(You) Set Me on Fire

by Mariko Tamaki

  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, tr
uthfully, 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.

  I was there the day he moved in, kind of helping him move and kind of bumming even more notes off him (a habit that would continue through the rest of the semester).

  + number cck“Adjusting his papers on his new desk, Jonathon explained that it was a fallacy that engineering students were the hardest working on campus. “There have been studies of music students, actually, because of their immensely high stress levels. It’s what you might refer to as an ironically grim reality that these people who are learning music, as it were, uplifting melodies, are also the most driven and the most often driven insane.”

  “Hopefully none of these people will pee on your door,” I noted.

  “Yes, I thought of that as well, although I must say that if any of these students were to attempt to, as it were, ‘relieve’ themselves on my door,” Jonathon remarked, “I could certainly take them down, so to speak.”

  Okay. Yeah. Suffice to say. After a long and bumpy road of awkward interactions, Jonathon was kind of growing on me.

  “Well,” I said, catching a glance at a sloth-like boy dragging what looked like a trombone case down the hall, “let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  The first thing Jonathon did when he moved in was cover all his mirrors with maps, hand-drawn maps of fake place rooms.

  <

  NINETEEN

  Sing out one last time

  If Carly was happy when Shar and I stopped being friends, she never said anything about it to me. Which is pretty cool when you think about it; I mean, if anyone had the right to an “I told you so” it was Carly. But she never even asked why Shar and I stopped speaking or hanging out. I’m sure she had a pretty good idea as to the why, though, based on what Jewel said and the rumours about the (two) fires that were still circulating.

  A couple days after the Trident fire, when I went to pick her up to go to Cultural Studies, I asked if I could come to the next film club meeting. Carly had a bunch of blue dye in her hair and it had crusted over like a plate of leftover blue spaghetti.

  She paused and I had this moment where I thought maybe she was still just a little bit pissed at me because of what happened when we’d gone for coffee. I mean, she’d have every right to be. I’d been super mean to her.

  “Or if it’s a problem,” I blurted, “forget it.”

  Carly sighed. “No, no! I mean, OF COURSE you can come. I’m sorry. I’m kind of fried today. I’m just, you know, in the middle of some drama … Uh. Never mind. Yeah. TOTALLY. Come tomorrow, we’ll be working out stuff for our next shoot.”

  “It won’t be weird that I haven’t been to anything before?”

  Carly shook her hair-fused head. All around her room, tacked onto the movie posters I’d seen earlier, were photos of zombies in bright green Technicolor.

  “Are those photos from the party?” I asked, pointing.

  “Yeah. They’re great, right?”

  “I need to redecorate,” I sighed. It was something I’d meant to say in my head.

  “You should. You should totally redecorate,” Carly mused. “I mean, seriously, this is college, Allison. It’s a time to pick new favourites, to try everything on. You know? Practise a little self-liberation. Some RADICAL EXPERIMENTATION.”

  This from the girl who showed up at my door the first day looking like a high school cheerleader. I tried to imagine what it must feel like to change the way Carly seemed to have changed. Like, REALLY change.

  “Fuck,” she trilled, “I gotta get my notes together. Hold on a sec.”

  One of the pictures was of Carly and a tall girl with long gre+90 screamen hair like ivy falling down one side of her face and shoulder. They were standing in front of a huge papier mâché zombie, a roaring creature with a huge head and spindly arms jutting forward. All around them people were frozen in expansive dance moves. The tall girl was wearing white painter pants and a bright pink sweater. In the picture Carly looked happy, resting her head on the girl’s shoulder, her arm wrapped around her waist.

  “Is that your girlfriend or something?” I asked.

  Carly stood and looked at the picture. Then she let out a long sigh. “Sort of. I mean, yeah. That’s Lila. But. It’s complicated.”

  I recognized the pants, the same ones Carly was wearing that day in the coffee shop.

  “She’s got a girlfriend. I mean, and I’ve got a boyfriend, sort of, too. It’s whatever. It’s hard. I mean, it kind of always is with me and like, LOVE. I suck at love.”

  “Maybe everyone sucks at love,” I mumbled.

  “Maybe.”

  Leaning in closer to the photo, I spotted a familiar face amongst the other dancing figures, a mop top of curly orange hair, intricate blood-red eye makeup.

  “Hey. That’s Jewel, right?” I pointed.

  “Yeah. That’s Jewel,” Carly said. “So you do know her?”

  “Yeah. I mean, yeah. I think I did meet her. Talking with the Patties. A while ago.”

  It seemed like ages ago.
<
br />   “Who are the Patties?” Carly chuckled.

  “Never mind.”

  Staring at the photo, it occurred to me that the day I met Jewel was the day Shar and I had our big fight. Wait. Was that true? Yes. Was it possible that Shar had been so pissed that day because she’d seen me talking to Jewel and the Patties?

  Carly put her hand on my back. “We should get going if we’re going to make it to class.”

  Overall I would say that Carly was a pretty awesome friend, like, especially those first few weeks after I stopped talking to Shar. Carly would kind of loosely shadow me around campus, checking in to make sure I wasn’t all curled up in a ball or anything.

  It was strange to be doing stuff without Shar, to feel the physical absence of Shar. Not that she was completely GONE. Like, even though she wasn’t actually around me anymore, it still sort of felt like she was … there. Somehow. I’d feel her. In the library in the French history section, in the hallway late at night. Lots of places.

  I’d heard she was still seeing that guy Jer, although I never saw them together. Jonathon said he’d heard that Shar told Jer we’d had “lesbian sex.” I guess straight guys find that kind of thing really hot.

  The last time I spoke to Shar was about a month after the Trident fire. It was a Thursday night, and I was heading back to dorm after a film club meeting, where I’d just been made the official boom operator for the To Zombie, with Love sequel, P.S. Zombie Loves You.

  I remember it was one of those damp post-winter nights where all the street lamps form pools of reflected light on the pave+O">OHment. It was cold and wet and I was walking fast when I spotted Shar ahead of me, her thin shape a shadow in the near distance, eight or nine legs ahead.

  I probably could have swerved to avoid her. Taken a longer or a parallel route. Instead I caught up to her at the intersection, touched her shoulder.

  She weaved, bounced from my touch, back and then forward, before looking over at me with lidded eyes. She looked different. Not like a new person or anything, obviously, because it hadn’t been that long. Just different. Like a photocopy of the person I used to know. Her makeup was smudged down under her bottom lashes and her hair was a tangle, shaken by a clumsy hand.