Firegirl (3 page)

I looked again and Courtney was reading. I didn’t imagine that I was completely alone in feeling something for her. She was really too beautiful for me to be the only one. From the way Jeff acted when she was around, I half suspected that he liked her, too. Sometimes he seemed to worm his way close to her in the lunch line, nudging ahead of the others in a way that looked almost natural. I tried not to worry too much about it because Jeff never actually seemed to talk to Courtney. He never talked
about
her with me, that’s for sure.

I had decided that the best thing was never to bring up the subject, even though Jeff was the only other kid I had ever talked to about very much at all. He knew about the Cobra. He knew about most stuff with me. But he didn’t know about Courtney or my dumb little powers. No one did. And I liked that no one did.

I felt I could hold onto everything better if I never talked about it and nobody ever knew. As long as it stayed mine, it could still happen. It could.

Thank you, thank you.

Chapter 5

Mrs. Tracy clapped her hands together and everybody looked to the front of the class.

“I have two announcements to make,” she said. “The first is something that worked very well last year in social studies, so I’d like to try it again with you.”

“No tests?” said Rich. “Yay, no tests!”

“Funny, Rich, but no,” Mrs. Tracy said. “I’m talking about having an election in class. Just like the real political elections coming up in a few weeks, in which I hope your parents will vote, I’d like to have a little mini-election right here. An election for classroom president.”

Mrs. Tracy was beaming. I liked to see her excited. It was fun when she was really into something. She was tall and thin and not too old. Though she had been around for as long as I had been at St. Catherine’s, she still seemed to get excited with each new class. I knew from the way seventh graders had talked about her in the past that she was the teacher to get, and it turned out to be true. Our first month in seventh grade had been one of the best so far.

“This is how it will work,” she said. “For the next three weeks, we’ll be learning about how governments work and what it means to hold public office. At the end of that time, we’ll have a primary. That’s when you can choose candidates from among yourselves. Everyone will have a chance to nominate someone they think would be best to lead the class in several activities we’ll do this year.”

“Can we nominate ourselves?” asked Joey Sisman.

“You better,” said Jeff. “No one else will nominate you.”

“Yes, we can nominate ourselves,” Mrs. Tracy said, “though it would be nice if you offered your support to someone else in the class.”

Joey pretended to nod thoughtfully. I heard Jeff chuckle quietly, probably because he got away with what he said.

“Once we decide on the candidates, we’ll vote,” Mrs. Tracy said. “The winner will be our classroom president. The first thing he or she will do is help me plan our Thanksgiving presentation for the parents. The president will form a committee for that. If this works out, we might have another election before Christmas for a new president. Maybe we’ll do it every month. There’s planning for our spring field trip, too.”

“I would make sure we went to see a Broadway show, maybe
Phantom
,” said Darlene, reminding everyone that she was Alice in last summer’s peewee
Alice in Wonderland
and that she was taking professional singing lessons.

Mrs. Tracy smiled. “I’m sure that together we can think of a lot of good ideas to consider. And because of all the committees, everyone who wants to be involved can be. Trust me, every other class has loved this, and I’m sure it will be exciting and a lot of fun for you, too. It’ll be a great way to learn about ourselves and the way people work together….”

I glanced over at Courtney. She was looking up at the teacher, her pencil swaying back and forth between her fingers.

It was stupid, but I remember wondering right then if there might be something in this election, some way that things could happen, that would give me a way to do something she might notice. Maybe I couldn’t exactly save her life, but … my mouth suddenly went dry.

No! Keep it to yourself!
I thought.

But it was so easy, I couldn’t keep it to myself. I got hot again under my blazer. Sweat rolled down inside my shirt.

I could nominate Courtney.

I could nominate her and then vote for her.

Wait, could I?

I could! It would seem so natural because she’s so incredible, who
wouldn’t
nominate her. But if I nominated her it would move me to another whole level. I’d be “getting out there.” And I’d finally be visible. Mostly, it would connect our names in class.

Mrs. Tracy, I’d like to nominate Courtney Zisky.

