Reese was glad, because she would have been even more embarrassed if her mom had been there to watch her lose. She even wanted to fly to Phoenix with them for the tournament, but her case ended up going to court during nationals-she was an assistant district attorney in San Francisco-so only Mr. When Reese’s mom found out, she was ecstatic.
They worked so well together that they qualified for nationals. They had both joined the debate team at Kennedy High School their freshman year, but it wasn’t until junior year last fall that their coach, Joe Chapman, suggested they might work well together. But as the song titles rolled past, she wasn’t paying attention.ĭavid was her debate partner. She took a shallow breath and forced herself to look at her iPod, scrolling through her music.
Little inferno freaked out food skin#
He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and the skin of his arm had a golden tone like sunlight during Indian summer. She bent down to pull out her iPod from her backpack, and as she fitted the headphones into her ears she surreptitiously watched David turn a page. The waiting had made her twitchy, and her leg bounced with nervous energy. Their plane to San Francisco had been delayed, but it was due to take off, finally, in an hour. When she sat down again she felt unsettled, as if the ordinary world had been knocked off-balance and everything was now listing slightly to one side.īeside her, David had returned to his book, and she saw the title angling across the cover in a retro-futuristic font: The Left Hand of Darkness. David went back to his seat, but Reese remained standing until the birds were removed, leaving only a smudge on the pavement: the stamp of their final moments. He stuck his hand in the bag and squatted down to pick up the remains as if he were cleaning up after a dog. Reese watched Blue Jumpsuit pull a plastic bag from a container on the baggage cart. “Have you ever seen birds just crash to the ground like that?” The unforgiving glare of the sun on the neon-orange vest and the glistening lumps on the concrete gave the scene a surreal cast-like overexposed film. “You mean that dark stuff on the ground? Those are birds?”īlue Jumpsuit was gesticulating at the sky and the remains on the ground, apparently explaining the birds’ fatal descent to Orange Vest. She took a tiny step away and said, “Over there-by those two workers.” A man in a blue jumpsuit pulled up in a baggage cart while another man, in an orange vest, ran toward him. His shoulder brushed against her as he joined her at the windows. “These birds just fell dead from the sky.”ĭavid closed the book over his right index finger and stood.
Reese tried to swallow the flutter of self-consciousness that rose within her as David met her gaze. “See what?” His dark brown eyes reflected the hard, bright daylight in tiny dots of white. “Did you see that?”ĭavid Li looked up from his book. She glanced back at David, her forehead wrinkled. Outside, heat waves rippled over the oil-stained runway. “What the-” Reese Holloway pushed herself out of the hard plastic seat facing the floor-to-ceiling windows. They struck the ground with such force that their bodies smashed into dark slicks on the concrete. The birds plummeted to the tarmac, wings loose and limp.