Wildefire (10 page)

The headmistress appeared in the doorway and summoned Raja with a flash of her hand. The door snapped closed behind them.

It seemed like no time at all before Ash heard the groan of chair legs against the hardwood floors the footsteps plodding across the room. Raja stealthily slipped through the door and out into the hallway without casting Ash so much as a sideways glance.

Ash was still watching Raja scurrying around the corner when she sensed the presence behind her.

“Ms. Wilde.”

The office was exactly as Ash remembered it—the leather armchairs, the miniature chandelier, the large world globe sitting quietly on its axis in the corner of the room. The air smelled vaguely of tangerines and licorice.

The sobering looks from Raja and the others had done nothing to diminish Ashline’s dread, but at least the cushy black leather chair was more comfortable than her seat in the foyer. Her offending ass cheek slowly regained sensation.

Headmistress Riley gracefully sat down in her chair and leaned back, taking in Ash for a spell. Finally she nodded. “Ash, I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and as soon as I ask them, I want you to answer with the first thing that comes to your mind. Don’t try to answer with what you think I want to hear. Don’t even try to 89

pad what you say to me. Just blurt out the first thing that comes to your mind. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Ash answered immediately.

The headmistress smiled and nodded. “I see you’ve grasped the point of this very quickly. Well, here we go.

How are you feeling at this very moment?”

“Exhausted.” The bags beneath her eyes felt as though they were filled with pudding.

Headmistress Riley arched her eyebrows. “I should think so. I’d be ready for a nap too if I’d been off cavorting until the witching hour.”

Ash looked toward the window and remained silent.

“Do you feel like you fit in here?” the headmistress asked, probing deeper. “Here at Blackwood?”

“If I say no—that I’m having trouble making friends, and that’s why I did it—then will you let me off the hook?”

After a pause Headmistress Riley laughed with delight—nothing sinister, just pure mirth. “Why, Ashline Wilde. You always look so serious. I didn’t realize you were a comedian, too.”

“I do mostly weddings and bat mitzvahs,” Ash said.

“And apparently the occasional bar night in Orick?”

“I knew you’d understand. A girl has to pay tuition, you know?” Ash smiled hopefully. “So that means no detention?”

“A stand-up comedian
and
a dreamer. Nice try, though.”

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The headmistress reached over to a small stack of manila folders on the edge of her desk.
Our files,
Ash realized. Four of the folders were thin and manageable. One, at the bottom of the stack, was half the thickness of a phone book. Ash thought it resembled a suitcase that had been so overstuffed that it wouldn’t zip closed.

She wasn’t surprised when the headmistress retrieved the fat file and opened it in front of her. On the top was a series of green records—report cards from junior high.

“Someone did her homework,” Ash said.

“I’m meticulous to a fault. Call it a personal flaw,”

the headmistress said. “But either way, it’s very clear that your grades have significantly improved since you arrived at Blackwood. You’re obviously a brilliant young lady, and I think that a little distance from the crisis in Scarsdale has given you a second chance at life.”

Ash stiffened. “Crisis?” She’d done her best to sweep the incident with Lizzie Jacobs under the rug so that her transfer to Blackwood would truly be a clean break.

But if a half-wit like Bobby Jones could do his research online . . .

The headmistress’s chair creaked as she leaned forward. “Your sister running away. Your father mentioned it during the phone interview when I asked about siblings.”

Ash let out a long breath, though she wondered what else her parents had mentioned during their phone con-ference with the headmistress. “If it’s all right with you,”

Ash said carefully, “I’d like to just take my punishment 91

and move along with this. I was the one who made the choice to go off campus yesterday. I have no desire to point fingers at any unresolved personal issues from my past and blame them for why I did it. I was tired. I was having a bad day. And I just needed to escape.”

The headmistress pursed her lips, but her eyes were compassionate. Still, when she broke eye contact with Ash, she looked more than a little disappointed that she wasn’t going to get to explore deeper with psycho-analysis. “I’ll respect your privacy with regard to the issue,” she said quietly. “And I certainly respect that you’ve assumed full responsibility for your actions last night.”

