When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,13

killed myself,” she told me.

When June rolled around, the chemistry student graduated, and his room was rented to a young man named Chaz, who worked on a road construction crew. “You know those guys that hold the flags?” he said. “Well, that’s me. That’s what I do.”

His face, like his name, was chiseled and memorable and, after deciding that he was too handsome, I began to examine him for flaws. The split lower lip only added to his appeal, so I moved on to his hair, which had clearly been blow-dried, and to the strand of turquoise pebbles visible through his unbuttoned shirt.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, and before I had a chance to blush he started telling me about his ex-girlfriend. They’d lived together for six months, in a little apartment behind Fowlers grocery store, but then she cheated on him with someone named Robby, an asshole who went to UNC and majored in fucking up other people’s lives. “You’re not one of those college snobs, are you?” he asked.

I probably should have said “No” rather than “Not presently.”

“What did you study?” he asked. “Bank robbing?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your clothes,” he said. “You and that lady downstairs look like those people from Bonnie and Clyde, not the stars, but the other ones. The ones who fuck everything up.”

“Yes, well, we’re individuals.”

“Individual freaks,” he said, and then he laughed, suggesting that there were no hard feelings. “Anyway, I don’t have time to stand around and jaw. A friend and me are hitting the bars.”

He’d do this every time: start a conversation and end it abruptly, as if it had been me who was running his mouth. Before Chaz moved in, the upstairs was fairly quiet. Now I heard the sound of his radio through the wall, a rock station that made it all the harder to pretend I was living in gentler times. When he was bored, he’d knock on my door and demand that I give him a cigarette. Then he’d stand there and smoke it, complaining that my room was too clean, my sketches were too sketchy, my old-fashioned bathrobe was too old-fashioned. “Well, enough of this,” he’d say. “I have my own life to lead.” Three or four times a night this would happen.

As Chaz changed life on the second floor, Sister Sykes changed it on the first. I went to check my mail one morning and found Rosemary dressed just like anyone else her age: no hat or costume jewelry, just a pair of slacks and a ho-hum blouse with unpadded shoulders. She wasn’t wearing makeup either and had neglected to curl her hair. “What can I tell you?” she said. “That kind of dazzle takes time, and I just don’t seem to have any lately.” The parlor, which had always been just so, had gone downhill as well. Now there were cans of iced tea mix sitting on the Victrola, and boxed pots and pans parked in the corner where the credenza used to be. There was no more listening to Jack Benny because that was Sister Sykes’s bath time. “The queen bee,” Rosemary called her.

Later that summer, just after the Fourth of July, I came downstairs and found a pair of scuffed white suitcases beside the front door. I hoped that someone was on his way out — Chaz, specifically — but it appeared that the luggage was coming rather than going. “Meet my daughter,” Rosemary said, this with the same grudging tone she’d used to introduce her mother. The young woman — I’ll call her Ava — took a rope of hair from the side of her head and stuck it in her mouth. She was a skinny thing and very pale, dressed in jeans and a Western-style shirt. “In her own little world,” Sister Sykes observed.

Rosemary would tell me later that her daughter had just been released from a mental institution, and though I tried to act surprised I don’t think I was very convincing. It was like she was on acid almost, the way she’d sit and examine something long after it lost its mystery: an ashtray, a dried-up moth, Chaz’s blow-dryer in the upstairs bathroom. Everything got equal attention, including my room. There were no lockable doors on the second floor. The keys had been lost years earlier, so Ava just wandered in whenever she felt like it. I’d come home after a full day of work — my clothes smelling of wet garbage, my shoes squishy with dishwater —