Originally published in Keeping Track.
Johnny didn’t smoke. But like all the boys who lived darkly, who wore black and let their hair grow long and straggling into their knowing eyes, he always carried matches and a Zippo lighter, its silver case engraved with serpents. We sat in the quad after school while he did tricks for us. The lighter tumbled over the bumps of his brown knuckles and reappeared in the other hand, the flame already dancing. He flipped open the lid, passed a hand over the wick, snapped his fingers, and the flame popped up, startling as a jack-in-the-box.
The corners of his eyes crinkled. It was enough to encourage us. Johnny was amusing himself, killing time, and we two sophomore girls were his willing temporary audience. But what he had—this snake charmer charisma of his—was something like magic. Or as close as we were going to get to magic before my mom’s car arrived like a pumpkin carriage to carry us home. Johnny lit matches and extinguished them with a bare fingertip and thumb, pinching the fire. He let a match burn down, pretended to tie a knot around the charred matchstick, mimed yanking the knot, and the match snapped in two. Our eyes went wide in the glow of firelight. His eyes were black, pupils and irises matched in their blackness, a tiny flame mirrored in each.
We knew exactly the moment that he became bored of us. A toss of his hair and a chin-lift for a goodbye. He sauntered away, motorcycle jacket bunched at his shoulders, all buckles and creaking leather.
“God, there’s something about him, isn’t there?” Nellie said.
There was something. Some guys had a kind of witchcraft to them, I thought, but said nothing. My magpie eyes had spotted Johnny’s half-spent matchbook in the leaf litter under our battered Chuck Taylors. I held it up like a piece of the True Cross. Jet paper with silver printing, comets with sparkling tails: Stardust Lanes. The bowling alley. The place had been closed for years, an eyesore on the wrong side of the tracks. Boarded up and graffitied, its palm trees shag-bearded with neglect. We could still summon up the smell of the place as it had been in our childhood. Cigarettes smoke and beer. The reek of Play-Doh and sour pee in the Kids Korner, where children were stashed while parents enjoyed their night out amid the crash and glamour. Why would Johnny have a matchbook from Stardust Lanes?
Nellie took the matches from me and lit one. “My mom always wanted to eat at Jade Garden at the bowling alley. Then she’d order a cheeseburger. Used to piss my dad off. A cheeseburger at a Chinese restaurant.”
We watched her match burn three quarters of the way down. Then she shook it out and fumbled and let it drop. She handed over the matchbook.
I lit another match, touching it to a damp brown oak leaf. The flame hesitated, tentative as a new boy’s hand. Then the leaf caught fire, the flame glowing along one edge before flatlining into sooty black.
“We never did play with matches as kids,” I said.
“Why didn’t we play with matches?” Nellie said. “We should have.”
“Never occurred to us. We lacked imagination.”
“Dumb kids. Now we’re all grown up and it’s too late.” She checked her watch. “Your mom’s five minutes away.”
We shrugged on identical black backpacks. Furtively I tucked the matchbook into a back pocket of my jeans, afraid Nellie would try to claim the relic. It rode against my skin as we walked to the parking lot, an annoyance, a scratch, a flirt.
•••
After dinner Nellie came over, as she did most evenings. After my dinner, that is; her dinnertime had become a sketchy affair. It might be spent mooning around the kitchen waiting for her mom to notice she and her little brother were starving. Or perched at the dinner table choking down scorched tater tot casserole while her mom sipped a Pepsi and gazed out the window through a fog of cigarette smoke.
These days, her dad stayed late at the jewelry store. He’d buy a steak sandwich downtown to pick at while he did the books, lost in his own blue smoke haze, a glass of scotch sweating rings into his desk. The books always needed to be done and redone; they never quite added up right, Nellie said. The books were wearing her handsome dad down. His cowboy-thin frame had gone to gristle, his sky-blue eyes radiated creases that never quite ironed smooth. I would nod knowingly, listening to her, like I had any clue. My own dad was the airport’s manager. He had healthy pink cheeks, pressed shirts, and a little pot riding above the waistband of his slacks. My mom spent afternoons making sure I did my algebra and that we had a hot meal miraculously timed to my dad’s prompt arrival home, complete with extras like cinnamon applesauce. Warm buttered bread. Asparagus tender from our own backyard. Nellie blinked in the foyer as the warmth of our dinnertime poured forth, as though stunned by such bounty. I often wondered if I should save her a plate. Afraid of shaming her, I never did.
