He’s set three more fires since that night when he burned the house—one fire for each time the men left him with bruises and scratches, the cut above his eyebrow that might scar, and the cops hadn’t stopped them, only watched from behind the shine of their sunglasses. Each house feels like relief or even revenge. Maybe if he keeps going, the cops will finally be sent out into the city with work, real work, to do something other than laugh at the people they’re supposed to protect. With every fire, he feels a weight lift from his chest.
Of course his thrill comes with new worries. What would happen if the police knew it was him? How many years would hespend behind bars? Swallowed up in a prison, disappeared from the world. The nerves that keep him awake at night, staring at the ceiling, are only calmed by more fires. Sometimes he will sit in his room and strike a match, just for a little taste of heat, a hint of power. A mere reminder of what he’s capable of. He’s seen the pictures in the papers—the dark husks and charred frames, the firefighters in their yellow helmets, the stern lines of their mouths.
He still follows the girl, too, though he doesn’t know what he wants from her. Maybe he wants to simply say he sees her. He sees her pain, which must feel like his when he thinks about his grandparents. The ache between his ribs. The sense that the city stole them, too; stole something he’ll never have back. He practices writing out the words, the ones that inch toward describing what he means. He writesI SEEon a scrap of paper. He tries to think of what else there is to say, but there aren’t any words that could protect him—he hopesI SEEwill be enough. He folds it in half, then in half again, until it’s small, another secret he’ll keep close until the time is right.
He takes to carrying the scrap of paper in his pocket, and soon it becomes as worn and soft as the two-dollar bill. He follows the girl on her lunch break, sometimes through the parking lot. He follows her to the boardwalk again, where she goes to the red-haired girl. While she was inside, he told himself he’d give her the note and the bill that afternoon, in the bright glare of the sun. But he noticed another man standing just outside the door, waiting, listening, his eyes so pale they looked like glass. Something about the man scared Luis—the way he stood or cocked his head toward the doorway. As though he owned it all.
He goes for another one of his walks that night, a lighter in his pocket, still thinking of that man’s stare, the angle of his head, the strange smile that looked a little like a grimace. The buildings of the city are spread before him, like a buffet, but none of them have the right feel. Nothing calls to him, summoning him in theway he’s come to expect. He walks farther, alongside the Black Horse Pike, underneath the spotlit billboards featuring bright blue drinks, platters of seafood, or big-breasted women in their underwear, blowing on a pair of dice. How beautiful it would be to set one aflame, to see one of those garish, ridiculous signs ablaze, an island of fire high above the grass.
The marsh. He won’t do it, but he likes the fantasy of it—the picture it creates in his head. He steps off the shoulder of the road, into muck that swallows his shoes. He looks back toward the skyline, the places where it’s gone dark, the hulking rectangles of concrete where the beautiful buildings were. If he lit the marsh, a straight line of lighter fluid drawing the fire across it, it would look as if the whole city was burning, about to be swallowed whole.
Of course, the marsh is actually quite peaceful. He used to come here to trap crabs with his grandfather when he was a boy. He thinks he could still find his way back to the creek where they used to find the blue claws, where they might find a nest of young birds, their feathers a wild fluff on their heads. He steps deeper into the grass, flies circling his head—he remembers that well, too, his grandfather taking aim and slapping them away.
Above him, the neon sign of the Sunset Motel casts a feeble yellow glow on the grass. He sees a hint of glitter that, for a moment, he takes to be water, a slice of the creek sparkling under the light. He steps closer, pushes through the grass, and what he sees makes him feel the way he did when Gold Tooth punched the air out of his lungs.
For the first few seconds his brain rejects what he sees, though the understanding seizes his limbs, his guts. His brain can only understand the scene before him in a series of shapes. The curve of a calf. The angle of an elbow. A parabola of hair. The arch of eyebrows. The thick lines of clotted blood that must be cuts. Then he processes colors. The white-blue of the skin,the rings of purple around their necks. The bruises. The glint of gold: an ankle bracelet dangling a dozen little charms. The smell hits him next, the smell he thought was a part of the marsh but must be them. He hits himself in the face, slaps himself hard a second time. He closes his eyes and waits to wake up from a dream. Flies land on his eyelids, his arms, the back of his neck. He steps closer, reels back. One of their faces looks collapsed. And their eyes are open. They see him, judge him. They know everything he’s done.
