How to Start a Fire (2 page)

“Yes, please.”

Kate filled a purple plastic tumbler from the in-room sink.

“I don’t remember coming back here.”

“Not surprising,” Kate said. “Anna slapped your face a few times to wake you up. We got you to your feet and walked you maybe half a block, like coaches and trainers do with football players who get injured on the field. But then you stopped moving on your own, and you’re heavier than you look.”

“Then what happened?” George asked, because stories about things you did that you don’t remember are always particularly compelling.

“Then we found the shopping cart,” Kate explained. “Getting you inside was a whole other hassle. I won’t go into the details, but if you have any unexplained bruising, suffice it to say, that was the cause. Sorry. We tried. But you really do weigh more than you appear to.”

“And then what?”

“We carted you to the shuttle stop. The shuttle driver was kind enough to help you onboard. It was late, and we didn’t know where you lived, so we just took you back here. The RA helped us get you inside. After he left, Anna took your dress because it still had vomit on it. The rest is history.”

George lifted the covers and noticed she was wearing a Banana Slugs T-shirt and underwear. She scanned the room for her clothes, but it was hard to spot anything amid the chaos.

“Where is my dress?” George asked.

“Anna’s washing it. She should be back any minute.”

As if on cue, Anna Fury entered the room, carrying a laundry basket and a can of Dr Pepper.

Anna smiled and said with the air of someone who knows, “I bet
you’re
hung-over.”

She dropped the laundry basket on the floor and handed the soda to George. “This should help—that’s why it’s called
Dr
Pepper. But what you really need is a greasy breakfast.”

George cracked the soda and took a sip. It helped. She crawled out of bed and glanced in the mirror.

“I look like shit,” she said.

Anna rolled her eyes. George was the kind of woman who could do nothing to shake her beauty. The old T-shirt, matted brown hair, and mascara migrating down her face only added to her attractiveness. She had a perfect olive complexion and freakishly high cheekbones and eyes that were a green-gray color Anna realized, when she finally got a good look at them, she had never seen before. George was on the cusp of being too tall. All legs, but useful legs, not decorative sticks. The kind of legs that could send a person places, like into the air for a perfect lay-up. Looking at George, Anna felt a stab of envy. But she understood from watching her mother that there was a cost to beauty—you were chained to it for years, and when it finally released you, you didn’t know who you were anymore.

George put on her dress from the night before, a form-fitting jersey that had clearly shrunk in the wash.

“Thank you for . . .” George said.

“You’re welcome,” Anna said. She turned to Kate. “I figured out what we should do today,” she said with the expression of a scientist who has just found solid proof of his career-making theorem.

“What?” Kate said.

“Go camping,” Anna said.

“Where?” Kate asked.

“I think it’s time you saw the Stratosphere Giant,” Anna said.

George must have looked confused, so Anna explained. “Kate is prone to desultory and passing obsessions. When I first met her, it was the actor Lon Chaney. Now she’s really into the California redwoods. The giant ones. Not your average redwoods.”

George stared blankly. Kate misunderstood the expression, interpreting it as information-seeking rather than the slow uptake of the hung-over.

“Some of those trees grow to over three hundred and fifty feet. That’s longer than a football field. You can even drive your car through one of them. Probably not a truck,” Kate said.

Anna turned to George and said, “You should come too. That’s exactly what you need: fresh air, enormous trees, a dip in a cold pond, s’mores, and sleeping under the stars.”

It wasn’t like George to participate in spur-of-the-moment activities, but Anna seemed so sure of her plan. When people have a certainty that you lack, being swayed feels less like a sharp turn than a slow arc in the road. George returned to her dorm, showered, and changed into practical clothes. She washed the makeup from her face and scrubbed a phone number off her forearm. His name was Doug, or maybe Don. She had left the party with him—that she could remember. What she couldn’t recall was why he’d left her passed out on the lawn.

