Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 54

All three of you know what’s happened before you roll up your driveway, before you see the empty tables and the paper plates with flies buzzing over them, before Colleen the babysitter the fire wives use comes out with your sister on her hip and says that there’s a fire – what else would scramble everybody across town? And you can even see it as you charge through the woods, not taking the path on the edge but barreling right through it, so magnetically drawn to the fire that your fear of ghosts is temporarily suspended, even in the darkest middle where the sun barely shines and things scurry around tree trunks, because oh god you can smell it, the burning in the air, a smell with ten thousand other smells inside of it, of ten thousand burning things that were once alive and well. It was a 10-21, Tim calls out as you leave the woods, the sun burning your skin. Screw that, Jason counters, it was a 10-24, I heard it. No, you tell them both, it was a 10-47, I heard it on my dad’s scanner. And that’s the end of that; Jason, like all the fire kids, nods with the same submissive agreement that you’ve come to expect, and if you ever felt bad about freezing him out for the first week of June, just to show him how it could be, it’s dispelled by the benefits being your deputy brings him. He’s going to get to play first base on the team, and you better believe he wouldn’t be getting that if it weren’t for you.