Feeding the Fire

by Amy Waeschle

  After another long minute of trying, her hands cramping, she took it off and looked at it again.

  Maybe she could fasten it and then slip it on, like a camisole. She fitted the tiny hooks into their loops then put it over her head and wiggled it down, carefully pulling it over herself. Then the bra was in place. But it wasn’t tight enough.

  Jessie tried again, this time shortening the straps with the slider thingies. She put the hooks and loops on the tightest setting. This time she had to squeeze her arms together to get it on. The fabric slid over the rash under her arms and she gasped at the pain. She put the bra carefully into place but the hard coil at the bottom dug into her ribs. Was it supposed to feel like this? How the hell am I supposed to wear this all day? Would everyone know she was wearing it?

  Her ratty sports bra lay on the floor, crumpled, the straps curled into ropes. The front hem was fraying. She remembered when it was white. Long before she wore it every day and to sleep. She scooped it up and stuffed it into her pocket.

  Her t-shirt slid easily over the bra’s smooth fabric. The edges of the bra pivoted over a rib. But the front fit tightly, and that felt good. Secure. At least the thin red cuts on her sides were below the bra and so wouldn’t rub. The ones under her arms still did a little, but maybe now they could get better.

  There was a noise at the window. She jumped into the corner space on the far side of her mom’s dresser to hide. Jessie hugged herself, feeling exposed.

  She heard a noise from outside, like the coo of a dove, though from someone’s voice. Not Cam’s.

  Stef?

  Cautiously, Jessie moved to the window and knelt down, finding him on the other side of the hydrangea bush. “What are you doing here?” she hissed, her anger from the night before somehow making its way into her voice.

  Stef shrugged his full lips. His free hand held his skateboard upright by the trucks. “Wanna skate?”

  Jessie wondered how long he had been at the window. An image of him watching her slip on her mom’s bra flashed into her mind, making her shudder. Why hadn’t she gone into the bathroom to change?

  “Sure,” she said, realizing that she was glad to see him.

  Stef turned towards her front door.

  Jessie hurried from her mom’s room. On the way through the dining room, she caught sight of the egg tucked into its ratty crib and wondered what she was supposed to do with it. Boudreaux had said it had to be “supervised” at all times, but who would know? Cam, she realized, her shoulders slumping. He would surely ask her about it when she went to his house tomorrow. Why had she agreed to keep the egg until then? She could already hear his accusation of abandoning their baby. Jessie groaned. It was just a stupid egg—she of course would never leave a real baby.

  She continued into the kitchen where she ducked into her hoodie then grabbed two granola bars from the cupboard. The bra bit into her ribs; she tried to readjust the fit but it was like the hard coil had teeth. Maybe she would get used to it. She thought of Grady Baker’s naked girl sketch, and shuddered. He’ll know I’m wearing it, she thought.

  Stef took off up the street as soon as she came out of her house, but Jessie paused at the end of her driveway. A part of her wanted to skate in the other direction, past the boathouse. She was curious about what it looked like now. A fluttery feeling twisted her stomach and she cracked her thumb joints, shook out her fingers. She thought again of Zach and wondered how he had felt, fighting it. Excited? Angry?

  She let out a huff of air and pushed off the curb after Stef. I’ll probably never find out.

  The cool morning air felt thick, and low clouds threatened rain, or at least all-day gray. They skated to the top of Sixth.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, dismounting at the intersection. She tucked her skateboard under her arm.

  Stef watched the passing cars. “You’ll see.”

  Jessie checked her complaint, remembering his I thought you were cool. They crossed the street and Stef led her to the trail that wound behind a furniture store and a dry cleaner’s and into the forest bordering the high school. It was the trail everyone knew to avoid at night. She had never used it because she always met Cam at his corner. She wondered how his fact-finding mission had gone at the main library the night before with his dad. Her gut twisted again thinking about where she’d been. No fires, he’d said last time. I mean it.

  But Cam hadn’t been there.

