooner and built a big fire in Joe’s fireplace. Joe had decorated the pines at the edge of his clearing with tinfoil stars. They flared in the firelight, turning in the cold wind, and the clouds scudded across the dazzling sky. Wrapped in blankets, they sang Christmas songs and drank hot wine. They threw pinecones into the fire and waited for them to pop. They were silent and listened to the wind. Then they staggered to their various beds, sated with joy, and were asleep before the cold, hard, invigorating sheets had warmed.

Chapter 17

        In January, one week before Joe’s birthday, an old woman named Sophia Browning, who lived a fair distance from the nearest mine tunnel, was mixing up cookie dough when she found herself short an egg. So she went out into the snow to buy a dozen and a quart of milk to go with the cookies. She planned to eat them hot. She left her little house, its lights throwing golden patches on the snow, and her cat,