Wildefire Read Online Free PDF Page A

just hated the Wilde family so much that she was willing to throw caution to the wind. At the corner of the house was a trellis, a crisscross pattern of woodwork that Ashline’s parents used as a clutching board for their Boston ivy. It was actually Ash’s favorite part of the house, and she enjoyed reading under it during the spring and summer months.
    Clearly her enemy had used it as a ladder to climb onto the roof. Now Ash was going to have to as well.
    Ash slipped off her wet socks and cast them onto the patio before she approached the trellis. She slipped her 28

    fingers through the square holes and rattled it a few times to make sure it was firmly attached to the wall. And then she began her ascent.
    It occurred to Ash as she climbed that she was just as crazy as Lizzie to be following her up to the roof. The holes in the trellis were tiny and didn’t offer proper footholds, and her bare feet kept slipping off. More than once she found herself dangling by her hands alone. The whole wooden structure was slick with rain—not to mention the snow from earlier—and felt slimy to the touch, as if it were covered with algae. Every time Ash reached for a new handhold, she half-expected the wood to have rotted away and the trellis to break off in her hand.
    And so it was to Ashline’s relieved surprise that she clambered over the gutter and onto the roof shingles without having broken a leg or dropped onto the patio stones twenty feet below. Lizzie was nowhere in sight. Using her hands and feet, Ash cautiously crawled up the treacher-ous, slippery slope, over the summit of the A-frame roof, and onto the side facing the street.
    Lizzie, who was at the other end of the roof and had her back to Ashline, was concluding work on the exclamation point in “SLUT!” She had painted the word in eight-foot-tall letters on the shingles, more than large enough to be read by passersby on the street, possibly by the passengers of low-altitude airplanes as well. The rain had caused some of the paint to ooze toward the gutter like runny eggs. Lizzie was already done with her first draft, 29

    but had apparently decided that the letters were neither wide nor bold enough to sate her thirst for retribution.
    Ash plucked her own bottle of spray paint from her waistband and clambered down the roof. “Let me help you with the dot on that exclamation point,” Ash said, and before Lizzie could turn around, Ash fired a stream of paint onto the back of Lizzie’s checkered London trench coat. By the time Lizzie could shy away, Ash had tagged her with a slime green bull’s-eye.
    Lizzie extended her spray paint arm, as if the electric blue paint would protect her somehow. Her cheeks and eyes were a swollen mess of black and violet and blue and tinges of green where Ash and Eve had made a Jackson Pollock painting of her face.
    Ash smiled acidly. “I figured I’d tag you, so that animal control would know that there’s a bitch on the loose.”
    With a growl Lizzie stripped off the now destroyed coat and tossed it off the roof. “That was my favorite Burberry!”
    Ash shrugged. “This was my favorite roof.”
    “What are you going to do? Push me off it?” Lizzie asked, trying to sound fierce, but Ash caught her glancing nervously to the ground below.
    “No.” Ash chucked the spray paint can to the side and took a deep breath, trying to quell the flames that this girl was so talented at fanning. “All I want is for you to go home. We don’t have to be friends at school, or even civil in the hallway. I don’t want to borrow your 30

    algebra homework, and I don’t expect you to come over and braid my hair while we watch VH1. I just want to go sit in my room alone, wait out my suspension, and forget this bullshit ever happened.”
    “Don’t act like you didn’t bring this on yourself,”
    Lizzie said, though she sounded like she only half-believed it. “I’m not the villain here.”
    Ash bowed her head. “I don’t know who deserves