  The woods closed in around her, making the already gray day even darker. The well-worn path held pockets of mud. She fussed with the bra’s hardware, pulling it down over the rib bone, but it kept rolling back. The fit was still a little bit loose and the fabric rubbed her front in a weird, feathery way, making her feel self-conscious. They broke through the woods to the street bordering the high school’s lower parking lot. Stef hopped on his board and pumped down Caldart. Jessie followed him to a church, feeling a twinge of disappointment. They were going to skate the parking lot of a church? She had imagined them finding someone’s empty backyard swimming pool, their own little private skate bowl. Like in Dogtown and Z-boys. Maybe abandoned pools only existed in southern California.

  The sign on the church wall said NO SKATING. Stef did rail slides down a section of steps, launched off the entry platform, and tagged a shrub in the process. She watched in envy—he was so good. Better even than the tricks he did at the skate park, and way better than her. She realized that he must spend a lot of time skating the church lot. Jessie worked on her kick flip and ollied off a ramp. She tried to copy Stef’s nose slide using a bench but it was tricky.

  She wondered if he carried that stuff from last night with him all the time. He didn’t have a backpack today, but that didn’t mean anything. She carried a lighter, after all.

  “We can skate Raab if you want,” Stef said.

  Raab Park was only a short skate from the church. Jessie thought about landing her 180 again. Then she remembered her skate helmet.

  “It’s not here!” Jessie had looked frantically all around the hiding place from the night before. Had the tide carried it away? Jessie squinted over the smooth water but did not see anything resembling a helmet.

  Stef stood with his arms hugging his skinny middle. “Where the fuck did you leave it? The boathouse?” he said, his voice dark, anxious.

  She glared at him. “Of course not. I was too busy watching you make a bomb.”

  His amber-colored eyes went wide. “You want a bomb? We can do that next time.”

  “No, Stef!” A rush of anger heated her face. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s called a surprise. They’re fun.” He sniffed loudly. “C’mon, you liked it. I saw your face.”

  She looked away, shocked to feel this idea hit home. A gust of wind pulled a wisp of hair from her ponytail. She sank to the beach, wondering what she would say to her mom about her helmet—a new one cost forty bucks. But of course, her mom wouldn’t notice or care. “I remember taking it off after we left the boathouse, when we were waiting.”

  “Down here?”

  Jessie nodded, but they had already searched the area. Her helmet wasn’t here.

  Stef lowered down next to her, keeping his long legs bent. “You can have mine,” he said.

  Jessie blinked at him. He always acted so tough all the time. Had he always been this nice underneath, and she just hadn’t noticed?

  “What was that powder?” she asked in a quiet voice. Her fingers traveled over the layer of gray pebbles at her side.

  Stef threw a shell into the bay. “It’s essentially bleach, just super-concentrated.”

  Jessie knew that bleach was dangerous. Super-concentrated bleach was probably extremely dangerous. She shuddered. “And the liquid?”

  “Brake fluid.” He shrugged. “Your basic hydrocarbon.”

  Jessie found a perfect flat rock to start a cairn, and set it down near her foot. She added a series of smaller and smaller rocks while her mind worked the details of the fire. W
asn’t bleach a liquid? So Stef had made crystals somehow, or bought them? The white cup he had asked her to hold had felt familiar. At Christmas some years they got their tree from a U-cut place; a man dressed up like Santa Claus gave out hot cocoa in cups like that. Styrofoam.

  His hazel eyes seemed to dance. She realized he was enjoying letting her think it through. “It works like a timer,” he said.

  Jessie thought about this. One time Zach had explained that a firecracker fuse was like a timer, a delay. So, the brake fluid in the Styrofoam was somehow a timer. How? She fingered the rocks for another pebble. One time in science class they’d done an experiment on acids and bases. They’d used some kind of acid to test different rocks to find out which ones were made of limestone. The one that was limestone bubbled because the acid dissolved the lime, the base. The explanation bloomed in Jessie’s head. “The brake fluid dissolves the Styrofoam?”

  Stef arched an eyebrow.

  “Then it reacted with the bleach?”