Attending Santa Cruz was not unlike going to college in a campground. You walked through the woods to class, and there were miles of trails where you could avoid even seeing a campus structure. But Anna firmly believed that adventures could not exist at one’s door. They required travel. She was using Kate’s obsession as an excuse to take a road trip. Her car was already loaded with off-season clothing, neglected schoolbooks, a myriad of empty soda cans and candy wrappers, and camping gear. Kate, always more practical, brought food, water, and emergency flares for the six-and-a-half-hour journey.

It was decided that George should take the back seat so she could stretch out her legs. For the first hour of the drive, George listened to Kate and Anna’s conversations as if she were tuned in to a radio show. Their back-and-forth had a speed and rhythm she couldn’t match. George’s hangover was still quietly vibrating, so she just watched and listened. After a while she realized that she had never seen two women so patently different be so at ease with each other.

Kate and Anna had met only three and a half months earlier. They were thrown together not by the careful dorm-room pairings that the housing administrators prided themselves on but simply because they were late applicants in a pond of already-paired fish.

“I have a theory,” said Anna now. “They try to match roommates based on common interests and similar backgrounds and areas of study. But from my observation, that breeds competition. What truly matters in a congenial cohabiting situation are sleep habits, taste in music, and levels of cleanliness. Kate and I have all three in common—basically, we’re sloppy insomniacs who loathe pop music. But in everything else, we’re like night and day. See, I’m a biology major; Kate, business. I have two parents, still married. Both of Kate’s are dead. Car crash when she was eight. I’ve never held a job. Kate has worked in her grandfather’s diner since she was twelve. I grew up in Boston. Kate was raised right here in Santa Cruz. She’s never even left California. Can you believe that?”

“We won’t be far from Oregon,” said Kate, who didn’t seem to mind having her life summarized solely in terms of how it differed from Anna’s.

“Maybe we’ll just dip inside,” Anna said, “so you can say you’ve been there.”

As Anna shattered the speed limit on Highway 101, the landscape turned a lusher green. Dark clouds pushed their way into the sky as headlights started to blink on. Anna interrogated her new friend with a series of seemingly random but actually premeditated questions.
What song would your torturers play to drive you mad?
“It’s a Small World.”
How many hard-boiled eggs can you eat in one sitting?
Five. (Anna was impressed; most people couldn’t answer that question.)
Who would you save in a fire, Keith Richards or Pete Townshend?

“
I don’t know,” George answered, indifferent to both men.

“The answer is Pete Townshend. A fire wouldn’t kill Keith Richards,” Anna said.

Kate asked the pedestrian kinds of questions and learned that George was a midwestern girl, raised in Chicago. An only child. Still-married parents. Italian American father. WASPy mother. She had several male cousins who’d taught her how to fight and play basketball. She had had a four-inch growth spurt when she was thirteen and played on the boys’ team until high school. Her major: undecided.

A few hours into the road trip, Kate posed a question that spurred a rapid-fire conversation George found hard to follow; it was like listening to actors in a 1940s radio show.

Small droplets of water dotted the windshield. Then the drizzle turned to rain, forcing Anna to turn on the windshield wipers.

The car swerved back and forth across two lanes with a rhythmic thumping sound. Anna slowed the car, turned on her emergency blinkers, and pulled onto the shoulder of the road.

Anna donned a yellow rain slicker that she found under a waffle iron in the trunk. George didn’t ask about the waffle iron—or the toolbox, or the snowshoes, or any of the other items that together easily exceeded the weight of a spare tire. Several minutes elapsed as Anna attempted to flag down passing vehicles, only to be drenched by their splash. Eventually, a Ford truck pulled over a little way up the road.

Anna ran the fifty-yard dash to the truck. Kate and George watched her gesture to whoever was sitting in the passenger seat. An objective observer would have thought the tale she was weaving was far more complicated than a simple flat tire. Then Anna turned around to face her travel companions, gave the thumbs-up sign, and casually walked back to the VW.

Anna opened the car door. “Just grab your coats and whatever you need for the night. They’ll drop us in town. We’ll get the car fixed in the morning. Oh, and Kate, you’re a foreign exchange student from the former Yugoslavia.”