Firegirl (2 page)

Samantha Embriano came by and sat in the last seat of my row. She had black hair and a round face and eyebrows that almost met over her nose. She always said her last name together with her first name: Samantha Embriano. Samantha Embriano. It was always like that.

It would be like me calling myself Tom Bender. Hi, I’m Tom Bender. Tom Bender here. You just don’t do that. I think at first she said her name like that because there must have been a year or two when she shared the same first name with someone else in her class. Samantha Baker or Samantha Taylor. But she continued to say Samantha Embriano even though that was not true anymore. Now we all called her that. Samantha Embriano.

Just after first prayers, when everybody stood up and held hands together and prayed along with Mrs. Tracy — “Hold hands? No way,” Eric LoBianco said every time — I leaned over to Jeff.

“We’re on for next weekend, right?” I asked. “Not this one, but the next one?”

“Next weekend?” he said.

“The Cobra,” I whispered.

Jeff’s face unclouded. He smiled. “Yeah. My uncle’s coming over.”

I smiled, too. Yeah, he’s coming over and yeah, it’s going to be awesome. Mrs. Tracy was still fiddling with something, and I scanned the room. I knew that no one else in the class was going to be riding in an awesome red Cobra next weekend. Or probably ever.

As I was thinking this and watching the last of the bus kids get into their seats, my eyes finally came to the last seat of the last row.

Chapter 3

Courtney Zisky sat in the last seat of the last row. She was the girl who I thought could easily be in clothes catalogs. Someone should pick her to be in them, posing with one hand on her waist, which was just the right size, and the other one flung up behind her as she pretended to walk. She’d be wearing all new clothes — a T-shirt never worn until five minutes before and flip-flops and shorts with flowers on them. Maybe there would be a breeze blowing through her hair as she tossed her head back but turned just a little to look at you.

Courtney was beautiful. She had dark, almost-black hair and her skin was sort of creamy white. She didn’t have freckles or the pimples and blotches that Darlene Roberts had, who was three desks in front of her.

Darlene might even have been pretty good-looking if not for that, but in a different way. Plus, Darlene sometimes squeezed her pimples in the lavatory. You could tell, because when she came back, the skin around them was suddenly pink, like the spots on Jeff’s shirt. You could also tell she was sad about her pimples and mad that she had them.

But Courtney was perfect. When I looked over, she was bending back up from putting something under her seat. A wave of hair went loose at that moment and fell from behind her ear across her cheek. It was like a splash of something. I almost looked away as if it were a private thing, but I didn’t. The ceiling light flashed right off her hair and made it shine like a wall of dark water or something. The shine of her hair amazed me, but that was just one thing. I also knew that the smell of it was awesome.

One day, late last year, in Sister Robert Marie’s sixth grade, I was able to move up a reading level because some of the books my mother kept pushing on me finally helped. My mom was so glad. And so was I, mostly because moving up that late in the year meant that no matter how badly I did, there wouldn’t be enough time to drop me back down again. I’d begin seventh grade on a pretty good level.

I wasn’t a good reader, at least not to begin with. All through first and second grade, and part of third, I was in the lowest group. My brain always used to switch letters around when I tried to read and the whole thing made no sense. And because St. Catherine’s classes were small, everybody knew you were in the dumb group. Maybe Courtney didn’t ever call it that, but whenever people moved up, Sister Robert Marie tried to make them feel better by announcing that they were moving up.

“I hope you’ll welcome Tom,” she said that day. “Tom Bender is moving up —”

“From the dumb group,” Jeff whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, because he stayed behind when I moved.

Anyway, last year, for a couple of weeks at least, I was at the same table as Courtney.

The first time, when she took the seat next to me, I caught a little scent of her in the air that moved when she sat down.

