shielded the tiny flame, moved it slowly so its own breeze didn’t put it out, and then I touched it to the twisted paper. The smiling ladies writhed and blackened and the smoke rose in a rainbow of greys. When the fire leapt up I felt its heat, warped and dancing in front of me like liquid, like magic. I didn’t know a flame could burn so many shades. I’m saying every colour in the world was in that fire, and watching it burn was the biggest, boldest feeling. I’ve never felt it again like the first time, not quite like that.
I got out of there when I had to, when the heat and the smoke made it hard to see and harder to breathe. I stayed low and made sure there was nobody around. My hands on the ground were covered with dust and ash. They looked like statues’ hands. I moved away fast and then I stopped to watch the smoke from my fire rolling fat and dark as a storm cloud. At the top of the park, from the observatory, you can see way out over the endless fume-hung map of grid streets and thin trees and squat tower blocks and lit highways, as far as the horizon, further. My fire was a little insult to all that, something wild in plain view of the city. It felt like a door had swung open, like I’d been kept in an airless room all this time and finally I could breathe. I knew I should hurry, but it was like trying to run in a dream. Bright sparks and flakes of charred leaf floated down through the blue behind me, gentle as you like, and the flames licked and snapped like a dragon, biting clean through solid wood.
I couldn’t see the smoke on the subway but all the time I knew it was there. I looked up and there was a boy, pale and dark-haired and skinny, older than me, fifteen it turned out, and he was holding up a handwritten sign and looking at me like he wanted to make sure I saw it. It read, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? I went red hot and looked at my dust-covered shoes.
“Psst,” he said, and I looked up again and a new sign read, WAS IT WORTH IT? DID IT FEEL GOOD? and I nodded and looked straight at him and we smiled.
That was Thurston. That’s how we met. On the subway, eight stops from Griffith to home, he showed other people other signs and I watched him. He held up the signs and waited for them to notice, and the whole time he stayed looking at me. An old lady got WHERE DID YOU HIDE IT? IT WILL ALL WORK OUT FINE IN THE END. A shifty looking guy got LEAVE IT ALONE and YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE. A girl about the same age as Thurston, her hair tied up high on her head, earrings swinging, got BE A BETTER LIAR and OH. MY. GOD. Each time, they acted like he could see inside their heads and they coloured right up and couldn’t look right at him again.
I loved it. I’m telling you, nobody had made me smile like that my whole goddamn life. I got off at my stop because I had to but I didn’t want to leave and when I waved at the boy he winked at me and held up BOUND TO MEET AGAIN.
Back home, Hannah and Lowell were out, but they’d be back soon, crashing through the door and trampling on my quiet with their verdicts on the relentless heat, the price of everything, and the vital overall importance of their day. Much better, this peace, this alone time, this thinking about the boy on the subway, this picturing my fire. As it burned, I washed my hands and face, scrubbed the muck from under my nails, pulled off my clothes and hid them under the bed. The smell of it was still in my shirt, sweet and black and smoky. I put my face in the sleeve at the bend in my elbow, and I breathed.
I was hooked right then, on both of them, the boy and the fire. I don’t mind owning up to that.
In London, I’d have dreamt about Thurston if I could. I’d have traded him for fire, but even in my sleep I couldn’t find him. The next morning, the noise of the real world descended like a net and caught me in it. Somewhere a lorry was reversing, a car door slammed. I could hear Lowell making coffee, banging cupboard doors, and sweating out his hangover. I felt the weight of my own body like gravity, pinning me down in the wrong place, on this bed. I opened my eyes and everything was the same as the night before, unfamiliar, intact and unspoilt. No plain blue still-as-a-picture California sky but something lower and rolling and cold. No posters on the walls like in my old room, no piles of clothes or comic books, just unpacked boxes. No Thurston throwing stuff at my window, waiting on the corner so we could begin our day. No heaps of ash, no charred and twisted remains, just carpet and plaster and metal, and a father I’d never met and didn’t want to meet, dark on the horizon like a storm. I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
My mother has four main stories she likes to tell: the edited highlights of her modelling career (who said what, who touched her where), her disastrous marriage to Ernest (no redeeming features), her many visits to Europe (ditto – Paris is littered with dog shit apparently, Venice is a rip-off and Florence is a bore) and the time she spilt a bowl of soup at the American Ambassador’s house in Regent’s Park. She never talks about anything real. She never gives herself away. It’s like her life started at twenty-one, like nothing happened before that was worth mentioning.
“Maybe it didn’t,” Ernest said to me once. “Maybe things were awful,” and it made sense, I suppose, of the way she drinks and thinks of everything as a fight, and grabs hold of the day like it’s a sheer drop and if she doesn’t dig her nails right in, she’ll fall.
Back home, whenever we had people over, Hannah rolled out variations on her four stories while Lowell pretended to cook deli-bought meals from scratch, throwing his head back when he laughed, rattling pans and putting on a show. The moment the doorbell rang he was out on stage and she was prepping herself under the lights. I guess it made them both feel as if they were working. My job was to pour the drinks and play it like we were your dream family, like really the best of friends. We couldn’t keep it up for long. Four minutes was about the limit. If we strayed into five, one or the other of us got bored or cranky and had to leave the room. There was no trace of our usual cook-your-own pizza and stay-out-of-sight arrangement. They didn’t work their way through a bottle of vodka in old T-shirts if there were guests in the house. They hid the TV in a cupboard and acted like we spent our spare time holding hands and listening to recordings of T.S. Eliot reading ‘The Waste Land’.
I used to think it was a miracle that anyone believed them. But people believe what they see. And mostly they see whatever is put in front of them, if it’s in their interests to believe. Thurston told me that, and he was right. If someone gave you a fat stack of money and told you to spend it, you’d like to think the money was real. If they handed you a diamond and said it was worth as much as a house, you’d want it to be true, because you’d be getting something out of it.
The first and only time Thurston met Hannah and Lowell, he showed up dressed as a girl. More precisely, he showed up dressed as Hannah, wearing clothes he must have taken from her closet some time before, when I wasn’t looking.
Lowell answered the door.
“Your friend’s here,” he said to me.
“What friend?”
“Charlotte.”
I didn’t look up. “I don’t know anybody called Charlotte.”
“Well she’s here,” he said, “and she’s asking for you.”
This girl came into the room, all long legs and lipstick and fingernails. Beautiful, flawless, just Hannah’s type, the kind of girl I avoided like the plague, who wouldn’t notice if she tripped over me in the street in her Manolo Blahniks.
“It’s Charlie,” she said, “remember?” Stretching out towards me, all grabby and polished, like some kind of sisterhood reunion. I looked down at her hands and I saw the little star tattoo at the base of the left thumb and it was only then that I knew it was Thurston.
“Oh God. Charlie!” I said. “So sorry.”
Charlie was bespoke, made-to-measure perfect for Hannah and Lowell to fall in love with, an Orange County girl, drowning in labels, with money in her veins and parents who did, “Oh, I don’t know, something in the movies.” She dropped names in a way that