by Tom Upton
I grinned. “I could prove it to him.”
“Uh, no,” she said. “No, we’re not doing that.”
“Well, then talk to him,” I said. “Tell him something he will understand. Make him see that I can’t be fixed. This is the way I am. I’m never going to be the perky, loving daughter that other people have. He got stuck with a freak.”
“Oh, Julie,” she murmured, but that was all she could say. She could never find the words to make things better for me, because there were no such words in any language.
I pushed away from the table. Before I left the room, I paused at the doorway for a long time. “Mom… I love you,” I said, but the words didn’t sound very convincing, not even to me.
***************
At school Monday all anybody could talk about was how some dude on the baseball team had burst into flames.
I sat across the lunchroom table from Melody, my best friend. She always got caught up in school gossip, every little tidbit that was floating around. She could go on for hours about how so-and-so had broken up with her boyfriend. Or how somebody got suspended for doing something stupid. It was hard to shut her up—she just babbled on and on. Today she was twice as bad, because of the guy on the baseball team who caught fire last Friday during a game.
“Can you imagine that!” she said, between bites of her pizza slice. “Suddenly, it’s like, poof, you’re burning. I wonder what that would be like.”
“If you want, I’ll find some lighter fluid and matches. We can experiment,” I said.
But it was as though she couldn’t even hear me. “I wonder if he felt it burning first, or did he see the flames first. Your dad’s a fireman, right? What did he say about it? I mean, about what might cause something like that to happen.”
Before I could answer, Jack Kilgore set his tray on the table.
“Spontaneous human combustion,” he said, sitting next to Melody.
“Oh, hey, Jack,” Melody said, running her fingers through her long hair. She had a crush on Jack for weeks now. It would have been nice if they could get together. At least that way Jack would leave me alone. Sadly he found Melody boring and shallow, which showed at least he had a good grip on reality as far as Melody was concerned.
“I said it weeks ago,” Jack said to me, as though Melody wasn’t even there, “after the first Mount Olive guy got torched.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I droned. Since I met him, and told him my secrets, Jack’s purpose in life seemed to be to convince me I should use my abilities to help people. And my dad thought I needed to see a psychiatrist?
“I saw a cable show on that—spontaneous—you know… what you mentioned,” Melody said to Jack, playing up to him. “I was wondering why it was when people burn up like that they are always alone. It’s always some old lady, sitting in her lounge chair, watching game shows. Or some old guy locked in the bathroom, getting ready to take a shower. Why doesn’t a newscaster burst into flames on live television?”
“Hey, I’d like to see that,” I put in.
“Or a baseball player in front of a couple hundred spectators?” Jack said.
“Exactly,” Melody piped. “Oh, that really did happen, didn’t it. You think it was that spontaneous human combustion?” she asked Jack.
“What do you think?” Jack asked me.
“Just leave me out of it, huh?” I was already stressing. I nibbled at my garden salad. The only other things on my tray were a hunk of corn bread and a large cube of green gelatin that was so solid it would probably bounce like a rubber ball. I started to play with the green cube, with my mind, pressing down on the top of it so that its sides bulged out and then letting go so that it went back to its original shape. I continued to do that, and I started to feel better. Not even Jack could bother me now.
“Jules, stop playing with your food,” he said.
But I kept pressing down on the cube and letting go, press and release, press and release. Pretty soon I felt like giggling. It just seemed so funny—I didn’t know why.
“Just don’t try to con me into something,” I told him.
“Come on, it’s getting creepy,” he said. “It looks like your Jell-O is breathing.”
I stopped flexing my gelatin, and looked at him.
“We were talking about a guy who started on fire,” Jack said.
“Which I really don’t want to hear about it,” I said.
“Jeremy’s a major tool,” Melody cut in. “Everybody hates the guy. His own teammates probably did something—maybe they soaked his jock strap in gasoline. But I don’t even know if even he deserved something like that. Does anybody even care about how he’s doing.”
“He’ll be fine. They have ways of treating serious burns,” Jack said.
“They use maggots,” I said.
Melody stared at me. “Maggots?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They put maggots all over the dead skin, and the maggots crawl along and little… by… little… they nibble the dead skin until it’s all gone.”
Melody turned white. She got a panicky look on her face, clamped a hand over her mouth, and then got up and ran from the lunchroom.
I looked at Jack. “Did I say something?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders, and slid over to take Melody’s seat, right across from me.
“I wasn’t trying to con you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“No.”
“You talk about weird stuff, and start looking at me in a certain way. I get a little paranoid, I guess.”
“Go ahead and play with your Jell-O, if that makes you feel better.”
“No, I’m good,” I said.
“I doubt you could do anything about spontaneous human combustion, anyway. Nobody knows what causes it, so how can anybody stop it from happening?”
“And given that it’s happening only to jocks, who would want to stop it?”
