Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why

First, I was outside the school. It was big, bigger than the other school. All concrete and glass. I didn’t like it. I’m not sure that there’s any reason for building anything other than huts. Can’t we just live in huts and be kind to each other?

I suppose we’d better go inside.

I could draw my first day at Whistler like a diagram. There is a line that goes across the page a little ways and then it hits a Rorschach blot. When it hits the Rorschach blot it just dies, the line absolutely curls up and dies. Which isn’t to say that it went badly.

Here’s a sample:

GIRL So, your name is Lucia. You went to Parkson?

LUCIA …

GIRL …

LUCIA …

GIRL …

LUCIA …

GIRL I heard you, uh, stabbed somebody with a pencil.

LUCIA …

GIRL …

LUCIA Yeah.

GIRL …

LUCIA …

GIRL Uh, I won’t tell anyone.

LUCIA That’s okay. You can. It doesn’t matter.

GIRL …

There would be a part in the diagram where you could lay a transparency across with little red blots of color to show other things, like—when I noticed kids who seemed okay. I saw a couple of those, but they didn’t talk to me. One of them was reading some Trakl, which I thought was okay. I mean, it wasn’t a bad sign, at least.

One girl asked me if I was going to go out for sports, which made me spit out the apple juice I was drinking. I said that sports were part of the spectacle. She said what. I said the ruling class. She looked confused. I said otherwise people would get fed up and they couldn’t be controlled, so no. I mean, I would go for a run if it was a nice day, or definitely swim. I would do judo or something if they had that. But chase a ball? Do I look like a dog?

I am the captain of the field hockey team, she said.

So, that ended that.

My aunt wanted to know if I had made any friends, and I said that I had made a bunch. She said, tell me about the day. I said:

Well, it started out really well. There was a girl named Kimberly sitting next to me in homeroom and she made me a friendship bracelet. She is in Drama Club and I’m going to be in it, too. We ate lunch together with her boyfriend and a bunch of really nice people. I had so much fun. Then, her boyfriend took us into the back of the gymnasium where no one could see and he inseminated both of us, just like that. It felt really good, not the actual act, but, you know, afterwards, the glow of it … So, yeah, I’m pregnant, and I have friends, but no prospects, really.

That’s not funny, said my aunt. How did it really go.

Okay, I said. I’ll tell you tomorrow.

So, I should probably mention a fact. I am really good at guessing how things are going to go. I am a good predictor. I told my aunt that, and she said, like Cassandra? I said, no, because I keep it to myself.

What I am not saying is—I can predict the future. That’s garbage. It’s this: I have a good way of modeling things in my head, so I can guess how to avoid having to do things I don’t want to do, or avoid being involved in things I don’t want to be involved in.

For instance, I am always sick when it is time for gym class. Mostly, this works. But I’m not sick right at gym class, no—I get sick during the class prior, so that I have to go to the nurse, and then returning from the nurse (where I turn out to be fine) takes a long time, and then gym class is over, so I am just starting to get changed when it becomes clear I shouldn’t bother. This was a point of contention between myself and the gym teacher at my first high school.

Another example: I made friends with the janitors and security guards at the school on my second day. That is, I said hello and offered them some licorice at the entrance to the foul little room where they sit together when they are doing nothing. As simple as that. Now, they like me. They know I’m not like the other shits who attend this school. What does that mean?

It means that when I sneak out the back of the school to go to the store for cigarettes or licorice they won’t say anything. Also—there is a girl who looks kind of like me whose locker is six lockers down, and I managed to take her license out of her bag when she wasn’t looking. Now, if I need to get in somewhere, I can use that, and it will be on the record that she went there.

I think about the future state of affairs, and what will be needed. I know that kind of thinking is foreign to some of you, but you’ll have to wise up, chumps! This is the world we live in.

On the second day, a guy asked me on a date. I am definitely not very attractive, that’s for sure, but I am pretty skinny and not a leper (my apologies to any lepers out there—not your fault). This guy, he probably figured it was the time to strike, right when I got there. Well, I said we could go out if he wanted, and he said what about for pizza that evening, so we went. He bought me pizza, which was good because I don’t have any money. I would rather have bought my own, but what can you do? He got a really big soda, and I asked him if he had a library card. He was mad that the counter guy had talked to me a little too much . He said a whole lot of stuff that I didn’t hear, and at some point we went outside and I left. He was really tall, so there’s that. I looked into the future and I saw that the short guys at the school would figure I only go on dates with tall guys and the tall guys would think she ditched a tall guy after one date, so things were looking good.

Maybe I mentioned that my aunt has a garden? Well, she does. She has a garden wedged in between the house and the garage and a side wall. It looks kind of like this:

X is the edge of the map. It’s important to let people know where the map ends, if you make a map for someone. I read that in a cartography book. Cartography is mapmaking, yeah? It used to be hard and all the maps were mostly wrong, but now it’s easy, that’s what they say.

So, my aunt’s garden. I guess there are two kinds—French gardens and English gardens. Well, maybe there are Chinese and Japanese ones too, but those have mostly moss and stones, so they don’t count right now. I’m talking about gardens with plants, yes? So—a French garden, as far as I can tell, is a garden that gets tended. You know, my aunt, she walks around it slowly and bends down now and then to pull up some shit, or to stick some other stuff in somewhere. That’s a French garden. An English garden is something that used to be a French garden but that no one does anything to anymore. So, it looks run-down. Things don’t grow in proper lines. This is what they tell me. My aunt’s garden goes back and forth between these two extremes. Sometimes it is more French, sometimes more English. I asked a French exchange student about this once and he said that English gardens actually aren’t gardens. But, he also thinks everyone in France was in the Resistance. To me—an embarrassing number were probably Vichy, and I’m not talking about the ones who got lynched. That’s just how it is with history. You do things and later on when people see what you did, it looks bad. The only exception is if you get to defend yourself, but mostly you don’t. History is just people behaving badly.

In the diagram you can see that the house is pretty big. That might lead you to think that my aunt is doing pretty well for herself or something like that. When people drop me off, they drop me off in front of this house, and it is a huge house, so they think, well, maybe she dresses like a hobo, but she must be wealthy. I guess it’s okay for them to think that. My aunt and I live behind that house and behind the garden. The garage is converted and we live in it, as if it were a little house. It must have been a hassle for my aunt to take me in when they sent my mom up. I sleep in the one bed and my aunt sleeps either in a cot or in this big chair that is in the corner. She often falls asleep reading, so I think it is nice for her.