Lydia and Raj learned about the pooling flood one afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and Mr. Patel came cursing through the shop with a vein visible on his neck like a little snake beneath his skin. He had mud all over his jeans and T-shirt from searching through the goddamned crawl space for the goddamned shut-off valve. Not long ago, she’d cut her hair short, and now, with an unexpected roughness, she rubbed it with her fingertips. Mr. Patel disappeared into the kitchen, and she sighed and followed behind him.
Lydia glanced across the table at Raj, who looked as if he were trying to disappear between the collars of his mellow-yellow jumpsuit. He suggested that they walk over to the library and get going on their schoolwork.
—maybe we should keep an eye on things here for a bit, she said. since your parents are—
—Killing each other behind the walls?
Lydia smiled. Raj tried to smile too but it didn’t work. At one point, Mrs. Patel came running out of the kitchen with a flashlight, locked the register, shut off the gas pumps, flipped around the CLOSED sign, and locked the front door, then ran back into the kitchen with two empty coffee cans. Mr. Patel cursed somewhere below their feet.
Lydia’s dad had snapped at Lydia plenty of times, so she was familiar with a base level of household tension, but being around the Patels when they were fighting was a different experience entirely, one that both frightened and mesmerized her. Their fighting felt like weather, like clouds had been trapped behind that swinging kitchen door and were presently rolling down from the ceiling. Eventually, though, the storm disappeared beneath the sounds of someone rapping the glass of the doughnut shop door. When Raj ran over to unlock it, a lanky man with a blond mustache, wearing jeans and a jean jacket, strolled in slowly, carrying a hefty red toolbox at his side. He flicked a toothpick and looked around, and even from across the room Lydia could see that his eyes were bright and the color of ash.
—Where’s the water? he said in a relaxed voice, as if he were a detective entering a crime scene, asking for the body.
Behind the plumber trailed a girl with a fierce, determined gait, her arms thrown back and chin thrown forward in a way that reminded Lydia of Eloise stomping the halls of the Plaza Hotel. She had irate red hair and a pale freckled face and wore the same red-and-blue plaid uniform dress as Lydia.
Carol O’Toole was her name. The plumber’s daughter.
—Thought it was gonna be all wet in here, she said, clearly disappointed.
Before Mr. O’Toole disappeared with his toolbox into the storm within the kitchen, he pointed to a stool at the counter and Carol sat down, facing the display case of doughnuts and the bank of coffeepots and stacks of little plates.
As soon as Raj locked up the door and slid across from Lydia again, Lydia kicked him beneath the table: Carol O’Toole. Carol O’Toole! They both looked at her linty lollipop of red hair. Carol leaned forward and pulled a fork out of the utensil bin and began cleaning out her fingernails with one of its tines, wholly indifferent to her classmates’ presence.
Carol was in the other fourth-grade class at Little Flower and her exploits were legendary. Lydia did not need to remind Raj that during the middle of the science fair last spring, for example, Carol had flushed four apples down the toilet, flooding the bathroom and part of the hallway, then had the guts to claim that her hypothesis had been validated. A few months before that, Carol had shown up at the Halloween party wearing a red dress with a fake knife sticking out of her chest, pronouncing to everyone that she was Annie, only stabbed. And just a few weeks ago in catechism class, one of the kinder nuns had lauded Carol for how original she was in her sinfulness, as if God had yet to announce the commandments that she was breaking every day. Needless to say, Lydia was impressed.
—You’re in the other fourth grade at Little Flower, Carol said, pointing at Lydia with the fork.
—yeah.
—So are you, she said, pointing at Raj.
—Yep.
She pointed at the ribbed glass containers of sugar and nondairy creamer that were tucked next to the napkins where the Formica table met the wall.
—Grab the creamer, she said.
With the grown-ups back in the kitchen, shining lights into the crawl space and sighing over the costs of this plumbing eruption, Raj and Lydia followed Carol out the side door and into the alley behind the shop. Carol looked around for a minute, then told Raj to take the jar of powdery creamer and climb up the access ladder built into the back of the brick motel across the way. Lydia and Raj had dared each other to climb that ladder before, but both had always chickened out. Not today. Today, under Carol’s squinting authority, chickening out was not an option. Raj tightened the buckled belt on his jumpsuit and took the creamer and climbed.
—Go up about ten feet, Carol said.
He hesitated, hugging the rungs.
—Or get down here and I’ll do it. It’s probably your nap time anyway.
Raj climbed. When he neared the top, Carol positioned herself beneath the ladder, then directed him to unscrew the jar’s flippy lid and slowly pour the powder down onto the flame.
—What flame?
—This flame, she said. Then she took a book of matches out of her pocket and struck one and twisted her wrist until the whole pack lit with a fiery flash that she held at the end of her fingertips.
—Go. Go! Go!
With a horrified grimace, Raj began awkwardly sprinkling the nondairy creamer from on high and it looked to Lydia like a falling white curtain, threatening to close them off from the rest of the world, and when it reached the matches a massive flower of flame began blooming in the air, feeding off the falling powder and igniting the creamer curtain and climbing with a sparkling whoosh toward the bottle in Raj’s hands. Carol snapped back just as the roll of flames slapped at her face and hair, and Lydia jumped away without looking and landed in the soggy pothole behind her. Within a few seconds the entire flame had dissolved, burning up most of the creamer and filling the air with sticky black specks. Carol tossed the matches to the ground, and Raj panicked and dropped the container from the ladder’s height so it shattered into a jagged pile of glass on the asphalt.
The three of them looked at each other. The air was thick with the muddy pungency of burned hair.
—Heckinay, Carol said.
She smiled and Lydia followed her lead, but Raj looked terrified on the ladder, like a sailor clinging to a mast. Almost immediately the doughnut shop’s back door opened and Mrs. Patel came out to dump her bucket, wearing a pink spiraling sari and long yellow kitchen gloves. When she saw Raj up on the ladder across the alley and the shattered creamer container below him, she quietly peered back into the doughnut shop to make sure she was alone.
—Pick up the glass, she said in a harsh and hushed voice, before your father comes out and sees you. Then you go to the library. Now.
Lydia and Raj picked up the shards and carried them in their palms to the dumpster. Carol pretended to help but really she just knelt next to the mess and made a show of trying not to laugh. Lydia’s left sneaker was soaked and gray from the watery pothole, and Raj kept touching his hair and eyebrows to see how badly they’d been singed. As the two of them hustled out of the alley toward the street, Lydia turned back to wave good-bye to their schoolmate Carol, but Carol had already moved on.