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  Agent Jackson, however, looked unsurprised at her outburst. Either he was too dense to read between the lines, or he already knew what Jessica had done. Jessica looked at him and suspected the latter, even though there was no possible way he could.

  “You know why,” Agent Jackson said. “Do you know how?”

  Jessica opened her mouth, but no words came out. It wasn’t the question she expected. It was also a question to which she had no answer. She remembered her anger. She remembered her father’s clothing sprouting a dozen jets of flame. She could remember that she had done it—

  But her memory didn’t make any sense. She knew she had set him on fire, but she didn’t remember touching him, or even so much as lighting a match.

  The fact that this stranger saw so deeply into her own confusion was terrifying.

  “We want to help you, Jessica. We know what you’re going through.”

  Despite her fear, Jessica had an intense desire to understand what this man was offering. The fact he knew so much scared her. But it also meant he probably knew more.

  What she had done to her father might not have been anything simple or mundane. She had watched her house explode into an inferno in a matter of minutes. She had watched the walls of the living room spontaneously erupt into rippling sheets of flame. Maybe understanding exactly what happened was the only way she could prevent it in the future.

  She looked at the smoking ruin of the house, remembering the power of the flames that had reduced everything to ash.

  Maybe understanding exactly what happened would be the only way she could do it again.

  ONE

  EUCLID HEIGHTS, OH: Monday October 16, 1999

  09:25 PM

  “Please, David. Do something about him.” Allison Boyle spoke in a harsh whisper. She hated the pleading sound in her own voice. It had been nearly an hour since Chuck Wilson had crashed the party and it had taken that long for Allison to work up the courage to talk to David.

  “Allie,” David’s voice had a nasal whine to it which was only made worse by the art deco Darth Vader mask he wore. “I really don’t want to start a scene with the guy.”

  “It’s your party,” Allison lowered her voice even further, because she saw Chuck weaving in from the kitchen. He was hard to miss. He was at least a year older than everyone else, and wasn’t wearing even an attempt at a costume. “You didn’t even invite him.”

  “People show up.” David lowered his own voice to a point that was barely audible. “Allie, my folks don’t know about the party. If I just ask him to leave…” David glanced over his shoulder. Chuck stood by the rear wall of the dining room. He had an arm up to the elbow in the cooler sitting there. He fished out a can of beer, grimaced at the label, and opened it anyway.

  “… he hasn’t disrupted anything.” David finished.

  “He’s disrupting me.”

  “Has he done anything—” David made a helpless gesture with his hand, rustling the black cape he wore. “Anything?” He repeated uncertainly.

  Allison wrung the tail of her costume in her hands. “No,” she said. Nothing real. “But he scares me.”

  David exhaled He sounded relieved. “At times he scares me, too. But he’s behaving himself. If I start something with him—” David shook his head. “I know the police would get involved. If he didn’t kill me, my parents would.”

  Allison nodded and backed away. “I understand,” she said.

  As usual, David’s chivalrous instincts hit him a little belatedly. “Allie, if you really want me to—”

  She shook her head, “Never mind.”

  “If he does start up—”

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks, David.” Allison backed into the living room, still wringing her tail.

  Why did Chuck have to show up?

  She found a safe corner to back into so she could watch everyone else enjoy themselves. She’d been looking forward to this party for weeks. However, right now, she wanted to be anywhere else. Another house. Another city. Another planet. All because of Chuck Wilson.

  The she felt disgusted with herself. Chuck had never even done anything to her. Nothing anyone would understand. He had a perfect right to hang around the school yard, right? If she saw him in the corner of McDonald’s or at a movie theater, that was just coincidence, right? There was no rule that said he had to use a different mall.

  But when she caught him staring at her, she felt hideously naked.

  She couldn’t get someone arrested for staring at her.

  Calm down Allie, she thought to herself, you’re going to freak out and give yourself a migraine. If it bothers you that much, you can just leave.

