Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  “I just—“

  “Has it occurred to you that you might not know everything about everything?”

  He waited for an answer on that one.

  I lowered my eyes. “I was just trying to make myself useful, sir.”

  “Maybe the newest person on a crew shouldn’t start changing everything right away. Maybe the newest person on a crew should spend a little time at the station before deciding to repaint it.”

  There are no words to describe how much I had not expected this reaction from him.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You bet you are.”

  “Should I—” I began, amazed that I was even asking the question. “Should I send the kits back?”

  “It’s not about the kits, Hanwell,” the captain said. “It’s about respect for the chain of command.”

  “I respect the chain of command, sir,” I said.

  “Do you? Because what do you do when a ranking member of the crew tells you to do something?”

  He blinked at me, waiting for an answer.

  “You do it, sir,” I said.

  “And what if a ranking member of the crew doesn’t tell you to do something?”

  I sighed. “You don’t do it, sir.”

  “We’re clear on that?”

  “We’re clear.”

  He turned back to his computer. We were done here. “Good,” he said then. “Now scram.”

  I walked to my locker feeling stunned—but also very lucky that I hadn’t been in trouble for what I thought I’d been in trouble for. Maybe the rookie was right. Maybe our going on a date would not lead inevitably to the end of my career.

  Maybe we were going to get away with it.

  Or maybe not: because when I opened up my locker, I discovered that somebody had scrawled graffiti all across the inside. Very specific graffiti that made it clear somebody somewhere knew something.

  In terrible handwriting, in five-inch-tall letters, in Sharpie—there was one word: Slut.

  * * *

  I SLAMMED THE door shut the second I saw it.

  I felt a sting of panic through my body. Not cool. Not fair. Not even, you know—accurate. Not even close.

  Six-Pack looked over. “Everything okay?”

  “Yep,” I said. But I was breathing fast.

  The timing was uncanny.

  Six-Pack was still eyeing me.

  “The lock sticks sometimes,” I said, leaning hard against the door, breathing.

  Had the captain recognized me? Was that why he was so weirdly mad that I had just earned the station four thousand dollars’ worth of safety equipment? Or had there been someone else there we didn’t see? Or maybe word of mouth? Of course, by the end of the party, every single person there knew that Owen had screwed a very drunk girl in the coat closet.

  All anybody had to do was recognize me.

  I’d been warned, of course. Captain Harris had warned me—as had a lifetime of being female. If we broke the rules, I would be the one punished. I had known the risk I was taking when I went to that party with him, though I had not truly been able to imagine what the consequence would feel like. But I’d persisted. Like a fool.

  Now, pressed up against my locker, frozen against it, really, my heart racing, my adrenaline on high alert, I was starting to get it.

  This was not good.

  Six-Pack frowned at me.

  The thing was, though, this actually was not the first time in my life that I had opened a locker and seen the word “slut” inside. The last time, it had been high school, and it had been scratched into the orange paint on the inside of the metal door. This time, it was dark black Sharpie ink. It seemed like such an impossible coincidence. What were the chances of getting harassed like that—even once, much less twice?

  Although, maybe the playbook for harassment just isn’t all that varied. Maybe the type of people who do this kind of thing don’t dig deep into creativity.

  Seeing that word, scrawled there so angrily, left an afterimage in my eyes that I couldn’t blink away. It shocked the hell out of me, honestly—both in the real moment of my current life, and in a way that felt like a reverberation from high school.

  Somehow, it made me angry at Owen. If he hadn’t been so irresistible, and so likable, and if he hadn’t frigging asked, I would never have gone with him to that party in the first place. Today could have been just another plain old regular firefighting day.

  It also made me angry at myself. What had I been thinking? How cocky was I—how flat-out stupid—to think that I could just do what I wanted? I knew what world I was living in. I had willfully, stupidly broken the rules, and now I’d have to suffer the consequences.

  And last, though not at all least, it made me angry at whoever had done it. Someone had gone to some trouble to figure out my combination and find a time when the locker room was empty. Someone had done something to hurt me. Intentionally. With malice.

  That was a horrifying feeling. Somebody out there had come after me.

  And I didn’t even know who it was.

  I spent that entire day rigid with rage at every living human being on earth, including myself. I glared at patients. I evaluated every guy on our crew suspiciously. My thinking and my emotions were totally jumbled all day, but one thing was clear: I needed to stay as far away from the rookie as possible.

  So …

  If he came into a room, I went out.

  If he asked me a question, I turned away.

  It was a way for me to reclaim a sense of strength. I could survive this. I was tougher than this. One piece of graffiti wasn’t going to shut me down.

  Then, once the guys had gone to bed, and I could hear the reliable rhythm of their snores, I snuck back down to my locker.

  I couldn’t sleep anyway.

  I opened it up and peered in. Part of me hoped that maybe if I just checked again, it might be gone.

  Nope.

  There it was. Slut.

  The handwriting was rounded and pointy at the same time. The T almost looked like an X. It looked more like Slux, really. Terrible penmanship. Come on. If you’re going to do it, do it right.