Ash nodded, relieved. She hadn’t transferred to a prep school three thousand miles away only to have her demons resurrected.

“I don’t believe in traditional detention,” Headmistress Riley said. “How can I expect students to learn by sitting silently and uselessly in a study hall? It’s inefficient and totally unproductive. So—are you ready for this?—

I’ve been in touch with the local park ranger service and have arranged for the five of you to help out with park cleanup on Sunday.” She pulled a map out from under Ash’s bulky file and twisted it around so Ash could see.

The headmistress’s finger came down on an area of green within the national park, adjacent to Gold Bluff’s Beach and not far from Blackwood. “This is the Fern Canyon I guess one of the movie studios filmed a big shoot there 92

last week for some new monster feature they’re produc-ing, and there’s still debris to be collected.”

Ash smirked. “So you’re making us a chain gang?”

she asked. “Mom and Pop will be really proud about that one.”

The headmistress leaned back and crossed her arms.

“If you’d prefer spending your Sunday scrubbing maple syrup off the brunch plates in the dish room, I’d be happy to talk to the sous-chef.”

“I’ll take the fresh air, thanks.” Ash stood up. “Is that all, Headmistress? Coach Devlin will eat me alive if I’m late for tennis practice.”

“Just one more question.” The headmistress remained seated but stared piercingly up at the student hovering over her desk. “Same deal—respond immediately and don’t think about the answer.”

Ash tipped her head to indicate that she was ready.

“If you could do last night all over again,” the headmistress said, “would you leave campus to go to town?”

“Yes,” Ash replied. “I would.”

The headmistress looked bewildered. Had Ash been the first of the five to answer this way? “Even after all the hassle of losing sleep, and your punishment . . . and of course having to take time out of your afternoon to have this chat?”

Ash shrugged. “If we hadn’t gone to Orick, our little sleepwalking friend might not have made it back to campus safely.”

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The headmistress deflated with relief. “Well, that’s an acceptable answer. I thought for a moment you were going to say that it was because you really needed a cocktail.”

Ash managed a smile over her shoulder as she crossed the room to the door. “That was just an added bonus.”

There was just something about having a fuzzy green ball hurtle toward her at ninety miles an hour that ignited Ashline’s senses. Sure, she’d been out of it all day at school, brought low by a high-strung French teacher and a failed exam. Stepping onto the clay tennis courts was like a cold shower. The fatigue dissipated, probably to be revisited at dinnertime. For now she was alert and ready, her fingers wrapped firmly around the grip of her racket as if it were her last tether to life.

If Coach Devlin had heard of Ashline’s foray the previous night—a high probability, given the headmistress’s close relationship with her faculty—she certainly didn’t show it. Instead her shrewd little owl eyes sparked with delight when she observed the ferocity with which Ash was playing. Her teammate, Alyssa Gillespie, sent a bullet toward the opposite corner of the court, well out of Ash’s reach.

But suddenly Ash was there in a sharp dive across the boundary line, firing the ball back over the net. Alyssa, who had celebrated the point prematurely, didn’t even have time to react as the ball firmly sunk its teeth into her own corner before skittering over to the fence.

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“Christ, Wilde,” Coach Devlin said, helping her star player to her feet. “Guess we made the right decision bringing you up from doubles. You been pounding pro-tein shakes or something?”

Ash laughed as she brushed the dust off her tennis shorts. “Just really wanted that break point, I guess,”

she said, and glanced over at the other side of the court.

Alyssa threw her racket against the fence and brushed angrily past Delia Cooney, who was offering her a water bottle. The door to the locker room slammed closed.

“Apparently Alyssa wanted that last point as well.”

“Forget about her,” Coach Devlin said, running a hand through her spiky hair. “Just promise me you’ll play like that when we take on Southbound next week.”

Ash remembered the crushing blow they’d suffered earlier in the season when they’d visited the Napa Valley prep school. She had left several dented lockers in her wake after the game—and had no intention of letting that happen again. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Maybe you should bring your good luck charm to the match,” Coach Devlin suggested. Ash raised her eyebrow quizzically, but the coach just pointed up into the bleachers and wandered away, probably to defuse Alyssa after her loss.

