(You) Set Me on Fire (18 page)

She held me for a second more, then dropped my arm, a little stiffly, and turned back toward the dorm. “I’m going to this party thing, Allison. You can come if you want.”

When we got into the elevator she said she needed a nap.

“If you want to come, drop by later and we’ll walk over,” she suggested, scooting out of the elevator without looking back.

I was at Shar’s at eight-fifty p.m. She opened the door and pointed to the bed, where I sat on a pile of what I quickly realized were my clothes while Shar finished up her eyes. A low hum of rock and roll filled the room.

“How’s your stitches?” she asked, layering a line of charcoal above her eyelashes.

“They itch,” I said, noticing another ball of my stuff shoved into a corner. “The ones on the inside of my lip are already coming loose a little.” I bent my lip open in her direction to show her but she didn’t seem to notice.

“You know that crazy bitch who almost killed you? When they were loading you into the ambulance she was all over me. Freaking out. Like, a crazy person. She wanted me to give you her number,” Shar said, breaking into my daze and sounding suddenly like herself.

“Oh yeah?”

There was another silence. The muffled sound of voices in the hallway, what sounded like shouting.

“I thought maybe she wanted to give you a shell,” she chuckled.

“Right,” I laughed.

Technically, I was short a shell.

“I gave her a fake number and told her your name was Madison.”

Madison. Madison? The named blinked in the corner of my eye, a flashing red light.

Like. Your sister?

“She didn’t get my name from the cops?” I finally asked.

“Nope. That woman was borderline. Did you see her? She looked like a tanning salon reject. She looked like a cocktail party reject. I bet she was driving drunk.”

“Is that what the cops said? That she was drunk?”

“No. The cops are idiots.” Stuffing her makeup back things I needed to be doingb cck“ in her bag, Shar flipped off the stereo. “You should come get your stuff and bring it back to your room tomorrow. It’s all over the place.”

Before we left, as I was sliding on my coat, Shar looked at me through the mirror over her desk and said, “I told you it was never serious with girls, right?”

“Yes.”

To be perfectly clear, I KNOW that sentence should have been my warning shot, my signal not to go to the party.

Of course. If you know me by now, you know …

It wasn’t.

The Trident party was not unlike the frat party I’d been to at the beginning of the year. By the time we
got there the building was a mechanical heart of pulsating party-goers. Inside, every hallway was lined with bodies—drunk, screaming students roaming in and out of rooms with beers and plastic cups held in increasingly precarious grips. Jer’s room, in the corner by the stairwell, was packed with boys and girls in various states of making out and wasted. One girl sat slumped on the floor, her head on her knees, her cup dangling between her thumb and forefinger. Two other giggling girls were hunting through Jer’s drawers. Another couple in matching St. Joseph’s T-shirts and blue jeans writhed entangled on the bed under a poster of some guy jumping in the air with a basketball. The walls were covered in pictures of people doing various things with basketballs: dunking them, throwing them, bouncing them on the ground. Besides basketball, Jer was clearly a big fan of rap; a full-frontal Auto-Tune assault boomed from the massive black speakers that stood like soldiers at the doorway.

Jer sat on the floor by the stereo, bumping his head to the rhythm.

“LITTLE BUSY IN HERE! SQUAT IT ON THE FLOOR!” he hollered over the noise, pulling Shar toward him.

“JUST NEED TO GET OUR DRINKS!” she hollered back.

“IT’S ALL IN THE BATHROOM. HELP YOURSELF.” Jer shot me a quick look. “HURRY BACK, BABY.”

The fifth-floor bathroom had been converted into a bar, with bags of ice in every sink and bottles of booze wedged among them like tombstones. In slightly less bombastic noise conditions, we took two shots each. Then I grabbed a bottle of gin and poured what I thought was lime mix in to top it up.

“I thought you weren’t into this stuff,” I said, taking a slug from the bottle.

“Drinking?” Shar scoffed.

“No, this.” I gestured widely at the space around me. “Since when are you all ‘Let’s party’?”

“You know,” she replied, grabbing the bottle and taking a longer swig, “what you don’t know, Allison, is a lot.”

“I know.”

“You’re always TELLING me that you know.”

“I know.”

“But you DON’T know.”

