(You) Set Me on Fire

by Mariko Tamaki

  “Sharon. Or, wait, Shar? No, it’s Shar. She’s on the sixth floor. I think she’s friends with that Asian girl in the stretch pants.”

  “Who? Where?”

  Carly pointed with her pinky.

  Shar.

  As the majority of the class leaned forward in the McDonald’s-like bucket seats of the Leacock auditorium, conceivably to hear the thin strains of the prof’s instructions coming through the classroom’s ancient speakers, Shar, sitting several rows over and dressed entirely in black, skin-tight clothing, leaned back, flicked her hair over her shoulder, and yawned. Like a fat cat on a windowsill.

  I’m trying to think of the best way to describe Shar to you without using words like “beautiful” and “model,” which are accurate but not helpful. She had a tiny body and a large round head framed by blond hair. Her skin was ivory white, glowing at the edges of her black collar. From a distance she looked like an ad, like someone who existed only as a visual representation of something expensive. I briefly considered the possibility that she was a movie star or something. Movie stars go to college too, right?

  Suggesting that Shar might be a movie star was one of the first embarrassing moments of my college career, which is sad consideringRTEEN

  “A MOVIE STAR?” Carly cackled, in a rare moment of disbelief, biting into the soft jelly-like middle of her Dylan Hall cafeteria mystery dessert. “Okay. You are SOOO FUNNY!”

  “Forget it. What time is it anyway? I think I have class.”

  “One oh four.”

  Social Problems. One-thirty p.m. Main hall.

  Of all the courses I was forced and happy to take my freshman year, probably the one cool one was Social Problems. Social Problems had me at “hello.” I mean, first of all, it was a class that’s about current events and fricking craziness, wars and riots and all that. It was a class all about fucking up, like, on a large scale. Had to connect to me somehow, right? Second of all, the professor was hilarious.

  Professor Jawari moved with what you might describe as a vampire-like, uncanny lightning speed. She streaked from the auditorium door to the lecture podium in a blink. It was incredibly difficult to track her movements. She just appeared.

  “Okay, miscreants,” she barked our first day, towering over the lectern like a wizard or maybe a mythical beast that’s really tall. “This is Social Problems, this is not a cheese course, I have no patience for kids surfing the net in my class, so shut your laptops NOW. Like right NOW. HEY! I’m teaching. If you’re here I want you HERE. Okay? I’m not your mom so don’t make me sound like your mom by making me repeat myself a MILLION TIMES. NOW!”

  A series of laptop clicks echoed across the crowd of hundreds of seated course-shoppers. Many students mouthed, in mock horror, “MOM?”

  Professor Jawari squinted. “My name is Professor Jawari. You can call me Professor J, although, technically, this is a first-year class and none of you should have any reason to call me. This is not a class for lecturing, this is a class with questions, because the social sciences, of which this is one, involve QUESTIONING and so I will ask questions. A lot of questions. If any of this scares you I would suggest you get the heck out of here now, before I waste a dead tree on you with one of these here OUTlines.”

  The woman was crazy like a talk show host. Like one of those judges on one of those TV court shows.

  It was amazing.

  More people should talk like this, I thought. It would make life way more interesting.

  About forty kids got up and left before she was even finished speaking. She waved them off then chugged a bottle of what looked like energy drink.

  With a mass of sweatshirts and bodies removed, I noticed Shar sitting in the front row, her stiletto boot dangling out into the aisle.

  Thirty minutes into the class, everyone noticed Shar.

  “Okay. So, for example, name one social problem you would obliterate if you could,” Professor J had challenged.

  “War!” someone called out.

  “Violence,” someone else added.

  “Poverty.”

  “Racism.”

  “Violence against women.”

  “Television,” someone else offered.

  “Capitalism,” the massive hippie with the beard next to me called out.

  “Obesity,” someone behind me interrupted, ignoring the hands-up rule.

  Shar must have yawned. Professor J bent over her lectern and looked at her, zeroed in on her.

  “And you?” she asked. “What’s your big contribution?”

