Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why

Give me that back.

He handed it over. Sorry, it looked interesting .

Ms. Kennison yelled at us for talking, so we shut up. A seed sown. There was still the question of if they let girls in the Arson Club. I could imagine some bullshit misogynist nonsense governing this also. My aunt was always telling me—never accept any privileges that are for girls, because it is only half the coin.

Fatty wasn’t there, so I just read. This time it was some Alfred Jarry that I found in a church bin. Apparently he would carry a revolver around and threaten to use it on people.

Not a good day. I spat on Lisette at lunch, and got detention for that, because, as it turns out, her mom is the guidance counselor and she has some kind of pull. So, when I show up for detention as usual, Kennison does a little chuckle, and says, I guess you’ll be a regular here for a while, like we have some joke in common. I’m not one to divide myself off from the rest of humanity, I mean, I would like to help them, but let’s be clear—Kennison and I are not in the same boat, no way. So, I just go and sit. I ran out of licorice the day before, and Green Gully ran out too, so I didn’t have any. To explain: there are two stores that sell the licorice I like. One of them, I can steal from. The other I have to have money. Now, my aunt has almost no money, so I can’t use the almost no money she has to buy licorice. That means, I only get licorice when Green Gully has it. They are a fancy supermarket, which means they charge so much they don’t need to have proper security.

By the way, I don’t think spitting on people is that great, but Lisette said something about me living with my grandma, which I didn’t like. All the time—all the time, people basically beg me to freak out on them, and mostly I keep my cool.

This is the day when I realize that the girls who sit at the other corner in the back alternate smoking a joint in the bathroom essentially the entire time they are in detention. They do this by repeatedly asking to go to the bathroom and claiming they have their period. I thought that was funny, when I saw them doing it, but I didn’t understand. Then, when I was actually in the bathroom to use the bathroom, I saw one of them, and she offered some to me. So, that made the detention go by pretty quick. In fact, I was high for maybe two hours, so after detention, I went with them to a park, and we watched a homeless guy chase seagulls. At some point, we had been watching him do it for maybe twenty minutes, Lana says, I think he’s chasing the seagulls, which made us all laugh until we cried. Even I laughed at that, and I never laugh.

I decided on this day to just do the research paper, even though it would be three weeks ahead of time. So, I browsed through the Russia book and wrote up a gloss of what the paper would be. Then, I wrote the first few pages. The position of the author as far as I could tell is that peasants burned down their own houses not for political reasons, but out of ignorance, and sometimes as vengeance for minor slights. This was a bit depressing, but seemed almost inevitable. There was a part about peasant women waking up early in the morning to take their babies out of the iron stove where they had put them in the night. Yes, they put their babies inside an iron stove full of coals. So, if you see a Russian person doing something crazy, as you sometimes do, remember—they have been doing that shit forever. It’s nothing new.

On day five, which was Friday, I should say—I found a note in my locker. It said—11 p.m., Alcatraz.

Alcatraz isn’t really Alcatraz, of course. It’s just a little island that is in the middle of a lake in one of the medical parks. Kids like to go there to drink.

My aunt doesn’t mind if I go out late, because I mostly don’t go anywhere. She thinks that if I’m out late, then maybe I have some friends. In her mind that outweighs the dangers of being out late, whatever those might be. As it turns out, when I am out late, it is just that I am sitting in a park somewhere, or in a cemetery, or even at a laundromat. You know, places where people go when they don’t know anyone.

That meant I could very easily go to this meeting if I felt like it. I stopped at home to drop off the library books and I got a screwdriver from under the sink. My aunt wasn’t even there—on Friday she volunteers at a shelter; I think it’s some kind of soup kitchen. The other people who work there are religious and she can’t stand them, but she goes anyway. She’s like me—she doesn’t know very many people, and so she gets stuck with the ones she does know.

I had to take the bus to the medical park, because it was pretty far from the house. I had been there twice before, both times with older guys, when I was still in middle school. It looked different when I was by myself, but I found the way.

The first part is—getting past the security booth that is by the main road. To do that, you walk about two hundred feet down along the fence, and there is a spot where there just isn’t any fence. The fence has broken and you can walk through. Why they don’t fix it—I don’t know. So, you go through there, and there is a path that leads to the internal road. While going along the internal road, you have to keep an eye out for the guard, but since he goes around in a truck with lights, there is always enough time to jump in the bushes. Eventually, you get to some woods, and you go through the woods. There isn’t really a path. For some reason no plants grow there, so you can walk where you want. Eventually you get to the island. If you go the wrong way, there is a swampy part and your shoes will get wrecked.

The island can be reached by climbing along a branch that goes about four feet above the water for something like twenty feet. At the end it goes into the water, but there are stones you can jump on. It sounds difficult, but it is pretty easy, especially if you are at all agile. To be honest, the island shares almost nothing with Alcatraz. Kids have been calling it that for a decade at least, though.

From the shore, I could see that there were some people out there. I went along the branch, jumped to the rocks, jumped to the bank. There I was. A kid came up—it was Stephan. He had on an insulated flannel shirt so I didn’t recognize him. He must have been waiting for me.

We’re over here.

He pointed to the right a ways. Once I was there, I could see there were a few groups of kids sitting on rocks. We went up to the crest of the hill and there was a pretty big tree next to a broken-down shack. The shack had writing on it. I couldn’t see it this time, but I knew from before. The writing (I don’t know if it is still there) said, Joan fecks goats. When I saw that, my first thought was that a Scottish person had written it, but I looked closer, and the e is just a screwed-up u . I’m not even sure Scottish people say fecks .

By the tree and the shack, in the darkness, there were a bunch of people, maybe ten. Stephan introduced me to them, but he did it the way you do when you don’t even know the people—essentially when you yourself need to be introduced, but there’s no one to do it for you, so you introduce someone else. It is a shitty way to behave.

This is Lucia .

One of them asked me in a sarcastic voice if I liked fire. I thought it was pretty hokey to do it, but I was holding my dad’s zippo in my hand and I flipped it open real quick and lit it. I did it real quick, I must say. It was some legerdemain.