The Girl in the Burning Orchard

When laugher and hindsight guts a college freshman like a knife, a ghost from her past comes asking for clarity - Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story

I’m told that the scene is just as objectively funny as the quote; but not even a fake laugh can make it past the knot in my throat. It’s impossible while memories of a burning orchard fill my head.

I manage a sniff and a head nod in an effort to appease my roommates desire to “watch me watch it” for the first time. The three of them are huddled under pristine stadium blankets and sit scattered around our smokey living room’s beer-stained carpet.

I on the other hand, am sat stiff and on display; knees pulled into my chest while perched on a turned-wood kitchenette chair in the center of the room. Throw pillows and empties sit in the laps of the girls around me as they wait for my reaction.

We are watching Friday for my benefit after all.

They felt it was abhorrent that I had gone through my early teens without ever seeing the film. They claimed it was a rite of passage, and that I must embrace it before I could ever be seen as a legitimate American teen. No excuses.

My sniff was not the desired result.

A chorus of rolling eyes and groans rams into me as they all return their focus to the wall-sized flatscreen that glows in the hazy room.

The familiar gap between has grown to a chasm; not that they will ever see it, or feel it. But I always do. Every time they shake their heads at me, swig their seltzers, and relax in the comfort of watching struggles of those they believe to be their others play out on screen for what they believe to be for their benefit. As their ripple of laughter mixes with the sounds of scripted humor I make my escape.

Navigating the patchwork of empty DVD cases and chip bags, I avoid the looks of disappointment and mime a need for a new drink. The group appears to agree this is an acceptable reason for my exit. So, I step onto the landing and let the locked door close behind me. Still locked. I hope my lack of key is enough of an excuse for me to be gone long enough to breathe and be me for a while.

The late fall air kicks the scent of weedy cigarettes out of my lungs, but a knot of despair sticks in my throat as it goes. My eyes sting with tears as I hobble down the last paint-chipped steps of the wooden stairwell and lope to the cluster of dusty coolers. They are all still pooled at the edge of the common yard and have been all afternoon. A plastic graveyard of debauchery just sitting out in the sun. I wrap my fleece blanket around my waist and drop down to sit on the largest of the white herd.

Fumbling with both hands wrapped in the ends of my sweatshirt sleeves, and with one of them still holding my bottle of corona, I wrestle with a thick sun-cracked lip of a cooler lid and manage to pry it open. I’m proud that I’ve done so without exposing any bare skin to the night air.

I flop the lid back to hang from its remaining vinyl prop and rustle through the last of the warm cans that are all grouped in a damp pile at the back corner. I choose my next sacrificial bottle, plop it in my blanketed lap, and reach out to pour the remains of my hand-warmed seltzer into the cedar bark below the parched evergreen bushes that crowd the commons. It wasn’t water, but it was something.

“How very generous of you.”

I jump to my feet. The bottle drops from my lap with a solid thud and I turn to face the speaker. In that instant I lose the protective wrap of my fleece. An icy gust of wind that it should have shielded me from cuts straight through the worn holes of my favorite pair of sweats and completely ignores my threadbare concert tee as it billows up the bell of my extra-large hoodie.

“Still the queen of hand-me-down fashion I see.” The voice chuckles. It’s sound is mixed in my ears with the snapping pop of sapling branches breaking. “Even more than me.”

Correcting my gaze, I spot a shadow in the test orchards across the street. A figure is swinging their legs through the pruned branches that sit in the channel between each row of cherry trees, waiting to be burned.

The girl has her arms raised above her head in surrender to balance her barricaded path. Her eyes twinkle up at me between glances to the ground. She checks each step before hauling her legs over the next woody tangle of future firewood.

“Thanks?” I say as she hops over the last pile of pruning with a childlike swing from a low hanging branch.

