(You) Set Me on Fire (10 page)

“What?” Rattles’s voice seemed to be breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces with every word she spoke.

“If you were injured. You couldn’t play. So?”

Rattles bent her head and started to cry again, the kind of crying that seems more to do with exhaustion than anything really sad. A tear dripped of things I needed to be doingened me f her cheek and onto the floor. Watching it splash against the linoleum I felt a weird sort of twist in my stomach, a tiny nervous twinge.

Slowly untangling her fingers from her hair, Rattles sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her snotty nose.

Shar pressed her cigarette into the plate she’d perched on the windowsill, snapping it in two.

Finally, because I had no idea what else to do, I popped up from my place on the floor, declaring, “I’m going to get you a tissue.”

Outside, I took another long look down the hall, listened for the sound of other people, the sound of someone, anyone, with a vested interest in helping the crying girl in Shar’s room.

Nothing.

I walked as slowly as I could to the bathroom, weighing each step, thinking, or hoping, that by the time I got back Rattles would have obediently disappeared.

I was standing with one hand on Shar’s doorknob, a wadded-up handful of toilet paper in the other, when
I heard a splintering noise, like the sound of a foot going through a brittle floorboard.

When I pushed open the door, Shar was sitting on her bed, hairbrush in one hand, sleeve pulled back to display a red welt on her forearm.

“See?” she said, rubbing her fingernail over her raised skin. “No big deal.”

Rattles seemed transfixed.

“Right, Allison?”

Before I knew it, Shar was up and had my arm in her grip, the brush raised. I could feel Rattles watching us, hear her raspy, post-crying breathing.

“Right, Allison?”

Truth or dare.

Which, like I said, I’d never played. Until Shar.

“Right?”

Her eyes still focused on me, Shar tightened her fingers around my wrist. She was pulling, a little, and smiling this familiar smile, like the smirk girls give each other when they’ve just said something mean about someone else, like the sly, no-tooth grin girls use when they’re playing a game, a trick. It’s
the look of an accomplice. The look you give to your accomplice. Me.

“Right,” I breathed.

Right answer.

SMACK!

I jolted. Shar held her grip firm for a moment as the sting spread across the flesh of my forearm.

I pulled my arm away and looked down to see Rattles hiking her grubby sweatshirt sleeves up.

Seeing Rattles’s arms bared, Shar let out a sharp laugh, tossed the hairbrush on the bed.

“Or, yeah, you know? Or you could just study and take the exam I guess,” she chuckled.

Rattles had gone stone quiet. She opened her hand, flicked the pills still stuck there onto the floor. “I should go,” she said.

No one moved.

“Okay then,” Shar chirped. “Good luck with your studies!”

“How many times,” Rattles whispered thoughtfully, “do you think … Like, to actually miss an exam. How many times would you, like, do it?” things I needed to be doingened me

“Theoretically,” Shar added.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe twenty-five?” Shar’s voice was smooth and level. “What do you think, Allison? Theoretically?”

“I don’t know,” I stuttered. “Like ten?”

“Ten?” Shar coughed incredulously.

“Fifty?”

Shar raised an eyebrow, lit another smoke, and took a long inhale. After a few drags she rested her cig on the plate and walked toward Rattles, who was clearly lacking in momentum. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your room.”

They were gone for a while, especially considering that Rattles lived next door. It was long enough for me to open my textbook and take up a purely aesthetic pose, “studying” what from a glance seemed an impossibly long list of all the languages spoken by “Chinese” people.

At one point I thought I heard Shar tell Rattles to stop crying. It was hard to hear, though. And I kind of didn’t want to listen.

Shar slid back into the room just as I was tracing my finger over a line about the Mongols, which I had clearly at some point thought was interesting enough
to highlight with neon pink. She walked up behind me and stabbed the tip of her toe into the small of my back.

“Fifty! What are you, some kind of monster? Man! She’s going to break her arm!”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re terrible, Allison.” She said it like she was describing a rock star, or something sweet and fattening. You’re TERRIBLE, Allison.

“She’s not going to DO it.”

“Oh no?”

Shar got down next to me, knee on my textbook, and took my arm in her hands. “Look at your poor little bruise,” she mocked. “Maybe you’ll have to miss YOUR exam, bully.”

