He said, I was going to tell you—I found a program that might be good. Have a look. He pulls this envelope out of his pocket and hands it to me. There is a test to get in, and anyone can take it. One of the places you can test is near here—and it’s next week. I or one of the other teachers would drive you, if you needed it.
Thanks.
He went away and I went into the bathroom to look at it. One of the stalls is broken, so no one ever uses it. I went in there and opened the envelope.
HAUSMANN
The place, Hausmann, was a one- or two-year school for kids who are fourteen to sixteen and (I guess) who hate school. That’s what I got out of the materials. You go to this place, which is somewhere really nice, like Maine or Vermont, I don’t know, and you stay there for one year or two depending, and at the end of it, if you feel like it, you go on to college, which would be a year or two early, and basically every last one of the shits gets into a great school (97 percent, which I guess means one or two kids probably offed themselves and ruined the numbers—kids like that must off themselves at a furious rate, that would be my expectation).
Well, I don’t care about college, but this is free, they say, if you pass the test, and the courses looked way better than Whistler. Then I thought about my aunt and I felt bad. I think she’s pretty used to having me around.
Beekman had written on the envelope, Lucia, it’s very prestigious, and I think you have a shot.
If by prestigious, he means for delinquents, then yes, I have a shot.
One of the pictures showed some girls rock climbing. Another showed a guy skeet shooting while someone else next to him, I kid you not, writes equations on a pad of paper. You know, the old tandem shotgun shooting + math lesson—that’s how it’s always done …
The kids in the pictures weren’t scrawny with beady eyes like I expected. They looked on the whole pretty normal. I thought of how neat it would be if a place somehow made promotional materials that had a little camera in them, and that they could then take your picture without you knowing. Then when you looked at the pictures, it would be you rock climbing, you skeet shooting, you taking dumb notes on a pad of paper next to yourself holding a shotgun. On second thought that is a terrible idea. Forget I mentioned it.
I found Beekman after lunch and asked him if he knew what the test was like. He said,
Yes, it is in three parts. There’s an IQ test, an essay question, and an oral part—a video you record in response to a question, sort of like an interview.
That sounds horrible.
Well, you don’t have to do it.
Thanks anyway.
He looked a little hurt.
Maybe I will, I said. I’ll think about it.
This is what happened. Jan and I jumped the fence and went in. He did in about three seconds, but I had to scramble over. I mean, he is about a foot taller than me after all. When I got to the other side, he announced:
He was going to set one of the project buildings on fire.
He actually said, it’s my intention to burn one of those project buildings to the ground. I thought that was a little grandiose, so I spat in the gravel. Was that me trying to do some cool guy stuff? Maybe it was. Thinking back it sounds kind of lame. I’m glad Lana and Ree weren’t there to see it.
As we walked, he told me a lot of stuff. Maybe he noticed I was nervous, because he told me that he was not going to do anything to me in the building, that I didn’t have to worry about that. He said I should stay outside and keep watch.
Keep watch? There’s no one here.
What is your name again? Lucia?
(I know he knows my name.)
Lucia, listen up: the first rule of setting fires is that someone should keep watch. Human beings are notorious for being where they aren’t supposed to be. Do you want your whole life to be ruined because some asshole is walking his dog and remembers your face? Such a pretty face, too.
He ran his hand through my hair and it creeped me out, but I didn’t say anything. I let him do it, I guess. We kept walking.
When we got inside, he took his coat off and put on a bright-colored jacket. I asked him why he would wear a bright jacket.
Afterwards, I get rid of it, he said. Obviously.
I still wasn’t sure that was the best idea—but I kept my mouth shut.
The field was uneven, so it wasn’t easy to cross it in the dark, and when I turned on my flashlight, Jan smacked me in the arm.
Off.
I shut it off.
He got a little ahead of me, and I ran to catch up.
Stephan just went home, huh.
He does what he’s told to do. The things Sco and me used to do to him when he was little, ha. Once we made him crawl through a thornbush. We told him it would be cool and he did it.
His brother’s in the army, yeah?
I don’t know. I don’t care about that guy. He can do what the fuck he wants.
When we got to the building, Jan took a bottle of something out of his backpack. Gasoline?
It’s like gasoline, he said. Something like that. Wait here.
There was a stoop next to where the street had been, so, I went up to the fourth step and sat down. I couldn’t hear anything from inside. The building had just swallowed him up. Any number of people could disappear into it.
I smoked. I waited. I smoked another cigarette, another cigarette. I would have smoked another, but it was my last. It must have been half an hour later when I heard someone running and Jan shot out of the building.
Book it, he said, and grabbed my arm. We set out sprinting across the field. I tripped two or three times, but got right up and kept going. Somehow Jan stayed on his feet the whole way. When we got to the other side, there was a huge pile of tires.
This should do, he said, and got behind it.
I don’t know what the fuck is in there, so I don’t want to be near it if a gas line blows.
Nothing
and
nothing
and
nothing.
I was looking into the black and breathing hard. I couldn’t even really see the building, just an outline of all the buildings where the darkness got lighter in the distance. Then, I thought I heard something, and WHOOSH!
That whole half of the world turned red. It was like a huge flame tongue erupted out of all the windows at the same time. It flashed away and I couldn’t see anything at all, and then a half second later, there was more, this time it was smaller flames that came, but they stayed, all along one line—about halfway up the building I’d guess.