by Erin Stewart
* * *
After school, Asad waves for me to join him on the stage when I walk into the auditorium. I take the stairs around the back rather than try to climb up with my compression garments and scars holding my knee joints together like superglue.
A bunch of other people are already standing in a circle on the stage when I slide in next to Asad.
“What’s this?” I say.
“The circle of trust,” he whispers, like he’s uttered sacred words. “We do it every day before practice. Tony says it helps us bond.”
“Tony?”
“The student director. The ‘Welcome to Oz’ guy? Looks like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s taller and more dramatic brother? Anyway, he makes us hold hands, and we all say one thing about someone in the group.”
I roll my eyes, trying to look more annoyed than terrified. I’ve inadvertently walked into a total nightmare.
Tony strides into the middle of the circle, a good foot taller than anyone else, with his arms outstretched as he completes a 360-degree turn. He’s wearing all black again, and I wonder if he changes after the final bell or if his drama-demigod status is an all-day thing.
“The circle of trust,” he says solemnly. “Let us begin.”
He grabs the hand of a girl next to him. She grabs the boy’s next to her, and so on around the circle. I watch the hand-holding wave push toward me, expecting full well that when it hits, the wave will crest, break, and drag me under.
When it reaches me, Asad grabs my right hand quickly, whispers something, and nods for me to hold out my left hand to the boy on the other side of me. So I do.
Only it’s not a hand.
It’s my flipper. My claw. My penguin Frankenhand with my big fat toe sticking out and my fused fingers all clumped together like a flesh-colored oven mitt.
The boy next to me already has his hand out midway when he sees it. When everybody sees it. His fingers hang in the air between us like someone pressed the pause button on my life. Oh, how I wish they would. Maybe some rewind action while we’re at it.
He grabs the hand of the girl on the other side of him instead, who—because fate is just that unkind—happens to be Kenzie, the girl Piper warned me about. She directs her pinch-faced snartiness right at me and my unheld fingers.
“You have to hold it,” she says. “It’s bad luck if you don’t.”
The boy’s eyes flick from me to Kenzie to Tony, then back to my hand again. My skin buzzes up the back of my neck, and I scratch it even though I’m not supposed to, partly to ease the itch, partly to do something with the claw of shame hanging by my side.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s kind of painful anyway.”
I slide my mutant appendage into the pocket of my jeans. The boy, breathing out a heavy gasp of relief, drops his hand.
I look at the floor as the wave pushes away from me around the circle.
“Close your eyes,” Asad whispers to me.
I squint out of one eye as the boy in black leads the circle, which centers on a Polly Pocket–size girl I know little about other than that she often skips through the halls, arm in arm with Kenzie. I mumble a comment about her cute pixie haircut when it’s my turn.
But I’m not thinking about her hair. I’m not even thinking about the painfully obvious break in the circle of trust on my left where the boy wouldn’t touch me.
I’m thinking about the boy on my right with hazelnut skin, who did.
14
I silently curse Piper.
She put this idea in my head with all her juicy-details talk. This is exactly why I didn’t tell her Asad is the nice boy on crew. She’d make this into a whole thing when there is absolutely no way this could ever be a thing.
Boys clearly belong on the list of Things I Lost in the Fire.
My sophomore-year boyfriend was the last boy for me. Josh and I shared lingering embraces in the hallway, long, late-night phone conversations, and even a post-football-game kiss once below the bleachers. It was mostly tongue mingled with Juicy Fruit and awkwardness, but it was my first and final kiss, so my mind graciously remembers it as romantic and lovely and full of just the right amount of sexual tension, autumn chill, and body contact.
When Josh came to visit me in the hospital, I refused to see him. Mostly, I couldn’t bear to see him see me. I wanted to remember the way he looked at me Before, that night beneath the bleachers when I hid my nervous smile behind my hair, and he brushed it away, his eyes fuzzy as he leaned in.
The fire could at least spare me a memory—one fading snapshot of when a boy looked at me like a girl he could love.
But that’s all it is—a memory. Boys don’t think of me like that anymore.
And neither do I.
Still, I peek at Asad’s fingers interlaced with the wrinkled ones protruding from my compression garments. When we open our eyes, he lets go. I look away, hoping no one caught me staring like a weirdo at our briefly intertwined digits.
Tony breaks us into cast and crew, and I sit cross-legged next to Asad on the wooden stage, awaiting orientation on how to be the Best Darn Stagehand in the History of High School Theater! Asad leans back on his arms, his legs outstretched in front of him.
“So, Ava Lee, Piper tells me you did drama at your old school.”
“Well, not like this.” I want to ask why he and Piper were talking about me, but instead I nod toward the cast members who huddle around a freshly posted cast list. “I was one of them.”
Kenzie jumps up and down, hugging the pixie-haired girl, squealing loud enough for everyone to hear that she got the lead role of Dorothy. A twinge of jealousy hits me: that used to be me with my friends.
“Why’d you cross over?” Asad says.
I laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”
Asad’s eyebrows stitch together, so I point to my face to spell it out for him.
