Firecracker Read online

  “Ugh.”

  “In these sessions, I’d like to take you out of your comfort zone, okay? I’m interested in some real honesty from you. Here’s a question, an idea I’ve been playing around with for you . . . have you ever really done something that you didn’t want to do?”

  “Why would I?”

  “What I mean is have you done something that someone else wants you to do or something that would make someone else happy?”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Like help a friend move, or volunteer at a charity, or visit a family member in the hospital?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just blinked a few times.

  “I have an assignment for you,” he continued.

  “Homework? I don’t even go to this school anymore.”

  “This is the process. It’s an exercise. I want you to really think about how you make your decisions and why. So, make a list this week of at least three things that you did even though you didn’t want to.”

  “I can do it right now.” It was easy. I finished it in my mind almost instantly. I wrote it on his legal pad and handed him back the list.

  “Why would you draw a picture of my underwear?” he said.

  “I didn’t want to. That’s the point, right?”

  “None of these things count,” he said.

  “Why doesn’t it count?”

  “Because it’s my assignment and I make the rules. I’m not talking about bathroom stuff, Astrid. I’m talking about actual things you do even though you don’t want to. Nice things for other people.”

  “Fine.”

  “Write the assignment down.”

  “I’ll write it on my hand.”

  I wrote DO 3 THINGS I DON’T WANT TO DO, [SOMETHING SOMETHING].

  He seemed relatively satisfied, which wasn’t my intention at all.

  “What happens if I don’t do the assignment?” I said.

  “It’s your time. It’s your life. Maybe I don’t even care what you do.”

  RECORD OF ARREST

  Southboro Police Department, Southboro, CT

  KRIEGER, ASTRID J.

  Known Alias(es): Astrid Cooper, Allison Krieger, Michelle Regularperson, Yves Graneveis, Killer D. Dog, Wednesday Mustacheface.

  Address: The Bristol Academy, 1134 Bristol Dr., Southboro

  Hair color: Brown Eye color: Blue

  Height: 5'2"Weight: 104

  Age as of current date (if minor, write MINOR): MINOR (age 17)

  ARRESTS (MOST RECENT FIRST) AND ARREST LOCATION

  • Armed robbery with a dangerous weapon (pepper spray)—Lulu’s Gas and Snacks

  • Resisting arrest (and also insulting the arresting officer’s mother, which is not against the law but should be noted)

  • Conspiracy to hire airplane to skywrite curse words over the town square on Christmas Eve. (Further investigation concluded that this breaks no actual laws, though the city council asks that a record of the act be included.)—Southboro Town Square

  • Selling city property without permission. (The perpetrator does not and has not ever had authorization to sell rights to the Southboro Police Department’s name and facilities to the People’s Republic of China.)—Southboro Police Department

  • Making a false police report. (Evidence proved that there have never been “orphan auctions” in the basement of the Southboro Police Department.)—Southboro Police Department

  It was warm out. Much warmer when I left Dean Rein’s office than it had been an hour before. I wore a big white coat so no one would see me, and it felt like a mistake. My arms felt sticky. My hair was curling into damp little brown nests, one of which kept bouncing against my forehead and dripping into my eye.

  I stuck one of my hands into my bag in search of gum, and my other hand just dangled around like a noodle. I looked at the thing I wrote on my palm—the thing about doing three things. It couldn’t really be hard. How could it? Because if it was too hard, I wasn’t going to do it. I didn’t like doing things that were very hard.

  My driver was circling around campus. There aren’t really streets for parking at Bristol. Sometimes kids ride horses, and the administration doesn’t like cars to be mingling with the horses. Bristol cared a lot about appearances and horses. You can’t have too many pictures of stupid horses. I suddenly wished I knew how to drive. I took off the jacket and held it in my arm. I was no longer invisible. The whole world could see me. But only one person actually did.

  “You look so terrible,” she said.

  I turned around. I had no idea who was talking to me. There was a girl standing right there, but she didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen before. She had this brutally short, almost-white hair and red, red lips. She was either wearing ultra-heavy eye makeup or someone had recently punched her twice in the face with perfectly circular fists.

  “I used to think you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, you know? I hated you for that,” she commented. “What are you even doing here?”

  I wasn’t thunderstruck. I could think at the same steady rate I always did. I had plenty of things I could say back to this person, but I couldn’t quite figure out what my goal was. If I was thinking of a comeback, I would have to solve two mysteries at the same time. Unfortunately, I was too preoccupied with the more important mystery: figuring out who would be so stupid as to say that I looked terrible right to my face. She was liable to lose a finger. And do I look terrible? I found myself wondering. I was usually happy with how I looked and I couldn’t imagine I had changed that afternoon. I rubbed the sides of my face from the sharp point of my chin, up my cheekbones, and across my forehead to the little old scar above the bridge of my nose. Lisbet once said that people would murder for my eyebrows—which is not the perfect crime—but as I ran my fingers along them, they were still as they always were—pointed in their perpetual “are you fucking kidding me” arch.

  “Say something.” She laughed a little bit. Fearless. “Superman lost her cape, huh?”

