Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

“Good morning, Dr. Shaffer’s office, Pam speaking.”

  Drill buzz drill

  “Good morning, Dr. Shaffer’s office, Pam speaking.”

  Drill buzz drill

  As the minutes pass, we don’t bother to look through the old magazines lying in a heap on the corkboard coffee table. Instead, we just watch Pam and start to wonder if there’s even anyone on the other end of the line. As if, when she wakes up in the morning and shampoos her hair, when she drives home after five o’clock, when she scrubs her family’s dinner potatoes, she’s always saying the same thing. Good morning, Dr. Shaffer’s office, Pam speaking. As if she continues to tell herself this must be true, this must be true, this must be true, in order to get herself to believe it.

  Throughout the fall and into the spring as the investigation proceeds, Mr. Lotte continues to teach his other students who made the cut. They are some of his best—the ones adept enough to tackle Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and the watered-down score to Les Misérables. Convinced of his innocence, the parents keep surrendering their five- and ten-dollar bills to him each week. The people of Mercury don’t bail when the going gets rough. This we know for sure.

  At school, kids in the hall prowl for details.

  “Hey,” they say to us. “You take lessons from Mr. Lotte, don’t you?”

  “Used to,” we answer as we elbow our way through the crowd, headed for the solace of our desks. “Just leave me alone.”

  When we reach our desks, we exhale and pretend to study our books until class starts, and so do our recitations.

  “Ain’t ain’t a word, people!” the teacher begins. We are learning that the mechanics of language are like the pistons in an engine of an American-made Ford. The verb pushes the noun. They pull and they push, pull and push.

  “Repeat after me,” the teacher commands. “I pull the wagon.”

  I pool the wagon.

  “Not ‘pool.’ That pronunciation is incorrect. Try again. Pull.”

  Pool.

  “No, pull.”

  Pooool.

  We make fun of the teacher during recess in the school yard with our own recitations, anything that will keep our lips moving and keep them from telling the truth.

  Repeat after us:

  Don’t say ain’t, your mother will faint. Your father will fall in a bucket of paint. Your sister will cry, your cat will die. The dog will call the FBI.

  We say it over and over and over, this Rust Belt recitation that keeps our mouths busy and compliant. This kind of doggerel occupies our minds until it becomes a feeble prayer to dumb us, numb us, become the sum of us—just like Pam and her receptionist’s jingle, just like our teacher and her nursery rhyme, and just like the gossip running wild in the town of Mercury.

  Torch

  I WAS LONELY AFTER LOSING NORA, and my soiled heart needed the oddest kind of elixir. I sought solace with the best company Mercury had to offer—church boys. There was no better place to retreat than to the leftover scraps of a campground on Lake Erie, one so beloved by the youth in our town that we couldn’t see how it barely staggered along. Each summer, I found myself most alive in a place that was almost dead.

  On the first Sunday of Pure Heart Presbyterian’s summer camp, the sun blistered as my friend Aaron and I sat on a weathered picnic bench in a clearing at the campsite. Aaron had been a constant companion through years of elementary school, middle school, Sunday school, and church camp. We’d gone through confirmation together just last year, now official members of the Presbyterian faith (or “Pres-bear-terian,” as my brother Seth’s favorite T-shirt coined it). Even then, Aaron hadn’t worn a tie.

  It was midafternoon, and the mood was quiet. The campers would be arriving in about a half hour, attached to fathers in gleaming pickup trucks and mothers with stamps for letters home. The parents would inspect the crooked mess hall, the gray beach, the rusting toilets, the soggy shower-room floor. They’d frown, and then they’d head for home, hoping for the best.

  Now old enough to be counselors-in-training, or CITs, Aaron and I had been charged with handling registration. We sat with our backs hunched, elbows on our bare knees. Water lapped up the dirty, tired shore of Lake Erie about three hundred yards away. Though we’d only been outside for an hour, both our necks were starting to burn. His white legs seemed to soak up the sun, the light disappearing into his pale flesh dotted with fine blond hair.

