Burntown

by Jennifer McMahon

  This new girl is something of an oddity in and of herself—very tall and thin with dirty-blond hair and red lipstick. She looks older than the bright-eyed boys who crowd around her, more knowing. Tucked around her neck, over the drab school uniform of white shirt, navy blazer, and red tie, she’s got a purple knitted scarf, even though it’s too warm for such a thing and the purple clashes with the school colors. Instead of the black patent-leather Mary Janes the other girls wear, she’s got on a battered pair of Doc Martens, with fuzzy, striped leg warmers in earth-tone colors. Her long fingers are stained with paint and ink, their nails short and ragged. They’re the hands of an artist, hands that remind Necco of her own mother when she’d come out of her painting studio. This new girl rests her hands on the Pontiac’s hood, drums her fingers like maybe she’s got better things to do, other places to go. The boys gather round, give her instructions since it’s her first time.

  “Hand her a gift and she’ll show you,” says the boy closest to her—an older one whose cocky sureness Necco despises. He’s called Luke.

  “Just don’t let her touch you,” teases a tall boy covered in freckles. “ ’Cause she can shoot fire from her fingertips.”

  Necco smiles at this and stretches out her hands, cracking her knuckles just for show.

  “She likes candy best,” another calls. “Anything sweet.”

  “I don’t know what I have,” the girl says as she takes off her school satchel—an army-green canvas bag covered in pins that say things like QUESTION AUTHORITY and NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME and I’M WAITING FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. She starts to dig around, laying the bag on the hood of the car so she can use both hands to paw through it.

  Finally, she pulls out a tattered box of Good & Plentys, the candy pink and white, rattling around in the box like medicine. “There’s not much left, but you can have it,” she says, thrusting the box in Necco’s direction. “Wait,” she says. “Here.” And she digs in her bag again before pulling out two pink metal knitting needles and a small ball of purple yarn—the color that matches the scarf around her neck. She seems to hesitate a second before handing them over. “It’s the best thing I’ve got,” the girl says.

  Necco takes the needles and yarn, delighted. They remind her of something, something from her life Before the Flood—her mother sitting in a corner by the fireplace knitting a long, knobby scarf. The comforting click-click of the needles. Her mother’s hair was neatly combed and pulled back in a braid, not the scraggly, barely containable tangle of red it turned into After the Flood.

  Errol was there, sitting by her feet, shuffling a deck of cards, smiling up at Mama, teasing her, tugging at the end of the yarn like a playful kitten. “I want a scarf, too,” he said. “I want one just like Little E’s. Or maybe, maybe you could just make it extra long, and she and I can wrap it around both our necks. We’d be like those twins who are born attached.”

  “Conjoined,” said Daddy. He was hunched over his notebook, scribbling, smoking a pipe stuffed with cherry tobacco. Necco had smiled then, liking the idea of being tethered to her big brother, an excuse to never leave his side.

  Now she blinks, and the memory is gone; unraveled like a bit of yarn. She’s trained herself to do this: to stop the memories before they get to be too much to bear. It’s dangerous to think about the past, that’s what Mama always said. So she lets them all go, locks them away before they can do any harm.

  Heart thumping, nervous in some new, unexpected way, she pulls up the right leg of her pants, showing the blade and lighter strapped in the custom sheath Hermes made.

  The new girl leans in; she looks excited, expectant, but one of the boys pulls her back.

  “Careful, she’s dangerous,” the boy named Luke warns. “I hear she once cut a boy’s spleen out for looking at her the wrong way.”

  Necco smiles, doesn’t disagree as she untucks the lighter from the sheath.

  The girl smiles back; it’s a conspiratorial sort of smile, an us-against-them smile.

  The kids form a rough circle around her; most of them have done this plenty and know the routine. But it’s a trick of which they never tire. Reaching into the car, Necco grabs a candle and a small cotton ball from the dash. She lights the candle, palms the cotton ball, then makes a show of tucking the lighter back in the sheath as everyone eyes the blade, wondering if this might be the time she pulls it. She’s dangerous, this Fire Girl they’ve come to see.

