Between the Spark and the Burn by April Genevieve Tucholke Read Free Book Online Page A

barren trees and green pines and wooden fences and open fields full of crows. But we were up higher now, and the sky was bigger. Even the clouds were bigger.
    â€œI’d be inclined to paint this, if I had my tools,” Luke said, taking a bite of his cheese and apple sandwich.
    We’d stopped to have lunch, and were eating standing up because it was too cold to sit on the ground. Luke was facing a little clearing in the trees. There was an old brown barn in the shape of one of the Citizen’s vintage art deco clocks—square on the bottom, dome-shaped above. It stood gazing out at us as we gazed at it, the mountains rising blue in the background.
    There hadn’t been room in Neely’s car for paints and canvases. And I think my brother was missing it, the painting, like how I was already missing my distracted parents, and Jack, and my closet full of Freddie’s old clothes, and just about everything I was used to. Being away from home was an eerie thing, thick and powerful and overwhelming. It was energizing to see new places and people, your brain on fire, your heart stirred up. But it was also kind of . . . sad too.
    I’d been itching to leave Echo and now that I was on the road, I felt an itchy need to get back home again, damn it. There was no satisfying me.
    â€œYou know what this scene needs?” Sunshine stepped in front of the barn, swung her brown hair under her blue hat, and struck a curvy, sultry pose, one palm spread open on her hip. She batted her sleepy eyes at Luke. “Me. That’s what.”
    Luke laughed. “I’ve already promised to do your portrait when we get back home. How much of my art do you plan to take over?”
    Sunshine shrugged, and then turned to me. “A nude,” she said, smiling. “I’m going to make him hang it in the Citizen’s art gallery ballroom, right next to all those naked paintings of Freddie.”
    I looked from Sunshine, to my brother, and back again. Then I tilted my head back, clenched my fists, very, very dramatic, and screamed.
“Noooooooo.”
    My voice echoed off the silent mountains and came back to me, and Neely started laughing. I pointed at my brother. “If you paint our next-door neighbor in the nude, then you damn well better hide it under your bed, because if I have to look at it I’ll kill someone. Probably you.”
    â€œI’d love to see that,” Neely said, his arms crossed, his back leaning against his now very dirty car.
    â€œSunshine’s nude painting or me killing someone?” I asked.
    â€œBoth,” Neely said, and then he was laughing that laugh again, his eyes crinkling up with it, and the next thing I knew I was laughing along with him.
    Luke tossed an apple core over the fence, into the snow, short and quick and cocky-like. “You’re such a prude, Vi.”
    Sunshine nodded. “It’s true, Vi. It’s always been true.”
    I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Would a prude do what I did with River? Would she? Even after he suicided Jack’s Pa, even after all of it? Would she have let him do what he almost did?” And then I shut my mouth again, seeing the looks on their faces.
    Especially Neely’s.
    His eyes had changed. They’d been happy and amused half a second ago. And now they were hot and dark and fiery.
    â€œYou were under his glow, Vi,” he said, the blush spilling off his face and spreading down his neck like it did sometimes right before he let his fists start swinging. “That wasn’t your fault.”
    â€œWasn’t it?” I asked, but my voice barely rose above the cold breeze blowing down the mountains.
    Wasn’t it, River?
    â‰ˆâ‰ˆâ‰ˆ
    We found Inn’s End just as the sun started sinking into the horizon. We pulled over no less than eight times, asking farmers and postmen and kids playing in the snow for directions. It wasn’t on the maps, just as