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where he stood. My brother was a firefighter, and even if he wasn’t, I’d have known it was stupid to light things on fire, but I was a sixth grader and Chris was in eighth. All I did was give him a mean look.
    Still, there was a little part of me that understood. Sometimes you do something crazy because you can’t stand to not do anything. That was Chris McKenzie, lighting fires because he needed his hands and his mind to be full. Bright sparks, dangerous things. They command attention. They distract. I didn’t know what it was Chris needed to be distracted from, but I recognized the need itself.
    And then sometimes you do something crazy becausethere’s nothing left to distract you. When Mr. Powell speaks, when he tells you what has happened to Chris—or, rather, what Chris has done to himself—there’s so much fear and so much sadness welling up inside you that you can’t hold it all. Yesterday Chris was a person lighting things on fire at the SaveGreat, and today there is no such person, and you might have been the last person to see him when he was still real. Your brain goes from overload to total shutdown, and then you blink, or at least you think that’s what you did, only you find out you’re not in class anymore. You’re standing behind your school, next to the Dumpsters, where the kitchen staff sneaks out to smoke, and your knuckles are scraped but you don’t know why. And Anthony Tucker is standing three feet behind you, breathing heavily and looking terrified, with his hands up, like you’re some wild thing that might charge him.
    â€œSasha?” He’s the school bully. Since you were second graders, he has followed you around, tugging at your braid, stepping on the backs of your shoes, and putting gum in your hair. You’ve never heard his voice sound anything except taunting, but now it’s dead serious and scared and he sounds about six years old. “Hey. What did that Dumpster ever do to you?”
    And you run past him because you can’t face the fact that the worst bully in the whole school just saw you lose your head for a minute.
    I’m not crazy. I’m not. It’s just that there are days whenthe scared and the mad and the sad inside me get so big that my body can’t hold them. And then they come out, and maybe I’m a little bit scared that it
does
make me crazy, but I’d never say so.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    When Phyllis is done singing about caged birds, I open my eyes. There is a weird sound, like a hard strum of a guitar. I am on my feet and Phyllis is half up from her chair, fingertips stretching out in the air like she’s trying to catch raindrops or the seconds that just went by. The guitar is on the floor with its strings pointing every which way, splinters of wood poking out along the side.
    I work on catching my breath. In-in-in quick. Out long. In-in-in quick. Out long.
    Phyllis, without her guitar, looks small. Her hands seem fragile.
    â€œWell. I guess I played the wrong song,” she says. There is nothing musical about her voice now. She sinks into her chair and goes still.

3
    Michael leapt sideways and managed
to catch the Frisbee even though I wasn’t very good at throwing it. We’d been playing for half an hour, and he had yet to miss a catch. My third-grade teacher, who just yesterday finished wrangling us through a Memorial Day craft, would have said we were being disrespectful, playing Frisbee in a cemetery with fallen soldiers and stuff, and I told Michael as much, but he said if he were buried here, he wouldn’t mind two kids having fun on his lawn.
    â€œAny soldier grew up here would know there’s no other place to play that’s sort of flat and doesn’t have trees,” he said.
    Michael had been planning to join the military; had been impossible to live with for weeks because of all the working out and eating healthy and all the