Me, Tom. Her, Courtney. She was so popular she would win, of course, and then she would say it:

Thank you, Tom.

Was it possible? Could it happen? Never mind the adventures for now. This was real. This was actually possible.

My heart was beating very fast. Courtney. Yes.

Ryan Ponacky said, “What’s the second announcement?”

“No tests?” said Rich, trying his joke again and snickering quietly, but getting no laughs at all this time.

Mrs. Tracy glanced at the note on her desk. “Well, a new girl will be joining our class today,” she said. “In just a few minutes, actually. Her name is Jessica Feeney.”

Right away the class broke into a low buzzing noise.

“It’s nice she’s here for the elections,” said Kayla, looking directly at Mrs. Tracy. “Right at the beginning, I mean.”

Samantha Embriano raised her hand. “I’ll show her around, and she can be my lunch buddy for a week — this week, okay?”

“I guess I’ll take next week,” said Eric LoBianco, a large boy who everyone said had wet his seat in second grade because the teacher wouldn’t let him leave the class to use the bathroom. “Wait, is she good-looking?”

The girls in the room squealed and gagged.

Jeff laughed sharply. Rich howled.

A new girl?

I looked at Mrs. Tracy’s face for some sign of what kind of person this girl might be. She had a cool name. Jessica. For an instant I wondered if she would be as pretty as Courtney. Just after I’d made all these plans about the election, wouldn’t it be strange if a new girl came in smelling like peaches, too?

No way! Forget that. I nearly laughed out loud in my seat. No matter how good Jessica Feeney looked, no matter how nice she was, she’d never replace Courtney. A flash of Courtney in skiing clothes suddenly came into my mind. There was a distant echo of sniper shots in the white mountains behind her.

I smiled a little to myself. So that was it. I would nominate Courtney and vote for her. Then she’d know. It would be so cool.

It’s odd now to think of how I almost missed what Mrs. Tracy said next. I almost missed it, thinking about Courtney, but I looked up just in time and now I can never forget it.

“There is …,” Mrs. Tracy was saying quietly, “there is something you need to know about Jessica….”

Chapter 6

Mrs. Tracy held onto her smile, but it was clear that something really wasn’t right about the whole second announcement. The pink was draining from her cheeks as she looked at us all. Then I noticed that she didn’t so much look at us, as over and around us.

“Jessica,” she said, “is a girl who has —” She stopped and looked at the door.

“What?” Kayla said softly behind me.

There was a tap at the door, and two or three kids in the middle of the room whispered and leaned forward to see out into the hallway. The door opened and the janitor walked in, sliding a desk noisily ahead of him.

“Where —” he said to no one in particular.

“In the back, please.” Mrs. Tracy pointed to the end of the second row. The addition of another desk would make that row the longest.

“She’s putting the new girl in the back of the room,” Kayla whispered to me.

“I think I take back what I said,” said Eric, just loud enough to be heard.

“Shh!” said Samantha Embriano.

The janitor scraped the desk along the floor between the first and second rows. I didn’t like the way he did it; he could have carried it, after all. He set it at the end of the second row, spacing it perfectly from the desk in front of it with a flick of his wrist.

When he left, we all turned to Mrs. Tracy.

“Jessica has suffered a terrible thing,” she said.

A couple of kids made noises. Their seats squeaked.

“Jessica was in a fire. She was burned, badly burned. She’ll be going to school at St. Catherine’s while she has treatments at a hospital in New Haven.”

Some girl whispered “Oh” suddenly, and it sounded like she had hurt herself or something. We all looked, but the teacher went on.

“I don’t know how long Jessica will be with us, but I want you to be prepared. Her burns are … she does not look like … anyone you have ever seen before….”

Mrs. Tracy’s voice caught and faded away for a second. Some of the kids seemed to get stiff in their seats. Others began shuffling things around on their desks. I felt nervous, as if I had been caught doing something wrong.

“But I know that you will treat her as good children should.”

