Chapter 3
Far away in Oregon, despite what she’d told her mother on the phone, Sophie was in the hospital.
Bandages lined her arms and legs, and she shook with a fever that the nurses said would break soon.
She prayed they could be trusted and it would.
Beside her on the table sat her phone, which she’d just used to call her mother and tell her an endless array of both truth and lies: that there had been a fire in the mountains (true), that they’d had to end their camping trip (also true), and that she and Ethan were headed back to campus and safe (not true at all).
The full truth was so harrowing that Sophie wasn’t sure she could face it.
When the fire broke out last night, Sophie had been frozen with shock, forgetting all the training she’d had on forest fires.
She’d been surrounded, sure that it was the end of her life.
When pain scalded her arms and legs, adrenaline shot through her, and she’d begun to run as fast and as hard as she ever had, all the way back to the cars at the campsite.
Branches had burst overhead, then crashed down in her path, nearly obliterating her.
She very narrowly made it.
From the looks of things back at the site, Ethan and his friends had been preparing to leave her behind.
Tears and soot lined her face, and Sophie screamed for them to stop.
They looked at her and screamed back, their faces twisted.
She’d probably looked like some forest monster, red and scalding, with steam coming off her clothes.
She had no idea what they were saying to her.
It was as though she’d lost all concept of language.
Immediately, Ethan had put her in his car and driven down the mountain to the hospital.
She’d wept beside him, watching as the orange light from the fire climbed higher and higher into the sky.
She wanted to say, "I told you, I told you this would happen," but it felt like a moot point. Ethan couldn’t stop shaking, so much so that he nearly crashed the car three times.
He howled and cursed, but not really at her.
Sophie knew better than to say anything.
As soon as Sophie had been checked in, Ethan had disappeared. He hadn’t said a single word before he’d gone.
Sophie was beginning to wonder whether Ethan had ever been real or was a figment of her imagination. Had she invented her own boyfriend?
Now, as Sophie lay back in the hospital bed and waited to be cleared to go back home, three cops came into her room and grimaced down at her.
There were two men in their thirties and a woman in her late forties, maybe.
Sophie already knew why they were there.
Although she’d prayed it wouldn’t come to this, she’d been expecting them.
“We need you to tell us what happened up there,” stated the female cop, who introduced herself as Officer Melton. She squeezed the belt around her pants, then hauled it up.
Sophie’s nostrils fluttered. She’d suspected that Ethan and his friends had taken off without speaking to the cops at all, leaving Sophie—the only one injured among them—to take the fall. But Sophie had no interest in doing that.
Sophie introduced herself, then explained that she’d been camping in the woods with her boyfriend and his friends. “I’m an environmental scientist,” she said tentatively. “I’m a grad student at East Oregon.”
“It sounds like you should have known better than to start a fire,” one of the male cops barked. “Do you have any idea what you and your friends have done? Do you have any idea of the damage you’ve already caused?”
Sophie wanted to sob and scream and sob some more. Her entire body itched and burned. “I told them not to build the fire, but they didn’t listen to me,” she said. “I tried to keep it small. I tried to keep it manageable. But they…”
“What did they do? Did they make fun of you? Did they say, ‘Come on, Sophie, let’s have some real fun’?
” Officer Melton said, feigning a pout, as though it was the silliest thing in the world, the idea that Sophie had caused a forest fire because she hadn’t been mentally and emotionally strong enough.
Sophie was quiet, tears filling her eyes. She couldn’t believe how weak she’d been.
Over the next half hour, the three cops explained that there would be financial and legal consequences for her and all her friends.
There was CCTV footage of the cars that had come to drop her off.
They would find all of her friends easily.
She didn’t even have to hand over their names.
Sophie didn’t know what to say. She wanted to point the blame at them.
She wanted to tell them it wasn’t her fault.
But the cops were right. She should have done more.
Now, the damage was done.
That night, the doctor came to assess her wounds and tell her that she was cleared to go the following morning.
Sophie knew she needed to arrange pickup, but the last thing she wanted was to see Ethan again.
