The Girl in the Burning Skirt

It begins with the perfume. Sylvie’s mother keeps her bottle of Chanel No. 5 in a black silk sock in the top drawer of her dresser. She hasn’t worn it since before Sylvie was born, and so she will never miss the perfume that Sylvie and the neighbor girl Gwen Bailey spill on the grass beneath the crabapple tree in the backyard. They spill it trying to work their fingers through the mouth of the bottle because they agree that when they spray each other and sniff each other’s wrists and necks, they just smell like soap.
In fact, when Sylvie’s mother finds the perfume while rummaging for socks two summers in the future, she will see that half the bottle is gone and think quietly of how she was once the sort of woman who used a whole half bottle of perfume in one summer--the one summer she spent in Massachusetts. She will think of how good her legs looked back then, reflected in the shop windows as they pumped the pedals of her bicycle when she rode through the morning streets and felt the eyes of the fishermen at her back like sneaker waves. But she had never used half the bottle. She had, in fact, only used about a teaspoon that summer.
The makeup comes next. Gwen locks the door of her big sister Joni’s bedroom and then she and Sylvie fumble through her trove of drugstore cosmetics. Little pots of blush, trays of Cadillac-colored eye shadows, cream lipsticks that taste like bubblegum powder. They sit at the window. Gwen does Sylvie’s face while Sylvie looks out the window, keeping watch in case Joni comes back from the skating rink early. Then they swap places and Sylvie does Gwen’s face. Gwen looks at herself in the mirror afterwards and clenches her teeth. She has watched her mother and Joni putting on makeup her whole life, and reckons she knows a thing or two about the routine. Sylvie knows nothing. Her mother wears long floral dresses from the secondhand store, often with rain boots. In the spring, she cleans out her hairbrush and winds the hair into a ball with lint and some loose threads. Then she strings it from branch of the crabapple for the birds to use for their nests. The Chanel No. 5 was from another life.
Gwen’s mother is from Las Vegas. She wears high heels to the beach. She knocks birds’ nests down with a broom when she finds them in her yard, because the ghostly calligraphies of their droppings appall her more than any downtown wall spangled with graffiti ever could. Gwen has watched her mother knocking down the nests. Gwen knows that she is prettier than Sylvie. She studies the lipstick smeared at the corner of her mouth and the eyeliner wandering off towards her left ear like a centipede. Now she wishes she hadn’t done such a nice job of Sylvie’s face. Sylvie is smiling, blushing through her blush.
Smoke and feathers she thinks, looking at her own eyes in the mirror.
Gwen corrects this as best she can by putting on her mini skirt made of peach-colored chiffon and a summer top with shoulder straps no bigger than noodles. She lets Sylvie wear an old pair of her cut-off shorts and a t-shirt that says “Cutie.” The awkward points of Sylvie’s early breasts pull the letters sideways. She walks like a politician with her shoulders hunched forward to pull her breasts down against herself, with her arms folded across them. She keeps waiting for her mother to take her shopping in the lingerie section at K-mart. But she never does. Gwen is flat as a pancake and has a drawer full of tiny pale bras which she fills with cotton balls on special occasions. Sylvie opens the drawer and looks at the bras every time Gwen goes to the bathroom. She could never bring herself to ask for one, even just to borrow. And Gwen is glad she doesn’t ask, because they’re hers.
Now that they are dressed, they steal down the stairs and into the kitchen. They sneak fistfuls of rainbow sprinkles from where they are hidden in a rat poison can. They hurry out the back door, through a cloud of hydrangeas, and out onto Junco Street. They eat the sprinkles out of their palms. The sprinkles don’t taste like anything. At the dead end of Junco Street is a wall of sugar maples. Gwen and Sylvie find the deer path that leads down a dark hillside to the Gold Coast Rock Quarry.
They step slowly down the deer path, the last of the sprinkles unsticking from their palms to fall in the dead leaves like sparks. The woods darken. After about twenty minutes of walking, they emerge into the yellow field at the foot of the quarry. The tall grass whips their bare legs pink as they run the rest of the way. The quarry is their new haunt. Until a few days ago, they had only been as far as the woods.
“Lars and I are going to be married.” Gwen says.
“Really?” says Sylvie. “That’s wonderful. Where will the wedding be, and when?”
Gwen is so glad she asked.
