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When Uncle Chad picks her up from the hospital, he says, “Hey,” and pats the passenger seat. “You can sit up front if you want.”
Ignacia has already opened the back door. “Mamá doesn’t like it when I sit up there.” She says Ignacia is too small, and she’s probably right. There are kids in her grade a full head taller than her.
He leans over and pops the door open. “Then don’t tell her. C’mon.”
It takes a couple of tries to get the door to close all the way. Ignacia is nervous about grabbing things with her freshly casted hand, and she’s always careful to not mess up her uncle’s car. Mamá doesn’t like Uncle Chad’s car, either — she says it makes him look like homosexual Speed Racer. Ignacia would say the same thing, and she thinks it rules.
“Is she mad?”
“She’s not mad,” he says, turning into a shopping center. “You want some ice cream? Y’know, take the edge off that broken arm—”
“You’re stalling. Which means she’s mad.”
“Okay, yeah, she’s ‘mad,’ but really, she’s just scared. You jumped out a third-story window. Cut her some slack.”
“Are you mad?”
Ignacia doesn’t really need to ask that question. It’s winter outside the car and summer inside. She can see the water in his mouth turning to steam when he talks.
He opens the window. “Just help me understand what the fuck happened.”
Ignacia looks outside. Night is falling, and everything is cold and blue. She knows Uncle Chad isn’t a great person, and she knows there’s people who would argue that he’s outright dangerous. She might even concede that they’re right.
But she still blows into the cold air and imagines her breath turning to steam in her mouth.
“I was trying to fly,” she mutters.
They have to sit in the car for a while; if they don’t wait, Chad might melt all the ice cream in the store. It gives Ignacia time to explain.
Some asshole kid threw some other kid’s lunch out the window. Landed in a tree. Now that she thinks about it, maybe somebody could’ve gotten it with a long pole or something, but she didn’t give them that chance. Her scuffed-up Sketchers were already on the windowsill.
She burst into flames and then plummeted straight down.
“You’re telling me you broke your arm for some kid whose name you don’t even know? I’m not trying to be a dick,” he interrupts, “I’m trying to figure out if I should be giving you the ‘don’t be a hero’ speech or the ‘don’t be a showoff’ speech.”
“Second one,” Ignacia says, because she tries to be honest with herself.
The first incident was at a baby shower or something. One of those family gatherings that you don’t really remember and that a kid definitely doesn’t want to be at, but was dragged to regardless. Uncle Chad hadn’t been out of prison for very long. She remembers the tattoo tape. Someone must have told him that it would be good to cover up scars, but he was still working out the kinks. The tape was a little too pink, and it peeled at the edges.
The thing was that as a kid, Ignacia had been — well, “dumb as fuck” is perhaps a bit uncharitable, but she was severely limited in her ability to predict other people’s behavior.
Ignacia thought that if she stood up in the middle of the baby shower, shouted, “Look what I can do!” and then burst into flames, that would be cool as hell, and if she saw someone else do that, she would also think “that’s cool as hell.” So surely, if she did that, everyone else would think that was cool as hell.
A few minutes later, Ignacia’s aunt was in early labor, four different adults were screaming at her, and Ignacia wondered for the first time if there was something wrong with her.
She doesn’t remember where Mamá was. Maybe she was following the ambulance to the hospital. Maybe she hadn’t been there at all, and just dropped Ignacia off. Picking up extra hours at work, because she’s always picking up extra hours at work.
What she does remember is where Uncle Chad was.
“Welp,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her, but everyone else had left the venue by now. There was no one else he could be talking to. “That fucking sucked. You good?”
Ignacia looked at her bruising knees. Chad was the one who put her out, grabbing a baby blanket and tackling her to the ground with it. “No.”
“Tch, of course not, why the fuck did I ask,” he muttered. “Don’t light up on the carpet next time. Could’ve burned down the whole building if I wasn’t here. Hell, you still could’ve burned down the building if I wasted time fucking around with that thing.” He jerked a thumb at the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall.
There’s a lot of expired fire extinguishers in Los Angeles.
The average person doesn’t think about their surroundings the way a pyrokinetic has to. Carpets burn when given the chance, people burn when given the chance. Hair, eyelashes, clothes. Your relatives act like you’re out of pocket when you talk about shit like expired fire extinguishers, and then they don’t thank you when you’re the only one with the presence of mind to put out the burning child.
After a moment of silence, he said, “What’s the smallest fire you can make?”
Ignacia concentrated real hard, and managed to cut a fire that engulfs her hand down to a single flame cradled in her palm. She looked up, searching Chad’s face for approval.
