I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: Field Day

"Let her," I said.

Paisley stared at me.

"She's going to say she made you."

"She's going to say a lot of things." I took my phone back. "I have a fire season."

We drove her back to the hotel in the dark.

She fell asleep against the back window before the highway.

Mom was waiting in the lobby in her stocking feet.

She hugged Paisley so hard the suitcase fell over.

Over Paisley's shoulder, she looked at me.

She didn't say thank you.

She didn't say anything at all.

But she didn't look away first, either.

We flew home the next morning.

Two days later I was standing in a burned black spruce stand on the Tanana flats with a weather mast on my shoulder.

The research crew was six people.

Two grad students. A tech. A hotshot liaison, who was a wiry man with a gray braid and a reputation. Another fellow from last year.

And me.

The fire had started from lightning the week before, forty thousand acres of it, crawling north.

On the first morning the senior grad student handed me the map.

"Your model, Carmody," she said. "Your day. Tell us where the wind turns."

Five people looked at me.

Every one of them was older than me.

For one second I was back at the kitchen table, getting a question wrong on purpose so nobody would look.

Then I put my finger on the map.

"Here," I said. "The low saddle, two miles east. If the humidity drops before noon, the wind comes through there around one."

The hotshot liaison squinted at the saddle.

"Long walk for a maybe."

"It's not a maybe. It's thirty years."

He looked at me a while longer.

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