It was raining, and when it rained, her whole yard smelled a little like sulfur.

This was always worrisome. She constantly found herself running to the door when she heard the first pit-pats of water on the roof, checking to ensure she hadn't left anything out in the open—firewood, half-finished projects, tanks of gasoline or books of matches.

She never anything left outside, she knew that. But she would always wind up standing just inside her doorway, the rain lashing at her feet, and squinting out into the overgrown yard. It was dalmatian-spotted with patches of burnt grass and strangle-weed. Bittersweet and ivy choked the chain-link, and shaggy bushes stood guard on the edges. Rain would collect in half-melted buckets and pour down the drainpipes of her shack to collect in antique rain barrels. Then she'd shudder, hard, and get back inside before the water could touch her further.

She never left while it was raining.

This fact was how the girl with the singed eyebrows found herself trapped in an Ace Hardware, almost a week later (the calendar behind the desk was now on June 29), meandering down the paint aisle for the fourth time. Rain smeared down the plate-glass windows, and her head had started to pound again.

Lacking bricks, she had begun casting through her dwindling ideas: the nests of loose-leaf paper scattered in corners of her house, covered in sketches and scribbling. Most she had discarded long ago or built already, but one had stood out: her opus, carefully folded and tucked away until she had the means and skill to construct it. A copy was sitting in her pocket even now, as reference, while she shuffled around the store again.

Hell. It had been half an hour, and the cashier was starting to watch her.

She slunk down another aisle and sat down on an empty stretch of bottom shelf. She set the paper bag with her purchases inside down at her feet, its metal treasures clinking together, and pressed her fingers to her temples. The pressure helped, sometimes. It wasn't, much, today.

Why did it have to rain?

According to the big clock on the wall, the one with the wrench and screwdriver for hands, it was almost two. Almost two meant she was late, and that got to her like needles under her skin, like bamboo slivers under her nails. Promises were meant to be kept, even simple ones like this.

It was the scrawny kid's fault, the one who could run his mouth quicker than she'd thought physically possible. He'd shown up on her doorstep yesterday, banging on the door with his dented bat and hollering until she couldn't ignore him anymore. She'd opened it to find the kid who had been hitting baseballs into the mob that day on the avenue. He was Tobias' youngest brother, he'd said, and that dumb sonovabitch was really screwed up over some crazy crash or somethin', and he'd talked about this weird girl he'd been with on the bus that lived out in the backwoods and holy crap wasn't she the one he smacked into last week, that's nuts, but anyway it was gettin' so no one could friggin' sleep no more at home 'cuz Toby kept freakin' out or some crap, so he'd tracked her down 'cuz he could find any damn thing, he'd been in Boy Scouts awright, and could she come maybe try an' talk some sense into the whiny bastard, they were desperate, hell, what a chump.

Faced with the threat of literally having her ear talked off, she had agreed to be outside the old police station at 1:45 the next day. The kid had looked so relieved she wasn't even all that annoyed.

But now it was raining, and so she was trapped.

It continued to rain for another fifteen minutes. She stared defiantly at the collection of cabinet handles until the persistent staccato on the windows faded. When she peeked out again, the sun was bleeding through the still-heavy clouds, bleaching the sidewalks.

The cashier looked up in alarm when she ripped the door open, and then she was bolting.

Redfield County Police Station (NOTICE: building condemned, Do Not Enter) was ten minutes walking from Ace Hardware, and she made it in five. She stumbled to a halt across the street from it, panting hard. It loomed at her, the boarded-up windows like eyes nailed shut. Gaps where shingles used to be studded the low roof like missing scales, and a web of graffiti crawled across the bottom. The neglected trees and unmown grass surrounding it were shiny-wet. Everything smelled like rain, normal rain, not sulfur-rain. That was worse.

Around her was decay. The forgotten police station was just one in a collection of abandoned and condemned buildings; anonymous brick and mortar structures with shattered windows rose up from the cracked pavement all around her, and dented streetlights stood watch like one-eyed scarecrows. Even the street was more tar than asphalt. It was one of those places that felt older than the town it was a part of: so devoid of life that it seemed impossible life had ever been there at all.

In the distance a jackhammer revved to life. A bluebird huddled in a bush a few feet off, huge with puffed feathers. Everything was wet, wet, wet, and the sun made it worse by highlighting every fffucking drop, and Tobias was not there.

