Playing with Fire

I got so close to the fire I felt its echo burning my skin. I grabbed her jacket, but it felt empty. Light. Her tiny body was limp in my arms. I tried to pry her off the hook, feeling my eyes stinging with smoke and tears and fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Aubrey, please!” My voice broke. “Please, baby. Please!”

I was yanked back, my fingers still wrapped around her jacket. I fought the force that dragged me back. Kicking, screaming, and clawing at the arms around me, blind with rage and hate. The hatred facing inward made me delirious. I’d made a promise to my baby sister, and I’d broken that promise. I was so busy getting drunk yesterday, I hadn’t even thought to take her into consideration. The one single time my parents gave me the responsibility of keeping my sister safe overnight while they were out, I failed them.

I failed her.

I failed myself.

I screamed until my lungs burned. Whoever grabbed me threw me on the snow and ran back inside. From my position in the front yard, I saw someone else running after them, screaming.

Dad. He saved me and went back for Aubrey.

Mom. She went inside with him to try to save someone, him or Aubrey, I couldn’t tell.

A piercing wail broke above my head. I knew it was Whitley, but I couldn’t turn around and look at her. In fact, my body couldn’t move at all.

I was no longer drunk.

I was stone-cold sober.

And facing the harsh consequences of my actions.

In the days after the fire, I found out a few things.

For instance, I discovered that the reason the toaster caught on fire was because someone had thrown bottle caps into it, and Aubrey, who didn’t know this, pushed two chocolate-chip waffles from the freezer into its jaws, trying to make herself waffles.

Afterwards, the insurance investigator (or whoever the hell he was) explained to us that she’d tried to escape, but couldn’t, because her Barbie jacket had gotten tangled in the exposed hook. She’d probably cried for my help, but I was all the way across the house, on the second floor, snoring and recovering from a bitch of a hangover.

The bottom line was this—our house wasn’t insured for fire caused by an asshole teenager who couldn’t keep his friends in check and fulfill a small promise he’d made to his sister. In other words—we were screwed. We had no house to live in, because soon after my mother dragged my father out of the house, the fire spread and the house pretty much collapsed in on itself.

We were suddenly broke, poor, and homeless.

We moved in with my aunt, Carrie, for the first few weeks, while my father and his coworkers “Band-Aided” the house as much as they could to make it livable again. My father, who owned a blueberry field and a small farm, had to neglect his business and throw himself into putting a roof over our heads. Every night, he pulled himself into bed and closed his eyes without even taking a shower.

I could swear he went weeks without taking a shower.

Months, maybe.

Neither my mother nor my father could bear looking at me. They didn’t blame me explicitly, but they didn’t have to. I’d killed Aubrey. At the very least, I was responsible for her death. And not in some vague ass way—the way people sometimes blamed themselves for someone else’s death because they didn’t insist hard enough on them going to get a mammogram or whatever. I’d straight up made this happen.

If only I’d dragged my sorry self out of bed and kept my promise, Aubrey would be here. With us. Happy, partly toothless, and alive.

I broke up with Whitley a week after the fire. She cried and told me I’d change my mind, but I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t deserve happiness, and a girlfriend definitely equaled happiness.

Once we moved back to our house—or whatever was left of it—my parents threw themselves headfirst into the arms of depression and didn’t leave the bed. They dwelled on their pain, neither of them working or trying to support whatever was left of the family. The blueberry fields were left unattended, the fruit unpicked. I quit football and took a job at Chipotle to help pay the bills. Coach Rudy begged me to reconsider, but once I explained my circumstances to him, he dropped it.

I was worried my parents and I would become homeless and neglected my social life indefinitely, but East stuck by me, even when I spent months not being able to look at his face without lashing out.

Then senior year happened.

Dad decided to get out of bed on my first day of school. I still remember the morning it happened. He put on his working clothes—The North Face jacket and Blundstone boots—and went down to the farm to see the damage. After months of neglect, nothing was left. He’d let the fruit in the fields die, and whatever animals he had, he’d given away for free.

Dad went downtown the same day and got himself a fisherman’s job. Grandpa St. Claire was a fisherman, so he didn’t have to learn the ropes, but by God, it must have been fucking humiliating to get a starter job so late in the game, especially for someone who’d been self-employed since he’d graduated from high school to support his small insta-family.

Mom emerged from her room a few weeks later. She was the first to actually talk to me, and by that time, it had been almost a year since any of them looked me in the eye, much less acknowledged my existence.

I’d been invisible.

They didn’t ask me how I felt.

How I was coping.

Didn’t feel me.

Clothe me.

Ask me how school was going.

Fuck, they didn’t even know I quit football. I was an invisible ghost, hovering in their way to the kitchen occasionally, and nothing more.

She sat me down and told me it was not my fault. Said she appreciated how I’d stepped up and paid the bills, and that from now on, things were going to be different.

But I knew that it was my fault, and that the quicker I got out of my parents’ hair, the better.

In the weeks leading to my eighteenth birthday, my parents made an effort to talk to me. Mom got on some meds after being diagnosed with major depression. Dad constantly smelled of fish. They were pretending to be okay. I didn’t buy it. They spent almost a year virtually ignoring me. There was simply no way they were over what I’d done. Even if they were—I wasn’t over it.

On my eighteenth birthday, they bought me a cake.

I returned from a shift at Chipotle. Walked straight past the cake with the lit candles, up to my room and locked the door.

I vowed not to celebrate birthdays ever again that day.