That was it. That’s what really started it with her. That time she sat down. Gosh! It was like the smell of fruit or something. It must have been the shampoo she used. It was faint, but smelled like peaches and apples. Maybe that’s what it was called.
Peaches and Apples.
Whatever it was, it filled up the space around her. Being so close to her was an unbelievable thing. If I ever sat behind her in class — which I never would at St. Catherine’s — I don’t know if I could ever get any work done. I would be leaning forward all the time and smelling her hair.

I nearly fell into a trance at the table that day.

But when Courtney began to read parts of the book she had chosen for the group, she spoke so clearly and with all the ups and downs in her voice that helped you understand what the characters were feeling, that I almost couldn’t bear it when she stopped and Kayla began to read. Courtney seemed so excited at the exciting parts, too. It all just blew me away. She really was perfect. She was beautiful, of course. I knew that just by looking at her. But the moment she started to read, I knew she was really smart, too.

Since then, since that afternoon — on the bus, at night before bed — I had begun to think of ways I could save her life.

I couldn’t be the only one who did that. I couldn’t be. There wouldn’t be all those adventure stories and comic books and movies and TV shows with all their action and lifesaving going on if I was the only one, would there?

Maybe it was from reading Jeff’s comics in the afternoons or thinking about being in the Cobra or not being out there enough and having too much time alone, but I thought about saving Courtney’s life nearly every day.

This is how it worked. It could be just an ordinary day — like today at school with the teachers and books and milk cartons and the smell of lockers and backpacks all around me — and I would suddenly sense that Courtney was in danger and I would have to rescue her.

For instance, Courtney and I would be the only ones at school, left behind because of something with the buses being gone and it was late or we were late. Then I would see her at her locker, reaching for the top shelf and looking up into the back of it.

Suddenly, the walls would begin to shake. The ceiling would rattle and the floor tiles would start popping up out of the floor.
Pop! Pop!
You could see them shooting up, silhouetted in the big square of light coming from the end of the hallway. I’d seen that light a million times before, only this time the tiles were popping right up into it.

Pop! Pop! Pop-op-op!

I knew right away what it was.

“Earthquake!” I yelled, running to her locker. Her hair was moving in a wave as she turned herself to the light then back to me. Ignoring the danger to myself, I pulled Courtney by the waist down the hallway toward the light. But as far as it actually was from our lockers to that doorway, it now seemed totally endless.

Pop! Pop-op-oppppppp!

We ran faster. Now the fluorescent ceiling lights began exploding one by one above us, the floor opened, and huge cracks appeared. A cloud of steam and flames burst up out of the ground under the school.

“I knew it — the center of the earth!” I said angrily. “It was just a matter of time!”

She looked at me, her eyes so wild. “But, Tom —”

I shook my head. “Just come with me!”

Dancing over the widening cracks, holding her closely, I drew her toward the doors to safety. We plunged through a small gap of daylight just as the walls thundered down behind us.

Standing next to her, breathing hard, as the police and fire engines and ambulances roared up around us, my arm still around her waist, I turned and smiled. “First period tomorrow’s going to be a little tough.”

She fainted then, but I caught her, moving my other arm swiftly up under her knees.

Chapter 4

But that wasn’t all. I had lots of rescues.

Masked marauders — I always liked the word
marauders,
which I got from one of Jeff’s comics, and of course they had to have masks on, really creepy masks with horns — would try to steal Courtney for some reason involving lots of money.

But there I was, battling my way past them, breaking the chains on her wrists, and carrying her up through some kind of tunnel of falling blades, which turned out to be not far from school when we surfaced. We dived right into my fat red Cobra and out of the parking lot, our pockets dripping with gold and jewels — enough for us to live on for the rest of our lives.

Or I would be at recess, flapping cool air into my blazer and talking with the guys about the science quiz, when I’d suddenly look up — I was the only one who knew to do this at just that moment — to see Courtney plummeting through the air. The jet her uncle was piloting was on fire and crashing.

“She bailed out!” I would say. “Stupid chute didn’t open!”

