by Tom Upton
As I neared home, I began to hear distant sirens. I didn’t think anything of it at first; it was a common sound in the big city, plus the local firehouse was only a few blocks from my house. But as I got closer and closer, it seemed that I was homing in on the sirens.
With growing dread, I turned down my street. I could see ahead, near my house, that a fire engine had the street blocked and smoke was rising toward the clear sky. Whatever was happening was happening close to home—really close. It can’t be, I thought. This had to be some hideous coincidence. I had just left Amy behind; there was no way she could have beaten me back here.
Since I couldn’t drive through, I decided to park and walk the rest of the way. The nearer I got to my house, the more curious people wandered out of their homes to check out what was happening.
The towering old maple tree near the curb in front of my house was completely engulfed in flames. It didn’t seem possible. Flames were swallowing the long branches covered with spring leaves and arcs of water rose from hoses as firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze. How did she do it? I wondered. She couldn’t have beaten me back here. Then I realized the horrible truth: not only could Amy will things to burn, she could project that power over a distance. Great! Just marvelous! Could I have picked a worse person to piss off?
As I approached my house, I saw my mom standing on the front porch watching the firefighters work. Even at a distance I could see her puzzle frown, as though she was wondering, How can the tree be burning? It’s all green wood… I was lucky not to be home when the fire started. I probably would have got blamed. It was weird, right? I always got blamed for anything weird that happened around the house.
Standing next to my mom, also studying the strange spectacle, there was Jack. What was he doing here? I wondered, suddenly annoyed. He couldn’t return my call, but instead he just showed up at me house. I glowered up at him as I stepped up to the front stairs, but he pretended not to notice.
My mom dropped her eyes from the burning tree. She gave me one of her looks, the one that was like an inside joke that wasn’t funny. She might as well have said, “Julie?” in a way that suggested she believed I had something to do with her tree being on fire.
“Hey,” I said to her, “don’t look at me. I wasn’t even here.”
She looked away from me, and resumed watching the firemen.
I walked up the stairs, and took Jack by the arm. I didn’t grab it but pinched a bit of loose flesh. “We have to talk… now,” I whispered. I led him down the stairs, across the front lawn, and into the gangway between my house and the one next door. The whole time I pinched him, pinched him hard, hoping I’d leave a bruise, but he didn’t complain or say “ouch” or anything. Maybe he didn’t have nerves under his skin, but probably he just didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of hearing his pain. I hated when somebody knew me, and obviously Jack knew me well enough to know that I could be a little sadistic sometimes.
When we were halfway down the gangway, well out of earshot from anybody, I released his arm and faced him.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“I got your message,” he said, sounding innocent. “It sounded like an emergency.”
“Why didn’t you just call back?”
“I couldn’t. After I retrieved the message, my phone went dead. I was still on a bus—I couldn’t recharge it. So I headed here instead of going home. Like I said, it sounded like an emergency. What’s with you?”
I held out my hand. “Let me see your phone.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
He handed me his cell phone. I checked it to make sure it was dead and he wasn’t lying. Maybe I was a little paranoid; sometimes, like now, I got the feeling that everybody was lying to me.
I gave him the phone back. “I left two other messages,” I said, softening, lowering my guard a little. “After you recharge the phone, you’re to erase them, without listening to them. You understand?”
“Not at all.”
“Just do it.”
“Why?” I didn’t answer. What was I supposed to say? I didn’t want him to hear those messages because I was afraid that I might sound weak or desperate or that I cared that I’d scared him earlier. “All right,” he said. “I won’t listen to them. I don’t know why, but I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, promise,” he sighed, and then asked, “Are you going to tell me what’s with your tree?”
“Not here. Let’s go inside.”
I led him round to the back of the house, and we entered through the kitchen door. We went up to my room. Once inside, I pushed the window up and climbed out onto the roof. It was something I’d usually do when I was alone, and wanted to feel more alone. It was as though, suddenly, I had forgotten Jack was with me. I suspected I was getting too use to having him around. When I remembered he was there, I turned round and peered through the window into my room. Jack was standing in the middle of my room and staring at me.
“You coming?” I asked.
“On the roof?”
“There’s a good view of the fire.”
He just shrugged, and climbed out the window. He didn’t climb through as easily as I had, but then I weighed about ninety pounds and had had a lot of practice. Jack was taller, heavier, and not at all graceful.
I sat on the roof and watched the arcs of water coming up from the ground and washing through the upper branches of the tree.
Jack finally made it through the window, somehow managing not to break his neck in the process. He stepped unsteadily down the slanting roof. When he sat next to me, he sounded winded from the physical effort.
“Maybe you need to work out a little,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, you’re in great shape, right?”
“One way or another, I’m doomed, remember? What does it matter?”
He winced at the comment. “I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that.”
