TORCH (5 page)

“Kai called me a disease, Regan. No one wants to hear that from a hot guy.”

“No one cares what Kai Seaver thinks. He may be hot, but that’s all he has going for him.”

“He’s a good swimmer,” I say. “Why isn’t he on the Eastfield team?”

“Because he’s a loner. He acts like he’s better than everyone else—when he even bothers to show up at school.” She ponders for a moment and relents. “Maybe he’s depressed or something.”

“If he isn’t, he should be,” I say. “With that personality.”

“Are you going to ask your dad what’s going on with his family?”

I make a face. “I’ll try, but Dad’s not exactly chatty, and I don’t see that much of him. Could you try your dad?”

 “I already did. He changed the subject.” She sighs. “I wish Mom was here. She’d tell me.”

Regan was nine when she lost her mom and remembers her well. All I have is a few fractured images of my mom, whose sandy hair and hazel eyes I inherited. My one vivid memory is of the two of us at a swimming pool, when I was about five. Mom was sitting on the edge, trying to get me to hold my breath and open my eyes under water. She threw a handful of coins into the pool and when I picked them all up, she was so excited she let me spend the money on candy. I didn’t get what the big deal was about, but I remember being happy that I’d made her happy.

The next year, she died in a car crash on the way to pick me up from school. I waited outside for ages until the principal and Nate came out to find me. I knew something bad had happened because Nate was crying. The principal drove us to the hospital in his van, and all Dad said was, “It’s too late. She’s gone.” It took me a couple of weeks to realize that “gone” meant gone for good.

Regan and I are still lost in our private musings when we reach the school, but shake off the mood when we see Melissa.

“Coming to the audition?” I ask.

“No way,” Melissa says, laughing. “I’m scared of the competition.”

She gestures down the hall, where Bianca and her troops are advancing on us like an army. They’re all dressed in identical yoga gear, trying to look like a chorus line. There are four girls besides Bianca, and while they’re all pretty, none are as pretty as Bianca. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the group, I bet.

“Don’t tell me you losers think you can make it into dance club?” Bianca asks, giving my sweatshirt and jeans the once over.

I return the once over. “Bianca, you’re the only person I know who actually looks better in a bathing cap and goggles.”

There’s a silence, in which everyone, including me, contemplates my social death wish. I’ve started a war I can’t win.

“I guess you think you’re some kind of hero in the pool,” Bianca says. “But I bet you’re as graceful as a whale on land. Look at those shoulders.”

“Whales don’t have shoulders,” I point out.

Melissa speaks up. “It wouldn’t kill you to be nice to the new girl, Bianca.”

Turning on Melissa, Bianca says, “Wearing your hair up doesn’t make you a ballerina, Bunhead, but go ahead and tiptoe through the audition because we could use a laugh. As for you, Chunky,” she adds, turning to Regan, “Stick to the back row. I don’t want you blocking my view.”

Tossing her auburn hair, Bianca coasts into the gym on a wave of giggles from her troops.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Regan and Melissa. “I can’t help baiting her but I didn’t mean to drag you guys into it.”

“As if I care about Bianca’s opinion,” Melissa says. “The bun absolutely makes the ballerina.”

Her posture is perfect as she leaves but Regan slumps a little. “Don’t let her get to you,” I say, pulling her into the gym. “You’ll knock ’em dead.”

Miss Otis, the gym teacher, gets right down to business. Cueing up the music, she demonstrates a sequence of steps and then watches as we copy it. In the front row, Bianca and her imitators execute each progression with military-like precision.

I turn out to be as clumsy as Bianca predicted. Regan, on the other hand, does pretty well until I trip over a mat and send us both crashing to the floor.

A sneaker lands on my forehead. I’m on Bianca’s turf now, and there’s no question of whose pedicure takes precedence.

Smiling down at me, she says, “Stay out of my way, Loser. Next time I’ll be wearing stilettos.”

I’m in a smoke-filled hallway, watching from overhead as a white-haired man in a security guard’s uniform crawls on his hands and knees toward the door. His jacket is tied around the lower half of his face. I hear a muffled word: “Help.”

I try to move but I seem to be locked in place, paralyzed. Yet I can sense intense heat and the smoke burns my nose and my throat.

Just a few yards from the door the old man falls onto his side, coughing and gasping.

Now, I am outside, watching, still from overhead, as the long, low building is consumed by flames. There’s an explosion and a fireball rips through the roof and puffs into the dark sky.

The front door bursts open and another man staggers out. In his arms is the security guard. I can’t get a good look at the rescuer coming down the stairs because flames obscure his face. In fact, his whole body is dancing with flame.

Reaching the grass, he falls to his knees and drops the security guard. I still can’t move, so I try to call out to them, and perhaps the rescuer hears something, because he looks up and the flames that surrounded him flicker out.

It’s my father. And he’s nearly naked.

