She’d eaten a peanut, a handful of Spanish peanuts, at breakfast. When they arrived at the peak of Beech Mountain, she’d caught him around the waist and kissed him on the mouth. She’d felt his body go stiff, but the longer she kissed him the more he relaxed, until he was kissing her back. The kiss lasted until they had to step away from each other and gasp for air. Forests and meadows rolled off in every direction. Eagles circled below them, they were so high in the mountains.
“It turned out like the other story—the Snow White story—especially the part where the witch makes Snow White bite the poison apple.” Her kiss had been nice. A nice kiss. They’d kissed a second time, and his mouth had a milk taste, like boys who are good at sports taste. She didn’t say anything, not right away, but she was thrilled. She hadn’t cured him, but she’d proved he wasn’t sick to begin with.
She’d planned to tell him he wasn’t sick as soon as they got home. He wasn’t weak. He only had a crazy mother is all.
Again Blush Gentry waited in silence. Testing Foster’s attention. Maybe wishing he’d interrupt and redirect the conversation to the theater collapse, the crowdfunding, something safe.
When he did not, she continued, “We hadn’t come down the trail a few steps before he started to wheeze…”
He had a pen, a kind of needle he carried in order to inject himself if he had such a reaction. But it was late October with no bees around and certainly no peanuts to worry about, and he’d left the injection pen in his jacket in Blush’s family car when they’d been dropped off. On a day this warm, he didn’t figure to need a jacket.
Events unfolded pretty much the way his mother had predicted. His face turned meat red and the skin swelled around his eyes and mouth. He looked like a stranger who couldn’t breathe, clawing off his shirt and clawing at his skinny red chest and arms.
She tried to cover him up, to keep him warm, but more embarrassed by his nakedness and distress. As if she could hide the damage she’d done simply by keeping his clothes on him. When she’d suggested running down to get help, he’d grabbed her hand and begged. The trailhead was miles, hours away, and there was no guarantee her father would already be waiting.
“He asked me not to leave him,” she said. Lawton thought he was going to die. His breathing was a whistle through the raw swelling inside his throat. He knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die alone.
She helped him stretch out on the pine needles and hoped that position would help. It would be like an epileptic seizure, she hoped, and he’d return to normal after a bit. But his eyes began to swell shut and his mouth gaped wider as he tried to draw the next breath. His chest heaved, held the air, and blew it out with a cry, each exhale erupting with specks of blood from his burning throat.
Sunk in her beanbag chair, Blush waited now in silence as if asking Foster’s permission to complete the horror. No longer was she telling a sweet story to entertain him and explain herself. Now she’d be sharing a burden that he’d struggle to carry for the rest of his life. She’d inflicted something and waited to hear his acceptance or rejection of it.
“Lawton’s eyes were swollen shut, but he raised an arm and whispered, ‘Dad.’” His swollen purple lips had twisted into a smile, and he’d tried to sit upright even as Blush pushed to hold him flat on the ground.
“It’s my dad!” he insisted, gasping. “He’s here to rescue me!”
Some words, Foster wished he could see coming. Dad, for instance, left him gut-shot. His belly couldn’t hurt more if someone had designed this story to torture him.
The eleven-year-old Blush saw nothing. The trail stretched empty in both directions. They wouldn’t have daylight for much longer, but she couldn’t bear to leave him to die in the dark. A blinded sixth grader facing death by himself in a dark forest.
It didn’t occur to her that she might soon be a sixth-grade murderer alone with the dead body of her victim in those woods at night.
That’s when her father’s words came back to her. About the motorcycle and the bee sting. Little Blush, she fumbled a book of matches out of her backpack. She slipped off one of Lawton’s shoes and socks and rolled up the pant leg to expose the skin where a scar wouldn’t show for the rest of his life. She was so sure she could save him. Instead of being a Disney princess, now she was someone out of Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Match Girl. And instead of bringing comfort, when she lit each match and held the flame to Lawton’s leg, he screamed.
Foster slugged back his drink and helped himself to another.
Instead of saving Lawton, each match brought the stink of sulfur and scorching flesh. The skin of his ankle blistered and split. Split and hissed. Hissed and sizzled.
Desperate, she lit the whole pack and tortured him until the flames sputtered and left them in total darkness: The Little Match Girl and her victim.
In lieu of saving Lawton Koestler more, Blush Gentry sat beside him and held his hand. “My dogs,” he raved hoarsely. “Oh Dad, oh Daddy!” Nothing approached. Only the wind rose in the trees as the daylight faded. Leaves were sifting down to half bury them in a layer of dirty yellow.
Lawton Koestler calmed. His wheezing breath slowed. He asked, “Can’t you see them?”
Blush could see nothing. The night settles fast in the mountains, and she might die as surely as Lawton was dying