“I was thinking... Las Vegas... with that cowboy made of lights. It’ll be in the summer. There will be lots of people there, and a white limo, and a cake with blue icing roses.”
“Andy and I are getting married, too.” says Sylvie.
Unlike Lars, Andy is not imaginary. He is the tall boy with the freckled arms and dark blonde hair who helps Sylvie’s father in the corner grocery. Sylvie hopes Gwen never sees him.
“Lars bought me a party dress.” says Gwen pointedly. “With a thousand diamonds on it... and we’re going to have a boathouse.”
“You mean a houseboat?” Sylvie says, not unkindly.
“No, I mean a boathouse.” says Gwen, blushing. “To keep our houseboat in, of course.”
“Andy proposed to me in a rowboat.” says Sylvie, imagining this. A long, green lake in summer. She would be older, with her own drawer full of bras. She would look like Brigitte Bardot. She would wear daisies in her hair. Andy would look the same as he did now. Gwen would be far away, in Las Vegas, alone with the cowboy made of lights.
“Lars proposed in Paris, on a balcony, under fireworks.” says Gwen.
“Andy says we’re going to go to Paris someday.”
“Lars travels to Paris all the time. He’s a spy, you know. I mean, don’t tell anyone.”
“Okay.”
“He might teach me to be a spy, too.” Gwen hasn’t thought of this before, and it pleases her. Immediately, she sees herself in shiny leather boots in a secret compartment of some foreign locomotive.
They are at the floor of the quarry now. Rock cracks like popcorn under their sneakers. Then they hear the voices and a sort of fizzing sound. Sylvie takes a step back, but Gwen grabs her wrist, putting a thumbnail on a vein, and tugs her toward the noise. A group of boys appears when the round the corner. There are four of them. They look to be about Joni’s age, some older. They look up and see the two girls in strange summer clothes. They draw back a moment in silence. Then Sylvie recognizes him. Andy, the bag boy from the corner grocery, is wearing long blue jeans and an old army jacket that looks like it would smell coldly of engine oil. Sylvie drops her head onto her chest and her yellow hair falls into her face.
“Hey-- girls!” says one to another and they laugh. They are standing in a half moon around a melted soda bottle and the tails of several burned-out firecrackers. The fizzing sound came from a roman candle dying in the gravel.
“What are you doing here?” says a boy with dark hair swept sideways over his forehead. “This is our place.” he says and laughs a strange, wild laugh.
“We were just walking.” says Gwen coolly. The chiffon shirt moves in the wind and she yanks the hem down. The boys laugh.
“How come you’re all dolled up? You going somewhere?” says another, a tall boy with red hair and glasses.
“Dolled up?” says the boy with the cowlick with disgust, and elbows the boy with glasses. “You’ve been hanging out with your grandma too much, man.” They laugh. Gwen and Sylvie both look at their shoes and wonder if they’re still expected to answer the question.
“You girls like fireworks?” Andy asks this, cutting through the laughter of the others.
“Yeah.” said Gwen, smiling a little.
“How about you? You talk... cutie?” says the cowlick boy to Sylvie. He laughs his strange laugh again. “See, look at her shirt, man. That’s what it says.”
Sylvie nods. There is a lump of fear in her throat she can’t swallow down.
Like a stone she thinks.
“Hey, Tommy, don’t be an asshole, man.” says Andy. Then glancing at Sylvie, he adds “Oh, sorry, jerk. Don’t be a jerk.”
“I didn’t say anything.” says Tommy, shrugging. Then he lifts his head and howls like a wolf into the big blue October sky. Sylvie lifts her head in bewilderment to look at him. It is then that she sees the bottle in his hand. It is made of glass the color of a riverbottom.
“Hey, do I know you?” says Andy suddenly, looking at Sylvie with narrowed eyes and a half smile. “Yeah, you’re Mr. Stetson’s daughter. I bought you some saltwater taffy one time, remember? I work in your dad’s store.”
“Yeah.” murmurs Sylvie. She nods. “Yeah.” she says louder.
“Aw,” says a boy with a big moonish face. “Saltwater taffy? That sounds serious. I didn’t know you liked ‘em so young, man.” The others laugh.
