Chapter 9
Ninth Grade
(age fourteen)
Am was getting twitchy. It was going to be another whole day before the teachers were ready to re-start school, and Kelli wasn’t answering her messages.
Of course, Am knew better than to say anything incriminating over the phone, even if everyone’s devices were jailbroken and everything was in secret code.
But she needed to talk to Kelli. She’d sent innocuous message after innocuous message: Kelli, are you ok.
Kelli, can we chat? Kelli, when can I see you again. And nothing in return at all.
Kelli was always bad at answering messages but usually that wasn’t a problem because Am would see her in class.
For the last few days, there’d been no class.
And there was something really wrong with this, doing something as big and awful as the fire and then not talking to each other.
Am wanted to respect Kelli’s boundaries or whatever, but she also didn’t want to wait another day.
It took her a while to work up to it, because honestly Am felt rotten, but eventually she marched out her door, down a couple floors, across the street to Kelli’s building, and up to the Reynolds family’s door. She rang the doorbell twice.
“Oh, Amelia,” said Kelli’s mother, opening the door. She looked drawn and worried. “Are you here to see Kelli? I don’t know if she’s feeling up to it right now.”
“She’s not answering her messages,” Am said, thinking of how she’d always hated that name.
“Oh, yes, she’s terrible about that. It’s just that the fire—the alarms, the stadium, you know how she is about crowds and noise—it really got to her. I don’t even know if she’s awake now. Maybe if you checked back later—”
“Look,” said Am, raising her voice a little, “Kelli is my very best friend, and my second-best friend just died, in case you forgot. I’m going to come in and I’m going to see if Kelli’s okay. I don’t even have to stay long, but that’s what I’m doing.”
Kelli’s mother reluctantly stepped aside, wringing her hands. “Kelli,” she called, “Amelia’s here.”
Nothing stirred in Kelli’s room. Am knocked on the door. “C’mon, Kelli, please.”
Much too slowly, Kelli opened it.
She looked like shit. Her thick hair was a mess and her eyes were red-rimmed.
Her shoulders hunched, and she looked down at the floor.
The room itself was still way cleaner than any room Am had ever been in charge of, but the bed was unmade and the covers had been thrown all over the place, which was a catastrophe, by Kelli’s standards.
“Hey,” said Am softly.
“Hey,” Kelli whispered.
“That bad, huh?”
Kelli made a dispirited gesture. She stepped back to let Am into the room.
Only when the door closed behind them did Am say, “Listen, I wanted to check on you, but also I needed to talk about something kind of weird, okay? Something kind of got stuck in my head since the fire and I don’t know who else I could possibly talk to about it.
Let’s do the check-in first though, because you look awful, wow. I’ve been worrying about you.”
Am’s heart sank even further as she watched Kelli’s posture. How Kelli stared fixedly at the floor. This wasn’t just overwhelm. Kelli had made up her mind about something.
“It was a mistake,” Kelli said, so softly it was almost a whisper. “The whole thing—it was a mistake. It was wrong. We can’t ever do something like that again.”
Am tugged on a strand of her own short hair. “Yeah,” she said. “Can’t argue with that.”
From the facts of it, Kelli was correct.
People had gotten hurt even worse than Am expected, and it hadn’t made her grief for Elaine hurt less.
It was only dumb luck that her efforts at covering her tracks had worked out, that nobody had barged in to haul them off to the community standards enforcement office.
And nobody had gotten the message that the fire was about Elaine, that what happened to Elaine had been wrong.
But . . .
But the look in Kelli’s eyes when she held up the match.
The rush of relief at being able to do something, even a stupid, violent thing.
The way Kelli had kissed her in the maintenance tunnel, feverish with the awful power of what they’d done.
Am hurt a lot about all this, in a very complicated way, but she wasn’t convinced she felt regret.
“Did you go to see the firefighters?” Kelli asked in a whisper.
“Did I what? They’re not, like, a tourist attraction.”
“I mean through the volunteer program.”
“Oh.” Oh, no. Am hadn’t even thought of that.
She’d seen the announcement on her home computer, a few days ago: students their age were being recruited to help care for the firefighters who’d been injured in the fire.