  In his right hand, he held a cheap, royal blue, convenience store lighter. He didn’t smoke back then. A Swisher Sweet cigar every now and then, maybe. Aaron, in years to come, could be tracked by an evolution of lighters—from the cheap ones bought in packs, to heavier models spanning the colors of the rainbow, to sleek black, and then ending with the Zippo. Not once did I see him with a match.

  Every so often, the flame from his lighter would flare. He’d hold it for ten seconds or so and then release. In the valley, we could see one of the teenagers brought over from the Czech Republic for the summer. He was shirtless, mowing the soccer field. We liked to joke that the manager of the campground kept his staff chained in the basement, because we only saw them when they were on the job. Other than the faint buzz of the mower, there was little movement around us. Just trees, the sporadic caw of a seabird, the occasional surf loud enough to reach our ears from beyond the cliff.

  The lighter. Aaron’s arm leaned into mine as he lit it.

  “What are you doing with that thing?” I asked him.

  “Stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “You know. Lighting fires. What do you think it’s for?”

  I laughed, and so did he. Aaron had gentle ways of poking fun, punctuated with a two-toned laugh, a “ha-ha” that chimed high, then low. I felt myself start to relax. I never had to worry about impressing Aaron, because Aaron didn’t care to be impressed. The other CIT boys around us absently tossed a ball back and forth. Thwap, thwap. Rush, rush, from the shore. Thwap.

  These church boys were the safe boys. They thought of nothing beyond the present, beyond the ways they could pass the time on yet another long Sunday. The schedule was always the same: Sunday school, the service, a luncheon or meeting, then youth group. These guys were pros at finding fun in places it didn’t exist.

  I’d known them since I was six, these boys who hadn’t changed much and had no interest in appearing to be other than what they were. They didn’t care how they looked. Mussed hair, old shirts, track pants. But they always smelled fresh, like fabric softener. Uninterested in games aside from sports, these guys wouldn’t be caught dead at the local pool. Under no circumstances would they make a girl cry. They knew it would horrify their mothers.

  Like the pool rats, this group had its own unspoken code. Their definition of a douche: he who tries too hard.

  New shoes were trying too hard. Long hair was trying too hard. Earrings. Cologne. Sandals were okay at the beach and nowhere else. They’d rather die than be seen at a county fair. But at church, every Sunday, you’d find them in the pews by the piano. On Sundays, they believed in clean clothes.

  Safe boys. I draped myself in them. There was Aaron, of course. There was always Aaron. Hoyce, aspiring film director and goatee enthusiast. Teddy, the sensitive misanthrope. Isaac, the guy who said if the world fell apart, he’d go into the woods and start shooting things so he’d have something to eat. Mikey, blond-haired blue-eyed army boy. Reuben “I’ll do anything for a dollar” Miller, Rube for short. Nick, the amateur comic. That summer, they were saving my life and they didn’t even know it.

  Sweat filled the hollow of my back. I arched and fanned out my shirt. Aaron didn’t appear to be sweating at all. He stared at his lighter.

  “So,” he said.

  “So.”

  “Pete?”

  I bit my lip. “Over.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of his eyebrows raise slightly. “Yeah?”

  I paused. “He’s with Nora now.”

  Aaron gave out his two-tone laugh.

  “
I’m glad that amuses you.”

  He laughed again, but I wasn’t hurt. Someone like Aaron wouldn’t bother to spend the energy to say “that guy’s an asshole,” because it would mean that he’d decided to give him the time of day, which he hadn’t.

  Aaron was Pete’s antithesis. Not friendly. Not interested in high school—academically or socially. Extremely cynical about almost everything except for odd, whimsical things like kittens, Trivial Pursuit, and the song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce. Aaron was only an optimist where music was concerned. Though he’d been told he’d never be able to carry a tune, he still practiced playing his guitar every day.

  “You’re upset,” he said.

  “Nah,” I answered, pretending to squint in the sun, as if the glare was making my eyes water.

  He cast me a look out of the corner of his eye. I flushed. He hadn’t bought it. I shrugged.

  “It hurts,” I said.

  He nodded. That’s how it was with Aaron—always catching me lying, always catching me telling the truth.