Using the app on her phone, she arranged for a very, very expensive taxi to pick her up at ten in the morning.
She prayed she’d have enough money for her May rent, then thanked her lucky stars that she’d survived to May at all.
She slept fitfully, her mind inundated with fiery nightmares that she couldn’t escape from.
When she woke up the following morning, her mother called her, as though she could sense she needed help.
“Good morning, honey!” she said. It was only three in the morning on the East Coast, which meant that her mother had been awake and thinking of her for hours.
It probably meant she couldn’t sleep. “I’ve been watching the progress of that fire.
It looks really bad. So many acres of woods, lost.”
Sophie’s stomach curdled with dread. “That’s terrible,” she croaked.
“I can’t believe you were there. Are they saying some campers caused it? Did you see them at all?” Celia asked.
Sophie closed her eyes tightly. “We heard them,” she said. “They were loud. Listening to music. Causing chaos.”
“I hate it,” Celia breathed.
Sophie hated herself far more than Celia could hate those campers. She knew.
“But you’re back on campus?” Celia asked.
“Yeah. Ethan and I are having a chill day in,” Sophie said. “It’s raining like crazy. I wish we could send it to the fire.”
“So glad you’re safe, honey,” Celia said. “I’d love to order you guys some delivery tonight. I can put money in your account and…”
“No. That’s all right,” Sophie said flatly. “We already have a plan for dinner.”
“Okay. Another time, then. Love you.”
At ten in the morning, Sophie left the hospital, her bandages clean and her head bowed forward.
The taxi waited for her, its driver wearing a stern expression.
Sophie slipped into the back seat, feeling as though she were being picked up from the principal’s office by an angry parent.
They drove in silence, with the radio off, all the way back to East Oregon State.
Sophie wondered if, somehow, he knew she’d been involved in the fire.
But right before they reached her college town, she spotted the text messages pinging into his phone, which he kept strapped above the radio so that he could watch the map.
The texts read: I don’t think this is working, and maybe I’ll move out for a few days.
Clearly, his mind was on something and someone else.
Sophie reached her apartment a little after one in the afternoon.
Her three roommates, Tasha, Holly, and Lynne, were on the sofa, eating snacks and watching the news.
On the screen, the fire raged across Oregon and threatened Washington.
Sophie thought she was going to throw up.
Tasha turned, her jaw ajar, and said, “Oh my gosh, Sophie!”
The three of them jumped up from the sofa to tend to Sophie.
At their tenderness, Sophie couldn’t stop crying.
Her shoulders shook. Lynne got to work, making soup.
Tasha went out to buy wine, cookies, chocolate, and chips.
Holly sat with Sophie on the sofa, turning off the television so that Sophie wouldn’t have to see it.
Their eyes told Sophie that they knew something about her trip, if not everything. What had they been told?
Soon, Holly explained that she’d run into Ethan at a bar last night.
“He was with those idiots, Freddy and Cedric, and they were so drunk. Like they couldn’t even talk.
I knew they were supposed to be with you, so I asked where you were, and Ethan looked all bug-eyed and weird.
He was like, “We didn’t do it. It wasn’t us.
I swear.” I knew they were talking about the fire.
I mean, it was too much of a coincidence, and word was spreading all over campus that it was probably East Oregon students who’d done it. I couldn’t believe you were there.”
Sophie’s stomach ached with hunger. She couldn’t bring herself to ask her friends why they hadn’t tried to call her or immediately tried to find her at the hospital.
At least they were helping now. At least they were here, pouring soup into a bowl, opening bags of snacks, and asking her what would make her feel better.
“I told them not to make the fire,” Sophie said. “And now…”
“We know,” Tasha said, because they knew what kind of person Sophie was. The problem, of course, was that the cops didn’t know that. The state of Oregon didn’t know that.
Sophie spent another horrendous and restless night in bed, unable to toss and turn because of the burns.
She didn’t want to cause an infection. She didn’t want to make this nightmare worse.
She wondered if Ethan was sleeping soundly in that king-sized bed of his.
Maybe he was already able to truly tell himself that he hadn’t done what he’d done.
