I'd Give Anything(46)
“But, listen, it’s more complicated than what he did or didn’t do and—”
“Oh, is it too complicated? Am I too stupid to understand? Am I too fragile to handle it? You always treat me like that. But I’m not, Mom. I’m way stronger than you think.”
After a long pause, her mother said, “You’re right. You and I should sit down and have an honest conversation about what happened with your dad. I should’ve done that a long time ago,” and the stark tenderness with which her mother looked at her when she said this would’ve softened Avery at any other time. But now it just made her furious.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t. And it’s not because I’m not brave enough to hear it. It’s because you weren’t brave enough to say it.”
Her mother winced.
“So tell me,” said Avery, in a hard voice. “Tell me about what was on the torn-out page.”
“Please stop asking that,” said her mother. “I can’t tell you.”
“What the hell? I can’t believe you.”
Avery yanked the journal, Zinny’s journal, hers now, off her mother’s lap. She crossed the room in three strides, but before she left, she shouted at her mother, “You know what? If Zinny met you now, she would hate you. She would think you were pathetic.”
Without waiting for a reaction, Avery stormed out of the room.
And storming felt very good to her.
Chapter Twelve
Ginny
People say fire is cleansing.
Sterilizing needles. Clearing underbrush from forests. Setting meadows ablaze so that they can be reborn. Smelting. Refining. Burning off impurities to find the gold inside.
Applying fire to steel makes it stronger.
People also say: fight fire with fire. And I’ve learned that this is more than a metaphor for revenge. A controlled burn can stop a wildfire in its tracks.
When I was eighteen and fire entered my life, all it did was ruin things.
Gray wanted his father to see him and accept him and love him for who he was, and I think his father would have, I really do, but some human monster set a fire that killed him before he had the chance, and could anything be sadder than that?
Fire is thievery and heartbreak and lost love and unleashed rage and falling and broken necks and unfinished stories.
And still, there came a bleak and desperate night when I stood in the woods behind my neighborhood and lit a match and put my faith in the cleansing properties of fire, and when I walked away from those woods, my hands empty, I tried hard to believe that it had worked, that the bad had been burned away. But the bad remained. And nothing, not one thing, was cleaner.
The fire at Lucretia Mott School would be ruled an arson, but the night I burned the journal page, not even the fire marshal knew that yet. Rumors were already flying, of course. A drunk public school boy—a known troublemaker—had been seen hanging out behind the groundskeeper’s shed, where the rakes, hedge trimmers, lawn mowers, and gasoline were stored. Rumor had it that the boy was overheard making threatening remarks about Lucretia Mott; when CJ was standing in line for the snack bar, he had heard him say that all the spoiled rich LM kids made him sick. Rumor had it that there was gasoline missing from the shed, although later, the groundskeeper couldn’t declare for an absolute fact that this was true.
When we heard about the drunk boy, CJ remembered that when he was on his way back after stowing his sax in the hiding place, he’d seen what might have been that same kid run right past him toward the back door to the school, the one CJ had just come out of. As soon as he remembered, CJ went to the police and told them. But even though he was almost positive it was the same kid, CJ hadn’t been paying enough attention to make an absolutely positive identification or to recall if the boy had been carrying anything, like a can of gasoline, and even though no one could blame CJ for not remembering (it was dark; he was sneaking around himself, stowing his sax; he was eager to get back to the game to relish LM’s defeat; there was no reason at that point to be suspicious), CJ blamed himself, terribly.
Although there would never be enough evidence to arrest the drunk boy, a lot of people were sure he had done it.
But there were people in our city who knew, weeks before the fire marshal’s ruling, that the fire had been deliberately set, and who knew, too, that the drunk public school boy had not been the one to set it, and, even though I would’ve given anything—anything—to not have been one of those people, I was.
I couldn’t sleep that night.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Gray in the five days since his father’s death. His stepmother and brother, Jimmy, had moved back into the house with him, and when Kirsten, CJ, and I knocked on the door, his stepmother hugged us and thanked us for coming and told us that Gray had barely spoken a word since that night. She told us he’d refused to see anyone.
“I know he misses you, though,” she said. “And appreciates how much you care about him. I think he’s just focused on getting through the funeral tomorrow morning. After that, I’m sure he’ll want to be with you.”
But that night, I worried—I was consumed with worry—that we had lost him forever.
On top of that, that evening, Trevor and our mother had had a fight about Trevor’s girlfriend, Melanie. Her father owned a hardware store, and Melanie had taken a year off before college to work in it, two facts that rankled my snobbish mother. She had thought they’d broken up, and then a friend of hers had seen them out together.