Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why

They had a hypnotist come to our school, to the last one, Parkson, and some people got onstage and he made them pretend to be farm animals and contort into weird positions. The math teacher stood on his head, which is something apparently he can’t do. I don’t know what that proves. The whole thing left me feeling a bit sick.

I thought about the guy from the Home while I was lying there drunk in the chair holding the tea my aunt made me. I couldn’t drink it because it was too hot, but I was holding it and it was kind of like a hot water bottle. We have one of those, my aunt and me, and we use it in the winter. Actually, I think my aunt uses it year-round, which doesn’t make sense. The window next to the chair is cracked at the top and mended with tape and there is a bit of a draft, which makes the glass brush back and forth. I like to listen to it when I sit in the chair.

It was great of him to bring me the applesauce. It’s probably the first nice thing someone has done for me in a while. He was wearing that awful uniform that the Home makes its employees wear, but it looked okay. I mean, it looked good. I’m sure he is completely deluded. Most people can’t keep all the lies straight—and they end up believing everything. I promise myself every day that won’t happen to me. He is probably in his late twenties. I don’t know.

I wrote down a prediction then, before I went to sleep, and it was:

Tomorrow I will find out more about the Arson Club.

This is a pretty shitty prediction, if you ask me. I think I shouldn’t do predictions when I have been drinking.

Of course, it is possible that such a thing could happen. I could find out more about the Arson Club. But there is no reason to think it would happen. I hate when I break my own rules. What’s the point of me being rational if I flail around like a clown?

Stephan, it turns out, is probably also in the Arson Club. I know this because of what happened in Social Studies class. We had to turn in a topic for research and then we had to go to the library and use the computers or look up books about the subject. Most of the kids are useless cretins, so they wait in a line while the librarian does all the work for them. First thing I do when I get in a library is—I go to the stacks and nose around. The idea is—you don’t know what you’re interested in. That’s why it’s possible to be surprised. So, instead of looking for things in particular, you look for what you didn’t know you liked, and then when you find it you know that you liked it, and then you are a broader person than you were before.

That’s what I was doing nosing around in the book stacks. Stephan was maybe doing the same thing. I had a slip of paper and it said, Russia Peasant Fire-Setting. There were some numbers, too, for the place the materials might be. I had walked back and forth, nosing around, until I got tired of doing it, and decided to find what I was actually looking for—and when I did, there was Stephan, looking at the same shelf. He was holding a book called Arson Investigation, Step by Step . He almost dropped it when I came around the corner.

STEPHAN What are you looking for.

LUCIA …

STEPHAN …

LUCIA I don’t know. Why?

STEPHAN …

LUCIA …

STEPHAN I don’t know.

LUCIA Excuse me, the book I want is right here.

I took it off the shelf and handed it to him.

?

You asked what I was looking for.

Stephan looked at the book and looked at me thoughtfully. I had my hood up, so I felt pretty good. I wondered if I should ask him about the Arson Club, but I didn’t. Next thing I know, we are all just back in class, and then I get called to the principal for having skipped detention, and then I am told: you have a week of detention. They don’t understand—I can just read a book. It doesn’t really matter where I am. The principal’s assistant actually takes me to the detention, as if he is afraid that I will run off into the woods.

In my head, I imagine the conversations that they have probably had at their country club with the old principal from Parkson. Little hellion stabbed him with a pencil, watch out. Yeah, he’s the best basketball player we’ve ever had . That and other nonsense I’m sure they say.

Anyway—it turns out that detention was the place to go if you want to join the Arson Club. Which makes my drunk prediction right. I’m not really comfortable with that.

Do you want to know how detention works? You go to a classroom and there, voilà, all the other shitty little fucks produce themselves like rabbits out of a hat. Then you are supposed to sit together doing nothing as punishment for not obeying. Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon’s soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them—they were chumps. More like—one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping.

So, you sit there and you are supposed to be stupid, so they don’t expect you to better yourself. You’re not allowed to talk, because they don’t think what you say to each other could be useful, even to their mission, as they pretend it to be (that we are bettering ourselves). I suppose they just think we will make trouble if we talk, which is true. But, the trouble we will make is unavoidable.

Let’s talk about DAY ONE, DAY TWO, DAY THREE, DAY FOUR, and DAY FIVE because those are all the detentions I serve that week, and nothing else that happens at school is interesting. In my classes I have my hood up and I sit and write in my notebook. At lunch I sit by myself. I have zero interactions and people have decided to leave me alone, which is partly due to a photograph someone got from someone else—I guess they know people at Parkson. The photograph was pretty funny. I don’t have a phone, so I couldn’t get the picture for myself, but I would have liked to have it.

It seems like somebody took a picture of me when I didn’t notice. Then they stuck cat eyes on my face and claws on my hands and put in a thought bubble, and in the thought bubble they put a picture of Joe Schott’s actual neck with the cuts from the pencil. So, I guess that other picture had been making the rounds at Parkson, and some genius here decided to be even funnier. Well, I liked it—that much I’ll say. I wish I could have showed it to my aunt or my dad.

I sat and read The Theatre and Its Double by Artaud. At first I thought it was just about theater, but then I realized Artaud probably hated theater. Or he hated other people’s theater. He wanted to rescue theater from the philistines, which is everyone. So, I sat and read that. I ate licorice. I saw that one of the guys I had seen talking that time, he was sitting next to me. We can sit wherever we want, but we can’t talk and we can’t move once we sit down. Janine Pezaro, for instance, sits at the front. She doesn’t care if people sit behind her because she is a brick shithouse and can beat up half the guys in the school. Probably more than half. She is in here for beating up two girls at the same time. I am sort of in love with her for that. But, she is definitely deluded.

The guy had mentioned the Sonar Club, and now he was sitting near me. I left the book All Russia Is Burning out on the desk next to the Artaud, and asked if I could go to the bathroom. They gave me a five-minute pass (that’s really only enough time to get to the bathroom and back). When I returned to my seat, I saw that he had taken the book from the desk and was reading it.