I let the flames lick the papers in the waste basket. Let the flames lick the curtains. The tiny dorm room was filling up with smoke. Good. It was going up in flames anyway. I breathed in, and maybe like wasps or bees I'd get drunk on the smoke. But I started to cough and choke and had to get out.
The fire alarm started its inhuman bray, and people started to pour out of their dorm rooms in various states of dress. I saw people in sweatpants and night glasses, the contacts carefully tucked away into the case. I saw girls with their hair pulled up into a fast ponytail, textbooks in their hands, puzzled looks on their faces. Boys in silk boxer shorts, wife beaters, bare feet. Everyone with the same dismayed puzzlement.
The fire truck sirens filled the silence of the distance and raced toward us, and I was laughing. It wasn't funny, but it was. It was a comi-tragedy. Didn't Shakespeare write those? I was living one. My college career was going up in smoke.
What had I been thinking? Was I actually thinking that I could be as effortlessly successful here as I was at Degrassi? No one cared about me here. I wasn't the Queen Bee, the most popular girl or one of the smartest. I'd gotten in because my mother had connections. I mean, I never thought, it never occurred to me, it never occurred to me that this might be too much.
I leaned against the wall and could feel the warmth from the fire creeping into the walls, seeping in. I could see the edge of the black and curling wallpaper before the firefighters doused it with their water and their chemicals. There was soot on my face, and I swiped at it with my hand. Now I looked like one of those chimney sweeping kids you saw in old Disney movies.
And I couldn't stop laughing. The puzzled looks of my fellow students were turning to anger, and points and whispers were starting to come in my direction. I knew what they were saying, 'that crazy girl, she's flunking out, she burned down her dorm room, crazy girl,' I just laughed. Shaking, bringing tears to your eyes laughter. So the dorm room was up in flames, up in smoke like Cheech and Chong. So what?
Now the firefighters' attention was turning to me, slowly, inexorably, like how the Terminator would turn to Reese and Sarah Conner in the first Terminator, and some of the laughter dried up. Beyond their thick rubber coats and boots and axes I could see my sopping wet dorm room, like some sad dog just come in from the rain.
"Miss," one of them said, the one with the handlebar gray mustache and wrinkled face. I wondered if fighting fires ages you before your time. All the smoke, all the tragedy and the drama, it must take its toll.
"Uh, yeah?" I said, still giggling a bit. I couldn't help it. I covered my mouth with my hand.
"Miss, is that your dorm room?" he said, pointing his ax toward my ruined dorm. The bright lights in the hall reflected off the blade of his ax, throwing a bit of light onto the wall. What could I say? Could I deny that it was? This had the feeling of when I'd smashed Spinner's car into Dean's. Reckless.
"Yeah, it is," I said, and I wondered if I was admitting guilt. It could have been an accident. I wasn't sure anymore if it was.
He just nodded and jotted down some information into a little notebook. I used to have a little notebook like that. I wrote down my homework assignments in it. I had been so organized, so focused, so on track. Now here I was, two failed tests and a burnt to a crisp dorm room behind me. That's a fine start to a college career.
"Your name?" he said, and I giggled again. The giggles just rose up like bubbles in a glass of beer. There was no stopping them.
"Paige Micalchuk," I said, and I thought if he asks me to spell it I'd spit on his big giant firefighter boot. But he didn't, he just flipped his notebook closed and walked away.