  And then I figured out who she was. Her laugh gave her away. This was Talia Pasteur. She was a member of the group of names Dean Rein read off in his office. But Talia wasn’t just anyone on the list. She was my right hand. I probably trusted her the most. And the person you trust most will always be the first person to let you down. “Didn’t you used to have braces, Talia?”

  “I had a lot taken off, Astrid. A lot.” And she was not exaggerating. I’m actually surprised I recognized her as Talia at all. She had taken many steps in the past week.

  “That’s not how Superman works, by the way,” I told her. “Superman doesn’t get his powers from his cape, so—”

  “I don’t have any idea how Superman works,” Talia snapped. “I don’t read comic books.”

  “I don’t read comic books either. But it’s just something everyone knows.”

  “But you’re no longer one to tell people what they should or shouldn’t know, are you?” Talia asked smugly.

  Talia and I were never exactly friends, but she was almost there. I kind of liked her. I rarely thought about her. When I was at Bristol, I needed to have people around me who had particular talents I could use. And Talia Pasteur’s talent? Well, she always said yes, she didn’t ask a lot of questions, and she looked like a tree.

  I’m not kidding about that. Talia Pasteur’s most practical skill was camouflage. When I first saw her the year before, it was the first thing I noticed about her. Maybe someone else would notice her tiny eyes or her way of touching people every time she said anything. If she was ordering coffee and needed extra milk, she would touch the coffee guy’s arm, lean in, and speak in a quiet voice as if the extra milk transaction was a special secret the two of them shared.

  But that’s not what I noticed. It’s why I’m different. I can see someone’s value
in a way others can’t. I noticed the way her frizzy hair whirled around her head like an assortment of twigs and the way her baggy brown sweater made her look lumpier than she was underneath, and I could picture her among a field of trees. I often thought about how she would be virtually indistinguishable in that field. You could walk right by her and figure her for a little spruce. She could hide almost anywhere. She could run surveillance. She was useful. Of course, she didn’t look like a tree anymore. In addition to her haircut and weird makeup, she had this short dress that could also be a long shirt. She was wearing tights as pants. Tights are not pants. She followed a straight path when she walked, completely unconcerned by the people in her way. Two boys actually jumped because she wasn’t changing course. Talia had never been mean before. I remembered her being nice, even though I never did anything around her to inspire kindness. But whatever she was—that person was somehow gone. And I thought about the circumstances of my getting kicked out of Bristol. And I thought about how I got set up. The night before I was expelled, Talia and I broke into the administrative building. She even threw the brick. I wondered whether Talia might have had some additional skills beyond resembling shrubbery. She might have had a lot of things rolling around in that head of hers.

  As I was walking away, I heard Talia yell after me. “Hey Astrid, enjoy your new school.” She didn’t mean it.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  When I think back to my first day of public school, I remember most clearly this burning feeling that started in my chest and moved to the top of my head and then down again. It wasn’t anger. That’s a hot feeling too, but it’s different. With anger, it’s like you’re breathing fire and you have to just unleash the flames at whoever is around you. Being angry is like being a dragon. This was more like a fever, one that didn’t come with aches or the chills. But it still made me want to crawl back into bed that morning. I probably could have. It had been ten days since my parents told me I had to go to Cadorette Township High School. I bought myself a few days while I went to Bristol to see Dean Rein, and then I had to wait for Bristol to send over my transcripts. And then I just didn’t go for a few days. I knew it didn’t matter to my parents enough to, like, check to make sure I actually was there.

  I spent a lot of those ten days in my grandfather’s study. It was a room with oak walls and oak furniture and leather-bound books that no one ever read. Some of them were in Latin. I knew that my grandfather didn’t understand Latin (who does?); he just liked them there. They were important books, and he was a decidedly important man, so it was fitting. On the walls were pictures of his life and other important people. Framed above his desk was a black-and-white photo of my grandfather during World War II with his arm around John F. Kennedy. Kennedy wrote Monty, Go fuck yourself! Jack. They were friends, I think. Kennedy was actually the guy who shot my grandfather in the kidney. It was during a game of Russian roulette in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  At the end of the day, after my grandfather’s bosomy nurse would go wherever it was she went, my grandfather would sit in the study with me. He was only allowed to smoke a cigar once a day, so usually the cigar in his mouth would be unlit, even though he pretended it was doing the thing cigars do. He stared long at an engraving of a giant whale in an old book, as if it was telling him something. “How long are you going to hide out here?” he asked.

  “Until I’m old and wrinkly and useless,” I said. “Like you.”

  He smiled but then closed his book with a thud. “It’s time,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

  Then the burning started all over again.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  The public school was brick with yellow aluminum siding. There were hundreds of paint strokes in different yellowy colors all over the building. It must have been to cover up graffiti, but plenty of new graffiti had popped up since the last time they painted. There was a drawing of boobs and some squiggly letters that may have said Paul or Fuego or anything in between. There were small metal letters to the left of the front door that said Cadorette Township Hig S hool. An h and a c were missing. In order to distract myself, I invented several fictional suspects for the stolen letters (Heather Carter, Henry Chatwick, Hugo Carboncini), but my temperature wasn’t going down. I saw people walk into the school around me, avoiding contact like I was a broken slab of sidewalk surrounded by orange cones, a potential safety hazard.

