by Erin Stewart
“Something about yourself. It’s up to you how much and what to share,” Dr. Layne reminds me.
Heat prickles up my neck. All the eyes in the circle wait to hear the details of my scartastic tapestry.
“My name is Ava. I moved here recently from central Utah. I guess I’m a student at Crossroads High now, and I’m a junior.”
They wait for more, and when I deliver only silence, all eyes turn to Dr. Layne. Pink Zebra Girl speaks first.
“Ummm…aren’t you going to tell us about your scars?”
Dr. Layne interjects.
“Piper. We’ve talked about this before.”
“I think she knows she’s burned, Dr. L.” She turns to me with her hand over her mouth in mock surprise. “Oh my gosh…did I totally just let the cat out of the bag?”
“Piper! Enough!” Dr. Layne says sharply, smacking her hand on her clipboard. “Over the next few months, you are going to all share as much or as little about your stories as you are comfortable with telling. There will be no right amount, and no right answers.”
Her gaze lingers on the girl in the wheelchair, who smiles back innocently. Dr. Layne proceeds to tell us how we will focus each week on a new element of empowerment.
“Today, let’s briefly discuss the power of words,” she says. “Words have power because we give them meaning. Hate. Love. Hope. Anger.” She turns to us. “Let’s start with some of the words that describe you. Which ones stick out?”
Crickets chirp as she scans the circle. Even scar-free Chatty McChatterson is quiet.
Dr. Layne seems pleasantly surprised when I raise my hand.
“A girl called me Freddy Krueger today,” I say.
Piper chuckles next to me. “Oooh…good burn.”
Dr. Layne narrows her eyes at Piper but directs her words to me.
“Names are indeed a type of word, but today let’s discuss the words we use to describe ourselves.”
She turns to the whiteboard behind her and writes the word VICTIM.
“How does this word make you feel?”
“Hurt,” the girl with no scars says.
The boy adds: “Hopeless.”
Dr. Layne writes again: SURVIVOR.
“How about this one?”
The boy volunteers: “Hopeful.”
“This week, pay attention to how you talk about yourself. Use words that give you power rather than strip it away.”
She writes some other examples on the board for us to ponder—ugly, disabled, burned, beautiful, weak, strong, healing—then gives us each a marbled composition notebook.
“Write about anything you don’t feel like sharing out loud. The most important thing is you are in control. You can’t change what happened to you, but you can take control of your story. Your lives have changed. My goal is to help you find a new normal.”
Dr. Layne releases us to the refreshment table after more details about support-group etiquette. How this is a safe place. Why talking about our trauma is so important. The usual mumbo jumbo.
Piper scoots her wheelchair up to me at the refreshment table.
“First group?”
I shake my head. “Nah, wrong room. Thought this was the modeling callbacks.”
Piper’s laugh fills the empty space.
“Uh-oh. Don’t let Laynie hear you cracking jokes.” She slaps on a somber face. “This is serious business. This is burn-survivor therapy, or as I like to call it, BS therapy.”
Piper fills a plate in her lap with cookies.
“So I take it you’ve done this before?” I ask.
“Yep, bona fide support groupie. My parents are happy as long as they think I’m ‘making progress.’ ” She puts air quotes around the last two words.
She reaches for a cup but can’t grab it from her chair. I hand it to her, and when my fingers touch hers, she doesn’t flinch.
“Thanks. So, fellow Crossroader, huh?” she says. It hits me that this is the girl Glenn mentioned, the one Cora thinks will be my insta-BFF.
“Sort of. First day today.”
“Oh man, with that mug, I can only imagine. How rough was it?”
I think of the looks, the whispers, the boy throwing a pencil at me like he’d seen a ghost.
“Brutal.”
Piper pops a cookie in her mouth and talks while chewing.
“Yeah, we’re not too good with outsiders. You’ve seen the mascot, right? The xenophobic Viking with anger issues?”
I nod. “He’s hard to miss. But I won’t be there long. Kind of a temporary trial run on life situation. After two weeks, everyone can forget I even exist.”
Piper cocks her head sideways, her lips stuck out in a mock pout.
“Well, that’s about the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.” She pulls out her phone—hot pink like her stripes. “Okay, since I know you exist now, what’s your handle?”
“Don’t have one.”
“I’m sorry, what kind of person isn’t on social media?”
“Hate to bring attention to the charbroiled elephant in the room, but—” I point to my face. “The kind of person who has no business plastering pics online.”
Piper puts her phone in her lap and folds her arms, looking me up and down.
“I’d like to revise my earlier statement. That is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Hey, this is therapy. No judging the depths of my patheticness,” I say.
Piper smiles. “Touché. Well, your lack of social media savvy aside, I, for one, am glad you graced us with your pathetic presence today, Ava.”
She crumples her napkin into a ball, tosses it into the air, then smacks it midfall with a quick flick of her wrist, sending it sailing through the air into a trash barrel.
“Ace!” She turns to me. “So, you free after group?”
“For what?”
