Firegirl (12 page)

“Today was so dumb,” I started. “But I was thinking —”

“I’m leaving,” she said.

I looked at her. “What?”

“I’m leaving on Wednesday. I won’t be back in school.”

I felt as if somebody had just punched me in the chest. “What?”

“It’s not working out,” she said. “We thought it would work out here. That’s why we rented this place. It was supposed to be until Christmas, at least. But the doctor doesn’t like how it’s going…. There’s a thing with my circulation, and he wants me to go back up to Boston again.”

I wasn’t getting it. “It’s only been like three weeks. You should be here more. You have to be here more.”

Words were getting jumbled in my head and on my tongue. I was sweating again, and I didn’t even have my uniform on. I tried to look into her eyes. I knew they were so green, but the light was nearly gone. “I mean, you can’t —”

“You can get back to normal in school now,” she said.

That was just too much. I felt myself begin to lose it. My eyes stung. “Jessica … don’t …”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t hate me….”

“I don’t. What for?”

It was coming out now, and I was mad. “For today! For the whole stupid thing! I should have talked to you more. Said more stuff to you. But I didn’t. I don’t know why, but I didn’t. I’m just like every other idiot.”

“No you’re not.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

She breathed out. Then she said quietly, “It doesn’t matter. I really have other stuff. Important stuff. About getting better. Or not getting better. Every time I go in the hospital, I find out all over again about what really matters. This doesn’t.”

I was shaking, imagining the hospital, then the car, and Jessica on fire inside it. Tears started boiling up out of me. “But people are actually scared of you,” I said. “Of the way you look. They don’t want you around. You have to hate them —”

I noticed she was trembling now, her hands shaking in her lap. “Sure I hate them. You don’t even know. But there are always some people who won’t be that afraid.”

“I’m afraid!” I said, surprising myself because I thought it was the worst thing I could say, but it was true. “The way you look … it scares me. I’m too scared to be close or nice to you. I don’t say anything. I don’t talk to my parents about you. I never talk to you where anybody can see me —”

Jessica laughed abruptly. “Who cares who sees you talk to me? Besides, you said my name; that was something.”

I turned to her. It was getting so dark in the room I almost couldn’t see her face anymore. “You heard me?”

The night sounds were starting outside the window.

“You really have to speak louder,” she said.

“I’m such a jerk!” I said, laughing and crying at the same time. “No one else heard it —”

“It’s okay. Besides, I’d probably only get one vote, so I’d never win. Then you’d feel a lot worse.”

“Yeah,” I snorted. “You’d be tied with me as the loser.”

“A vote for Tom,” she said. Even though I couldn’t see, I could tell there was a smile on her face when she said that. You can tell if someone is smiling when they speak.

For the next few minutes we didn’t say anything. I wiped my face and rubbed my hands on my pants. The room was almost totally dark now.

As the minutes went by and we didn’t speak, the silence went around and around and dropped down over us like the night dropped into the room. It was strange, but it was okay. It was good. We were quiet, both of us, in her dark room. I practically couldn’t see her anymore. She was just the shape of a person. But I felt that of all the places I could be — at supper, in my room, watching TV with my parents, in Jeff’s car, anywhere — I was in the one place I should be, doing what I should be doing.

The room darkened finally and completely. I still knew the rest of the world was outside the window, but it was okay without us. Everything was just waiting for us to finish what we were doing.

“It’s dumb to ask for a lot now,” she said after a while. “It took me a long time to figure it out, but when I throw up or pass out or hurt all over or get some new test results, it seems stupid to want to be pretty or to have friends or to fit in or to be in high school. I just feel amazed each time I wake up after a treatment and still know who I am. My mother … my mother was the first one with me when I woke up after the accident. She gave me this —”

She moved in the dark and I just made out that she took the stuffed green frog from her pillow and held it up.

“You said you hated her.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes.” Then she said in a whisper, “I was so afraid…. Tom … do you know what I did when I woke up the first time? After the accident?”

“What?”

