Burning Down the House (Nature of Love #3)

Prologue

Everything good in my life happens in the woods.

That’s where I’m headed.

I tie the bedsheet with all my favorite things in it to a stick I found on my last woods trip. Hitching it over my shoulder, I shout back into my granny’s house.

“I’m running away and I’m never coming back!”

Granny had asked me to clean up my leaf collection, and when I didn’t obey in a timely fashion, she swept them all into the kitchen trash. The kitchen trash with this morning’s gross breakfast potatoes and ketchup and stuff in it.

Her crappy little dog barks in my wake, the one that jumped up and bit me on the dang hip somehow. I slow my pace at the edge of the yard, waiting to see if Granny or Gramps chase after me. No such luck.

No matter. I’m at home in the woods anyway. I’ve become the feral little forest troll that everyone at school pretends I am. I’m a rebel without a cause, a vagabond headed for my brave new future.

I jog the half mile or so to the woods entry, a path worn to dirt by my frequent trips into the woods.

By the time I hit the trail that leads to Brodie’s and my favorite spot, the hot day has sweat crawling down my neck.

I crest the hill, finding him like I so often do, skipping rocks down the creek.

It’s narrow enough that you could jump across it here, so it’s not wide enough to skip a rock across it—only down it.

Brodie looks up at the sound of my footfalls, his warm brown eyes crinkling at the edges under a shock of shaggy red hair. “Where you going, Ari?”

While I’m momentarily distracted by my friend, I remember that I’m supposed to be upset. I stomp my foot and huff before taking off down the ridge.

“Wait up!” he calls. “I found a crawdad!”

“I don’t have time for crawdads,” I shoot back over my shoulder. “I’m running away!”

I’m not looking where I’m going, letting muscle memory guide me—until, in an almost cartoonish way, I skid to a stop to avoid hitting a hump in the path.

My stick pack goes flying, all the contents of my makeshift bag scattering to the forest floor.

Why did I have to make a sheet on a stick like in old movies instead of taking my school backpack? This was an amateur move.

“Whoa, there!”

The hump talked?

A man with a tiny white Afro rises to his full height, a guy I recognize from church. “Mr. Hines?”

He examines a bright orange mushroom in his hand, dusting some dirt off the bottom. “You’re the Johnsons’ grandbaby, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. Aria.”

He finally focuses on me, examining the contents of my pack spilled on the ground. He flicks his chin toward the wreckage. “Let’s pick up your things and you can help me with my foraging.”

I’m shocked. I thought for sure I was about to get punished. Maybe the foraging is a punishment, but it sounds fun. And he seems too peaceful to be doling out punishments anytime soon.

He stoops to gather a few of the items, then looks back at where I kneel in the dirt. “Come on, now. We gotta move fast before the slugs get ‘em.”

We get everything put back in my pack and he hands me a basket from the ground next to him. I’m not sure if I’ve been invited to some exclusive club.

“Mr. Hines, what kind of mushrooms are these?”

“These,” he says, opening his hand again to show them off, “are chanterelles. And you can call me Richard.”

He drops the mushroom from his hand down into the basket.

Twigs snap behind us and Brodie’s face comes into view.

“What are you doing?” he calls.

“We’re picking mushrooms!” I shout, trying not to let too much enthusiasm into my voice. Brodie is two years older than me in school, and even though he’s my friend, I’m desperate to maintain my cool status with him. Is he going to think I’m weird for hanging out with some random old man?

My fears are quickly allayed when Brodie’s face brightens. “Can I help?”

Richard looks between the two of us. “Sure. Aria, show him the chanterelles.”

The more I look at the forest floor, the more chanterelles I find, bright yellow-orange screws coming out of the ground.

Richard points out the poisonous lookalikes—jack’o lantern mushrooms— and tells us they even glow in the dark.

Brodie’s familiar metallic sweaty tang blooms next to me as we pick the forest’s fruits.

In my head, the scent is called “Outside Brodie.”

Birds flit around us, unafraid. Richard talks to them like they’re old friends, and it almost seems like they talk back.

Like it so often does when I go into the woods, my day goes from disastrous to magical.

After we have an overflowing basket of mushrooms, Richard invites Brodie and me to come to his house. Brodie and I conference between ourselves. “We’re not supposed to go into strangers’ houses,” I say. “Stranger danger.”

Brodie shrugs. “He goes to church? I don’t know. If we go together, nothing will happen.”

We trudge along behind Richard to his house at the edge of the woods. Stepping inside, I note its homey touches: a granny square blanket over the back of the worn plaid couch, an easy chair, painted hardwood floors, a few pictures of a woman I assume is his wife. Cluttered but clean.

“You kids like juice?”

Brodie and I exchange a look. “Sure.”

Richard gets down three small glasses and pours orange juice for all of us. He speaks to no one in particular. “I think we should cook up some chanterelle pasta. It’s about as fancy as any restaurant in Paris.”

“France?!” I ask, thinking of a cool book I used to read about a little girl who walked in two straight lines in Paris.

He just chuckles, setting the juice in front of us.

I take a sip. It has pulp in it, the kind that makes me gag when Gramps gets the wrong kind.

But I want to be cool, so I drink it anyway.

Richard shows us how to clean and cut the mushrooms, shocking them in ice water to get any hidden bugs to crawl out. The thought makes Brodie and me make a face at each other, but we don’t make a peep. It wouldn’t be adventurous of us to object to a little bug.

Richard puts a pot of water on the stove to boil while Brodie and I prep the mushrooms. The weight of Richard’s gaze presses down on me. “Well, Miss Aria, where were you headed with that pack on your back?”

He’s calling me out, and it makes my cheeks heat. It’s hard to imagine my emotional turmoil now that I’m on this amazing adventure.

“I was going to live in the woods, sir.”

Brodie tosses out a hand. “You could sleep at my house. You don’t have to sleep in the woods.”

“We’re not allowed to have boy/girl sleepovers anymore,” I remind him. “We’re too old.”

He shrugs. “You could say you’re staying with Skye.” Skye is his older sister, a whole four years older than me. It just wouldn’t be plausible. Also, she is mean and scary, and I don’t know how long I could pretend to be her friend before she shuns me with her cruelty.

Richard pushes past our grousing. “Why didn’t you want to stay home?”

I focus on my hands, making careful cuts into the chanterelles. “Granny threw out my leaf collection.”

Mr. Hines just shakes his head and chuckles. “That Mrs. Johnson’s a mean old thing, isn’t she?”

Finally, someone gets it. He stirs the pot on the stove and turns to lean against his counter, scrubbing a hand over the white stubble peeking out of his otherwise deep brown chin.

“What kinds of leaves did you have in there?”

Relief floods my veins. This guy gets me. I rattle off all the species I so carefully collected, sometimes going very deep into the woods to find them.

Richard surveys me, thinking. He presses his lips into a line and sucks in a breath.

“Tell you what, honey. If you go home tonight, you can come back tomorrow and we’ll start your collection over. If you still want to run when you’re older, the door’s always open. But for tonight, I think you should go back to your granny’s.”