Chapter 10
My new coworker Jerica looked around and sniffed. “Is there someone having a barbecue on school property?” she asked. “Do you guys smell that?”
Several other school employees said yes, they had also caught the odor of something, something like a chimney. It was too early in the season to burn leaves and it wasn’t cigarette smoke—
“It’s me,” I told them. “Sorry. Recently there was a fire in the apartment next to mine.”
They had plenty of questions and were very curious, although also very nice about it. No, no one had been hurt, and no, the building hadn’t burned down. How had it started? And why did I still…Jerica sniffed delicately and didn’t ask me directly why I still smelled.
It was because the stink of smoke was impossible to remove. I had washed my clothes and sheets over and over. I’d wiped down the walls, scrubbed the old refrigerator, and sprinkled all kinds of stuff over the carpet to absorb the terrible odor. Butevery time I walked out of the apartment, I knew that it still lingered on me. And I hated it.
But luckily, I still had my clothes, my sheets, and everything else. The fire had been contained to my neighbor’s unit, and it had started there because he hadn’t paid careful attention to the many candles he’d lit in preparation for the spa night that he’d planned for himself. When the authorities had allowed me to go back upstairs, I’d seen the inside of his room for the first time and I’d been very surprised. It was red and black and looked like a Wild West bordello, except that he also had a large pedicure chair like I’d seen in various nail salons. I’d always wanted to try one.
“This is awful!” my sister had said the next day, when she’d finally seen my messages and Boyd had driven her over. “It smells so bad and what’s that stain on the wall?”
It had been from the water that the firefighters sprayed in the unit next door, and one of those guys had mentioned something to me about mold and making sure that the landlord got involved in the clean-up. That hadn’t happened yet, and I wasn’t holding my breath—although if there was mold in the walls, maybe I should have been.
Boyd had stood at the door, looking into our small space. He didn’t make any comment about the fire except to say, “Maybe you could get out of the lease.”
“Where would we go?” I had asked him, and that was when I’d found out that they had a plan. It included the two of them, but not me.
Today wasn’t actually our first day at work at the school, not a real one with kids here. We, the cafeteria staff, had only come for training and orientation. The teachers and admins had returned for their own meetings, and they were also preparing the classrooms for the upcoming school year. That morning, I had seen Anita, the nice woman who had helped me get information for Everett, and she had smiled and stopped to chat.
“How was your summer?” she’d wanted to know, and I hadn’t felt like explaining the fire. She’d also wanted to know how I’d ended up back at Silver Leaf Elementary in the cafeteria rather than at another school as a teacher, and she’d stopped smiling and frowned as I had explained my job search. Phil, my former cooperating teacher in the fourth grade, had passed by as we’d spoken and she had seen how he’d mostly ignored me, only nodding briefly in my direction. Maybe he was embarrassed and thinking that my failure to get a classroom of my own somehow reflected on him, like he hadn’t trained me well.
Now our day was over. I left my cafeteria coworkers in the school parking lot, where they were making plans to go have drinks to welcome the new year, and drove back to my stinky apartment. There was plenty I had to do there, like clean more and try out the moisture meter that I’d borrowed from the janitor at the school to test for mold. But I drove slowly enough on the way that several cars passed me, and I myself passed several open parking spots when I finally arrived. I went around the block, then did it again and again, before I made myself choose one and go upstairs.
There were only two units here and I hadn’t seen or heard from my neighbor since the night of the fire, so I was alone on the floor. I didn’t miss him, but it felt very, very empty now. The elevator had stopped working that night and the stairs smelled so awful that I could taste it. The hallway outside my apartment was even worse and so was my room, even though I had cleaned over and over.
It was slightly emptier now, but many smelly boxes of belongings remained. Cardboard really hung on to bad odors so I had spent too much money on plastic bins and I was carefully transferring everything over, after sanitizing it as best I could. I also put in bags of charcoal and lavender to try to absorb/disguise how it all still reeked. That process was what I should have continued doing now, but I only sat on the bed and looked at everything. Without the neighbor pounding on the wall, with the bar on the ground floor currently closed, and without any emergencies summoning the firefighters and their trucks, it was very, very quiet here.
That was why I almost fell on the floor when someone knocked on the door—not pounded, just knocked. “Who’s there?” I asked. I didn’t get up because the bed was close enough to the hallway that my words would have been perfectly audible.
“It’s Everett. Remember me?”
Of course I did, although we hadn’t seen each other in person in a while. He’d played in more preseason games and offered me tickets. Had I wanted three seats again? I’d said that two would be great, and my sister and Boyd had taken them and I had gone to work instead. Since the fire, he had texted me a fewmore times and Willow had also been in contact, but I hadn’t heard from anyone else. My former best friend, the flautist? She had been too busy to see me the last time she was home after college graduation, and I’d looked back through all our texts. I had realized that it was all me—I was the one who always wrote first, I was the one trying to make plans, I was the one who still wanted to be friends. I decided to stop doing that with all of my former high school bandmates. I wasn’t going to bother anyone anymore.
But I did get up and took the half step to open my door for Everett now. “Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He looked at me and then peered over my head at the room. “It still smells like a fire.”
“I know and I’m trying to fix it. Why are you here?” I asked again.
“I wanted to check on you. Should we go somewhere else?” He pressed his knuckles under his nose, like he could block the odor. “This can’t be good to breathe.”
I shrugged and grabbed my bag, knowing that I would be bringing the smell with me. We went downstairs and walked around the corner to one of the little restaurants there, and since it was an odd time to eat, only one other table was filled. Those diners looked excited when they saw the Woodsmen starting quarterback and tried not to let on that they were taking pictures of him.
Actually, he was still just half the Woodsmen quarterback. Dallas Laforet had also been taking a lot of snaps throughout thepreseason, but maybe that would change now that the regular games were starting this Saturday. The excitement of the town had ramped up to an even higher level—I hadn’t really noticed it in prior years, but I certainly felt it now.
Everett looked slightly worried, not excited. “You haven’t been answering me,” he said after we’d ordered something. I wasn’t even sure what I’d asked for.
“I haven’t?” Had I somehow missed his texts? I checked now and saw that every time he had written, I had replied. “Yes, I have.”
“Not like usual.” He scrolled through his own phone. “This is what you wrote after I said I’d seen a marching band practicing when I was back in Arizona.” His voice changed slightly, going a little higher when he read out my words. “‘That’s so exciting! They must have organized a special practice for themselves out of season. Or maybe your local district goes all-year so they don’t have a long summer vacation, and that’s why they’re back at it right now. I think that type of school schedule is more prevalent in Arizona. I hope it wasn’t too hot for them out there. Were they on artificial grass? I’m sure you know how it can roast you. I hope you’re not too hot, either. Talk to you soon.’”
He looked at me and I felt humiliated. “That was long,” I commented lamely. “I don’t know why I said all that.”
“I liked it,” he answered. “It was fun to read. I kept writing back to you, and you kept telling me interesting stuff.”