  The trick works best in the dark, but she’s learned to do it quickly in the light, the way her mother taught her. Necco isn’t a true Fire Eater, not in the sense that mother was, but she’s learned a few parlor tricks. Enough to earn a little spending money.

  She stares at the candle flame, passes her right hand over it, making a grabbing, pulling motion at the flame. Then, cotton ignited, she’s got a flame of her own between her thumb and index finger.

  The new girl watches, eyes wide. There is sweat on her upper lip.

  Necco moves the little ball of flame quickly in a ceremonial circle through the air before opening her mouth and shoving it in. She closes her mouth, exhales smoke through her nose.

  Everyone applauds, hoots and hollers. Necco gives them a little bow. The boys shuffle their feet, know it’s time to go, but don’t want it to end.

  Then, the girl does what none of them have ever done before: she reaches out and touches Necco’s shoulder, says, “Thank you. That was amazing.”

  The boys laugh, loud and hard. “Fire Girl’s amazing!” they call, faces flushed.

  “Marry me, Fire Girl,” one boy begs, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his neatly ironed school pants. “Have you ever slept in a real bed, Fire Girl? Huh? Have you?”

  Necco laughs. He can’t be more than fifteen, this boy.

  She doesn’t tell him that once, she slept in a canopy bed covered in brightly colored handmade quilts. Her room was purple and she had a lamp with a stained-glass shade on her bedside table. Her father had made a circle of dragonflies with paper bodies and tiny lights inside that surrounded her bed, their wings flapping gently in the slightest breeze.

  Promise the doll sat perched on top of the bed, her face new and clean, her pink gingham dress crisp. If you pulled a cord on her back, she’d sing a song.

  “Marry me,” the boy insists, eyes glistening.

  Sometimes, the boys ask Necco to do other things. Dirty things. The cocky boy, Luke, has done this before. “Twenty bucks if you blow me, Fire Girl. I’ll throw in an extra five if you’re any good at it. I bet that mouth of yours can eat more than just fire.” They offer money, promise to get her anything she wants. But she always shakes her head. She rarely speaks to them. This is part of her power.

  If they get too insistent, too rude, she shows them the blade. One time, a boy got too close, put his hand on her chest, and she hit him in the gut so hard he doubled over.

  “Theo loves Fire Girl,” hollers the tall boy with freckles, and the new girl turns and stomps hard on his foot, making him scream. The other boys laugh harder, and Necco actually joins them. And just like that, for about thirty seconds, she’s a normal girl.

  “Show’s over!” a voice booms, shattering the moment.

  Hermes is upon them, his shadow long and lean as he whips his backpack around like a heavy weapon. “Go on! Get! Unless you all want to pay again,” he yells like they’re a pack of stray dogs begging for scraps.

  The kids scatter like bugs. The girl is last to leave, and gives Necco a little smile and a wave, then turns and runs to join the others, flipping one end of the purple scarf up over her shoulder as she makes her way around the old bedsprings and back through a gap in the wall to the street.

  “Why do you let them stick around so long after the trick?” Hermes asks, tossing his backpack into the Pontiac. His dark hair falls into his eyes and he pushes it back. His face is tense, frustrated. “It’s not like they’re your friends or anything. They just come to see you do that fire trick over and over like a circus freak. I hate
that that’s what you have to do to get stuff.”

  “I like to do the trick. And I don’t mind them sticking around. They amuse me,” she confesses.

  “I don’t like you doing it when I’m not here,” Hermes says, laying his backpack down and starting to rummage. “I don’t like the way some of those boys look at you.” He gives a look, part jealousy, part worry.

  “I can take care of myself,” she says. “And it wasn’t just boys today. There was a girl with them.”

  She looks down at the knitting needles in her hands; then something catches her eye on the hood of the Pontiac. The girl has left her bag. Necco looks for the girl, thinking she should call her back, but it’s too late—she’s out of sight.