  Though it was a clue. Maybe there’d be some way to get a peek at some of our paperwork from the captain’s office—or maybe four graffiti letters wouldn’t be enough to settle it.

  I drew in a long, scratchy breath, then let it back out. I just let my head lean forward until it was resting in my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt so tired.

  That’s when I heard a sound in the doorway.

  I snapped to attention and slammed the door closed in one motion.

  It was Owen. Sleepy looking, hair a little mussed, in his undershirt and, I guessed, recently slid-into work pants.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said, leaning back against my locker now, to block it even more.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  We hadn’t spoken since he’d dropped me off after the party, a hundred years ago, when my whole body was still molten with delight over all the fun we’d had in that coat closet. The last time we’d spoken, every molecule in the air between us had shimmered with possibility.

  But everything was different now.

  And that made me angriest of all.

  “Were you—” He searched for the word. “Praying? Or something?”

  I want to state for the record that I knew intellectually that the rookie was not attacking me in any way.

  Still, I felt a little bit attacked. Couldn’t I just get a couple of minutes to process this by myself? The feeling was compounded, I’m sure, by the fact that the graffiti was actually an attack—though not, of course, coming from Owen. Although, who knew? Could have been anybody. Maybe this was his evil plan all along: Gain my trust by seeming all nice and sweet and mouthwatering, kiss me into oblivion, and then sabotage me behind my back.

  Ridiculous.

  Then again, this whole situation was ridiculous.
>
  “I was thinking,” I said, sounding more annoyed than I expected to. “You’ve heard of that?”

  “Sure,” he said, frowning at me. “Huge fan of thinking.”

  “What are you even doing awake?”

  “Wakeful,” he said, shrugging, like, The usual. “I might go bake some chocolate chip cookies.”

  I stared at him.

  “Want some?” he asked. “If I do?”

  Even the idea of him baking something as comforting and delightful as cookies felt annoying. “Nope,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, like I was acting odd.

  Later, I’d try to figure out why I felt so mad at him in this moment. I didn’t really think this whole situation was his fault. I knew he was just trying to be a friend. But that was it, right there. That was the problem. Did I want a cookie? Of course! Did I want to be able to tell him what was going on and hash it all out with a pal? Of course. But the rookie, despite being the one person I wanted to talk to, was the last person I could talk to.

  Off-the-charts frustrating.

  What can I say? It came out as anger.

  “You’ve been acting weird all day,” he said then.

  “So?” I demanded.

  “So … are you okay?”

  “No. Okay? I’m not okay. And no, I don’t want to talk about it, or rap it out, or have a feeling circle. Just leave me alone. Just go.”

  The rookie held his hands up, like, Easy. “Hey. Okay. No problem. I’m gone.”

  “And no cookies!” I called after him.

  Then he actually was gone. He left the room, just like that—which I’d just asked him to do—but it still surprised me.

  Alone again. I was exactly as glad that he’d left as I was disappointed.

  I tried cleaning the Sharpie marks off with alcohol, but it didn’t work. Finally, after trying Windex, then WD-40, and scrubbing with steel wool and Comet, I hung the beefcake calendar from my old Austin station over the word with duct tape and called it a day.

  It was a pretty good solution, covering the graffiti with Hernandez’s shirtless, bulging form. But it also made me homesick.

  After that night, I struggled for weeks to hold on to my equilibrium—on runs and workouts and parkour jaunts. I struggled with it every minute of every shift. I struggled with it as I fully, solidly ignored the rookie with such vigor that it was like he didn’t even exist. And I struggled with it as we went out on call after call, helping an elderly man with chest pains, a mother who had driven her car into a ravine, a teenager who gave birth without ever having realized she was pregnant.

  I couldn’t make sense of anything anymore.

  It violated everything I knew about firefighters to think that one of them would stoop to such a thing.

  Here’s the most essential truth about firefighting: It’s a helping profession. People get into it because they want to help others. Yes, okay, maybe they also want to wear the bunker gear, or bust things up with axes, or drive a big red truck with a siren.

  But firefighters are basically good guys at heart. I’m not saying they don’t get into trouble, or have difficulty processing their feelings, or harbor a little unexamined sexism—or other isms. They’re human. They’re messy and imperfect and mistaken. At their cores, though, they’re basically good people.

  This was the crux of it.

  If firefighters weren’t the good guys, then maybe there just weren’t any left.

  * * *

  IN PRACTICE, THE weeks at work that followed were not all that different from the weeks before. I still got to work on time and did all my chores and duties with care. I still ran calls and took care of patients and brought my A-game. I still took a six-mile run every day. I still practiced parkour and studied the course whenever no one was looking. Maybe I ignored the rookie a little harder than I had before, but it wasn’t like I’d ever actively sought out his company. For various reasons.

  On the surface, things probably looked about the same.

  But nothing was the same.

  That night with the rookie had opened me up in the most profound way. It’s like I was a flower bud on a time-lapse camera and I just exploded into petals and tenderness and color.

  I keep thinking that if I’d walked into that locker room the next morning as my usual, armored self, seeing that graffiti would have smarted, yes. But it wouldn’t have shredded me like it did.