“To hang out,” she says, as if we’ve already synced our calendars.
I search her face for an explanation.
“Did Dr. Layne tell you to be my friend?” I say.
That’s exactly the kind of thing the committee would do. Cora and Dr. Layne probably had a powwow about my social status, and this wild-eyed girl in her hot-pink compression garments is the best they could come up with.
Piper holds up her hands.
“Wow, defensive much? No, she did not, and I wouldn’t have done it even if she did,” Piper says. “Jump all over me for trying to be burn buddies.”
“I don’t need buddies,” I say. “I’m only here for two weeks.”
Piper considers this for a second and then leans toward me.
“I don’t care if it’s two weeks or four years, no one survives high school alone.”
The late-afternoon sun streams through the rec room in slanted polygons, bouncing off Piper’s bright garments and a small, golden bird charm around her neck. I recognize it immediately—a phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from the ashes of the fire unblemished.
“You swear this isn’t some rigged charity mission? Because I do not need it.”
Piper puts one hand over her heart and holds up her other hand with four fingers separated in the middle to make the Star Trek Vulcan salute.
“Scout’s honor—”
I think about today, those girls finding me alone backstage, the hallways parting before me like a leprotic modern-day Moses, that clueless kid staring at my toe-thumb.
Maybe a friend isn’t the committee’s worst idea.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m free.”
Piper smiles and raises her fruit punch cup high in the air toward me.
“To finding a new normal!” She taps her cup to mine. “Whatever the hell that means.”
8
Cora practically wets herself when she hears I’
m bringing home a friend. She tries to cram in a few minutes of bonding/interrogation time before Piper’s mom drops her off.
“I want to hear everything,” she says, patting the sofa cushion next to her.
She wants me to plunk down and tell her all about my new life, but I’m too drained from a full day of pretending to be stronger than I feel to dish out a play-by-play. If she were my mom, I’d plop next to her, inhale her vanilla-bean scent as she stroked my hair, and tell her every detail. Sara probably would have done the same.
“Come on,” Cora prods. “About school. Group. Everything.”
“All fine,” I say.
“I’ve been dying all day to hear what happened.”
“Let’s see. Principal is a jock. Most of the kids are jerks. And I am a joke.”
Cora frowns. “I’m sure they weren’t all jerks. What about this girl who’s coming over? She had a car accident, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, is she nice?”
“She’s weird.”
“Nice weird?”
“Weird weird.”
Cora studies me from the couch, her aggressive optimism rippling out in irritatingly hopeful waves. I duck into the kitchen to avoid exposure.
She talks louder. “So do you think you’ll stay?”
“Too early to know.”
“When will you know?”
“If it stops sucking, I’ll know.”
Cora intercepts me on my way back to my room and wraps me in a soft hug. When she steps back, her eyes glisten.
“You are an inspiration, Ava. A survivor, through and through.”
A knock on the door announces Piper, and I extricate myself from Cora’s embrace.
“So everyone keeps telling me.”
* * *
Glenn helps Piper’s wheelchair over the front step. Inside, he stops, evaluating the long staircase up to my bedroom.
Piper shifts in her chair with a weak smile. “No worries. I’m a first-floor kind of person anyway.”
Glenn’s eyebrows inch together as he shakes his head.
“Oh, I’ll get you there.” He studies the stairs and then Piper again. “Okay if I lift you?”
She nods, and he reaches out his arms to hoist Piper out of her chair, her hot-pink cast dangling in the air. He carries her up, one arm under her knees and one around her back like he used to do with me at first, when those stairs might as well have been Mount Everest.
I carry Piper’s chair up behind them, and Glenn places her back in it inside my room.
“What in the name of Ken and Barbie?” Piper says before Glenn even shuts the door all the way. Sara’s insanely large doll collection looms in front of us in tall, glass-front cases.
“They belong to my cousin,” I say.
Piper tries to pry open one of the cabinets, but it’s locked tight.
“Why doesn’t your cousin keep them in her room?”
“This is Sara’s room. Was Sara’s room. She died in the fire.”
Piper stops trying to infiltrate the doll display. She picks up a pointe shoe.
“Is all this stuff hers?”
Sara’s old things fill the room: the quilt with bright yellow daisies, the corner shelf with pictures of her dance troupes, the box of pointe shoes.
“A lot of it is.” I grab the shoe and put it back on the shrine. “It’s fine. All my stuff burned up anyway.”
Piper picks at a strip of faded butterfly wallpaper trim that runs through the middle of the wall.
“You should at least repaint or something. Otherwise, you’re just living in a dead girl’s room.”
I shrug. Most of the time, I don’t mind living in a makeshift mausoleum because my own room is gone and this one holds the memories the fire didn’t take. The bed we squeezed into for our monthly cousin sleepovers. The desk where Sara tried in vain to teach me makeup contouring. The butterfly wallpaper where we wrote our initials teeny-tiny beneath a purple wing.
Piper points to a frame with a picture of Sara in a dance skirt, her hands lifted gracefully over her head.
