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“Well, that’s one way to do it.” Bodhi nods with a smile when the planner quickly goes up in flames, the fingers of one of his hands lacing through mine down by my side.
He gives my hand a squeeze as we both stare down into the fire of my quickly burning life plans, thanks to the lighter fluid and this crazy man next to me who makes me feel like doing crazy things.
“Don’t you want to know why I have my own traveling torching kit?” I turn my face to stare at his profile, studying the sharp angles of his perfect jawline, his full lips, and a dimple in one of his cheeks, when he turns his head and our eyes meet.
“Do you find yourself torching things a lot?”
“If it annoys me, yes.”
“Do people or animals ever get hurt?”
“Never.” I adamantly shake my head.
“Does it make you happy?”
“Yep.”
“Then that’s all I need to know.”
My entire body feels like it turns to jelly now, and I have to lock my knees together before I fall into a puddle of goo on this deck, when Bodhi drops my hand to reach into the front pocket of his shorts.
“Here, you can have this,” he says, handing me what he just pulled out of his pocket. “It’s an all-weather Zippo that works in wind and rain that a Shaman gave me in Tibet. Now you can torch things in all kinds of weather conditions.”
I never, ever want to get married or settle down, thanks to my shitty parents and their shitty marriage filled with nothing but resentment and screaming at each other. But suddenly, something as simple as a damn Zippo is making me seriously reconsider my stance on the whole thing and want to ride off into the sunset to make hot, homeless-looking surfer babies with this man.
No! Bad Tess!
“Wanna go down to the snack bar and get some popcorn, my little firestarter?”
My entire body jolts like I just touched an electric fence when he calls me that nickname, but not in an “Oh, God, I just pissed myself” way. In more of a warm, tingly, “this is freaking weird” way, like I’m suddenly starting to believe in the whole soul mates thing Birdie, Wren, and Emily never shut up about that doesn’t really exist. Even though he said he didn’t need to know why I travel around with lighter fluid, once again, I find myself spewing my baggage all over the place, because Bodhi just has a face that makes you want to tell him all of your secrets and let him make everything better.
“Funny story, my dad’s favorite movie ever was Stephen King’s Firestarter,” I explain to Bodhi as he takes my hand again and starts leading me down the stairs to the snack bar. “It’s one of the only things I remember about him. He worked nights and was rarely home or awake when I was, but on the rare occasions we were awake at the same time, he’d let me sit on the couch with him and watch that movie.
“And my mom would always yell at him on the rare occasions she felt like being a mother,” I continue as Bodhi orders us each a popcorn and a soda from the window, pays, and we head back outside to stand by the railing down here to enjoy the view. “My dad would look over at me and ask, ‘Are you scared?’ and I’d shake my head, and he’d turn to my mom and say, ‘See? She’s fine.’ And I wasn’t scared. I knew it was make-believe and that little girls really couldn’t light things on fire with their mind.”
“After you tried it, of course.” Bodhi snickers, tossing a handful of popcorn in his mouth, and then tossing a handful over the railing and into the wind for some low-flying seagulls.
“Of course. I was super pissed my grandmother didn’t go up in flames when she yelled at me for spilling a bowl of cereal a few months after I’d been living there.” I shrug. “That movie also taught me a very valuable lesson—that if you can’t get mind-fire to work, actual fires should always be lit outside, and not in the middle of the living room carpet just for funsies.”
Bodhi laughs, and the sound makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, which just annoys me, and I aggressively shove too much popcorn in my mouth, making me choke on a few kernels.
“Anyway, after they walked out of my life, I kind of got obsessed with the idea of fire,” I tell him after I finish almost choking to death on popcorn, being more honest with him about my love of fire than with anyone else in my life, including my best friends. They just think I’m bat-fucking-shit crazy and they’ve accepted it. “Whenever anything would annoy me, I started writing it down on a piece of paper and then lighting it on fire. I hate math. I hate people. Tucker Shoemaker doesn’t like me back. I hate people. I have daddy issues. I’m never drinking tequila again. People…. And so on and so forth. It was like watching all my troubles just magically burn away until they were gone, and it helped me stop worrying about them, or dwelling on them, or being annoyed by them. I don’t know; it feels weirdly therapeutic, and I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day with me, but whatever.”
