Firegirl

  When he left, we all turned to Mrs. Tracy.

  “Jessica has suffered a terrible thing,” she said.

  A couple of kids made noises. Their seats squeaked.

  “Jessica was in a fire. She was burned, badly burned. She’ll be going to school at St. Catherine’s while she has treatments at a hospital in New Haven.”

  Some girl whispered “Oh” suddenly, and it sounded like she had hurt herself or something. We all looked, but the teacher went on.

  “I don’t know how long Jessica will be with us, but I want you to be prepared. Her burns are … she does not look like … anyone you have ever seen before….”

  Mrs. Tracy’s voice caught and faded away for a second. Some of the kids seemed to get stiff in their seats. Others began shuffling things around on their desks. I felt nervous, as if I had been caught doing something wrong.

  “But I know that you will treat her as good children should.”

  She stopped again. It was like a kind of wave passed over the class when she finished talking. I felt icy and weird in my stomach as if I was really hungry or really full. I kept on sweating and my forehead was damp, along with my waist.

  It must be horrible, I thought.

  If Mrs. Tracy talks like that, saying this girl was “badly burned,” it must be horrible. And this girl is coming into our class? I remember thinking that as long as the teacher kept talking to us, even about a bad thing, the bad thing wouldn’t happen yet because she had to tell us all about it before it happened. But now that Mrs. Tracy had said what she had said and stopped talking, there was nothing more between us and whatever it was that was waiting. Between us and Jessica Feeney.

  I suddenly wished that while we were waiting, Mrs. Tracy would say something totally different, not about this girl, whoever she was. But about the weather. Or TV. Or the class elections. She should go through all that again. The primary. The voting. The committees. Thanksgiving. Anything to take our minds off of the whole “badly burned” thing she had just said.

  I wanted to hear something, anything to assure us that even after this girl came into our class, things would still be normal and regular. I tried to imagine something about a volcano and a submarine, but I kept looking at Mrs. Tracy and nothing would come. She just twisted her hands for a while, then stopped, then waited, and then looked toward the hall.

  Something was happening outside the door now.

  This was it. The terrible thing was coming. Would somebody actually scream when they saw her, or say something? Would I say something? Would it be like a horror movie? A hideous creature? Or maybe it wouldn’t be that bad?

  My mother had burned herself at the stove lots of times. Just last week, in fact. The burns were red, sometimes a little white. But they weren’t all that ugly. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

  “We’re not the closest school to the hospital,” said Jeff, staring down at the top of his desk.

  “What?” I looked over at him then back at the door. Mrs. Tracy moved to it, turning the knob.

  It would be bad. I knew it would.

  “We’re a bunch of towns away; we’re not the closest Catholic school for anybody to go to,” said Jeff.

  I watched the teacher open the door. Her left hand reached into the hall. She sort of half turned to the class. Her face was so pale then. Finally she said a bit more loudly than normal, “Class, I’d like you to welcome our new student.”

  She took the girl’s hand and drew her in. “Everyone, say hello to Jessica.”

  As horrible as I thought the girl would look, when I imagined what burned people looked like, it was nothing compared to what stepped into the room.

  Jessica Feeney’s face, the first thing everyone looked at, was like a mask. I looked at her, then away, and then back at her. I couldn’t believe I was looking at the face of someone alive.

  The skin was all rough and uneven. It looked almost smeared and was stained all shades of pink and white and red.

  Her lips were swollen. They nearly filled the space between her nose and chin. Her eyes peeked out from behind skin that looked melted. Her hair was mostly short. Her arms were covered, except that the forearms were bare and blotchy. Her fingers were bent as if she were trying to grab something.

  My neck felt thick and stiff. There was a lump in my throat and a high ringing in my ears. I remember wondering how someone looking like that could even be alive. Was she in pain right now? It seemed like she must be. As if being in that skin would make you want to scream and scream and scream until you died.

  But there was no screaming. It seemed like all the sound went out of the room for a long time while this girl stood there in front of us waiting. She stood stooped over in a brown dress. She had thick gray tights covering her legs. It wasn’t the St. Catherine’s uniform.

  Finally, she said “Hi,” in a small, tight voice, breaking the silence. Her mouth and cheeks hardly moved when she spoke. The skin on her throat was stretched and smeared like the rest of her. She’s burned everywhere, I thought.

  Someone whispered something and I felt my whole face go red. Shut up. Everyone shut up. No, I mean talk! Fill the room up with noise. Be a regular class again now. Do it now!

  Mrs. Tracy seemed confused at first, but then said, “Will the people in row two please move back one seat each.” Her face now was as white as I’d ever seen it. “Jessica, we sit alphabetically here, so your seat is at the head of row two.”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  Without a word, Jeff collected his stuff and got up from his desk. So did the others. They moved back one seat. Everyone else tried to look busy as the new girl stood there waiting.

  Finally, she sat down at her desk.

  Jessica Feeney. The burned girl.

  Without making much of a fuss, Mrs. Tracy went straight into science.

  Chapter 7

  “Well, that was fairly gross,” said Jeff, hopping off the bus in front of me that afternoon. “The new girl.” He made a noise like throwing up.

