Burntown

by Jennifer McMahon

  Theo freezes, then turns on her heel and runs back across the lot, bounding over a section of low brick wall as she heads toward the church, with its brightly lit entryway. The crunch of her footsteps seems loud enough to wake the Fire Girl and her boyfriend, but she grits her teeth and keeps going. She doesn’t risk a look back until she’s on the sidewalk. Nothing. Whoever it is seems to have disappeared—maybe she scared him as much as he scared her. The Fire Girl’s car is as still as ever. Theo starts jogging toward Summer Street, relieved to know her apartment is only minutes away.

  Necco

  Necco is dreaming of her father. Of his workshop, the little aluminum-walled shed in the backyard that was one of her favorite places on earth despite being dark and airless.

  Daddy is at his workbench, sitting amid a chaotic assortment of springs, gears, and scraps of metal and wood. The smell in here is comforting: grease, rust, and the smoke from Daddy’s pipe.

  One of Daddy’s best creations flies in circles above them: a little mechanical bat with leather wings, tethered to the ceiling with a strand of wire. Round and round it goes, gears ticking like a clock, wings beating. Necco always wished she could clip the string and let the bat fly off into the night.

  Her father’s most frightening invention is laid out on the worktable, covered in a white canvas tarp like a corpse. But he’s not working on this machine now. Something else has his attention.

  “What are you working on?” Necco asks.

  The machine under the tarp gives a twitch, then begins to move with a slight rise and fall, as if it’s breathing. She hears the dull pop and crackle of static.

  She wants to run but instead forces herself to move forward, sliding one foot in front of the other, like she’s walking on ice, as she comes up behind her father. He’s wearing his leather apron, denim work shirt, and stained khaki pants. His right hand is visible on the bench: he’s holding a large sewing needle. He’s got something cupped in his left hand. Something she can’t see yet.

  “Daddy?” she says, placing her hand lightly on his back.

  He turns to face her, and she tries to scream but no sound comes.

  His left eye has been replaced with a thick, telescoping monocle that is stitched into the socket with heavy black thread, blood seeping down his cheek.

  He holds out his left hand, opens his palm, and his eyeball is there—a smooth orb with a familiar brown iris—looking up at her.

  “A way to keep an eye on you,” he tells her.

  Necco wakes, heart pounding, the sunlight hitting her face. It comes streaming through the Pontiac’s cracked windshield, so bright it feels as if it’s pulsating and flickering like a nearby fire. Necco lies there a minute, letting it warm her, letting the terrible dream images fade away. She hears the kids across the street hurrying to school. The church bell is ringing. Ding dong. Ding dong.

  She’s listening to the bells, thinking about the church and how she’s never been inside, when something silly comes back to her in a flash: a metal bottle opener with a magnet on the back stuck on a glossy white refrigerator. They used it to open cans of juice, bottles of orange pop and Hires root beer, which was Errol’s favorite. Mama called the opener a church key, which always seemed like a funny thing. Like church was a big bottle waiting to be pried open.

  Then Necco remembers the key around Hermes’s neck. The mysterious thing he has to show her. And she gets nervous, the hairs all over her body standing up—she doesn’t like surprises. But maybe this will be a good kind of surprise. Maybe it’s true what Hermes promised, that everything is going to be okay. She rolls over to wake the old sleepyhead up so he’ll take her to see whatever this big secret thing is.

  The scream escapes before she can help it. It’s a shriek really, high pitched and crazy sounding. A sound that can’t possibly be coming from her. She’s not a girl who screams.

  Hermes is lying on his back, waxy and still like a piece of fake fruit. His face is covered in blood—its stickiness has soaked his shirt, the blankets, even her own clothes.

  A pink knitting needle sticks out of his left eye.

  Necco closes her eyes and feels water cover her in one great, powerful wave, making everything dark and cold, filling her mouth and lungs. Her screaming still sounds far off and dull. A voice underwater. A drowning sound.

  Then there are other sounds. The kids are coming, the nuns and teachers, too. They surround the car, peer in through the windows like they’re looking into an aquarium.