Am felt bad about the firefighters, but the volunteer job, as described in the announcement, had sounded stupid.
Just handing out flowers, candy, cards, and good wishes to people who needed skin grafts and painkillers, not candy.
At least it was an actual, optional volunteer job—not like what the grown-ups did.
Nobody had to worry about it except for brown-nosing students who thought that it sounded like a good idea.
It hadn’t occurred to her Kelli would try to do a thing like that. But of course she had. Of course noble, dutiful Kelli would have tried to do a thing like that.
“I saw him,” Kelli choked out. She sat on the bed and stared fixedly at the floor, barely managing any words at all.
“The firefighter. One of them. He was sitting in his bed, he had his hands out in front of him like a zombie. Hanging there. In some kind of device, with bandages over them. He couldn’t use his hands.
Am—he was burned so bad—I don’t know if he’s ever going to use them again—they had to feed him his food with a robot arm and—”
She broke off, her chest heaving. Am wanted to put a hand on her, comfort her. But what comfort was there for this? The only comfort, as far as Am could figure, was not to think about it too hard. And Kelli never could have stopped herself from thinking hard.
“We did that to him,” Kelli spat out at last. Her eyes looked a thousand miles away.
“And we didn’t do a thing to the therapists.
They’re fine. They’re even setting up a temporary clinic at the other end of town, with the same software.
Because of course the therapy building isn’t the only place where they keep copies of that software. We did all that for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Am whispered back.
Kelli stared at her.
“Okay, so like . . .” Am gestured in frustration.
She really didn’t know how to articulate any of this.
“We did it wrong. It was literally wrong, like the way you can get the wrong answer in math class. It didn’t do what we wanted it to, and it did do things we didn’t want.
But that’s just because we weren’t thinking.
What if we didn’t give up on trying to do things, trying to get justice?
What if we just . . . thought about it more next time? ”
“Next time?” Kelli spluttered.
“Right, like—I don’t mean another fire. I’m just saying there’s other stuff we can do besides set fires. What if we wrote on stuff and didn’t burn it and just left it up there for people to see? What if we broke a bunch of stuff, and it was just stuff, and not people? What if we—?”
But she trailed off there, because Kelli was staring at her with genuine revulsion.
“You don’t feel guilty at all,” said Kelli. “Do you?”
“Sure I do, I just—”
She didn’t know how to explain. Am had worked hard all her life on not letting guilt slow her down.
Kelli got plenty of shit from everyone about things she’d supposedly done wrong, but Kelli was nonetheless the kind of person who could try to be good and at least partway succeed.
She was a focused student and a dutiful daughter.
She got all the questions right on every test. Am couldn’t have been like that if she tried—and she had tried, when she was very little.
She’d tried so hard to sit still and pay attention and follow the rules. She’d never lasted five minutes.
Kelli could let her guilt shrink her down to a miniature size, where she never did anything to offend anybody. It would be miserable, and a waste, but technically Kelli could do that and live. If Am tried, there would be nothing left of her at all.
“You don’t,” Kelli said. “If you felt guilty, you’d agree with me.”
“I don’t think that’s how that works,” said Am.
“If you felt properly guilty,” Kelli said, “you’d have been thinking about what we did and about why it was wrong. And you weren’t, were you? You were thinking about—what even was it? What was the weird thing that got stuck in your head that you needed to tell me?”
“Um,” said Am, losing her nerve. “Really, it’s not that important, it’s just a weird thing. We should talk about the fire, you’re right.”
“No, really,” Kelli snapped. “If it caught your attention more than feeling guilty for setting the fire then it must be very important. I want to know.”
Her tone was cold and cruel, but her face said something else.
She and Am were girlfriends, and girlfriends were supposed to share everything.
Something in Kelli really did want to understand what was weighing on Am’s mind, even if she was also very angry and scared.
That look on her face was what did it, not the ugly words in her mouth.
“Okay,” said Am. “I know there’s something kind of wrong with me for thinking about it at a time like this. But you can’t really, like, control what your thoughts do. And—Elaine wanted to try being a boy, in the stories, right?”
