The lot next to his house looked like a dinosaur dig when Eli got home from school that afternoon. Men in yellow uniforms scoured the strata of ash, pulling out copper ribs and ceramic skulls of toilet bowls. A fire truck was parked on his front lawn, muddy water draining into the street. When he first saw the trucks, he thought they must have caught another gang of teenagers sneaking into the abandoned house. Then he smelled the smoke. He saw the sun glaring chartreuse through the clouds and remembered what firemen were really for.
Eli barreled across the street, calling out his mother’s name over and over. It wasn’t his house, he realized as he passed the dripping trucks. Only when he felt the firemen’s eyes on him, peering through their extraterrestrial masks, did he remember the lighter pressing hot inside his pocket. He hadn’t used it in months—there wasn’t even any fluid left inside. He just liked the feel of it close by, always handy, though he hoped he never had to explain that feeling to the police.
His mother stood on their unburnt front porch, arms folded and head shaking as if watching an execution. Eli’s beating heart calmed, and he slowed his breathing by gulping in the smell of doused flames.
He wedged his nose against the fence that separated his house from that of his best friend. Only there was no house. There was the aftermath of a volcano.
*****
They’d met at the bus stop, must have been five and seven. She was older. Both their mothers watched the children through the front windows of their respective houses, instead of waiting with them at the chilly bus stop on the first day of school. The women didn’t get along much better than the grass of Eli’s lawn got along with the neighbor’s weeds.
The children, picking up on the rivalry, faced away from each other as they waited for the bus. Eli faced the wind, putting him at a disadvantage as it chapped his lips and tore back his eyelashes. He held his ground, knowing his family’s honor was on the line. He almost gave up and turned first, but he heard her say, in a tiny voice that burned red hot on his ears, “Sit with me on the bus.”
Eli wondered for a moment what his mother would think of him, talking to this strange girl. But as they boarded the bus and rolled away, his house drifting down the cracked river of the street, he found it nice to sit with someone. They crammed into the seat, closer together than their houses ever would be. She had Chap Stick, which she shared, and he paid her back with jellybeans.
Her name was Phoebe, and she had crooked teeth, front one grayer than the others. The two swore to keep their friendship a secret, a pledge that lasted until they stepped off the bus at the end of the day and Phoebe’s mother saw them holding hands. Eli thought she would tear Phoebe away and hide her in the house, but instead she waved her hand and invited them both to sit on the front porch. She didn’t let them inside, which Eli found strange, but she offered them each a stick of beef jerky. Eli knew his mother would have made them oatmeal cookies, but she was slower to forgive when it came to long-standing feuds.
When they’d finished their snack, Phoebe told him about the snake in her drain pipe. She was scared to death of it—she told him with an excited gleam in her eye—but Eli said a little smoke would clear it out, no problem.
“Pyro,” she shoved his shoulder.
Her voice sounded funny, hanging in the mid-august air, so he picked up a cracked fence post and clanged it against the house’s drain pipe. That would coax the snake out. Phoebe screamed and covered her ears, but she smiled mischievously and said the snake would bite him. Together, the clanging and her yelling drowned out the strange sound of the word echoing in his mind.
He wasn’t a pyro. He hated fire. He just knew that it, like friendship, could be useful.
The next time he visited Phoebe, a few weeks into the school year, they broke the cellar door. It was Eli’s fault, although she was the one who’d suggested they practice sneaking like spies, in case the skill ever came in handy. Since Eli didn’t have any siblings, he wasn’t good at keeping quiet, but Phoebe knew all sorts of tricks for sneaking around behind her mother’s back. She walked on the balls of her feet. She placed every step as if snakes slithered below, waiting to bite. Eli followed her, both of them pressed flat against the panels of the house. They learned every inch, how many steps it took to reach each corner. She was just teaching him about nighttime sneaking, making him slink along the wall with his eyes closed, when he felt the ground give way beneath his foot. Some metal thing retched, the smell of rotten eggs reached him, and he felt leaves as crisp as tumbleweeds crunch below his shoe.
He opened his eyes to find his jeans ripped from ankle to knee. His leg had gone straight through the cellar door, snapping the iron lock on the latch. He may not be a spy, but he was strong.
Pride vanished when he saw her face. He wondered if he was bleeding, to make the blood of her own face drain so quickly. He pulled his leg out, ripping his jeans further, but instead of helping, Phoebe shook her head, hands writhing, and said he ought to go home. She’d fix the door, no problem. She’d take the blame, so long as he please, please left right that very second.
He went home.
