Little Fires Everywhere: Chapters 12–13

On The Today Show, a host discussed the rumors about the president and a stained blue dress; even more salacious stories circulated about a cigar and where it might have been placed.

Everyone seemed so blasé about saying words she’d never even dared to whisper.

Everyone, it seemed, was fluent in innuendo.

When Pearl had passed her at her locker, Lexie had said, “See you later, Brian and I are—hanging out,” and in Pearl’s mind all the nebulous things that were swirling in the air rushed in to fill that pause.

They were alone in the house: anything could happen, she realized, and the thought was intoxicating.

She had always struck him as a mousy little thing, cute even, but not a girl he’d thought much about, beyond the baseline of teenage hormones that made anything female worth looking at.

With three quick strokes she sketched the problem on the page—across, down, and then a sinuous line that made him think suddenly of lips and hips and other curves.

As soon as dinner was over, she retreated to her bedroom, claiming she had a lot of homework, to mull over what had happened.

“Who did you call?” Pearl asked, and Trip suddenly looked abashed.

It was so out of character, and so earnest, that she nearly kissed him right there.

Trip kept his word: although Tim Michaels pestered him repeatedly, he refused to divulge the name of his new mystery girl, and when his other friends asked where he was headed after school, he made excuses.

But Lexie would demand every intimate detail, would tell Serena Wong and everyone in the school would know within a week.

She’d let him keep her hand until they broke through to the door of the theater, and then gently disentangled it under the guise of reaching into her purse for some lip balm.

The nurse at the desk was a stout woman with copper-colored hair, who looked at the two girls with benign sympathy.

No one would ever believe that she—small, frizzy haired—was related to willowy, sleek Lexie.

In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul.

When he wouldn’t nap, Mia lay next to him in the center of their parents’ bed, blankets heaped around them in a chenille nest, singing him songs and patting his cheek until he dozed.

They had their own words for things, a jargon of obscure origin: for reasons even they had forgotten, they referred to butter as cheese; they called the grackles that perched in the treetops icklebirds.

And with no controls—no aperture control, no focus—she learned to be creative in the ways she manipulated her camera and her scene.

Marvelous toys they were: a set of molds that you filled with plaster to cast Christmas ornaments; a Saturn-shaped ball on which you could bounce, pogo-style; a giant doll’s head with hair of gold to coif; a box of perfumes to blend and pinkie-sized vials to hold your concoctions.

Strange and beguiling new words swirled in her head: f-stop, aperture.

It looked, to them, like something from the Victorian era, balanced on a spindly tripod, with a pleated belly like a bellows and a dark cloth that Mia ducked underneath.

She’d dabbed the prints with a damp cloth and, while the emulsion was wet, used the tip of a needle to scrape away the image, leaving a pin-thin white line.

The results were a kind of reverse scrimshaw: a spectral worker slumped on the steps outside a shuttered factory; the outline of a sedan atop the empty hydraulic lift of Jamison’s Auto Repair; a pair of phantom children scrambling hand in hand up a hill of slag.

The results were a kind of reverse scrimshaw: a spectral worker slumped on the steps outside a shuttered factory; the outline of a sedan atop the empty hydraulic lift of Jamison’s Auto Repair; a pair of phantom children scrambling hand in hand up a hill of slag.

There were no pictures of the two of them doing such a thing but it seemed to them they’d spent their childhoods playing on the slag heaps that butted up against the park, and looking at his sister’s photograph, Warren felt as if Mia had taken a photo of the ghosts of their past selves, about to fade into the ether.

They were middle-class people, had lived all their married lives in a butter-colored middle-class ranch house in a stolid, middle-class town.

Her father was a handyman, founder and sole proprietor of Wright’s Repair, one day working at the church repairing the eaves where a board had broken and a family of squirrels had wriggled their way into the nave, another day at a neighbor’s house snaking the drains or replacing a U-bend under the sink that had rusted away.

Her father was a handyman, founder and sole proprietor of Wright’s Repair, one day working at the church repairing the eaves where a board had broken and a family of squirrels had wriggled their way into the nave, another day at a neighbor’s house snaking the drains or replacing a U-bend under the sink that had rusted away.

But there was Mia, sprawled on the floor for hours, taking a perfectly good picture of Warren and cutting him out like a paper doll, setting up her cutout brother in a diorama of leaves in an old shoebox—all for one photograph, in which Warren looked like an elf surrounded by giant acorns: clever, but it hardly seemed worth the time she’d put in.

The camera folded down into a valise the size of a briefcase and somehow this made it even more disappointing to her parents: all that money packed away into such a small space.

With the last of her savings she’d headed over to the photography store on West 17th, where a young man sold her film and paper as she tried not to stare at his yarmulke.

The undergrads she served tended to be either haughty and obnoxious or leering and obnoxious, more so as the night wore on, but they tipped her, and at the end of a good night she might have thirty or forty dollars in her apron.

Now and then, when she called home—for she did call home, she and her parents all insisted there was no ill will between them; they asked politely how school was doing and showed, or at least feigned, interest in her answers—Warren asked if it was worth it.

A Man Ray photograph burst onto the screen before them: a voluptuous woman, her back transformed into a cello by two painted f-holes.

All of this Mia knew already, from Mr. Wilkinson’s tutelage and her own experimentations over the years.

“But no one cares about poetry,” Mal said with a rueful laugh.

Here, she found, everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths.

She brought them little things she had made: bunches of leaves gathered in Central Park and bound with a ribbon into a ruddy bouquet; a thumb-size basket woven from grass; once, a little sketch of the two of them she’d drawn in ink, even a handful of pure-white pebbles after Pauline mentioned she’d begun a new project with stones.

The car was half full, enough people that she could call for help if she needed, but not so full that the crowd would hide anything untoward.

He put his briefcase down at his feet, between them, and Mia relaxed an infinitesimal amount.

At the time it seemed like a lark: just a way to satisfy her curiosity, and get a nice meal in the bargain.

Joseph Ryan had not told her where to meet them, so she stood awkwardly to one side, pretending to admire the painting that covered one of the lobby’s enormous walls, trying to avoid the attention of the maitre d’, who floated around the entrance of the dining room like a solicitous specter.

“The tapestry.” Here in the lobby he seemed almost bashful, and she had almost forgotten the menace she’d felt the day before. “Well, not a tapestry per se, I guess. He painted it on a curtain. They asked him for a painting, but he didn’t have time to make one, so he gave them this instead. I’ve always admired it.”

“I’m Madeline,” she said, and Mia had the uncanny sensation, as their hands met, of touching her reflection in a pool.