  “Boom,” he said, bursting his hands outward in a mock explosion.

  She scoffed this with a look—there had been no boom—but he didn’t look away. His hazel eyes were so clear. A nervous flutter tingled through her.

  “Where did you learn how to do it?” She started another design of pebbles, this time placing one in each of the crisscross gaps made by her shoelaces.

  “A teacher at my old school.” Stef added a pebble to a cairn he was building. “He was always doing experiments for us. I guess I paid attention.”

  She imagined Stef in a white coat working in a lab with beakers and jars full of chemicals. “I heard you blew up a science lab.”

  Stef gave a grunt. “If I wanted to blow it up I wouldda.” He glanced at her. “Fucking Seibring. He was across the room. This kid at my table, he thinks it’d be funny to mix the salt and sugar with the acid. I tried to stop him. And then I get blamed.” He shook his head.

  “Would it have blown up?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “And they kicked you out?”

  “That Seibring thinks he’s so smart. He’s such a has been.”

  Jessie hadn’t known that simple things like bleach and brake fluid would cause a fire, or that mixing salt and sugar with anything would blow up. She made a note to start paying more attention in science class—though this year everything was about the human body. She wondered if she could convince Miss Chapple to advance her to high school chemistry.

  “How did you know about the dumpster fire?” she asked.

  Stef added a green pebble to his cairn. “I guessed.” He caught her eye. “Everyone knows about camp.” Jessie felt her cheeks flush. Last spring, her class had gone to Environmental Learning Camp for three days, but Jessie had been sent home a day early because she’d started a grassfire with a magnifying glass—totally by accident. Her mom had been too preoccupied with Evan’s recovery to doubt her bogus story that the counselors had overreacted. To her surprise, Zach had acted curious, even asking her to show him how she’d done it. Then he’d only given her his careful, long look. “What would have happened if that fire had spread?” In an instant, she realized that he was right. The dry grass would have blazed in a flash and spread to the cabins. They never talked about it again, but his words had stuck.

  “Then, summer. Your fingers were blistered. I saw them.”

  Jessie had lit a fire in her mom’s bathroom, trying to see if a concoction made with nail polish would burn. It had—too fast, and if she hadn’t gotten it into the sink it would have lit the whole drawer on fire. Her fingertips had blistered in the process. Good thing school was out or she wouldn’t have been able to grip a pen in class, let alone do homework. The craziest thing was that her mom didn’t notice the burn mark on the drawer or the lingering smell, or her fingers, which she had bandaged with gauze and hid inside the cuffs of her sweatshirt. When the blisters popped it had hurt so bad she couldn’t sleep.

  Stef’s cairn was a foot tall, made of thin, oval rocks. “I can show you more. If you want.”

  Jessie remembered the rush of running away from the boathouse only to see it go up in flames.

  Stef grinned. “You’re somethin’ else, you know that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mom’s tapping a firefighter and you’re some kind of firebug.”

  Jessie hugged her knees tight and the pebbles tumbled off her laces. She didn’t like the way he’d said tapping. She’d seen porn once, totally by accident—and only for a few seconds. At first, she had no idea what she was seeing . . . it looked so . . . violent. Did her mom and Zach do it like that? She shuddered. “I’m not a firebug,” she said over the whoosh of blood thudding into her ears.

  “Aw, don’t get mad,” he said.

  “I’m not!” she said, standing. “I’m going home,” she said, even though home was the last place she wanted to go.

  Chapter 16

  Jessie

  Stef tossed his handful of pebbles, and stood. “Later, then. I’m out.”

  Jessie’s anger faded. “Where are you going?”

  “Seattle.”

  She liked how he always seemed to surprise her. “How?” she asked.

  “On the ferry.” He gave her a look. “What, did you think I was gonna fly?”

  She countered his squinty look with one of her own. “I’m coming too,” she said.

  He shrugged one shoulder, then climbed up to the street. She clipped Stef’s helmet under her chin and followed him.