  Hermes looks up from his backpack at her and frowns hard. “What have you got there? Another one of their gifts?”

  “Nothing special,” she tells him, pulling the satchel to her chest.

  He shrugs, goes back to looking in his own backpack.

  When Necco peers into the bag, she finds the usual things—a school ID card, pens, notebook, chemistry textbook, a couple of paperbacks, including one she recognizes immediately: The Princess and the Elephant by Dr. Miles Sandeski. Heart hammering, holding her breath, she nearly pulls the book out, shouts to Hermes, says, “Look! It’s my father’s book!”—but it’s too much. They’re not supposed to talk about their lives before. Fingers shaking, she tucks the book down at the bottom of the bag, turning it over so that she sees Daddy’s photo on the back: he’s wearing glasses and his favorite corduroy jacket, smiling into the camera, at her mother, who took the photo. She’s never read her father’s book. She’ll take it out later, maybe, sometime Hermes isn’t around.

  At the very bottom of the bag, next to where she’s tucked her father’s book, is a thick envelope held together with a rubber band—she can see it’s stuffed with cash. And next to that, a clear plastic bag full of pills and capsules bright as candy. She can’t tell how much money is there—it looks like a lot. She almost pulls it out to show Hermes, but something stops her. She thinks of the girl’s smile, the way her fingers felt on Necco’s shoulder; of how she’s the first one who hasn’t been afraid to touch the Fire Girl.

  Amazing.

  Necco stashes the girl’s bag under the front seat.

  Then she turns to Hermes, raises a hand, strokes his hair. When he faces her, she kisses him.

  He has a scar over his lip in the place where most people have a slight groove—a faint reminder of the animals we once were. She knows about evolution: her father taught her, showed her textbooks with pictures of early man, told her that all mammals shared a single, common ancestor.

  Hermes’s scar makes it look like his lip is split right down the middle like a rabbit or a squirrel—something small, soft, and vulnerable. She likes to kiss him there, feel the raised skin, the place where there’s no stubble.

  She does it now, touching her lips to his skin as delicately as a moth landing.

  “Tell me,” she says, not needing to finish the sentence. He knows what she wants, can read her mind. Necco believes they were destined for each other. That if things were different, if they’d met in their lives before rather than out here on the street, they might even have gotten married one day. Had a whole herd of little babies with beautiful faces. Maybe send them to Catholic school where they’d learn about the Holy Ghost.

  “You know,” he says. “I’ve told it a thousand times.”

  “Tell it again,” she asks, voice cooing. “Make it a thousand and one.”

  “I fell off a horse,” he tells her, irritated, bored.

  She pictures him riding a wild stallion through the desert, just like the cowboys on the curtain. They don’t talk much about their lives before. Hermes always says, “There is no before. There is only us. That’s all that matters.”

  Hermes is older than the schoolboys in their pretty blazers. He’s all done with high school. He went to college last fall to study computer science, but he says college is just part of the zombie machine, and his father was on his ass all the time, full of expectations, and so he bailed after his first week of classes. He packed a few things in a backpack and came to live on the streets. “Screw college. Screw my dad. I’m not gonna be one of the sheeple, walking around just doing what everyone else expects.”

  He wears combat boots, green fatigue pants, and a long waxed canvas coat. He keeps a huge hunting knife strapped to his belt in a leather sheath, and he carries a flashlight, screwdriver, pry bar, rolls of duct tape, and paracord everywhere he goes. He believes in being prepared.

  “Hermes was the messenger of the gods. He’s also the god of thieves,” he once explained with a wink. And that’s how her Hermes survives now—he goes into crowded places at lunchtime and comes back with a backpack full of wallets, cell phones, laptops, and hundred-dollar fountain pens with ink as blue as the ocean in a kid’s painting. Sometimes, he gets whole briefcases. He dissects the electronics, wipes them clean, and sells them. He’s got a guy across town who will pay cash, no questions asked.

  “This is where it’s happening, Necco,” he tells her. “The real world. All the stuff that matters.”

