Burning by Elana K. Arnold Read Free Book Online

a little tent and a big old canvas tent, too. A clothesline was strung up with a few cotton shirts hanging on it. A pretty strange place to set up camp, if you ask me.
    Then I saw the sign, a plywood A-frame positioned soyou could read it coming to and going from Burning Man: FORTUNE-TELLING .
    Pete slowed his truck and edged off the highway, his wheels sending up a dry cloud of dust.
    And then the door of the RV opened, and a girl stepped out.
    Pete was saying something, and Hog Boy was rapping his knuckles on the little glass window that separated the truck’s bed from the cab, but these sounds didn’t mean much to me. All I had room for in my head was the girl—the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

They came out of the dust of the desert, down the long, flat road that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
    I was not watching for them, but their arrival did not surprise me. The three of them came out of the truck—rusted, old, but still straight—each in his own way.
    First out was the fat one. He hopped down from his perch in the bed of the truck with a loud snort of a laugh. Later, when I heard the others call him Hog Boy, I wondered if perhaps they were more intuitive than they seemed.
    Next came the driver of the truck. He was handsome, very much so … tall, with rather narrow shoulders and slim also through the hips. He wore his hair long around his ears and loose across his forehead, which gave him something to do with his hands—brush the hair back in a way that I suspected gathered quite a few female admirers.
    His energy was different from that of the boy who rode like livestock in the back of the truck; his eyes held secrets, and pain. My first hope was that I would have the chanceto hold his hand palm up between mine and ferret out the secrets he hid within those eyes.
    And then I watched, amused by their childish antics, as they yanked open the passenger door and tried, one and then the other, to pull some third, unwilling visitor from his seat.
    I could not see the face of this reluctant guest, but still I noticed much that interested me. Neither boy—not even the fat one—could force him from the truck. So he must be strong. And the faces of the other two, the handsome one and the one who resembled swine—they were by turns affable and persuasive, but neither looked angry—whoever was so stubbornly immovable in the cab of the truck was someone they respected, someone each of them loved deeply.
    Finally, the handsome boy held his hands up, supplicating, and at last the third boy rose from his seat, closing the truck’s door behind him.
    Though I was not near them—I stood perhaps thirty feet away, near the door to our motor home, with Violeta beside me—I heard clearly the sound of the metal door slamming shut. It was a sound of finality, of the end of something—or perhaps this was just how I chose to hear it. Perhaps it was just a closing door.
    His back was to me. His shoulders were broad and well muscled. An athlete—that was clear. His hair was a mixture of light brown and blond, lightened by the touch of the sun. So he was someone who spent his time out-of-doors, his head uncovered. No helmet, then, required for his sport. The back of his neck was brown from the sun.
    When he walked around the front of the truck, flanked by his two companions, the difference between him and them was marked. Though I had thought the other boy handsome, this one, who was clearly full of reticence and did not want to be here, seemed to me like the answer to a question I had not known I’d asked.
    Deep inside me, it was as if something was waking and stretching its limbs. Some secret dragon hibernating in my core had been stirred by the presence of this boy.
    It was flames I felt, a fire as the dragon yawned. My body felt possessed, overtaken. I heard my words as I spoke to Violeta next to me as if someone else was speaking them—“I will take that one, the one in the center, if they are here for