“Just being real,” I said, watching the water filter through the burning leaves. They seemed to be defiant, stubbornly burning under cascades of water. “I’m like a cancer ward patient, withering away in bed, with tubes going into my rotting body. You think Pilates is going to do me any good?”
He winced, as though my words stung, but didn’t say anything.
For a while, we sat and watched as the fire in the tree weakened and finally began to die. Now and then the wind changed directions, and a fine spray of cold mist hit us.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry I got mad at you before.”
“My fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that. I shouldn’t have touched you.”
“It’s all right.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. I looked over at him.
“Jack, I meant it’s all right, never mind that it happened. I didn’t mean it’s all right, go ahead and do it again.”
He jerked his hand back as though afraid something really bad was going to happen. I couldn’t help laughing.
“What?” he asked, surprised that wasn’t hostile, that he hadn’t pulled back a stump instead of his hand.
“I can’t read you anymore,” I confessed.
“No?”
“No. You’re like my parents now.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Try not to feel anything,” I told him. “Trust me—you’re better off.”
“Like you?” he asked. I stared at him for a heartbeat or two, long enough for him to get uncomfortable. “Okay, I withdraw the question.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“I didn’t hurt you, when I grabbed you, did I?”
“No.”
“I was just trying to--”
“I know what you were trying to do,” I said. “I’m weird not stupid. You were trying to protect me from Amy. I just don’t understand why you’d want to bother. I’m just not worth the trouble. I think it’s just that you’re fascinated with all this
supernatural stuff. If I wasn’t such a freak, you wouldn’t be interested at all.”
“No, it’s more than that,” he protested.
“There is nothing more than that. You just think there is,” I said. “I wish there was more.” I thought for a moment. At times it was hard to determine how much you should say to somebody. With each and every word you say you give away a piece of yourself that can never be taken back. “You know, sometimes, I wish I could be normal—with normal problems. Then things might be different. I mean, you’re not so bad. Your wardrobe is a disaster. And your hair—that whole grunge look thing isn’t even from this century. But other than that you’re a pretty good guy.”
He chuckled. “Is this your way of saying you actually do like me?” he asked.
“Yeah, but don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll never go out with you. I can be cruel, but not cruel enough to do that to you, or to anybody else. Look, this is my life: burning trees and psycho pyromaniac bitches. And it’s not going to get any better.”
By now the fire was extinguished. The tree was a mottled mess of bright green and charred black. The fire engine rumbled, idling as firemen prepared to return to the station. Thankfully my dad had been assigned to a station on the south side. How traumatic would it have been for him to have to answer a call at his own address? Amy was a pyscho-bitch on auto-pilot. She didn’t care what damage she did to people or their feelings. Strangely this made me mad—strangely, because usually I didn’t care about such things either. I thought myself different somehow, so maybe I was a hypocrite. All right, I was just a hypocrite.
“So you want to talk about it,” Jack asked, as fire engine rumbled away.
“I was trying to avoid that,” I said, and then told him everything that had happened. “It was like she was all buddy-buddy, you know. And then one moment came where I hesitated, where I showed that I didn’t think what she was doing was just fine. Then she seemed to snap—some kind of switch flipped in her head, and I was suddenly an enemy, a dangerous enemy because I knew what she was up to.”
“Ergo, you have a burning tree in front of your house.”
“Just as a warning. If she has the ability to project this power over a long distance, she could have done worse. I could have got nuked in my car driving home.”
“She’s crazy, you know,” Jack said.
“Duh.”
“But she did admit to you that she was the one who started those jocks on fire, right?”
“Yeah, she seemed to find it pretty amusing.”
“Did she say why she did it?” he asked.
“She needed practice on a moving target.”
“For real?”
“For real,” I said.
He shook his head, not knowing how to respond to such insanity.
“You starting to lose your fascination with the supernatural?” I asked. “Maybe you should take up stamp collecting instead, huh?”
He snorted. “Actually I never read about anything like this.”
“You think you’re going to find this shit in a book? For that there has to be some kind of proof. This crazy bitch can do whatever she wants, and she knows she can get away with it. We know what she’s up to, and we couldn’t prove it.”
“Any idea what these big plans of hers are?” Jack asked.
“She didn’t say exactly. She just said she wanted me to be a part of them. I tell you one thing: it’s going to be huge—I mean, like something that will make all the papers and the nightly news. Maybe she’ll hit the prom.”
“The prom was last Saturday,” he pointed out.
“Oh, well, I don’t pay much attention to that type of thing,” I said, feeling stupid. “It’s not my thing. Can you see me at a prom, in a dress, with a corsage on my pencil-like wrist?” He didn’t say anything, but appeared to be trying to visualize it. “Don’t bother,” I told him. “Your imagination isn’t good enough. Nobody’s is…. So if not the prom, then what?”
