Read Invitation to a Bonfire for Free Online

wrists and volleys of useless admonition: “ You go left.” “No, you.” “No, you .” All the while, Vera walked the room’s long perimeter, occasionally hopping over a box or dodging under pieces of sharp-edged machinery. Staying unnoticed, if not unseen. I began to follow her.
    In the years since, I’ve learned that there are veins in the human body so long that, if uncoiled, they’d span city blocks. City limits, even. I’ve alsolearned that the blood inside our bodies starts to look blue if it’s buried deep, and needs to be pumped with oxygen. It’s appropriate that the image of me trailing behind a young Vera would be one that mimics a trajectory towards the heart. The door to the hall was cracked open, and from time to time a bit of wind would lift the yarn, and then settle it back down. A red string and a blue string, side-by-side. Two little rivers, rushing.
    I followed Vera for a good five minutes, careful to keep my own trail far enough away from hers that they wouldn’t be shoved together somehow and lose us the game by stupid default. She never turned around or glanced over her shoulder, so I assumed she didn’t mind. And why, after all, should one person reach the finish alone when two could go just as easily? The meeting was almost over, and my heart began to pick up speed as I imagined the scoutmaster praising us for following her directions so well. The other girls would look at me with new interest—me and Vera both—as we held our hands aloft in victory.
    Vera slowed down as she approached one of the room’s far corners, and I paused too, holding my yarn in place with the toe of my shoe. Based on what she’d done so far, I expected Vera to duck around a stack of crates and continue down the length of the wall. But there must have been something else in the way, because instead she turned sharp on her heel and stared at me, her face as blank as paper. I realized the reason she’d let me follow her wasn’t charity or goodwill: she just hadn’t known I was there. Within seconds of starting the game, she forgot the rest of us existed.
    â€œYou need to go that way,” Vera said, indicating me back with the flick of her wrist. The first words she ever spoke to me. And the last for many years. When I saw she was instructing me to cross another girl’s line in order to clear her own path, I felt an unexpected resistance.
    â€œNo,” I said. “I’m winning.”
    She shook her hand at me again, nodding her head in the direction she intended, but I stood firm, weaving the loose end of my yarn around and around my fingers. And then I saw a shutter go down behind Vera’s eyes. She looked at the yarn on the ground, all the various threads intersecting around the room, plus our two paths in perfect perpendicularity. A pile of wool, all across the floor. Not just her path. A dozen of them.
    Vera could still have won, then. Made a few careful pivots, dodged around me, headed back to the center of the hall. But I knew that she wouldn’t. She had only been interested in playing when she thought she was making up the rules as she went. As soon as she realized she was part of something larger, and something entirely outside her design, the game lost all its value for her.
    Dropping her remaining yarn into a red puddle on the concrete, Vera walked across the floor, past the circle of wooden chairs, and out the door. As she went she pushed a few of our threads around, smudging them together with everyone else’s in a hopeless tangle. Not, I thought, out of malice. She just didn’t care enough to pay attention.
    The scoutmaster called us all back to our chairs and took a ceremonial puff from her cigarette. “Ok!” she said. “ Spacibo, rebyata! I’ll see you next week.”
    Of course, Vera never returned to those meetings. No one mentioned her absence the following week or the week after