  I thought of her face and felt my body go cold again. I wondered if I would ever forget what she looked like.

  “Who’d want to be alive after that?” Jeff added, shaking his head as we crossed the yard. “The burns are all over her. Her hands are like claws, all bent up. Her fingers! Gross. Her fingers are totally stuck together. And you see the way she sits, bent over like that? All day I had to look at her. She’s bent over because her skin is all tight, not like normal skin. It’s all hard and crusty.”

  “Really?” I said. I wondered if that was true.

  “I should know. My mother tells me about people like her from the hospital. It’s the worst. Her skin must have melted on her, which means the fire was really, really hot. She was probably this close to dying.”

  We headed into the house and went to the basement.

  “I just can’t believe anybody could be alive after all that,” I said.

  “No kidding. The doctors probably kept her alive on tubes and stuff. I’d want to be dead. With a face like that, all, uck —”

  We dropped onto the couches, and he started flipping through his comics, one after another. I could remember just about every detail of her face. It was like something melted, like wax on a candle. And all those, I don’t know, patches of skin?

  Flipping the pages but not reading, Jeff went on about her puffy arms and stringy hair and something he couldn’t even bring himself to say, but just made noises about. I probably felt the same way he did, but it was starting to feel a little creepy talking out loud about it. I didn’t want to hear it anymore. I found myself just blurting out the first thing I could think of.

  “Yeah, well, she knows math, though.”

  He turned and looked at me, his face all screwed up. “Random much? What are you talking about? Math?”

  “No, I mean she blows Kayla totally away in math,” I said. “You can tell from that one answer she gave.” So what was I talking about? Was I trying to sound all light and funny all of
a sudden?

  He snorted. “Who cares?”

  I forced out a kind of chuckling sound and went on. “But you know what the worst thing is? The worst thing is that you and me don’t sit next to each other now. That’s the real bummer. Mostly for you, though. You can’t cheat off me.”

  “Uh-huh. What?” said Jeff. “I don’t cheat. I never cheat. Hey, want to drive the Batmobile?”

  Batmobile? Here it was again. The whole off-the-wall thing. He was already across the room, pulling the top box off a stack of cartons in the corner and rummaging in the one under it. All right, this was better. It was more like normal.

  I played along. “Batmobile? What Batmobile?”

  He pulled a radio-controlled model of Batman’s black car from the carton. It had a lot of fins shooting off the back. A control box with toggle switches was attached to the car with a rubber band. He touched one of the toggles. It made a whirring sound, and he laughed.

  “My stupid father got this for me a couple Christmases ago,” he said, going for the stairs. “I can’t believe the batteries still work.”

  I hated to hear him call his father that. Jeff was always mad whenever he talked about him. I started upstairs after him. “Cool. Can I drive it?”

  “Let’s set it on fire and burn it up. It’ll get all drippy. Like her.”

  I felt as if someone had just poured ice water on me.

  “Burn it? What do you mean burn it?”

  Jeff flew up the stairs two at a time and through the kitchen. I followed, getting up to him just as a car door banged in the driveway.

  “Your mother’s home,” I said. “Better not burn anything. …”

  Jeff shrugged. “She doesn’t care. Hey, Mom,” he said, passing his mother on his way to the patio door. “We’re going out back.”

  Mrs. Hicks stepped fully into the kitchen. She was wearing her light blue nurse’s uniform. Now, at the end of her shift, the uniform was pretty wrinkled, but not bloody.

  She didn’t take any real notice of me standing there in the kitchen. Setting her pocketbook down on the table, she bent over to dig in it, her hair hanging down both sides of her face.

  She sometimes works with burned people in her hospital in Bridgeport, I thought. I wonder if she knows anything about Jessica. Should I ask her?

  Suddenly, she glanced up and caught me looking at her. I turned away and went to the backdoor where Jeff was waiting.

  “Matches,” she said sharply. “Jeff, have you seen any matches?”

  He shrugged and shook his head a little. “Nah,” he said, pushing out the door. “Tom, let’s go.”

  We left her hunting through the cabinet drawers, one by one.

  Once we were in the yard, Jeff dug his hand into his front pocket and pulled out a book of matches.

  “You keep matches in your pocket?” I said. “Your mother was just looking for some.”

  He shrugged again. “It keeps her from smoking.”

  Setting the car on the ground, he put a match between the matchbook striking strip and the folded-over cover and whipped it out quickly. It snapped into flame.

  “Jeff—” I said.

  “Watch this,” he said. He held the match under the car’s front bumper. A few seconds later, the black plastic went orange as the flame grabbed it. It boiled slowly up the hood to the windscreen. The smell of burning plastic filled my nose. I arched back from it.

  “It’s just like that girl,” Jeff said carelessly.

  Enough, already. What a jerk. “You know, your mom’s going to get mad….”

  “Look.” Jumping up as the car’s flame went higher, he pushed the control box’s toggles down hard. On fire, the car skidded across the patio and over the slate walk, singeing the grass as it wheeled and bounced across the yard.

  “What’s amazing is how long it can keeping going, on fire,” he said matter-of-factly, his thumbs working the levers.