  Their mouths move, and at first she can’t understand what they’re saying. Can’t hear them above her own frantic screaming.

  At last, the words tumble through.

  “He’s dead! She’s killed him.”

  Someone else screams. Someone makes a retching, puking sound. One of the nuns starts to pray.

  “That’s one of the knitting needles Theo gave her yesterday,” chirps a boy with glasses. “She murdered him with it! I always knew she was dangerous.”

  Someone else says the police are on their way.

  Mama said never trust the Jujubes. Never tell them anything. If they come after you, run.

  They tried to find Necco after Mama died. They asked around. Came to the little shack under the bridge where she and Mama camped out in nice weather and went through all their things. They questioned the other Fire Eaters. Necco watched them from the bank across the river. She watched them and knew she could never go back to the little house they’d built from old shipping pallets and driftwood. She also couldn’t chance going back to their other home, the Winter House. She spent a few weeks going from place to place, sleeping under bridges, in old drainage tunnels. Then she met Hermes.

  She can’t let the Jujubes find her. Not now. Not like this. They’ll haul her off to jail without even asking any questions. Caught red-handed, they’ll say, and there she’ll be, fingers sticky with blood, a girl no one would ever believe.

  Necco takes in a breath, feels herself start to move in slow motion, all awkward and jerky, like her body’s just a puppet and she’s at the controls. She finds Hermes’s backpack on the floor of the car, tucks Promise the doll inside. Remembers how the doll used to open and close her eyes and turn her head before the gears rusted. Now, she’s got one eye open, one closed. Her face is dirty, her hair matted. Necco hears sirens in the distance, and moves faster. She grabs her gold locket with the photo of little-boy Daddy dressed as Robin Hood, a bow in his hands, a thick belt around his waist, his outfit brown and green like a tree. She pulls on her boots, reaches for her blade, and without looking at his face, carefully slices the string around Hermes’s neck, pocketing the key.

  She climbs up to the front seat, reaching under to grab the girl’s satchel with the money and pills, and stuffs it into the backpack as well.

  Knife in hand, she crawls out of the Pontiac, the kids around her screaming, scattering.

  “Oh my God, she’s got her knife!”

  Some of them run back across the street, stand in the shadow of the church. Some just back away slowly, eyes still locked on the Fire Girl. They’ve never seen anything like this in their lives. A real-life monster in their midst.

  She’s got blood on her hands, down her front. It even soaks the back of her shirt, making it stick to her skin. She smells its sweet, iron scent and thinks she might be sick. She takes another deep breath.

  The sirens are closer now. The Jujubes will be here soon.

  Heart pounding, she shoulders the heavy black backpack and starts to run. She thinks they will try to stop her, but the kids and nuns fall back, away from her, parting like the sea for Moses.

  Her legs are fast as she sprints, through an opening in the ruined brick wall, and down the alley between the auto parts store and empty bakery with busted windows. She zigzags between buildings, keeping to alleys and empty one-way streets, slipping through fences, sliding between dumpsters and tractor trailers pulled up to loading docks with early morning deliveries.

  She cuts through the urin
e-soaked alley behind the Mill City Bar, and dodges the rusted, parted-out lawn mowers and snowblowers that are lined up against the crumbling brick walls of the small engine repair shop. She knows Burntown’s secret shortcuts, its shadowy forgotten places that college students, nine-to-fivers, and comfortable families who walk these streets never see. There are two cities: hers and theirs, and she knows how to walk them both.

  She makes it to Orange Grove Avenue (silly name, far too cold here for an orange tree to survive), drops over the low ledge on the east side, and takes the drainage tunnel under the street until, finally, she comes out down by the river.