“This her?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty.”
In the picture, Sara’s long blond hair sweeps over her petite, Cora-esque body. She was the kind of girl who was so pretty you wanted to hate her but was so nice you couldn’t. We were different as Country Barbie and City Barbie (as Glenn used to call us), but we were bound by one thing: our love of performing. As kids, every summer, I’d fumble through dance camp with her; she’d tolerate drama camp for me. I’d always be in the front row at her ballets, and she’d be the first one on her feet on my opening nights.
Piper points to a wall-size poster of Hairspray Cora found at a garage sale.
“Yours or hers?”
“Mine. I guess. I used to be into singing and musicals and all that.”
I say this like it’s no big deal, like my parents weren’t grade A theater junkies who raised me on a steady diet of Broadway.
But that was another lifetime, one where spontaneous choreographed dances and happy endings seemed not only plausible but likely.
At some point, you realize life is not a musical.
“Yours or hers?” Piper says, picking up the charred handbell I keep on my dresser. The once-shiny surface is all greenish black on one side, but it was the only thing at “the site” worth salvaging, according to Glenn. I’m all too happy to take his word for it, since seeing my house in ashes is pretty low on my to-do list.
“My mom’s,” I say. “So yeah, mine now.”
Piper puts it down to pick up a picture. Mom has her arms around me on the stage in my lopsided Rizzo wig and Pink Ladies jacket, while Dad gives a dorky thumbs-up trying to act like one of the leather-clad cool kids from our production of Grease.
“Your parents died, too?” Piper says.
She looks at me expectantly. I never know what people want me to say. That being an orphan sucks? That no one will ever love me like my parents did, without limits or fine print? That they left me adrift—untethered, unanchored? I cross my legs on the bed, with my pillow bunched up on my lap.
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Piper puts down the picture among all the other framed memories I’m trying to forget.
“Noted,” Piper says. “Kind of picked up that vibe at group. I have to warn you, though, Layne has ways of getting you to talk.” She strums her fingers together like an evil genius. “Let us help you, Ava. Let us heal you.”
She picks up the therapy notebook on my desk.
“Trust me: the best way to get through these survivor powwows it is to play nice, say the right things, and look like you’re having some major breakthrough every few weeks.” She flaps the notebook at me. “And fill this up with all sorts of gobbledygook about your inner feelings or Layne’s gonna make you do one-on-ones.”
“What do I write about?”
“Anything. I write lots of lists and poetry because they take up more pages, not to mention I get bonus therapy points because Layne thinks I’m using art to ‘process’ what happened.”
“What did happen?”
“Drunk driving. Well, technically, drunk passengering.”
“Who was driving?”
“Someone else.” Piper picks up another frame and spins around toward me.
“Were you at Regional? Me too!”
A chorus line of nurses and doctors and Cora and Glenn stand with me in the hospital on the day I left the burn unit.
“Terry the Torturer!” Piper shouts. “That guy was a total sadist.”
Terry (who is technically a physical therapist) has his arm around me in the picture. He used to come in with all his medieval torture devices to make sure I didn’t heal like a human Shrinky Dink. He�
��d strap my arms into “the airplane,” splaying me out like a taxidermied pheasant in flight.
“PT: pure torture,” I say.
Piper tosses the frame into my lap. “Well, you look pretty happy here.”
In the picture, I’m smiling huge. I was leaving after more than four months of imprisonment. No more dressing changes in “the tank,” where nurses pried off my dead skin. No more screams in the hallways. No more Nickelodeon on loop. No more poking and prodding. I was going home.
Turned out home was as unrecognizable as my face.
“I was an idiot,” I say.
I hold up both pictures—the one of me encircled by my parents, and the one of me surrounded by professionals trained to keep me alive.
“Ava Before the Fire, and Ava After the Fire.” I look at me on the stage as a normal teenager. “I don’t even know this girl anymore.”
Piper nods.
“One second you’re loving life, and then you cross a little yellow line on the road and bam!” Piper slams her palms together. “Goodbye, walking.”
“Or an electrician puts a faulty wire in your wall before you’re born and sixteen years later, your life burns down.”
I lie back on my pillow and swat at the Native American dream catcher I hung above my bed a few months back.
Piper nods to the round web of string and feathers tasked with catching all my nightmares. “Bad dreams?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too. Dumb stuff like crashing on my bike. Layne says it’s my brain’s way of working out trauma in a familiar context, or some psychobabble.”
“Yeah, I get those.” I fail to mention that I also dream I’m facing down the flames again. I feel the heat. Taste the smoke. See my dad rushing through the fire.
Then there’s the dream where I’m me Before, jumping on the trampoline with Sara, or helping my mom weed the garden. No face full of scars. No flipper hand. No missing ear.
I don’t know which is worse. When I wake from the nightmares, relief washes over me because the fire isn’t real.
But with the dreams of Before, the nightmare starts when I open my eyes.
Piper takes the lid off a shoebox jammed to the brim with cards, opens the top one, and reads out loud: