How to Start a Fire (14 page)

“Do you want to get out of here?” George asked. “I need to go for a walk or something.”

“Yes,” Edgar said. He would have said yes to anything she’d asked.

The pair traversed a jungle of bodies to make their escape. Once they reached the door, George overheard Anna describing in great detail the ankle break that had destroyed her figure-skating career.

“See you later, Natasha,” George said, closing the door to apartment 3A.

A month later, Edgar was a habitual visitor to the tiny Fury/Smirnoff/Leoni dorm room at Porter College. For the first few weeks, Anna always screwed up his name—Ernest was the most common error, because
earnest
was the word that described him best. Years later, Edgar had scarcely any memories of talking to Anna (he eventually learned her real name), and when they did speak, their conversations were always rather superficial.

Once, when Edgar knocked on the girls’ dorm-room door, Anna opened it and asked him, “What does this building remind you of?”

“I don’t know,” Edgar said.

“Think about it,” Anna said.

“A college dorm?”

Anna motioned for Edgar to gaze down the long hall.

“Now do you see it?”

“The hallway?”

Anna grew impatient and gave him the answer she’d been trying to extract. “Very institutional. Don’t you think?”

“I guess so.”

“The architects designed prisons. That’s what they were known for.”

This was an exaggeration based on a shred of truth. After Anna had imparted her bit of misinformation, she left, an attempt to facilitate his budding romance with the roommate she thought he was courting. She assumed the object of his affection was Kate, since Edgar and Kate were an obvious pairing. The fact that George was always in class or at basketball practice while Kate was present for Edgar’s visits supported that notion. And Kate too began to think the visits were for her. But Edgar assumed he and Kate were forging a friendship. He had few female confidantes and found comfort in the idea that one day he might be able to tell Kate everything.

An hour after one of Kate and Edgar’s study sessions had begun, George returned from basketball practice. What Kate hadn’t yet deduced, George already knew. She had seen that look before, but behind Edgar’s harmless eyes, there was no threat, and so she let his emotions take form without doing anything deliberate to lead him on. George never knew that Kate had met Edgar first and that she thought of him in ways George never would. Had she known, she would have discouraged him at every turn. Instead, she maintained a level of friendliness that could easily be misinterpreted as encouragement by someone inclined to misinterpret.

“Turn around, Edgar,” George said as she proceeded to disrobe.

Edgar looked away, stared at the poster of the gaunt man with his jeans partially undone, and tried to control his sudden erection. That was the tell that Kate did not miss. After George wrapped a towel around herself and headed for the showers, Kate decided to test her instincts.

“I think I need to go to the library. You in?” she said, gathering her books.

“No. I’m almost done with the assignment. I think I’ll head back,” Edgar said.

They collected their respective study materials and departed in unison. Only Kate noticed that Edgar had left one of his physics books behind. Kate had grown accustomed to being invisible to men when in George’s company, but she’d always thought that Edgar saw her. Discovering otherwise hit Kate hard, although no one would see it. Kate thought that pining over a guy was the ultimate indignity. She went to the library to wait out whatever was going to transpire at Porter College. She tried to lose herself in a book on Morse code.

As it turned out, nothing transpired. George returned to the room, put on her pajamas, and studied for a biology exam. Edgar knocked on the door exactly twenty minutes after he’d left and inquired as to whether she had seen his physics book. George retrieved the physics book and handed it to him as he stood outside the door.

“See you later, Edgar,” George said.

“‘Look in the closet’ or ‘There is no Santa Claus,’” Anna said, reading off strips of paper once again culled from the basin of a plastic pumpkin.

George would have liked to attend a party without a mission, but Kate was so used to missions and games and plots that it never occurred to her to protest. And this was one game she liked.

“The first one,” Kate said.

“Whatever,” George said.

“Do you need to write it down?” Anna asked.

George was prone to forgetting the code phrase, or so she claimed. Reluctantly, she took the slip of paper from Anna and stuffed it in her pocket.

This party was a legitimate one, not a con. It took place in a three-bedroom off-campus apartment that belonged to grad students in the English lit department. Anna had recently begun a friendship/flirtation with her American lit TA. She frequented his office hours, always in an attempt to get a grade changed. She managed this approximately 30 percent of the time, according to her notes. Reed Bannister, PhD candidate, had moral codes—he stood by his grades, and he didn’t date students. Anna, however, was good at cracking codes.

“When you were a child, were you afraid of monsters?” Kate asked the first person she encountered at the party. It happened to be Lane Smith, a theater major who was never seen without a colorful scarf around her neck and wild, wayward hair that appeared unstyled but took hours to fashion.

“No, but I had an imaginary friend named Lucy,” Lane said.

“Where did Lucy live?” Kate asked.

“With me.”

“She didn’t hang out in any particular part of your bedroom?”

“No.”

“You never had to go look for her or anything?”

“No.”

“I see,” Kate said. “How about ghosts? Did you have any ghosts in your house?”

Anna tried a different tack. She approached the preppiest male in the room.

“Do you play golf?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” Preppy Male said.

“If you were to instruct someone on how to find your golf clubs, what would you say?”

“Look in the trunk of my car.”

“No, that’s not it,” Anna said, meandering away.

The triumvirate settled around the keg, refilled their cups, and shared notes.

“I’m getting nowhere with the monsters-as-a-child method,” said Kate.

“For future reference, if you ask a stranger to borrow his clothes, he finds it suspect,” George said.

“Back to the drawing board,” Anna said.

“I have an idea,” said George. “Why don’t we just enjoy the party?”

“Now, where’s the fun in that?” Anna said.

“What’s the game, Anna?” her TA asked, approaching the group with an empty glass.

“What game?” Anna said, playing innocent.

“Your friends are asking my friends ridiculous questions.”

“My friends can be ridiculous at times.”

“You are a very strange woman,” Reed Bannister said to Anna.

“Thanks,” said Anna. Had he told her she had the manners of a truck driver or the ethics of a bank robber, she would have replied in the same tone. Anna maintained a thick skin by never being inside it.

Meanwhile, George was ready for the game to end. She instructed Kate to hide in the closet so that she could ask someone where Kate went.

“That seems like a shortcut,” Kate said.

“That’s the point,” said George. “Now, please, get in the closet.”

Reed Bannister came closer to Anna and whispered, “In fifteen minutes, meet me outside.”

“I don’t think so,” Anna said, but they both knew she was bluffing.

Reed departed just as Edgar stepped across the threshold. He scanned the room nervously. Not even a minute passed before he felt out of place. Anna saw him turn around abruptly as if he were about to make a run for it.

“Edgar! Get back in here,” she shouted.

Edgar followed her instructions, as most people did.

“Glad you could make it,” she said.

Edgar searched the room, looking for the woman he was always looking for. “I’m not sure I can stay,” Edgar said when he couldn’t find her.

“You need to tell her,” Anna said.

“Excuse me?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Anna said. Although Anna was talking about Kate, and Edgar was thinking about George. “I know her. She won’t say anything until you do. You have to tell her how you feel and you have to do it tonight.”

Edgar summoned courage from some mysterious recess in his mind.

“Where is she?” he asked.

Anna answered, reluctantly ending her own game.

Santa Cruz, California

“Did you know there’s a woman sleeping in our closet?” George asked.

“She moved in a few days ago,” Kate said, coating her toast with a thick layer of butter. “I’ve been meaning to introduce you, but you haven’t been around.”

“Who is she?”

“Sarah Lake.”

“Where did she come from?” George asked.

“Do you mean what city and state? Humboldt is where she was last living. I’m not sure where she was born. I can ask her when she wakes up,” Kate said.

“Why is she here?” George said.

“She needed a place to stay. And the hall closet is big enough to sleep in. Anna always said we should turn it into a guest room.”

“How long is she staying?”

“I don’t know. But she’s paying rent.”

“What? So it’s permanent?”

“I don’t think any of us are staying here permanently.”

George checked her watch, unhitched a banana from its bunch, and poured a cup of coffee into a commuter mug.

“She’s not staying,” George said. “This is a whole human being. It’s not like a stray cat.”

“You didn’t let me keep the cat,” Kate said. She had never argued about the cat, which only fueled her resentment. It was short-haired, and there were shots, and some people just got over cat allergies. All points she’d made in her head when she carried the Abyssinian mix in a pillowcase to the pound.

“I have allergies!” George snapped.

“Now you have a human allergy?” Kate asked.

“You can’t just invite people to move in here.”

“Before you rush to a decision, maybe you should meet her first,” Kate said.

It was, in fact, Anna who’d first met Sarah Lake, the closeted houseguest. But later she would not recall their introduction.

For two weeks straight, Anna had lived in the library, studying for her organic chemistry final. She was barely passing the class going into the final exam. Sometimes Anna would study with Kate, making 3-D molecular models. But Kate always managed to digest the material in a fraction of the time it took Anna, assembling her model like a child playing with Legos.

Anna was living on caffeine and Ritalin and gummy bears and beef jerky. In the library, it was hard to miss the pajama-clad woman with an overcoat and matted hair. She was afraid to stop, like the driver of a car with a recently jump-started battery. Her skin took on a blue-yellow tone. Her hands had a Parkinson’s tremor; she couldn’t trust that she hadn’t accidentally stabbed an extra electron on the Lewis dot structure. Sometimes merely looking at a hydrocarbon chain would bring her close to tears. Nucleotides went down easy. DNA, RNA, their relevance to medicine, the human body, shook her awake. But the snaky polymers and peptides, those fucking endless impenetrable carbon chains, made her forget everything she’d learned. She scratched her neck until it bled. Kate put a bandage on Anna’s scratches and covered her fingers in sports tape. One night, Anna entered the front door, sat down on the floor to remove her shoes, and fell asleep in the foyer.

Kate woke her early the next morning and fed her coffee, and the cycle started all over again.

The final exam was on Tuesday from ten to noon. When the TA collected Anna’s Scantron, he raised his eyebrow with an unspoken question. Anna shrugged. She refused to predict her performance, having surprised herself too many times with abysmal test results on exams she’d thought she had aced. Anna left the physical sciences building at 12:05 p.m. with other bleary-eyed students. While many congregated for an exam postmortem, Anna was done, like an assembly-line worker clocking out for the day. There was no need to revisit any of it. She walked, with no destination in mind, just away.

A winking neon sign beckoned her. She could have sworn she witnessed a letter die, like an old square flashbulb. Now the sign said Pet E ra. Anna decided then that if she ever opened a bar, she’d call it Pet Era. She even wrote the name on her forearm so she wouldn’t forget. She opened the door. Inside, it smelled of whiskey and beer and bleach; that was good enough for her. She entered the tavern. Darkness had never been so inviting.

“What’s your poison?” an unusually tall woman with dirty-blond hair and white-girl dreads asked with a touch of irony.

“Whiskey, with a beer back,” Anna said.

Two men, regulars, chatted at the edge of the bar, griping over politics, the economy, the End of Days. Anna listened only so she could blot out the battling formulas and compounds that dusted her brain, like a chalkboard haphazardly erased between lessons. The whiskey helped, and so did the beer. She knew how this day would end. That familiar sensation would return—the need to do something wrong. Anna ordered another round and thought about calling Kate or George as a preemptive strike, but she knew they’d show up too soon. Anna scratched her home number on the back of a coaster and called the bartender over.

“When it’s time for me to go, will you call this number? Ask for Kate.”

The bartender looked at the coaster and then returned her gaze to the young woman, already on her second round before one in the afternoon.

“You got a name?” she asked. “I figure I better be able to identify you to whoever I’m calling.”

“Anna.”

“I’m Sarah. Nice to meet you.”

“Can I get another round?”

Sarah put a bowl of salted nuts in front of Anna. “Eat the nuts and then we’ll talk.”

Four hours later, Anna was slumped in a booth with a dodgy-looking guy wearing a trucker hat and sunglasses and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache. Happy hour was in full swing. Sarah knew the man’s look was most likely just the result of a series of bad fashion choices, but it came off as a sketchy disguise, and Sarah began to feel uneasy, having time to clock Anna only occasionally out of the corner of her eye.