(You) Set Me on Fire (5 page)

“Okay, so, hey guys. Welcome to the Film Appreciation Society. Right. I’m really glad you’re all here and it’s, uh, great to see so many people with an interest in film. I guess we should start by going around and introducing ourselves. Maybe say what your favourite film genre is and who you are? I’ll start: I’m Boris and my favourite film genre would have to be film noir.”

“I’m Judy, I’m also really into film noir.”

“I’m Tanya. Hello. And I would also have to say film noir actually. Guess we’re just a bunch of darkies.”

Ha ha, whoops.

“Oh. Okay. Hello, dolls. I’m Danny. I generally adhere to the auteur system so my genre would be better described as Kubrickian. But let’s not make a big deal about it.”

“I’m Carly, I’m into musicals.” Carly twirled her finger in the air when she said “musicals.”
Eyes pivoted to focus on me. I was still trying to figure out what “genre” my favourite films were. Which meant trying to figure out exactly what was meant by “genre.”

“Um. I’m Allison. And. Um.”

things I needed to be doingicddAcross the room, Shar shifted in her seat, recrossed her legs, and smiled at me. “Horror?” she asked, tapping at her neck in the same place where my scar was.

Next to me I could hear the sound of Carly’s mouth popping open.

There was an instant stillness in the room, broken only by the mouselike coffee-slurping of a guy in an orange sweater. Shar tilted her head, widened her eyes at me. Smiled.

I froze, could feel my body seizing up, a sensation similar to what any kind of prey feels when encountered by a predator. A familiar sensation, not unlike what I felt stepping into every gym class I attended from grades nine to twelve.

I remember looking at Shar, her face a mask of amusement. She was looking directly back at me, like someone getting ready to pass a note, or a secret.

As someone who was distinctly unpopular and picked on in high school, I’ve often felt it should be
easier to interpret the things other people do and say more accurately, more often. There should be a system of language that lets us know not only what people mean but also the level of hostility implied. Imagine how lovely all our childhoods would be if we knew that sort of thing, if we knew the difference between a person being vicious and a person attempting to be friendly. Like the time Rahnuma Tang, from across the street, invited me to a birthday party that didn’t exist, luring me into her backyard so that I could get jumped by a bunch of her crappy friends who beat me with their skipping ropes, almost blinding me in the process. I know there are some people who see sound as colour, and I’ve always wondered if mean looks different than not mean. I bet it’s purple.

“Um. Right,” I said, slowly crawling into my sentence the way you step into a shoe after you’ve just seen a cockroach on the floor, “totally horror.”

Slurp. Sip.

Shar’s smile spread across her face. She reached a finger into her blond hair and twisted herself a temporary band around her index finger. As she grinned, a warm glow of relief spread across my limbs.

“And you?” Boris asked, leaning forward and pointing at Shar.

“Oh,” she said, in a somewhat mocking singsong voice, not looking at him, “I’m Shar and I’ll watch anything as long as Julia Roberts isn’t in it.”

After the meeting, as the group exchanged numbers and emails, I was sitting alone in my folding chair when Shar slipped over beside me. Up close, her black outfit revealed several shades of black: jet, ink, and coal and steel, fuzzy, and velvet all wrapped together. Her perfume curled through the air, snaking a faint trail of what smelled like hot pink orchids around my head.

“Shar Sinclair,” she said.

“Allison Lee,” I replied.

“Sooooo, Allison,” she said, “you here to make a movie?”

“Uh, no. You?”

“Fuck no,” Shar hissed, turning to re-survey the crowd, which appeared to be engaged in a series of intense conversations (about film). “I just dropped in to check out a bunch of losers with delusions of fame.”

“Oh. I guess, uh, fun. Sounds fun.”

“Do you want to be famous, Allison?” things I needed to be doingicdd Shar tipped her head forward as though to pour the contents of her eyes into my soul.

“What?”

“Famous, Allison. FAMOUS. Big time. I’m asking if you want to be a STAR.”

“No. I mean, no, I don’t think so.”

“You should know.” She raised an eyebrow. It was strange to be the sudden focus of someone like Shar’s full attention. It was like being locked into something. Like, a laser beam. A big starship laser beam. “Most people know if they want to be famous. It’s a pretty basic thing to know.”