Her voice cracked on the name. It was hard to get the name out.
“Yes,” said Kelli, brow furrowed.
“Well, that’s why I was thinking about it. It’s because of her. I just kept thinking, we’ll never know if she would have been a boy for real. But I think maybe I do. Maybe I want to be a boy.”
Kelli wrinkled her nose. “But we’re lesbians.”
“That’s just a word. It’s the best word we had when this all started.
But we didn’t know anything then. Maybe we need a different word.
Or maybe I’m full of shit and I’ll try it for two weeks and then get bored of it and be a girl again.
But what if we tried it, just to see? You could try calling me a boy, just when we were alone and nobody else was listening.
You could give me boy characters to be in the stories.
You could try talking about me like I’m he and him.
You could try calling me a different name. ”
“What name?” Kelli asked, curious despite herself.
“Rowan, I think. Like the tree.” She’d come up with a lot of others, but Rowan was her favorite. It was the tree they’d used to climb up and sit in together all the time.
Kelli took a deep, slow, deliberate breath. She sat up very straight. She put her hands in her lap and let the breath out.
“Rowan,” she said softly, “I’ve decided something.
And I want you to know that I’d already mostly decided before you got here.
It’s not because of what you just said. It’s not because you might be a boy.
I’ve never liked a boy and I don’t think I’m going to start, but if it was just that you were a boy, we could have probably figured something out.
Anyway, I’ve decided. I can’t do this anymore. ”
The words hit Am like a lead pipe. She sat in them, stunned.
“I can’t be with you,” Kelli said. “I can’t be a lesbian at all.
You like being an evil lesbian—or, I guess, whatever you call it when there’s a lesbian who’s a boy—but I don’t like having to do bad things.
And I think that’s what happens when you’re a lesbian.
Maybe girls loving other girls isn’t wrong, but the problem is that if you start doing it, then you have to start doing so many other bad things.
You have to lie to people and hide what you’re doing.
You have to sneak away from school. You have to get illegal books from criminals just so you can understand yourself.
You have to think about illegal sex all the time.
You have to—” Her lip wobbled so hard, for a moment, that she almost couldn’t get this one out.
“You have to put even more things in people’s lives that they can’t explain to their therapy chatbot.
And then you get so wrapped up in lesbian things that when someone’s bad to lesbians, like they always are, you end up getting so mad you start a fire.
I wanted to grow up and change things to make them good but I can’t do that if I’m already bad.
Bad people can’t make things good. So I can’t do this anymore. I don’t like how it goes.”
“But—” Am spluttered. “But we’re friends. But we’ve always been friends.” Kelli was the only friend she had left. “You can’t just—”
“I don’t think we can be friends anymore either,” said Kelli, with a ruthlessness borne of desperation. “Because when people used to date and now they’re just friends, they always want to date each other again. I’ve read the reviews of those movies. I know how it goes.”
“Don’t do this,” said Am, standing up. “We don’t have to do any more illegal things, okay?
We don’t have to write on anything with markers or break any stuff; forget I said all that.
We don’t even have to read the books anymore.
Just please don’t do this. You’re panicking, okay? You’re not thinking straight.”
“I am not crazy,” Kelli snapped. “Don’t call me crazy.”
Am stepped forward in a panic, before she could stop herself. She grabbed Kelli’s arm. “I’m not going,” she snapped back. “You can’t make me leave.”
But the instant she said it, she realized her mistake.
She’d said it like a threat. She’d loomed over Kelli and grabbed her. Like she was going to do whatever she wanted, whether Kelli liked it or not.
The way a boy would.
In the next second, Kelli stood up straight, fists balled. Am’s hand fell away from her arm. They were both about the same height. They stood there, inches from each other.
“Think very carefully, Rowan,” Kelli whispered. “Because everyone in this apartment and at school will take my word over yours.”
Am took a step back.
“I—” she said. She couldn’t figure out any sensible words. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Get out,” said Kelli.
Numbly, not knowing what else to do, Am got out. Kelli’s parents wordlessly furrowed their brows as she stormed out the door, like they were starting to realize how much there was that they didn’t understand.