She turned to appraise herself in the mirror, smoothing down her hair and wiping a tiny smudge of black off her cheek.

“Stop staring at me, Allison.”

A blast of music enter+A5 cck“ed the bathroom on the heels of screaming college girls.

Shar headed back to Jer’s room, with me in close pursuit.

I’m not sure how much detail you need about the next few hours. From the time we arrived in Jer’s room I just sat on the bed with the wriggling makeout duo and watched Shar flirt with Jer in a way that was completely unlike the person I knew. At some point in the evening Jer pulled out his collection of belt buckles.

“Got the TITTY INSPECTOR BADGE. Sweet. Got. Oh this is the Salami Samurai. Oh YEAH. Check this out. Party in the FRONT! Poker in the … GET IT?!”

The crowd erupted. Wow. Buckles are HILARIOUS. Shar giggled, flapping her hands in front of her face. TOO FUNNY. A foot hit me in the back and I grabbed my drink and stormed out.

After that I wandered in and out of rooms, each one exactly alike, a house salad of teenagers and booze and making out and posters of guys playing sports. Boys grabbed me around the middle, grinded against my leg, grabbed my arms. I struggled free, tumbling like the world was on spin cycle.

By what felt like midnight a couple doors were locked, underwear slung on the handle.

The drill for people like me in situations like these is that we’re supposed to leave. That’s the unwritten rule. We’re supposed to get out of the way. It’s not just about being a lesbian, obviously. I’m pretty sure this happens to straight people too. It seems to happen to lesbians a lot though. Because we’re such idiots, I think.

Maybe if I wasn’t rocking a couple bruises and tasting the stitches in my bottom lip I would have just disappeared. Maybe if I hadn’t just spent whatever number of weeks with Shar where we were, like, the only two people at St. Joseph’s, I would have disappeared.

Maybe if it weren’t for Carly and Madison and Rick.

And Anne.

A little bit of Anne.

That, and the feeling, the growing sensation, that I had been thoroughly betrayed, and thoroughly fooled, into loving someone.

Again.

So yeah, maybe if it weren’t for all that, I might have gone home.

But I didn’t.

By the time I got back to Jer’s room I was like the final episode of a really messy reality TV show. I was both barely standing and insanely pissed off, rage wrapped around my face like a hurricane, making it hard to breathe.

Shar was in Jer’s lap, her face in his neck as he talked to someone on the bed. Her face in his neck but her eye trained on me as I stood in the doorway, feet cemented. My right lung collapsed. Thin red flames shot out of the scar on my shoulder. A serpent shook its barbed tail in my mouth.

Shar lifted her head, got up, and walked over to me. All the while pointing like a kid at a crosswalk.

“Go home, Allison. I’m so fucking done with this.”

She took another step forward, nudged me out of the doorway and into the hall. The bodies around us paid little to no attention as we bumped past them.

I pushed her back. “You don’t want me here?” I slurred. “This little show isn’t for me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why are you acting like this!?” I was yelling. The music was loud. It felt like camouflage. It probably wasn’t.

“I’m not acting like fucking ANYTHING, ALLISON. YOU are acting like a jealous psycho!”

“Are you serious?! You’re calling ME jealous?” I was screaming so hard my lips were numb. “Oh my GOD, SHAR!”

SEVENTEEN

Harvest paradise

Maybe I don’t feel guilty about what happened in Jer’s room that night. Maybe that’s why I remember it so precisely.

It was quiet in the room. Just a little noise coming from down the hall, end-of-the-night Led Zeppelin that no one had bothered to turn off.

At first all I could think about was the fact that Shar was gone. That she’d left to go who knows where with Jer. Probably back to her room where she was making out with him on top of a pile of my stuff.

Thinking about that made my chest seize, like my heart was a gravelly hole being scooped out with a fork.

Like, horrible.

I looked down on the floor and noticed one of Jer’s shiny sexist belt buckles gleaming up at me. Poker in the back. A metal girl standing with her back end sticking out, smiling a little metallic smile. I crushed her with my foot, the buckle’s hinges snapping under the sole of my shoe.

Which felt amazingly good.

