The Fire Artist (3 page)

I grab a purple pen from my bag, and I draw the Empire State Building on my body. A promise to myself. Someday I will join them. Someday I will be far away from here. I draw it somewhere no one else can see.

On my hip bone.

Then I drop the phone on my bed and take what’s coming to me.

His way doesn’t work. His way never worked. But soon, soon, nights like this won’t be needed. That’s what I tell myself as I leave the garage, pushing open the door with a clumsy combination of elbow and thumb, my hands hurting in a way they never do when the fire comes from within, and I walk back inside my dark and muggy house and head straight for the freezer.

We don’t have air-conditioning. This is ordinarily a very bad thing in southern Florida. But tonight, it’s a very good thing, seeing as the windows in our one-story house are always open, which expedites the occasional nighttime excursion after a renewal.

My chest burns again, like it did at the ballpark when my fire rattled a concrete wall. After every renewal, my body roars with too much heat and propulsion. I have to skim some off the top so I don’t set the world on fire.

I slide open the screen on my bedroom window and lower a pair of black rubber boots to the ground. My hands are colder now; I’ve cooled them with ice for the last hour.

Before I can leave, I conduct a safety check. My mother—she is curled up in a ball in her papasan chair in the TV room. Coffee-table-high stacks of newspapers surround her. Each day, she reads the paper cover to cover, circling articles, making notes on the newsprint, and looking up the rare word she doesn’t
know in a purple, tattered paperback dictionary that’s tucked, oddly, between her knees like a pillow. This is where she spends her days and her nights. The navy-blue cushion on the rattan chair must have a Mom-sized indent now, but I rarely see the cushion without its tiny inhabitant.

They are fused together.

A mosquito buzzes past her, flickers near her nose. She twitches but doesn’t wake. Her hands are curled up under her cheek, her teal-colored nails visible in the dark. She used to paint my nails when I was younger. She made a big production of it, pulling out a wooden footstool, plunking herself on it like a manicurist in a salon, and painting my nails in patterns of peach and aqua, lavender and mint, every now and then in bright purple and cherry red if I could convince her.

“Purple is my favorite color,” I’d beg as I held out my hands, as if I were a sophisticated little lady getting all dolled up for a fancy occasion, even though all we were doing was running errands. We’d put on little wedge sandals and pretty summer dresses for a trip to the bank, the drugstore, the park.

Then she’d do hers, and I’d watch as she carefully, artfully applied the polish, all while whispering to me how she liked to accessorize even for an errand. “I just think you should look your best whenever you leave the house. Besides,” she’d whisper, “you never know when you might run into a granter.”

My eyes widened. “A granter! Have you ever seen one?”

She’d shake her head and smile. “Nope. And I’ve no need to. Because all my wishes have come true. I have everything I could ever want.”

Now, she never leaves the house, and I never do my nails,
because I don’t want to draw any more attention to my scarred hands.

But my mom still paints her nails, though it’s probably just a way to pass the time in that chair that’s become her burrow. There’s a small wet spot near her fingertips. Her fingers leak now and then at night, when she’s in the deepest stages of sleep. She was a water artist years ago, before the Leagues began. She never performed in a formalized system, just in the odd tent of a fortune-teller or mystic. Or in most cases, as the party entertainment at some pink-shirted, white-jacketed, and overly suntanned rich Floridian’s swank home with a lavish outdoor pool. I’m told she could make the most beautiful, majestic waves roll off her body and swirl around her.

I find a hand towel on the floor, stained from years of use, and tuck it gently under her fingers. She won’t like waking up to a wet spot in her home.

Maybe she does need a granter now. I bet she has a whole new set of wishes. Or really, one wish. To be well again.

My brother, Xavier, is snoring on the nearby plaid couch, an apron still tied around his waist. He didn’t even make it to his bedroom. His hair is slicked with grease, the side effect of being a short-order cook. I wish he were awake. I wish he could come with me tonight, but no one can. Besides, I’ve grown accustomed to being without him after he spent the last four years behind bars for arson.

I tiptoe down the hall and press an ear against my father’s door. I hear no sound, no movement. Still, I turn the handle slowly and open the door just the slightest crack. When I see my father lying still, eyes closed, chest rising up and down, I
release my breath silently. I look at him for a second; these are his finest moments. When he’s sleeping. This is how he should look all the time, never waking, never ever.

My chest tightens; I suck in a hard breath, and hold my hands behind my back so I don’t accidentally set my house to flames.

I retreat back to my own room, the one I share with Jana, who’s five years younger than I am—twelve. Jana’s the reason I need to impress the scout. Because if I succeed in the Leagues, then my dad might back off her. I know he’s itching to draw out her powers like he did to me. See, Jana hasn’t come into her power yet, if she even has one. Only time will tell; powers don’t usually surface until around age thirteen.

Usually
.

I was a “late bloomer,” as they called me. But I was actually the freak; I was proof that enough desperation could make you upend genetics.

Scientists have been studying elemental arts for years, in a quest to understand why some have gifts but most do not. They started their research with a young boy in Egypt named Rami. He’d been born into a fire-eating family many years ago, and one day he wowed crowds in the streets of Cairo with an unplanned trick more spectacular than merely swallowing fire. He had expelled a huge breath and an accompanying plume, when twin jets of flames burst from his hands too.

