Page 8

Three days before the fire

EMMA FINALLY FALLS asleep at four in the morning. Sometime around seven, she turns off her blaring alarm. By the time she gets up, breakfast is over, and she has ten minutes to get to class on time.

She dresses quickly, runs a brush through her hair, and manages to make it into Ridgemont’s brand-new, state-of-the-art chemistry classroom a minute before the bell rings. She slides into her seat, stomach rumbling. She offers Ava Green, who is flat-out staring at her, a half smile.

Ava just blinks at her.

“Are you, like, okay?” she whispers.

Emma shrugs. She doesn’t even know how to answer the question. If your mood only ranges from pitch-black to dull gray, what qualifies as “like, okay”? Is now the right time to explain what chiaroscuro is?

Also, does Ava actually care how she feels?

“I heard about your essay,” Ava says. “You weren’t serious, were you?”

No, of course Ava does not actually care how Emma feels.

Ava is not concerned so much as curious .

To her—and to most of Ridgemont—Emma is not a person; she is a curiosity.

A rich, pretty, white girl who isn’t flourishing, and no one can understand why a person with all of her advantages in life isn’t performing up to standard.

Ava Green practically is the standard. Ava’s one of the Ridgemont princesses, a shiny-haired girl from Connecticut whose primary interests are boys and gossip. And at the moment, Emma is good gossip.

Emma shrugs again. “I don’t know,” she says. She opens her notebook and starts pretending to look over her notes so Ava will leave her alone.

Ava takes the hint and turns to her other neighbor. “Did you hear about that insane essay Emma wrote?” she asks Eden Graham in a stage whisper.

“No! Tell me!”

Thankfully the bell rings and their teacher starts talking, which drowns out whatever Ava has to say about Emma’s self-immolation essay. Although other people are probably talking about it, too, Emma realizes—they just aren’t doing it right in front of her face.

She wonders if anyone’s seen the video. Probably not.

Certainly there wouldn’t be many Ridgemont students checking YouTube before breakfast. Their GPAs, though, maybe.

Olivia reaches for her phone as soon as she wakes up in order to plot her data points on her follower graph, but Emma has never seen the allure.

“—so make your way back to the lab tables,” Ms. Geller is saying. “Partners are the same as last week.” Her tone turns threatening. “Cormac, if I see that phone in your hand again, I’m going to drop it in sulfuric acid.”

“Chemical formula H 2 SO 4 ,” adds Simon, the teacher’s pet.

At Emma’s lab station, Elliott Jameson, her partner and Ridgemont’s star quarterback, says, “Morning, gorgeous.”

“Morning, meathead.” Emma does her best to offer him a real smile.

She actually likes Elliott, even if he’s never read a book he wasn’t forced to.

He has big blue eyes and Cupid curls; he looks like a grown-up baby doll.

She surreptitiously checks for a pull string in his back, and wonders if “Morning, gorgeous” is one of his preloaded statements.

“Directions are in the packet at your stations,” Ms. Geller says. “I know that I don’t need to tell you this, but open flames are dangerous, so please be careful with your precious limbs.”

“Ha ha, don’t get any crazy fire ideas, Emma,” Spencer Jenkins calls from the neighboring table.

Emma rolls her eyes at him. Spencer thinks he’s funny because no one has ever told him he isn’t.

Probably no one has told him no in his whole life either.

For his sixteenth birthday he got a custom Rivian with $100,000 in the glove compartment.

Ava sniffed and called him nouveau riche, but Spencer just grinned and said, “The riche is all that matters, baby.” And maybe that was what it took to convince her, because two weeks later, they were stuck together like lampreys outside the student union.

Emma can’t stand either of them anymore. But is it really their fault? Or is it because now she envies them? Not because they’re rich—Emma comes from money too—but because nothing bad has ever happened to them.

She watches as Ava blows Spencer a kiss. Probably it’s a little bit of both.

“Dude,” Elliott says. “Earth to Planet Emma.”