“Well I’m not really all that basic, I mean … right now.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say.”

“Good answer, Allison. Very good answer. You heading back to dorm?”

“Yeah, I just have to wait for Carly.”

“Oh, right. CARLY.”

On the walk back, wedged between me and Carly, Shar turned and asked her the fame question.

“Doesn’t everyone want to be famous? I guess I want to be good famous. Maybe a little famous anyway,”
Carly reflected. “But, like, um, productive famous. Like Meryl Streep or Janeane Garofalo.”

Bad answer, apparently.

“Rrreally.” Turning her head toward me and away from Carly, Shar rolled her eyes.

“Yeah well. Anyway,” Carly said, speeding up a bit, “I thought tonight was pretty interesting. I hope we get to make a movie.”

“Oh yeah I’m so glad you invited me tonight, Carly,” Shar trilled. “So lucky that I ran into you in the hall. Really great time.”

At the lights, Carly paused and turned, her lips neatly pressed together. Like she wanted to say something. To me.

“Really,” Shar cooed, “great group.”

“Well. Okay. I’m glad you had a good time, Shar. I hope you did too, Allison.”

“Sure.”

In the elevator, Shar said I should come back to her room to study for Social Problems.

What she actually said, to Carly, as she pulled me out at the sixth floor, was, “I’m taking Allison to my room to force her to teach me about Social Problems. Bye, Superstar!”

As the elevator doors closed, pinching off the image of Carly, she turned to me and said, “For the record, I’ve just saved you from a year of stupid.”

On the sixth floor, Shar’s floor, the long hallways were littered with girls sprawled out in coloured pyjamas in various patterns from Disney to camouflage; textbooks open, cradling big bowls of popcorn, they lolled around, giggling and reading. The whole floor smelled like a movie theatre.

Shar stepped over the rows of legs like they were driftwood, barely paying attention to the voices around us as she slipped into her room and shut the door.

Inside, music was already playing, something low with lots of bass. Thr things I needed to be doingicddowing the window open, Shar flopped down on the bed and lit a cigarette. The combination of cold air and smoke made the skin on my neck prickle. Not knowing where to sit, I leaned against the closet and tried to seem cool.

“It’s so weird that all our rooms are the same,” I said finally, when it appeared that Shar was lost in a haze of nicotine and not planning on speaking. “It’s like looking at my room, only …”

“Messy” was what I wanted to say.

“… with more red,” I came out with instead, because it seemed like a better thing to say to someone I didn’t know.

The word “red” seemed to trigger Shar, who suddenly sat up and craned to look at my burns. “Right,” she exhaled. Then, “That thing on your neck is fucking crazy. Were you the survivor of a house fire or something, Allison? Were thousands lost and you walked away?”

“No. I mean. It was a small fire. None were lost. Not even me.”

“Right. So … So, what? So you burned yourself?”

“I had an accident with a bonfire-type thing. That I was making. I had a c— Uh. It was an accident.”

Stabbing her cigarette out on the edge of the window with one hand, Shar extended her other hand, the inside of her wrist flexed toward me. “Burned myself once as a kid. Put my hand on a stove element. People thought my parents were abusing me. You can still sort of see the scar.”

“Scars are cool.”

Amazing how a word like “cool” can land like a lame penny falling from your pocket onto a city sidewalk.

“I mean. I think they tell a really interesting story. Which is … interesting. They’re like skin punctuation …”

Stop talking, Allison.

Shar r_4" aid="7K4IC

FIVE

Fast friends

Sitting lazily in the park, cross-legged, perched on a sweater serving as picnic blanket, Shar ran her fingers through the grass a book in the library.Iwhoelas the smoke from her cigarette smouldered in a patch of dirt not far away. All around us were the plastic skins of pilfered snacks. A troop of tai chi seniors made slow movements just north of us. The leaves of the tall trees that lined the park were slowly breaking from their branches and falling, orange, red, and yellow, to the ground.

The perfect day. Autumn chill but not too fall cold. Shar had crawled into my lecture hall to rescue me from East Asian History and now we were well on our way into our third hour of just sitting and talking, which felt infinitely more important than knowing whatever China was before it was China.