She followed me to my room. I’d recently moved into my sister Amy’s lair. Fifteen years older than us, she’d deserted the room long ago. Traces of her remained. Dirty scotch tape stuck to the daffodil-colored walls, left over from rock posters. And things abandoned in the closet. I showed them to Nellie. A red pillar candle with an avalanched lip. A stick of incense like a 4th of July sparkler. A handful of velvety purple cones. A pot metal frog, his back pierced with holes, who regarded us with a cryptic smile and rhinestone eyes.
“What is all this crazy shit?” Nellie said.
“Check it out.” I fitted a stick of incense into a hole on the frog’s back. “These,” I said, palming the cones, “these are incense, too. I totally remember my sister listening to Peter Frampton and burning them. Check it out. See those scuffs, down there low on the wall? That’s where my sister sat at her vanity table to put on her makeup. She always had her legs crossed, and she’d kick the wall. I remember being really little, hearing this noise. Bang. Bang. Bang. I’d sneak up and spy on her putting hot rollers in her hair, totally Farrah Fawcett. Weird to think she was our age. I mean, back then she was the same age we are now. She seemed so much older, then.”
“Oh yeah!” Nellie said. My excitement had caught her. “I totally remember that, too.” Even though she only remembered my telling her the story, not the experience itself, because by the time Nellie and I had met and become friends, my sister had already left home. But that’s how a childhood growing up together went: Nellie’s memories, her experiences, my memories, my experiences, braided together like supple twin trees, until we felt like a single living being. “And your sister collected frogs, didn’t she?” She picked up the incense holder. The single stick protruded from the back of the frog like the result of an unfortunate javelin incident.
“Hi-ho, I’m Kermit the Frog,” I said. “And today, I want to let all you kids out there know that it’s never too late to play with fire…” I pulled a book of matches from its hiding place in my sweatshirt. Three tries before the match took. I made a silly flourish—fluttering the matchbook like a butterfly—to mask the awkwardness of my unpracticed hands.
I lit the incense stick and a purple cone. Then the red candle with its deformed lip. The dusty wick resisted lighting until the match burned down to my fingertips. Hissing, I sucked my finger.
Nellie and I regarded the artifacts glowing on the dresser. Patchouli smoke climbed and twirled in the mirror. In that light, our faces lost their details. Our childish cheekiness, the light rash of acne on our foreheads…all erased. We looked feline and sensual. No wonder people craved the fuss of candles and white tablecloths. No wonder—we recalled those frowsy late night movies—no wonder people hungered for firesides, brandy snifters, bearskin rugs. As the wax on the candle went melty, we dipped our fingers in, raised them up gloved in crimson.
Our late-blooming love affair with fire had begun.
•••
Things we burned: photographs of ourselves in unstylish clothes, Band-Aids, a crow’s feather, the Joker from a deck of cards, Monopoly money, a real dollar bill, our own hair. Entire matchbooks. An army of her little brother’s olive drab men, writing our names in melted plastic on the sidewalk between our houses.
•••
My backyard had a no-man’s land, a blind alley on one side of the house, too small and narrow to bother prettifying with grass and flowers. My parents kept a woodpile there, extra pavers, a hump of weeds yanked from summer’s garden and left to wither. It was a convenient spot to retreat to during an afternoon spent swimming in our pool. Squatting, you’d yank your suit bottom to the side and take a furtive pee, the sensation hot and shocking after the cold water. It was a place where nobody looked for you.
Down on our haunches in the dry fescue, Nellie and I leaned over a saucer full of beer and snails, all dead but for one.
“This brave trooper.” I nudged the striped brown shell. “He’s dared to survive the initial assault.”
Nellie tsk-tsked. “We can’t have that. What kind of example will he set for the others?”
“He’ll start a revolution. He’ll set a dangerous precedent with this kind of passive resistance to—to—intoxicants.” A giggle cracked my voice.
“We must punish him.”
“Yes. Our action must be swift and it must…be…deadly.”
I pried the snail from the saucer. Its muscular foot bucked and buckled. How must we have looked to its seeking eyes on their stalks, our 15-year-old faces backlit by a blue October sky, gleaming and sweating through poorly-applied makeup, a devastating twin-headed goddess? The snail withdrew into its shell, frothing bubbles of lurid green.
“Looks like he’s not going to be a willing informant,” Nellie said.
“Willing, unwilling. We have special ways to make him speak. Matchbox, please.”
“Matchbox,” she said, retrieving it from her pocket.
“Go ahead and light one,” I said, impatient. This battle with the snails was something we returned to from time to time, feeling justified because they were pests in my mom’s vegetable patch. The invertebrates had never uttered a single complaint, just bubbled and frothed. But fire as a weapon…this was a new twist. I wanted an accomplice in this task I’d envisioned, silently agreed upon but never actively discussed.
