(You) Set Me on Fire (13 page)

“Danny’s kind of a film genius,” Carly added, stabbing a fry with a plastic fork. “He’s totally our leader now. He’s our Wes Anderson.”

“Oh? Cool.”

“HONEY. I’m your Danny Maclane. That’s who I am, baby. Wes Anderson can go blow himself.”

Afterward Carly bought me an ice cream at a creepy Korean convenience store. It was already getting dark outside. It was also too cold for ice cream but Carly didn’t seem to care.

“Hey so. If you’re free. You should come to a film club meeting sometime. It’s actually really cool.”

“Yeah that sounds cool.”

Peeling open her ice cream and licking the cottoncandy-blue top, Carly took a good long look at me. “Okay. Can I ask you something without sounding like an asshole? Like, with you understanding that I’m not being an asshole? I just want to know?”

“Sure. I guess. This is a really weird thing to be eating in the winter.”

Carly stopped walking and sat on one of the little concrete college benches with positive learning affirmations engraved on top.

I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they learn. —Albert Einstein

Sitting on “learn,” I watched Carly’s face as she formulated her question, her butt rocking back and forth on “pupils” as she shivered in the cold.

“Why do you think? Okay. Wait. Okay. Here it is. Why do you think that Shar, who I’m sure when she’s with you is totally cool … but … why do you think she’s so mean?”

“Because of what she said to um … the yoga girls?”

Carly paused. “Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Sure. That and the other stuff.”

Rattles. I couldn’t remember her actual name so I didn’t say anything. Maybe it wasn’t Rattles.

“I don’t know. People piss her off sometimes?”

“Allison, everyone gets pissed off. Shar’s a permabitch. Like, someone says ONE thing to her and then for the rest of the year she’s all up in their face? What’s up with that?”

I pictured Shar sitting on her bed, curled up the way she usually was when we were hanging out. Carly made her sound like some sort of fairy-tale evil witch, which of course she totally wasn’t.

“I guess some people, like, trigger stuff for her?”

It occurred to me that Shar could be hiding in the shadows. I took a brief scan. “Her sister has an eating disorder,” I whispered. “So. I think it makes her mad when people are all freaked out about food.” and walked out the door?0

“Oh.” Carly rubbed her hands together, popped the last bit of her blue ice treat in her mouth. “Okay. Well. Yeah, okay I guess. It’s like, still, you know? It’s still weird. But I didn’t know about the eating disorder sister thing.”

“Yeah well.” I stood up. “Thanks for hanging out … and all that stuff.”

“You okay?”

“Of course. See you later I guess.”

“Bye!”

Street lamplights swung my shadow along the sidewalk, stretching the silhouette version of me to a breaking point and then snapping it back. A block away I could hear shrieks and giggles, the scraping of heels against pavement, the low rumble of idling cabs.

It was Wednesday, HUMP DAY, official slut night at Dylan Hall.

Something that was definitely not part of the “let’s be healthy in second semester” St. Joseph’s campaign.

Basically, even though technically every day of the week held the possibility of going out and getting shit-faced, no matter what,
everyone
went out on Wednesday: engineering students headed for the local beer and pizza place, the yoga heads chugged energy drinks and went clubbing, jocks headed for sports bars, and even the social work students went out (mostly to movies). That night the main hall was an overwhelming Pixies mix of loud and soft as girls called up to people to come downstairs (“Bitch, if you do not get down here this instant we are fucking OUT OF HERE”), fought about restaurants (“Oh my GOD PLEASE no more PIZZA”) and bars (“Can we go someplace I can have WINE? Like, not just BEER?”), and fixed each other’s hair. Two girls adjusted their gloss using the reflection in their phones. Hope, bundled in a massive orange down coat, brushed past me on my way to the elevator.

“Hey. Uh.”

“Allison.”

“Right. Allison. Have a good night, eh?”

On the landing of the sixth floor a bunch of Shar’s floormates were all painted up and ready to go, anxiously bouncing around and talking about some guy some girl was going to fuck that night.

“Oh SUUUURE you’re going to get laid. Right. My ASS.”

“Shut up, Ashley!”

“I’m just going to get wasted and make out with some random guy.”

“AGAIN! HAR HAR!”

Shar’s door was closed.

