(You) Set Me on Fire

by Mariko Tamaki

  A sour cherry candy melted onto my tongue as I tilted my head up to feel the sun on my face and the slight pull of my burn, which was starting to feel less like a burn and more like leather.

  “Truth or dare, Allison.”

  “What?”

  “Truth or dare?” Shar raised an eyebrow, a dapple of sun sliding across her face through the tree above.

  “Uh, truth?”

  “Have you ever given a guy a blow job?”

  Stalling, I attempted to appear momentarily distracted by the art of tai chi. Swinging back to the conversation, I stuttered, “Wait. It’s a truth about ME?”

  “Have you never played this game, Allison, or are you just avoiding the question?”

  Yes to both.

  A better question might have been whether I’d ever had a BFF to PLAY Truth or Dare with.

  Answer: no.

  Making and or getting friends has always been kind of a … struggle for me.

  When I was in grade school, all the girls had first, second, and third best friends, positions you might equate to something like president, vice president, and defence secretary of friendship. These positions were always shifting and depended on what seemed to me to be ridiculous and incalculable factors, qualities that could only be assessed by really popular people like Carolyn Tyler. At our school, Carolyn and her best friends were the grade five mafia; you had to check in with them before you bought hair clips or they’d give you endless amount of shit for buying the wrong ones. Carolyn Tyler was beautiful and had a pool and everyone wanted to be her friend.

  I did not have a pool.

  Before college I managed to have a sum total of two “friends,” whose acquisition and (temporary) loyalty both required some form of bribery/sacrifice. In grade six I traded my bike for a third-best friendship with Dawn Martin, but then I accidentally laughed when she fell off the swing and broke her leg. And then I was pretty much first NOT best friend. First UN best friend.

  Senior year I used prescription medication to purchase the affections of Anne Craig.

  Yes, THAT Anne.

  Anne was one of those girls who was super popular almost by default (both her parents had pools). She had these bouncy curls and these big blue eyes. From grades nine to eleven I think we spoke all of two sentences to each other. Then in senior year, in the fall, we both got put on set-painting duty, assigned to Hamlet’s castle. Anne was really messed up because this boy she’d given a blow job to had stopped answering her texts (apparently because he wasWhat does that mean?”

  “He’s such a power freak,” Anne moaned.

  “My doctor is really chill,” I said, dabbing paint on the fireplace we were both supposed to be painting. “He pretty much does whatever I tell him.”

  Dr. Zygiel, a pushover who’d been writing me notes to get out of gym, for “cramping” reasons, since I was fourteen.

  It took me two doctor’s visits to get a prescription. I’d heard enough from Anne to know quite a bit about the symptoms of anxiety, and so it was easy to describe them as my own. For good measure I faked an anxiety attack in his office.

  I handed the bottle of pills over to Anne the next day.

  “Take them. Feel better.”

  Anne cried and threw her arms around me. That night she invited me over to her dad’s condo and we ate spaghetti and took one and a half pills each. I think by then I was kind of in love with her. We were friends for the rest of first term. And it was kind of amazing. Then we were more than friends. Then it was OVER.

  Anyway.

  Those were pretty much my only two experiences of friendship going into college.

  Fortunately, probably the easiest place and time in the world to make friends is a college campus freshman year. The first month at St. Joseph’s was a BFF BONANZA. Everyone was going out of their way to make friends and be friends with people. Girls especially. Boys, I don’t know, boys always seem to be making friends. But girls, you know, they need an occasion and this was an occasion. It was like a friend sale, with everyone starting from scratch, NEEDING friends, and OH LOOK here’s a bunch of kids your own age. People BECAME friends really fast. Like these two girls from Shar’s floor: Sarah and Tori. Sarah was this tall Chinese chick with a big long ponytail of jet-black hair and a lot of cartoon character T-shirts and Tori was this little curly haired redhead with a lot of track pants. By the end of the first week they’d become this sweatpants-andcartoon-T-shirt-wearing posse.