  The car spun through the leaves, darkening some where he slowed it, but mostly just trailing smoke above and behind it. He swung it around toward us, then zigzagged it over the walk and onto the patio again. It bounced into the border on the edge of the stones.

  In the border was a small rock that had a word carved on it — dream. The front passenger tire struck the rock. The car turned over and tumbled into the dirt. Flames wrapped around it, curling from the top to its underside, then going higher and filling the air with acrid, black smoke.

  “Ahhh!” Jeff yelled in a mocking way. “The caped crusader is trying to escape, but he can’t! He melts in flames! Robin, too! Yaaaah!” He laughed and laughed and jumped around the smoke.

  The car was completely in flames now.

  As suddenly as he started, Jeff seemed to get bored. He dropped the control box on the patio stones.

  I couldn’t stand to see the car on fire. It seemed stupid and a total waste. I turned around and picked up the garden hose, which was lying coiled on the edge of the patio. I sprayed the car. “I am The Spitter, helper of the dynamic duo!” I said, doing some stupid accent that made it sound like “Zee Spittaire!” I made a kind of laughing and spraying sound, as if it could all be part of Jeff’s little car-burning game.

  “That’s so lame! What are you doing that for, for Christ’s sake?” Jeff cursed, jerking the water off. Then he kicked the car upright and cursed again. “Stupid.”

  I just stood there, holding the dripping hose.

  “Jeff, get in here,” his mother said. “Jeff.” I smelled cigarette smoke coming from the kitchen.

  He turned to go into the house, and then looked back. “Hey, did you know that my dad owns some original copies of The Human Torch? I think he left them in the attic. Let’s go find them.”

  “But your mom—”

  “Hey, did I ever tell you my uncle’s coming?”

  He dashed into the house while the smell of hose water and burning plastic drifted up over the patio.

  Chapter 8

  Over the next few days, mostly from things Mrs. Tracy said when Jessica Feeney wasn’t there, which was a lot of the time, I picked up more stuff about her. One morning, I was in the hall near the classroom door when I overheard her telling one of the parents that Jessica and her family had been living in town for a week or two already. They had come down from Boston and were renting a condo really close to my house while she went for a bunch of tests and treatments at the hospital in New Haven.

  “Jessica just finished undergoing some skin grafts,” she said to Darlene’s mother as I put my lunch in my locker. “Some more grafts,” she added. “She’s had quite a few already.”

  Undergoing was the word she used. She said it again to the class when Jessica was out of the room after lunch. It sounded so creepy. I imagined someone lying flat on a table going under some kind of horrible machine.

  After supper that night I searched the Net on my computer and found out basically that skin grafts are when doctors take skin from one part of a person and stick it on another part that is damaged, hoping it will grow normally. It seemed like some kind of horror story with bizarre people in wet basements doing things with bodies. I also found out that sometimes scientists grow stuff that looks and feels like skin. They make it in test tubes and then sew it onto where your skin is burned. Other times they take skin from an animal that’s sort of pink, like a pig, and they use that on you, at least to start.

  For faces, I read, it was mostly your own skin because it matched better, although Jessica’s didn’t really match much. It took time to heal, though, and then it blends better. They have pictures on the Internet that I didn’t want to see, but I looked at anyway. They made me feel sick after eating so I stopped searching.

  Just before bed, though, I was online again and I saw that there were long times between when burned people did the treatments — to see how well the skin grafts “took.” I guessed they didn’t go so well for Jessica and she was probably starting some more.

  Somebody (I thought it might have been Courtney, but I wasn??
?t sure, because it made its way all across the room) said that Jessica’s parents wanted her to keep up with Catholic school between hospital visits because she had lost almost a year of school time.

  “Jessica’s been to a number of hospitals over the last few months,” Mrs. Tracy said, too. “So it’s likely she won’t be at St. Catherine’s for very long. Though New Haven has, of course, one of the best hospitals, so there’s really no telling.”

  The next day in the hall before lunch, I found myself telling Samantha Embriano and Joey that even though Jessica would normally have taken my bus in the morning, she didn’t.

  “When I was taking the absentee notes to the office this morning, I saw a man drive her in late,” I said. “And yesterday afternoon, the same guy came early to pick her up.”

  “So that’s her father?” said Samantha Embriano.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Does he look normal?” asked Joey. I laughed. “What? Yeah. Of course!”

  “So he wasn’t in the fire?”

  I felt a shiver run up my back. I’d never thought of that before. “No. I guess not.”

  When I came home after school on Wednesday, my mother was cutting vegetables at the kitchen counter. I dropped my backpack on the table and washed my hands. She told me she heard from another mom that there was a new girl in my class.

  I felt nervous all of a sudden. I had never said anything about Jessica, although she was pretty much all I was thinking about. I tried to be cool about it.

  “Jessica Feeney,” I said, wiping my hands dry.

  “Right …”

  I shrugged and didn’t say much, not actually going to my room to start homework, but looking at the mail on the table and flipping through a clothes catalog that had come. I saw a picture of a girl who reminded me of Courtney. Then my mom started asking questions and I gave her some answers until somehow we were into what Jessica Feeney was like and I used the word melted.