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That’s everything, that’s the whole society. All our personal belongings, our clothes and computers and photographs, all of it burning. The thrift store art, the mismatched chairs, the couches. All gone. The basement full of bottles and cases of beer, thousands of dollars’ worth of smuggled goods.
Gone. Everything, gone.
Dom rushes forward. He and Nathan try to get past me, but I grab them and pull them back. Nathan doesn’t struggle—he knows as well as I do. But Dom doesn’t want to let it go.
“We can get inside. We can still grab our stuff. This doesn’t have to be the end.” There’s pure panic in his voice.
It breaks my fucking heart. He only just got here, only just started to experience life in Calico.
“Let it go,” I say to him and hold him back. “Let it go.”
Lesley comes to me then. She hugs me and I hug her back as she sobs. Paola joins, and Jayson, and finally Kaye. She’s quiet, too stunned to do anything more than hold my hand and try to comfort Lesley.
The school fire brigade appears. There aren’t many of them and they can’t do much more than keep the flames contained to the structure. “Sorry, kids,” the chief says, a burly man with a thick mustache in a floral button-down shirt. “Not much we can do.”
We stand back behind their trucks and watch.
Calico is dead.
It’s all burned away.
Chapter28
Kaye
Emilio lies in my bed and stares at the ceiling.
That’s what he does most of the time these days. Sits in my dorm room and stares, not speaking much, only staring and thinking.
I try to coax him out. Lesley and the others stop by and do their best to convince him to join them out by the wreck of the house. They want to rebuild, maybe somewhere closer to campus.
Emilio says nothing, only shrugs and offers them all the money in the Calico bank account.
My dorm room feels cold as the days slip past. I’m lucky my roommate moved in with someone else and I’m alone with Emilio. He can barely seem to keep himself functioning as it is and I’m not sure how he’d do with a stranger around all the time.
Calico’s fire is the talk of campus. Everyone’s chatting endlessly and speculating about what happened. One night, four days since the house burned, I sit outside with Nathan as he bounces a tennis ball off the wall over and over. “My favorite theory is we were cooking meth and blew the place up.”
“I haven’t heard that one.”
“Sure, I’m into it. VeryBreaking Bad, you know?”
“Did they ever recover anything from the basement?”
He shrugs and shakes his head. “Not that I know of and I doubt the administration would tell us about it.”
“What about Cask and Barrel? Are they still making runs?”
He scowls deeply. “Yeah, that’s the word, anyway. They moved right in and started taking control before the embers burned themselves out.”
I nod slowly and take a long breath. Emilio was right—losing the boat was one thing, but losing the house and everything in the basement was a disaster we might never recover from. I expected a visit from Dean Wotherspoon, but everything’s been quiet, and it’s like all the drama that was happening before the fire disappeared like smoke.
“Who do you think did it?” I ask him and step up to catch the tennis ball. He smirks at me and shrugs.
“Does it matter?”
“Let’s pretend like it does.” I toss him the ball and he goes back to bouncing it.
“Cask is the obvious culprit. They gained the most from our downfall.”