  In the shallow valley below us, a few cars started to collect by the tree line. We heard muffled car doors opening and shutting. Squeals of children. Trunks popping. The week was about to begin.

  Aaron sighed, and he turned toward me. His brow was furrowed, and I thought for a moment that he was going to hug me. My body stiffened. Aaron and I weren’t huggers. He wasn’t one to feel compelled to alleviate my pain. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He just understood that sometimes things hurt, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  I could see him swallow. His Adam’s apple leapt up and then landed. His hand clutched his lighter, the flame strong. His thumb released, and the flame went out. Then he took his cheap, plastic lighter and thrust it into the flesh of my upper arm.

  The burn made no sound. I flinched.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “That’s hot!”

  On my left arm, two tiny red tracks of inflamed skin began to swell.

  “You just burned me,” I said, rubbing my arm. “Did you really just try to brand me with that thing?” I shoved his shoulder. “What do you think I am? A cow?”

  Aaron’s mouth dropped open. He wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words. He’d surprised himself.

  “Sorry,” he finally said. “I have no idea why I just did that.”

  But I think maybe he did, even if he couldn’t find the words to say it. Aaron understood that sometimes it felt good to get burned.

  The first night at camp on the edge of Lake Erie, we set ourselves on fire. After the campers went to bed, I waited outside in the dark, peering through the screen door of the tepid women’s bathroom in the middle of the grounds. The air inside was moist, stagnant. In the distance, a crowd of teenage kids joked and laughed at the campfire. Fluorescent light dripped through the screen like water through a sieve, drawing a grid on the cement. A leaflike insect resembling a butterfly clung to the center of the screen, cockeyed and still. Below it hung a sign that someone had Scotch-taped to the door.

  “Hello. I am a luna moth. I am almost extinct. Please do not slam the door.”

  I creaked open the door, tiptoed inside, slipped the door shut. I crouched to inspect the moth. It looked beautiful and dead. The moth leaned its face toward the light. I heard the echo of boys’ laughter.

  “Torch it! Dare ya! Torch it!” one of them yelled from about a hundred yards away.

  I stared at the luna moth, who gazed into the fluorescence. Other insects and moths spun around above me, buzzing as they rammed into the light bulb. The luna moth just seemed to watch the others, close enough to feel the warmth of the light, far enough to keep herself safe.

  Down the road past the bathrooms and all of the cabins, two boys dangled a stick with a sock speared at the end of it over the campfire. I watched them jockey the sock back and forth between them.

  “Torch it. Dare ya. Torch it,” one of them said again.

  “Nah,” said the other. “You torch it.” The sock dropped into fire and disintegrated. The boys snickered.

  What they were doing was nothing new. Being young in a town full of matches guaranteed any summer evening would end with someone suggesting that we set something on fire. I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt as the night chill swept inland from the black chaos of Lake Erie. I leaned against the fence that separated the edge of the cliff from the steep drop to the beach, the lake to my back. There was nothing to see out there anyway. It looked like nothing, Pennsylvania’s rocky edges. The water remained a polluted lost cause, just gray with freezer-burn foam at the crests of its waves.

  We were fifteen years old, and someone was always burning something. Leaves, trash, rubber, flesh. Every boy owned his own Zippo. He flicked it open, flicked it shut. Becker, who was seventeen, thrust his lighter out at arm’s length and ignited the flame. His friend aimed a can of insect repellant at it and sprayed. It burst—a bluish-orange flame ballooned from the tiny lighter for just an instant. We laughed. Something about it was very funny. The rest of camp was dark and the flash was all we could see.

  Next, Becker doused his whole hand in bug spray. I started to get nervous. He flipped open his Zippo and lit his hand on fire, waving it around. His hand beamed electric blue, like the end of a lit match.

  “Knock it off, guys,” I said. “You’re gonna get hurt.”

  They ignored me. I stepped toward them, about to protest, but Becker clapped his hands together and the flame vanished.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he says. “See?”

  He showed me his hands. His palms were white and soft. The backs of his hands had grown tan from hours spent mowing lawns for money. He wiggled his fingers. He’d caught fire but hadn’t burned. It was magic.