  Shar hated Sarah and Tori. Shar said something about going to the Tower of Power with Sarah, but I guess she rubbed Shar the wrong way. Whatever happened, it left a mark. Shar narrowed her eyes whenever Sarah and Tori walked past us in rez. She called them “the Patties” because they’d quickly developed the habit of eating these veggie patty things they bought at the convenience store around the corner and then toasted in the communal kitchen.

  “Look, it’s the Patties.”

  “Yeah. Their colons must be totally twisted from eating all that soy.”

  “That’s Asian Patty,” Shar said, pointing.

  “What’s the little one?”

  “Mini Patty.”

  Shar detested the food at the cafeteria too, but her solution was a little less healthy than the Patties’. Basically, whenever possible, we ate in one of the many crappy diner-type places in and around campus. EatWhat does that mean?”

  and looked sly and serious. But she ate like someone who was about to have her plate yanked away. Plus she covered just about everything she consumed in a mess of ketchup so that it looked like roadkill. It was kind of gross.

  “The Patties are TOTALLY anorexic,” Shar said one day while devouring a hamburger special with fries. “Anyone who insists on going to the bathroom WITH someone, that’s anorexia.”

  “Weird. How do you know they weren’t just going to the bathroom together like girls do all the time?”

  “There’s a difference. You can just tell with girls that are precious like that.”

  Shar said the Patties reminded her of her sister.

  “My sister Madison is anorexic.”

  Madison, I wanted to say, sounds like a hotel.

  “Allison, you don’t know what it’s like living with that kind of reality-TV fucked-up-ness. It’s all well and good to feel sorry for people like that until you have to eat with them.”

  Shar sucked up a french fry and swiped her ketchup lip gloss off with her napkin. In the booth behind her, boys were rapping along with the restaurant radio. Shar paused to roll her eyes. “My parents had to install a widescreen in the kitchen so we wouldn’t have to watch Madison lick her hundred calories out of her special teacup every night. That’s the fucked-up thing about anorexia, right? It’s cute until someone’s skin starts losing its elasticity and their gums bleed. Wait. You’re not ’rexian are you?”

  “No. I mean. Obviously.” Actually I was probably exactly the opposite. My whole life my body had had the exact same shape, like a tube of toothpaste. It was hard to get all worked up about a consistency.

  “Never, when you’re around me, bitch about feeling fat.”

  Shar’s eyes pinched and focused in on me as though to detect any future body image issues I might whine about.

  “You really think the Patties are anorexic? They don’t look very thin.”

  “That’s how it STARTS, doesn’t it?” Shar scoffed. “You have to BE FAT to want to BE THIN, Allison. Now THERE’S a social problem for you.”

  Ever since the first Social Problems lecture Shar had gotten into the habit of pointing out social problems whenever they appeared in her view. Crowding, littering, mass stupidity, sameness. College was rife with them.

  “Is this a social problem you plan to do something about?” I asked.

  “If I wanted to,” Shar noted.

  After lunch, I went to my Introduction to Linguistics class and Shar went to Environmental Geology, a science class designed for arts students. Environmental Geology was composed almost entirely of slackers in swe
atshirts who would text on their cell phones while the professor, Professor “Charlie” Brown, who Shar was convinced was suicidal, tried to get through his lecture. She texted me ongoing updates about Charlie Brown’s mental state while I sat in a stadium of hundreds of future linguistic students trying to remember the difference between the types of verbs (w a book in the library..ed me hich seemed to be key to understanding language).

  Charlie Brown paler than usual.

  CB cried thru lecture.

  “Is his name really Charlie Brown?” I stupidly inquired after the first round of texts.

  “It should be,” Shar sneered. “GOOD GRIEF!”

  Shar said there were people who made out at the back of the class and Charlie Brown just stood there behind his lectern and sulked.

  By mid-October the idea of “classes” had begun to evaporate like steam from the sewer grates ascending into the rapidly cooling atmosphere. Shar pointed out that most of the lectures were available online or in the textbooks (which we still hadn’t read), so what was the point of going to class?