He pushes himself up and scoots closer. To my right, two girls elbow each other and nod toward the boy who is blatantly gawking at the Burned Girl.
“So how did they happen, anyway?”
“My scars?”
“Yeah.”
The way the girls stare, waiting to see what I say, makes me channel Piper, who wouldn’t care at all that some girls are looking at her or that some stupid kid didn’t hold her hand in the circle of shame. She would say something shocking and hilarious that makes everyone forget her wheelchair and her burned skin. I lean forward with the creepiest smile I can muster and whisper, “ ‘You wanna know how I got these scars?’ ”
Asad’s eyes widen as a smile spreads across his face.
“You did not just quote The Dark Knight to me.”
“Technically, I quoted the Joker.”
“Well, then technically, you may be the coolest girl I know.”
I stare at the stage, trying to ignore the flip of my stomach. Fortunately, the boy in black appears from behind the curtain and everyone snaps to attention, making Asad momentarily forget his question, which I have zero intention of answering with these girls lurking close, waiting to turn my personal tragedy into lunchtime gossip.
“So you want to be on crew?” the boy says. “I warn you now. You won’t get roses or applause.”
He pauses, scanning our faces.
“But without you, the show stops. You are the invisible hands behind the scenes.” He holds a black T-shirt high in the air. “In fact, your sole purpose is to disappear into the stage itself. Can you do that?”
I nod. Yeah, that I can do.
Everyone passes around the black T-shirts, putting them on over their clothes. I slip mine over my head, hoping I can get myself dressed like a big girl. But of course, my life is the cosmic joke that just won’t quit, and I somehow insert my head into an armhole. I silently panic in the 100 percent cotton-polyester darkness as I try to get m
y elbow to bend enough to get me out.
Through his laughter, Asad asks if he can help. I give up and let my arms hang limp at my side as I nod from within the shirt.
He tugs on the collar, straightening out the holes for me, and as my head wriggles through—because the universe is nothing if not thorough in its humiliation quest—my bandana slides off.
Asad’s eyes reach my scalp before my fingers can, and for a split second, his eyes go wide. Instead of the long, stick-straight brown hair I had Before the Fire, my scalp now boasts little bald spots where the doctors cut out skin to graft onto my face. Some of the follicles burned off completely, and the hair that did survive is growing back coarse and frizzy. Dr. Sharp says this spriggy regrowth is temporary, but I’m not holding my breath for shampoo-commercial locks.
My patchy scalp only contributes to my crypt-keeper vibe, but instead of running off screaming, Asad reaches out to adjust my bandana. “Congratulations! You’ve officially crossed to the dark side of drama.” He slips his own T-shirt over his head. “Soon you’ll be like me, classically trained in fading into the background.”
I tug the bandana tight around my earhole just to make sure. “I can only dream.”
Tony leads us on a tour of the inner sanctum of the stage. Single file, we weave through the black curtain maze as he points out sound booms and lighting rigs and secret storage closets.
Asad leans closer to me to whisper when Tony turns around to explain how the curtain pulley system works. A piece of his black hair tickles my forehead.
“Want to see where the real magic happens?”
When the group goes off toward the dressing rooms, Asad leads me the other way to the back of the auditorium. The skin on my knees pulls painfully tight as I follow him up a dark, winding staircase, to a room that looks like the control station of a spaceship. He sits in a rolling chair and glides backward, his arms wide, gesturing to the rows and rows of switches and buttons.
“Welcome to my lair,” he says. “It’s humble, I know, but chicks dig it.”
I fold my arms across my chest and lean against one of the panels, trying to ignore the throbbing in my knees, afraid if I rub them or collapse on the floor like I want to, he’ll suddenly wonder why he’s hanging out with the bizarro Burned Girl.
“How many chicks, exactly, have you had in here?”
Asad hits a button and turns off all the lights in the auditorium, which stretches out below us through a large window. He hits another and just the center-stage spotlight blinks on.
“Quantity is not the key when it comes to chicks,” he says.
Asad brings the lights back up in the auditorium. The floor seems a million miles away as I peer over, sending my stomach churning. My mind darts back to a memory of me leaning out my bedroom window. My dad yells, “Jump,” but my feet won’t listen. He pushes me, and I fall, watching the ground zoom toward me.
I step back quickly from the glass before the memory burrows too deep. As I do, a group of girls walk onto the stage, Kenzie at the helm, her tight-pinched face even snartier than usual.
“That girl really thinks she’s something, huh?” I say.
“Kenzie King? She owns this place.”
Asad points to the sign at the back of the theater, which I can barely make out by squinting. THE KING FAMILY THEATER.
“As in, she literally owns it. Her family donates buttloads of money every year to the drama department, so Kenzie naturally thinks she runs it—and everyone in it.”
He rubs his palms together in excitement. “Shall we listen in?”
He cranks up a dial on the panel in front of him, and the sound of the girls’ footsteps fills the room.
“Umm…creepy voyeur much?” I say.
Asad laughs and turns the dial louder.
Kenzie’s voice wafts through the speakers on the walls, already in the middle of a sentence.