The flicker of Nellie’s lit match held our gaze briefly, enough time to draw in a long breath and exhale.
The snail unfurled itself like a slimy green flag. Its eyes waved. I touched the burning match to the tip of its foot. Instantly it went out in a puff of stench, and the snail snapped back into its shell.
“Oh gawd, disgusting!” I threw the snail at the wooden fence. It bounced off, and disappeared into the weeds. I upended the saucer of shells and dirty beer, sick with myself, sick with both of us. We ran inside to scrub our hands, to talk about other things.
•••
Things we burned: rose petals and the ashes of roses, a plastic rosary, every candle we could steal from fusty hall cabinets, a palm leaf. Rhyming love poetry. A tumbleweed that hissed and whistled like it was alive.
•••
“Wanna know something funny?” Angela said. “You know how you guys have been friends for, like, forever?” She sat on the edge of my bed between Nellie and me, swinging long legs and staring at her candlelit face in the mirror. She’d sprayed her hair into a perfect daisy shape, her face the middle, only pale.
“Our friendship is funny…why?” said Nellie.
“Yeah, I want to know something funny,” I said, always more ready to indulge. I was treading a fine line here, having my childhood best friend and my high school best friend over at the same time.
“Well, you guys have a reputation. I mean, not really a reputation,” she said, deliberately vague. “But there are these rumors…”
“We’re lez-be-friends,” Nellie said. “The rumors are all true. You’re very perceptive.”
Angela gave an obscure sniff.
“No seriously, rumors?” I said.
“What I mean is, I heard you guys do weird stuff together after school. And I thought—” She paused and backcombed her bangs with her fingertips. “I thought somebody close to you guys should tell you.”
“Weird stuff,” Nellie said.
“Relax,” Angela said. “Just weird kid stuff, is all. Like, let’s see, I heard you guys still play with model horses. The senior girl across the street, Kelly? She says she saw you guys playing with bugs.”
“Oh my gawd,” I said. “I’m so sure. I may still own some model horses. I don’t play with them.”
Angela fixed me with a curious look. “Really?”
“Well, they are collectibles. One day I’ll sell them and put myself through college.”
“Really.”
“We so totally don’t play with bugs,” Nellie said. “I, personally, hate touching bugs.” She gave me a pointed look. “Of course, I can’t speak for everyone present. But I’ve personally never on purpose touched an insect.”
“Whatever,” Angela said. “You guys want to smoke?”
“What?” I said. “Smoke, like, what?”
She slowly lowered aquamarine eyelids, pouting at her reflection, taking her time. “Well, we could smoke your mom’s cigarettes.”
“My mom doesn’t smoke.”
She sighed, turned her head slowly as though it weighed a thousand pounds, and looked at Nellie.
“No way in hell I’m gonna go steal my mother’s precious cigarettes.” Nellie made a vicious X with her hands. “I’m so completely done with my mom for the day. Maybe even the week.”
“So there’s nothing here to smoke,” Angela said. “Lame. Lame-lame.”
“Wait,” I said, inspired, frantic. “I’ve got a little something stashed away, I do believe.”
“Really? Well, now you’re talkin’ my language.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had crude cigarettes crafted from spiral-bound paper, stuffed with powdery grey-green leaves and rolled into fat joints. We sparked up with Angela’s lighter, took huge, gulping hits, burst out coughing. I stubbed mine out on the dresser. Angela and Nellie kept smoking.
“Shit’s harsh,” Angela said.
Tiny bits of burning paper floated towards the ceiling light. The room seemed to be tilting like a snow globe paperweight—no, I thought—a smoke globe paperweight, everything loose and spinning, becoming more and more obscure. A smoke storm in a teacup. Angela and Nellie collapsed against each other, laughing, all the sticky, prickly friendship barriers dissolving, going down. The carefully arranged pillows on my bed toppled and fell.
And far away, something was shrieking.
Shriek.
Shriek.
Shriek.
“Smoke alarm!” I flung open the door to piercing sounds. SHRIEK. SHRIEK. SHRIEK.
Angela gasped with laughter. “Shoulda opened a window, Dum-Dum.”
I slammed the door, pressed against it, staring at a madly blinking, screaming circle of plastic on the ceiling as though the sheer strength of my will would stop the smoke from drifting out and up, tickling its electronic nose.
My mom appeared. My dad and visiting big sister, Amy.
“What’s going on here?” my dad said.
