Firecracker (6 page)

L
ucy lived in a row of houses that all looked alike. They were beige and brick, and the only identifiable feature of hers was the cluster of balloons tied to the mailbox. Two balloons apparently meant “party time” in the Redlich house. The party started at six, which is ridiculously early, but I got there around eight. That was fine because the invitation told me it ended at
?
, which meant that time was open to interpretation. It could last years.

I had my driver turn the car off, and I sat and thought for a minute about why exactly I'd come to Hair Eater's birthday party. I was not a fan of the idea of birthdays. There's no reason to celebrate the aging process. Birthday parties were like having breathing soirees or heart-pumping galas. They were celebrations of the mere act of existing. And I found that stupid.

After several minutes of me sitting, a very small car about the size of my outstretched arms pulled in front of the house. A little door opened. Noah stepped out and looked around.

“Drive!” I said to the driver. “Take me home.” But then I quickly said, “Stop!” Noah was looking straight at the car, so my cover was blown. In the future if I wanted to be stealth, I probably wouldn't have a three-hundred-thousand-dollar, chauffeured Rolls-Royce slam on its brakes in the middle of a suburban housing development.

I got out and walked over to Noah. I tried to play it casual by making a joke about his tiny car. “When men have really ridiculous flashy cars, it usually means that they have small penises. Your car, I guess, points to a very big penis.”

“It's my mom's car,” he said. “She lets me borrow it.”

“Your mom's penis must be enormous,” I said.

“I didn't expect to see you here.”

“I didn't expect to see me here either. But that's who I am—a master of what's not expected. Do you really want to go to this thing?”

“Of course. I'm here, aren't I?”

“Well, then so am I. Shall we?”

It was a long time before anyone answered the door. It felt even longer than that because I'm not good at small talk. Noah kept looking at me like I was supposed to ask him if he'd had a nice weekend or something. I wondered if maybe no one would ever open the door, and then I wouldn't get credit for going to the birthday party.

“Yes?” asked the woman who answered the door. She wore a nervous smile, as though afraid we were there to rob her.

“I'm Noah,” Noah said. “This is Astrid. We're here for the birthday party.”

Then the woman looked absolutely terrified. I wanted to assure her that we needed nothing from her, but then my mind wandered and I almost decided that we should try to rob her just to see what that would be like. She was an easy mark and would be too scared to tell the cops.

“I don't . . . I don't think there is a party anymore.” She looked back into the house.

“No, there is,” I said. “I got an invitation and everything. It was pink. There was glitter on it.”

There was another long bout of silence, and then I heard Lucy from inside the house. “It's okay,” she said. “They can come in.”

The living room was small but bright. There were snacks on coffee tables and more balloons. But there was no music and no people. The place was untouched, as though it were a museum about birthday parties. Lucy was trying to bury herself into the side of the couch. She was chomping away at her hair in what was not a celebratory hair eating. It was the hair eating of sadness.

Noah walked in slowly and I followed because it had become pretty much impossible, by that point, to sneak away. He sat down on the couch next to Lucy and ate a corn chip with a hefty portion of lumpy, green-and-white mush. He smiled at her as if nothing was odd at all about the party. Then he asked a bit too enthusiastically, “What is in this dip? It's fantastic.”

Lucy's mother gave a tight smile. “It's artichoke. And there's also crispy onions in it.”

“Well,” Noah said. “It's out of this world. Really. Good. Astrid, can I dip you a chip? You won't believe how good this is.”

I sat down on the other side of the couch. “No,” I said, “I believe you.”

Lucy scooted over on the couch so she was now closer to Noah and me but still wrapped up in a tight ball. “No one . . .” she said really quiet.

“What?” I said.

“No one . . . came.” This was pretty obvious at this point, though I hadn't said it out loud because there was no need. Lucy lifted her head so that she was looking right at me.

“I wouldn't say
no one
came,” I said. “We're here.”

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “But I don't even want to think about what you must think of me.”

Yes. She didn't want to know what I thought about her. But to be fair, no one has ever wanted to know what I thought about them. Almost everyone mentioned in this book probably should not be reading this book. But with Lucy—and in that moment—I didn't think of her any differently than I had before the guestless party. Why would I? “If I had a birthday party, no one would come either. Maybe Pierre, but that's a good reason to never have a party in the first place,” I said. I wasn't trying to make her feel better. It was simply a fact.

