The butterfly effect is one of the principles of chaos. Fractals are too: they’re never-ending patterns, repetitive, and infinitely detailed. They’re the most gorgeous designs.
That seems contradictory, doesn’t it? Chaotic designs? But at the heart of chaos theory is this: there are patterns everywhere, even when they seem complex and entirely random. That’s why the method for creating new fractals was originally called “the chaos game.” Fractals will become patterns. And under the right conditions, chaos will start to form order.
Perhaps if I create enough chaos, order will come again.
*
I walk until I’m back home, until I sag down against a tree in our front yard. I light the lighter in the cup of my hand. Let is extinguish. Light it again.
The flame is a comforting ball of warmth in the darkness. I could stare at it forever. But it isn’t enough. The papers, the clothes. The hundred small things I burned. It isn’t enough to create chaos, and it won’t stop Mom and Dad from leaving me alone again with him.
I want patterns. I want flames to reach to the skies. I want him to feel fractured too.
I’m not a pyromaniac. I told you I can control my impulses quite well. But I won’t be the only one hurting anymore.
*
The interior of a car burns easily. I break a window and spread gasoline across the seats. It stinks, but I know it’ll burn. I’ve grabbed the newspaper from the door pocket next to the driver’s seat and turn that into a torch.
With one of the windows open for oxygen, and the dark of night around me, I wait until the paper smolders.
Then I toss it in.
The gasoline flares. The flame spreads like wildfire, and within moments it absorbs everything. It’s loud. Violent. I wonder how long it’ll take for Grandpa or my parents to wake up.
I walk across the street. Sitting down on the sidewalk, I rest my elbows on my knees and watch.
This is calculation. This is chaos. This is freedom.
The lights from the Bend shone down below us. We’d spotted them a while back and had limped toward them like a beacon calling us home. The sun had long set, but the others were determined to make it back before midnight, and there was no power in the world that could stop them. Georgia had decided she was going to walk the last mile on her own, and I kind of admired that about her.
Jenna let Georgia lean on her as we trudged through the wilderness. “We don’t live that far apart,” Georgia said. “Maybe we could, I don’t know, see each other or whatever.”
“Maybe,” Jenna said.
There hadn’t been much to say when she’d finished her story. I think most of us had guessed what was going on, but hearing her tell it was different. No one should have to go through what she went through, and I kind of wished she’d burned her grandfather’s car with him still in it. But then she would have been in prison instead of with us, and I don’t think she deserved to spend her life in a cage.
“I wish I could have met someone like you at camp,” Georgia went on. “Not like that, I mean. I’m not—”
“Gay,” Jenna finished. “I know; you already said so.”
Georgia shook her head. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. I just meant that I like knowing you.”
Jenna didn’t say anything for a minute. Then “Yeah. I like knowing you, too.”
I fell back to walk near Lucinda and Tino. She hadn’t threatened to punch or castrate him once since she’d told her story and he’d defended her.
“You still with that Jameson guy?” Tino asked.
“Why? Because you think you have a shot?”
Tino shrugged. “Maybe.”
“You don’t.”
“Can’t blame me for trying.”
Lucinda rolled her eyes. “Like hell I can’t.”
I moved between the groups, ignored and unseen. I listened to Jaila and Sunday laughing as Jackie told her the whole story of how she’d got caught stealing from a science-fiction convention. And I heard Jaila tell about how she she’d wound up in the Bend because her best friend Ursula’s older brother, Mauro, who Jaila had been in love with had been found murdered and how her father wouldn’t let her go back to Xalitla Guerrero for the funeral, so she’d run away from home multiple times. She made it all the way to the border crossing on money she’d earned busking before she was caught.
Sunday swore the story she’d told us really had been true, so she talked about her dads instead. It sounded like she had a nice family, and I kind of envied that.
“My sister really did disappear,” David said to Cody as they walked. “And I do think it was aliens that took her.”
Cody didn’t say a whole lot, but there was a strength in his walk that made me think he was channeling those old movie star actresses he loved so much.
“I put nails under Mike’s tires,” he said. “But I think my parents really sent me here because they thought it would make me into a ‘real man.’?”
Tino had stopped to readjust his pack, and started walking with them. “Being a man isn’t about how you walk or talk. It’s about being you, right? So you swish and glide and do whatever the hell you want. And if people don’t like it, they can fuck right off.”
“Thanks?”
“I’m serious,” Tino said. “My stepdad was always acting macho and talking shit. He thought he was a man. At least he did until I shoved his sorry ass down the stairs.”
“I’m guessing that’s why you’re here,” David said.
“Sometimes there’s only one way to show people you won’t be ignored.”
I thought they were done talking and was about to slip away to eavesdrop elsewhere when Cody said, “But if there was another way, you wouldn’t have done it, right?”
Tino cocked his head to the side. “I’m not saying I’m sorry about what I did, but yeah. If I could have made him stop some other way, I would have.”
“Because we’re not animals.” David took a puff from his inhaler and coughed, and the three boys walked on.
*
Jaila started singing in a language I didn’t know as we walked the last quarter mile. A slow, earnest song in a voice that carried the scent of summer and shook the leaves. I’m not sure she was even singing for us or cared that we heard. She just sang, and it was beautiful.
Doug and the other counselors were waiting for us when we finally reached the Bend. Tino carried Georgia to the infirmary while Doug tried to chastise Jaila for not using her flare. But Jackie cut that right off and lit into him about not making sure to give us a flare that actually fucking worked. Eventually, we all went our separate ways to shower and eat and sleep in something resembling a bed.