“It’s not even a bruise.”

“You want me to kiss it better?”

That same smile.

“No!” I said, maybe a little too fast and too loud.

“As if,” she cooed, planting a loud smooch on the pink outline the brush had left behind.

The next day I slept in and had to make a mad dash
to the auditorium for my East Asian History exam. The last question involved drawing a map of China. AN ENTIRE MAP. I drew a half-hearted rectangle with jagged edges and added in some rivers where I could remember there being rivers. Later on I found out that someone had taped a map to the back of the third toilet in the women’s bathroom. So apparently there are a few reasons to stay in touch with your classmates.

I saw Rattles in the hallway before I heard the news. She was walking stooped, bent almost to a ninetydegree angle. Paler than ever with black circles under her eyes. She had a tensor bandage wrapped around her right wrist, a flesh-coloured wrap wound so thick it looked like a turnip.

“What happened to Ra— Nat?” I asked Carly, who was sitting on the floor in her room,econds later">OH surrounded by a sea of Cultural Studies notes I was hoping to borrow.

“She hurt her wrist.” Carly shrugged, not looking up, twirling a highlighter in her fingers.

“Doing what?” I tried to perch myself on Carly’s bed without disturbing what seemed to be a delicate study system.

Carly’s walls were covered in black and white movie posters—all of them movies you’d have to rent at some obscure retro place to watch. I wondered if she had. Rented them.

She shrugged. “I don’t know actually. I mean, I guess it was from practising too much because she plays piano, right? Hmmmm. Did you download the videos for Cultural Studies, because you need those too.”

I got the whole story from Shar during her celebratory feast at Chicken! Chicken!

“Well she’s TELLING PEOPLE that she tripped and fell. That girl is such a liar.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think? She beat her fucking wrist! With a stapler!” Shar chuckled. “A STAPLER! Can you imagine? Guess someone didn’t have a BRUSH!”

“WHAT?”

Pausing over her plate, Shar tapped her fork on her wrist in demonstration. “You know, like BANG BANG BANG!”

“She actually did it.”

“Of course. Because she’s a spineless pushover and I—WE—gave her a genius way to get out of her exam. Although”—Shar picked up a bit of chicken finger and proceeded to drown it in ketchup—“I’ll say this, Rattles outdid herself. She CHIPPED a bone.”

“NO!”

“Yep.”

Watching Shar suck the ketchup off her chicken finger, it occurred to me that she was kind of glowing, with a look on her face like a mom holding up her kid’s first-place ribbon. In front of her a feast of french fries lay smothered under a bloody blanket of ketchup. One of the fries was poking through like a bone splinter. Sort of.

The sickly sweet smell of tomato and the image of that little fry was making my stomach hurt.

“Wow. So. Huh.”

It was hard not to picture Rattles alone in her room, maybe sitting on the bed next to her stapler. Her face all sweaty from constant crying. No one around to buy her chips and tell her to chill out, that exams are no big deal.

“I feel bad,” I said, twirling the straw of my Coke.

“Why?”

“Because …”

“Allison. We did not do anything to that girl, okay? Not that she didn’t WANT us to, the lazy slug. Like we’re going to do her dirty work for her. Like we’re going to leave the door open for her to charge us with ASSAULT.”

“She WANTED you—she wanted US—to hit her?”

Shar shrugged. “Who knows WHAT that girl wanted? Look, whatever you do, do not feel bad for the Rattles of this world. Maybe this will teach her not to wander around the halls sobbing and looking for sympathy.">“What do you think?toDo”

On the way home, Shar demonstrated Rattles’s wristbanging technique on various surfaces. The railing on the steps outside the restaurant. A tree down the street from residence.

“Like this so BANG BANG BANG BANG!”

“Problem,” I finally said.

“HA!” Shar hollered. “Are you kidding? Oh poor little Rattles can’t handle exams! Oh poor Rattles! Let’s all FEEL SO SORRY for her. Poor Rattles and her DEADLY office supplies! Fuck. It might just be the funniest thing I’ve heard this year. Oh! Do you think she did it fifty times? Is fifty enough to chip bone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Allison”—grabbing me by both shoulders, Shar pressed her forehead against mine—“you must RELAX and enjoy this moment with me!”

I could almost taste the red candy she was sucking on. Cherry.