  Shar’s voice was sharp and clear, a clean note amongst the fuzz of that much space. “Nothing,” she said.

  “Not going to stand in the way of any world-altering problems?” Professor J persisted.

  “No.”

  “Just going to relax and watch the carnage unfold?”

  “Of course.”

  At the back of the room, a boy dressed in a top hat and a trench coat laughed loudly and clapped.

  Professor J also chuckled, slamming her lecture book closed. “Okay, on that note, that’s it for today. Don’t be morons. Do the reading and I’ll see you next week.”

  Carly was waiting in the hall under a WELCOME banner with a handful of free-for-student snacks. Apparently a bunch of people were outside dressed as chip bags, juggling snacks and throwing them at passing students.

  “This is why we’re all going to get huge,” I observed, slamming a handful of chicken-flavoured bagel bits in my mouth. “Freshman fatteners.”

  “Not if we join that morning jog group,” Carly noted.

  As we munched, I noticed that the top hat guy had grabbed a seat on the floor in the centre of the hallway and become a human road bump as the crowd swirled around him. Under his top hat he had huge eyebrows and, from what I could see, some skin problems that rivalled what was happening on my neck.

  “That guy’s in my class.” I nodded in his direction.

  “Hey! I like his hat. What’s his name?”

  “Dunno.”

  By the time we got to our ravioli dinner that night in the Dylan Hall cafeteria, the big story was that, shortly after we left, some guy had broken his arm tripping over top hat guy. This was pretty bad news because the guy who tripped was a basketball player. I guess a lot of people were pretty pissed. This girl from my floor, Mary, said that the top hat guy ran off before the paramedics got there and some other students dragged him back to apologize.

  “Dragged?”

  “Totally DRAGGED. Like, apparently, he ran really far, too.”

  “What’s his NAME?” Carly asked.

  No one knew.

  “He’s in Allison’s class,” Carly added.

  “Really?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah. Social Problems.”

  “I heard that class is all crazy hard and the teacher is a psycho.”

  I shrugged.

  “I also heard that this girl was inRTEEN

  “That’s not what she said,” I mumbled, stabbing my stale ravioli and trailing it through the ketchup– tomato sauce coating my plate. “She just didn’t have anything she’d like to eradicate.”

  “A pacifist,” someone else I didn’t recognize observed.

  “No.”

  Funny the things we know before we actually know them.

  Months later, when our friendship became a topic of conversation, Shar would say that we were sitting together in that first Social Problems class.

  “No, I was sitting next to a hippie in a beard who was against money,” I corrected. “We met at film club.”

  Of course, it’s not really important that the first time I actually spoke more than a handful of words to Shar was several days after that first class, at the first meeting of the Film Appreciation Society (which later wouldn’t be called that). But it was, for a long time, what I considered to be our first meeting.

  It was Carly’s idea to go. I guess she heard some other girls talking about it at lunch and totally fell in love with the idea. At t
he time we were doing pretty much everything together, so I decided to go too. I’m not huge into film but, you know, why not? I thought maybe we could watch a bunch of free movies.

  The film group itself was dreamed up by this guy named Boris Borlau, if you can believe it, a hand talker who wore, among other things, a charcoal turtleneck and a pair of Ray-Ban shades perched in his crown of thick, curly black hair. Guy looked like Bob Dylan. Carly and I sat next to the clearly gay guys in the clearly gay fuzzy sweaters and hair full of product. The gay guys were all talking about Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson, although I couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying. The rest of the people in the group, all blondes, were talking about some band when Shar slipped in the room and grabbed a chair. As she calmly untangled herself from her scarf, Boris clapped his hands.

  “Okay, so, hey guys. Welcome to the Film Appreciation Society. Right. I’m really glad you’re all here and it’s, uh, great to see so many people with an interest in film. I guess we should start by going around and introducing ourselves. Maybe say what your favourite film genre is and who you are? I’ll start: I’m Boris and my favourite film genre would have to be film noir.”

  “I’m Judy, I’m also really into film noir.”