“Ha, ha,” Lucy said. “
Everyone
would come. I mean . . . ” Lucy trailed off and her lip quivered, which, coupled with her lisp, made her sound less like a person and more like an owl.

Noah stood up and sorted through Lucy's iPhone. “It's not a party without music, right?” he said, trying to change the subject. “We should dance or something . . . Is this whole playlist just French horn? Well, that's fine.” And then Lucy and I were sitting on the couch while Noah tried his best to dance with no one to “Fanfare for the Common Man” while he insisted, “Come on, it's a party!” He was trying. And I could tell from his face that it wasn't easy. It was a depressing party. I'm sure there have been memorial services for school buses crashing into puppy stores with more celebration. There have been solitaire games with more people.

I stood up because by being there, I'd already completed the task I was supposed to. I didn't want to go to Lucy's birthday party (and here I hadn't thought I had anything in common with the rest of the school!), and my showing up was pretty much all Dean Rein had asked of me. He didn't expect me to change the world. I wasn't a magician. Also, where was the magician? I was pretty sure there was supposed to be one.

As I inched my way closer to the door, Noah changed his dance moves in a spastic maneuver that brought him very close to my face. “Where are you going?” he hissed at me through clenched teeth.

“There's no party,” I said. “This isn't a party. I'm doing everyone a favor and putting this event out of its misery. Time of death: now.”

Noah raised his eyebrow as if to say,
So that's who you are, huh?
And while it wasn't part of some elaborate plan to change my mind, it made me feel a pang in my gut. Meanwhile, Lucy and her mom both looked very helpless, and Lucy was tearing up. They didn't say anything, but it was as though they were asking me for something. They wanted me to do something. And I am the kind of person who does things. They're not always the right things or the good things, but I do things. My motto: Astrid Krieger: I Do Things.

I looked around the room for something I could use. Some good gear for epic revenge. There were chips. Balloons. Cake. A family portrait. A collection of porcelain elephants. An aquarium. A television. A bin full of umbrellas.

“Who was supposed to be here? Do you have a list?”

Lucy's mom nodded.

“The aquarium. Do you love each and every living thing inside?”

“They're my fish,” Lucy said. “Of course I love them.”

“Yes, but can we make a small sacrifice? In war, we sometimes must sacrifice those we love.”

“We're not fighting a war,” Noah said.

“My grandfather taught me that every day you're still alive, you'd better be fighting a war.”

“Delightful,” Noah said.

“He wouldn't like you either.”

“What are you going to do with my fish?” Lucy asked.

“I don't need to use all of them. That's an anemone, right? The one that looks like . . . genitals?”

“It's not a fish,” Lucy said.

“My grandfather used to do this thing in the navy. You put one of them in someone's footlocker—or in this case, their house or car or sweatshirt . . . or school locker. The anemone is, like, ninety-nine something percent water and the rest is just shit. You anemone your enemy. The water evaporates and you're left with a smell that never goes away.”

“Excuse me?” Lucy's mother said. I had turned her off completely.

“You want to do that to everyone who didn't show? There's only one anemone.” Noah had a point.

“We can cover however many we can cover. Did Summer Wonder RSVP?”

“Yes,” Lucy's mother said, a little unsure.

“A lot of people did,” Lucy said. RSVPing to her party was probably a hilarious way for those people to prank Lucy. But pranks aren't funny when you target the weak. That's certainly not my style. What did Lucy ever do to anybody? Stupid people don't understand pranks.

“I'd love to hide this in her car. It'll make all of us feel better.”

“I don't want to do anything mean,” Lucy said.

“It's not mean. It's what's right.”

“Maybe we should all go to the movies,” Lucy's mother suggested.

“What do you want to do, Lucy?” Noah asked.

Lucy was quiet for a few moments. “Whatever Astrid wants to do for revenge sounds fun, sure. But I love my aquarium. I don't know. I'd also maybe go to the movies. Something romantic. Or a fantasy. But also something funny. A musical?”