Eli had a theory. He figured there used to be another house wedged between Phoebe’s and his. The two sheet-style apartments sat on the same street, their neighborhood far enough from the center of the city to escape the honking horns and the game day traffic, but close enough that they got to go ice skating in the city square at Christmas. The bricks on the side of the houses looked exposed, like a cherry pie with a slice removed. Between them was a canyon full of enough weeds to strangle a dozen lawn mowers, if they didn’t choke on the rusted nails and broken glass. Eli’s mother complained a lot to the county about that lot.
He asked his mother once whether there’d been another house at some point, and she said there could have been but nobody’d choose to be the neighbor of that woman (meaning Phoebe’s mom).
He almost asked her what was wrong, then. What made Phoebe’s family so bad? Why they were worse than him, just because they hadn’t lived in the neighborhood as long? Why couldn’t they be friends instead of neighbors?
But Phoebe wasn’t his neighbor, technically. His neighbor was an empty lot.
On the Fourth of July, Eli’s mother was working. She’d been so desperate to cover her shift at Mollie’s, “the only fine dining this side of the river,” she’d asked Phoebe’s mom to watch him. That was a big thing, for her to accept help, especially since Phoebe’s mom always held things against people. She stored up favors like pickled eggs in her basement.
So while the favor of watching Eli sloshed around in a jar of vinegar, Phoebe and Eli played hide and seek in the field between their houses. The dry grass felt good, crunching like a summer day beneath Eli’s shoes. Phoebe went barefoot.
He let her hide first. She had the advantage, knowing the lay of the house, but Eli was cleverer. His mother said so.
He checked behind the still broken cellar door, knowing that was too obvious. He peered through the lattice below the porch and saw the diamond shadows, but no Phoebe. He even glanced across at his house, wondering if she’d broken the rules and run off her lot.
Something rattled behind him, louder than the donut trucks that passed by his house each morning on their way from the factory. He snapped around and saw the garage door, creasing back like a cootie catcher, and Phoebe standing underneath, holding the door up with one arm. She smiled, no doubt knowing Eli would call her a cheater.
“Cheater,” he said. “We’re not supposed to go inside.” He took a step forward, knowing she’d never let him in the garage. She drew the door down a little, a bashful clam.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I already found your hiding spot.”
“I win. You lose.” she said.
“You gotta catch me first.” He darted forward, diving into the garage.
Cobwebs filled Eli’s mouth as he army-crawled across the concrete floor, getting a nose-full of car oil and dog shampoo. The swish of his jeans against the ground echoed in the room, and when he looked around, he saw it was empty. The opposite of his garage, with its pot-bellied boxes and carpets rolled up like oversized newspapers. There wasn’t even junk in here. No broken lawn mower. No jars of pickled favors.
“Were you robbed?” he asked.
“Who’d want anything we’ve got?” she said.
Eli wondered what his mother would say about the spider webs and the dusty corners, but decided then and there he never wanted to find out. He’d keep this to himself, folded tight, no matter how she tried to pry it from him.
He glanced at the crack of light under the garage door. It looked like one of those booby traps that protected a Pharaoh, which made this hollow place the crypt.
One look at Phoebe and he saw she knew what he was thinking. She pulled on the door, but he was too fast, ducking under just as it was closing. Outside, he rolled on the cracked driveway, glancing back in time to see the door smack shut, separating them.
That was the furthest he ever went inside her house.
“I wanna show you something,” Phoebe told him. It was spring and they were all counting down the days till summer vacation. He realized he hadn’t heard her voice much the past year he’d known her. She kept it to herself, usually, like the hot head candies she hid in her desk and never shared.
Today, though, her voice was enough to make his ears burn.
They snuck around the corner of her house, into the no man’s land between their windows. She placed her hand spread-eagle on the mold-tinged panels of the wall and pointed to a dark spot.
“See that?” she said.
Eli squinted at the spot, a metal ball flattened into the wood like a wad of chewed gum.
“It’s a bullet,” she said, eyes so wide her smile couldn’t touch them.
“Someone shot at your house?” They lived in the better part of the city, away from all that “gang nonsense.” His mother said so.
“They shot at something.” She shrugged.
“A long time ago.” Eli said. If it was recent, he would’ve heard the shots outside his window. Your neighbor didn’t get shot without you knowing.
“Where’d you live before here?” he asked.
She shrugged and tried to pry the bullet out of the wall.
“Did you live in the bad part of town?”
“There is no bad part,” she snapped, denting the drain pipe with her fist.
If there were snakes, Eli thought, they’d come hissing out now.