“Shar?” I tapped. “Shar?”

I could hear what sounded like a fan going on the other side of the door. I was pressed up listening hard when Shar appeared behind me.

“What?”

It had occurred to me in the elevator on my way up that I’d never really fought with Shar, mostly because I’d never said or done anything to contradict her.

Standing in the frame of the bathroom door, Shar frowned. Her split lip was scabbed over now, a brown lump against pink. In her giant Madonna T-shirt, she shifted her hip to one side. Waiting. back to dorm, c

“Um. I was just coming to see what you wanted to do tonight,” I said.

“I don’t feel like doing anything.”

“Oh. Okay well. I guess I was just. I mean, do you want to get a movie? We could. Um. I mean I could even go and grab food if. I don’t know if you ate. Um.”

Here’s something. You can talk and talk and talk and not get rid of silence.

“Or we could just sit and, I don’t know if you want to study.”

Sometimes silence sits on talk like a bully, squashing any power words might possibly have.

“Or we could go out? Or. You didn’t want to do anything so …”

Shar’s silence pushed on me the way a mattress pushes on you when you sleep. At some point she broke past me and into her room where she immediately flipped on her music and slammed the door shut.

I went upstairs to my room. More silence. I tried to think of things I n/a>

ELEVEN

It dragged him back to apologize awhoel’s you. Again.

By law, every dorm floor at St. Joseph’s must be equipped with a fire extinguisher. At Dylan they were in those glass cases on the wall by the elevator, next to the sign that insisted you
not
take the elevator in the case of a fire. Not even if you’re really tired.

Since spotting ours the first day, I’d often stopped to take a good long look. I thought of it less as pre-emptive and more as just a practical thing for a girl with my experience to know about. So. I knew how the latch opened. (The door was secured with a little plastic tag that was easy to rip.) Sometimes buildings house these things behind glass you’re supposed to break to get in, which I suppose is to make sure that it’s really a serious fire and not something you could snuff out with two wet fingers.

I’ve never had the opportunity to use a fire extinguisher myself. I am, apparently, the person
who makes this kind of object necessary, but not the person who makes it useful.

Hope ended up using the fire extinguisher. She got off the elevator and immediately noticed the smell of smoke. She was about to bolt back down the stairs (bypassing the unrecommended elevator ride) when she noticed the fire extinguisher and decided it was worth at least checking to see if she could put out whatever was on fire.

The source of smoke and flame was Katy’s door, which was covered not only in sticky notes but also photos—of Katy, her boyfriend, her new nephew, and a bunch of other people—and a giant whiteboard for people to leave “positive messages” on. Katy was sort of the unofficial person to talk to about problems in our dorm. She had the number of the Head of Residence as one of her Fav Five. People were always tacking their problems to her door. Someone had also left a garbage bag at the foot of her door earlier that night; in it were a sweater and some pants that had been damaged in the often-psychotic twists of the eighth-floor washing machine. It nearly killed Katy when someone, somehow, set it on fire and the bag leaked plumes of smoke into her room and mine. Katy slept soundly with the help of her ambient noise machine, so she didn’t hear a thing until it was almost too late.

It was Hope I heard shouting “FIRE,” whose shouting was eventually joined by Katy’s screams and finally the screams of what sounded like two other girls. I remember smoke rushing into my lungs. I remember standing and suddenly feeling sick, sick like a dead pig must feel in the hot dark confines of a barbecue pit. I remember watching my hand grab the doorknob and being afraid it wouldn’t turn. When I flung the door open, smoke still hovered in the air. The hallway was covered in white. Katy’s knees cut long tracks through the mess of white foam as she crawled toward the stairwell in her long cotton nightgown, looking like Ophelia in her final days, mad hair and eyes, grey limbs. Hope dropped the extinguisher and hunched over her. Little bits of foam were stuck to Katy’s hair. She was whimpering.

“Katy! Katy, stop! It’s okay!”

The smoke ended up mostly affecting Katy’s room and mine. Katy was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation; the paramedics checked my vitals and then told me to take it easy and to come to the hospital if I had any symptoms, anything that seemed abnormal. One of them pointed at my scar and raised an eyebrow.

“Is THAT from a fire?”

“Not a big one,” I replied.

