(You) Set Me on Fire

by Mariko Tamaki

  Maybe it was just the light.

  “You,” she said. “Ha! Fire starter.”

  “No,” I said unconvincingly.

  “Not that I care, Allison.”

  “How’s your new boyfriend?” My voice evaporated as soon as it left my lips.

  “OH. He’s fah-bulous, thanks. He was homeless for a while, thanks to you, but he’s fabulous now. Doesn’t he seem fabulous?”

  “I guess. If you like that type.”

  The light changed. Instead of crossing, Shar teetered over to the building on the corner and leaned back against the wall.

  “Sooo how are you?” she hiccupped as she rooted through her pockets. “You know what? Fuck it. Don’t answer. I don’t care. I hate you.”

  “I’m sorry, YOU hate ME? What does that mean?”

  I watched as Shar slowly, laboriously, pulled a smoke from a crumpled pack. The tips of her fingers were chewed up, wrinkly like old carrots.

  “You know,” she finally slurred, jamming the pack back in her pocket, “I remember that first time I saw you, all covered in puke. On that hill by the frat house. You looked SOOOOO PATHETIC. And you said you didn’t have ANY friends. Remember? And I looked at you and thought, THIS person will be my friend. You know? I just looked at you. And I thought, yes. This person will be there for ME.”

  “Because I was covered in puke and lonely?”

  “No.” Shar shook her head violently. “NO, it wasn’t even true that you didn’t have friends, was it? Y’ad SUPERSTAR. You’re lucky I got you anyway. You’re lucky and I’m not. Because you’re all the same. You all fuck off eventually. So. Fuck you all.”

  “That’s not true.” I watched the flame from her lighter dodge around her cigarette, endlessly missing its target. “I didn’t do anything! You fucking hooked up with the jock, you told me you don’t like girls. I lo— I cared about you and you just LEFT!”

  “Oh I see! So you didn’t do ANYTHING? HA! Blah blah blah, Allison. Like you never do ANYTHING.” Everything I said she twisted, tore in two, threw back at me. “That’s not what I’m saying, Shar!”

  “HEY! DON’T act all innocent with me.” She looked up, eyes black. “You were getting ready to BETRAY ME. YOU were looking for dirt on me. Hanging out with that bitch+s not cck“ JEWEL! Hooking up with that midget cheerleader. Fucking Rattles told me you were all hanging out with her.”

  “What?” My face got hot. I stepped toward Shar. Her head was back against the wall, her eyes closed. My heart pounded, expanded. Ridiculous. “Shar, that’s not what happened. I didn’t betray you! I wasn’t going to leave. I wasn’t going anywhere! That doesn’t even make sense!”

  I was standing about a foot away, my hand reaching out, almost touching the skin of her wool coat, when her eyes opened.

  “Shar, why did you lie?”

  “Lie?”

  “About …”

  About everything, I wanted to say, not even sure what that meant.

  Shar took a long drag, smiled a soft smile.

  “You wanna know something? You know what I said to Rick that night I smashed his fucking ugly Jeep in the parking lot of Hal’s Amazing Donuts? I said, ‘If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have cared.

  So there was no baby. So what?’ And he was like, ‘Well. If I did care, I don’t care anymore.’” The smile evaporated. “Fucker.”

  “Shar.”

  “He broke my heart. He deserved what he got. I gave him what he deserved. And you.” Pointing her smouldering cig at me, Shar narrowed her eyes. “You broke my heart too.”

  “This is what you get to do when your heart is broken?”

  “You all deserved what you got. Enjoy your new wounds, Allison. Consider them a fucking parting gift.”

  And she walked off, up the sidewalk.

  “HEY!” I shouted.

  She spun around and gave me the finger, and walked away.

  It’s possible to still be heartbroken and yet happy to see someone go.

  I watched her disappear into the haze. Until she was gone.

  It occurred to me, standing in the dark, that it was maybe hypocritical for me to ask Shar about why she lied while not admitting that I had lied too.

  I had this brief idea that maybe the reason Shar lied, about everything, was maybe not all that different from why I’d lied about Anne, about Anne and me. Because I wanted to be someone else, if only to one person.

  It’s just a theory.

  The only person I ever talked to about Shar was Jonathon. In addition to being kind of funny, when he wasn’t nervous and therefore acting weird, Jonathon turned out to be a really good listener.

  A couple days after my final shouting match with Shar, Jonathon and I were eating wings in his dorm’s (disgusting) rec room and I kind of laid out the whole story. I skipped the part about how I’d set fire to Jer’s room, because Jonathon is a bit of a do-gooder at heart, I think, and maybe he’s also the sort of person who would turn a (fairly new) friend in to the authorities if he believed she was an arsonist.

  “Your friend Shar sounds extremely insecure,” Jonathon noted.

