rookie was not attacking me in any way.
Still, I felt a little bit attacked. Couldn’t I just get a couple of minutes to process this by myself? The feeling was compounded, I’m sure, by the fact that the graffiti was actually an attack—though not, of course, coming from Owen. Although, who knew? Could have been anybody. Maybe this was his evil plan all along: Gain my trust by seeming all nice and sweet and mouthwatering, kiss me into oblivion, and then sabotage me behind my back.
Ridiculous.
Then again, this whole situation was ridiculous.
“I was thinking,” I said, sounding more annoyed than I expected to. “You’ve heard of that?”
“Sure,” he said, frowning at me. “Huge fan of thinking.”
“What are you even doing awake?”
“Wakeful,” he said, shrugging, like, The usual. “I might go bake some chocolate chip cookies.”
I stared at him.
“Want some?” he asked. “If I do?”
Even the idea of him baking something as comforting and delightful as cookies felt annoying. “Nope,” I said.
“Really?” he said, like I was acting odd.
Later, I’d try to figure out why I felt so mad at him in this moment. I didn’t really think this whole situation was his fault. I knew he was just trying to be a friend. But that was it, right there. That was the problem. Did I want a cookie? Of course! Did I want to be able to tell him what was going on and hash it all out with a pal? Of course. But the rookie, despite being the one person I wanted to talk to, was the last person I could talk to.
Off-the-charts frustrating.
What can I say? It came out as anger.
“You’ve been acting weird all day,” he said then.
“So?” I demanded.
“So … are you okay?”
“No. Okay? I’m not okay. And no, I don’t want to talk about it, or rap it out, or have a feeling circle. Just leave me alone. Just go.”
The rookie held his hands up, like, Easy. “Hey. Okay. No problem. I’m gone.”
“And no cookies!” I called after him.
Then he actually was gone. He left the room, just like that—which I’d just asked him to do—but it still surprised me.
Alone again. I was exactly as glad that he’d left as I was disappointed.
I tried cleaning the Sharpie marks off with alcohol, but it didn’t work. Finally, after trying Windex, then WD-40, and scrubbing with steel wool and Comet, I hung the beefcake calendar from my old Austin station over the word with duct tape and called it a day.
It was a pretty good solution, covering the graffiti with Hernandez’s shirtless, bulging form. But it also made me homesick.
After that night, I struggled for weeks to hold on to my equilibrium—on runs and workouts and parkour jaunts. I struggled with it every minute of every shift. I struggled with it as I fully, solidly ignored the rookie with such vigor that it was like he didn’t even exist. And I struggled with it as we went out on call after call, helping an elderly man with chest pains, a mother who had driven her car into a ravine, a teenager who gave birth without ever having realized she was pregnant.
I couldn’t make sense of anything anymore.
It violated everything I knew about firefighters to think that one of them would stoop to such a thing.
Here’s the most essential truth about firefighting: It’s a helping profession. People get into it because they want to help others. Yes, okay, maybe they also want to wear the bunker gear, or bust things up with axes, or drive a big red truck with a siren.
But firefighters are basically good guys at heart. I’m not saying they don’t get into trouble, or have difficulty processing their feelings, or harbor a little unexamined sexism—or other isms. They’re human. They’re messy and imperfect and mistaken. At their cores, though, they’re basically good people.
This was the crux of it.
If firefighters weren’t the good guys, then maybe there just weren’t any left.
* * *
IN PRACTICE, THE weeks at work that followed were not all that different from the weeks before. I still got to work on time and did all my chores and duties with care. I still ran calls and took care of patients and brought my A-game. I still took a six-mile run every day. I still practiced parkour and studied the course whenever no one was looking. Maybe I ignored the rookie a little harder than I had before, but it wasn’t like I’d ever actively sought out his company. For various reasons.
On