I'd Give Anything(75)

CJ stopped drumming his fingers. His hands stopped moving entirely, along with the rest of him. And I knew; I knew he’d done it. Perpetual motion CJ never sat still. Not a muscle in his face moved as he stared down at his thin white hands resting on his khaki-covered knees. Kirsten let out a sob.

“You did find out about the fire wall when you were researching your project, didn’t you?” I said. “You’d never overlook a detail like that. That’s why you could so calmly run back into the school to get your sax. At that point, we weren’t even sure where the fire was. We saw the smoke in the sky but not the burning. But you knew exactly where it was and knew that it would never spread to the other end of the school. What you couldn’t have known was that the door to the furnace room would get stuck.”

“Why would I do that?” said CJ in a thin voice. “If I’d set the fire, why didn’t I just bring my sax out with me afterward?”

“I don’t know. Maybe in your rush you forgot,” I said. “Or you might not have had time.”

“Can you look at me, Seege?” said Kirsten, tears on her face. “Please look at me.”

Slowly, CJ raised his head, and his eyes met Kirsten’s.

“You would never have hurt anyone on purpose,” said Kirsten. “We know that. We love you.”

CJ’s chin began to tremble.

With enormous gentleness Kirsten said, “It’s time to tell, honey. If you set that fire, it’s time to tell.”

Tears filled CJ’s blue eyes, and very, very slowly, he nodded.

Kirsten covered her mouth with her hands.

“Oh, CJ,” I said. “Why?”

CJ swallowed hard. “Because of Gray.”

This answer was so unexpected that for a few seconds, I hardly registered his words. And then, all at once, I thought I understood.

“Because you were mad at the football team? For the way they treated him? Were you trying to disrupt the game?” I said.

CJ shook his head.

“I knew about the fire wall. And I also knew that the door to the furnace room would stick. I knew it would stick because I made it stick,” said CJ.

Kirsten and I looked at each other in confusion.

CJ wiped his eyes.

“After Gray told people he was gay, the entire school turned on him. Everyone but us. Since ninth grade, he’d been everyone’s hero: smart, star quarterback, nice, pretty girlfriend. They’d feel lucky if he even talked to them. And then, boom, they knocked him off the pedestal and loved doing it. Even the ones who weren’t openly mean treated him differently. They stopped looking up to him, would whisper behind his back. And then his coach and his stupid fucking teammates ran him off the team. It was so unfair.”

“It was,” I said. “It was despicable.”

CJ lifted his chin. “So I decided to make him a hero again. I planned it all out. And at the beginning of that week, I started bringing small containers of gasoline to school and hiding them in the basement, the part the maintenance staff never went in. I went to the public library and did research on fire. I didn’t want a huge conflagration, just a fire big enough so that people would take notice and be scared. So that the guys who put it out would be heroes.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

“I knew Gray would be working the night of the game. And I knew that, when I ran away and said I’d be right back and then didn’t come back, I knew you two would figure out where I was. And I knew that when Gray found out, he would try to save me. I couldn’t be absolutely positive that Gray would be the one to run into the school to find me, but I knew he’d want to. He was always brave. And he could be very persuasive when he wanted something. But at the very least, he’d tell them where to find me, and if I had to, I was ready to play that up afterward, how I could’ve died if it weren’t for Gray. He’d be a hero again; I’d make sure of it. And the people who’d treated him like shit would feel horrible about it.”

He smiled. Tears were sliding down his face, but he smiled. “It worked, too, didn’t it? Everyone liked him again. I saved him. Good old CJ.”

He spat out those last words so bitterly, I ached to hear it.

“Oh, CJ, honey,” said Kirsten, crying.

“There was no one in the auditorium. I made sure of it.”

He dropped his head into his hands. “I was so arrogant. I thought I was so smart that nothing could go wrong. I had it all figured out. But then the fire, it got so big. And Gray’s dad—he just slipped. Lost his footing doing something he’d probably done dozens and dozens of times before. I don’t know; I just didn’t think of the firefighters getting hurt. The fire was supposed to be small and contained, and they were firefighters. Gray’s dad was this larger-than-life guy to me. I didn’t even consider the possibility that he would get hurt. I thought I was so smart, but how stupid was that?”

“If you’d known,” I said, “you wouldn’t have done it. You would never have hurt Gray or his father on purpose.”

Kirsten got up, sat down next to CJ, and put her arms around him. He toppled sideways into her, and she held on harder.

“Nothing could ever make up for what I’d done. But I tried. I have tried to make it up to him for all these years,” said CJ.

“By being his friend,” I said.