  There’s plenty of cover here: bushes, scraggly trees, brambles. Other than the park across the river, it’s the largest stretch of wild land in the city. There are bent apple trees with tangled branches, red and black raspberry bushes, cattails with roots that taste delicious roasted in the fire, fiddlehead ferns to pick each spring, wild onions with greens for salad and bulbs for soup, daylilies with orange flowers you can eat and shoots you can cook like asparagus, and sumac bushes with clumps of berries like fluffy torches that you can soak in water to make pink lemonade. One time, Necco caught a bear drinking down here. An actual black bear in the heart of the city. It was just after Mama died, and Necco wished more than anything that Mama had been there to see it.

  Now, she rests under a gnarled tree with branches that brush the ground. She listens to the sirens, which are farther and farther away. She catches her breath, then pushes off again, making her way upriver, staying under cover.

  Her mama taught her well.

  If there is one thing Necco is good at, it’s running.

  Theo

  Theo’s mom has already left the apartment by the time Theo rolls out of bed, gets herself dressed, and makes her way downstairs. Her mom works at the Ashford Bank and Trust. She was recently promoted to branch manager, which as far as Theo can tell just means she has to get there half an hour earlier every morning and stay late every night. Apparently, being obliged to work harder than ever is her reward for working hard.

  There are two wrapped Pop-Tarts (unfrosted blueberry, of course) on the counter next to an empty coffee mug, and a note on the dry-erase board on the fridge: One way or another I WILL be home for supper. Chinese takeout sound good? See you tonight, Love, Mom.

  A night at home with Mom and Chinese takeout sounds perfect. Just what she’ll need to try to forget about everything with Hannah. And by then, she’ll be done with the whole mess. She will curl up on the couch, eat shrimp lo mein, and tell Mom about how great school is going. She’ll share how excited she is for college next year (she’s already been accepted into Two Rivers and isn’t even considering anyplace else because she’s getting a huge grant for being a low-income student from Ashford) and all the other happy horseshit Mom loves to hear. It’s always been a little too easy to play the good girl with Mom—the girl who gets straight A’s, goes to church on Sunday, and spends her spare time reading, studying, and knitting. The girl whom boys might ask out sometimes, but who always says thanks, but no. “You’ll find the right young man, eventually,” Mom tells her. Her sweet, well-meaning mom with her sensible haircut and cheap, bank-friendly polyester pantsuits that are always pilling. “Maybe when you go to college.”

  “Maybe,” Theo says, smiling and nodding. Sometimes she feels like an impostor in her own life.

  Theo pours the lukewarm remains of the coffee into the cup Mom left for her, gulps it down, tosses a foil-wrapped package of Pop-Tarts into her purse, and heads out the door to get the satchel before the first bell rings. She walks briskly down Summer Street. The roads are crowded with commuters, delivery vans, buses, a few bicycles. No one looks anyone else in the eye. Everyone seems harried and unhappy. A kid zips by on a skateboard, his music so loud she can hear it pulsing through his headphones. An old woman pushes a shopping cart full of her worldly possessions along the shoulder of the road, oblivious to the cars beeping at her. She walks with a limp, using the shopping cart like a walker.

  Theo’s nearly there now, just four blocks away, when the phone vibrates in her blazer pocket. She pulls it out, knowing who it will be, telling herself she shouldn’t answer. But Hannah’s called twelve times since last night, leaving messages that say, I need to talk to you, please call me back. She sounds a little more desperate each time.

  Good. Let her get good and desperate. Bitch.

  Theo looks at her watch. Shit. Even if things go well with the Fire Girl and she gets the bag without a hitch, there’s no time to get all the way to Hannah’s and back before first period. She’ll have to ditch Chemistry, her most difficult but also her favorite class. It’ll be okay, though. Mr. McKinnon writes comments like Theo is the kind of student a science teacher dreams of…on her report card. She’ll tell him she had a migraine, offer to stay after school to make up the lab work.

  With shaking fingers, she pulls the pack of cigarettes from her purse and lights one. She tries to put Hannah out of her mind and concentrate on how she’ll get the satchel back from the Fire Girl. She decides honesty might work best. She’s sure the girl looked through it and found the money. “It’s not really mine,” Theo will tell her. “It belongs to this guy. If I don’t give it to him, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  Surely the Fire Girl will understand. She knows about danger. About the terrible mistakes people make. Theo got that just in the five minutes of being around her yesterday.