  “I’m Tanya. Hello. And I would also have to say film noir actually. Guess we’re just a bunch of darkies.”

  Ha ha, whoops.

  “Oh. Okay. Hello, dolls. I’m Danny. I generally adhere to the auteur system so my genre would be better described as Kubrickian. But let’s not make a big deal about it.”

  “I’m Carly, I’m into musicals.” Carly twirled her finger in the air when she said “musicals.” Eyes pivoted to focus on me. I was still trying to figure out what “genre” my favourite films were. Which meant trying to figure out exactly what was meant by “genre.”

  “Um. I’m Allison. And. Um.”

  things I needed to be doingicddAcross the room, Shar shifted in her seat, recrossed her legs, and smiled at me. “Horror?” she asked, tapping at her neck in the same place where my scar was.

  Next to me I could hear the sound of Carly’s mouth popping open.

  There was an instant stillness in the room, broken only by the mouselike coffee-slurping of a guy in an orange sweater. Shar tilted her head, widened her eyes at me. Smiled.

  I froze, could feel my body seizing up, a sensation similar to what any kind of prey feels when encountered by a predator. A familiar sensation, not unlike what I felt stepping into every gym class I attended from grades nine to twelve.

  I remember looking at Shar, her face a mask of amusement. She was looking directly back at me, like someone getting ready to pass a note, or a secret.

  As someone who was distinctly unpopular and picked on in high school, I’ve often felt it should be easier to interpret the things other people do and say more accurately, more often. There should be a system of language that lets us know not only what people mean but also the level of hostility implied. Imagine how lovely all our childhoods would be if we knew that sort of thing, if we knew the difference between a person being vicious and a person attempting to be friendly. Like the time Rahnuma Tang, from across the street, invited me to a birthday party that didn’t exist, luring me into her backyard so that I could get jumped by a bunch of her crappy friends who beat me with their skipping ropes, almost blinding me in the process. I know there are some people who see sound as colour, and I’ve always wondered if mean looks different than not mean. I bet it’s purple.

  “Um. Right,” I said, slowly crawling into my sentence the way you step into a shoe after you’ve just seen a cockroach on the floor, “totally horror.”

  Slurp. Sip.

  Shar’s smile spread across her face. She reached a finger into her blond hair and twisted herself a temporary band around her index finger. As she grinned, a warm glow of relief spread across my limbs.

  “And you?” Boris asked, leaning forward and pointing at Shar.

  “Oh,” she said, in a somewhat mocking singsong voice, not looking at him, “I’m Shar and I’ll watch anything as long as Julia Roberts isn’t in it.”

  After the meeting, as the group exchanged numbers and emails, I was sitting alone in my folding chair when Shar slipped over beside me. Up close, her black outfit revealed several shades of black: jet, ink, and coal and steel, fuzzy, and velvet all wrapped together. Her perfume curled through the air, snaking a faint trail of what smelled like hot pink orchids around my head.

  “Shar Sinclair,” she said.

  “Allison Lee,” I replied.

  “Sooooo, Allison,” she said, “you here to make a movie?”

  “Uh, no. You?”

  “Fuck no,” Shar hissed, turning to re-survey the crowd, which appeared to be engaged in a series of intense conversations (about film). “I just dropped in to check out a bunch of losers with delusions of fame.”

  “Oh. I guess, uh, fun. Sounds fun.”

  “Do you want to be famous, Allison?” things I needed to be doingicdd Shar tipped her head forward as though to pour the contents of her eyes into my soul.

  “What?”

  “Famous, Allison. FAMOUS. Big time. I’m asking if you want to be a STAR.”

  “No. I mean, no, I don’t think so.”

  “You should know.” She raised an eyebrow. It was strange to be the sudden focus of someone like Shar’s full attention. It was like being locked into something. Like, a laser beam. A big starship laser beam. “Most people know if they want to be famous. It’s a pretty basic thing to know.”

  “Well I’m not really all that basic, I mean … right now.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say.”

  “Good answer, Allison. Very good answer. You heading back to dorm?”

  “Yeah, I just have to wait for Carly.”