Struggling, I break free of my sheets, sit up and switch on the light. My heart is racing and I’m fighting for air. I’m so hot it feels like I’m still in the fire.

“It was just a dream,” I tell myself, hugging my knees to my chest to stop the shaking. “Just a dream. Just a dream.”

The repetition calms me. After awhile, I get up and walk down the hall and check Dad’s room. Empty, as it should be. He’s working the night shift.

Crawling back into bed, I keep the light on and try to fall asleep, but I can’t.

Finally, I get up and go into the bathroom. Fumbling around in my make-up bag, I find a pack of matches. I take a sheet of newspaper from the stack I keep in the cupboard under the towels, crumple it into a ball and drop it in the sink. Then I strike a match and hold it to the edge of the paper, watching as fire surrounds the ball. The flames rise to meet the faucet in a beautiful burst, and then it’s over. All that remains is a small pile of ashes in the sink.

Usually one sheet is enough to calm me, but tonight I crumple another and burn it. I switch on the bathroom fan so that the smoke detector in the hall doesn’t go off, and burn sheet after sheet of newspaper.

Even after I’ve burned a dozen, all I can think about is Nate, who died in a smoky hallway like the one in my dream. My brave, happy-go-lucky big brother was alone when Uncle Rick finally found him. Now I truly understand how desperate Nate must have felt—trapped, abandoned, filled with panic. It’s not fair that this happened. Not fair to Nate, not fair to Dad, Graham and me.

Tears start rolling down my cheeks. Wiping them away with my sleeve, I grab a couple of sheets of paper, scrunch them together furiously, and throw the ball into the sink. Before I can strike the match, however, the paper alights on its own—not from the edge, where I’m holding it, but with a little puff from the center. The flame has a faint indigo tinge, and it spreads slowly, until the bluish ball collapses into a heap of ash.

I stare into the sink, wondering if I’m hallucinating. Probably, because instead of freaking out like I should be, a sense of calm comes over me.

After flushing the ashes down the toilet, I go back to bed and fall asleep.

G
raham slides the
Press-Tribune
across the breakfast table to me and says, “Dad’ll be sorry he missed this one.”

I take another spoonful of cereal and chew as I check out the photo on the front page. It shows a long, low warehouse in flames, while the fire department tries to contain the inferno.

While no one was seriously injured,
the article says,
the company’s security guard was hospitalized with smoke inhalation.

Below the article is a second picture, this one of the white-haired man from my dream being lifted into an ambulance.

“I thought I was a goner,”
the story quotes the man as saying.
“I came to on the lawn. No idea how I managed to get out.”

The spoon falls out of my hand and clatters into the cereal bowl.

“What’s wrong?” Graham asks.

I stare at him blankly for a moment. “I had a dream about a fire last night.”

“Yeah, so? I have them all the time.”

“Me, too. But last night I dreamed about
this
fire.” I tap the paper.

He tilts his head. “What do you mean?”

“The building, the security guard... I saw them.”

Reaching for the cereal, Graham pours himself another bowl. “Warehouses all look the same,” he says, shrugging. “Security guards, too.”

“You think?”

He grins. “Sure. It’s an old man’s job. Except for Dad.”

I want to believe him so I drop the subject. It’s better than explaining to my little brother, who depends on me, that I’m losing it. Grief over Nate is finally hitting me hard enough to pull me under.

The dream last night felt so real. And the fire I started in the sink without a match? That seemed even more real. It reminds me of something similar that happened at Regan’s house in July, when we visited. Dad had completely forgotten my birthday the week before. Although I knew he had a lot on his mind, I was still disappointed. Okay, pissed off. It felt like a statement that the only kid who’d mattered had died.

Regan tried to cheer me up by baking a cake. She covered it in an inch of frosting to hide a sinkhole and lit seventeen candles. I made a wish and blew them out. They relit. Regan swore they weren’t trick candles, but I kept blowing and they kept relighting, until we were laughing hysterically. Finally she grabbed the snuffer and killed them. But when she went into the kitchen to get a knife, the candles relit. I remember thinking, as I snuffed them one by one, that the tiny indigo flames were pretty.

These strange events—the hot flushes, the spontaneous blue flames, the dreams—are starting to add up to trouble. I don’t believe in visions or magic powers. Mysteries make me nervous, so I really hope there’s a logical explanation.

One thing I know for sure is that nothing like this ever happened when I swam. I could block out anything simply by focusing on one stroke after another, always trying to shave a fraction of a second off my time. There was no room for negative thoughts. But the guidance counselor at my last school said suppressing my feelings about Nate was a bad idea and that my unconscious mind would find another outlet for them down the road.
“Grief shows itself in unexpected ways,”
she said.

Well, my little fire problem is “unexpected,” and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

It looks like there’s only one solution: I’ll have to join Eastfield’s swim team.