  Besides, there were so many more interesting ways to pass the time. We’d wake up and go for coffee. Then for breakfast. Then we’d watch a movie. Then to the park to smoke and watch other people who didn’t have jobs or school as they walked around looking like idiots. Then sometimes we’d go to fancy office buildings and ask to see the “man in charge.” Or we’d hang around until security asked us what we were doing there.

  “Loitering,” Shar would say.

  We made time disappear. Or it just melted around us. We’d run out of things to do, then turn a corner and Shar would develop a new course of action.

  “You know what we should do, Allison,” she’d say, pulling me into or out of a cab.

  “What?”

  One day we spent the entire afternoon in a tattoo parlour pretending we were waiting for a friend to come get a tattoo.

  “I dare you to talk to the first person who comes in,” Shar whispered.

  The first person was a scrawny woman wearing sweatpants with the words BOOTY SHAKE on the back. She had a sad face and long wavy hair that looked like brown seaweed.

  As soon as she sat down Shar jabbed me, hard, in the side with her index finger.

  “Here for a tattoo?” I asked, my voice cracking a little.

  “Yeah,” the woman said, holding up a picture of a horseshoe with a four-leaf clover on each side. “For my boyfriend Chuck.”

  “Wow,” I said, “that’s SO WEIRD because we’re here … uh … waiting for OUR friend Chuck.”

  Shar nodded. “Chuck’s going to get a memorial tattoo for his sister. What’s he getting again? Do you remember, Allison?”

  “He’s getting his sister’s name and … uh.”

  “A toilet. Because she was bulimic.”

  “With her name engraved on the seat,” I continued, suppressing a smile almost as cleanly as Shar, “or in toilet paper like a runner along the bottom.”

  “I didn’t think you could die from that,” Chuck’s girlfriend gasped.

  “OH. Yes,” I said.

  “People die from it every day,” Shar whispered. into someone’s Bugs Bunny garbage pail.nddd

  Outside, sunshine bounced off the plastic store signs. When I looked down, Shar and I were stride for stride as we rushed back to rez. Looking at her feet and mine in synch, I think that for a moment I actually forgot about things, things like the burns on my neck, Anne. Maybe not all of Anne, but most of her.

  “I’m getting a memorial tattoo too,” Shar said. “I’m going to get a toilet with your name on it.”

  “I’m going to get a picture of you upchucking,” I added.

  Shar thought that was pretty funny.

  “Wow,” she said, “that’s hysterical, Allison.”

  When we were studying in her room Shar doodled on the covers of all her textbooks with a black Sharpie and then ripped them off and handed them to me. “Art for your otherwise boring and crappy room,” she explained, flinging the ripped covers at me. “Keep them, Allison. Treasure them.”

  Semi-serious. An order but not an order. Like when we’d go out and she’d say, “You know what we should do, Allison.”

  Of course, for the first little while hanging with Shar, in the back of my brain I had a nagging concern about not knowing what exactly her deal was. Part of me, because of my past, will always wonder what the deal is whenever anyone decides to be my friend, especially in cases where I can’t see exactly what it is I’m bringing to the bargain.

  Shar didn’t seem to want anything from me, other than to have me follow her around.

  Briefly, very briefly, I wondered if we’d eventually encounter the plot twist where it would be revealed that Shar was hanging out with me because she’d made a bet with her popular friends that she could earn my trust then break my heart, which is the twist in a shocking number of movies about teenagers.

  Of course for that to be true, Shar would have to have some kind of posse of really popular friends, and Shar did not.

  Actually, she didn’t even seem to like a lot of people other than me.

  One night we were lying around in her room drinking coffee and listening to her favourite old rock and roll, the Rolling Stones, when her floormates decided to have a RUNWAY WALK OFF in the hall.