A sour cherry candy melted onto my tongue as I tilted my head up to feel the sun on my face and the slight pull of my burn, which was starting to feel less like a burn and more like leather.

“Truth or dare, Allison.”

“What?”

“Truth or dare?” Shar raised an eyebrow, a dapple of sun sliding across her face through the tree above.

“Uh, truth?”

“Have you ever given a guy a blow job?”

Stalling, I attempted to appear momentarily distracted by the art of tai chi. Swinging back to the conversation, I stuttered, “Wait. It’s a truth about ME?”

“Have you never played this game, Allison, or are you just avoiding the question?”

Yes to both.

A better question might have been whether I’d ever had a BFF to PLAY Truth or Dare with.

Answer: no.

Making and or getting friends has always been kind of a … struggle for me.

When I was in grade school, all the girls had first, second, and third best friends, positions you might equate to something like president, vice president, and defence secretary of friendship. These positions were always shifting and depended on what seemed to me to be ridiculous and incalculable factors, qualities that could only be assessed by really popular people like Carolyn Tyler. At our school, Carolyn and her best friends were the grade five mafia; you had to check in with them before you bought hair clips or they’d give you endless amount of shit for buying the wrong ones. Carolyn Tyler was beautiful and had a pool and everyone wanted to be her friend.

I did not have a pool.

Before college I managed to have a sum total of two “friends,” whose acquisition and (temporary) loyalty both required some form of bribery/sacrifice. In grade six I traded my bike for a third-best friendship with Dawn Martin, but then I accidentally laughed when she fell off the swing and broke her leg. And then I was pretty much first NOT best friend. First UN best friend.

Senior year I used prescription medication to purchase the affections of Anne Craig.

Yes, THAT Anne.

Anne was one of those girls who was super popular almost by default (both her parents had pools). She had these bouncy curls and these big blue eyes. From grades nine to eleven I think we spoke all of two sentences to each other. Then in senior year, in the fall, we both got put on set-painting duty, assigned to Hamlet’s castle. Anne was really messed up because this boy she’d given a blow job to had stopped answering her texts (apparently because he wasWhat does that mean?”

“He’s such a power freak,” Anne moaned.

“My doctor is really chill,” I said, dabbing paint on the fireplace we were both supposed to be painting. “He pretty much does whatever I tell him.”

Dr. Zygiel, a pushover who’d been writing me notes to get out of gym, for “cramping” reasons, since I was fourteen.

It took me two doctor’s visits to get a prescription. I’d heard enough from Anne to know quite a bit about the symptoms of anxiety, and so it was easy to describe them as my own. For good measure I faked an anxiety attack in his office.

I handed the bottle of pills over to Anne the next day.

“Take them. Feel better.”

Anne cried and threw her arms around me. That night she invited me over to her dad’s condo and we ate spaghetti and took one and a half pills each. I think by then I was kind of in love with her. We were friends for the rest of first term. And it was kind of amazing. Then we were more than friends. Then it was OVER.

Anyway.

Those were pretty much my only two experiences of friendship going into college.

Fortunately, probably the easiest place and time in the world to make friends is a college campus freshman year. The first month at St. Joseph’s was a BFF BONANZA. Everyone was going out of their way to make friends and be friends with people. Girls especially. Boys, I don’t know, boys always seem to be making friends. But girls, you know, they need an occasion and this was an occasion. It was like a friend sale, with everyone starting from scratch, NEEDING friends, and OH LOOK here’s a bunch of kids your own age. People BECAME friends really fast. Like these two girls from Shar’s floor: Sarah and Tori. Sarah was this tall Chinese chick with a big long ponytail of jet-black hair and a lot of cartoon character T-shirts and Tori was this little curly haired
redhead with a lot of track pants. By the end of the first week they’d become this sweatpants-andcartoon-T-shirt-wearing posse.

Shar hated Sarah and Tori. Shar said something about going to the Tower of Power with Sarah, but I guess she rubbed Shar the wrong way. Whatever happened, it left a mark. Shar narrowed her eyes whenever Sarah and Tori walked past us in rez. She called them “the Patties” because they’d quickly developed the habit of eating these veggie patty things they bought at the convenience store around the corner and then toasted in the communal kitchen.