time for some more stuff

(Based on true events, but a fictionalization.)


"Kids." A hush fell around the campfire as forty faces swiveled towards the speaker. "I hope everyone enjoyed their s'more. Now the campfire is over at 9:30, which is in ten minutes." Groans. "Now..." Silence. "We have already given you an extra half hour. Lights out is at ten, so do not stay up! I will see you at rehearsal at 7:30 sharp, and I expect you to be bright and alert. Good night!"
"Good night," chorused everyone. There were some dark mutters from the eighth graders, but no one made any real attempts at rebellion. Treva was the undisputed ruler of the Springfield Children's Chorus, and her word was law. As she walked up the hill to the camp lodge, chatting with a couple of the choir mothers, Sarah snuck over to sit on the edge of the fire ring and stared into the flames.
Sarah had always loved fire. She had learned very early the proper way to bring it to life. This fire was dying. As she watched, sadly, one of the central pillars collapsed, pulling down logs on either side of it and throwing up ash that choked the surrounding flames. There was nothing she was allowed to do to save it. She sat entranced on the cold stone of the fire ring and watched the embers swim with light for nine more minutes, then turned her back on it, picked up her jacket, and walked back to the dorm.
"This is so stupid," complained one girl to three others who nodded vigorously with the prepubescent amen, "I know!"
"They said that this was going to be a party! It's only 9:30!"
More approval. She wasn't sure what they were complaining about. Maybe they had burned their marshmallows-- that was always pretty upsetting. She didn't yell about it or act like it was everybody's problem, but that would hardly be the first thing she didn't have in common with these girls.
She was still working her tongue around, trying to get rid of the taste of toothpaste, when the door opened quietly and two mothers leaned in conspiratorially, framed by the flourescent light coming from the hallway.
"We're going to go back down to the lake!" whispered one. "If you girls want to come, you can come down for a little while longer, but we have to be quiet so everyone that's sleeping can stay asleep."
Excited murmurs. A dull few turned around in their blankets and went back to sleep; the rest hastily put tennis shoes on bare feet, pulled on sweatshirts, and shuffled back out into the dark. Sarah went with them. She had been told enough times to make friends on this trip. To her delight, the fire was still guttering. She found a suitable stick and began tending it carefully: shifting some of the larger logs, letting air into the hot red center. The fire responded marvelously, and she let the tip of her stick catch a small flame in its ovenlike core. Holding it like a candle in front of her, she sat on the stones and watched it carefully, sighing with delight at the feeling of the hot air on her face.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
Sarah turned, surprised, to find a girl with glasses and a ponytail looking eagerly at her. "I'm just fixing the fire."
"Really? How?"
"Well, I just use this stick, to kind of... move the flames around." Sarah looked anxiously for a response. The girl's face seemed to be permanently stamped with a look of eager incomprehension.
"That's so cool. Hey Tricia! Come see what this girl is doing."
Soon there were a dozen girls surrounding her, each reaching into the fire and pulling out sticks with an alarming lack of concern. "Girls, what is going on?" called one of the mothers from the lakeside.
"It's fine, Mom!" yelled glasses girl. This appeared to be convincing enough for the mother, who went back to her conversation.
Sarah backed away from the fireside for the first time and sat on one of the cold logs surrounding it. This was probably when she should be making friends, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. They were going to kill the fire, the way they kept poking at it and taking sticks from it. Actually, if they kept waving those flaming sticks around, they might cause more harm than that.
This had apparently occurred to one of the mothers as well, who was more proactive than the first. "Girls, no fire outside the fire ring."
"But that girl showed us how," said glasses girl, pointing at Sarah. Sarah was appalled both at the traitorious behavior and at the implication that they were following her instructions by wrecking her fire and nearly burning off each others' hair. The mother appraised Sarah unapprovingly. "I don't care," she said directly to her. "Put out the sticks. We don't want to get in trouble."