The rest of my exams, after that, were a bit of a blur.

Linguistics was multiple choice; that is, the choice between a bunch of things I didn’t recognize (so not much of a choice, really). Thankfully the Cultural Studies exam had an option to write about the one movie I’d managed to attend. Social Problems was an essay on a specific social problem; I chose sex. Shar finished her essay in fifteen minutes. I ended up sitting next to Jonathon, who was still there when I left. It looked like he was writing a novel.

The night before students left for Christmas break, each floor in the whole dorm had a secret holiday elf gift exchange. A stack of presents sat by the elevator in a cardboard box, cryptically labelled.

I’d gotten Carly, so I bought her a little magnet that looked like a Super 8 camera. Someone got me a giant chocolate A. Shar got a massive bottle of bubble bath.

“Because I take soooooo many baths,” she drawled.

Shar was supposed to get a gift for Rattles, but when she walked down the hall she noticed a huge pile of presents with Rattles’s name on them in the box.

“Fuck that,” Shar said.

So we snuck into the St. Joseph’s Debate Society Karaoke, which had made the mistake of stuffing a flyer into Shar’s mailbox, and drank what would have been Rattles’s present instead.

Shar said the last thing Rattles needed was more sympathy, let alone a bottle of Amaretto.

The karaoke night was a RETRO SPECIAL. We stayed for three versions of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” an extremely shrill rendition of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry,” Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” one too many interpretations of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” and four rounds of Heart’s “Barracuda.”

“JeSUS we just HEARD this song,” Shar would scream after every encore. “YOU GUYS SUCK!”

Every three songs we went up to the MC and requested the Rolling Stones until the DJ refused to talk to us anymore.

When we got back to residence, someone had giftwrapped Rattles’s door in pink paper and bows. Shar tore a ribbon off and stuck it on my head.

“Merryeconds later">OH Christmas, Sonny.”

Later, sitting on her bed watching
Jaws
, Shar held my arm in her lap and drew fifty tiny x’s around my wrist.

Shar’s train home left at nine the next morning.

I walked her to the station through the first few flakes of snow as they drifted down like tiny paper airplanes. The station was a cloud of white noise and bustling bodies, like Grand Central, like you see in the movies.

As soon as we got in line to pick up her ticket, Shar changed. I kept waiting for her to say something shitty about all the slacker students in their track pants waiting in line. Shar hated track pants. But she just stood there, holding her coffee, looking off in the distance.

“You should go back and pacdrink we were

NINE

Break and split

Going home felt like a humongous waste of time.

I had basically no desire to see my parents (that sounds harsh but it’s true). It wasn’t as if I’d spent any time at St. Joseph’s missing my home or my neighbourhood or high school. If anything, I’d just started feeling like I’d managed to escape that stuff.

Like, you know, thank GOD.

Of course, the first thing my mom noticed at the train station was the scratch Shar had left on my burn Halloween night. Dance Yourself to Death ",

By dinner she was picking and poking at me, pulling on my shirt to expose the borders of old wounds.

She was all over me to go to the doctor. Like, immediately. Like let’s all overreact and call an ambulance why don’t we?

“It doesn’t really look like you’re looking after it.”

“Mom! It’s nothing! I had this HUGE scab and now I have this teeny tiny sore bit—”

“It
is
sore then,” my dad noted.

For fuck’s sake.

“Dad. It’s a BURN. It doesn’t TICKLE.”

Overall, my parents noticed that I looked way paler than I did when I left. My dad said I had dark circles under my eyes, which he guessed was from partying.

“You know, there was this kid in my school who got scurvy when he was a freshman because he only ate beer and mac ’n’ cheese,” he noted.

“I don’t have scurvy, Dad.”

Halfway through dinner Shar called and I ran up to my room to take it.

Shar’s mom lived on the west coast and her dad lived in England.

“The fact that I’m spending my Christmas NOT in England with my dad should tell you something about my parents’ shitty power struggle,” she’d explained a week before going.

On the phone she sounded tinny and thin.

“Well, Allison, I actually don’t even have anything to say to you. Weird. Are you having fun?”

“Fun?”

“Clearly it’s a stupid question, Allison. My mom is downstairs and I don’t feel like dealing with her. So, make some small talk with me so I have something to do before I go out.”