At times, she still rotates his expression in her mind. It wasn’t the big, scary, angry fear that the other adults had hit her with, colder than any bucket of ice water. He was smiling, but there was something else there, something she couldn’t name.
This is the hard part, he told her.
When Uncle Chad opens the door to his apartment, people are already laughing, ice clinking in their glasses. Ignacia swallows the last of her ice cream cone and tries to smooth down her hair.
Chad’s dining room can accommodate a small army, and it is. Ignacia has met a couple of her uncle’s coworkers before — namely, Alice — and she’s seen most of the others around. She’s not sure how the guy in the polo shirt got in here, but he raises an eyebrow and says, “Oh god, Flambae has a kid?”
“This is my niece.” Chad pulls up a chair. “And if anything happens to her, I’m gonna blow up everyone here and then myself, got it?”
“You blow women now?” Invisigal says without looking up.
“Shut up, Courtney. Nacho, you done with your homework?” When she nods, he tosses her the TV remote. “Couch is yours.”
Ignacia nods, but passes up the couch to sit on a barstool. Watching her uncle’s friends talk shop is frequently more interesting than television. Polo guy refills everyone’s drinks from the bottles lined up on the counter. “Hey, Flambae, what do you want?”
“Paloma.”
“Remind me what that is.”
“Just pour some Squirt over tequila. The soda,” Uncle Chad says loudly as Invisigal tries to say something. “The soda, the soda… is called Squirt. It’s in the fridge.”
“You sure you don’t want a fireball?” says polo guy.
“Jesus Christ, you people still think you’re funny.”
Ignacia eventually deduces that polo guy is probably their dispatcher. He doesn’t exactly get news coverage, but he’s been described to her as looking like a depressed ferret, which seems about right.
Robert is some guy from Pasadena. He was hired on a Friday. Uncle Chad was betting that he’d quit on Monday. That was six months ago.
He eats twinkies for lunch. He went drinking with his coworkers and ended up biting off a man’s thumb. He has back problems because he sleeps in a plastic lawn chair, which is because he threw his mattress out a window “for work reasons,” and then he just refused to elaborate further. He brings his dog to work.
Uncle Chad might have a crush on him — he never talks about his other coworkers this much. But then again, if Ignacia knew someone this confusing, she’d also never shut up about him.
Robert notices that she’s staring. He holds up the tequila bottle and says with the exact same gravity that he’s given every other statement, “Want some?”
“Flambae, the boss is getting your kid drunk,” Sonar says flatly.
“What the fuck, Robert?” her uncle snaps. He adds, in a lower tone, “And she’s — she’s not my kid.”
Ignacia wasn’t actually curious about alcohol, but now she has to chime in. “I’m not a kid, I’m ten! …Almost eleven!” she adds when the previous number fails to impress.
Robert sighs. “How about this — I give you one sip of this, and if you can handle it, I’ll think about giving you more. Deal?”
Ignacia nods. Robert looks over his shoulder at Chad.
“Deal?”
Her uncle throws his hands up. “Yeah! Sure! Fine.”
“Glad we’re on the same page.”
“One sip, Bob-Bob.”
Robert pretends to do a big dramatic pour just to make Uncle Chad flinch. The actual amount is more or less a trickle of tequila.
Ignacia has tasted gross things before, and the wisdom that she’s gleaned from Robitussin is that it’s best to swallow it all in one go. She quickly learns that this does not apply to alcohol.
“Hmm,” Robert says as she fights for her life. “Well, she’s lasting longer than I did.”
It’s a struggle, but eventually the tequila makes it past her gag reflex. A puff of smoke leaves her mouth when she declares, “Ough. Done it. Easy.” She can still feel the burning in her chest. “For unrelated reasons I will not be drinking more.”
The table is amused. Punch Up declares her a good lass.
“If you want people to stop thinking she’s yours, maybe your family should stop making kids with the…” Malevola makes spectacles with her fingers. “Yanno. The eyes.”
The orange eyes. Not just a really warm brown. Jelly bean orange. Slightly glowing, if you turn the lights off.
Uncle Chad says pyrokinetics are just like that.
The principal wanted Ignacia’s parents at the meeting. She gave them Uncle Chad’s phone number instead. For several reasons, but mostly because the meeting was about him. Sort of. It felt fair to let him have a say in it.
When he rolled up wearing sunglasses and downing Aleve she realized that maybe this had been a mistake.
“Yup. …Uh-huh. …Yeah, I understand.”