The gaggle doused their torches and moved on, sitting around a picnic table and spilling gossip about the male sopranos. Sarah quietly resumed her place at the fireside. What was left of the fire sputtered and smoked, but it could be easily fixed, if she could push the end of that log aside. She put her right hand down in the cold outer ash to reach across with her left, and immediately stood up, grabbed her right wrist and started walking towards the mothers. Rather than put their torches into the fire itself, the girls had apparently left them laying around the outskirts of the fire ring, and Sarah had just leaned with all her weight onto one of their dormant embers, which burned through the soft heel of her palm instantaneously. She gripped her wrist a little tighter, hoping to drown out that pain with some of her own making.
The mothers were surprised to be approached.
"It's not a big deal," she began, apologetically, heat and pain coursing through her, "but someone had stirred up the embers or something, by accident, and I kind of burned my hand. So if I could get some ice--"
The mothers looked at each other.
"The ice is in the kitchen..."
"We can't get into the kitchen. Everyone's supposed to be asleep."
"What are you supposed to do for burns? Run cold water on it?"
"Yeah, but that's too loud too. We share that bathroom with the other room. God, I don't want to get lectured by Treva."
Sarah gaped. She had never suspected that they were outside against the will of Treva. She thought they had special permission.
"We're only going to be out here maybe ten more minutes," said one of the mothers, finally facing her. "Do you think you can wait that long? We'll get a handiwipe or something for it when we get inside."
Sarah nodded. "Yeah, ok. That's fine. I mean," she laughed somewhat frantically, "there's a whole lake! So there's water. Just uh, let me know when you're going inside."
The mothers turned back to their conversation. Sarah stood for a moment in consternation, then started walking towards the lake. In the blackness, she stepped into the murky boglike shore mud without realizing it. There didn't seem to be any way to reach the clear water without wading out about twenty feet, so she gave up.
The pain was becoming unbearable by the time she reached the hillside. She sat by the fire again, but the wound seemed to pulsate along with the glowing of the embers, so she left. She dug her nails deeper into her wrist, but it did little good. Eventually she stumbled halfway up the hillside and collapsed, carefully pressing her hand into the cold dew on the grass as the first hot tears started to come. This was not right. She looked up to the lodge at the top of the hill. Surely she would be justified in going back and getting a different, more normal mother, one who would immediately spring from bed and lead her to the bathroom sink, giving comforting and sympathetic words. She could get Treva herself. But now that she knew they were outside against orders, she couldn't do it. It would mean getting other people in trouble. And then where would her plan for making friends be? They would all hate her. Especially their mothers. She bit her tongue and found a new patch of dew to drape her hand over.
This had all been a disaster. She allowed herself to mouth the word idiots at the crowd around the picnic table. She didn't want to be angry. As the pain jolted continuously up her arm, she pulled her knees up to her chest and started to cry silently in earnest, letting out her breath in long hisses between gasps. The carefree conversations of mothers and daughters drifted up the hillside, and she hated them. She couldn't stand to even look at them. She fell back and stared up at the sky, and forgot them.
Stars like nothing she had ever seen before burned brightly ahead. There were thousands of them. Living in town, she had always thought that stars were uncountable because you would lose your place halfway through the sky... in an instant she knew differently. They clumped and drifted in shapes and colors too vivid and interesting to be defined by the few stick-figure constellations she knew. She stared upwards intently, her pain not forgotten but not important as she surveyed these stars for the first time, wondering if anything could ever equal the surprise and the splendour of that first glance.
And then, one moved. A short white line stood against the black sky for less than an instant. It took her a minute to realize it was a falling star. By then, there was another-- and then two more. The chatter from below drifted up still, oblivious to the glory above them, as the sky erupted in flying lights. She was barely distracted when one of the girls from the picnic table came at long last to see how she was doing.
"Why are you over here all alone?" she asked.
Sarah kept her gaze fixed on the cascade and nodded towards it.
The girl followed her look just as two more lights dripped down. "Oh wow," she breathed, but she didn't make any effort to alert the masses either. They noticed, of course, now that there was a person who mattered there, and they drifted over in twos and threes, disguising their bored curiosity with sympathy for the lonely girl. The crowd drew around them and emitted little squeals of delight every time a star fell, nearly always accompanied by the whine of the girl who missed it.
Sarah heard them, but did not listen. She sat with her gaze fixed upwards long after the shower had ended, lost in joy, lost in the fires of the heavens.