She pressed the heel of one hand to her temple and looked around one last time. Then she folded in on herself, sinking down to sit on the curb with her paper bag, and digging her scalded fingertips into her arms.

She would wait. Maybe he was late, too.

That was fine for a while. That was fine until she noticed that somewhere water went drip, drip, drip and the sound bored into her skull worse than the jackhammer. She couldn't focus on anything else. Her headache was flaring back up, steadily moving toward the "dizziness and nausea" stage. She chewed her lip, and before she really knew what she was doing her hands had vanished into the pockets of her green jacket. Her fingers searched, feeling slow and numb, until they collided with the metal and plastic hidden within. It was cool and solid to her touch, the old dents and scratches familiar and comforting. She pulled out the lighter, a sleek little yellow BIC number, and flicked it open; the flame was weak in the daylight. With an easy jerk of her thumb she put it out again. Lit. Unlit. Lit. Unlit. Lit…

She had no idea how much time had passed when someone called her name; could have been one minute, could have been twenty. Fumbling to snap the lighter shut and pocket it again, she searched for the speaker.

It was Tobias, across the street, dripping wet and loping toward her with his hands shoved deep into his red letterman jacket. An unlit cigarette hung from his mouth, and dog tags she hadn't seen before jangled around his neck. His shiner was just a trace of greenish-purple around his eye now, but he had acquired dark circles under both. "Uh, hey."

"Hey."

He came to a halt in front of where she sat, leaning back on his heels. Reaching up, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and began carefully, "…So uh my kid brother—"

The girl snorted. "Never shuts up?"

He stopped, and a grin spread across his face. "No kiddin'. Try living with the guy. He can run like damn, though, you should see him go." A bead of water fell from his hair and rolled down his cheek, agonizingly slow. How could he stand it? "Thanks for coming? I dunno really what he thought was gonna happen, but, like, hey, nice to see ya."

She rolled her shoulders almost imperceptibly in response. "Yeah. S'fine."

"What's in the bag?"

"Parts."

"For?" he pressed.

"Building something."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He wasn't getting more than that out of her. He didn't even know what a kiln was.

He scratched his head. "Well uh, yeah, alright then. Cool."

Neither of them said anything more, and the silence grew uncomfortable. Then Tobias said, "Oh!" snapped his fingers, and grinned. "I know why he picked here. Wanna see something great?"

The skeletal remains of an antique warehouse were tucked behind the old station, down a long dirt driveway and sequestered behind high chain-link fence someone had hacked a hole through. It was cramped, and half-filled with the gutted remains of impounded cars. Spray paint decorated the walls and cars alike: Sharks Eat Jets!; a peace symbol; Kilroy Was Here. A puddle stood beneath a hole in the roof on one side, and the water in it was jumping, because it had started to rain again.

"This is where me an' my brothas'd hang out when we was kids," Tobias said, absurdly proud. She could barely hear him over the rain, over the growing pounding in her head. "Don't come 'round much no more, though… hey, whoa, 'tcha doin'?"

Newspaper. There was newspaper, still dry with the heat of summer and discarded by a stack of raggedy cardboard. She had shoved her bag into Tobias' arms and gone straight for it before she knew what she was doing.

The paper was too close to the wall, the rain, the sound for her liking, and so she moved it closer to the center of the warehouse. The cardboard followed next, and Tobias watched her with a kind of baffled awe as she sat down and began making kindling. There was no wood, and her fingers were acting stupid, but this would have to do.

By the time she'd ripped everything up and put it back together properly, Tobias had sat down cross-legged beside her, chin propped on bony knuckles, her bag in his lap. Gingerly, she withdrew her BIC again and set the little black-and-white teepee aflame. As the paper curled into ashy feathers, her shoulders sagged in relief. The lighter disappeared back into her jacket. She leaned on her knees and watched it, basking in the sight and sound and scent. Even as small as it was, it was perfect.

She'd almost forgotten Tobias was there until he spoke. "You still not upset?"

"About what?"

He snorted gently. "The, the thing on the bus. Guess not, though."

There was a pause. "I had a nightmare the other night," she said. "About drowning."

"Yeah?"

"But it's one I have a lot." She tilted her head to one side as she gazed into the fire. "Your brother said you were having problems."