She wipes her hands together and swipes them at her deep black jeans. Her faded pink zip-up is slightly smaller than the bright white remembrance tee underneath it. Dark hair is pulled half up and haloed with fly aways from the ridge of her hair band all the way down to the curling waves that tumble over her shoulders into the limp hood along her back.

Her brown eyes meet mine behind carefully barreled and pieced bangs, and she lets an enigmatic giggle roll between us. Skipping, she crosses the road and stops to lean against the awning of the stairwell, crossing her arms and letting a smirk spread to the crease of her smile.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

Her eyes stay on mine as she rolls her eyes, considers me a moment, and then saunters over to me and my plastic herd. She sweeps an arm into a cooler, twists off the caps of two micros as she knees it closed, and plops onto it in a straddle. She hands me the bottle that is not already raised to her lips.

“I know you.” She says, with a sigh that is neither sad nor satisfied, “You’ll remember me. Just give it a moment.”

I sit back down on my cooler, jerking and stretching the throw to cover my upper arms and death-grip the neck of my new beer. With a hard swallow I admit what I’ve known since I first heard it.

“I know your laugh.”

The giggle returns, this time with the bright shine of her eyes, which are more hazel than brown. They lock on mine as she scooches across the top of the cooler and reaches over to clink my bottle with hers.

“And I know yours.” She winks.

With her other hand, she retrieves the edge of a grit-covered beach blanket crumpled in the grass. She fluffs the dirt off and flicks it over our shoulders with an arced flourish. It wraps around me with a heavy scent of sunscreen and sea water. It covers us both more than it should, and its stiff weight blocks the next gust of wind to an unnerving degree. She gestures for me to make room on my cooler.

I scooch across the rough plastic, and we adjust the tarp-like fabric over our heads and shift my fleece throw to cover our legs. We each hold one edge of the blanket in at our center as we craddle our bottles to our chests.

She is warm, like the glow of sun through a window in an air-conditioned room. And as she lays her head against my shoulder, the lump in my throat returns.

“Are you going to drink that, sis? Or can I?” She elbows me and it hits me that I know this warmth. It isn’t the artificial buzz of heat that skates across your skin with an over-friendly gesture from a drunken, best-friend-for-the-night. This feels far more familiar. Genuine. Personal.

“I feel horrible.” I say, still staring at my drink. “I can’t remember your name.”

“It will come to you.”

“I feel I’ve known you for a long time though.”

“We are sisters. Remember? Just like me and her” She opens her wing of the blanket and taps her t-shirt with her bottle before wrapping us back up in warmth with a heavy, concerning shiver.

That shiver enters my heart and I turn to ice.

“I don’t want to remember.” I say, my words filling our small space in the thin energy of shared pain.

“Sometimes I don’t either.” I feel her weaken against me with the words and a cough of wildfire smoke rises from her heart and envelopes us both.

An ache spreads itself across my heart and grips at my throat and jaw in desperation. Tears fall in silent trails on both halves of the canvas shield that hugs us tight.

“Did it hurt?” My voice comes out choked. The words rake cold wire through my spine.

“Yes.” Her voice is soft, but steady, “But not the flames.”

“Your little brother?” I wipe a tear from the tip of my nose with the shoulder farthest from her. I turn back and take her bottle with mine, setting them both carefully onto the lid of the closest pod in our plastic caravan.

“He fell asleep first,” she nods, understanding my question, “coughing in the crook of my arm while I dragged us below the thick smoke to the door. It was locked.”

Her form was burning against mine now. We are a cocooned ember. I pull our cover tighter and we grip our hands together, fabric tied around tangled fingers.

Our wet cheeks set against shoulder and forehead. In united solidarity, we slide down to sit on the grass and lean against the strength of each other instead of the coven of plastic comfort circled all around us.

“They didn’t come.” The girl in her voice is younger now. More familiar. It says these words with a wet, choked, gasp. “We screamed for help, sis. They let that burning orchard erase us and they didn’t come.”

