Wildefire by Karsten Knight

around in confusion. “What’s going on?” she asked, her soprano voice projecting clearly through the parking lot.
    Then she whispered to Ash, “I’m not getting kidnapped again, am I?”
    83

    BLUE FLAME
    Frida
    y
    Ashline’s Friday morning was a train wreck, and showed none of the signs that portended a good weekend. She had slept a total of three and a half hours—
    restless, all of it—and had barely made it to trigonom-etry on time. In third-period French she awoke halfway through the class to Monsieur Chevalier pounding his fist on her desk and shouting “Pamplemousse!” over and over again in her face. A rude awakening, to say the least.
    Then, of course, the dreaded chemistry exam. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the material. But it was impossible to concentrate, between Dr. Hammersby’s occasionally scathing glances from her desk, and the sympathetic looks from Jackie. (Darren had smartly hidden his car out beyond the front gates, to be retrieved later, and they’d successfully snuck back onto campus with the other Blackwood kids. The bastards). As she held the pen in her hand and reread for the fifteenth 84

    time the chemical equation she was supposed to be balancing, she could feel the reservoir of knowledge frothing somewhere in the back of her brain, but the bridge connecting all of those thoughts to her pen had been brutally obliterated.
    Later, after school, she found herself sitting in a circle of chairs with Lily, Ade, Rolfe, and Raja, faces that had become overwhelmingly familiar. Ash shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Half of her butt had fallen asleep, which caused her to lean painfully on the other, and the unforgiving mahogany of the chair was doing her no favors in the comfort department.
    “So . . .” Rolfe, who was twiddling his thumbs anxiously, broke the silence first. “This is kind of like a really shitty version of The Breakfast Club , huh?”
    “To put it lightly,” Lily said.
    “What sort of punishment can we look forward to?”
    Ash asked. “Toothbrushes and soap to scrub the hallways on our hands and knees?” Even after her own brushes with trouble back in Scarsdale, she had no idea what to expect from boarding school discipline.
    Raja sighed. “With the new headmistress we’ll be lucky to get graveyard shifts washing dishes in the dining hall.”
    Ade’s eyes explored the room. “And yet our little visually challenged friend is nowhere to be found.”
    “Like Headmistress Riley is going to punish Serena,”
    Raja replied. “Hell, maybe if we all tell her that we were sleepwalking too, she’ll let us off the hook.”
    85

    Ash had also noticed the empty sixth chair in the waiting room. “No one wants to talk about Serena? Anyone else interested in how a blind girl who seems to keep completely to herself ends up the victim of a kidnapping in the middle of one of the quietest, most boring towns in America? How an entire bar full of people couldn’t hear her screams?”
    “Except for us,” Lily added.
    Ade turned his attention to the office door’s opaque window. “I’m just curious what she confessed to the headmistress. If she told her about the kidnapping, then we should be getting some sort of medals, or plaques.”
    “Or our choice of women in the senior class,” Rolfe added.
    “Pig,” Raja muttered.
    “Sorry, babe.” Rolfe patted Raja’s knee. “You’ve got another year to go before you’re ripe enough for me. But I’m willing to wait.”
    Raja cracked her knuckles. “Which one of your two balls would you like to keep?”
    Lily quickly picked up a magazine and began to leaf through it.
    The door to the foyer sprung open, and there in the door frame stood the headmistress herself. The five students immediately sat upright in their chairs, their feet coming together as if they were off-duty soldiers surprised by a visit from the general.
    At just over six feet, Abigail Riley stood taller than all 86

    of them, except for Ade, who as a rule