  “Maybe,” I said.+O">OH

  “I’d say she seems sad. And dangerous,” he added.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask? Are you over her, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. It’s complicated. I don’t want to be her friend. Anymore. But I still feel this urge to talk to her sometimes. Mostly because I’m mad that it’s all so messed up. I’m mad that after all that, most of what I know is still just bits of the truth and lies.”="body-text_4"

  EPILOGUE

  Joan of Arc

  Thanks to Jonathon, and the fact that, once Shar was gone from my life, I had nothing to do BUT school work, I managed to get most of my shit together for the second half of second term. I mean, technically I was pretty much fucked because I’d missed most of my first classes, first papers, and first tests. But for the last two months I worked my butt off and got EVERYTHING done. Like, every paper. Not that they were genius or anything. I don’t think anyone expects a freshman to be genius. I think mostly all they want is for us to show up and … not set ourselves on fire.

  I did write what I thought was one intensely kick-ass paper for my Women’s Studies class. It was on Joan of Arc, about how different people have interpreted her life: her heroic accomplishments and her death, which may have also been heroic depending on your perspective on these things.

  Basically, Joan of Arc was this regular-type French girl who started hearing voices when she was thirteen years old. She figured the voices were God talking to her. She decided to be a virgin, or stay a virgin. Then she decided to save France, or at least help this one guy who she thought was supposed to be the king of France. Then she got screwed over by the system and these people sold her to some English people. Then she was accused of being a witch, and they had a trial, which she lost (of course), and then, finally, they burned her at the stake.

  Afterward, as in, after she was burned and dead, she got a retrial and they decided that she wasn’t a witch after all. And they made her a martyr instead.

  Not that Joan got to rise from the ashes and enjoy her new-found freedom or anything, because she was DEAD.

  Part of my paper was about how Joan of Arc is a really great example of a woman who ran against what the expectations were for women back then. There were no other women with Joan on her horse, saving France and generally being a warrior, which is pretty much why she got persecuted and burned up.

  Have things really changed? I asked at the end of my paper. If Joan of Arc were here today, fighting for feminism, would she not be in peril of facing a similar fate?

  When I got my paper back, Ms. Frances (Women’s Studies) had drawn a little grey line and a question mark through that part.

  Are you saying that feminists today face the possibility of being burned at the stake? she wrote.

  I suppose it had been a slight exaggeration.

  After, like, forever
in the library I also found this book by a guy who said that Joan of Arc might have been a lesbian. He called her a “gender bender” and said she liked to have young women hang out with her. Jonathon said I should take that bit out of my essay because it weakened the flow of my argument and wasn’t relevant. I left it in. Jonathon’s a genius and all, but he doesn’t know everything+edy%;margin-left: 0em; about Women’s Studies. I mean, come on, he’s a GUY.

  The thing about Joan of Arc is, she wouldn’t be a saint today if she hadn’t been burned. If she hadn’t been set on fire, she’d just be this woman warrior who none of us ever heard of. I bet people wouldn’t even believe she existed. But because of the way she died, and the fact that she was innocent and everything, she had a chance to be this inspiring story. She was a regular person, reborn through flames into a legend. Even though I’m sure the actual process was pretty horrifying.

  Just so you know, me writing this paper was not about any delusions I have where I think I’m anything like Joan of Arc. Obviously I’m not Joan of Arc. I’m not a warrior. I’m not even a fighter. I wasn’t burned at the stake, just burned. Several times.

  It’s just a paper I wrote about something I thought was really interesting, this story of a tragic fire situation turned into something meaningful and important. I guess it was something I was thinking about a lot as the semester ended and everyone started reminiscing about their first year of college, the things we’d all been through and what it all meant.

  The last day of school, the day before load-out, Dylan Hall had this big special dinner in the cafeteria and then they showed this slideshow of pictures people had grabbed off Facebook and Flickr, pictures of residents.

  Photos of everyone being friends and hanging out. There was a picture of the Patties doing yoga on the front lawn with a bunch of girls in pastel Lycra. There was a picture of Rattles with other people from the St. Joseph’s orchestra. There was a picture of Hope kissing some guy at the Valentine’s dance. There was a picture of Katy and two other girls volunteering at a soup kitchen (which someone said they only did once because some girl got lice from the chef hat they lent her). There were a bunch of pictures of Carly: Carly looking like a cheerleader doing the run up the hill during freshman orientation. Carly at the dance with the rest of the Grease guys. Carly and the green-haired zombies.

  If you looked really closely at a picture of a group of girls sitting on the front steps of Dylan Hall, waiting to go on a canoe trip, you could see a blurry Shar and me in the background, but you’d have to squint.

  I remember thinking, when the picture flashed on the screen, that it was probably the only evidence I had left that Shar and I were even friends. One blurry photo.

  They called the slideshow “At Play, New Friends.”

  Which sounded backward to me, but what do I know?

  People bawled their eyes out. Mostly I think because they were playing sad songs in the background, like “That’s What Friends Are For” and “Closer to Fine” and this ridiculous song about wind and wings.