  She shook her head. That would be giving in, and she didn’t like giving in. She hadn’t given in to the headaches, and she wasn’t going to give in to Chuck. Besides, she had spent too much time on her tiger costume— even though the leotard that made up most of it helped her feel even more naked around Chuck.

  Someone tapped her shoulder and she jumped, knocking her fake nose and whiskers askew.

  A tall, black Princess Leia looked down on her and asked, “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Very funny, Macy.” Allison dropped the tail of her costume to straighten her nose. She looked up at Macy, a fair distance since Macy was probably the tallest girl in the entire sophomore class of Euclid Heights High School. “You nearly scared the fur off of me.”

  “That’d be a show.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “So why’re you wedged in a corner instead of joining the party? You missed Ben putting some candy corn and a can of beer through his nose—”

  “I’m not in the mood, Macy.”

  “Chuck?”

  Allison nodded.

  “He didn’t do—”

  Allison put her hand to her forehead and tried to push back the throbbing she felt there. “No. He didn’t do anything.”

  Macy stepped back at Allison’s tone. “Sorry.”

  Allison shook her head. “It isn’t your fault.” She sighed. “I just got through talking to David.”

  “Ah ha.”

  Allison looked up. “‘Ah ha,’ what?”

  “Nothing—”

  “You meant something by that.”

  “Chill, girl.” Macy backed up, holding up her hands and smiling.

  “Yeah,” Allison nodded violently. “You should talk. You go with a guy who puts corn through his nose. Why I—” Allison’s voice trailed off with a strangled gurgle.

  “Allie?”

  Allison felt her breath knocked out by the headache even before the pain hit her. She managed to whisper, “All… right,” before the first wave of agony ground into her temples. Her eyes watered and colored rings began sprouting from every light source in her field of vision.

  “Like hell,” Macy said.

  Allison could feel an arm groping for her and she grabbed it. “Bathroom,” she managed to whisper.

  A hot iron band wrapped her skull, squeezing in time to her pulse. Dimly, she heard Macy yelling, “Make way, make way— the lady’s going to hurl. Move it. Move it.”

  Macy maneuvered her up the stairs, through a crowd of costumed teenagers. Witches, vampires, spacemen and soldiers blurred into an amorphous mass of sound and color. Allison still had enough mind left for her to be embarrassed at the scene she was making. Then the pain flared again and all she could concentrate on was not falling over.

  She barely noticed the crashing sounds behind her.

  Macy got her to the bathroom and knelt her over the toilet. Allison blinked at the blue water in the bowl. It rippled into colors that made her eyes hurt as badly as her head. “Alone,” she managed to say.

  Her nose— whiskers and all— fell into the toilet, splashing blue drops on her face.

  “Girl, I don’t think—”

  “Please. Leave.” It took all of Allison’s breath to say those two words.

  After an eternal pause, she heard Macy back up and the door close.

 
She hyperventilated into the toilet, deep gasping breaths. She tried to clamp down on the pain by force of will. The effort screwed her eyes shut.

  She pulled herself upright, one hand clamped on the sink. She swayed and almost fell over. With a shaking hand she pulled open the medicine cabinet, spilling a bag of cotton balls, an open box of Q-tips, and a plastic cup filled with Band-Aids.

  She cursed David’s parents as she knocked aside antacids, prescription bottles, bunion pads, cough medicine—

  Aspirin, Advil, Tylenol, Motrin— please, something.

  She managed to find a bottle of generic headache medicine behind a bottle of Peptol Bismol. The Peptol Bismol fell into the sink as she tried to fumble open the child-proof cap on the bottle.

  She accidentally ate part of the cotton batting as she dry-swallowed a handful of pills.

  She gagged and sat down on the tile floor. The pain made her dizzy. She leaned her back against the door and closed her eyes. Red flashes shot across the inside of her eyelids in time to her pulse. After a while, she heard a knock on the door and, “How you doing, girl?”

