The gray puff turned the corner like a locomotive, and then it was an engine on fire, and the flames took the paint off the wall, and the wind from the outside door flung fire and smoke toward the girls, and Venita screamed, “Fire!” and Macey screamed, “Get Out! Everybody out!” and they turned left because the fire had captured the right, and by the time Macey and Venita had gone the ten steps to the next Sunday school room, the fire had caught their heels and Macey saw Austin and Isaiah, and then the smoke was upon her and bit her eyes so cruelly she had to close them, and she felt the fire on her back.

Macey looked like some terrible angel in a crown of fire.

In the horror of the moment, Austin could not explain it.

His shout did not reach her, for she was blind and deaf under her own flames.

It was her hair blazing.

She had beautiful hair, a dark rich chestnut, straight and long. She was always putting her hair up in Scrunchies or twisting it into a knot she could hold with a pencil stab, then taking it down to make a ponytail in her fingers.

Austin pulled his T-shirt off and, just before the smoke swirled in, yanked it over her head, suffocating the fire and Macey. She fought him, and he yelled at her, rubbing and scraping at her head, pinning her to the wall with his knee so he could put out the fire in her hair.

Lindsay and Grace were screaming uselessly. Davonn and Isaiah were yelling even louder, “Shut up, shut up!”

Davonn lunged against the panic bar at the exit, and the door opened outward.

“Where’s Chamique?” screamed Venita, and Austin shoved Macey through the exit door. Chamique was right behind him; he grabbed the cloth of her shirt and pulled her along.

The smell was horrific.

Burning paint and turpentine did not produce the fine, appetizing smell of barbecues or beach bonfires. It was the smell of fear and death.

The exit did not exit. It opened to a stair and the stair was enclosed by a bulkhead, leaving a tiny triangle of space for them to crouch in. Chamique yanked the door shut after them, to keep the fire and the smoke on the other side.

The door above them did not lift, no matter how Austin and Isaiah and Davonn slammed their shoulders into it.

It was completely dark in the triangular space of stair and lid, but not yet very smoky. “We’ve got to calm down,” said Austin, who was not calm; who was sick imagining Macey’s face from those flames. “There’ll be some sort of lock bar holding the bulkhead doors together. We’ve got to find it with our fingers.”

“I found it already,” said Isaiah. “It isn’t hooked. But the door still doesn’t open. It’s padlocked on the outside.”