“It’s her I’m worried about. That whole circle-of-trust disaster was so embarrassing, although who can blame that kid for not wanting to touch that…thing. And I honestly think she has no idea that she smells like a walking old-folks home.”
My muscles tense as I inch away from Asad, hoping he won’t take a whiff to confirm. Instead, he flicks a switch, silencing the conversation.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”
I shrug. “I’m used to it.”
“You shouldn’t be.” Asad’s face contorts as he taps a switch back and forth, flickering a small light at the back of the stage on and off. I step farther back from the glass, less afraid now of the height and more of Kenzie noticing the light and looking up to see me watching her like a stalker. “We should say something to her. You should say something.”
I lean against the control panel, trying to be casual even though all I really want to do is get out of this small space that has suddenly filled with the hospital-drenched scent of my lotion.
“Right, because people like me can just walk up to people like her and say, ‘Please like me. Pretty please’? Girls like that are just one of the irrefutable laws of high school—like gravity. No matter what I do, they’ll always be there.”
Kenzie and her entourage file out of the auditorium, their mouths still moving even though Asad has momentarily silenced their mockery.
“Besides,” I add, “if I stood up to every injustice, when would I find time to watch The Real Housewives?”
“It’s still not right,” he says with a weak smile. “Even if you are friends with Piper.”
I stand straight, not sure I heard him right.
“What does Piper have to do with anything?”
“You know…” Asad pauses and swallows hard. “Everything that happened on New Year’s.”
Asad waits like I’m supposed to understand what he’s talking about. I stare blankly back.
“How she and Kenzie were best friends and then they weren’t anymore and then you showed up and took her place, and from what I understand about girls—which I warn you is pathetically little—that’s like a big no-no.”
I put my hand out to stop him.
“Piper and Kenzie were friends? In what world?”
Asad lets out a long, low whistle as he shakes his head.
“Piper hasn’t told you any of this?”
“No. We have a pretty strict don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy.”
Asad blankets the auditorium in darkness by flipping all the switches with his palm. “It’s probably time to ask.”
15
That night, I do some reconnaissance on my phone. My first stop: the online profile I’ve avoided looking at since the fire.
I wasn’t technically lying to Piper about not being on social media—I’m not. At least, not this version of me.
In the small, circular selfie in the corner of the page, Ava Before the Fire grins in front of the enormous maple tree in our old yard. I don’t open my profile page. I made that mistake once in the hospital—took me an hour to scroll through all the aggressive commands to Get well soon! and the You’re a hero/inspiration/survivor comments. I never responded to any of them. What was there to say?
Besides, I kind of like that the old me still exists out there, untouched by fire and death and reality. Ava Before the Fire with her flawless skin and happy smile. That’s how I want her to stay, frozen in the amber of the interwebz.
So I don’t tap on my name or the red 153 in the corner announcing the backlog of messages from my old friends. I guess I want them to remember the old me, too.
A picture of Chloe pops up first on my feed. She’s straightened her wild hair and lost so much weight that I almost don’t recognize her sitting on the edge of our school’s theater, Emma and Stacy flanking her.
And then I’m down the rabbit hole. Pictures of all my old friends, still hanging out, going to Tommy’s Burgers & Shakes,
hiking up the canyon, taking a bow on my stage.
My life, my friends, moving on without me.
I pause when I get to a picture of Josh, standing in the high school parking lot, arm around some girl with long, beach-wavy hair.
I x out of the photo quickly. This is exactly why I don’t look. This recon mission isn’t about my past, anyway.
I type Piper’s name and spot her easily by the neon-striped compression garments radiating from her profile pic. The rest of her photos are classic Piper—oddly angled black-and-whites of her wheelchair spokes, close-ups of her burns, angsty poems about scars and endless tattoo variations of phoenix wings. But her photos only go back to mid-January, nothing about the crash on New Year’s Eve, nothing about Kenzie.
I try “Kenzie King” and tap on a close-up of a windblown, beach-in-the-background girl.
Bingo.
Her account is private, but through some sleuthing, I sift through her friends’ accounts, finding photos of her and Piper wearing massive New Year’s Eve glasses and top hats, grinning into the camera. Before that, more pictures of them with the girl with the pixie haircut huddled under blankets at football games, in sequined dresses for homecoming, and standing arm in arm on the lip of the stage.
In what bizarro universe were Piper and Kenzie friends?
I scroll through the pictures of the past that Piper has clearly tried to delete. And if I’m going to survive in Kenzie King’s theater, I need to know why.
* * *
The next afternoon, Dr. Layne goes on forever at support group about the power of fear, but all I can think about is getting a minute alone with Piper.
Piper rolls her eyes as the crying boy—I think his name is Braden—talks about how he’s afraid he’ll never play the piano again because of the whole one-hand thing, and then he launches into how his girlfriend wants to get freaky, but he’s scared she’ll be grossed out by his scars.
“Thank you for sharing,” Dr. Layne says over Braden’s muffled sobs. “I want you all to think about the greatest fear in your life right now. How can you take back control? Grab a partner and discuss.”
