We Cared Only Briefly

By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. There was smoke first, or the smell of it, sharp and determined through the vents of the classrooms, and then whispers, hopes that classes would be cancelled, that the front hallways were burning. We were in no danger, they assured us, the fire wasn’t close. Just focus, just pay attention to the equation. We couldn’t see much from the windows, only the reflected lights of firetrucks, red, yellow, red, yellow, and then they closed the drapes. By the time we were dismissed we could see the trees alight outside of his house, angry and demanding of our full attention. As we walked closer, the gaping mouth of the garage, the house windows like blackened teeth dangling. Then they told us to stand back, to go home, we weren’t helping .

We were under the impression everything burned. Sheets and shampoo bottles and empty dog food bags and the box of his school photos, the ones from elementary, before he’d been pulled. Things that were theirs and things borrowed, things permanently unreturned. We were under the impression everything was wholly consumed by a hot mouth of fire, a thick breath of black smoke, devoured completely. That was the rumor.

No one died in the fire, so it was easier to forget. By the time the semester ended we’d moved on, there were relationships crumbling and beginning again, finals approaching, and honestly, we didn’t really care that much about him in the first place. He was good gossip for a moment, a burst of flash paper, hot for a second and then gone completely.  

Jeremy was 12 when they started homeschooling him. My mother said not all children are cut out for public school, but we knew it was because he choked Brett Harling until blood came out of his ear. It was better that he was gone, his bursts of anger were what school called “not conducive to a peaceful learning environment” and what we called “lowkey crazy.” Some of us claimed to miss him, but we were lying, we only missed the views on our livestreams when he started throwing chairs in the lunchroom. None of us were really surprised when he burned down his house. The fact that he disappeared right after was a rumor, but so was his affinity for fire, so I guess it wasn’t all gossip.

A detective came to third period study hall and asked if we knew him, if we’d seen him. That’s when we found out he really was missing. Detective Brandt, the same one who held the mandatory sexting awareness course freshman year, leaned awkwardly on Mrs. Grayson’s desk in a wrinkled button down and khakis and explained that this was serious, if we knew something it was our duty to say something. “Be responsible. Speak up,” he said. Same line he used in the sexting seminar. We chewed our pen caps and woke our phone screens and wondered if Jeremy was dead. 

They published Jeremy’s short story in the local paper alongside the announcement that information leading to his whereabouts was worth $500. There was no Amber Alert, just a blurb behind the crime blotter explaining how his story had been sent wirelessly to several neighbor’s printers before he dumped gasoline on the unmade beds and calmly lit a match. Although the fact that he was calm is a rumor too, no one has come to third period to announce it, so it isn’t official information.

The story itself was disjointed, 600 words about a black rhino drowned by a poacher in a murky African lake. There was nothing there to hold onto, just more smoke curling into the air and evaporating, more ash to shift through, bits of something that was once something else but isn’t anymore. Jeremy wasn’t that bright, so it wasn’t that good, and no one knew what it meant.

But it reminded me.

In 4^th grade we earned a party for reading 100 books in a semester, a cumulative effort propelled by the smart kids, none of whom were Jeremy, that culminated in 20 minutes of greasy cheese pizza, one slice each, served on brown paper towels and eaten at our desks. A celebration of our literary achievements. Jeremy was my seat buddy that week, our names having been drawn together from a felt top hat that meant we’d have to share a desk cluster until Friday afternoon. I spent that week avoiding eye contact and he spent it falling asleep in his chair, head tilted forward like a snapped sunflower, arms crossed on his chest in defiance or maybe defense. It was always hard to tell the difference with Jeremy.

But he was awake for the pizza. He was first in line despite the fact that he hadn’t read a single page of a single book, and his copy of Holes, the Book of the Month for Young Readers, was in the heating vent in the back of the room, crumpled and torn and never once opened. At our desks, he watched through narrowed eyes as I blotted the grease from my pizza with a napkin.

“You know there’s starving kids in Africa who would kill for that grease,”

“Okay.” I said. His pizza was mostly gone, swallowed in two loud bites, all that remained was a crescent of crust, and he held it in his fist like a knife, like something he cared about.

“Are you gonna eat it or are you just gonna keep molesting it?”

It was the first time I really looked at him and probably the last. There was a bruise on his cheekbone, a small blossom of violence. His Minecraft shirt was ripped at the collar, a hole like a tiny mouth screaming below his collarbone.

“Well?”

“I’m actually not that hungry. You can have it.” I slid the now greaseless pizza across our desks, and he inhaled it, two loud bites, no crescent of crust left to hold onto.

“Your loss,” he said, “But thanks.”

I didn’t miss Jeremy when our seats changed that Monday, or when he was pulled from school that fall, or when he disappeared completely after the fire. I didn’t miss him when we stopped talking about him at the end of the semester, or when the paper stopped running stories about how loved and missing he was. None of us did.

He was like the fire he started, like the gossip that followed him; eager, hungry, destructive, all-consuming for a moment, and then gone.