  What choice did I have but to retreat after that? What choice was there but to armor back up? It was self-preservation.

  But now I knew what I was missing. Now I remembered what it felt like not to be alone.

  And now that I knew, it was unbearable.

  But I bore it anyway. That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.

  Still, the loneliness after I turned away from the rookie was so excruciating, so physical, that I actually felt like I might wither and die.

  And so, the next best thing: crochet club.

  Maybe, I thought, if I soothed the loneliness elsewhere, I could find a way to be okay.

  Josie and Diana were always delighted for me to join them, and they gave me a giant basket of yarn balls to wind. And even as I marveled at how low I’d sunk—winding yarn balls!—I had to admit that the softness and the rhythm of the motion were pretty soothing, after all. Especially the chenille.

  To be truthful, it wasn’t just crochet club. I looked for every opportunity to be around either of them. I started showing up at the kitchen table for coffee. I helped prepare dinner. I volunteered to help Josie in her shop. When Diana invited me to go to the movies, I said yes. When she asked me to help in the garden, I did that, too. And when she hugged me, as crazy as it sounds, I hugged her right back.

  It was like I was starving for human connection—and had been, all along—but I’d only now just figured that out.

  My plan was to feast on friendship at home so that I’d be satiated when I got to the station.

  It kind of worked.

  Except that I never seemed to get satiated. The more connection I got, the more I wanted. You know, like when you take a nap, but when you wake up you’re somehow sleepier than you were before? That was me, all the time—with humanity.

  To everyone’s astonishment, after Diana and Josie had failed to even coax me out of my room for so long, now they couldn’t get rid of me. To my relief, they were delighted. And they were also hell-bent on solving the Case of the Slutty Locker.

  They treated it like a Nancy Drew moment, and they questioned me about each guy on the crew, trying to nail down our suspects.

  “It could have been any one of them,” Diana announced one night.

  “I say it was the captain,” Josie said. “He’s the one who saw her at the party giving the rookie a blowjob.”

  “Can I just reiterate that I did not give the rookie a blowjob?”

  “Not yet,” Josie said.

  “The captain does make a good suspect,” Diana said, totally unflummoxed by the topic.

  “Well,” I said, “he doesn’t think women should join the fire department.”

  “That’s suspicious right there,” Josie said.

  “Is he mean to you?” Diana asked.

  “No, he’s mostly very nice. In his gruff way.”

  “Is he harder on you than on everybody else?”

  “He actually tends to use me as an example of how everybody should be doing things.”

  “Does he like you?”

  “I don’t know that I’d go that far.”

  “But he admires your work?”

  “Frequently.”

  “Does he realize that you’re a woman?”

  “He says I’m the exception that proves the rule.”

  “Whatever that means,” Diana said.

  “If he knows you’re onto him,” Josie suggested, “he could fire you.”

  “He’s not going to fire me,” I said.<
br />
  Josie smiled at me. “You’re adorable. Yes, he is.”

  Diana nodded in agreement. “Yeah, he’s probably going to fire you. If it was him.”

  “Who else could it have been?” Josie asked.

  I shrugged. “It could have been anyone, really. Six-Pack has lost a ton of money—hundreds—betting against me. I absolutely annihilated Tiny in a game of hoops one time. DeStasio and Case were never thrilled to have a woman around. But there’s no obvious villain. They’ve all been surprisingly nice to me.”

  “They underestimate you,” Diana pointed out.

  “But not in a vicious way,” Josie said. “In a chivalrous, slightly patronizing way. Not mean-spirited.”

  “Maybe it was the rookie,” I said then, and they both lowered their crochet.

  “Absolutely not,” Josie said.

  Diana shook her head, too. “Impossible.”

  “Why not? It’s the perfect alibi. Pretend to be allies and then do a double cross. Oldest trick in the book.”

  “He’s not pretending. I saw the way he looked at you.”

  True enough.

  “Why do you want to work with these guys, anyway?” Josie asked. “They seem very high maintenance.”

  I shrugged. “I love the job.”

  “And she’s good at it,” Diana added.

  “I love the job because I’m good at it.”

  “Maybe it’s the fact that you’re so good at it that’s the problem. It’s got to be someone who’s jealous of you. Or who feels threatened by you,” Diana said.

  “That could be anyone,” I said.

  “Maybe you could lay some kind of a trap,” Diana said. “Maybe rig a squirt gun full of paint to go off when somebody opens your locker.”

  “That’s a little flawed,” I pointed out. “I have to open my locker.”

  Diana and Josie thought I should report it, but I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t go to the higher-ups, because that would be not just complaining but also squealing and breaking ranks. I couldn’t confront the stalker, because I didn’t know who it was. In different circumstances, I might have just worked harder, tried to get better, in hopes that whoever didn’t like me might come to see my value.

  I suspected that Graffiti Guy had never wanted me there and had expected me to burn out on the job and quit. Well, I hadn’t burned out. And once he realized I wasn’t going to fail on my own, he’d decided to make me so miserable I’d have to leave.