He sprints back through the marsh, out toward the road, to retch into the gutter. His stomach convulses painfully, as though it is wringing itself out. He can only think about catching his breath, about wiping the tears from his cheeks, the vomit from his lips. Once he is sure he can breathe, he starts to run back into town on wobbling legs.
He can’t stop thinking of their fingers. Like they were reaching for one another, trying to hold hands. Trying to hold on.
LILY
OUR SHIFT FROM SAFETY, LIGHTNESS,toward darkness was so quick, so subtle.
The man who approached us looked like he might have been a high school football coach. It took a good deal of maneuvering for him to sit on the barstool and shift so his stomach wasn’t pressing up against the bar. But the redness in his face implied anger coiled in him, waiting to strike. Underneath his smile, he was the kind of man who smashed bottles at bars.
“What do you want, Long Island iced teas? Ladies seem to love those Long Island iced teas.”
“You must buy a lot of girls drinks, huh?” Clara said. “And here I thought we were special.”
“Well, then I’ll buy you two, darling.” He was already licking his lips. “If it’ll make you feel special. If it’ll make you feel good.”
“I’m sure that will make me feel good,” she said, laying her hand on his wrist. I felt a little jilted that she had seemed to care about my story and now her attention had been so easily redirected to someone else. The man murmured something near her ear, and she giggled in a way I hadn’t heard before, giddy and girlish. I didn’t think I could stand it, watching her hand fallagain and again on this man’s arm. His hand creeping from her knee up her thigh. I reached for my bag, waited for the bartender to turn around so I could close out my tab.
The man raised his eyes from Clara’s mouth to look at me. “Hey, missy, you look a little lonely over there. I have a friend who I’m sure will want to keep you company.”
“I’m about to go,” I said.
“Oh, Lily, don’t,” Clara said. She inched closer to me, put her hand on mine. “Just for a little while?”
“Another round on me, until he gets here,” the man said.
I didn’t want to leave her with this guy. He was probably no worse than anyone else she’d met up with, but I still felt responsible. Like I could steer the situation, control it. Maybe eventually talk her into just going home. I would have to take a cab home anyway, and it could drop her off on my way back. My mood was turning sour; tomorrow would already be marred by a hangover. I was stuck, regret on either side: past and future. The only thing to do was wade through the oblivious, gin-soaked now. I stirred my drink and thought of Clara’s prophecy again: If I were really going to fall before I would rise, it might be better to get the fall over with. Better to face it, collide into it head-on. Some other humiliation, some other way the world was going to use me. I already had a sense that these men would make us into something smaller, less human. They would want to make us into a story for when they retreated back to their lives—these two young sluts we met down in AC, throwing back Long Island iced teas like you wouldn’t believe—the way Matthew had made me his story. If I had learned anything it was that if you were someone’s story, they owned a part of you, took a piece of you away.
“Fine,” I said. “What the hell.”
“Yay!” Clara leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, close to the corner of my lips, lingering a second longer than she needed to. Her eyelashes brushed my cheek.
“Well, now, ain’t nothing better than two sexy women showing each other a little affection. Or a lot of affection, if you know what I mean.”
“We certainly do.” Clara gave me a theatrical wink.
“Well, I like the sound of that. Girls who know how to have a little fun.”
“You have no idea how much fun,” she said. I tried to ignore how sad it made me to hear her like this. She was so good at being what he wanted, at hiding herself behind clichés. And he was so easily pleased, so willing to believe that this was all she was.
My jaw clenched tighter. Was it this easy? Did people really talk like this? In middle school, one of my friends and I would watch porn on Starz after her parents went to bed. We were curious about sex, how it worked, how two seemingly sane, rational people ended up clawing at one another like animals, moaning and grunting. We were interested in the act, sure, but we also wanted to know about what led to it: Were there code words? Did the innuendo just pile up until you knew when to touch each other? Clara and this man reminded me of the scripts of those movies. The woman approaching the auto mechanic in his shop, letting him know she wanted him to do more than service her car. A raised eyebrow, a turned foot, a bitten lip, and in minutes they were all over one another, the woman’s body smeared with black grease.