The principal, who seemed to have clenched every atom in her body when a hungover convicted arsonist entered her office, hazarded to relax just a bit. “So you can see why we feel the need to suspend your niece, Mr. Iskander. Do you have any questions?”
“Yeah, a lot of questions, ‘cause this is bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
Here we go.
“Why is it just us here? That other kid started it. Where’s him and his parents?”
“‘That other kid’ isn’t the one who burned a student.”
“Yeah, he was just being a bigot, which as we all know, is fine.”
The kid was kind of an asshole to everyone with powers, but when he heard about Uncle Chad, he latched the fuck onto that. A pyrokinetic pyromaniac released from prison to fish balloons out of trees. If entire news channels were happy to drag him through the mud, of course a ten year old wouldn’t see anything wrong with it.
She wouldn’t find out exactly what triggered the incident until later. Her uncle had set off a sprinkler system or something, and the tattoo tape had come off in a big flap before a reporter approached him for comment.
Most people didn’t know what they were looking at — the only thing the tape hid was two round, pea-sized scars on the side of his neck, like he’d been bitten by a weird vampire.
Powers don’t have an off switch. In most cases, a prison will just strap a supervillain into a shock collar. Automated. Triggered by spikes in heart rate. If you excite easily, or have a high resting heart rate, or you just can’t control yourself, the collar can shock you so often that even with burn resistance, the electrodes will eat straight through you and sink into your skin.
The kid said to Ignacia that his dad was a prison guard. He said that he saw pyros in prison every day, falling to the ground and foaming at the mouth like rabid dogs. If they can’t calm down — which they often can’t, because they’re being electrocuted — the current just keeps coming, and they vomit, piss themselves, and die, their organs fried from the inside out like a miniature electric chair.
Ignacia just punched him in the face. His hair only caught fire because—
Well, it would make sense if she lost her temper, right?
But she doesn’t remember feeling angry. She just wanted him to stop talking. She needed him to stop talking, stop putting these images in her head of her uncle screaming and convulsing on a concrete floor — it felt like he was reaching into her head and electrocuting her too.
Is that anger? The desire to protect yourself and others, to stop suffering, is that an attack on someone else?
The principal seemed to think so. She added two more days to Ignacia’s suspension and told them to get out of her office.
“I’m worried about her,” Mamá says. “What do we even do about this?”
Ignacia almost opens her eyes, but squinches them shut quickly. The lights are dimmed, and if she looks, the orange glow will be too obvious.
Her uncle sighs. “Well, flight school would be a good start. I don’t think she’s gonna stop trying, so we might as well make sure she’s doing it right.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
Oh yeah, Ignacia knows what they’re talking about. What if you were ten and there was something wrong with you? And everyone else knows this, but they don’t want to talk about it, like they’ll speak it into existence. It’s called magical thinking, which is a thing that you looked up because you’re not stupid, you’re just ten. Your uncle went to jail but he’s better now, or trying to be, at least, which in your opinion makes him better than the fuckass kid who thinks it’s funny to imagine how he could’ve died screaming. Society doesn’t agree with you. You refuse to submit to public humiliation, and for this you are punished. You are ten and a man on TV says that if ICE deports your uncle they should break him like a wishbone and send one half to Mexico and the other to Afghanistan. Laugh track. Your mother says nothing; she’s the one who put on this channel. You are ten and while you’re in the bathroom where he thinks you can’t hear him, your uncle tells his friend Alice something, and you think he’s laughing, but when you come out, you realize he’s crying. Neither of them see you, so you go back to the bathroom and wait for it to pass. You are ten and you are realizing that the people you love can’t protect you, actually, that they can’t protect themselves, actually. Children watching their parents suffer watching their parents suffer watching their parents suffer.
You are ten, and you are told that you are unreasonable. You are ten, and you are told there is no reason to be angry.
“Yeah,” Uncle Chad says. “...Yeah,” he says again, and he doesn’t say anything else.
He’s thirty-six. They’re telling him the same thing.
He mutters, “My coworkers keep calling her my kid. Still hurts to say that she’s not.”
“You know this is for her own good. You spent half her life talking to her through bulletproof glass, that’s no way to raise a child.”
“That doesn’t make it easier.”
“You can do hard things, hermano. You’re a superhero.”
“I know,” he says, and scoops Ignacia off the couch.
Her eyes flicker open briefly, but Chad just pats her head.
She knows now what that face was, when he saw her cradle fire in her hand. He wasn’t afraid of her. He was afraid for her.
“Go back to sleep, mi fuega. I’ve got you.”
Ignacia closes her eyes and lets him hold her until he’s ready to let go.