Burn for Burn

BIG EASY. BIG EASY. BIG EASY. IT DOESN’T MATTER how pretty I look tonight. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’ll still be a pig. I’m Big Easy.

I’ll be her forever.

I’m still in my homecoming dress, I can see it on me, but it feels different. Like soaking wet jeans and a dirty, gravel-covered T-shirt. I rub my hands together, rub my arms. They look normal, my arms, but the skin feels tight and stretched, as if, inside, I’m ballooning to the weight I was when I was twelve.

Suddenly everything electrical in the gymnasium rushes toward me, as if a match were set against hundreds of little rivers of gasoline. If you touched me, I would burn you alive. The hum of sizzling currents drowns out the whispers. The lights overhead, the extensions cords running to the DJ booth, the heartbeats of the people standing around me; it all comes at me. I am magnetic. With trembling hands I push my hair out of my face. Each strand is a live wire.

He’s staring at me, stunned, disbelieving. Disgusted. I shut my eyes, but it’s too bright. There’s nothing but burning white inside me. It has nowhere to go but out.

When I open my eyes, there is the most terrible spark.