THE ART OF BURNING

XX: BUG-KILLING BRO

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CALLIE

IF YOU'D ASKED EIGHT-YEAR-OLD CAROLINE MENDOZA WHERE SHE SAW HERSELF IN TEN YEARS, her answer would be simple: either dead or the principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre. Or perhaps if you caught her during dress rehearsals when her mom was holding her down to glue big, glumpy, spidery falsies to her poor eyelids, she'd offer a potential plan B: world domination. Sometimes she even let herself have a plan C: a professional food taster for her dad's empanadas.

Her childhood ten-year-plans never included arson. Nor did they include breaking her friends out of prison because they'd been wrongly convicted of a crime she'd committed. (Well, technically, she and Maya had committed. And it had mostly been Maya.)

But, alas, here she is. Eighteen-year-old Callie. The Callie that technically isn't dead, at least, not in this dimension; the Callie that never amounted to much besides the corps de ballet at Berlin Ballet Company; the Callie that glues on her own damn falsies; the Callie that plays the Sims to subdue her lust for world domination; the Callie that can her own Guatemalan food; the Callie that's done a lot of things her younger self never would have dreamed of, namely branching off into a gluten-free diet. That and the whole arson shebang.

After she and Maya fled the scene of the crime, they found their way home. Maya watered their succulents, and Callie fed Fidel Castro. They showered and crashed in their bed, the communist Prime Minister of Cuba purring in between them. Everything seemed to be fine, and that was going to be the end of their story. They'd been revolutionaries; they'd burned the wall that killed so many; they were going to go back to their everyday lives. They'd gotten away with it. They had no idea that their friends had been arrested. They thought that they'd either have died in the fire or would find their way home on their own.

But everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

The next morning, as is custom during Ramadan for Suhoor, they're up before the sunrise. Maya's making breakfast while Callie struggles to get caught up with her schoolwork, half paying attention to the morning news. A coffee pot purrs underneath the Keurig. Callie's just getting up to pour herself a cup of coffee when the reporter mentions the burning of the wall.

Both girls snap to attention, Maya temporarily forgetting her eggs.

Staring at them from the screen is a blue-eyed reporter standing in front of the the remains of the Warwick Wall.

"I'm here to share the story that's shocked the nation," the reporter's saying into a microphone.

Callie feels like she's about to throw up—she needs Maya, but she's frozen in place, in fear. Maya's skin is clammy and pale; she keeps clenching and unclenching her fists. Neither of the two of them seem to know how to react.