  The group of boys followed Becker’s lead. They lit one hand. Then two hands. Then two hands and one foot. They waved their arms around like two burning baton ends, saying, “Woooo! Woooo! I’m on fiya!” Then they all smacked their hands against their thighs, stomped their feet. The flames went out.

  The next morning, the luna moth wasn’t on the bathroom screen door anymore, and neither was the sign. I searched the cement and found the little luna moth, burnt up like a leaf. I felt sick. Someone had torched it.

  The girl who hung the notice sat in the bathroom next to the communal shower. She cried, clutching her paper sign, her tight curls bobbing. She sniffed. “Why on earth would anybody do this?”

  But she knew why. We all echoed the sound of this evanescent Appalachian existence. As soon as that luna moth left its cocoon, the clock had started to tick. It was only a matter of time before fire would prove what all of us were worth.

  Though I never thought about the lie itself, I still remembered the moment just before the police interviewed me about Mr. Lotte, the moment I started to spin my own cocoon. I had a dress rehearsal for an upcoming mime performance at a church a few towns over that specialized in theatrics. The act was set to a worship song, the choreography a blend of sign language and dance movements meant to evoke emotion from the crowd. The body speaks in ways the mouth cannot.

  Before the dress rehearsal began, eight preteen, would-be starlets shoved themselves into a tiny yellow bathroom with two stalls, each of us jockeying for space in front of the single mirror above the sink. As fifth graders, Carly and I were two of the youngest. We all smeared our faces with gobs of sticky white goop. Once it dried, the paint constricted the skin on my face and it cracked at the corners of my mouth when I tried to open it.

  Toni, our dramatic performance madam, strutted around us in that cramped bathroom. She commanded us to keep our mouths shut to hide our stained teeth. She commanded us to dance for the Lord, not ourselves. Never ourselves.

  In the mirror, I saw a white face, darkened eyes, black lips. The glass shone like a vanity in a Hollywood dressing room. A yellow ridge of rust circled the drain of a dirty sink.

  “Watch me, girls,” the madam commanded us. “Do as I do.” Toni lifted her hands in the air an
d stretched. We did the same.

  One by one, we raised our hands in the air, flames of white spreading from black sleeves. A still frame: I stared into the mirror with a blur of girls around me, our faces a legion of gaunt expressions, slick with white paint. My lips barely parted. My eyes darkening. My self disappearing.

  On the ride home, my mother told me two policemen would be waiting at our house to ask me some questions. “You don’t need to be afraid,” she told me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Just tell the truth.”

  But I’d already entered my hibernation. I’d made my choice.

  Later in the evening at the Lake Erie campground, the boys formed a line and soaked their hands in bug spray. The sky darkened. Then I smelled the acid of insect repellant, I saw the gleam of a Zippo. The flame ignited one pair of hands, and those hands lit the next, and the next, and the next. The sky slowly lightened like the dark sanctuary on Christmas Eve during the annual rendition of “Silent Night,” which I’d always loved. Christmas was the closest I came to touching fire—once a year, I let hot Christmas Eve candle wax lose its form and drip onto my hand. I’d watch it harden and latch itself to my finger. I’d peel it off and leave the shavings on the floor. Every other night, even those heart-out-of-your-chest nights like this one, I kept a safe distance.

  The last pair of hands in the chain went ablaze. They laughed at themselves for a minute, at how well they had cheated fire. Our way of life, our very selves, endangered but not yet extinct. Not yet. One by one, the flames disappeared. But the last boy hoisted his hands above his head and ran away from us down the stretch of camp past the bathrooms and the cabins, hands burning like two lit torches.

  “On fiiiiiiiiiire!” He laughed as he ran.

  The shallow waves of Lake Erie lapped against the shore at the bottom of the cliff, making the shards of empty beer bottles tinkle like the toast from a thousand champagne glasses.

  “On fiiiire!” he screamed again as he looped back and sprinted toward the cliff. He ran straight toward the magnetic orange-blue campfire, like a moth to a flame.