(You) Set Me on Fire by Mariko Tamaki Read Free Book Online Page A

Like Meryl Streep or Janeane Garofalo.”
    Bad answer, apparently.
    “Rrreally.” Turning her head toward me and away from Carly, Shar rolled her eyes.
    “Yeah well. Anyway,” Carly said, speeding up a bit, “I thought tonight was pretty interesting. I hope we get to make a movie.”
    “Oh yeah I’m so glad you invited me tonight, Carly,” Shar trilled. “So lucky that I ran into you in the hall. Really great time.”
    At the lights, Carly paused and turned, her lips neatly pressed together. Like she wanted to say something. To me.
    “Really,” Shar cooed, “great group.”
    “Well. Okay. I’m glad you had a good time, Shar. I hope you did too, Allison.”
    “Sure.”
    In the elevator, Shar said I should come back to her room to study for Social Problems.
    What she actually said, to Carly, as she pulled me out at the sixth floor, was, “I’m taking Allison to my room to force her to teach me about Social Problems. Bye, Superstar!”
    As the elevator doors closed, pinching off the image of Carly, she turned to me and said, “For the record, I’ve just saved you from a year of stupid.”
    On the sixth floor, Shar’s floor, the long hallways were littered with girls sprawled out in coloured pyjamas in various patterns from Disney to camouflage; textbooks open, cradling big bowls of popcorn, they lolled around, giggling and reading. The whole floor smelled like a movie theatre.
    Shar stepped over the rows of legs like they were driftwood, barely paying attention to the voices around us as she slipped into her room and shut the door.
    Inside, music was already playing, something low with lots of bass. Thr things I needed to be doingicddowing the window open, Shar flopped down on the bed and lit a cigarette. The combination of cold air and smoke made the skin on my neck prickle. Not knowing where to sit, I leaned against the closet and tried to seem cool.
    “It’s so weird that all our rooms are the same,” I said finally, when it appeared that Shar was lost in a haze of nicotine and not planning on speaking. “It’s like looking at my room, only …”
    “Messy” was what I wanted to say.
    “… with more red,” I came out with instead, because it seemed like a better thing to say to someone I didn’t know.
    The word “red” seemed to trigger Shar, who suddenly sat up and craned to look at my burns. “Right,” she exhaled. Then, “That thing on your neck is fucking crazy. Were you the survivor of a house fire or something, Allison? Were thousands lost and you walked away?”
    “No. I mean. It was a small fire. None were lost. Not even me.”
    “Right. So … So, what? So you burned yourself?”
    “I had an accident with a bonfire-type thing. That I was making. I had a c— Uh. It was an accident.”
    Stabbing her cigarette out on the edge of the window with one hand, Shar extended her other hand, the inside of her wrist flexed toward me. “Burned myself once as a kid. Put my hand on a stove element. People thought my parents were abusing me. You can still sort of see the scar.”
    “Scars are cool.”
    Amazing how a word like “cool” can land like a lame penny falling from your pocket onto a city sidewalk.
    “I mean. I think they tell a really interesting story. Which is … interesting. They’re like skin punctuation …”
    Stop talking, Allison.
    Shar r_4" aid="7K4IC

FIVE
    Fast friends
    Sitting lazily in the park, cross-legged, perched on a sweater serving as picnic blanket, Shar ran her fingers through the grass a book in the library.Iwhoelas the smoke from her cigarette smouldered in a patch of dirt not far away. All around us were the plastic skins of pilfered snacks. A troop of tai chi seniors made slow movements just north of us. The leaves of the tall trees that lined the park were slowly breaking from their branches and falling, orange, red, and yellow, to the ground.
    The perfect day. Autumn chill but not too fall cold. Shar had crawled into my lecture hall to rescue me from