  When it was over, Carly came over to where I was sitting and handed me this Post-it Note with a doodle on it of our two heads. Her head was buzzed short, both on the Post-it and in person.

  “Hey thanks. What happened to the blue?”

  “Shaved it. Noticed your photo didn’t end up in the show so I made you a pic for keeps,” she said.

  “It’s cool. Thanks.”

  “Okay so! Tell me! What+ms cck“ happened when you talked to the dean?”

  My academic semester had ended the day before with a meeting with Dean Portar, to check up on my mental state post several accidents and to confirm that my grades were a “satisfactory pass,” which is another way of saying “just pass,” which is a (metaphorical) warning bell.

  Dean Portar talked for a long time about expectations, about how we make decisions about our future. The word “path” came up a lot. She wanted to know if I still felt that St. Joseph’s was a good fit for me. Like, for example, given that I was having so much trouble academically, did I think this was where I wanted to continue my academic career as such? Did I feel like I needed a change?

  Her face was a serious, solid line. Concrete.

  I was like, Gee, way to sell the St. Joseph’s College experience. What happened to all those preorientation materials I got in the mail telling me St. Joseph’s was a place where I could ACHIEVE?

  I don’t know what happened to me, exactly, sitting in that office, looking at Dean Portar. I just got this surge, this sudden gut feeling, that, this one time, the look I was getting, that look of what could be interpreted as disappointment, was … premature. Or, at the least, not completely right.

  I explained that, yes, in a lot of ways it was a crappy year, but, I said, I was kind of trying not to blame it on the place where I was or any of that other stuff. Plus, I noted, I did have this one class, the Women’s Studies course, which I did really well in and I was kind of thinking maybe I would take more classes like that next year.

  “More classes like what?”

  “You know, classes where people question why people think what they think. Stuff like that?”

  “Philosophy?”

  “Maybe.”

  Dean Portar took a moment to look at me, kind of hard.

  “You seem to be a capable young woman,” she finally said, fingering the pile of academic program brochures on her desk. “You’ve got the world ahead of you. I hope, Ms. Lee, that you’ll consider what you want your future to look like and that you’ll take steps to make that future a reality.”

  “I know. I know maybe it’s weird,” I said, “but I really do think that the step I need to take is to stay.” So. Cheesy.

  “Well, Ms. Lee. I’d love to see that happen.”

  She was kind of … smiling at me.

  It was nice to hear someone talk about the future I had ahead of me without the look of intense concern. Even if it was just a fleeting grin, I took it as a positive omen.

  “Uh. See you next year, I guess.”

  “Less in this office, Ms. Lee, I hope.”

  The day I left Dylan Hall, after I’d done a final sweep of my room, I touched the mirrors, my desk, the little holes in the walls. I realized that if I leaned into the wall by my bed, I could still smell a faint whiff of smoke. The bottom of the door was warped and frayed, like an old shower curtain, from water damage.

  It was weird to imagine the slightly less battered me standing in the slightly less batt+s, cered room less than a year earlier, hugging my boxes and feeling afraid. I felt, like, a million years older than that girl.

  I left my key on the bed. I was going to leave Jennifer Taylor’s ID behind, but then at the last minute I figured I might need it next year, so that was the one thing I kept. And then I closed the door behind me.

  I resisted the urge to trace the letters etched into the glass case of the new fire extinguisher, “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF FIRE,” while I waited to take the elevator to the main floor where my dad was waiting, anxious to depart and avoid traffic.

  After a summer working for my dad (I know! What thrills!), I’ll be back at St. Joseph’s next year and, kind of, starting all over again. Jonathon asked me if I wanted to live with him and this other girl, Lucy, who’s a cellist in second year. Lucy already has a house and it’s really nice. Back garden and everything. I said yes. I mean, I don’t know if Jonathon and I will be the most compatible roommatries that don&

  es because sometimes when he talks I have this insane urge to roll my eyes. But he’s a good student. And, as far as I can tell, he’s not crazy in any way that might cause me (further) physical damage.

  And, you know, he’s been a really good listener and he’s basically the reason I passed my courses. Now that he’s out of Trident his skin even looks a little better.<"body-text_4">Just a little, but that’s pretty good.

  Carly is living with a bunch of girls from film club next year, including Lila. I don’t think it’s the best idea, but who k
nows. Carly said I should make sure there’s a couch in my place so she can come and crash if there’s drama. Which is a distinct possibility.

  I pretty much owe her LOTS so. Yeah. I’ll make sure there’s a couch.

  I don’t know where Shar is going next year. I don’t think she’ll be coming back to St. Joseph’s. I could be cynical and imagine that she’ll go to some other college, get her clutches into someone new, a girl she’ll become best friends with, and that girl will think Shar is like this amazing BFF or even a new beginning. When really it’ll all just be the same thing, the beginning of another cycle of manipulation and lies and destruction.

  I don’t want to think that, though. I want to think that ma/p>