Sitting alone close to the top of the otherwise empty metal bleachers, decked out in full park ranger greens, was Colt Halliday. Two of Ash’s teammates—JV freshman—were dawdling at the base of the bleachers, giggling and clearly waiting to be noticed by the handsome park 95

ranger. But their amorous glances were unrequited; Colt was either oblivious of or indifferent to them and was patting the metal bench next to him, his stare monoga-mously devoted to Ash.

Ash scooped a tennis ball off the clay and side-armed it at Colt. He caught it between his open legs, robbing Ash of her intended target.

“Hello to you, too.” Colt lobbed the ball back at her.

She swatted it away with a casual sweep of her racket, letting it bounce off toward the locker room. The two freshman girls, who must have sensed that the battle for Colt’s affections had been won long before they’d even shown up, scurried over to the empty court to volley back and forth.

“Wow.” Ash climbed the steps two at a time. “So you’re a park ranger, a college student,
and
a die-hard fan of prep school athletics. You wear many hats, Colt Halliday.”

He opened his hands humbly. “My cable box is on the fritz back in my apartment, and since I’m missing Wimbledon, I thought I’d get my tennis fix here.”

“Wimbledon isn’t until June,” she corrected him, but applauded lightly. “That was a really original and valiant attempt at a good excuse, though.”

“I knew I should have done my research.” He laughed. “I came by to see how Raja was doing. She just sent me some cryptic text last night about finding her own ride home, and disappeared. And after I confirmed 96

that she was all right, I asked her where I might find you on a misty Friday afternoon. She pointed me in this direction.”

Ash growled and rapped him on the back of the head with her tennis racket. It was supposed to be a light tap, but she must have put a little too much oomph into it, because Colt winced and rubbed his prickly buzz cut.

“Are you
trying
to make enemies for me, Colt?” she asked. “I came to Blackwood to get away from the ang-sty teenage love drama. You’re really not doing me any favors in the ‘starting over’ department.”

Colt groaned impatiently. “You’re going to have to trust me on this one. There is
nothing
going on between Raja and me. From either side. If you ask me, she’s got her sights set elsewhere.”

Ash only stood there, with her hands fixed on her hips, studying the park ranger. He was certainly beautiful, though more of a “wolf,” as opposed to the puppies she was used to. But beautiful had never done her right in the past. Rich Lesley, Bobby Jones—her track record certainly wasn’t impressive. Of course, she was only passively at fault for “choosing” Rich and Bobby, as they had been the ones to seek her out. In both cases her only sin had been that she’d succumbed to beauty.

So how was this any different? Here was a guy who by all standards should be too old and too cool for her, and he had a winning smile that could probably thaw an ice age—or at least melt an ice cube tray or two. And 97

rather than ransacking his campus for tail on a Friday afternoon, he’d taken time off from patrolling the forest to visit a couple of teenagers. It was flattering and creepy at the same time.

Even after earning the attention of Raja, who had an exterior modeled on Aphrodite herself, he was dodging her to visit Ash. She dug for any thread of logic in all of this, but whatever Colt Halliday’s intentions were, reason was not what had compelled him to make the drive north to watch a high school tennis practice.

“Listen, you can throw as many tennis balls as you want at me, or threaten to hit me with the racket again,”

he said, and rubbed the metal bench next to him. “But when you get all of that out of your system, would you mind pulling up a seat for a few minutes?”

Perhaps it was the whisper of the dew against her skin. Perhaps she was exhausted from her match against Alyssa. Or perhaps it was just hormones winning out and she was tired of fighting his charm. Regardless, she caved and dropped down heavily onto the bleacher seat next to him.

“Okay, Halliday,” she said. “You’ve just won a few minutes of my valuable time. I’ll make you a deal. You get to ask me any three questions you want. After I’ve finished answering them, I’m going to shower and take a much needed nap.”

Colt whistled. “Only three questions. Guess I better choose ones that count, then, huh?”

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Ash nodded. “Guess so.”

“Well,” he said. “I suppose I wouldn’t be any sort of gentleman if I didn’t ask how your head is feeling today?”