  After the ferry ride, where they sat on the sun deck in the lee of the wind and ate the granola bars Jessie had brought, they shuffled off the ferry with the other walk-on passengers.

  “We’ll skate uptown,” Stef said once they’d broken free of the crowd.

  “Uh, where’s that?” she said before she realized how stupid it sounded.

  Stef hot-footed it down a set of stairs and they stepped onto their boards.

  They skated along the water, dodging pedestrians and the homeless people with their sad-looking dogs and cardboard signs. Jessie was out of breath when they reached the hill. Her stomach rumbled; the granola bars weren’t exactly a meal replacement. They hiked up the hill. “Why are you in such a hurry?” she asked, struggling to keep up.

  He gave her a glance, seeming to think it over, but didn’t reply. But he slowed down. They reached the Pacific Science Center. Jessie remembered it from the dinosaur exhibit she had visited as a kid. Her mom had taken her to the butterfly aviary once but it had been sticky-hot inside and the two butterflies they’d seen just sat pumping their wings. Jessie had lingered at the exit until her mom finally let them leave. Afterwards she could tell it had hurt her mom’s feelings because they didn’t talk until they got on the ferry.

  The skate park was a series of rolling ramps with a bean-shaped pool in the middle; one side was nicely steep. They were alone except for one grown-up man wearing gigantic headphones. Jessie had never seen anyone skate so . . . strangely. Like he was trying to fly. Finally, he left and she and Stef took over.

  “That dude’s always here,” Stef said. “He does a load of shrooms in the parking lot.”

  Jessie squinted down the narrow alley the man had disappeared into.

  “That freaked you out, didn’t it?”

  Jessie gave him a look. “Hardly.”

  Stef raised an eyebrow. “Firebug’s got a shroom habit, huh?”

  “Stop calling me that!” She pushed off and raced away, down into the bowl and up the other side. Stef caught up but she passed him in the opposite direction, not looking at him. They rode like passing trains until Jessie stopped at the exit, out of breath. She kicked her board into her hands. “I don’t party, okay? I’m not my brother!”

  “Whoa,” Stef said, putting up his hands.

  Jessie swatted a tear from her cheek. “It’s just . . . everybody thinks that because they know Evan, that they know me.” She looked at him, her jaw feeling tight. “They don’t.”

 
Stef’s lanky shoulders seemed to sag. “It was a shitty thing to say. Sorry.”

  Jessie watched his face, trying to read him. The light had softened and it was turning his hazel-colored irises glassy, like a tiger’s. His long lashes fluttered against his pale, freckled cheeks. “It was,” she said, feeling that strange tug of energy pull at her insides.

  Jessie picked at a peeling section of deck tape along the edge of her board. “It’s just so . . . intense.” She shifted her feet. “I want him to come home, even though we’ll have to go through everything all over again.” When Evan got better after Timberline, she remembered thinking that Zach could marry her mom and everything would be fixed. But it wasn’t turning out that way.

  “Sometimes I stay here,” Stef said.

  Jessie looked at him, surprised. “Here?” She thought of him skating through the night and sleeping in one of the maple trees, like a bat.

  Stef shrugged. “There’s a place. They’re cool.”

  Jessie tried to understand. Only kids like Evan left home. When things got bad, he stayed away for days. Every time it wrecked her mom. The worrying. The waiting for the phone call, either from the police, from a “friend” telling them where to find him, or from Evan himself, begging for help. Like now. They were all just waiting.

  “What about your parents, don’t they go crazy wondering where you are?” she asked.

  “They got their own problems.” His voice had a hard edge to it.

  “So, what makes you go back?”

  Stef seemed to be focusing on a spot high above the skate park. Jessie tried to follow it but there was only the gray skyline and pigeons roosting on the skate park wall. She had the feeling that she’d said something wrong, but couldn’t figure out what.

  “I gotta take care of my mom,” he said, his jaw tight.

  Jessie cringed as a wave of guilt crashed into her. Why couldn’t she take better care of her mom?

  His broad shoulders gave a little shrug. “We can get something to eat. Let’s go.”