Little Fires Everywhere: Chapters 5–8

Trip himself was not even aware of why he was glancing at her, but he could not help noticing the little hourglass of skin her shirt revealed: the bare triangle framed by her collarbones; the bare triangle of midriff, with the delicate indent of her navel; the intermittent flash of navy blue bra above and below that single fastened button.

But by the time the first kernels pinged against the pot lid, the three teens had already discussed Anthony Brecker’s new car, an old VW bug painted purple; how Meg Kaufman had come to school drunk the week before; how much better Anna Lamont looked now that she was straightening her hair; and whether the Indians should change their logo (“Chief Wahoo,” Lexie said, “is so blatantly racist”).

His parents were really named John and Deborah Avery, but his father was a doctor and his mother was a lawyer and, truth be told, they did exude a certain Cosbyish vibe, his father sweatered and affable and his mother wittily competent and no-nonsense.

His parents were really named John and Deborah Avery, but his father was a doctor and his mother was a lawyer and, truth be told, they did exude a certain Cosbyish vibe, his father sweatered and affable and his mother wittily competent and no-nonsense.

Despite her air of frivolity, she was near the top of her class—officially, Shaker did not rank its students, to reduce competitive feelings, but she knew she was somewhere in the top twenty.

Still, she liked the idea of being able to jaunt in for a day—a morning at the Met looking at art, maybe a splurge at Macy’s or even a weekend away with Brian—and then zip away from the crowds and the grime and the noise.

Lexie and Serena Wong, though, had both been invited by Stacie herself, and thus had dispensation to bring a guest—even a sophomore that no one really knew.

Shaker Heights, as with everything, had regulations about trick-or-treating: sirens wailed at six and eight to mark the start and end, and although there were no official age restrictions, people tended to look askance at teens who showed up at their doors.

The last time he had gone trick-or-treating, he’d been eleven, and he’d gone as an M&M.
For Stacie’s party, though, a costume was de rigueur.

But as she racked her brain for something sultry and witty, she noticed that Trip had disappeared from the patio.

Half an hour later, the dancing and the liquor and the sweet, heady rush of being eighteen had filled them both with a feverish flush.

The Tuesday after the Halloween party, Mrs. Richardson stopped by the duplex on Winslow Road.

There were studies of shadows against a faded brick wall, photographs of feathers clotting the shoreline of Shaker Lake, experiments Mia was conducting with printing photographs on different surfaces: vellum, aluminum foil, newspapers.

“Perhaps,” Mia said. “But the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them. So in the end I’d probably just frustrate us both.” She smiled placidly, and Mrs. Richardson fumbled for a response.

She had had a plan, from girlhood on, and had followed it scrupulously: high school, college, boyfriend, marriage, job, mortgage, children.

First he’d patted the pockets at the sides of her knees, then those at her hips, then, when he’d reached for the ones on her rear, she’d smacked him, and to her smitten delight he’d said, “Don’t be mad, you know I love you,” and put his arm around her shoulder.

Their first week at Denison, he had fallen for the ardent young woman collecting signatures around campus to end the draft.

She was a tall, painfully thin woman with hair dyed an unnatural flaxen and cropped in a manner reminiscent of Dorothy Hamill.

But in the rush before first period everyone funneled past them up and down the stairwells, too busy passing notes and cramming for quizzes to even glance up at the bulletin boards, and after second period she found that some dour security guard had torn the signs down, no doubt perplexed by these missives, leaving only flyers for Youth Ending Hunger, Model UN, and French Club.

Which was to say: she cast about for ideas for exacting revenge—egged windows, flaming bags of dog shit—and chose the best thing in her limited repertoire.

Had she glanced at their faces, though, she would have seen not derision but admiration.

By this point, Izzy’s anger had ballooned to cover not only Mrs. Peters but the principal who’d hired her, the vice principal who had handed out the suspension, every teacher—every adult—who’d ever cudgeled a student with arbitrary, unearned power.

It is not easily removed without a pair of needle-nosed tweezers, which are often not handy and take some time to procure.

Beneath his collar his neck began to chafe, and he wiggled a finger beneath his tie.

A group of boys stood in a ring outside, smashing the apples from their lunches against their foreheads and egging each other on with guttural roars.

She recognized a kindred spirit, a similar subversive spark to the one she often felt flaring inside her.

Mia looked down at Izzy, this wayward, wild, fiery girl suddenly gone timid and dampened and desperate.

Along with the basics of photography, she began to absorb Mia’s aesthetics and sensibilities.

There were many convoluted routes into this fantasy: she and Pearl had been accidentally switched at birth years ago; she had been taken home by her parents, who were therefore not her parents, and this was why no one in her family seemed to understand her, why she seemed so different from them all.

The docent giving the class a tour was elderly and thin and looked as if all the juice had been sucked out of him through a straw via his pursed mouth.

Some were medieval paintings in gilt frames hardly bigger than CD jewel cases; some were rough pencil sketches of Renaissance statues; some were larger-than-life oil paintings.

But the piece that had transfixed Pearl was a photograph: a black-and-white print, eight by ten, of a woman on a sofa, beaming down at the newborn in her arms. It was unmistakably Mia.

Virgin and Child #1, she read on the placard, and she allowed herself to imagine for a moment that the child in Mia’s arms was her.

She turned around and began to dry her hands briskly on the dish towel, and to Pearl’s chagrin her mother’s face was suddenly stiff and closed in.

“Journalists,” she explained in a civics speech about dream careers, “chronicle our everyday lives. They reveal truths and information that the public deserves to know, and they provide a record for posterity, so that future generations can learn from our mistakes and improve upon our achievements.”

In history class, when young Elena had learned the term noblesse oblige, she’d understood it at once.

So she’d headed to Denison the following fall instead, with an ambitious and illustrious future plotted out for herself.

She covered the swearing-in of the new city manager (“solemn”) and the Halloween parade (“spirited”), the opening of Half Price Books at Van Aken Center (“a much-needed addition to Shaker’s commercial district”), the debate on spraying for gypsy moths (“heated, on both sides”).

Art collectors were often reclusive, she thought. Especially where money was involved.

Izzy. Her harebrained live wire of a daughter, the perpetual overreactor, prone to fits of furious indignation about nothing at all.