Jesse Ball - How to Set a Fire and Why

If you want to be able to get around the abandoned water park without help, you need to get there when you are still sober, and you need to get there when it is still light.

The best situation at the water park is to have some friends with you and to go away from them and then to hunt for them and find them and then to go away from them and then to hunt for them and find them. In the meantime, you meet other people, many of whom are not worth talking to, but some of whom are okay.

Sometimes you are in the going away from them part of the instructions, and then you are surprised because you have fallen out of sync and one of your friends comes and hunts for you and finds you, and as it turns out, that is just as good.

You should have: licorice, a cup, a flashlight, a notebook, and a screwdriver.

You must never under any circumstances fall asleep in some far-off part of the abandoned water park. If you are tired, you should find the opera singer who (apparently) sings all the time during the day at the abandoned water park, and ask her if you can lie down on their couch.

Really, though, if you are tired, you should go home. The abandoned water park is the sort of place that attracts rather decent people, so it is likely someone will take you where you need to go.

That’s enough of my descriptions for now. I’ll put some more in later.

How things stand at this point if you haven’t been paying attention:

I go to Whistler High School; everyone hates me, except Lana and maybe Stephan (and some other people whose response to being school-victims is to try to uselessly band together). I like Lana.

My mom is in a mental hospital. My aunt is in a real hospital.

I spend most of my time thinking about joining the Arson Club, which I will do, and I am writing a pamphlet about setting fires. I have not actually set any fires yet, but I can do a better pamphlet about it anyway than some people who (maybe) have.

So—

Jan canceled the meeting with me and Stephan. He did this by just not going, which is the best way to cancel an appointment, I have found. That means Stephan went there alone and wandered around like a moron for two hours looking for us.

The other day, I went there and wandered around happily knowing I wasn’t looking for anyone. But Stephan, he went and wandered around in the dark like a moron feeling he’d been tricked. That’s a comparison of our two experiences. I am not being superior—if our positions had been switched, I would be the one scrabbling around in the dark like a mole rat. Or, actually, not like a mole rat. Mole rats are really great at being in the dark. They are totally content there. It is hard not to feel some fondness for them.

Stephan was a little mad that I hadn’t gone, and he was being a bitch about it. So, I told him about my aunt’s stroke, and my aunt’s stroke trumped his irritation. He apologized immediately. I guess he has pretty good manners.

He said he called Jan and we would meet in two days. I said okay. He said, did I want to go today to burn something. I said, I was really busy, but I would go to the other meeting, so he should make sure to go to that.

He said, of course he was going to fucking go to that. That was his meeting that he got me invited to. I said, fine, if you think so.

That’s how things are with Stephan. He doesn’t reassess things often enough. I think he is still pretty immature.

In English class, the teacher, VanDuyn, announced that we were going to do a creative writing module. Someone asked what that was. The teacher said he was going to teach us to share our thoughts and ideas in fiction. A bunch of the kids got really stressed out, I guess because they think that their thoughts and ideas are completely worthless. Ordinarily, I would stick to the party line and say that everyone has useful stuff to say, but this group of kids, I don’t know. I think probably they were right to be stressed out.

So, VanDuyn had everybody take out their laptops. If you don’t have a laptop, he gives you a block of paper. One girl, Maya, has no laptop because she has broken three of the school laptops. She takes them to the fourth-floor bathroom and throws them out the window. No one knows why she does it, but when she does she gets a lot of credit from everyone. It is really funny. She pretends it is an accident each time, but she still gets in trouble. So, Maya and I got blocks of paper, is what I’m saying, and everyone else had a computer.

VanDuyn read to us from an essay by some Pulitzer Prize–winning author. He said, to enter the sweet land of fiction, think about something outside of yourself. Then imagine yourself inside the thing. Then that is a story.

I have no intention of entering the sweet land of fiction, wherever that is.

We worked on the stories for three days in English class. On the third day, we had to give ours to the person next to us to read. I gave mine to Grace, and Grace gave me her laptop with the story open on it.

It’s not really done, she said.

Mine is, I think.

Grace’s story is called DOLPHIN FRENZY.

It is about a dolphin named Reno who wants to go to the big city. I’m not kidding. You can’t make this stuff up. The problem with Grace’s story is that after the first page, on which we get a bunch of Reno’s thoughts, most of which are small-town thoughts and thoughts about swimming, Grace runs out of steam. She starts just putting in facts about dolphins. I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything, but the language changes a little, so it seems like maybe she copied the quotes from somewhere. Here’s a sample:

Reno woke up late and his mom was already setting the breakfast table. He took off the sheet and got up and brushed his teeth. Got to run, Mom, he said, and got just to the bus in time. Some common dolphins are: the common dolphin, Fraser dolphin, Clymene dolphin, Pacific white-sided dolphin, and others. New dolphin species are discovered every day. If you can have a curved dorsal fin, you will, or else probably you will have a straight one. Watch out for the rough-toothed dolphin. They can reach 350 pounds.

I told her that it was great. Don’t change a word. They will tell you to change it, but you have to stand firm.

She said my story was pretty good, too. I asked her why. Then she admitted that she didn’t like it very much, she was just trying to be nice. I said that’s okay—she should know I actually did enjoy her dolphin story very much. She asked if I wanted her to try again with mine, and I said, no. She admitted that she didn’t really read it. I was playing with my phone, she said.

Maybe I should put more animals in mine, she suggested. That’s how she got hers started.

At the end, VanDuyn had everyone read the stories out loud, which was really painful. When it got to me I said I hadn’t done it. Grace got a weird look on her face, but she kept quiet. She read hers, and she was honestly really proud in the way that she did it. I thought it was pretty beautiful that she could be so proud of such a terrible story. I am such a coward I could never have read my story to the class like that, no matter how good it was. So, Grace is a little ways ahead of me on the path of life, I honestly think.

After class, VanDuyn motioned me over to his desk. He said he was willing to give me some leeway because of my situation , but he would love to see what I wrote if I was prepared to show him. It’s almost the worst thing when people are actually kind. It would be easier if they could all be creeps all the time.

Anyway, you are probably interested in hearing about my story, even if Grace didn’t like it.

My story was called “MAY I SWEEP YOUR FRONT STEP.” It was about a woman who lives in a house. One day a beggar comes and asks her if he can sweep her front doorstep. So, she lets him. The story doesn’t start there, though. It starts in the future, at this refugee camp. There has been a disaster, and no one has a nice home anymore, but even in the refugee camp there is stratification, so some people have tents and others don’t. Outside one of the tents, there is this guy sleeping, and he occasionally gets up and mimes sweeping the ground in front of the tent. Every now and then he lies down and sleeps some more, then gets up and repeats it. Someone asks the woman in the tent why he is doing this and she says, many years ago, she lived in a wealthy house in a big city and a man came to her house, a beggar, and he wanted to sweep her front step. She could tell that he was a suitor in disguise, and wanted to marry her. But, she let him sweep the front step, and she was kind of tricky, so whatever stratagems he would use to try to get more out of her, she would always reply with something more clever and he would have to keep sweeping.