Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

“Don’t you kind of wish we had one right now?”

“You’re crazy,”

“That’s the craziest shit I’ve ...

“Don’t even say shit l...

Hard as it was to admit, she knew he was right. In Shaker, high schoolers did not have babies. They took AP classes; they went to college.

There was only one thing to do, then. She curled up on the bed, feeling small and pink and tender as a cocktail shrimp, and let her fantasy go, like a balloon soaring into the sky until it burst.

Lexie called Pearl. “I need a favor,”

“I need you,” Lexie said, “to come with me to this clinic tomorrow. I’m getting an abortion.”

“And your name?”

Lexie said, “Pearl Warren.”

On the line for “Emergency contact,” Pearl quickly jotted down her own mother’s name and their home phone number. “Here,”

“I told her, I didn’t care how nice these Ryan people were, I didn’t approve of it. I didn’t think it was right to sell your own child.”

“Mia was pregnant and was planning to let this couple—the Ryans—adopt her baby?”

“Not exactly,” Mr. Wright said. There was a long pause. Then: “It was their baby,

too. They couldn’t have their own. She was carrying it for them.”

When she spoke of Pauline Hawthorne, her tone was half the adoration of a schoolgirl for a crush, half the adoration of a devotee for a saint. It had not been clear, at first, that it would turn out that way.

“How long have you been working with the view camera?” she asked, and when Mia told her, she said, “Would you like to show me some more of your photos?”

Pauline and Mal pressed her to stay for dinner, until she finally admitted she had to go to work. “Then next week,” Pauline suggested, “when you have a day off.” Over the following months she would visit Pauline and Mal often,

have some information that my client thinks may be relevant. But before I pass along any information, I wanted to be sure Mr. Riley is still representing the Ryans. As you can imagine, this information is rather sensitive.”

“The Ryans. The information I have regards a Mia Wright.”

Lexie was in no condition to go home.

“We’ll go to my house.”

“What about your mom?” Lexie asked,

Pearl said, “She can keep...

“You’ll always be sad about this,” Mia said softly. “But it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It’s just something that you have to carry.”

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

Lexie fell silent. Unconsciously, one hand crept down to her belly, where an ache was beginning to blossom.

“I feel bad for her,” Lexie said suddenly from the far end of the table. “Bebe, I mean. She must feel so awful.”

“I’m sorry,” said Izzy, “is this the same Bebe that you referred to last month as a negligent mother?”

But if I—” She hesitated. “If I got pregnant, you’d make me give it up, too?” “Lexie, that would never happen. We raised you to have more sense than that.”

One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.

Lexie was due for a follow-up appointment at the clinic, and to both Pearl’s and Mia’s surprise, she asked Mia to accompany her.

Pearl had felt a strange sense of reversal: as if, while she and Lexie slept under the same roof, Lexie had somehow taken her place and she’d taken Lexie’s

So now, when presented with a rare empty house, Pearl decided to take full advantage. She left a note in Trip’s locker;

“Dude,” Tim said when he’d caught up to Moody. “You know anything about this mystery girl of your brother’s?” It took Moody a moment to parse this question. “Mystery girl?”

He was still fretting when he got home and found Izzy reading on the couch. “What are you doing home so early?” he said. “Mia had her other job this afternoon,” Izzy said. She turned a page. “Where is everyone? Is Pearl not with you?”

Without answering Izzy, he dropped his bookbag on the coffee table and headed to the garage for his bike.

But there, just as he’d expected, was Trip’s car, parked across the street from the house.

Then both of them looked up and saw Moody, astride his bicycle on the sidewalk, and froze. Before either of them could respond, he jammed his foot onto the pedal and sped away.

Over the past two months she had wormed into his mind at all hours of the day: in chemistry lab, during practice, at night when he normally would have fallen asleep quickly and dreamed banal dreams.

“I thought you were smarter than the sluts who usually agree to do it with him.” He thumbed one of the strings, nudged the tuning peg a little higher. “But I guess not.”

Pearl fought the urge to cross the room and yank the guitar from Moody’s hands and smash it against the desk.

“Whatever,” he said at last. “Just—do me a favor and let’s not talk about it. Okay?”

As it turned out, this meant they stopped talking at all.

In the middle of algebra, when Pearl was in the bathroom and no one else was looking, he opened her bookbag and pulled out the little black Moleskine notebook he had given her all those months ago. As he’d suspected, the spine hadn’t even been cracked. That evening, in the privacy of his room, he tore the pages out in handfuls, crushing them into wads and tossing them into the garbage can.

She never even noticed that it was missing, and somehow this hurt him most of all.

“That’s what you want?” Brian said at last. “Okay. We’re done, then.” He clicked the unlock button on the car door. “See you around.”

People don’t like to hear about abortions. And an abortion while trying to get back a baby you abandoned?” She drummed her fingers on the table. “At the very least, it would suggest that she was careless enough to get pregnant again.”