Carly arrived a couple minutes after the fire department had gone downstairs to check on why the fire alarm hadn’t gone off. She had to push her way through security.

“Um. WHAT THE FUCK?”

“Fucking FIRE!” Hope hollered over the shoulder of a security guard.

Seconds later, Carly stood next to me, peering into my room. It smelled like a bonfire.

“The alarm didn’t go off,” she said.

“No.”

“Shit. Are you okay? Holy shit. A fire!”

Not a fire, I wanted to say.
Smoke
.

Girls trickled in from Hump Night adventures. Freaked out. Checked their rooms to make sure everything was still there and nothing had combusted or been stolen by flames.

A person in charge of college residence stuff appeared about an hour later with a book of cab chits and forms for us to sign relating to damage assessment. Residents on the eleventh floor were told to gather what they’d need to relocate for the night while the police and fire departments did an investigation.

“Of course, the college will provide housing for the evening.”

“A hotel?” Hope asked hopefully.

“No.”

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to sit in the hallway and wait. Underneath my fingertips the hallway carpet fibres were sticky. Damp. Not good to sit on.

“Allison? Allison, where are you staying tonight?” Carly’s voice was careful.

“I’m fine,” I said, although of course I didn’t feel fine.

“Okay. Come on,” Carly coaxed, grabbing my elbow. “It’s late. Let me take you to my friend Jay’s house. Okay? Just for the night. He’s got a huge apartment and you can sleep on his couch.”

One or two people reached out to give me what I supposed were meant to be consoling touches on the shoulder. My head hurt, a light buzz of a hurt that hovered over me like a tilted halo while Carly guided me out down the stairs, onto the street, and into a cab.

My coat, my hair, my skin smelled like ashtray. When I closed my eyes I saw the shadow of my doorknob lightly outlined in the dark of my room. Right before I opened my eyes I fell forward as I mentally grabbed for that thin silver shape.

I jerked myself upright. Saw Carly.

“Wow sweetie, you look like shit. Do you want water or something? Okay, just try to relax.”

I managed a quick “hello” to Jay before bolting past him and into the bathroom, where I immediately barfed my guts out. After that I lay on the floor listening to Carly in the hallway.

“Fire. Something something something something. Yeah, AGAIN.”

A couple of minutes later, a scratch at the door.

“Allison? Allison are you okay? Should we take you to the hospital? Allison? Can you just like kick the door with your foot or something to let us know you’re not passed out or in a coma?”

“I Bugs Bunny garbage pail. just OH’m okay.”

“Allison?”

“I’m OH KAY.”

The linoleum was cold and comforting. It was dirty, covered in a sea of grey lint balls and smelling slightly of mildew, but also cold and comforting.

An hour later I made it to the couch. Carly made me a mug of camomile tea. She tried to get me to change my clothes. I refused. I wanted to be still. I pushed myself into the corner of the scratchy couch
that smelled like mothballs. Every thought in my brain felt like it was blocks away, huffing through the cold, heading my way but still too far to hear. I fell asleep to a rerun of some cop show about an angry cop.

My phone buzzed at three-thirty a.m. Shar.

Are you ok? Where are you?

I stared at the glowing text for a while. Imagining what a concerned Shar would sound like.

At someone’s house. Ok.

Seconds later.

Come here?

On the TV there was a commercial playing about an old person who was applying for life insurance. It occurred to me that it was strange for Shar to ask me, rather than tell me, to do something.

Although then I figured, Well, of course, she’d heard what happened.

Please.

It took me about five minutes to find my boots and coat, and then a piece of paper to leave a note for Carly saying I’d decided to go back to the dorm. I found the door and slipped out onto the street. The cold air felt good on my face, even if it was kind of
insanely freezing. I dug out my mittens and covered my ears with my hands. I must have looked like someone walking away from an invisible shouting person, charging off in silent fury.

There was no one in the hallway, no one on the stairs. I slipped through the dorm like a burglar, touched Shar’s door softly with the pad of my index finger.

“Shar,” I whispered, suddenly worried that I’d hallucinated the call.

“Who is it?”

“Allison.”

The door opened. Shar’s face was wet, her features smudged and puffy, her hair pushed up on one side. She’d changed into a little black silk nightie that was crinkled and ripped a bit. It stuck to the skin of hene.