Playing With Fire

As he approached the dilapidated elementary school, Tyson snuffed out his Marlboro on the dashboard of his mother’s car. Getting out, he opened the door to the backseat and removed the ingredients of his plan: Gasoline, matches, flashlight, and an ice pick. Checking the time on his digital watch, which read 1:42 AM, he set forth on foot towards the entrance to the school - a row of locked doors coated in chipped and fading light green paint. With a swing of the ice pick, Tyson shattered the full-length window on the left side of the doors, and the sound of breaking glass reverberated through the warm night air. The sound of an ambulance could be heard in the distance and overhead, a nearly full moon shone down of the scene. Tyson didn’t notice.

Not bothering to step around the shards of glass, he made his way through the dark, deserted halls, covered with children’s artwork. It was June, and school had let out two weeks ago. As much as Tyson hated school, neither did he really know what to do with himself when he was off. He would enter twelfth grade at the end of August, getting grades just high enough so as to graduate at the year’s end, as he had been doing throughout high school. He had flunked seventh grade, and the experience of being called “dummy” and “retard, combined with being left behind by his friends, had convinced him that failing a grade was something to avoid. But what would he be doing one year from now, when there would be no more school? Tyson did not know.

He walked first to his old sixth grade classroom. As Tyson recalled, sixth grade was when his troubles had begun, and it had been there that he had first dreamed of burning down the school. His problems had started when his father, an alcoholic, died in a car accident in the July before that school year started. His mother had remarried to her boss eight months later, and Tyson later discovered that she had been having an affair with him at the time of the death. To make matters worse, he had been extremely short and puny, and was bullied mercilessly by the “big kids”. His grades began to fail, and he turned himself inward.

Tyson was not exactly sure of how to accomplish his aims. Over the years since he had last been in the room, he had rehearsed how he would do this at least a thousand times in his mind. Opening the top of the tank of gasoline, Tyson poured it onto the thinly carpeted floor, pausing to watch it accumulate in a puddle before moving on, trailing it all over the room until he was satisfied with his work. He poured what was left of the gas outside in the hallway and left the tank there. Stepping several feet away from the flammable liquid, Tyson reached into his pocket and pulled out a fold of matches. Striking it and getting a small, successful flame, he threw it onto the gas. Feeling the heat rise at his back as the gas ignited, he ran as swiftly as he was able towards the doors of the school. Once outside, he stood briefly to reflect upon his doing, enjoying the sight of the bright orange flames dancing from the school’s walls. Climbing into the Camry, he fled the scene.

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Tyson slept late the next morning, getting up at around 11:30. He headed downstairs, rummaging through the kitchen for some acceptable food, before heating up two frozen slices of pepperoni pizza and grabbing a coke. Sitting down in the den, he picked up the remote control and pressed the power button. Channel surfing, he saw that there wasn’t much on- typical daytime TV. He changed channels again and came to the local news station, where the anchor was amiably speaking to viewers about the near abduction of a ten-year-old downtown. The scene changed, and the channel went live to Suzanne, reporting at the site of a burnt building.

“Harold E. White Elementary School became the victim of arson early this morning, when a resident of a nearby apartment complex happened to see flames coming from the site and alerted the fire station. An administrative assistant named Janice Hopkins who was inside the school at the time was taken to Lutheran Medical Center after being discovered by firefighters. She was pronounced dead early this morning due to smoke inhalation.

Tyson froze. He didn’t hear what Suzanne was saying next about Hopkins’ family and friends gathering to mourn, nor did he hear about the police questioning the residents of the school’s neighborhood in attempt to find the perpetrator. All that he could think was that he had killed someone. He was a murderer. He had chosen June because he had assumed that the school would be vacated. What had that woman been doing inside the school in the beginning of summer, anyway?

Feeling sick, Tyson went to his room for a pack of smokes, then sat back down on the ripped and stained sofa and tried to think. A minute later, the phone on the end table to his left rang, and after peering at the caller I.D. he saw that it was his mother. He hesitated, then picked it up on the third ring.

“Hello?” he said, feeling as lifeless as he sounded.

“Hey Ty,” his mother’s cheerful voice came over the line. “Did I wake you up?”

“Uh... No.”

“Ty, is everything all right?”

“Yeah Mom.”

“Well that’s good. Anyhoo, can you pick up Lindsay from gymnastics and at three?” She was referring to Tyson’s little sister.

“Yeah, okay.”

After they hung up, Tyson sank back down on the sofa, feeling rotten to the core. His intentions had only been to destroy his hated elementary school. What was he going to do? There was a new movie out about aliens, and maybe that would distract him. He estimated that if he left soon, he could be done in time to pick up his sister.

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“Tyson, your really late,” his sister whined when he showed up at the gym, a full thirty minutes late.

“Uh-huh.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing!?” his sister continued, raising her voice to that annoying childish tone she used when she was upset with him. “Do you just not care about me? I had to wait like, half an hour for you!”

Tyson said nothing. Lindsay continued ragging on him, but he tuned her out.

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Tyson felt he had no choice but to keep his secret. What good would it do if he turned himself in to the police? Doing so couldn’t bring back the life he had stolen. For a week he survived on Hungry Man trays and the cigarettes he purchased with his fake I.D. He took sleeping pills and spent most of the day unconscious. His mother wondered what was wrong.

“Tina dumped me,” he said groggily. In fact, Tina had recently dumped him, after he had failed to take her cell phone calls and ceased to return her text messages.

“Oh, I’m sorry about that.” His clueless mother left him alone, feeling it was best to let him deal with his loss in peace.

Tyson was troubled by the fact that he had no future. He had always known it, in a way, but it hadn’t begun to bother him until the third year of high school. When he had been little, he had wanted to be a cop, ironically, but he hadn’t had career aspirations for years. He knew that he didn’t deserve to be alive and all he wanted to do was sleep.

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It wasn’t until two weeks after the inferno that Tyson made a nighttime return to the site, now surrounded by yellow police tape. Slipping over it and stepping around a pile of scorched material, he walked to a less burned part of the building, what had been a second grade classroom. It was in another wing of the school than the sixth grade, and its walls were only slightly charred.

He paused a moment to reflect on what he was preparing to do.

Then he held the gasoline over his head and poured. He let the smell of the substance fill his nose for a moment. He’d always loved that odor.

He tore off a match from the same fold he’d used to start the blaze exactly fifteen days ago. But upon attempting to strike the match, his hand trembled uncontrollably. He couldn’t do it.

Tyson stood there, inside the burnt walls of the school, drenched in gas, illuminated only by the flashlight he had propped upright as a kind of lantern. He mentally prepared himself to strike the match on the count of three, but again, his hand was petrified.

He drove home to keep his secret.