I reached out and touched the spot
slightly below the girl’s elbow and at once she dropped her textbooks and went
tiptoeing down the hallway like a ballerina, her arms flowing from third
position to fourth. They stopped and watched her, teenagers wearing backpacks
crammed with notepaper and thick books. Together we stared as she went into a
short run and leapt forward, legs split front to back, her feet and the weight
of her all landing on the floor with a gentle thud.
She stopped at an orange locker and
spun the combination wheel clockwise, counterclockwise, then clockwise again.
She lifted the metal handle and swung the door open, her skinny fingers and
skinny arms reaching in and pulling out a chocolate cupcake with an unlit
candle claimed in its fudge center. A Korean boy came out of the chemistry lab
and she offered him the dessert.
“Make a wish,” she said. “Close
your eyes and wish the continent.”
I came up behind her in careful
steps. I pinched her left earlobe with my thumb and forefinger. She released
and the cupcake fell to the ground, rolled on its side. Then I saw that the
girl was looking at me. For the first time, she was looking at me. I could see
the whites of her eyes darkening to the color of ocean, that shallow heart of
the Pacific. Like the surrounding waters of Maui .
The kind of blue where tropical fish swim, streaked in yellow and black, their
noses like little trumpets.
“I know you,” she said.
I stepped back. “What?”
“From middle school. You’re
Kenneth. Tell me your name is Kenneth.”
I looked away, through the window, somewhere
else. “No,” I said. “That’s not me.”
“Thomas, then. Jules. Yes, your
name has to be Jules.”
I took hold of her narrow wrists
and squeezed. At first, nothing. Then a sound out of the sky, something like
trees buckling under the wind and splintering in half, something like the cry
of a wounded animal lost in the gross blackness of a cave. There was a shout of
light, a pause in time, and the world seemed to breathe in deep and exhale
slow. It was quieter now, the world.
I blinked and saw that the girl’s
head was on fire. She was burning and a ladder of smoke rose from the top of
her head up to the ceiling, quickly casting itself out wide until no ceiling
was left to be seen. Someone’s voice was yelling for water. Another for the
glass to be broken and the fire alarm pulled. Students and teachers were
heading down the stairs, some with shirts pulled over their noses and mouths,
others coughing into a hand.
The floor emptied and only the girl
and I remained. She lowered her burning head as if to bow.
“Make a wish Nicholas,” she said.
“Close your eyes Kale and wish the stars. Wish the great wall of China.”
I closed my eyes. I thought about
my name, its letters and the way it appeared on the signature line. How the
tongue touched the roof of the mouth whenever it was spoken. My name was the
fire in that girl’s hair and the liquid melting down the sides of her face. It
was in the gray of the smoke and caught in the people’s lungs. My name, my
name. I took a long breath and in one blow snuffed the girl out.
