Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,42
one’s a doozie.”
“Agreed.” She nodded. “The biggest—and the best.”
“Are you telling me I need to try to find upsides that came from your leaving?”
“It sounds greedy of me, doesn’t it?”
“A little.”
“But that’s just the way it works. I’d tell you the same thing if we were talking about anyone else.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to study.” Next, she tilted her head. “Can you think of any upsides? Can you think of any good things in your life that wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t left?”
I let out a long breath. I frowned. I thought about it for a long time as I stared at the floor.
Then, at last, I said, “I got very, very good at basketball.”
Fourteen
MY STRATEGY FOR avoiding the rookie was much like my strategy for avoiding Diana. And about as effective. As determined as I was to get away from the rookie, the captain was just as determined to throw us together. We had to sit side by side at meals in the wobbliest two chairs. We had to clean the bathroom together, and do the chores nobody else wanted. We had the worst two parking spots, the farthest away.
For a while, we always got lumped together as newbies.
I worked hard to change that. Practically speaking, this meant pulling pranks on the rookie—establishing that I was a prank-er, not a prank-ee.
So: Hiding his clothes while he was in the shower? Me. Pouring ice water on him while he was fast asleep? Me. Filling his shoes with water and putting them in the freezer? Me. Whatever the guys needed done, I did it. I volunteered. I thought it would separate us. I thought it would distinguish me with the crew. I thought, at the very least, it would annoy the rookie and discourage him from being so nice all the damn time.
But it didn’t. He was Big Robby’s kid. He’d practically grown up at a firehouse. He knew the honor of being pranked. He laughed every single thing off, and I never saw him look even mildly irritated. Pretend OJ made out of mac-and-cheese powder? Awesome. Mayonnaise on the toilet seat? Epic. Fake poop in his bed? Hilarious.
One morning, I convinced him to pee in a plastic cup and leave it on the captain’s desk.
“You don’t want to mess around with drug testing, man,” Six-Pack chimed in. “We all turned ours in at the start of shift.”
“You don’t want him to think you’re hiding something,” Case added, all casual, from his perch in front of the TV.
The rookie looked around at all of us, deeply suspicious. But he took the cup off the table and started to walk out. “Don’t forget to label it with your name,” Six-Pack called after him, and flung a Sharpie at his head.
Ten minutes later, the captain came busting into the kitchen. “Callaghan!” he bellowed.
The rookie looked up from making a sandwich. “Yes, sir?”
“Why is there a goddamned cup of lukewarm piss on my desk with your name on it?”
The rookie squeezed his eyes closed as we all fell out laughing. He suppressed a smile and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I was told you were collecting urine samples today.”
“And who the hell told you that?” the captain demanded.
But the rookie didn’t rat us out. “I can’t remember, sir.”
With the crew, my strategy worked. But with the captain, it backfired. As soon as he stopped thinking of me as a rookie, he started wanting me to deal with the rookie.
Which meant he threw us together even more.
Especially since, in the wake of my opening a can of whoop-ass on Tiny in B-ball, I now had a new problem. Nobody wanted me to play hoops because I was too good.
Ironic.
Somehow, in the afternoons, just as any pickup game was starting, the captain would send me off to practice essential skills with the rookie.
Which meant the one guy in the world I was desperate to get away from was forced to spend hours every shift putting his hands all over me. Repeatedly. Slowly. For long periods of time.
While the guys shot hoops out back, I had to let the rookie check my spine alignment with the pads of his fingers—all the way up and all the way down, again and again. I had to let him splint my hands, my ankles, and my knees, and strap me to a backboard and put me in a C-collar, leaning across and brushing against me as he worked the straps.