  “Fine, Macy.” Allison spoke while moving as little as possible.

  “No 911?”

  “No. Go watch Ben put something through his nose.”

  “You’ll be all right?”

  “I’ll survive. Join the party.”

  It was a few moments before she heard Macy’s steps recede down the stairs.

  The pain slowly became bearable. That’s how she dealt with the headaches; sit still, breathe, wait for the painkiller to kick in.

  She didn’t know what was worse, the headaches or Chuck. Both were responsible for her godawful attendance during the start of the school year. Both were something that she wouldn’t be able to make anyone understand. She’d been to the doctor twice for these headaches and— supposedly— nothing was wrong. Her mother thought that the headaches had been psychosomatic, some sort of stress. Something that showed Allison couldn’t deal with school.

  Allison couldn’t admit that.

  That’s why she couldn’t talk to Mom about Chuck. It would be an admission that Allison couldn’t handle herself. She never again wanted to hear the condescending tone she’d heard from her mother after the second visit to the doctor. “What’s the real problem?”

  The question made Allison want to scream.

  Since then, Allison had kept her headaches to herself, spending too much of her allowance on over-the-counter painkillers. Unfortunately, that meant she had now over a dozen unexcused absences on her record that Mom didn’t know about. All in less than two months. Her teachers, according to school policy, had the right to flunk her for that alone.

  Allison still didn’t know what she was going to do when report cards came out. Mom would freak.

  “The doctor didn’t find anything wrong,” Allison whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  ◆◆◆

  Allison sat in David’s bathroom long enough to tell four people to go away. None of them was David. Allison didn’t know whether or not she was grateful for that. She didn’t want to admit her feelings toward David had changed. They’d been together since they’d started high school. But in the last two years she’d changed, and David had stayed David.

  I don’t need to be thinking about this.

  Allison opened her eyes and found that the light in the bathroom wasn’t painful any more. As she pulled herself upright, she felt a deep wave of guilt looking at the mess she’d made of David’s parents’ bathroom. Band-Aids and Q-tips covered the floor. Bottles filled the sink. Worst was the Peptol Bismol, which had opened, splashing thick pink liquid all over the sink, mirror, and wall. She looked down on herself, surprised to find her costume unviolated.

  She pushed the fading headache from her mind as she did her best to repair the damage she’d wrought. Cleaning the mess ended up being easier than figuring out how all this stuff had fit in the medicine cabinet in the first place. She ended by tossing out the Q-tips and the nearly-empty Peptol Bismol bottle to make room for everything else.

  She hoped David’s parents wouldn’t notice.

  She finished by cleaning herself up.

  Between losing the nose, blue water stains, and smudging from tears and the palm of her hand, she had to wash the makeup off her face. It took a while to remove the black and yellow stripes. In the end, all that was left of her costume above the neck was a pair of black ears peeking out from her blond hair.

  Red rimmed her eyes. Anyone could tell she’d been crying.

  She grimaced and fished her nose out of the toilet. She wrapped it in toilet paper and promised herself that she’d disinfect the thing before Halloween came around.

  She opened the door a crack. She could hear the party still in swing downstairs. Though it sounded like a lot fewer people. She caught a glimpse of a clock through a bedroom door. It read eleven-thirty.

  I was in there two hours?

  “Time flies when you’re having fun,” she muttered.

  Someone had posted a note on the bathroom door. It read “Do not disturb,” and had a crude cartoon of a cat with its head in a toilet. Allison ripped it off the door and crumpled it up. She’d never hear the end of this. She shouldn’t have come to the party.

  She hoped Macy hadn’t left without her. She didn’t want to walk home alone the way she was dressed.

  Allison caught up with Macy, next to the nachos in the living room. Most of the party seemed to have gone, the food mostly untouched. “Where’s everybody?” she asked.

  Macy turned around, looking surprised. “Allie, where’ve you—”

  “Bathroom.”