Then I locked the door. Then I started looking around. That’t before charg

EIGHTEEN

Reconstructing the crime in question

It was shockingly easy to lie to the cop and campus security guard that arrived at my door sometime around noon the next day. It didn’t even feel like a lie, just a remixed version of the beginning and the end of a much longer and more complicated story.

Overall I would say it was, mostly, the truth.

“Sure I was at the party,” I said, “but I was drunk. I remember looking for my friend, Shar. I thought maybe she was in this guy Jer’s room. But when I got there the door was closed. Then I left.”

“Did you see anything strange?” the cop asked.

“Strange like what?” I asked, possibly looking for clarification, looking to be helpful.

“Out of place,” the security guard added.

“Um. Well there was a guy sleeping in the hall. But I don’t know if that’s strange,” I explained. “This is college.”

They wanted to know what time I left. I said I didn’t really know what time I left. I explained that I’d taken the stairs down because when I’m drunk elevators make me feel nauseated, which was maybe why the front-door guy didn’t see me leave.

They said the fire damage had been restricted to the room of Jeremy Tivens. It had destroyed a significant portion of his possessions, including an expensive laptop, sports paraphernalia, and other personal items. There was also smoke and water damage to the entire fifth floor.

Jer had already reported that he’d seen Shar and me fighting that night, although he had no idea why we were fighting.

I felt pretty secure that Shar would never say anything about the content and history of that fight to anyone.

I told the cop I couldn’t remember why we were fighting.

The cop saw my face and pointed at it with his pen.

“Got yourself some stitches?”

“Yes I do.”

“From?”

“Fell off a curb. I was drunk.”

“Maybe you want to cool it on the drinking.”

“Yeah.”

The cop asked me, again, what time I left and I repeated, truthfully, that I really +rey%;margin-left: 0em;and truly didn’t remember what time it was when I left Trident.

“Maybe around one?”

“Could be.”

Then they wanted the names of everyone else I saw there, which of course I also didn’t know. I said there were a few girls and a few boys.

I’m a crappy witness.

I wondered briefly, as I stood in my room after they’d gone, careful to stay in the spot where the sunbeam hit the floor, if anyone had dusted for fingerprints to see who’d managed to pull the alarm that night. I’d rubbed it with my sleeve afterward, but then I thought maybe they would match the fibres on my sweater, so I threw it away.

The main suspect, which I know because he told me all about his interrogation experience, was
Jonathon. It turned out that Jer was one of the many Trident goons who’d pissed on Jonathon’s door and in his hat. Jer was also one of the guys who’d grabbed Jonathon and dragged him back to apologize to the basketball player who tripped over him, and as a result broke his arm, on the second day of school.

Weeks earlier, Jer had explained to Dean Portar that the pissing on Jonathon’s door was TOTALLY a mistake; he explained that originally they all thought they were pissing on their buddy Keith’s door (next to Jonathon’s). Keith was a funny guy who liked pranks and was always playing pranks. So the pissing thing was harmless stuff. Typical freshman stuff. Totally not something meant to make someone feel like they were being bullied. No way.

That’s what the dean told Jonathon the day he went to see her, right after I saw him in the hall, crying outside the office. She sat Jonathon down and explained to him that sometimes people make honest mistakes.

The whole thing, she explained, was nothing to get upset about.

Although, obviously, the practice of urinating on a door was unsanitary and no one should be doing that on anyone’s door, whether that person was inebriated or not. Jer had promised the dean, in a
written letter, that he would absolutely cease and desist this practice.

Jonathon was removed as a suspect in the Trident fire when it was revealed that he was with his parents that night, in a fancy hotel with a doorman who could confirm that no one bearing Jonathon’s description had left the building after nine p.m.

That’s where he was when I went looking for him, by the way, not “moving out,” just at a hotel. His parents, after talking with the dean, had gone to the college to convince him to stay at St. Joseph’s. He spent their entire dinner begging to be allowed to go home. I guess his parents convinced him to remain, or just refused to let him leave. They bought him a new laptop and let him stay in their hotel room for just one night of peace and quiet. He slept on the floor.

The fire ended up being a bit of a break for Jonathon. A lot of people from Trident’s fifth floor ended up getting moved into new dorms. Jonathon got transferred into McMurtry Hall, composed mostly of music students, many of whom were even weirder looking than he was. Certainly none of them looked like they brushed their hair or washed their face.