“I asked her if I was still alive or if I had died.” She turned to me. I was crying again. “Isn’t that the dumbest thing? And she didn’t say anything; all she did was cry and cry. I guess she didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know then what I was like. Isn’t that the dumbest thing? To ask if I was alive?”

I wiped my face and remembered what everyone had said. That they couldn’t believe she was alive. “It’s not dumb. I’m glad you’re alive.”

“Me, too. It’s different now, but I’m glad.”

“It’s a good thing to be,” I said. “You could do a lot with just being alive.”

She breathed out a quiet almost-laugh. “Because you shouldn’t ask for too much, right? You told me that.”

Boxes were being shoved downstairs, chairs thumped on the floor. Silverware and dishes were clanking together.

“You have to pack?”

I saw her nod. “Yeah. The moving people are coming in the morning.”

My chest was pounding.

“Bye, Tom.”

She was just a shape in the dark, and I leaned over and sobbed like a baby and hugged her. I haven’t hugged my mother in probably two years. But while I held Jessica it seemed the only thing to be doing. It was long. When I moved away, my cheek brushed against hers. It was wet, too.

“Bye.”

Outside, the street was empty and the night was clear, quiet, and blue. When I got to my room, I lay in the dark for a while, just being quiet as the cool air streamed over my bed. I imagined her face as it was now. It faded into the one in the picture, then moved away and came back different still.

Chapter 20

The following morning, Mrs. Tracy announced to the class that Jessica was moving to Boston for more treatment. She would not be back in class.

Some kids mumbled a couple of words. A few even said it was too bad, we were just getting to know her. But there wasn’t much real talk about it. Now that Jessica was gone, we all felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from our shoulders. Everyone had wanted that to happen since the first day we saw her. Finally, it was okay to be goofy and loud and dumb and regular again.

As Mrs. Tracy started into science, I glanced up from my desk. Courtney looked as if she were going to jump up and storm right over to me, but she didn’t.

Jeff didn’t say much all day, and that was fine with me. After school, I went straight home. From the little window in my room I could just see the back end of the moving truck parked in front of her house. I actually started over there. I wanted to see her again, I wanted to talk to her again. But halfway to the corner, I stopped. Beyond the front of the truck, in the driveway, I saw her mother holding a cardboard carton under one arm and pulling at the minivan door with the other. She tried once, twice, then finally got the door to slide open. Jessica appeared at the kitchen door, nudging it open with her arm. She dragged a thick duffel bag out onto the step. I started walking over again, but when Jessica lifted the bag across the walk to the car, I stopped again.

Mrs. Feeney turned around and then moved back. I guess she was surprised to see Jessica so close beside her.

Jessica looked at her mother and then pulled something green from the opening of the duffel bag. It was the stuffed frog she’d shown me the night before. She plopped the frog on her mother’s arm suddenly. Then she hopped it jerkily across her mother’s shoulder to her cheek and leaned it in as if it gave her a kiss. After a moment, she pulled it back, nuzzled it for a second, and then put it into the bag.

All this was done without either of them saying anything.

I watched as her mother helped Jessica stow the bag and then went back into the house with her, slipping her arm around Jessica’s waist. That was all there was to see.

I turned and went back home. The rest of the afternoon, I just lay on my bed. Movers went in and out of the place, carrying boxes and furniture, less and less each time. I spent Jessica’s last day there staring out the window until it got dark.

The next morning I looked out, but the truck was gone, and of course the minivan was gone, too.

The air was cool. Fall had finally moved in. It took me almost the whole day before I realized I wasn’t sweating like I had nearly every day since school began.

In fifth period, I caught Courtney looking at me again. She did nothing then, but at the end of the day, as the last buses were called, she surprised me at my locker.

“You were nice to her,” she said, coming out of nowhere. “To Jessica.”

Her voice was soft and nervous. Looking into her eyes that close, I was surprised to see after all this time that they were gray.

“I didn’t do anything much,” I said.

“You did. You must have. She nominated you to be class president. Because you were nice.”