  “I thought you left. What’d you do, fall in?”

  Allison sighed.

  “How you feel?” Macy asked.

  “Better, I think. I want to go home and lie down.”

  “Sure thing. Let me get my coat—”

  Allison looked at the uneaten food. “What happened to the party?”

  Macy shrugged. “I’m not quite sure. Apparently a table full of food upended about the time I was helping you upstairs—”

  Allison nodded. She could picture David’s reaction, especially now that she saw all the stains on the carpet. The whole costume party was beginning to seem like a less than great idea all around. “Where’s David? I should say good-bye.”

  “I think he’s sulking in the kitchen. Is your coat in the bedroom?”

  She tossed Macy her nose. “Yeah, and would you put this in my purse?”

  “Ah— sure.” Macy wrinkled her nose at the blue-stained toilet paper and said, “I ain’t even going to ask.”

  Allison shook her head and started for the kitchen. There were still some people left, chatting quietly. Presumably they were uninvolved with the table incident.

  Poor David.

  He didn’t deserve to have his party collapse around him. Even if he could be, at times, what Macy unkindly referred to as a “prime-quality wuss.” Allison sighed. She didn’t like thinking badly about David.

  She weaved past a sheeted ghost, toward the kitchen, and an arm appeared to block her way, bringing her up short. She turned to see Chuck Wilson grinning at her.

  Oh God.

  “Hiya, sweetcakes. Wondering where you went to.”

  Instinctively, she backed away and hugged her arms to herself. Chuck had managed to slip between her and everyone else. His jeans were rolled up over combat boots. He wore a wide leather belt with a brass Marlboro buckle. Hanging off the belt was a chain for his wallet and a sheath for a buck knife. He wore a red flannel lumberjack shirt that was rolled up to the elbows. He chugged the can he held in the hand that wasn’t blocking her way.

  “Don’t want to miss you without a hello.”

  “Sure,” she said. She tried not to appear frightened, however futile the attempt. She managed to look him in the eyes, and even that felt as if she had to fight invisible weights chained to her neck. “You’ve said hello.”

  He wa
s only a foot away from her. She could smell beer and sweat. No one else seemed to notice them. There could have been a half-dozen people in the dining room, but she still felt terribly alone.

  Don’t let him touch me. Please, don’t let him touch me.

  Chuck had her cornered by the cooler. She could’ve ducked under his arm, but that would have meant brushing by him, in a leotard that felt more and more as if it was only painted on.

  “Come on, sweetcakes. You gotta know I like you.”

  Please go away.

  Chuck bent to get another can out of the cooler. He had to reach across her, backing her into the corner. Allison felt on the verge of panic. Chuck’s right hand held onto the door frame in front of her, his other reached around behind her. Her back pressed against the wall, and a light switch dug between her shoulder blades. His face couldn’t be more than three or four inches from her own. His breath smelled of alcohol.

  “You don’t know how special you are, sweetcakes.”

  She felt his hand rummaging in the cooler. The plastic jostled against her thigh. Drops of water splashed against her leg.

  “We should get to know each other—”

  Chuck moved his right hand away from the door frame. She didn’t know if he intended to use it to touch her hair, grab her shoulder, or help him fish for beer— but it gave her an opening.

  She ducked around Chuck. As she did, her back brushed the light switch and the lights in the dining room went out. Someone on the far side of the room distinctly said, “shit,” as he tripped over something.

  “Where you going?” Chuck said.

  Allison felt a tug on the tail of her costume. It felt like the fabric was tied directly to her heart. For a moment she couldn’t breathe. She stood there, frozen, until she felt something brush the lower curve of her behind.

  Knowing it was Chuck’s hand made her want to vomit. Pain flowered behind her eyes again, and she could almost see his hand. She screwed her eyes shut and tried to pull away, and this time it felt as if the tail tied directly to the middle of her brain. When she heard it tear, it almost felt as if it was her spinal cord, and not the fabric, that gave way.