The following morning, Sophie awoke at ten thirty to three emails from her beloved professors.
In them, they detailed what they’d heard: that Sophie was at least partially responsible for the fire that raged across the forests and mountains.
Each of them requested a private meeting with Sophie to discuss what had happened and whether they would feel comfortable having Sophie in the graduate program any longer.
Sophie got up, went to the bathroom, and immediately vomited everything left in her stomach from last night.
She was suddenly and horrifically unfit for the life she’d built for herself.
She wondered if this was punishment for falling in love with the wrong guy.
More than that: she wondered if this was punishment for being herself—insufficient, the wrong person to join the world of environmental science academia. Maybe she was never right for it.
She imagined telling her mother what was happening and immediately wanted to curl up in a ball.
Again, Celia called to check in. “I can’t believe this fire,” she said.
Sophie squeezed her eyes shut and willed her mother to talk about anything else.
“It’s a slow time at the Eco-Lodge,” Celia continued, sounding distracted. “A woman’s here. Ruth. You know, there’s something secretive about her. I’m starting to think she’s not telling me something.”
Sophie prayed that her mother wouldn’t catch on that she, too, was lying. “I’m sure she just wants to get away from her real life,” she said of Ruth.
“Yes. I’m sure you’re right.” Celia hesitated. “Is Ethan still taking good care of you? I’m sure you’re both still shaken up after the trip.”
“He’s been a dream,” Sophie lied.
The following night, Sophie was able to remove one of her bandages.
The skin beneath was angry and reddish-pink, with bits of white mixed in where it had already begun to regrow.
Sophie was amazed at the resilience of her body, a body that had faced a forest fire and lived on.
She wasn’t sure if her heart was quite as resilient.
She still needed to write back to her professors to arrange a time to talk with them.
She needed desperately to explain herself.
Free from one of her bandages, Sophie felt lighter than she had since the hospital.
She had a sudden, desperate need to get out of the house.
She put on a big sweatshirt and pulled it over her head, then donned a pair of sunglasses.
She wanted to see something other than the sad, tousled sheets of her bed.
Tasha watched as she got ready, jangling her keys.
“Are you sure you don’t want company?” Tasha asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sophie said. “I need to think.”
“Too much thinking isn’t good for anyone,” Tasha said, but she let Sophie go.
Sophie stepped into the early evening. Purple light descended upon the line of squat houses.
Sophie marched past them, her heart swarming with memories, visions of not so long ago, when she and Ethan had walked hand in hand through the neighborhood, eating ice cream or planning their next drinks out.
Over there, they’d kissed beneath a pregnant moon, and over by that stop sign, they’d gotten into a silly argument that eventually left them breathless with laughter.
Their relationship hadn’t been total garbage, Sophie told herself.
But it had certainly ruined her life.
Sophie headed toward the street near campus where most of the students congregated, where their favorite bar and favorite burrito place and favorite coffee shop sat in a little cluster of joy.
Sophie considered what she might do. Maybe she could grab a drink for herself, sit in the corner of the bar, and people-watch.
Maybe she could convince herself that everything would, one day, go back to normal.
And then, a group of people spilled out of the bar, cackling. Ethan was among them.
Sophie recognized him immediately. The gash of his smile and the curls of his hair felt like punch after punch into her gut.
She stepped into the shadows and watched him chase a woman, catching up to her.
It was clear they’d been in the bar together.
Sophie vaguely recognized her as someone in Ethan’s circle, another woman from a wealthy East Coast family—a woman who, probably, Ethan should have been with all this time.
Ethan’s hands found her sides, and he pulled her into him, kissing her with reckless abandon.
Sophie’s knees gave out, but she didn’t let herself fall.
This was the man who, over the phone, she’d been telling her mother was taking care of her. This was the man who, two weeks ago, had wrapped her in blankets on his bed and said, “I love you. You’re the one for me. I’ve never been so sure of anything.”
Was she a fool to have believed him? Or was she a fool now, standing in the shadows, watching him with this growing ache in her gut?
She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was on the verge of giving up.