She stopped again. It was like a kind of wave passed over the class when she finished talking. I felt icy and weird in my stomach as if I was really hungry or really full. I kept on sweating and my forehead was damp, along with my waist.

It must be horrible, I thought.

If Mrs. Tracy talks like that, saying this girl was “badly burned,” it must be horrible. And this girl is coming into our class? I remember thinking that as long as the teacher kept talking to us, even about a bad thing, the bad thing wouldn’t happen yet because she had to tell us all about it before it happened. But now that Mrs. Tracy had said what she had said and stopped talking, there was nothing more between us and whatever it was that was waiting. Between us and Jessica Feeney.

I suddenly wished that while we were waiting, Mrs. Tracy would say something totally different, not about this girl, whoever she was. But about the weather. Or TV. Or the class elections. She should go through all that again. The primary. The voting. The committees. Thanksgiving. Anything to take our minds off of the whole “badly burned” thing she had just said.

I wanted to hear something, anything to assure us that even after this girl came into our class, things would still be normal and regular. I tried to imagine something about a volcano and a submarine, but I kept looking at Mrs. Tracy and nothing would come. She just twisted her hands for a while, then stopped, then waited, and then looked toward the hall.

Something was happening outside the door now.

This was it. The terrible thing was coming. Would somebody actually scream when they saw her, or say something? Would I say something? Would it be like a horror movie? A hideous creature? Or maybe it wouldn’t be that bad?

My mother had burned herself at the stove lots of times. Just last week, in fact. The burns were red, sometimes a little white. But they weren’t all that ugly. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

“We’re not the closest school to the hospital,” said Jeff, staring down at the top of his desk.

“What?” I looked over at him then back at the door. Mrs. Tracy moved to it, turning the knob.

It would be bad. I knew it would.

“We’re a bunch of towns away; we’re not the closest Catholic school for anybody to go to,” said Jeff.

I watched the teacher open the door. Her left hand reached into the hall. She sort of half turned to the class. Her face was so pale then. Finally she said a bit more loudly than normal, “Class, I’d like you to welcome our new student.”

She took the girl’s hand and drew her in. “Everyone, say hello to Jessica.”

As horrible as I thought the girl would look, when I imagined what burned people looked like, it was nothing compared to what stepped into the room.

Jessica Feeney’s face, the first thing everyone looked at, was like a mask. I looked at her, then away, and then back at her. I couldn’t believe I was looking at the face of someone alive.

The skin was all rough and uneven. It looked almost smeared and was stained all shades of pink and white and red.

Her lips were swollen. They nearly filled the space between her nose and chin. Her eyes peeked out from behind skin that looked melted. Her hair was mostly short. Her arms were covered, except that the forearms were bare and blotchy. Her fingers were bent as if she were trying to grab something.

My neck felt thick and stiff. There was a lump in my throat and a high ringing in my ears. I remember wondering how someone looking like that could even be alive. Was she in pain right now? It seemed like she must be. As if being in that skin would make you want to scream and scream and scream until you died.

But there was no screaming. It seemed like all the sound went out of the room for a long time while this girl stood there in front of us waiting. She stood stooped over in a brown dress. She had thick gray tights covering her legs. It wasn’t the St. Catherine’s uniform.

Finally, she said “Hi,” in a small, tight voice, breaking the silence. Her mouth and cheeks hardly moved when she spoke. The skin on her throat was stretched and smeared like the rest of her. She’s burned everywhere, I thought.

Someone whispered something and I felt my whole face go red.
Shut up. Everyone shut up. No, I mean talk! Fill the room up with noise. Be a regular class again now. Do it now!

Mrs. Tracy seemed confused at first, but then said, “Will the people in row two please move back one seat each.” Her face now was as white as I’d ever seen it. “Jessica, we sit alphabetically here, so your seat is at the head of row two.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

Without a word, Jeff collected his stuff and got up from his desk. So did the others. They moved back one seat. Everyone else tried to look busy as the new girl stood there waiting.

Finally, she sat down at her desk.

Jessica Feeney. The burned girl.