He kept questioning her, prodding her as he’d prodded the opening of the drain pipe, trying to get her to talk again. She’d offered him a tiny taste of her voice, and he kept snatching grubby-handed for more hot heads. But she wasn’t giving anymore.
The next time Eli saw her, she was on the sidewalk that ran past both their houses, crying. A glacial trail of broken glass led from her house’s shattered front window to the concrete where she knelt, the skin of her palms cracked open like the pavement. Eli’s mother kept a first aid kit under the bench on their front porch, but when he rose to get it, Phoebe grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down. In that rare, cinnamony whisper of hers, she asked him to stay and wait for her mother. Eli wondered then if she was scared of being found alone.
So they watched the street get embarrassed at being caught out so late, blushing grapefruit pink. Just above the shingles of the houses across the street, they saw the glass of the skyscrapers, rising like shark fins. In the dark, they made up stories about the lights that turned on, gossiping about people they knew only through their mothers’ complaining. His mother’s gossip was the best in town, though only a few people knew it. She knew to keep the best for herself, tweaking her stories, creasing the truth until she’d folded it into the perfect paper crane or crouching bull frog. His mother, the origami queen of gossip.
When the sunlight shot down their street, it caught in a glint in the gutter. Eli pointed it out, but Phoebe was almost asleep, slumped against him. He slipped her off his shoulder and set her on the sidewalk, crawling on all fours to where he saw the gleam.
It was a lighter. Low on fluid. Rusting around the flint-wheel. He knew from movies how to make it light. If he ever needed to.
He heard Phoebe trying to move. Crawling back to her, he waved the lighter triumphantly.
“Now I can keep the snakes away, Phoebe,” he said.
“There was no snake.”
Though he couldn’t see, he heard the grin in her voice. Even hot heads could lie.
His mother found them, sitting on Phoebe’s front porch with her hands bleeding and her mom nowhere in sight. One look at them and she shook her head, stooping down to help them up. She whisked them to the front porch, where she wrapped Phoebe’s hands, wiping a tear from the girl’s eye with the corner of the gauze. Then she tapped Phoebe’s snotty nose and ordered Eli back inside.
As he watched out the perfect glass of his front window, something in the way his mother rested her hand on Phoebe’s shoulder told Eli she was counting the creases in the paper, figuring out how to fold it in her favor.
The weather got cold, but Phoebe still wore her sundresses. Eli liked how brave she was, not scared of the principal or her mom or the goose bumps on her own arms. She’d just grip her elbows and pinch the cold out of them, leaving fingertip-shaped bruises on her skin.
“Good day to be a pyro,” she told Eli, blowing on her fingers. The cold made her stutter.
“Why don’t you wear warmer clothes?” Eli asked. It may not scare her when her lips turned blue and her teeth clinked like dominoes when she talked, but it sure scared him.
“Don’t have any,” she said.
He wondered if she’d moved from Florida, or someplace always warm. But she seemed too used to the cold. Then he remembered the bullet holes and the empty garage. What was she hiding, inside that house? Stolen bones? Secret guns? Probably nothing at all. Probably all those pickled favors in case his mother ever mailed out her origami gossip.
It was the cellar door that finally did it.
Eli woke one morning to his mother shouting, in the open street where everyone could see her tearing into pickle-juice Phoebe’s mom. He heard the words “cellar” and “broken” and “brat,” and the blood swished into his head.
She’d found out.
He imagined the gaping jaws of that cracked door, leaves swirling as they fell to their doom. All their friendship, all those shared sticks of beef jerky, even the time he’d scared a snake out of her gutter, it didn’t count for a thing with Phoebe’s mom when his own denounced her publicly.
“You calling my son a liar?” He heard his mother’s voice.
“No, ma’am.” Phoebe’s mom said. “Just a no-good vandal.”
“Maybe your own juvenile delinquent’s been a bad influence, don’t you think?”
Eli didn’t know what juvenile delinquent meant, but when he glanced out his window, across to the scarred side of Phoebe’s house, he saw her peering out from her window, staring back at him.
Her face fell. She apologized with her eyes. He’d never hear her hot head voice again.
Phoebe’s mom lost her job at the donut factory. At first his mother claimed she had nothing to do with it, but when she saw the way people respected her, a little glimmer of fear in their eyes, she recycled the tale and folded it back into her hand.
She couldn’t stop him from going to see Phoebe. It made him glad to know their friendship would look bad on both their mothers. People would talk. Maybe his mother would lose her reputation, and so then wouldn’t be so ruthless about keeping it.