  She turns the corner onto Church Street, and her smoky breath catches in her throat, the cigarette falls from her fingers.

  There are half a dozen police cars, vans, even cops on bicycles. There’s a news truck with a satellite dish, an ambulance, and a horde of people gathered along the edge of the street.

  She moves forward, faster now. At first, she thinks something has happened at the school. A shooting maybe, some misfit kid gone wacko—but why so early, before the school day even starts? Then, she sees the yellow crime scene tape blocking off the vacant lot across the street. It’s stretched across what remains of the old brick walls. She’s almost there now, and she peers over a low pile of rubble along Church Street and sees that the Fire Girl’s car is being searched by two men in suits with rubber gloves on.

  No, she thinks, shaking her head, as if that will stop all this from happening. No, no, no.

  “Theo.” She feels a strong hand clasp her arm and turns to see Luke. He’s pale and sweaty, and he’s taken off his school tie and unbuttoned his shirt.

  “What’s going on?” she asks, her eyes on the car, the swarm of cops around it. Is that blood smeared across the open door?

  “You’re not going to fucking believe this! The Fire Girl, she fucking stabbed that guy who chased us away yesterday. She killed him and took off through the alley.”

  “No way!” Theo remembers seeing them sleeping tangled together under the covers.

  “I saw it,” Luke says, voice shaking. “I got here early. She was screaming—a bunch of us ran over. God, Theo, there was so much blood.” Luke lowers his voice. “The cops are asking about you.”

  “Me?” she asks, but she knows why. The bag, of course. The cops had found her bag in the car. And it had her books, her student ID, a baggie of drugs, and all that cash.

  Theo scans the scene, wondering which way she should go, which way has the fewest cops. She won’t run, that would just draw attention. She’ll walk away calmly. And go where? To Hannah? No way. Hannah’s the last person who could help her now—when she heard the cops had the money she’d freak the fuck out.

  “You can’t say anything about how I was the one who brought you here yesterday, okay?” Luke is still talking, fast and quiet. “Not a word about anything that happened on our way over here yesterday.” Poor Luke with his scholarship to Yale and perfect life that might all be ruined if anyone found out he’d just bought two thousand bucks’ worth of blow. And, as usual, thinking only of himself when some guy had been murdered.

  Murdered.


  She still can’t believe it. She thinks of the knife strapped to the Fire Girl’s boot, a good six inches of blade. But why? What had he done to deserve it?

  “Of course I won’t,” she snaps at Luke, turning from him, eyes on the sidewalk as she starts to cross the street.

  She’ll keep walking toward the school, then go around to the back, head south on Sycamore Street, and zigzag her way back home. She’ll quickly gather up whatever cash she can find, pack a bag, and go. And where, exactly, are you gonna go? she asks herself. It’s not like she has friends and relatives who would take her in, offer to hide her. She’s got no one. Her mom. And Hannah—well, she used to have Hannah. That’s really it.

  She remembers the woman limping along with a shopping cart full of dirty clothes, an old blanket, and other treasures. She thinks of the Fire Girl—of what her life might have been like before she came to live in the car, what path might have brought her to that vacant lot. Was that Theo’s future?

  “Theodora?” a man’s voice calls out behind her. “Theodora Sweeney?”

  No! Her heart hammers in her ears. Running will make her look guilty, and she’d never get away—there are uniformed cops ahead of her on both sides of the street.

  Slowly, she turns.

  One of the men in suits is walking toward her. He’s got short dark hair and big square Clark Kent glasses.

  “Are you Theodora? One of the kids over there, he said that’s you.”

  “Yes,” Theo says. Caught. She’s been caught. The whole thing feels so anticlimactic—no big chase, no drama. Just one question: Are you Theodora?

  “I’m Detective Sparks. I have a few questions for you.”

  He’s got a little notebook out and is holding a pen.

  Theo nods. Her face is burning, her palms damp with sweat.

  “Do you know the girl who’s been staying in that old car?”