We turned left and right, following the alley. “I saved the day,” my dad mumbled, mock-grumpy. “I feel a cinnamon bun is more than warranted.”
“A kiss from your wife isn’t enough?” my mom asked, clapping a hand to her chest.
We turned out of the alley and onto a street...which was blessedlyclear of traffic. “There,”said my dad, “Baby, a kiss from you is priceless. I’m just saying that there are times when a man?—”
A flash of movement on my left. A dirt bike with two people on it, the visors on their helmets down to hide their faces. As they passed my dad’s window, the glass disintegrated into tiny pebbles. At first, I thought they’d accidentally caught it with their wing mirror, but then they hurled something through the hole.
Time seemed to stop.
All three of us stared at the glass bottle as it tumbled. I could see it in exquisite detail: the colorless liquid that sloshed inside; the stained, red rubber band that secured the burning strip of rag. We knew what the thing was; we’d all seen them in movies. But none of us could process the thing being in our car. Then, as it went neck-down, glugging liquid, the tang of gasoline hit my nostrils. And the raw horror of it became real.
The bottle hit the dashboard, just in front of my mom, and shattered. Gasoline sprayed the windshield, the roof, my parents’ clothes...followed a split-second later by flames. The outside world disappeared behind an orange sea of fire.
My mom screamed as flames raced up her sweater and down her legs. My dad’s face, hair, and beard caught fire, and the car swerved violently. There was a sickening crunch, and suddenly we were lifting and spinning. As the car corkscrewed through the air, burning gasoline fell like rain. Some of it reached the backseat, and I screamed and ducked, covering my face with my hands.
The car landed hard on its roof, and I blacked out for a second. I woke to agonizing pain in my left leg.
I was hanging upside down, held by my seatbelt and?—
I was in a leotard, and even though the car’s heater had been on, my mom had wrapped a blanket around my legs to make sure I stayed warm. The blanket had come loose from my right leg, but it was still around my left...and the blanket was on fire.
I screamed and kicked, trying to slither out of it. Which is when I discovered the blanket was made of some man-made fiber, and it had melted and stuck to my skin.
In the front seats, my mom was screaming hysterically, non-stop. My dad wasn’t making any sound at all. Every surface was covered with roaring flames, and the car was filling up with choking white smoke.
I hit my seatbelt release and collapsed onto the ceiling, which was now the floor. My leg was a solid mass of white-hot pain. I could barely see through the tears, and every choking sob filled my lungs with smoke. I somehow managed to find the door handle and pulled it, spilling out onto the snowy sidewalk. Blessedly cold air bathed my body, but the blanket was still on fire. I remembered something about rolling on the ground, but it hurt too much to move. I scooped snow over my leg instead, and the flames finally went out.
Now I had to save my parents. I gritted my teeth against the pain, rolled onto my front, and started crawling back towards the car?—
The wind cleared the smoke for a second. I saw my parents...and started screaming.
I fought my way up out of the nightmare and woke still screaming, my lungs raw. I scrambled across the bed and hugged myself into a fetal ball in the corner.
The police found me lying on the sidewalk. They rushed me to the hospital and then to a specialist burn unit. My leg’s bone and muscle were intact: when I healed, I’d be able to walk with no problems. But…
I ran my hands over my left leg in the darkness. From toes to mid-thigh, the skin was a mass of swirling, shiny scars.
The cops figured out what had happened pretty quickly. Two mafia families, the Torrisis and the Emilianis, were at war. The Torrisis had targeted an Emiliani lieutenant called Stefano, and he drove the same model and color car as my dad. The guys on bikes had been chasing him and briefly lost him. Then we happened to turn onto the same street, right in front of them.
If I hadn’t been going to a dance exam.
If I hadn’t been nervous, and made my dad take a shortcut.
Everyone knew that the Torrisis were responsible, but the cops couldn’t prove anything. No one went to jail.
With my parents gone and no other relatives who could take me in, I wound up in a group home in a shitty area of the city. All the other kids were already involved in petty crime, or drifting towards it. As the lone kid from a nice neighborhood, I was an instant target. I found that out the first morning, when I dug my spoon into my oatmeal and found a dead cockroach.
I gave up on ballet. There was no money for lessons, plus who wants a ballerina who makes the audience cry out in horror—or pity—when they see her leg? For a few weeks, I had this forlorn hope that someone would adopt me, like in the movies, and I’d get a whole new family who loved me. I soon learned that people want to adopt adorable babies, not traumatized, scarred twelve-year-olds.
The de facto leader of the other kids was a boy called Wyatt. He alternated between beating me up to impress the others and pressuring me to get into shoplifting because, as a girl, I could hang out in the cosmetics aisle and fill my bag with valuable, easy-to-sell make-up. But I kept thinking of my mom and dad. Somehow, it felt even more important now to make them proud. So I said no, even when it meant Wyatt leaving me with black eyes or, once, a broken finger.
There’s something about living without affection—without anyone hugging you, without anyone asking how your day was or comforting you when you’re hurt—that hardens you, and not in a good way. I put up walls to keep everyone out and became silent and withdrawn at school.
Then, when I was fourteen, Wyatt started making noises about a different way I could work for him. There were men he could introduce me to, he said.
I ran out into the night, in the middle of a downpour. I wound up sobbing my heart out on the curb a few blocks from the group home. I just wanted my mom’s scent and my dad’s hugs.How is this my life?
I hit rock bottom. I hit it so hard that something inside me cracked, and what leaked out was a dark fury.