“An event that involves a lot of people. Graduation ceremonies?”
I frowned. It didn’t sound right. “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s just the seniors, and their families. It doesn’t much involve the junior class.”
“Does it have to? She’s crazy, right?”
“Even crazy people aren’t totally random. I think she might find it very satisfying to scorch her classmates in particular. And that would tend to leave graduation out.”
“Then what?”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then it was as though we had the same idea at the same time.
“The barbecue,” I said.
“Has to be,” Jack said. “There’s nothing else.”
At the end of every school year, there was a barbecue that was held a large recreational area in one of the forest preserves just outside the city. It was a tradition that started years ago. It was mainly intended for the graduating class, but really everybody came—juniors, sophomores, and even freshmen were tolerated. It was held the afternoon of the Saturday before the last day of school. Hundreds of students showed up and poured into the large picnic area. Dead meat was grilled and eaten. Drinks were drunk, and not just soda and bottle juice and water. It was the last time seniors got to act like totally idiots until they went to college, where they could act like total idiots every weekend. The festivities lasted until the park area was closed down, at eleven at night. Then the forest preserve police, a division of the county cops, would move in and clear the area. Usually there would still be a least a hundred kids or so left, most of them drunk as skunks and rowdy as hell. They could have been arrested for underage drinking and other violations, of course, but because the skimpy squad of cops was greatly outnumbered hardly everybody ever ended up in handcuffs. It seemed more important to get them away from county-patrolled land, where they became the problem of city and suburban cops. Oddly, through year after year of this ritual of reckless behavior, nobody had ended up dead or seriously injured.
“It’s perfect,” I said, “perfect for a fiery massacre.”
“Hundreds of people, like sitting ducks,” Jack murmured.
“She could hide in the woods.”
“Nobody would know what hit them. Everybody running around on fire.”
“There wouldn’t be enough ambulances.”
“And nobody would ever figure it out.”
“It would be—epic,” I said, studying the treetop beyond the roof. Some leaves, burned black, fell away from branches and fluttered toward the ground.
“So what do we do?” I heard Jack ask.
I looked at him. “What?”
“What do we do?” He was totally serious, as though there were dozens of options.
I shrugged.
“There has to be something,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Maybe you can make it rain on her,” he said.
“I’m trying not to think about that.”
“It was pretty trippy. You ever have any clue you could do something like that?”
“Did I really do that? I was hoping it was some weird coincidence.”
“Not much chance of that. You got mad at me, and it started storming. No, that was you all right.”
“Just what I need—another weird ability.”
“But maybe this is a good thing,” he said.
“Oh, Jack, you’re not going to try to convince me there’s a bright side to this, are you?”
“Well, maybe it is. Look, why couldn’t you rain on her? Fire and water—maybe you can put her out.”
I had to laugh at that. “Do you think it could be so simple? These things are never that simple.” I told him about how Amy looked when I met her in the parking lot, how the rain never touched her but cascaded away from her as though she were surrounded by some invisible cocoon.
“So she’s immune to you,” he said. “Well, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Could you be immune to her?”
“You me
an, like, she wouldn’t be able to light me on fire?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I want to find out, either.”
“There has to be some way to stop her,” he insisted. “You probably understand her better than anybody else. Maybe you can get into her head.”
“Yeah, right. That’s just what I need. If you haven’t noticed, I’m not doing too well inside my own head.”
He thought for a moment. I found it irritating that he never gave up on things.
“Something you just said,” he forged onward. “She would hide in the woods. How do you know that? I mean, if she could set your tree on fire from miles away…”
“That was just a warning,” I said, getting wearier by the second. “This other thing is the main event. She would want to see everybody burning. She would want to hear them screaming in pain and terror.”
“But why?”
I sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. Because she’s evil, because she can make it happen, because she had a bad childhood…. I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said, and pushed myself up to my feet. I walked up the slant of the roof to the window, and climbed back into my bedroom.
I kicked off my shoes. I was lying in bed when Jack fell through the window and landed on the floor in a tangled mess of arms and legs. At another time I might have laughed, watching him tumble to the floor, but not now.
“Graceful, Jack, graceful,” I commented dully, lying on my side and watching him get to his knees.
He crawled over to the side of the bed. Somehow he looked more attractive crawling.
“You okay?” he said.
“I’m never okay,” I said. “You can take that as a given.”
“This stuff bothers you, doesn’t it?” he asked.
“No, you bother me.”
He tipped his head like a confused dog.
I sighed. “I wish you really knew me, knew what goes on in my mind. Then I wouldn’t have to explain so much.
“This ‘stuff’ doesn’t bother me, not at all. The idea of somebody wanting to hurt a lot of people probably seems insane to you. It’s Amy’s fantasy, and she wants to make it real. I know that, because it’s been my fantasy, too.”