  She knows Hermes is not his real name. He whispered it to her once, just a few days after they met, the day they found the Palace and moved in. They were lying curled up together in the back, his fingers wrapped around hers. “What was your real name?” he asked. “Your name before?”

  Her body tensed. “If I tell you mine, you have to tell me yours.”

  “Okay. But you gotta promise you won’t ever call me by it. I’m not that guy anymore. And I promise I’ll never call you by your other name either. You’re Necco to me, now and forever.”

  So she told him her name. And he kissed her ear, whispered his own into it, Matthew, and it sounded so lovely when he said it, a glittery golden ball sliding over his tongue, through his lips and teeth.

  Matthew.

  He’s never told her his last name. All she knows is that his daddy is someone important. Someone with more money and power than God, if you go by what Hermes always says. But Hermes doesn’t want any of Dad’s money. He’s turned his back on the whole thing, and his dad has actually hired a private detective to track Hermes down and bring him home.

  “Can you believe it?” he asks sometimes. “My dad actually paying someone to trail my ass around town?”

  And Necco doesn’t answer. The truth is, she can believe it. If she lost him, she’d pay anything she had to have someone bring him back.

  Necco’s story of how she ended up on the street isn’t like Hermes’s. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It was just what they had to do. That’s what Mama always said, anyway. And even though Necco questioned about half the things Mama said After the Flood, what choice did she have but to go along with it all? Mama was all she had left and she was all Mama had left—they had to stick together no matter what.

  What bothers Necco the most is that she has no memories of the flood itself: the very event that brought them to live the way they did.

  Necco is sure it was the bump on the head that did it. It knocked all the memories of that day out of her. When her mother found her the morning after the Great Flood, she had a big swollen gash on the back of her head.

  “Some things are for the best,” Mama always said when Necco complained about her loss of memory. Necco would ask Mama, pester her for details about what actually happened on the day of the flood, but Mama always shook her head, told her their own past was not important.

  Miss Abigail and the other Fire Eaters found Necco and her mother a few days after the flood. She and Mama were trying to start a fire down by the river to heat a can of soup Necco had shoplifted. They were cold and hungry, and Necco wanted, more than anything, to go home.

  “Please, Mama,” Necco begged. “Can’t we go back to the house just one more time?” She wanted to go back and get more of her things, her own clothes, her books, her favorite purple boots.


  “No,” Mama told her in a stern voice. “We can never go back. There’s nothing there for us. The flood took everything. The house is gone. Your father and Errol are dead. And it’s not safe.”

  “But, Mama—”

  “Listen to me, Necco. There is a bad man looking for us. A very bad man. And he’ll be watching that spot, hoping we’ll come back to see if anything’s left. Promise me you will never return,” she said.

  A thousand questions filled Necco’s head. About the flood, who the bad man was; about how her father and Errol had died. “But I just—”

  “Promise,” Mama said, digging her fingers into Necco’s arms, her eyes frantic.

  “I promise,” Necco said, and Mama released her. Necco struck another match, setting it to the crumpled, soggy newspaper, trying desperately to get it to light.

  Half an hour later, Necco looked up from the still unlit fire to see four women coming toward them. The oldest had long, unkempt gray hair knotted with colorful rags, and was in the lead.

  “I’m Miss Abigail,” she said. “My friends and I—Miss F, Miss Coral, and Miss Stella—have a camp about a quarter mile downstream, under the Blachly Bridge. We’ve got a warm fire, shelter, and plenty of food. Will you come join us?”

  Mama shook her head. “We’re fine on our own.”

  Miss Abigail looked around. “This spot you’re in, it’s not safe for you. We can keep you protected. You and the girl.”

  “What makes you think we need protecting?” Mama asked, looking the old woman straight in the eye.

  “The Great Mother told us. She told us you were coming. To expect you and help you. She said there were dark forces working against you.”

  The women were all dressed in ragged clothing. Clearly homeless and crazy, they were the sort of people Mama would have pulled Necco away from back in their other lives, the kind they would have crossed the street to avoid.