  Someone set up some speakers while the rest of the girls pushed the stacks of textbooks, mandarin peels, pop cans, and pizza boxes to the side. The first thing we heard was the pulse of bass. Then a squeal. When we opened the door, the scene in the corridor was like some sort of low-budget, modest Playboy mansion movie: girls were dancing in oversized T-shirts, frilly nighties, and pyjamas with the legs rolled up and waistbands rolled down. Some girls were even handing out spare heels for people to borrow. The Patties were there, with patent heels and surprisingly shapely calves. Mini Patty wasn’t all that sturdy in pumps but she managed a nice plant and turn, pausing for a moment to pucker her lips, emphasizing her cheekbones, before she sashayed back down the brown carpet. Carly was there too, in a pink baby-doll nightie and pink heels, trotting down the hallway, light as air, the popcorn littering the hall barely crunching under her feet.

  I fear dancing with the lights on in groups the way some people fear dark spaces at night. Next to the runway, I flattened myself against the wall as if someone was pressing me there, pushing the ">“I know.”toDoscarred part of my neck, which was suddenly insanely itchy, against the cool plaster. Out of the corner of my eye I watched as Shar stood stock-still and crossed her arms. Asian Patty spotted us and darted over to grab Shar by the elbow and pull her into the show.

  “Walk it, Shar!” someone cheered as Asian Patty attempted to twirl her.

  Shar was immovable. Her joints locked into place.

  A tiny sliver of what looked like the result of a bad smell pulsed across the surface of her face. As Asian Patty pulled, Shar put on an impossibly wide smile and backed away. “Uh. No.”

  “Oh come on!” someone behind us yelled. “Just let loose, Shar! Relax!”

  Shar tugged her arm free with maybe a little more seriousness than anyone expected. The music stopped for a second while someone’s iPod selected a new song. The pulse was slow to start up again.

  Asian Patty let loose a little snort. “Uh. OKAY. I told you she wouldn’t. What’s your deal, party-pooper?”

  Shar’s smile tightened so that it looked like two parallel elastic bands stretched tight. “Hmmm. ‘Partypooper.’ That’s nice. What are you, seven?”

  A sharp laugh erupted from my body. Asian Patty frowned. Shar grabbed my hand and pulled me back into her room.

  “Whatever. What a bitch,” Mini Patty coughed behind us.

  Inside, Shar cranked the music and dropped back onto her bed. “You know what the best thing about college will be, Allison? Not even having to pretend to want to be a part of anyone else’s stupid shit.”

  I was smiling. I could feel it on my face like one of those masks they paint on you at the circu
s or the fair, a big, wide, capital U in red and black.

  A couple of days after the runway, Carly came to my room with an offering of Cultural Studies notes and a massive cellophane bag of pink popcorn.

  “Hey! So, you haven’t been … to class? So, I thought I’d bring you some notes and junk food.”

  “Holy crap, thanks. I’m oddly starving.”

  Dropping the bag on the bed, Carly tilted her head. “This used to be, like, my favourite food, so my mom sends me boxes.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not.” Carly twisted her mouth into a tiny frown for a second before adding, “I’m thinking I might not be so into pink now.”

  “So you can just switch your favourite colour, just like that?”

  “Oh, you know, I’m pretty much always actively looking for a new favourite thing. I’m, like, serially non-monogamous when it comes to loving things. You know? I like liking lots of things. I like CHANGE, ya know? Like, when I was little, I NEVER wore skirts. Then one day I just decided. POOF. Into skirts. One day I hate pink. The next day, I’m a fricking bottle of Pepto-Bismol.”

  “Wow. That’s kind of cool, I guess. I don’t even have a favourite colour.”

  “You are SO FUNNY. How could you not have a favourite colour, Allison? You into someone’s Bugs Bunny garbage pail.nddd should get at least one.” Carly smiled. “Let loose a little. Experiment.”

  Looking at the notes, I felt a tiny wave of guilt. “I’m totally coming to class next week by the way.”

  “Great. We should sit together.” Turning to leave, Carly paused. “Did you …? Um. Do you know who broke the toaster oven downstairs?”

  “What?”

  “The toaster oven. Is broken.”

  “Oh. That sucks.”

  Carly was staring past me. The multitude of strange doodles had become an overwhelming presence in the space over my bed, and they fanned out behind me like a peacock’s tail.

  “But, uh, no,” I finally added. “No, I mean, I don’t know who did it.”

  “All right. I’m just asking around. Tori’s really upset.”