At her side, he grimaced, then sighed so heavily she actually looked at him for more than a moment. Their eyes met, briefly, before he turned back to the blaze, and it dawned on her that he looked … off. Different, tired?—no, tired wasn't the right word. There was more to it than the bags under his eyes. "I haven't been able to sleep," he said. "Like, any. Guess he mentioned that. It's like, I try goin' t'bed and it just don't come. S'been like that since the thing on the bus." He shifted where he sat, rolling his cigarette between his fingers. "I'll go like that two, three days and then I either start talkin' t'myself an' seein' things or I crash, an' even when I crash I wake up as tired as I was before. My brothers, right, Elliot an' Scott, we share a room an' I'm drivin' them up the damn wall, they told me don't come home 'til I stop bein' crazy." He grinned, weakly, and stuck his unlit cigarette back in his mouth.

Hollow. He looked hollow. She frowned. "Just because of the bus?"

Tobias made a soft, exasperated noise and waved his hand without looking at her. "I know, I know, alright. We ain't all … spooky untouchable like you, 'kay? I'm surprised too." She shrugged, and he reached forward to flick a pebble into her little creation. "So what's the fire about?"

Her mood flipped so quickly she thought she would get whiplash. "What the hell is it to you?" she snarled. The way the words caught and tore over her teeth, coming out misshapen and vicious, surprised her. It surprised Tobias, too, if the look on his face was anything to go by.

And then it was quiet, except for the patterns of the rain, and the fire. Tobias was slow to overcome his shock, and it took him a few seconds to say, "It was jus' a question." She shot him a dark look, and he ignored it: he was pulling out his own lighter, glaring at it like it had insulted him. He lit his cigarette and breathed. "Friggin'… jus' tryin' to make conversation." He took a long, hard drag, and made a frustrated gesture with one hand as he pulled it away. "You're hard to talk to, you know that? Either you say nothin' or you say somethin' … somethin' weird as hell."

"Gosh," she said, the word dripping acid. "No one has ever told me that before. I am enlightened! Thanks."

Tobias didn't answer. She glowered at him a few seconds longer before reaching for more newspaper. She had nearly fed the rest of it into her little blaze by the time he spoke up. "It's just you don't see girls buyin' out firework stands an', an' like buildin' stuff and lighting fires much."

She gave him a low, irritated growl. He pressed ahead anyway. "Makes a guy curious."

"Screw off."

Tobias looked at her, her with her eyes sharp and angry and defensive, then threw his hands into the air in surrender. The conversation was over. Time passed in silence, and she found herself fidgeting badly.

The rain showed no signs of stopping, but it was not, at least, getting worse. The smoke from her fire and his Newport weaved up and around, painting abstracts in the air. Tobias had slouched as deep into his jacket as his long limbs would allow, and he looked half-crazed with his rain-mussed hair and wet clothes and sullen, empty glare. The last one, especially, didn't fit—she had already defined Tobias as an ineffably cheerful moron, and he was challenging that pigeonhole. It irritated her.

Time passed, but neither of them left. Whoever left first was the loser, maybe, or else they were simply both too stubborn for their own good. But eventually, Tobias sighed and said, "Sorry."

The girl gave him a suspicious look. He raised one eyebrow. "I'm tryin' t'apologize."

"Right."

"I am!" he asserted, puffing on his cigarette. "For offendin' your delicate lady sensibilities or whatever." Smoke drifted out of his mouth as he said it, and he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. "I mean. Crap. You don't wanna talk about it, thas fine, you're right, thas none'a my business anyway. I ain't slept in two days, I'm not really thinking all that straight. So … sorry." He dropped his arms and gave her a sidelong glance before outstretching one hand. "Peace?"

She opened her mouth to respond, and realized she had no idea how. So she shut it again, her brow furrowing. Tobias looked at her a while longer before giving up and dropping his hand.

The fire was getting low. She deliberated, then threw the last of the cardboard onto it and said, "It makes me feel better." She peered sideways at Tobias to gauge his response, and found him just looking at the flame. "…the fire. Sometimes I get too wound up or stressed out, and making a fire, burning something, it helps me calm down." She paused. "That's weird, right?"

Tobias screwed up his face, like he was thinking. "Maybe? Geez, I dunno."

"I haven't met anyone who thinks otherwise."

"Yeah, well," he said. "Keep tryin'. It'll happen." Lenny's words, she remembered. "Already did, maybe. You're one-of-a-kind, firebug."

"Firebug," she repeated.

"Fits, don't it?"

"I have a name."

"Two names never hurt nobody." He said it with a smile, and offered her his cigarette.

She took it, after a long, hard stare, but didn't smile back.