The hairdresser was able to save about an inch and a half of hair. It didn’t stick up, like a buzz, but lay rather softly. It was not the look that was weird—although each glance in a mirror was startling—but the weight. Her head was lighter. She felt as if her skull showed, a feeling akin to going around without a bra. The smell could not be cut off.

Even though Sasha insisted that Macey looked elegant and trendy; even though Austin said he liked it that way; even though her mother and father spent Saturday evening insisting that every bit of burned hair was gone; even though Nana and Papa drove over to make sure their darling granddaughter was really all right; and even though they too said they could not smell fire on her head, the burning was with her through the night.

Her hair had gone up in smoke.

How incredible, how lucky, that they themselves had not.

Austin dreamed that night of fire.

In his dream, a little kid who loved hiding places fell asleep inside bleached bones of driftwood. Gasoline poured down and drenched the child, and Austin could see the face as the child burned, and it was somebody he knew, and Austin woke up sick and shivering, blankets on the floor, window open to a cold April dawn.

It’s only a dream, he said to himself. Nobody died inside the bonfire. Nobody even got a blister in the Good Shepherd fire.

He couldn’t get warm.

He couldn’t go back to sleep.

He lay flat on his back and reviewed the minute, or eternity, they had spent in the triangular prison beneath the chained exit. Crouched between Chamique and Macey, knowing the next smoke-laden breath would kill him, he had had only one syllable in his head.

No.

Not a screaming No no no no no don’t do this to me!

A simple quiet refusal.

No.

This was not his destiny. He was rich and smart and attractive and … white.

He had actually had that thought. It’s okay for them, he had thought, but this isn’t supposed to happen to me.

The evil of his final thought—what would have been his final thought if the firemen had not been so quick—this evil stayed awake in him, until eventually he had to get up and shower again; try the hot water cure for sin.

Austin had not telephoned his parents to tell about the fire, and he made light of it to his grandparents. “Smoke, mostly,” he said, shrugging.

They shook their heads. “That’s the problem with this community service program,” Henry Fent said. “It’s poorly supervised, with no real goals.”