  “Oh, right. CARLY.”

  On the walk back, wedged between me and Carly, Shar turned and asked her the fame question.

  “Doesn’t everyone want to be famous? I guess I want to be good famous. Maybe a little famous anyway,” Carly reflected. “But, like, um, productive famous. Like Meryl Streep or Janeane Garofalo.”

  Bad answer, apparently.

  “Rrreally.” Turning her head toward me and away from Carly, Shar rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah well. Anyway,” Carly said, speeding up a bit, “I thought tonight was pretty interesting. I hope we get to make a movie.”

  “Oh yeah I’m so glad you invited me tonight, Carly,” Shar trilled. “So lucky that I ran into you in the hall. Really great time.”

  At the lights, Carly paused and turned, her lips neatly pressed together. Like she wanted to say something. To me.

  “Really,” Shar cooed, “great group.”

  “Well. Okay. I’m glad you had a good time, Shar. I hope you did too, Allison.”

  “Sure.”

  In the elevator, Shar said I should come back to her room to study for Social Problems.

  What she actually said, to Carly, as she pulled me out at the sixth floor, was, “I’m taking Allison to my room to force her to teach me about Social Problems. Bye, Superstar!”

  As the elevator doors closed, pinching off the image of Carly, she turned to me and said, “For the record, I’ve just saved you from a year of stupid.”

  On the sixth floor, Shar’s floor, the long hallways were littered with girls sprawled out in coloured pyjamas in various patterns from Disney to camouflage; textbooks open, cradling big bowls of popcorn, they lolled around, giggling and reading. The whole floor smelled like a movie theatre.

  Shar stepped over the rows of legs like they were driftwood, barely paying attention to the voices around us as she slipped into her room and shut the door.

  Inside, music was already playing, something low with lots of bass. Thr things I needed to be doingicddowing the window open, Shar flopped down on the bed and lit a cigarette. The combination of cold air and smoke made the skin on my neck prickle. Not knowing where to sit, I leaned against the
closet and tried to seem cool.

  “It’s so weird that all our rooms are the same,” I said finally, when it appeared that Shar was lost in a haze of nicotine and not planning on speaking. “It’s like looking at my room, only …”

  “Messy” was what I wanted to say.

  “… with more red,” I came out with instead, because it seemed like a better thing to say to someone I didn’t know.

  The word “red” seemed to trigger Shar, who suddenly sat up and craned to look at my burns. “Right,” she exhaled. Then, “That thing on your neck is fucking crazy. Were you the survivor of a house fire or something, Allison? Were thousands lost and you walked away?”

  “No. I mean. It was a small fire. None were lost. Not even me.”

  “Right. So … So, what? So you burned yourself?”

  “I had an accident with a bonfire-type thing. That I was making. I had a c— Uh. It was an accident.”

  Stabbing her cigarette out on the edge of the window with one hand, Shar extended her other hand, the inside of her wrist flexed toward me. “Burned myself once as a kid. Put my hand on a stove element. People thought my parents were abusing me. You can still sort of see the scar.”

  “Scars are cool.”

  Amazing how a word like “cool” can land like a lame penny falling from your pocket onto a city sidewalk.

  “I mean. I think they tell a really interesting story. Which is … interesting. They’re like skin punctuation …”

  Stop talking, Allison.

  Shar r_4" aid="7K4IC

  FIVE

  Fast friends

  Sitting lazily in the park, cross-legged, perched on a sweater serving as picnic blanket, Shar ran her fingers through the grass a book in the library.Iwhoelas the smoke from her cigarette smouldered in a patch of dirt not far away. All around us were the plastic skins of pilfered snacks. A troop of tai chi seniors made slow movements just north of us. The leaves of the tall trees that lined the park were slowly breaking from their branches and falling, orange, red, and yellow, to the ground.

  The perfect day. Autumn chill but not too fall cold. Shar had crawled into my lecture hall to rescue me from East Asian History and now we were well on our way into our third hour of just sitting and talking, which felt infinitely more important than knowing whatever China was before it was China.