Whatever fog of horrible sadness I had walked into was now—at least temporarily—lifted. In its place was a new problem—and that problem was me. I shouldn't have shown up. And I didn't want to spend the next two hours watching a funny romantic fantasy musical movie. I wanted to be alone. I went into my purse and left a hundred-dollar bill on the coffee table.

“You all should go to the movies together. Enjoy it.”

“You're leaving?” Noah was incredulous.

“Yes, I think I am,” I said.

Noah walked me to the corner and whispered, “You can't just throw money at her.”

“Of course I can. And I did,” I whispered back.

“She's sad. You can see that, right?”

“Of course she's sad.”

“Look at her.”

“What?” I said.

“Just look at her,” Noah said.

And so I did. Lucy's eyes were downcast, and she was still biting on her lower lip. She gazed up at me with her pathetic face. She said, “Why do you think no one else came?” She was kind of asking everyone, but she was looking at me. No one wants to ever know the truth. Not about bad things. And I didn't know the true answer anyway, at least not for sure.

“I don't know,” I said. It was the least horrible answer available to me.

She nodded anyway, as if I'd actually cleared up the matter. What I was feeling had to be what empathy was like. Dean Rein would be so happy to see me experiencing empathy. And suddenly, I couldn't leave. “Hey. Everyone,” I said. (Only three people counted as everyone.) “Let's take this party on the road. I have a big car and a driver.”

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

Lucy eventually chose to go to a roller-skating rink because I'd presented her with the option of going basically anywhere in the entire world, and she chose the worst option.

I had never roller skated before. I'm not good with things on wheels. I rented skates and moved out to the floor and
oh my god
, I was roller skating. I couldn't believe it. Within a second, I fell. Hard. Noah grabbed my hand to pull me up, but he's not very coordinated either, and so he fell. The next several minutes until I gave up were a constant exercise in standing and falling. Roller skating is fucking terrible. I can't express that enough.

I gave up quickly and crawled to the side of the floor. I sat there as people blew past me, sometimes backward.

Lucy whizzed by me. She could move fast. Her face was pink with a certain kind of happiness, and it was nice to see. She was happy, and I had helped with that. I'm not saying I changed the world or anything—I totally didn't, but I started to get why Dean Rein wanted me to do things I didn't want to do.

“Happy birthday,” I called after her as she sped past me in her next lap. She waved, and when she did, her hair blew back, falling however briefly out of her mouth.

I'
d been thinking about Talia Pasteur a lot.

The night before I got expelled from Bristol, there was a party. As Pierre described it, “It is by the lake. There are some senior guys who have a rowboat.” I wasn't sure what he was trying to say with that information. Was the party on the rowboat? Was the rowboat ferrying in supplies? Or did the rowboat have nothing to do with the party and Pierre was simply excited to have heard of a rowboat earlier in the day? Pierre was an idiot. Nonetheless, everyone I knew was going except for, well, me.

“You should attend,” he said. “Dean Rein's office will still be there tomorrow.” You see, the next Monday, there was to be a test in Dean Rein's class. That night, according to the plan, was the night we were going to get the answers. It wasn't just for me. It was for everyone. I was accused of being the one big cheater at Bristol, but truthfully, everyone cheated at Bristol. It was the way things were done. I was just really good at it.

When everyone else was at the rowboat party, I was outside the administrative building on my own—or so I thought, until I heard a wavering voice say, “You're soooo lucky.” I looked over toward a collection of trees to see Talia Pasteur fall over, her face hitting the dirt. It does bear repeating that even dressed up for the lake party, she continued to look so much like a tree that she was nearly invisible until she collapsed.

She lifted her head, probably expecting me to pull her up. But I was still by the door to the administrative building. “I probably have dirt all over my face now,” she said.

“Yeah. That's what happens when your face falls in dirt.”

Talia was feebly drunk. Drunk-Talia was like one of those inflatable people with swinging arms outside car dealerships.

“Why am I lucky?” I asked her. I still have no idea why I decided to engage her, but my concentration was shot.

“Because he wants to be with you all the time. All the time, Astrid.” Surprisingly, I understood what she was talking about. Talia had a burning crush on Pierre. It was a secret only to people who never talked to her. The fact that I was having a conversation about Pierre proved how unlucky I really was, thus collapsing her entire premise.