From his hands
.

A boy who could make fire. A boy who could control fire. He was so much more than a fire-eater.

But the scientists couldn’t find a new gene in him, or in any
of the others they studied. Their conclusion was that many fire-eaters had some sort of undetectable genetic difference, and that’s why they can play with fire. For Rami, his body had been built to accommodate fire, to make it, to create it, to control it.

Soon there were stories of other young teens who could create fountains of water with their hands, who could walk through air. Who could craft and control the elements.

All the bizarre sideshow acts who’d been relegated to circus tents and carnival cages came out of the woodwork.

I can hold my breath underwater for five minutes
.

I can levitate
.

I can make it rain
.

They were the precursors. The freaks before we knew that freak powers could be harnessed, channeled, trained, and turned into something beautiful. Something people would pay to see.

Since there is no litmus test, no pinprick at birth or blood test later on to determine whose DNA has been imprinted with elemental abilities, it is a waiting game to see if powers surface. Most elemental artists come into their powers around age thirteen, but there are usually hints beforehand. The accidental flicker from their fiery fingers or the kid who swims like a fish at a young age. Later, with training and many-hours-a-day workouts and drills, those abilities can be harnessed into something more for those who are good enough. The high school athlete gifted enough to go pro.

Parents with such powers are much more likely to have children with elemental gifts.

Unless a girl born of fire and water has no choice but to find her power another way.

Jana is sound asleep. The clutching in my heart is tighter and hotter, and it wants to burn me alive from the inside out. That’s the Faustian bargain I struck when I got my fire in the first place. I bring fire in to save me, but the fire is slowly killing me.

I climb out the window. I slide the screen back in place, grab the pair of black rubber boots, and slip through the tangled grass and fallen palm leaves in our yard.

A pair of headlights sweep the street. I tense but duck quietly behind a bush. I peer through the branches as a sedan rolls by, the telltale sirens on the roof quiet for now. The cop could be driving through or heading home. I’m not doing something illegal, but I’d rather not be spotted. I wait until the street is quiet again, as if the silence itself is its own soundtrack of emptiness.

Then I creep, catlike, through neighbors’ patchy yards, crisscrossing cars jacked up on cinder blocks in driveways, winding along wilting acacia bushes and past ceramic flamingo statues, including one with a missing wing. A drop of sweat beads down my back under my black cotton tank top.

I grip my hands together behind my back, the pressure keeping my flames inside me for now.

A bullfrog sits in a driveway a few blocks down. His skin is slick and his chin pulses in and out. When I near him, he scampers away. Animals don’t like me, especially cold-blooded ones.

I turn onto the path between two worn-out, weathered homes beaten down by sun and rain and heat. I wedge past leather ferns, then the crunchy Bermuda grass slopes downward as the canal comes into view a few feet away. My heart speeds
more, a rhythm that would alarm any doctor monitoring me, the kind of pace that can only be soothed by one thing. It’s like a hole is about to sear through me, and I hate the way this feels. I stop walking, take off my flip-flops, and slide on the black boots.

The waist-deep saltwater canals that run behind the homes here are quiet. They’re not wide enough for motorboats; they’re merely thoroughfares curling out to the bay. I wade past the gnarled mangroves and stand up to my belly in murky water. The water ripples nearby as a giant snake scurries from me. A boa constrictor, I think. Probably someone’s onetime pet that escaped. Our canals are rife with boas and Burmese pythons that were once kept in cages.

The snake flees down the water, submerging his body, and he’s out of sight.

I’m alone.

I dip my hands in the water and let the fire fly. From my heart, through my veins, all the way out through my fingertips. The water lights up with an orange glow. I glance around, and fear pounds in my ear. I plunge my hands deeper to try to hide the light.

I set off more flames, like I’m letting loose what ails me, what has sickened my insides. I drop down to my knees, the water up to my neck, my hands as far from the surface as possible, extinguishing each flame underwater. And like this, in the brackish canals littered with beer cans and cast-aside exotic pets, the seconds spread. They pool into minutes as all this extra fire pours out of me.

This is the fire in me. Wild and ravaging. Devouring.

Then my heart is no longer racing away, and the tightness subsides, and I can breathe without burning my throat. I crawl out of the canal and flop onto the prickly grass, spent and exhausted, like I have just heaved up a bruised and battered wild thing, a half soul with a an amputated life.

I’d like to say I feel better, like I’ve just cleaned out the house. And I do feel better, technically speaking. But I don’t feel any less disgusting now that my fire stores are normal. Now that I can manage them.

I drag myself off the grass and wipe a hand across my slick forehead, covered in sweat. I’m wet and muddy and I wash myself off with a nearby hose left in a front yard.

I make it back to my house, unseen, unheard. I leave the boots outside the window. I peel off my shorts, underwear, and tank top. The skyscraper on my hip bone is smudged from the hose and the canals. I touch the messy ink marks, wishing I were there. Then I hop back inside, drop the damp and dirty clothes into a plastic bag, and toss that into the laundry basket inside my closet.

No one else does laundry around here anyway.