Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

The fire was not a bad one at all—but the principal decided to send everyone home, so the buses came early. I don’t get a regular bus, so I just waited for Lana to see if she would show up, but she wasn’t anywhere. This guy Rufus came up to me and asked if I knew who did it. I said why would I know. He said, he is asking everybody.

I watched him go off along the line of buses, and yeah, he was asking everybody. There are people, there really are, who think that they could be detectives if they wanted to. When I talk to these people I want to say, if you could be a PI or a detective, you would be. Being a detective is too exciting to not do it. If you aren’t doing it, it’s because you couldn’t do it. So, stop telling me you could be a detective.

Detectives are a special case, though. Not everything is like that.

You remember I had the argument with Beekman. He’s the one who gave me the detention that led to six detentions. Well, when I turned in my paper early, he was shocked. Seems like he had me pegged as a dunce. I still don’t think he thought it would be good, though. He probably thought I was trying to put one over on him by handing in a terrible paper early.

I went into school, though, the next day, and Beekman comes up to me at my locker and he is raving about my paper. He says it is a really good paper. He says it is the best one he’s ever gotten. Okay. Take it easy, guy. It’s a paper.

He goes off down the hall, and I figure it’s the end of it, but then O’Toole in math asks me why I can write such good papers but don’t do anything for him. He says I can’t leave class until I redo my last two tests, and he gives them to me again. So, I do the tests, and fill in the answers this time. I really wish Beekman hadn’t blown the whistle on me.

It gets worse, though. The rest of that day was fine, but I guess Beekman talked to more people about the paper. He wanted to put it up for some kind of award. It was just too much.

So, last period, everyone comes down to the auditorium to hear this speech that the principal gives about our civic duty and how setting fires is evil, actually evil, and that if anyone knows who did it, that person should come forward.

I think that they should, actually. If a person is a jackass who wants to burn up the music room, where delicate Mr. Alphonse who is from Spain or France and barely speaks English but is the only really kind one in the whole place, he sits there in the music room with crappy pictures of Mozart on the wall and tries to patiently teach people the fucking oboe, if they want to burn that room up, ahead of the rest of the godforsaken place, then yes—clap them in irons, I say. The order of things matters.

By the way, the principal was talking about evil, and I was thinking: how goddamned Manichaean this country is. Isn’t it obvious that the world is a meaningless place where there is a faint impression you can leave on each other by being compassionate, but not more than that? And even awful things just pass away? I don’t understand what evil is, and furthermore, I don’t think he does. Our principal would love to take the occupational test from the guidance counselor and find out that he should be a principal. That would suit him right down to the ground.

I’m sorry for the digression. The point of all this is, after the auditorium speech—someone comes to the principal, another teacher, to talk about the paper that Beekman is blabbing about, my paper. So, the principal gets it in his head that I probably started the fire. He noticed that there was fire in the paper and a fire in the music room. He is basically a hero to himself.

What does that mean? It means my aunt gets dragged down after school, and I am sitting in the principal’s office again, this time with Mr. Alphonse across from me. He is purposefully not looking at me. I think to myself—he really thinks I did it. I was shocked.

I touch Alphonse’s knee, and I say, mon professeur, je ne l’ai pas fait.

(I asked my aunt how to say it.)

He smiles this really nice smile. It is like, I said something to someone and for once they believe me.

The principal comes over. What did she say? Then, he and Alphonse have some words off to the side and Alphonse leaves. The old man didn’t want to have anything to do with it, since he knows I’m not the one. The principal is showing Alphonse the paper, which he somehow has, but Alphonse won’t go with it. He says some shit in French and leaves. My aunt laughs. What did he say? I ask. Something about birds and donkeys, she says. I’ll explain later.

The principal comes back and tries to be a tough guy with us, but I point out that I was in a class at the time the fire was set. He calls that teacher in over the loudspeaker, and she hasn’t left yet, luckily, because she is ninety years old and slow. It takes her twenty minutes to get to the office, but when she does, Ms. Cassidy tells him, yes, Lucia Stanton was in Chemistry at that exact moment. I give her a thumbs-up, but it only confuses her.

So, I’m like, too bad, I guess your little witch hunt didn’t go as planned. For which I immediately got a detention until my aunt stuck up for me.

Or, I guess she did. They told me to leave the room, and my aunt talked to him. When she came out, she said she threatened to make a big deal out of me being accused if he didn’t can it. How could he go after a poor girl like me who has done nothing?

My aunt, what a lady.

I guess that meant I wasn’t going to get an award for the paper. It’s not like I worked that hard on it. Some of the other kids started asking me to write their papers for them. I said do your own work, weaklings. Actually, I didn’t say that. I just said, no.

Beekman read some of it out loud to the class,

Whatever this material means to the author, there is a dangerous implication. That implication is that the vengeful burning of one another’s dwellings by these peasants is not political, and is not a thing that is performed with agency. In fact, the burning is a result of the ignorance forced upon the peasants by their masters, and by the imposition of a religious framework that fails to prepare them to weather the calamity of their daily lives. The people with agency in the situation have total agency, that is, the masters control completely what happens. When the peasants burn each other’s huts, or even burn their own huts (by accident), the masters have chosen to permit the burning of the huts to occur. It is they who are guilty.

Everyone looked pretty bored while he read it, and I really wished that he would stop. At the end, he asked why it was good, which really made me turn bright red. I completely hid in my hood at the back of the class.

The first girl who raised her hand asked if she could get up to throw her gum out.

Beekman said yes, now—what was good about the paper?

Somebody said maybe it was good because I had read the book.

He said, that was important. He said he often got papers written by people who hadn’t read the book. But, it wasn’t that.

Someone else said something stupid, so Beekman was forced to come out and say it himself, which he should have done in the first place if he wanted it to get said.

He said, it was good because I read the book with an open but argumentative mind. He said the paper was at least good enough to be a college paper, whatever that means. I really wish that he hadn’t said that part, but the first part was okay.

It is pretty stupid, how I felt. I felt that—I wished my aunt was there to hear it. She doesn’t get to hear much that is positive about me. The landlord even told her I am a bad kid, which was rough. He is an old Ukrainian guy, and I thought he liked me.