Emma jumps. “Sorry,” she says. She opens the lab packet and turns to the right page. She’s so tired that the words blur and seem to dance. “‘Before you begin,’” she manages to read, “‘ensure that you are wearing appropriate safety gear, including safety goggles.’”

Elliott hands her a pair, and she slips them on. He’s wearing a lab coat now, too, so suddenly he looks like a grown-up baby doll who dressed as a mad scientist for Halloween.

“‘Dip the Nichrome loop into the beaker containing hydrochloric acid to moisten the loop,’” Emma goes on. “‘Then dip the loop into the beaker holding the strontium nitrate. Ignite the Bunsen burner.’”

Elliott dips the wire into the right beakers and hands it to Emma while he lights the burner. It makes a low hissing sound; the flame burns steady and pale blue.

When Emma holds the treated wire loop in the Bunsen’s flame, it turns a brilliant red.

“Dude,” Elliott says, because dude is his favorite word. “Totally satanic.”

“Don’t write that in the notebook,” Emma says. “Just put ‘red.’” She cleans the loop, dips it into the next beaker, and offers it to Elliott. “Your turn.”

The barium chloride burns apple green at the end of the loop. Emma writes this down.

“I should also not need to remind you to make your observations legible,” Ms. Geller calls. “Maria, Spencer, James—I’m looking at you three in particular.”

Emma’s eyes wander off the lab paper, the flickering light of the flame drawing her in. How hot is it? A couple thousand degrees?

Elliott says, “Okay, what does it say we’re supposed to do next?”

Emma doesn’t answer. Why does it matter what compound they test? It’s a stupid experiment. They could simply write down a series of colors and pass this lab.

Or they could google all the answers in two seconds.

Which Cormac is probably doing with the phone he’s not supposed to have in class.

He, like Emma, knows this is sixth-grade science.

But—as Ava pointed out with a sniff when she googled Ms. Geller—their new teacher came to them from a public school.

Ava practically sneered the words, shocked that somehow she’d be receiving instruction from someone who had been moving among the general public only months earlier.

“Ugh,” Elliott says, “where are the directions—hang on—”

Emma hears him, sort of. But her attention is focused on the steady gas flame. And on her arm moving toward it.

How can she explain what she does next?

Call it an experiment.

Or maybe a test.

She holds her arm three inches above the Bunsen burner’s flame. It doesn’t hurt right away. At first she feels nothing but warmth. But then the pain comes, and it does so in a white-hot rush, and suddenly it’s so bad that her brain starts to short-circuit.

One second. A knife made of fire pushes into her skin.

Two seconds. The blade is twisting inside her arm, cutting muscles as it spins. She isn’t Emma Blake anymore. She’s nothing but pain.

Three seconds. Shredding tendons. Splintering bone. The sun burning inside her skin.

Four seconds. It isn’t heat. It’s agony.

“Whoa, what the fuck!” Elliott shouts. He knocks her arm away and the burner tips over, the flames shooting sideways. A lab notebook ignites.

People are yelling now. Emma’s vision swims, her brain now processing more than just pain. There’s a red welt on her arm … and the smell of burning flesh. Why didn’t she include what it would smell like in her descriptive essay?

“Stand back!” Ms. Geller’s shouting. “Stand back!” The fire extinguisher sends out a white chemical stream.

Emma falls to her knees. Clutches her wrist, inches from the burn.

The first moments away from the flame are somehow even worse.

The pain radiates up her forearm. Now it’s in her shoulder.

The side of her face. It feels like she’s pressing her skin against a supernova.

She feels sick to her stomach. She grabs the edge of the lab table with her good hand.

Tries to stand up. Bile rises in her throat.

“Jesus, Emma, are you okay? What were you doing?” Elliott’s voice sounds panicked. High and girlish.

Ms. Geller runs over, her face white as paper. Emma holds her arm like she’s trying to hide it from her. The class is in an uproar.

I did it, Emma tells herself. Now I know what it feels like.