A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Read Free Book Online

important experience. I wrote about an epiphany I’d had while standing atop a large rock. I had stood there, and I picked up some kind of vibration about my destiny. Basically, that I realized I wanted to be a statue when I died, a great man.
    “In the second grade,” I began now, “we were assigned to write stories about an imaginary place. And my teacher, who still used the paddle, right, and was this very august African-American lady, sat us down in a circle. I volunteered mine for her to read, and she took it up. I was the teacher’s pet. But she gave me this look. Like her jaw dropped.
    “My story was about backwards-land. So naturally I titled it after my backwards-named city. Aslut. Which is Tulsa backwards.”
    I paused.
    “But the crucial detail here is that I wasn’t able to figure out what the matter with the title had been, until years later.”
    “Oh,” said Adrienne. She gloated a little with me.
    “Yeah.”
    Adrienne was going to tell me one. First, five seconds to collect herself: she had obviously told this story before, but maybe not often. She related it in hushed tones, and paused often—as if it really was sacred. It was like she regarded her younger self as a more important, more trustworthy person than her present self.
    “There was a fifth-grader named Derek Walkin. He was bringing a Zippo to school, and that was a big deal. They would set trash on fire behind the dumpster. And they let me watch. I was little. I was a second-grader. Every day at lunch I would go up to their group and stand there. I thought they would kick me out. But I didn’t even look at them—their faces. I just stared at the fire.
    “But. I wanted the lighter. I searched Derek’s locker. But he always kept it in his pocket.” Adrienne was staring straight ahead, as if she could still see the little Zippo working on the playground. “I went up to him and asked him for it. I wanted to borrow it. Which was madness.” Adrienne’s voice turned excitable. “I don’t know if you know what it takes, for a second-grade girl to convince a fifth-grade boy to give her
his lighter
? I caught him alone after school and at first just asked him to show me how itworked. It always looked like he was doing something weird with his wrist, shaking it or something—you’ve seen Zippos. You have to do like that—” She motioned. “I thought I had to get it right the first time or he would never let me borrow it. But my hands were so little.”
    “What happened?”
    “It took me like eight tries.”
    “What did he say?”
    Adrienne squinted. “He just let me borrow it.”
    “Wow. Why?”
    “I don’t know. He just did. He wasn’t a very well-liked boy.”
    I could imagine a boy like that. A semi passed behind us, rattling. Adrienne was so acute, so practical in her dealings. It was quiet at the gas station, there wasn’t even canned music. Adrienne resumed. “He gave me his lighter because I told him what I was going to do with it. In fact the main reason he almost didn’t give it to me was that he got scared. I made him prove he wasn’t.
    “I took that lighter that weekend and I set fire to my aunt’s garage. I burned it down to the ground.”
    “Oh.”
    Adrienne blinked. “For a while the fire was kind of nice. It spread out like at the bottom part of the wall. I stayed inside with it, to feed it, and pulled down rags and pieces of wood to keep it going. It took forever. But then it got big fast.” Adrienne widened her eyes. “What I hadn’t expected was how loud it would be. I had gone to stand by my favorite tree, to watch. For a long time I could hear the fire more than see it. I could see smoke, but that was all. Until the flames burst out the window.They broke the glass like a fist.” She pumped her fist, but slowly. “I had a cordless phone too, in my hand, to call 911 if the fire spread. And I wanted to call, you know. I wanted them to stop it. But I had to stick to my plan. I had to watch that