“Shut up, Ben. Don’t be an idiot.” says Andy. “You girls want to see some fireworks?” he says kindly. Gwen and Sylvie nod and step a little closer. Andy takes a book of matches from a pocket of his jacket and a pinwheel from a canvas backpack on the ground. He lights the pinwheel and they draw back. The pinwheel sparkles and spins in the gravel like a dying bumblebee. It bangs and smokes and the boys cheer and open more bottles of beer. Tommy, the boy with the cowlick, howls like a wolf again, right beside Gwen. The sound makes her heart leap like a rabbit. She smiles.
“You got a boyfriend?” he asks, touching her bare shoulder with the lip of his beer bottle.
“Hey,” says Andy sharply. “Cut it out, man. They’re way too young for that stuff. You’re drunk, man.”
“I do have a boyfriend.” says Gwen suddenly. “His name is Lars.”
“Oh, really?” says Tommy, smiling crazily. “How old is Lars?”
“Older than you.”
“Oh-ho! Really? And what about cutie?” he asks, elbowing Sylvie. “You got a boyfriend?”
“Her boyfriend’s name is Andy.” says Gwen.
A silence big as a boxcar passes through the quarry. Then Tommy claps a hand to his mouth in amazement. Then he laughs and howls like a wolf again. The others are laughing by now, too. He slaps Andy on the back.
“Oh, yeah, man. She definitely remembers you. Hell!” he says, slapping his thigh.
“You guys are idiots.” he says softly. He shakes his head and gives Sylvie an apologetic smile, but she’s looking at her shoes again.
“You got any sparklers?” asks Gwen, anxious to get past the joke she doesn’t understand.
“Yeah, we’ve got sparklers.” says the boy with glasses. “Andy, get out the sparklers, man.”
Andy is standing with his hands in his pockets, wondering if he should try to talk to the shy Stetson girl whose name he can’t remember, tell her its all right or something like that. He decides its better to just pretend it never happened. He takes a bundle of sparklers from the backpack. Tommy is so drunk now that he’s stumbling, the toes of his sneakers seeming to catch on every pebble underfoot. He keeps waving his hands vaguely in Gwen’s direction like he’s trying to cast a spell on her.
Abracadabra thinks Sylvie.
Andy lights the sparklers and hands them out to everyone. Sylvie forgets about her shame for a moment and stares at the sparkler’s thousand forked tongues of light. She is facing Gwen, who is also staring at her own sparkler. Tommy and the moonfaced boy are sitting on a rock behind her.
“These things are for chicks.” says the moonfaced boy, and throws his sparkler away into the rocks.
“No, man. Watch.” whispers Tommy. Sylvie looks up to see Tommy carefully holding his sparkler to the hem of Gwen’s skirt. Sylvie watches in dread for several seconds, unable to move or cry out, before the skirt catches fire and Gwen begins to scream. The boys stagger back and for a second everyone watches the girl in the burning skirt dancing with death. Then Andy runs to Gwen and yanks the skirt from her waist. The little piece of chiffon falls to the shale and burns until it is gone. Gwen stands watching the flames beside Andy. She is crying. Her underwear have blue stars on them. Then Andy is walking towards Tommy.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!?” he screams. He picks up Tommy by the collar with both fists and throws him against a wall of rock. Tommy is still holding a bottle of beer. This shatters against the rock.
“What the hell!?” screams Andy and throws him against the rock again. Then Tommy makes a sound deep in his chest and Sylvie watches the neck of the beer bottle with its jagged edges the color of a riverbottom sink into Andy’s stomach. Once. Twice. Three times. Andy staggers back and falls in the shale. His legs kick slowly like he is swimming in deep water. He makes a soft yawning sound. Then Sylvie sees Gwen plunge past her and towards the woods. Tommy staggers toward her. Sylvie gets up and runs, following Gwen in her starry underwear into the woods. The hillside is black as a storm cloud. Sylvie can hear Gwen sobbing ahead.
Then they are back on Junco street, the sodium lamps haloed by moths. Only then does Gwen turn back and look at Sylvie. They look at each other a long time. Then Gwen slips back into the cloud of hydrangeas beside her house and disappears. Sylvie walks to her own house. She sits a moment on the stoop. She takes her sneakers off. Then she goes inside and closes the door behind her.
Within the hour, Andy’s body will be at the bottom of a slow, nameless river dark as bottle glass. And Sylvie and Gwen will never speak to each other again.