“You really have a hateful side to you,” he commented.
I grinned, and then tried to eat some more salad.
“Hey, you need to do something!”
I looked up, and saw that Jessica Harper was standing at the end of the table, looking down at me. Jessica was Adler’s queen of mean. She was tall, slim, and blonde, but had the personality of a rabid pit bull. Right behind Jessica, her friend and number-one lackey Amy Nicci stood with her arms crossed, her dark eyes trying to bore holes through me.
Jack looked at me, like What’s all this about?
“You hear me?” Jessica asked, when I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah.”
“You need to do something,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You need to tell Eloise nobody likes her.”
“I do? Why? Why don’t you tell her.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m not going to tell her. I don’t like her, right? I wouldn’t be caught dead talking with that lump.”
The girl she was talking about was Eloise Parker, who had transferred to Adler earlier this year. She was homely, hopelessly awkward, and weighed about two hundred pounds.
“Why does somebody have to tell her that?” Jack asked.
“Because she needs to know everybody hates her,” Jessica said. To somebody like Jessica, that kind of thing was important.
I glanced over to where Eloise was sitting, a couple tables away. It was the only table in the lunchroom that had open seats. In fact Eloise was the only one sitting at the table, which was about eight feet long and could have seated several other people.
“Uh, I think she knows that,” I said.
“But she needs to be told, so she knows for sure.”
“And why me?”
She looked at me as though I were stupid. “Because if a weirdo like you tells her, she’ll know how thoroughly despised she is.”
Jack started to object, but I waved him off.
I looked from Jessica back to where Eloise sat, and then I pushed away from the table.
�
�You’re not really doing this?” Jack asked.
I ignored him. I walked over to Eloise. She really was quite the mess. Her face was moon-shaped and constantly wore a dull expression. Her clothes looked like they had been bought at the thrift store. Her hair was nicely styled, but that only made the rest of her look worse.
As I approached her, Eloise looked up from her food. She seemed uncertain; it was as though she couldn’t believe anybody would walk up to her table.
“Hey?” she said.
“You know everybody hates you,” I told her.
She glanced down the vacant length of the table. “Gee, you think?” she said in a dead-pan way.
“I just wanted to tell you—in case you didn’t realize.”
“Jessica put you up to this, didn’t she?” Eloise asked.
“Pretty much. I really don’t think she speaks for everybody.”
“She thinks she does. What’s wrong with her, anyway?”
“Just a little evil, I suppose.”
“Well, she needs to leave people alone.”
“You want me to hurt her?” I asked.
She considered the offer for a moment, and then wagged her head. “Don’t bother. She’ll get what’s coming to her someday. They all will. They all have a boat-load of bad karma coming.”
“Well, if you change your mind…” I said.
I turned away and headed back to my table. I sat across from Jack again.
“Did you do it?” Jessica demanded.
“I told her.”
“Good,” she said smugly.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Jack said.
Jessica turned and started to leave, Amy right at her heels, like a faithful little puppy. As they walked away, I focused on Jessica’s ankles, the way I had focused on my gelatin cube. A couple steps later, her feet tangled and she fell forward hard and ate floor. She released an agonized yelp, and everybody at the nearby tables started to laugh.
Amy leaned over her and helped her to stand, and as she did that, she glanced up and shot me a look of pure hatred. She put a protective arm round Jessica, who was holding her face and sobbing, and they walked away as everybody continued to laugh.
Jack, who had turned round to watch the spectacle, now turned back to me.
“You’re incredible, you know,” he said, disgusted.
“Hey, I didn’t do anything. She tripped,” I lied.
“Yeah, right,” he snorted. “You’re wasting what you have.”
“Really, I need some air,” I said, pushing my tray away. I couldn’t stand to be judged by anybody, least of all by Jack.
I headed for the nearest exit, and sure enough, Jack got up and followed me.
Outside it was a warm spring day. The sun was bright and small wispy clouds scudded across the pale blue sky. There were a lot of kids outside. Some of them had laid beach towels out on the grass and were having picnics. Everybody knew that that was against school rules, but a lot of them were seniors who didn’t care because they had less than a month left before graduation.
I walked along the path that wound through the campus, and Jack came up next to me.
“Did that make you feel better?” he asked.
“Loads,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Hey, Jessica had it coming,” I said. “I hate people like that. They just can’t leave a person only—they just keep needling, and needling, and needling.”
“Like I do to you?” he asked.
“It’s not the same. She means something by it—you don’t. You can’t help yourself. You just want to keep dropping weird things on my doorstep, as though I don’t have enough weird things to deal with already. You want to stand back and watch what happens, like I’m a lab rat or something.”
“Hey, I don’t do that,” he complained.
“No? Well, it seems like it.”
“I was just talking about a guy who started on fire.”
“And spontaneous human combustion has absolutely nothing to do with me.”