Tossing my blazer aside, I would somehow leap up from the roof of the gym (I was on top of the gym now) and jump sort of sideways across the school yard and catch her just as she fell. We would tumble slowly and softly to the ground together, on the bright green grass of a golf course that was across the street, and her hair would fly across our faces as we rolled and rolled down a little green hill. Then it would get a little hazy, but suddenly everyone was crowding around us — Joey and Rich and Darlene and Mrs. Tracy and Samantha Embriano.

And there would come the moment in front of everyone when Courtney would thank me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

And she would always be with me after that.

It could happen.

A short snapping sound of loose papers being stacked on a desk made me lift my head. Mrs. Tracy called on Joey Sisman to hand back some graded papers. He started in the back corner, putting a couple on Courtney’s desk. She nodded and then leaned forward, moving her right hand between her skirt and the desk seat.

She looked up, maybe at the clock, and I turned away.

Of course, Courtney Zisky never actually noticed me. She was popular and had her own big bunch of friends that had never included me. Why would it include me? I was just a sweaty, fat kid with baggy pants, and she was Courtney Zisky.

But being unknown was actually good. Here’s where not “getting out there” was a good thing. Not being noticed was perfect for a superhero. And I sort of was a superhero in all the adventures I thought of with her in them. I was pretty fearless. I had powers.

I had powers, even though I have to say that there was a pretty strange thing about every rescue story I thought of. The powers I had were not the usual superhero ones. They were small. Little powers. Not very remarkable. You could say they were even dumb.

In my battle against the marauders, for instance, I didn’t have amazing strength or superspeed. When it came to the big moment to rescue Courtney, I found that what I could do was spin really fast — so fast I was like a blur! — on one foot.

If spinning fast was almost worthless in most situations, it happened to be the perfect thing against the marauders. They could do nothing against my spinning around. They fell away from me, dropping their weapons, which clanked to the floor. Their mouths (I could see their mouths behind the masks) were open wide and yelling. Their eyes were full of fear. Finally, I stopped spinning long enough to pull Courtney away to freedom. We lived a happy life after that.

One-foot spinning was not all I could do, though.

Sometimes a hand made of glue was the one thing I needed to stop the bad men. Once I used a detachable ear to trick them. A very loud finger snap, invisible elbows, an earthshaking hum, legs of snow, and the ability to roll uphill were just some of the many powers that helped me in my Courtney stories.

Each time, before I hopped into my famous roaring red Cobra and tore off into the night with her, I would use one of these abilities and leave all the powerful evildoers falling down in defeat.

Not that these rescues were ever easy.

Some of them were very tough. A lot of the time there would be a point when I’d have to choose between two really horrible things to save Courtney.

It was either the pit of hissing snakes or the rushing bunch of sweaty men with big iron clubs. The stairway of flashing sabres or the man-eating-snake-infested pool that stank like garbage.

Faced with these kinds of dangers, there came a moment when everything stopped and an instant of complete stillness fell over me and over everything around me.

I stood there, sizing up my choices.

It was like I was standing in the middle of a flimsy, little rope bridge. On one side the ropes were on fire, burning away from the rocks that held them. On the other was a troop of sword-waving bandits with painted faces charging at me.

At this moment in the soundtrack — my adventures were always accompanied by booming horns and thundering drums — everything would go silent except for a single long note played on a violin, a note as thin and sharp as a thread (like the thread that held up that bridge I was on).

While that one note played, everything stopped. The bridge didn’t burn. The bad guys didn’t charge. No one breathed.

Sometimes, that violin note went on too long and my daydreams faded away. Someone would snap some papers or the school bell would ring or a bus would honk its horn, and the adventure couldn’t go on. Then I would look around and pretend to be with everybody else again, which meant that I’d have to start at the beginning of the story. That was okay, too. The start of the adventure was the best part, anyway. I had lots of beginnings about how I could be the only one to really save Courtney.

There was a sharp knock at the classroom door. It opened a crack, and I heard a voice say “Linda?” Mrs. Tracy went into the hall for a second then came back with a pink note.