Talia pulled herself off the ground and brushed dirt off part of her cheek. “I just wanted to kiss him on the face.”

“That's a really disgusting image you just gave me.”

“What should I do, Astrid?” She swung her arm out toward my shoulder, either to hug me or kill a mosquito. I stepped back and gave her the opportunity to do neither. “I just need someone to tell me what to do,” she said.

People like Talia always needed other people to tell them what to do. It's why she had such consuming crushes and almost nothing to say.

I didn't care what she did. Her love life may have been the single least important issue in the world. But like I said, I sort of liked Talia. She was almost a friend. Also, I happened to have a use for her at that moment. The lock to the administrative building had proven difficult to pick, and my master key had gone missing the year before. “You should throw a rock at that window.”

“Why?”

“Don't you ever get so mad you need to just break something? You're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, Talia. It would really help.”

Talia scrunched up her face so her eyes looked like tiny slits extending from her nostrils. She picked a rock up from the ground and flung it. It didn't hit anything. It just fell on the ground.

“Why don't you try again, Talia?”

She pulled her arm back again, and this time, the rock hit glass, making a nice shattering sound. I nodded approvingly. Talia was out of breath like she had just had the most important experience of her entire life. “What do we do now?” she asked.

“Now?” I said. “Now we go inside.”

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

When I saw the all-new, blond Talia Pasteur with her stupid-looking mime makeup the week before, I felt a combination of shock and confusion. It was like trying to do a really hard math problem while also trying to swing on a trapeze. I may be overselling my feelings, but it was overwhelming given that I arrived at a bunch of very different conclusions all at once. Talia Pasteur had been planning her haircut and her eye makeup for months, maybe even years. Talia was ready to blossom—like when a tree becomes a butterfly. For whatever reason, Talia waited until I was out of the picture to make this big life change. That wasn't a coincidence. I decided that Talia Pasteur had wanted me out of Bristol. She was the person who set me up.

I had other suspects, sure. Others had wanted me gone. My grandfather has a phrase for people like us: “Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown.” You may have heard that before. He didn't make it up (though he claims he did). What it means is if you are, say, Astrid Krieger, and life as Astrid Krieger is thoroughly and completely awesome, you should still watch out. It can be a pain in the neck (you know, because of that heavy crown). It's not all lollipops and rocket ships. People very often don't like me. (I know. Shocking.) Luckily for me, though, the people who haven't liked me have rarely been smart or clever.

I first suspected Whitney Brown of setting me up. My first year at Bristol, Whitney was running for freshman class student representative. She had a prominent unibrow and fingers like a lizard. I had known her since I was two, when we would quietly play with blocks and think about how much we hated each other. I remember her calling my stuffed bear “learning disabled.”

Student government elections are a lot different at Bristol than they probably are at your school. At public school, someone's mom does her posters with Magic Marker. At Bristol, it's this whole thing with professional printers and attack ads. So Whitney Brown's father was actually running for Senate against my grandfather that same year and his stupid slogan was One Choice, One Connecticut, Carl Preston Brown. He lost. But not before Whitney ran for class president. So Whitney used the same printer and the same design, and her posters were supposed to say One Choice, One Year, Whitney Brown. I spent a late night wandering through campus and blacking out certain letters on her posters (specifically,
Choice
On
ar
Whitney
and
n
) so her campaign slogan became One Eye Brow. She had like a thousand of those posters printed, and she was super angry. (She shouldn't have been because she actually won. People loved voting for “One Eyebrow.” And I didn't care either way.) Do you want to know how she tried to get me back? By hanging a bucket of water over my door. Seriously. If her plan had been executed perfectly, I would have opened my door and the bucket of water would have fallen on my head. And then what? I'd have gotten a little wet. Who cares? I could just dry myself and change clothes in my room, which is where the bucket-holding door was. Straight-up amateur hour. I decided that there was no way Whitney set me up. She never could have been so innovative.

