field, I couldn’t hear a word she said. When she was done, she hopped off the stage, forgoing the stairs, and handed me a can of spray paint.
“You serious about this?” she asked.
By way of answering, I uncapped the can and pointed it at her for a second, grinning. Then I walked to the far end of the football field, by the opposing team’s goalposts. I wanted to say the one thing that would make everybody see themselves for what they really were, but I had no special insight into the human condition. I had only one thing to say, the thing I’d been swallowing every day since I had first been confronted with the entitled faces of my “gifted” Lakewood classmates, since I’d first heard the taunts of the Eastdale neighborhood kids, who would have ignored me my whole life if it hadn’t been for Geena, who would have never understood that I was angry on their behalf as much as on mine. YOU ARE NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU THINK YOU ARE, I sprayed in huge letters on the grass. I shook the paint can when I’d finished, but it was empty.
“Geena,” I called, “I’m not done. Bring me another paint can.”
But she didn’t answer me, and when I turned around, she wasn’t doing anything herself, just leaning against the stage, smoking a Newport and looking at me with some mix of concern and confusion. She walked over to where I was standing.
“Come on,” she said, dropping her cigarette and taking my hand. “Let’s go. I shouldn’t have talked you into this.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not finished. And you didn’t talk me into it.”
I wanted to sign my name—my real one. I wanted, for the first time in my life, the world to see my real self, my whole one. I walked over to where Geena had left the paint cans and went back to my work of art. FUCK YOU, I wrote. LOVE, CRYSTAL.
“Crystal,” Geena yelled when I was halfway done, “are you drunk or are you stupid? You can’t put your real goddamn name! Put mine!”
But I wasn’t drunk or stupid, just tipsy and angry, and it wasn’t about Geena anymore, or even about tomorrow. I saw Geena coming over with a small brush and paint can in her hand, watched her dump it over the C in my name. I expected it to be swallowed up in fresh paint, but it remained clear, like Geena had just splashed it with water, and something sharp hit my nostrils.
“Shit!” Geena shrieked. “That was paint thinner. Fucking Ray.”
For a second we started to laugh together at Ray’s ineptitude, but then I saw the faintest shimmer of orange a few feet from where she’d spilled it, remembered the cigarette she’d dropped earlier. I grabbed her hand and we raced breathlessly down to the other end of the field. I was still thinking it wasn’t a big deal, that we could grab the water hose attached to the back of the school and put it out before it got any bigger, but by the time we turned around, the fire had scorched the whole spot where the letter C had been, and was starting to spread from there. It was almost summer, and the grass on the football field was dry and brown. I had heard once that our football field was a Civil War graveyard; watching the fire slither outward from one blade of glass to the next, I believed it. The fire was still small in area and low to the ground, but if nothing stopped it, it would reach the wooden stage, and then perhaps the wooden bleachers, and eventually the trees behind them, then finally the houses behind it. I looked at the fifty-yard line, where the grass no longer said CRYSTAL, and above it, where it still said YOU ARE NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU THINK YOU ARE but wouldn’t for long. I ran for the pay phone in the school’s front parking lot, Geena behind me. I had just picked up the phone when Geena reached past me and pressed down the receiver, her nails glittering purple against the metal.
“Go,” she said, her face so close to mine I could see my eyes reflected in hers. Her mascara had pooled into black smudges under her eyes; I knew I couldn’t look much better. “This isn’t little-kid shit anymore. They’re gonna find out who called. They’re gonna look.”
I understood her but I didn’t move at first, not until I imagined myself answering questions at a police station, the look on my parents’ faces when they got the phone call, the look on Libby Carlisle’s face when she got to give my speech tomorrow, when she got to tell everyone she’d been right about me all along. I started to back away slowly.
“You wanna let the fucking school burn down, stay,” said Geena. She wouldn’t take her hand off of the receiver.
I stared at Geena for a long second. Then I took off running, stopping in the middle of the parking lot to take off my heels. I kept running, the asphalt stinging my feet through my panty hose. Halfway up the hill behind the school, I stopped to look back, vaguely recalling Sunday school and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Already I could hear sirens in the distance. I watched Geena sitting on the curb beside the pay phone, fists curled backward into cushions for her chin. She looked small and still and ready. I turned then, shut my eyes, and ran breathlessly toward the dam. I didn’t stop again until I had crossed the bridge and hopped the fence that took me back to Eastdale. On the other side, I stopped to catch my breath, and then kept running, knowing even then that a better person would have turned around.
a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Throughout the writing process I’ve had the support of my immediate and extended family and stepfamilies, who have lent me their homes, their money, and occasionally the details of their lives, which are better than any I could invent. There are too many people and favors for me to list all of them, but consider me eternally grateful. Many thanks to my mother, who taught me to be honest; my grandmother, who taught me the value of a good story; and my father, who taught me how much you can say without words.
This book would not have been possible had I not been so lucky in my friends, who let me show up on their doorsteps and sleep on their sofas, helped me move back and forth across the country, made me feel at home in new cities, answered their phones in the middle of the night, and told me when to hang up and get back to work. Among them: Jeanne Elone, Miriam Aguila, Dana Renee Thompson, Lailan Huen, Teresa Hernandez, Ileana Mendez-Peñate, Reina Gossett, Nell Geiser, Rachel McPherson, Laleh Khadivi, Sean Hill, April Wilder, Jennifer Key, Joel Creswell, Elizabeth Snipes, Sarah Wiggin, and Tiara Izquierdo. Thank you. Special thanks to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, for so often being my first and favorite reader. I am thankful for the support, financial and otherwise, that I’ve received from numerous institutions. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop gave me time, money, and, most important, faith that my writing mattered to an audience—all rare and valuable for emerging writers. Special thanks to Connie Brothers, Jim McPherson, and Adam Haslett. The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing is one of the best places a writer could ever call home. I’m grateful to the entire UW-Madison creative writing faculty, and the late Carol Houck Smith, for making my fellowship year possible. Special thanks to Jesse Lee Kercheval for being a constant source of sound advice. Thank you to Columbia University, especially the Kluge and Mellon scholars programs, for giving me the room to try these stories in their earliest forms and to Missouri State University and American University, for giving me homes while I finished them.
I’m indebted to my amazing agent, Ayesha Pande, who is a fantastic supporter and advocate and fielder of frantic phone calls and emails; my editor, Sarah McGrath, who gave the book so much of her time, energy, and attention; and her editorial assistant, Sarah Stein. Thank you to all the editors and journals who have published stories I’ve written, and to those who took the time to send encouraging or instructive rejections. Special thanks to Phoebe, which took a chance on my first short story, and The Paris Review, which has been so supportive of my work. Many, many thanks to Radhika Jones for her work on the story Virgins.