That last word stung. I started shaking my head. I had so wanted to get all the feelings out of me for good. When Jessica left, I wanted all my mixed-up thoughts about her to leave, too. But it was like they wouldn’t go. Now as I stood there, the hallway thinning out, they came flooding out of me.

“I don’t know why she did that. I tried to nominate her, but I didn’t get to. I wanted to do so much, but I was so stupid and so sc — scared … and now she’s gone —”

My nose burned suddenly and my eyes filled up. “I’m sorry, this is so dumb.” I started to turn, but Courtney reached out and touched me on the arm. It was a light touch. I saw that her eyes were wet, too.

“I think you probably made her feel better than anyone else did,” she said. “You went to her house. You took her her homework and everything.”

I shook my head again. “Mrs. Tracy told me to.”

“But you went. No one else did.” She stopped for a few seconds. “Anyway, she had at least one person here who she liked. She liked you.”

I wiped my eyes and swallowed. “Maybe.”

“I’m pretty sure.”

That was all.

I didn’t go to Jeff’s house in the afternoons much after that, even though a couple of weeks after Jessica left, he began inviting me again. He didn’t move or go to public school after all, but it was too much of the same stuff all the time, and I just didn’t want to hear it. Hanging with him and talking and laughing at the stuff he did didn’t seem right anymore.

My mother asked me why I didn’t go to his house like I used to, and I said that the seventh grade had more homework.

“I have to stay in the good reading level,” I told her.

My excuses to Jeff were pretty lame, too: I had to clean my room, move some plants, rake my grandparents’ yard … After a while, he stopped asking and did more things with Rich instead.

I thought it would never be like the way Jeff and I had done stuff, but with his empty house after school every day, at least he had somebody to hang around with, and Rich was okay.

Jeff moved back into the seat next to me, and he and I still talked in school. Sometimes he was pretty funny. But it wasn’t the same between us after Jessica.

At first, I wondered how long she would even remember being at St. Catherine’s. I mean, what was the big deal with us? The way she went from city to city and school to school, how could she remember one class over another? All the faces staring at her like ours did. Everyone so afraid of her. We must all blend together and get mixed up after a while. She had more important things to deal with than to remember all the dumb people around her. She had to live. Her days were filled with stuff so bad I could barely imagine it.

But I did try to imagine it.

I found myself zoning out in class, wondering what was happening to her. If she was in some hospital. If she was in another school and was it high school this time, where she should have been. Where in the classroom they put her desk. Did they make up stories about how she got burned? Did she still have that picture with her? Was she looking any different? Would she live as long as me?

On the outside it doesn’t look like very much happened. A burned girl was in my class for a while. Once I brought her some homework. In class she said my name. Then she was gone. That’s pretty much all that had happened.

I wish I could say I was a better person because of Jessica, but I’m not sure. Every now and then I wonder what she would think of the things I do or don’t do. Would she get mad at me like an older sister would? Would she smile like when she said “A vote for Tom” that time in her room?

Once, on a cool night, I imagined we were talking in her dark room again. Everything quieted down and it was just us. I told her I talk to Courtney more now, but that she’s not in my adventures so much anymore. I don’t know who it is because her face keeps changing. Then, even though I knew I was talking for both of us, Jessica said I should take all those snake pits and detachable ears and invisible elbows and find a way to do something really good with them.

Maybe I will. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get out there.

One thing I know. If I ever saw her again, I think I’d start saying all kinds of stuff and probably wouldn’t be able to stop. And I’d want her to talk, too. A lot. I’d want us both to talk to each other deep into the night and not stop. Mostly, I’d want to tell her thank you. And I’d try to say it loud enough for everyone to hear.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt to everyone who read this small story as it took shape, especially my agent, George Nicholson, who championed it through thick and thin and for longer than I did myself; Craig Walker, among the very first to help a little idea blossom into something bigger; Patricia Reilly Giff, my teacher and friend, whose comments were, as always, completely inspired and completely correct; Paul Rodeen, who saw potential and followed through on it; Alvina Ling, my delightful and sensitive editor at the very beginning of our relationship; and finally my wife, Dolores, to whom I am indebted in ways far deeper than words can express.