“If that’s what it is,” he said.
I looked over at him. “You mean you don’t think it’s that anymore?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “If there is such a thing, it’s pretty rare. Here you have three different guys bursting into flames within a six-month period. All of them are athletes. That doesn’t seem so random—that seems like a pattern.”
“Like somebody is actually doing something to cause it?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say we had a pyrokineticist on our hands.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A pyrokineticist,” he said. “I made up the word, because there wasn’t a word for it. It’s somebody who can generate heat with their mind. Like you just did to Jessica, only with fire.” He watched me closely, and then asked, “You can’t do that, can you? I mean, think things on fire?”
“Not so far,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked, as though he didn’t quite believe me.
“If I could do that, you would have been well-done a while ago.”
“Well, I think somebody’s doing it. I just can’t figure out why?”
“Set fire to a bunch of jocks? Oh, I don’t know. I can think of a few reasons, like general principle.”
“You really dislike everybody, do you?” he asked.
“Some more than others. Jocks are on top of the list.”
“You sure you didn’t do anything?”
“Positive,” I said.
“Well, I’ll get to the bottom of it,” he said, sounding pretty determined.
“Out of curiosity— and just curiosity—if you find that somebody is responsible for burning these guys, exactly what do you plan to do? Go to the police?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t given that much thought. I guess, if I find out who it is, I’ll just confront them. I’ll tell them they need to stop, before somebody actually dies.”
“What if you end up like burnt toast?”
“Well, at least I tried. Somebody has to do something, right?”
“Ah-hah,” I said softly, eyeing him. Now it was my turn to be suspicious. “Are you trying to manipulate me?”
“No, why? What do you mean?”
“So this isn’t some back-door attempt to guilt-trip me into helping you?”
“Not at all,” he said, and when he saw that I wasn’t sure, he added, “If you don’t believe me, read my mind.”
“I don’t want to read your mind. I’m afraid of what else I might find.”
“Well, I’m not trying to con you or anything. I know how you are. You have no sympathy for anybody. You don’t care about anybody, not even yourself. You can’t help being the way you are. Nobody can.”
He made me sound like a heartless bitch, and, really, in many ways, he was right. I always figured that my problems were worse than the problems of other people. I could never tolerate it when somebody moaned about aches and pains and boyfriend problems. What were those? Nothing. Try having visions of an airliner crash, with charred body parts strewn across an open field. Try hearing the perverted thoughts of a passing stranger. Try going to sleep at night while enormous eyeballs are staring down at you from the ceiling. I would trade all that for mundane problems any day of the week.
I wanted to tell Jack I wasn’t that bad, but, honestly, I wasn’t sure about that.
“Jules?” he said.
“Huh?”
“You drifted off. You weren’t…”
“Oh, no, I was just thinking—my own thoughts,” I assured him.
“Well, I have to get to class,” he said, splitting away from me, heading for the front entrance to the school. “See you tomorrow?”
“Sure. And hey, don’t get burned,” I added, but the words sounded hollow, just like they sounded hollow that morning when I had tried to tell my mom I loved her.
After Jack was gone, I turned and went back down the path. When I passed the parking lot, I glanced up and saw the telephone a
nd electric lines that looped down from a post toward the side of the school. Suddenly I had a flash of the same lines at a different time. The sky is filled with great gray clouds, and rain is falling hard, slanting down to the sodden ground. There is something hanging from the wire, dangling up there, engulfed in flames. The cold rain hits it and hisses, and the flames do not weaken but blaze hotter and brighter….
When I got home that day, I saw that the garage door was open. My dad was working on his pick-up truck. It was an older model Ford—actually it was older than me—and required regular attention. He was lying under the truck, his legs sticking out from the front of it, and I could hear him fiddling with something underneath.
I dreaded having to talk to him, because of what my mom had told me that morning—that he thought I needed to see a psychiatrist. But I reasoned I better nip that idea in the bud before it went too far. Somehow I had to convince him that I didn’t need counseling, and I wasn’t sure how to do that. There are probably a million ways you can prove to somebody that you do have issues, but how do you prove that you don’t?
So I decidedto put up a perky front. Perky girls always seem to be accepted as well adjusted, although, personally, they always gave me the urge to vomit.
I walked into the garage, and said in a light, airy way, “Hey!”
I must have startled him, because a wrench clattered on the cement floor.
“Julie, is that you?” he called from under the truck.
“Yeah,” I chirped.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” he complained. “What are you doing home from school?”
“Uh, because school is finished.”
“Oh, it is that late?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you eat lunch today?”
“Yeah,” I said, my perky façade sustaining a crack; he was always harping about my weight and how I was too thin.
I stepped over to the workbench, and jumped up to sit on it. My feet dangled over the oil-stained floor. If I was going to carry on a conversation with a couple legs sticking out from under a truck, I wanted to be comfortable at least.
