Four months earlier
_
It’s a sultry summer evening. Though not as hot as during the day, the few passersby wear nothing more than t-shirts and shorts. The sky has gradually transitioned from deep blue to velvet black. Stars shine in overwhelming abundance. The last songbirds have fallen silent, and the first bats begin their erratic hunt for insects, drawn to the lights of the street lanterns.
The 16-year-old girl standing on the lawn of the small farmhouse at the edge of the village doesn’t notice any of this. She stares, hypnotized, at the open window on the first floor. Inside, birthday decorations hang from the ceiling. The light shifts slowly from blue to yellow to red to green, repeating. A checkered patchwork of light dots moves across the walls and ceiling. She hears music and laughter. It’s exactly how a birthday party should be, except she’s not there. She should have been, but she’s standing outside.
It had been a total shock when her best friend hadn’t invited her. The shock only grew stronger when she was completely ignored from that moment on. “Freak” was the last thing she had heard before her friend ran off, crying.
It was made incalculably worse by the fact that she hadn’t seen it coming. How could she have? Even though they were completely different, they had been friends since kindergarten. The tomboy with the short unkempt hair and gnawed down nails and the princess with the pink dresses and the long flowing hair. An unlikely friendship that worked perfectly. Until last week. No explanation, just “freak.”
She had tried to forget about it. She even went to bed early, in a desperate attempt to sleep through it. She doesn’t even know if she managed to fall asleep; she only knows that right now, she’s standing beneath the open window, wearing her father’s worn, oversized t-shirt and her dirty, lace-less sneakers. She made a solemn promise never to cry again, so she forces her tears back. She’s frustrated—no, she’s angry. It’s growing inside of her from a small shoot to a full-grown tree, fast-forwarded 1,000 times, like in a documentary she once saw.
A girl hangs out of the window, screaming with laughter. She would recognize that laugh anywhere. The last remnants of grief evaporate. The tree inside her grows buds. The buds bloom into flowers of fire. The palms of her hands itch. Her sight becomes hazy and unfocused. She knows she must get a grip, must regain control, but when she finally does, it’s too late. Large sections of the farmhouse are burning, as if someone has run around it with a flamethrower.
Nobody seems to notice yet, but when the smoke is sucked in through the first-floor window, the screaming starts. She hears desperate calls for help. The window is too high to jump out of. They are trapped.
The girl on the lawn reacts instinctively. The hallway and staircase are already burning, but the flames won’t hurt her. They never do. In the room with the pounding music and flashing lights, four girls lay unconscious on the floor. She drags them to safety, one by one, through the hallway and down the staircase, their heads and shoulders banging on the steps. Tomorrow they will be covered in bruises and have terrible headaches, but they will not burn as long as she’s their friend, whether they want her to be or not.
When she climbs the stairs for the last time to save her best friend, the inferno has become so overwhelming that she must concentrate to create a tunnel through it and by the time she manages to drag her friend down the stairs, she’s exhausted. Her clothes are scorching at the edges, the tips of her hair start burning, and the hairs on her arms melt away. She stumbles, falls, and pushes herself one more time.
Only after she finally dragged her friend to the safety of the lawn does she allow herself to collapse, landing with her head close to her unconscious friend on the soft, cool grass. She watches her friend’s face and caresses a strand of hair out of her eye. It’s the only thing she has the strength for.
As everything turns black and she finally surrenders to a deep, dreamless sleep, she hears the sirens of the approaching fire trucks.