Amy sniffed the air. “Oh, I know what she’s been up to. I know that smell.”
“It’s totally not that,” I said.
“Please. I think I’ve been on this planet a few more years than you.” She crossed her arms. Thick with judgement, ready condemnation.
Angela and Nellie stumbled into the hallway, their eyes beet-red.
“It’s just…just this…” I pulled a crumpled cellophane bag from my pocket. Smoothed it, held it up for all to see. A bewhiskered cartoon tabby in a bowtie smiled at us, smug and proud.
Catnip. My friends were high on burnt catnip.
•••
My grounding put a hold on our fireplay. When the two weeks of isolation were up, I found I’d lost my taste for matchbooks and lighters. I dumped the last cone of incense in the trash, angrily scraped teardrops of wax from my dresser with a thumbnail.
Nellie and I didn’t talk about it. Like most of our games, we didn’t discuss the ending, and there was no definitive conclusion. The charm had passed; we’d moved on.
Fall was over. Christmas, the long foggy march through January, the hopeless crush of February.
Nellie’s call came on a rainy Sunday. “Come over. My mom’s gone for the day.”
No further persuasion offered or necessary. Such events were rare. We’d long ago learned not to play over at Nellie’s house, an atmosphere dominated by carefully polished brass animals and her mother’s foul moods. I’d never known a woman so unrelentingly mean. She’d throw us out into blistering sun or bone-chilling Tule fog alike, simply because our faces annoyed her. If she forgot to lock all the doors and windows and we somehow found our way back inside, our lips and cheeks sunburnt or windburnt, then she’d force us to play with Nellie’s little brother, the only person in the world her mom seemed to like. And by play, she didn’t mean just dress him up as a clown-bride, trying to convince the boy that a dead bug was actually a tasty Raisinette. She meant include him in our most secret of schemes, the ones we’d be hard-pressed—even if forced at gunpoint—to explain to outsiders. The ones written on the fly in an unspoken code only we could understand.
“My brother’s gone with her,” Nellie added, reading my mind.
The first thing Nellie did was take me into the kitchen where she’d been cooking slices of bologna in a frying pan. “They’re exactly like the ones on a stick you get at the mall at Hickory Farms.” She pushed the meat about the pan with fussy, irritable jabs of a fork.
I politely declined a taste test.
“I’m not hungry, anyhow,” she said, turning off the stove. “I’m too pissed.” She motioned at the table. “Look.”
A little red teddy bear sat there. He clutched a pink satin heart that read “Happy Vday Baby Girl!” in embroidery. His face and chubby body were charmless and crude in that dime store way. Rough acrylic fur, undoubtedly toxic to babies, pets, and people with compromised immune systems. A toy destined not for love, but for the thrift store or the trash.
Beside the bear like an afterthought: a box of Necco candy hearts, the kind that costs a quarter.
I wasn’t sure how to react, but figured it was a situation set up to make fun of. I grabbed the bear. “Awwwww, how ugly.”
Nellie slumped, scowling.
“From that one guy in third period, the kid with the flattop?”
“Worse,” she said.
“Big goofy dude in computer class?”
“Even worse. My dad.”
“Oh. Oh my gawd.”
And then I didn’t know what to say. Nellie’s father? He showered her with gifts for every imaginable occasion, even the more arcane ones like Groundhog’s Day. Good things, like a pink television set, a Greek evil eye ring, expensive chocolates. Or something he’d built for her in his garage workshop. A Victorian dollhouse, an oak desk with a beveled glass top. For as much as Nellie’s mom hated her, Nellie’s dad loved her. He treated her like a small, imperiously finicky yet beloved queen. Even though he worked late and worked often, worked himself down to the bone, she always knew he loved her. The misshapen teddy bear, the satin heart, the chalky candy…this was beneath him, beneath them both.
“What are you going to do?”
“Do? What can I do. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us anymore. He’s spending all his money on some bitch he met at the Cuckoo. He left this shit in a paper sack on the doorstep like a goddamn bag of flaming dog turds. In case you haven’t noticed, he hasn’t come home for two months. That’s okay though. It’ll all catch up to him, just you wait.”
I sat stricken. Completely unable, for once, to find that golden seam where her life bound up with mine.
“He’ll get caught for all that embezzling, too. Never trust a goddamn cokehead. They’ll steal you blind.” She gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, Mr. Leslie’s not gonna stay stupid about it forever. And it’ll serve my dad damn right. And we won’t be around to bail him out, either.”
These weren’t her words. They were her mother’s. But I looked into Nellie’s eyes—so bloodshot the irises were a painful, poisonous green—and knew there were words beneath these words.
