Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
Excerpt
Little Fires Everywhere
The orchestra teacher, Mrs. Peters, was widely disliked by everyone. She was a tall, painfully thin woman with hair dyed an unnatural flaxen and cropped in a manner reminiscent of Dorothy Hamill. According to Izzy, she was useless as a conductor and everyone knew to just watch Kerri Schulman, the first-chair violin, for the tempo. A persistent rumor—after some years, calcified as fact—insisted that Mrs. Peters had a drinking problem. Izzy hadn't entirely believed it, until Mrs. Peters had borrowed her violin one morning to demonstrate a bowing; when she'd handed it back, the chin rest damp with sweat, it had smelled unmistakably of whiskey. When she brought her big camping thermos of coffee, people said, you knew Mrs. Peters had been on a bender the night before. Moreover, she was often bitingly sarcastic, especially to the second violins, especially the ones who—as one of the cellos put it drily—were "pigmentally blessed."
Izzy, who had been playing violin since she was four, and had been assigned second chair even though she was a freshman, should have had nothing to fear. "You'll be fine," the cello had told her, eyeing Izzy's frizzy golden hair—the dandelion fro, Lexie liked to call it. Had Izzy kept her head down, Mrs. Peters would likely have ignored her. But Izzy was not the type to keep her head down.
The morning of her suspension, Izzy had been in her seat, practicing a tricky fingering on the E string for the Saint-Saëns piece she'd been working on in her private lessons. Around her the hum of violas and cellos tuning up grew quiet as Mrs. Peters stormed in, thermos in hand. It was clear from the start that she was in an extraordinarily foul mood. "Hangover," Kerri Schulman mouthed to Izzy, who nodded gravely. She had only a general sense of what this meant.
At the podium, Mrs. Peters took a long swig from her mug of coffee. "Offenbach," she barked, raising her right hand. Around the room students riffled through their sheet music. Twelve bars into Orpheus, Mrs. Peters waved her arms. "Someone's off." She pointed her bow at Deja Johnson, who was at the back of the second violins. "Deja. Play from measure six."
Deja, who everyone knew was painfully shy, glanced up with the look of a frightened rabbit. She began to play, and everyone could hear the slight tremor from her shaking hand. Mrs. Peters shook her head and rapped her bow on her stand. "Wrong bowing. Down, up-up, down, up. Again." Deja stumbled through the piece again. The room simmered with resentment, but no one said anything.
Mrs. Peters took a long slurp of coffee. "Stand up, Deja. Nice and loud now, so everyone can hear what they're not supposed to be doing." The edges of Deja's mouth wobbled, as if she were going to cry, but she set her bow to string and began once more. Mrs. Peters shook her head again, her voice shrill over the single violin. "Deja. Down, up-up, down, up. Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?"
It was at this point that Izzy had jumped from her seat and grabbed Mrs. Peters's bow.
She could not say, even when telling Mia the story, why she had reacted so strongly. It was partly that Deja Johnson always had the anxious face of someone expecting the worst. Everyone knew that her mother was an RN; in fact, she worked with Serena Wong's mother down at the Cleveland Clinic, and her father managed a warehouse on the West Side. There weren't many black kids in the orchestra, though, and when her parents showed up for concerts, they sat in the last row, by themselves; they never chitchatted with the other parents about skiing or remodeling or plans for spring break. They had lived all of Deja's life in a comfortable little house at the south end of Shaker, and she had gone from kindergarten all the way up to high school without—as people joked—saying more than ten words a year.
But unlike many of the other violinists—who resented Izzy for making second chair her first year—Deja never joined in the snide comments, or called her "the freshman." In the first week of school, Deja, as they'd filed out of the orchestra room, had leaned over to zip an unfastened pocket on Izzy's bookbag, concealing her exposed gym clothes. A few weeks later, Izzy had been digging through her bag, desperately looking for a tampon, when Deja had discreetly leaned across the aisle and extended a folded hand. "Here," she'd said, and Izzy had known what it was before she even felt the crinkle of the plastic wrapper in her palm.
Watching Mrs. Peters pick on Deja, in front of everyone, had been like watching someone drag a kitten into the street and club it with a brick, and something inside Izzy had snapped. Before she knew it, she had cracked Mrs. Peters's bow over her knee and flung the broken pieces at her. There had been a sudden squawk from Mrs. Peters as the jagged halves of the bow—still joined by the horsehair— had whipped her across the face and a shrill squeal as the mug of steaming coffee in her hand tipped down her front. The practice room had erupted in a babble of laughter and shrieking and hooting, and Mrs. Peters, coffee dripping down the tendons of her neck, had grabbed Izzy by the elbow and dragged her from the room. In the principal's office, waiting for her mother to arrive, Izzy had wondered if Deja had been pleased or embarrassed, and she wished she'd had a chance to see Deja's face.
Although Izzy was sure, now, that Mia would understand all of this, she did not know how to put everything she felt into words. She said only, "Mrs. Peters is a total bitch. She had no right to say that to Deja." "Well?" said Mia. "What are you going to do about it?"
It was not a question Izzy had been asked before. Until now her life had been one of mute, futile fury. In the first week of school, after reading T. S. Eliot, she had tacked up signs on all the bulletin boards: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons and Do I dare to eat a peach? and DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE? The poem made her think of her mother, doling out her creamer in a precise teaspoon.
The second week of school, when Ms. Bellamy had asked them to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class, Izzy had selected "This Be The Verse," a poem she felt—based on her fourteen and a half years—summed up life quite accurately. She had gotten no further than "They fuck you up, your mum and dad—" before Ms. Bellamy had peremptorily told her to sit down and given her a zero. What was she going to do about it? The very idea that she could do something stunned her.
From Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Celeste Ng, 2017.
How do I print part of this page, not all of it?
- Point your cursor at the start of the content you're interested in.
- Click and drag until you have highlighted the content you want. Then take your finger off the mouse button!
- The area you want to print should now be highlighted in blue.
- Click 'Print This Page' at the top or bottom of this document.
- The Print Screen should now open. Under 'Page Range' choose 'Selection'.
- Then click print.