One girl among us had set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she’d gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father’s car had run out of gas? I couldn’t look at her without thinking about it.
I think the gasoline had settled in her collarbones, forming pools there beside her shoulders, because her neck and cheeks were scarred the most. The scars were thick ridges, alternating bright pink and white, in stripes up from her neck. They were so tough and wide that she couldn’t turn her head, but had to swivel her entire upper torso if she wanted to see a person standing next to her.
Scar tissue has no character. It’s not like skin. It doesn’t show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It’s like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what’s beneath. That’s why we grow it; we have something to hide.
Her name was Polly. This name must have seemed ridiculous to her in the days—or months—when she was planning to set herself on fire, but it suited her well in her slipcovered, survivor life. She was never unhappy. She was kind and comforting to those who were unhappy. She never complained. She always had time to listen to other people’s complaints. She was faultless, in her impermeable tight pink-and-white casing. Whatever had driven her, whispered “Die!” in her once-perfect, now-scarred ear, she had immolated it.
Why did she do it? Nobody knew. Nobody dared to ask. Because—what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We’ve all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it’s cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you’ve been planning, when you’ll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You’ll have to find another way.
What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirin? Or was it just an inspiration?
I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it’s not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.
She lit the match.
Where? In the garage at home, where she wouldn’t set anything else on fire? Out in a field? In the high school gym? In an empty swimming pool?
Somebody found her, but not for a while.
Who would kiss a person like that, a person with no skin?
She was eighteen before this thought occurred to her She’d spent a year with us. Other people stormed and screamed and cringed and cried; Polly watched and smiled. She sat by people who were frightened, and her presence calmed them. Her smile wasn’t mean, it was understanding. Life was hellish, she knew that. But, her smile hinted, she’d burned all that out of her. Her smile was a little bit superior: We wouldn’t have the courage to burn it out of ourselves—but she understood that too. Everyone was different. People just did what they could.
One morning somebody was crying, but mornings were often noisy: fights about getting up on time and complaints about nightmares. Polly was so quiet, so unobtrusive a presence, that we didn’t notice she wasn’t at breakfast. After breakfast, we could still hear crying.
“Who’s crying?”
Nobody knew.
And at lunch, there was still crying.
“It’s Polly,” said Lisa, who knew everything.
“Why?”
But even Lisa didn’t know why.
At dusk the crying changed to screaming. Dusk is a dangerous time. At first she screamed, “Aaaaaah!” and “Eeeeeh!” Then she started to scream words.
“My face! My face! My face!”
We could hear other voices shushing her, murmuring comfort, but she continued to scream her two words long into the night.
Lisa said, “Well, I’ve been expecting this for a while.”
And then I think we all realized what fools we’d been.
We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.