I didn’t hug her or offer platitudes. It wasn’t our way.
“It’s shit, that’s what it is. A total load of bullshit.” I picked up the bear, stabbed a finger at his pudgy heart. “You’re an ugly little piece of bullshit. You deserve to die a slow and painful death.”
“He deserves to burn in hell.” I wasn’t sure if Nellie meant her dad or the bear. Warming to it, brightening, she said, “Let’s do it.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s burn this shit.”
“But where?” I glanced skeptically at the windows sheeted with rain.
“I know where,” she said.
•••
We sat cross-legged inside her father’s shower, our denim kneecaps touching. A year ago, her dad had put the finishing touches on a new wing to their home. An office he promised he’d use so he could spend more time at home with the family. A closet for all his expensive, cologne-scented clothes. A bathroom with a walk-in shower so he could get ready in the morning without waking anyone. I held the bear, Nellie held the matchbook.
She regarded me quietly, then shrugged. “I figure in here’s perfect because first of all, if my mom comes home, we’ll have time to get out before she catches us. This place is like death to her because all his stuff is still here. Even left behind his hair gel. She hasn’t set foot in here since he left. And plus, we can turn the water on afterwards to put out the fire.”
I sat and admired her logic.
I was pissed, angry at her dad not only for leaving her, but for making me feel all these years like my own father and I had had a less-than relationship. My dad and I didn’t hug and kiss. He’d never once told me he loved me. I never got flamboyant gifts just because. But he was always there. And if his love was a flame, it was one turned down low. Low but steady. And all this time, Nellie’s dad had been this flickering bright trickster, all diamond rings and gaslight eyes, fooling her and me both.
Hell, I’d been half in love with him myself, despite being just a hanger-on.
Nellie lit a match and touched it to the bear’s red ear. It caught right away, the fur blazing up, remarkable and fierce, rank, like napalm mixed with sweatshop. She shoved the flaming toy at me, saying, “Wait! Wait here!” She scrambled out, the shower’s glass door rattling on its tracks. I waved the bear slowly before me, the fire playing tricks with my eyes in the dim light, glinting off the fiberglass walls and the glass door trimmed in chrome, leaving ghosts of ghosts trailing in its wake.
Nellie returned, for some unfathomable reason feeling compelled to shut the glass door behind her. She stood above me, and with the fire and the smoke, the narrow walls seemed to close in like an asthmatic’s throat. “Here, here, there’s this, we can’t forget this,” she said. Chalky hearts rained upon the shower floor, their trite words bouncing. Be Mine. Loverboy. Call Me? Heart Throb. She stooped and scraped them into a pile, took the bear from me and positioned it on top. “And this,” she said, and the thin red and pink cardboard candy box followed, catching with a small sigh. Stench of burning paper, burning sugar, burning thread and fluff and stuffing.
We coughed, our eyes streamed with tears. We persevered. The fire grew to the size of a small animal, capering at our feet, greedy for fuel. It held us more captive, more entranced than ever before, so that we couldn’t move until it had consumed everything we had and threatened to go out.
We crept backwards out of the stall, gulping fresh air. Then burrowed through sink drawers, seized things at random to feed our fire, bring it back to life. Cologne hissed in the shower. Toothpaste squiggled and festered in the flames. A plastic comb made us cough with its stink. A box of razors. Mouthwash. Soap and shaving cream.
We were slowing, and then we slowed, and then we stopped. Nellie turned on the shower head, and we watched the last of the fire extinguish, turn to black and stinking char. We left it that way, still smoking, closing the door to the shower, the door to the bathroom, the door to the office, no smoke detector around to betray us.
The following spring, when Nellie’s mother finally discovered what we’d done, she uncharacteristically said nothing. Aghast, Nellie watched as her mom stooped and scrubbed the black, sticky mess on the bottom of the shower, her sleeves rolled up, hands encased in pink rubber gloves that fit close and went up to the elbow like a prom queen’s. Then she joined her mom in the labor, and they both did the best they could. But the fire had scorched through the bottom of the shower, burned the fiberglass shower pan itself, leaving a permanent scar.
It wouldn’t matter. Nellie’s dad never came back to that house. From my home just down the street, I’d watch the For Sale sign go up. The house sold that summer, black scar and all. They would move away, ninety miles up the valley, the mother, the daughter, and the son. As a parting gift, I slipped Nellie the matchbook, the one Johnny had abandoned in the leaves. Not much magic remained inside its empty cover, but just enough to keep our friendship flickering over the miles that kept us apart.