Nobody answered when Eli knocked on Phoebe’s door. He tried again the next day, and the next, and the next. Stalactites of toilet paper began to appear on Phoebe’s porch and trees. The shutters got leprosy and went white with mold. When the gutters collapsed, coughing out hairballs of leaf clumps, he knew they were gone for good.
He carried the lighter with him everywhere. He wouldn’t dare get near the house, knowing what his mother would say if she found out. But when he came across a dead snake, drying on the sidewalk, he decided to end its reign of terror once for all.
He’d save Phoebe yet.
Wading through the grass to a far corner of his backyard, he cleared a space and built a fire as best he could, making sure to stay in view of Phoebe’s window. He never gave up hope that maybe, they were still hiding inside. Phoebe and her mom, huddled in an empty corner of the garage where no one would bother them, call them names or shoot at them.
Starting a fire was harder than he thought. He made a Lincoln log cabin, then heaped on dry grass. The flame slithered out of the lighter like a genie. Smoke billowed up as the flame met the grass. The snake’s raisined body sunk around its slinky-ribbed skeleton, its eyes long ago scorched out by the sun. He hoped Phoebe could see the smoke, hoped it so hard he didn’t see the flames nipping at the grass of the lawn.
The fire spread before he could stop it. He jumped back, ankles blistering, and didn’t have the thought to beat the flames down. He only watched as the fire licked blade after blade, leaping toward the dead branches above. They fell short of their goal. The flames died, starving on the dirt-drowned grass. The fire disappeared. He was safe, unscathed, but for singed ankles.
Nobody came to the window to check. Nobody called the fire fighters. If any neighbors saw the smoke, they must have told themselves his mother had only started the barbecue.
He didn’t think about the fire for a long time. True, he still carried a lighter in his pocket, but only as a good luck charm. Only to remember Phoebe, and that summer, and the hot head of the word “Pyro” in his mind.
He watched over the next three years as vines snaked in the windows, clawing open the shutters. The phone line snapped in a lightning storm, whipping the raw side of the house. All those red bricks started to sag, cherry filling of the pie melting out and the pastry crust of shingles crumbling.
His mother sent Eli to other houses with trays of oatmeal cookies so he could make friends whose mothers she approved of. She thought he’d forget about the cellar and the beef jerky and the snakes in gutters. But you can’t forget the thing right next to you, like one of those model hearts, the two pieces fitting perfectly. Like the red/blue of a police light. Like a pyro and his matches.
A few weeks later, he saw the pink slip pinned to the front door to keep the vandals out. He thought nothing of it, until he came home one day and found the fire engine parked in the driveway. It wasn’t his house, and it wasn’t a dinosaur dig. There wasn’t any volcano.
There was just fire.
*****
“It was an accident,” his mother chirped as she scooped an oatmeal cookie off the sheet. “A fortunate one. Saved the city from spending money to tear it down.” She offered him a cookie. As he sank into the couch, rubbing smoke out of his eyes with his palm, his mother explained the circumstances. She’d seen the smoke, rising out of the chimney as if that no-good woman’s soul were escaping. She’d called it in, sure it was somebody’s teens who’d snuck inside again. The firemen hadn’t arrived in time to save the building.
“It’s not like they were in it,” his mother said, waving a spatula at his stunned face. It took him a moment to realize she meant Phoebe and her mom. “They didn’t find any remains, not even those no-good kids. Nothing was lost.”
In the charred lot, the firemen pulled a white cabinet door out of the ash. Its edges crisped, it looked like a crumpled origami swan. If it wasn’t an accident, why did he feel the eyes of the firemen staring through their visors at him? Why did his heart stop when one pointed at his window? He fingered the lighter in his pocket, now part of the endangered species of things that reminded him of Phoebe. He should throw it out, now, he knew, before they became suspicious. Before they snooped around, and called him things his mother would rather the neighbors not hear.
As his mother continued to talk, he stumbled out the back door. He slid against the side of the house, sneaking so the firemen wouldn’t see him. Out here, the oatmeal cookies baking inside smelled like charcoal. His mother washed dishes. He held fire in his palm.
The garbage can was on the back porch. Thank goodness he’d forgotten to take it to the curb yesterday. As he held his hand with the lighter in it over the dented garbage can, though, his mother’s words repeated in his mind, and he realized he couldn’t remember what Phoebe’s voice sounded like. Nothing was lost nothing was lost nothing was lost.
Deborah Rocheleau’s work has been published by Tin House, 100 Word Story, Flights, and the Boston Literary Magazine, among others.
