Things You Save in a Fire(6)

Things just kind of snowballed from there.

Somewhere along the way, I realized this was what I was born to do.

There are lots of qualities that make a good firefighter. It doesn’t hurt to be big and strong, because that makes it easier to handle all the equipment. It’s nice if you’re good-natured and low-key, because it’s the textbook definition of a high-stress job. Wanting to help people is a plus. And if you happen to deal with anxiety by running around in your underwear, or dumping water on people’s heads, or wrapping toilet bowls with Saran Wrap? Even better.

You’ll fit right in.

Oh, and if you can be a guy, be a guy. That’s definitely an advantage.

I was not a guy.

But I was a really good firefighter.

Maybe that sounds cocky, but you just know when you’re good at something, you know?

For one thing, I was the top student in my graduating class at the academy. The number one top student. I knew the Merck Manual backwards and forwards. I could start an IV in my sleep. Plus, I was strong—for a girl, and even for a lot of guys—and I didn’t get offended easily. I was totally comfortable in the firehouse with the guys. I wasn’t shy. I didn’t get scared. I never panicked. I had a single dad who was a high school basketball coach—so I grew up playing hoops constantly, and talking trash, and beating the boys at everything.

All that helped, but what really made me a good firefighter was a funny little personality quirk that I never even knew I had until I started using it. It takes guts to walk into a burning building or staunch an arterial bleed—no question. But it also takes a special kind of brain. Firefighters think differently from other people, and this is especially true of me. Because when everybody else is panicking, when the entire whole world is freaking the heck out—that’s when I get calm.

It’s like some circuit in my brain is reversed.

Everybody in the fire service has this reverse wiring to some extent. When herds of panicked people are running out of a burning building, that’s when we’re calmly strolling in.

But I’ve never met anybody who has it like I have it.

Normal humans see the explosion, or the flames, or the twenty-four-car pileup and think: Run! My brain just thinks: Huh. Cool. Everybody else is sprinting away, wild-eyed and shrieking, because that’s what evolution wants us to do—get the hell out of there. I just slow to a stop and look around.

I must get a tiny squirt of adrenaline—but only just the right amount. Enough to make me beautifully, brilliantly alert. Everything comes into sharp focus and gets quiet, and I can see what’s happening with exquisite clarity. For everyone else, it’s a blur, but for me, it’s details, textures, colors, connections. Insights.

Sometimes I feel like that’s the only time I ever see anything clearly.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t wind up an ER doc. You don’t want me just after the emergency. You want me during the emergency.

It’s a strange thing to know about yourself, but there it is: I’m at my very best when things are at their very worst.

And so, even though my dad was sure the “fireman thing” was “a phase,” four years later, here I was, still at Station Eleven in Austin, still the only girl on B-shift—except for our badass female captain—and still loving every impossible minute.



* * *



THAT’S WHY THE night I got the valor award should have been just another easy, inevitable step in my unblemished, pure-hearted firefighting career.

But I have to confess something. I didn’t just hit Heath Thompson, city councilman, with that wooden plaque when he squeezed my butt.

I beat the crap out of him.

I pummeled him. I mauled him. Even after I’d cracked his head with the plaque itself, I landed a punch to the face, a knuckle strike to the windpipe, and at least one jab to the solar plexus before adding a few good kicks to the ribs with my pumps after he hit the floor. Nobody saw it coming, not even me, so his reaction time was a little slow—which worked to my advantage.

I cut my hand on his teeth, but it was worth it.

I don’t remember this part, but according to Hernandez, the whole time, I was shouting, “Touch me again, douchebag! Touch me again and see how long you live!”

He did not touch me again.

Lucky they didn’t book me for assault. I could have—should have—spent the night in jail. It’s no small thing to pummel a city official into a bloody, quivering pulp on a stage in front of three hundred of the city’s bravest public servants. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen every day. Or ever.

Of course, it’s no small thing to grab a firefighter’s ass, either.

They whisked us both off the stage and bandaged his face and my hand while the emcee tried to get everybody to sit back down and finish their desserts. The police came, but Heath Thompson refused to press charges. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he kept saying through his swollen lips. “Just let her go.”

I bet he wanted them to let me go. There were news cameras out in the lobby. And a thousand bucks says I wasn’t the only thing he had to hide.

In the end, they snuck us both out the back door. I don’t know what kind of strings he pulled, but nothing about it showed up in the papers. I’m not sure, ultimately, if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Later that night, after I was home, and had showered and bandaged up my hand in my quiet apartment, Hernandez showed up at my door.