  The dress I wore that day was also keeping a wide circle open around me. I wore a uniform at Bristol, so all my regular clothes were mostly these complicated outfits for formal occasions. The dress wasn’t long, but it was as wide as my outstretched arms. It was from Denmark, and they make weird dresses in Denmark. No one else walking past me was wearing a dress. Or even a skirt. Not one person. The girls wore jeans. Most were very tight. Some of the boys wore shorts with basketball teams on them, but most of them also wore jeans. I had never owned a pair of jeans, and I didn’t plan on it. I am not a cowboy, a farmer, or a 1950s greaser. I just don’t really get it.

  “What are you looking at, princess?” The person addressing me said it in a singsong voice that made it clear he was sharing a joke that I wasn’t involved in. And even though he asked me what I was looking at, he didn’t wait around for my answer. He just laughed and punched his friend on the arm. People punched their friends on the arm a lot in public school.

  There were no longer people walking through the front entrance. The yellow buses parked outside had begun driving away. It was now or never, so I walked inside.

  I was hit with the smell of glue and urine. Magazines and hamburgers. It was in the walls, the sort of smell that never leaves.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  “Your first day, and you’re late,” the bearded man stated.

  This was the principal, Mr. Barth. When he told me his name, I said, “The kids must have a lot of names for you.”

  “And they’ll have a lot of names for you too, Astrid,” he said, quickly dodging the filing cabinets and the myriad of secretaries that decorated the room, dropping a paper in an in-box, and signing a form in triplicate. His beard was possibly his most distinguishing trait; it was long and thick, as though it had been with him since he could grow one. He was likely into the Grateful Dead. The thing about the beard was that it was half full of white hairs. And he was plump, so as soon as the white hairs became the majority, he would no longer be a hippie. He would be Santa Claus. I had the feeling that this shift of balance between white and brown could happen at any moment, possibly by Christmas.

  “The students will be pretty excited to have you here. We’ve never had a celebrity student.”

  “I’m not a celebrity.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a celebrity for Cadorette. You’re notorious.”

  “Hardly.”

  “I was sent your arrest record when you enrolled.”

  “That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that’s allowed to get out.”

  “It’s exactly the sort of thing that’s allowed to get out,” he said. “I kind of require it. The secret service called me as well.”

  “You bring one knife to a White House state dinner . . . When did the world lose its sense of humor?”

  “I don’t know. It was gradual. Everyone here knows who you are, I’m sure.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Perfect.”

  “Do you have Astrid’s schedule, Mrs. Ramos?” Mr. Barth asked one of the women typing on an ancient computer. She tore a piece of paper out of a printer—the kind of printer that makes a screeching sound as it prints. It may have been fifty years old.

  “I can get you a map, but I don’t think you’ll need it,” Mr. Barth said as he pointed to a series of numbers and letters on the schedule. “This is A hall. The parallel hall is D hall. So then that’s B and that’s C. And if there’s a 2 in the room number, it’s on the second floor. The cafeteria, well, you won’t miss that. Or the gym. Does that make sense to you
?”

  “Does it make sense to you?” I asked. He was already back by a filing cabinet and in the middle of asking the other secretary about an in-service day. He seemingly had no further interest in me, which was refreshing. But it also left me with no idea whether or not I was supposed to stand there or leave.

  “Do I need to get you a guide?” he asked in a tone that could’ve been genuine or could’ve been another What are you looking at, princess?

  “I’ll be fine. A hall, D hall, something, something. Upstairs, something, something. Great. See you at graduation.”

  “Mrs. Ramos, could you page, um . . . ” He looked at the schedule in my hand. “Lucy Redlich’s in her English class. Page her, would you? Lucy Redlich will show you around, Astrid. This is old hat for her. We’ve had a lot of transfers this week.”

  “Is that normal?” I said.

  “No. Not at all.” And again, Mr. Barth buried his head in a filing cabinet.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  You could probably guess exactly what Lucy Redlich was like. I think it’s universal that the girl who is the principal’s go-to for showing people around for no personal gain is rarely the sort who attracts other people. Lucy was covered in freckles and ate her own hair. She munched on that stuff like it was dinner. It was disgusting. I’m getting a little queasy just thinking about it right now.

  “I’m really happy to meet you,” she said. And I think she meant it, though I don’t know why. She had this horrible lisp. It was so bad that instead of “Lucy Redlich,” she called herself “Lucy Wet Lick.”

  “Did you do plays or student government or marching band at your old school?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Forensics or FFA or DECA?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Did they assign you a locker?”

  “That’s a real thing?” And then I realized I was surrounded by lockers. Every spare inch of wall space had lockers. I guess you probably think it’s ridiculous that I was surprised, but I seriously thought lockers were just props they used in movies about high schools. I didn’t think that people actually used them anymore. Why would kids need all that storage? We weren’t settling in for a long weekend. I worried for a second that I wouldn’t get to leave.