What was just so unbelievable about Talia Pasteur is that she tried to get me kicked out of Bristol and succeeded. I honestly didn't think she had it in her. I would have admired her if I wasn't so mad at her. I never thought much of Talia at Bristol. I certainly didn't hate her. We weren't friends, but she was the closest thing to a friend I had. When I was stealing term papers or buying fireworks, she was usually there. Talia wasn't my enemy. I didn't understand why I was her enemy. We weren't equals. I was the shark and she was the little fish sharks barely even notice. Why would she have wanted me out of school? I could have thought of a hundred reasons a hundred people other than Talia Pasteur would have wanted me out of Bristol, but none of the people with those reasons had done it. The good news is, I could beat girls like Talia while blindfolded and drowning in a pool filled with vanilla ice cream, caramel syrup, and maraschino cherries. What were we talking about? I could super use a sundae.

I was going through all of these thoughts aloud during an art class at Cadorette. (They called it an art class, but they didn't have the money to actually make us do anything. So it was more of an exercise to see what people nearly old enough to vote could do with construction paper, paste, and finger paints.) And when I say I was saying my thoughts aloud, I mean that Pierre was there, but when I talk to him, it's basically like monologuing. This time around, he seemed too busy trying to form a paper clip into a dog to even listen. But after I'd finished addressing most of my Talia-related stuff, he looked up as though he'd been paying attention all along. “She wrote to me,” he said.

“Who wrote to you? Talia?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“She didn't
not
say anything about you. It was between the lines. She was disappointed that I left Bristol. She says it is like a whole new school now. That I would like it there.”

“And?”

“She wants to talk to me.”

“About me?”

“She didn't actually mention you.” He very slightly touched the edge of my pinky finger with his pinky finger, causing me to jerk my hand back. “But if she is anything like me, she was thinking about you with every word.”

“You're incredibly helpful, Pierre.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

“I didn't actually mean that. I meant the opposite of that.”

“Ah, yes, that is sarcasm you are so fond of.” I was sure they had sarcasm in Pierre's language, but he always treated it like some magical new invention.

“I am glad I go to this school, now,” Pierre said. “Don't you?”

“No, Pierre. No, I don't.”

“Really? It's wonderful here.” Pierre had immediately thrived at Cadorette. Girls found him funny and exotic and guys found him impressive. They made him the kicker for the football team. “It is a very funny story,” he said. “The boys, they asked me if I play football and then they qualified and said that they know that what I call football is what they call soccer. And I told them that what I call football is what they call football and what they call soccer is actually what I call
fotbalový
.”

“That might be the least funny story I have ever heard in my entire life,” I said. “I have heard funnier stories about the Bataan Death March.”

Pierre went on as if I had just agreed with him. “So they asked me if I could kick and they said that their kicker fell to injury. They looked at me and must have seen my masculine energy and knew I was needed on their team.”

“It's a very masculine position, Pierre. Do they provide you with the ballet slippers or do you bring your own?”

“I bring my own,” he said. “You will cheer me on for the big homecoming game, I hope.”

Homecoming had quickly become the most important topic in the lives of the poor, poor morons at Cadorette and I had a hard time figuring out what I was supposed to think about it because I was sad to admit that I was one of those poor, poor morons. Pierre was very excited about it.

“Do you think they'll have hip-hop music and streamers and do you think they will play ‘In Your Eyes'?” he asked. Pierre got incredibly excited when anything in his life remotely resembled a movie about a fifteen-year-old girl struggling with love and her burgeoning desires. “Don't make any big plans,” he said. “I am going to ask you to the homecoming dance in a big way but I have yet to sort out the details.”

“I think I'm committing seppuku that evening.”

“You are what?”

“It's Japanese ritual disembowelment with a sword. It's how I would prefer to spend that night.”

“You are very hilarious, Astrid,” Pierre said.

Pierre drove me to Bristol for my next appointment with Dean Rein. It was a horrible ride. He had a car, but we took his motorized scooter instead. It wasn't comfortable for two people, and it hit a breezy thirty-five miles per hour on the highway. I thought we would die a hundred times. Ordinary death paled in comparison to dying while clutching Pierre's waist. My obituary would exist forever, calling him my boyfriend and mentioning that I died after being thrown from a lavender Vespa. I decided that I should really learn to drive very, very soon. I would never again have to hear Pierre's music mixes, and I would never again have to hear him say through the buzzing of his Vespa's little engine: “The words of this song translate to ‘My love is strong like the crust of mountains and soft like bales of cotton.' Love is confusing. It is both things.”