I ache at the words and pull her closer to me, tears flowing in hot waterfalls. I shake my head and shocks of pain stab the grinding bones of my neck.

“No.” I confess. “Not until you were already gone.”

She curls up her knees and is smaller now. Hunched against me in a tight ball, the smell of coconut conditioner fills my senses and I hold on to it. Wield it against the acrid sent of burnt flesh that saturates the dense smoke now filling our dark burrow.

I hug her closer, her limbs are like twigs, her spine a hacked up trunk, her head a frail cage of fading hope. Her skin flickers, green leaves caught on fire that smolder her clothes to ash and sear my cradling arms with stains of cherry and blood red.

“Why?” She asks, her voice a small scream from the center of her burning body.

“I don’t know.” I weep into her.

“But you do.” Her words lash out at me and gouge at my heart as I holder her tighter.

“I don’t want to know it.” I sob openly, clasping her rapidly shrinking soul to my heart and gathering her broken wing of our shelter into mine.

I tug her and the edges of our once shared comfort closer to my heart.

“That isn’t true.” She sobs. “Is it?”

“No!” The word roars out of me in agony but tremors in the air as a whisper, my hands shake as I hold her small shell of memory in the palms of my hands and cradle her against my forehead.

“Tell me,” Her voice pulses against my temples. Fainter now. “Sister, please?”

“They thought you were illegal.” The words are like vomit. I collapse in on myself. I strain my senses to feel her presence between my palms but find her gone. I bury my face into my knees and cling the fading hum of her remaining warmth within the folds of our haven to block out the empty world.

“I see,” her voice vibrates within me and with it I feel her fear, her heart, and her ache to be seen. “And so, our screams were illegal as well.”

“Yes,” I sob into my hands.

“Thank you, for remembering.”

“I don’t want you to be gone.”

“But I am, sis.”

The words hang in my heart, weighing me down and forcing me to raise my head and gulp harsh shards of cold air. The night numbs my senses with each breath. I pull myself to sit tall on the coarse plastic lid once more, and I let the blanket slide to the grass. As a shiver rushes my spine, pulling me back to reality, I reach for my bottle, but grab open air.

Below my grasping hand is a drawing.

Penned on ruled paper and folded to a square: a cross adorned in cherry blossoms and caressed by a ribbon.

I remember my hands as they scrawled out those letters, remember that first empty space that had grown wide between me and my peers. And in my memories, I am back in that moment. I watch as seventh grade me places the drawing down next to the flowers and candles that surround her locker. Weird looks follow me as I leave and whispers race through the hall. Both keep wavering between anger and skittering, hiccupping laughter. There is a clear divide between the people who are laughing and the people who now see me as the other.

The chasm between me and all of them is wider than I am willing to cross. She was the bridge that brought me to their world with soft hands and a smile. The giggle making it safe to keep being me. The voice of belonging that always met my ears when I stared into the chasm I kept having to cross for too long.

The laughter of my roommates' upstairs trickles down the stairwell and across what is now a grand canyon. I can climb across to them, because she taught me. But I don’t want to.

I can never share in that laugh.

They never wrote those exact words in honor of a childhood friend. Never braced their blue pen from shaking as they carefully space each letter across a ribbon of remembrance. It took time to decide what the banner would say after the news of her death, but the drawing for my note came easily. I would draw the cross she wore and the flowers she taught me to draw. The image of her smirk and playful eyes prodded me to write the last words she had ever heard me speak. I just didn’t know at the time how horrible it was for me to write them.

And so, in ignorance, but with love and grief for a girl who had called me sister, I wrote, “Goodbye, Felicia.”

This story was written in remembrance of my childhood friend, Felicia. You will always be with me, sis.

And to everyone in middle school who saw my drawing and those words and thought the worst of me, I honestly didn’t know anything about the movie or the quote until I got to college. I’m sorry for any pain that my ignorant note caused you.