I remember being eleven, and trying to scoop up a handful of fire from the grate, like I'd seen mum and dad and Renne do a hundred times before. When I tried it though, my hand turned all to blackness and blood, and it hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt.
My older sister Renne taunted me all through my six-week recovery, while my hand was mittened in bandages and plastic bags. She would hang around me while I was trying to read or watch television, conjuring little fires on the tip of each finger, swallowing the flame like a liquid.
"You're too young," she would say, smilingly. "You're only little."
What made it worse was that she was right. Until you can Conjure, until you’re fireproof, you're only a child.
The skin of my hand grew all pink and fresh and tender. Then it creased and scarred. It never really healed.
***
One day Becka, who used to be my best friend, came into school with a tiny little firebrand balanced on her shoulder. Showing off her new talent. All through the day people she didn't even really know we're coming up to her to say hi, and congratulations, and so I didn't really get to speak to her until lunchtime.
"How did it happen?" I asked her, and she shrugged.
"I just concentrated really hard, and it just happened. I mean, I've tried before - but this was different. I sort of knew it was time, but not really." She giggled.
Then she went off with her new friends, and after that day I got to see her less and less. She made friends with the older kids who could already Conjure, and I was left on my own.
***
The first time I kissed a boy he burned my hair.
His name was Denver, and he wore thin, wire glasses that made him look so smart and casual and cool. Because I didn't say anything I guess he assumed I was fireproof already, which is why he touched the back of my neck with his hand full of fire. It's supposed to feel good, but I don't know why.
My hair caught and blazed and crumbled, and this was right in the middle of the corridor at school. One moment I'm feeling so sophisticated and happy and proud, like I'm floating six foot above everyone else; then the next my neck and head is a mess of white-hot pain and I'm drenched in foam from where Denver's grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and put me out.
After that I couldn't stop myself from crying, and I ran away. I just ran away. I was a child who'd tried to overreach herself; I was a too-little pretending to be a grown-up.
Denver called me up to say sorry, but after that he never spoke to me again, and he wouldn't even look at me when we passed in the corridor at school. Renne gave me a bright red headscarf to wear over the crumbled dust of my hair.
***
It came so that I was sixteen and still without flame. At my graduation I think I was the only one who hadn't yet developed, and as I went up on stage to collect my certificates I felt like an imposter, like a childish, awkward nuisance in front of all those men and women.
College years were the worst of my life. I pretended I was shy, and mostly by luck I never had any cause to Conjure. Everyday though, I kept thinking that surely someone would find out. Surely.
Each week I would try something new, some rumor I had heard on the Internet or in a magazine; anything to accelerate the process. Eating green vegetables, running, meditation, sleep-deprivation, a hundred different diets. None of it worked.
I just kept pretending.
The first time I deliberately burnt myself it seemed so sweet. This, I thought, this was my vengeance on my stupid childish, freakish body. My body that had betrayed me.
That first time I sat up in my room with a handful of splints I’d stolen from the chem-lab at college, and I lit one on the stove and kept it burning, a tiny spark of an ember. When I breathed on it, it puffed up fierce and hotly orange and full of life. I pressed it to the soft inside of my arm and where it touched, my skin charred red hot and puffed up bloodily. It hurt, and I wanted it to hurt.
The scars left over were cherry-red and beautiful. Over months I wove them into bracelets around my arms. I branded patterns on my shoulders, my breasts, my stomach. I ran red burn lines down the length of each leg.
And it felt wonderful to have something that was so good and right and my own amongst everything that I hated.
***
Renne went away to work up north, delivering lambs on a farm in Scotland–and still I could not Conjure.
Becka got pregnant for a month and a half, and people only knew about it through rumors–and still I could not Conjure.
Denver learned to drive, then got in a car crash and had to wear a neck brace for ages–and still I could not Conjure.
***
The only thing that stopped me killing myself was the lack of an appropriate method. It needed to be something that would be quick and easy and wouldn’t leave me disfigured. Something that wouldn’t give me a chance to chicken out, something that would definitely end it the first time round.
I’d never have the willpower to use a knife.
Leaping into traffic would be far too messy.
No buildings around me were tall enough to jump from.
Pills and poisons were no guarantee.
I couldn’t face a slow hanging.
Nothing I could do, so instead I just kept burning myself. Where new scars overlapped old scars they left a microdot flower pattern that was so beautiful it took my breath away. All the time I wore long sleeves and long skirts to cover up this one perfect secret of mine, and during the day these clothes stuck slightly to the residues of cooked blood on my legs and arms and belly.
If mum ever saw the dried-up stains, she didn’t say a word.
***
It got to the point where I felt like I was invisible–and I guess that was how I coped. If people can’t see you then they can’t discover your secret.
At school I spent breaks and lunchtimes in the library, reading or pretending to read. My parents stopped trying to talk to me after a while, and once I heard them telling each other it was just a phase I was going through. That made me want to scream.
***
Then one day, as I sat upstairs in my room branding a perfect, pretty little circle into my shoulder, I found the burn just wouldn’t take. The heat didn’t hurt like it should. I was fireproof; and sure enough when I concentrated, and focused and willed it the fire sprang obediently up in my hand like the most natural thing in the entire world.
As I looked at that one tiny flame it all of a sudden seemed an awfully stupid thing to ever have worried about at all. I breathed it in, the hard, smoky scent of it, and loved it.
All this happened in a matter of seconds, and then everything my life had been just folded down and disappeared, and I felt so lost I cried.
Then and now Conjuring has never been something trivial for me, it has never been something that I take for granted. I think I might be the only one–or at least one of very few who think of it like this–but the pain for me is rooted in. Maybe that made me stronger, or maybe it didn’t. It’s hard to know; maybe it’s just something that happened; a way that I felt for such a long time.
The scars I gave myself have lasted forever. I don’t think I’d want them to fade.
