Free Alex by Lauren Oliver Page A

to live there, but I liked to imagine that they’d gone off to the Wilds, made a clean break for the border once the new regulations kicked in, once people started getting locked up for disagreeing.
    It was close to the border, only fifty feet from the fence. That’s why I chose it too.
    I had started with small things—matchbooks, papers; then piles of leaves, heaped carefully into a garbage can; then a little locked wooden shed on Rosemont Avenue. I watched from Presumpscot Park, sitting on a bench, while the firemen came to put out the shed fire, sirens screaming, geared up. I watched while the neighbors gathered, until there were so many they blocked my view and I tried to stand. But I couldn’t stand. My feet and legs were numb. Like bricks. So I just sat and sat, until the crowd thinned and I saw the shed wasn’t a shed anymore but just a pile of charred wood and metal and molten plastic, where a bunch of toys had fused together.
    All because of the smallest spark. All because of the click of a lighter in my hand.
    I couldn’t stop.
    Then: a house. It was summer, six o’clock, dinner hour. I figured if anyone smelled the smoke they might think it was a barbecue, and I’d have plenty of time to get out of there. I used rags stuffed with kerosene and a Bic lighter I had stolen from the desk of the principal’s office at my school: yellow with smiley faces on it.
    Right away I knew it was a mistake. The house went up in less than a minute. The flames just . . . swallowed it. The smoke blocked out the sun and turned the air blurry from the heat. The smell was awful. Maybe there’d been dead animals in the house, mice and raccoons. I hadn’t thought to check.
    But the worst was the noise. It was louder, way louder, than I had expected. I could hear wood popping, splitting apart, could hear individual splinters burst and crackle into nothing. Like the house was screaming. But weirdly, when the roof went down, there wasn’t any sound at all. Or maybe I couldn’t hear by then, because my lungs were full of smoke and my head was pounding and I was running as fast as I could. I called the fire department from an old pay phone, disguising my voice. I didn’t stay to watch them come.
    They saved the barn, at least. I found out later. I even went to a few parties there, years afterward, on nights I couldn’t stand it anymore: all the pretending, the secrets, the sitting around and waiting for instructions.
    I even saw her there, once.
    But I never went back without remembering the fire—the way it ate up the sky, the sound of a house, a something , shriveling into nothing.
    That’s what it was like waking up in the Crypts. No-longer-dead. But without her.
    Like burning alive.
    I have nothing to say about my months there. Imagine it, then imagine worse, then give up and know you can’t imagine it.
    You think you want to know, but you don’t.
    No one expected me to live, so it was like a game to the guards to see how much I could take. One guy, Roman, was the worst. He was ugly—fat lips, eyes glassed over like a fish on ice in the grocery store—and mean as hell. He liked to put his cigarettes out on my tongue. He cut the insides of my eyelids with razors. Every time I blinked, I felt like my eyes were exploding. I used to lie awake at night and imagine wrapping my hands around his throat, killing him slowly.
    See? I told you. You don’t want to know.
    But the worst was where they put me. The old cell where I’d once stood with Lena, staring at the words etched into the stone. A single word, actually. Just love , over and over.
    They’d patched up the hole in the wall, reinforced it and barred it with steel. But I could still taste the outside, still smell the rain and hear the distant roar of the river beneath me. I could watch the snow bending whole trees into submission, could lick the icicles that formed on the other side of the