The Arsonist, the Bully, and the Thief

Danae Arrives in The Mail

The vice principal’s wife ripped the package open on the kitchen counter, her mouth tasting like metal. Mrs. Vickerswritten in purple loops was the first bad sign. The return address from the high school where her husband worked was the second. What bad luck no one stole the package from the lobby or set it on fire. What did she expect to find inside? A hank of hair. A desiccated heart smelling of Glossier perfume and pink vodka. What it was: a Malibu Barbie with a diamond ring encircling her neck, the jewel glinting like a winking eye. 

The Arsonist

Outside the art classroom, a girl named Joan kicked a boy until he cried, but this part of the story is about the arsonist Riana. There were drips of dried glue on Riana’s balsa wood Phoenix sculpture, but the wings were what were important. Maybe going up in flames in the art room sink was a fitting end to a Phoenix. Not all art was supposed to last, and a whole-school distraction was needed. Yet when Riana’s lighter flame licked the beak, her own lips burned. It was unfair to lose so much again to fire. The wings lifted in the blaze as her fingertips traced the cabled scars on her forearms from when she stumbled into the bonfire trying to impress Olivia Castaneda at the beach last summer. 

“Poor girl,” she said. Meaning the Phoenix. Meaning her own ragged heart.

The alarm sounded in short blasts and when Riana ran out, Joan and the boy were gone. Beautiful, hardcore Joan faced expulsion if caught in another fight on campus and what would be the point of going to school without Joan there to long for? 

The Bully

Rage crackled between Joan’s teeth. People liked to talk tough but hardly anyone wanted a real fight. The itch for more violence marched under her skin like a bad army. Colin cupped his bleeding nose while she scrolled through the pictures on his phone.

“Grace was into it, I swear,” he said. 

“Do you smell burning?” she asked, texting to herself the pic of him grinning alongside unconscious Grace with her shirt pulled to her chin. The image was more than enough to ruin any chance Colin had at a college swim scholarship. Picking on Grace was a mistake, and though Joan didn’t talk to her so much anymore, they were best friends in eighth grade and that was a bond.

With the sudden blow of the fire alarm, Colin ran off and she followed, crunching his phone under her boot as smoke billowed from the art room because, fire or not, Joan needed to break something.

The Thief

Grace loved the words for what she was. Pirate. She took what she wanted.

Shoplifter. How powerful to be able to lift a shop.

Stealer sounded like steel, a material forged in fire. Steel was stainless. Steel didn’t feel and Grace loved to steal.

In the main office, Joy splayed her hand so that the other girls could admire her new diamond ring. “I don’t know if it’s real,” she said, honestly clueless. Grace knew the value of things and even under the fluorescent lights, the diamond sparkled as only the real deal would.

A fire alarm shattered the circle. Drills were never scheduled after school so somewhere in the building there was a fire as real as the diamond Joy wore in a ring too big for her. Grace knew exactly who gave her sixteen-year-old friend a present meant for a grown woman. As everyone rushed for the door, her fingers feathered Joy’s hand, and so the ring was hers, the words for her secret identity sounding in her ears in time with the fire alarm’s emergency ringing.

Pirate.

Lifter.

Stealer.

Thief.

In the privacy of her bedroom, Grace sifted through her things. A gold-cased red lipstick with heft. A silver chain, cool as water against her throat. A silk flame yellow scarf. Glossier perfume. And now a diamond ring, a gift for her friend Joy who had no idea how to behave with a secret, flashing around the school’s front office like a proud fiancée, forgetting that diamonds came with expectations. 

She emptied a shoebox of old toys: her Slinky, a fist-sized baby doll, and a Malibu Barbie with a red bikini, flaxen hair, and a tan. The Barbie looked like Joy, to be honest. Grace snapped off her head to put the ring around the neck, then glued her back together. The diamond sparkled with its one blind eye as she rested Malibu Barbie inside the shoebox. She remembered Danae from Greek myth, the girl whose own father shoved her out to sea in punishment for attracting the attention of a god, as if the poor girl chose to have skeevy Zeus rain into her bedroom. Maybe Danae was happy at first with the attention of a powerful older man. Maybe she thought it was cool to be wanted. Grace walked down the street and mailed the package, covered in enough stamps stolen from the school office to send across the ocean, though the doll and ring didn’t need to go that far. There was a picture in her mind of an apartment and a wife everyone saw the day she showed up at school to give Mr. Vickers the house key he accidentally left at home. The vice principal kissed the woman on the cheek and Grace thought they looked like dolls moved around by a little girl play-acting an idea of love. There was a picture in her mind of those dolls with a lighter held to their burning mouths and there was a picture in her mind of fire.