After the Fire I Let Her Burn

The smoke hit me first. Not the smell of it, but the memory of it, thick and acrid, crawling into my lungs before I even opened my eyes. For one long second I was back in the corridor of the old Kessler building, and the beam was coming down, and I could feel the weight of it in my chest like a fist closing. Then my eyes snapped open, and I was lying on the grass behind the Kessler theater, and someone was screaming from the second floor. I sat up slow. My heart was slamming, but my hands were steady. Around me, the afternoon was ordinary and bright. Kids from the conservatory were drifting across the lawn with their instrument cases. Someone was practicing scales through an open window. A lawnmower coughed somewhere off past the parking lot. Same Tuesday. Same May heat. Same smoke curling out of the window above the loading dock. Except this time I wasn't already running. This time I was sitting in the shade with a cold can of soda in my hand. "Help! Somebody, please!" Her voice rang out over the grass, thin and cracking on the please. It was a voice I knew better than my own. Two years of Westbrook Conservatory together, three months of dating, and then one long afternoon in which she'd ended both of those things with a single shove. I looked up at the window. Smoke was pouring out of it in slow gray ribbons, and behind the glass, a shadow was moving. "Someone call 911!" a kid near the loading dock yelled. "There's someone up there!" People started running toward the building. That was the thing about Westbrook. Everyone wanted to be a hero, because the school handed out scholarships to heroes and the rest of us just paid tuition. I got up, put the can down on the bench, and walked toward the loading dock like I had all the time in the world. "Hey!" A freshman in a Westbrook hoodie grabbed my sleeve. "There's a girl up there, she's screaming, we have to—" "Fire department's already been called." "What?" I lifted the soda and drank. The can was cold enough to sting my fingers. "I called them ten minutes ago. They're four minutes out." I nodded at the smoke. "You go up there right now, you breathe that, you spend the night on a ventilator. Or you die. Your call." He stared at me like I'd spoken Latin. "But she's—" "She's fine," I said. "She's in a stairwell. She's not even in the room." The kid looked up at the window, looked back at me, looked at the other kids gathering around the loading dock. Everyone was frozen. Nobody wanted to be the one who ran in, and nobody wanted to be the one who didn't. "Is anyone actually trapped?" someone asked. "No," I said. "Yes!" The voice from the window came again, higher now, cracking into a sob. "Please! The door's locked, I can't get out, please!" I looked up at her. I could see her now, small and pale in the smoke, hands pressed to the glass. Marissa Alden. Senior. Flute. My ex. The girl who'd told me she loved me in the fall and pushed me out of a second-story window in the spring. "Nobody go in," I said. "The smoke's going to flash over in about two minutes. If you're in that corridor when it does, you're not coming out." "How do you know that?" the freshman said. Because I'd been in that corridor. Because I'd gone up those stairs on this exact afternoon, in the first life, and pulled her out through the smoke and the heat, and carried her down two flights with my lungs burning, and set her down on the grass, and taken one breath of clean air, and then the beam fell. It hit me across the shoulder and the back of the head and I didn't even see it coming. She didn't warn me. She saw it coming. She was standing right there. She watched it come down, and she stepped back, and when the beam hit me, she turned and ran. I didn't know any of that at first. I knew it later, in the dark, the way you know things when you're dying and your ears still work. People running. Sirens. Someone saying, "Where's the other one? There was a boy with her." And Marissa, voice shaking, saying, "He went back in. I told him not to. I told him it was too dangerous." That was the story. The boy who went back in. The boy who tried to save two people and only saved one. The boy who was a hero. I didn't care about being a hero. I cared about the fact that she'd locked the door behind me. She set the fire. She locked the stairwell. She waited for me to come up, because she knew exactly what I would do. And then she watched the beam come down and she let it happen, and then she stood on the grass in front of the whole school and cried and told everyone I was a hero. I woke up eleven days later in a hospital bed with tubes in my arms and a lawyer at the foot of it, and the whole world had already decided what happened. Marissa Alden, poor thing, so brave. Liam Reyes, dead at nineteen, what a loss. Except I wasn't dead. I was just done. And then I woke up here, on the grass, on the same Tuesday, with the same smoke in the window, and the same girl screaming for someone to come save her. "Hey!" Marissa's voice came down again, raw and desperate. "Liam? Liam, is that you? Liam, please!" I raised the can. "Hi, Marissa." "Liam, thank God, please, I'm stuck, the door—" "I know. You locked it." There was a pause. A long one. The smoke kept coming, and the crowd kept growing, and somewhere in the distance a siren finally started to wail. "What?" she said. "No, I—Liam, please, I don't know what you're talking about, just come up here, please, I'm scared—" "You're not scared," I said. "You're a very good actress. You've been doing this for two years." "Liam—" "I'm not coming up." The window went still. For a second I thought maybe the smoke had gotten to her. Then her face appeared again, closer to the glass, and I saw something underneath the tears. Something hard. Something cold. Something I should have seen a long time ago. "You'd really let me die," she said. "You'd really stand down there and watch." "I'd really let the fire department do their job," I said. "Which is what I should have done the first time." And then the fire truck came around the corner of the building with its lights going, and two men in gear jumped off before it had even fully stopped, and the crowd scattered, and I stood there with my soda in my hand and watched them go up the stairs. Marissa was out in six minutes. Not a scratch on her. She came down on her own two feet, wrapped in a blanket, mascara streaked down her face, and the whole school turned to look at her like she'd been resurrected. She looked right at me. I raised the can. And she smiled. That was the thing. She smiled. Just a little. Just for me. And then she turned to the paramedic and started crying again, and everyone crowded around her, and I walked away across the grass with the empty can in my hand. I had eleven days before the hospital bed. Eleven days before the tubes. Eleven days before the lawyer and the verdict and the whole world telling me what happened. Plenty of time.