Free True Confections by Katharine Weber Page A

bag, which I had bought on Eighth Street on a day trip to New York’s Greenwich Village with a group of girls from my class a few months before. It was a spontaneous gesture, with no more than a second of premeditation before I took it, if that. (And no, I did not smell the lighter fluid, hard as that may be to believe.)
    Why did I take it? I can never answer this question satisfactorily enough. Just on an impulse, to be silly, to whip it out at some point later that night as a joke. My mother used an old water pistol to discourage a neighbor’s cat who liked to dig in our flower beds and shit all over her penstemon. If I had really planned only to use a water gun as a joke, the assistant district attorney, Kevin what’shisname, kept asking triumphantly, why hadn’t I taken that water gun from my home? Which only proves that this was a spontaneous act, my taking the loaded water gun off the Crabtrees’ windowsill, wouldn’t you think? I had no plan!
    What did I have in mind? Absolutely nothing. Yes, it is truethat at Debbie Livingston’s party I anticipated that I was likely to encounter Andy Ottenberg, who had developed a nasty habit of mocking me cruelly when I was at my most heartfelt and impassioned. He had done this all through our senior year at every opportunity. He was the managing editor of the school paper, for which I wrote an excruciatingly pretentious advice column called “Go Ask Alice.” But I had no plan. And it really didn’t feel like theft of a potentially lethal weapon. It was just a plastic water pistol.
    After Beth’s mother told us to have fun at our movie (we told her we were going to see
Dog Day Afternoon)
, we headed over to Debbie Livingston’s house, where there were no parents, because Mr. and Mrs. Livingston thought their little darling was still the sweet innocent who not so long ago dressed as a bumblebee three Halloweens in a row. They had no idea that these days she was famous not for her imaginative costume skills but for her imaginative and dexterous approach to certain skills of sexual manipulation, which she provided willingly to a select group of the most popular senior boys, and her parents had definitely never heard her personal motto, “It isn’t a sin if you don’t put it in.” Mr. and Mrs. Livingston thought they had no worries at all that night, since Debbie had told them she would do homework and feed the cat, and maybe her best friend, Mara, would sleep over and they might watch some television before bedtime; meanwhile her parents should have a super great time in the city. So off they went to New York, for dinner and a musical and then an overnight stay at the Plaza Hotel. It was their wedding anniversary.
    I FINALLY SAW
Dog Day Afternoon on
television one night when I was up late with Julie, who was a colicky infant who frequentlyneeded to be held and rocked and soothed. Howard had gone to bed because he had work in the morning. (I took six months maternity leave for Jacob, and for Julie, but in fact both times I was back at Zip’s before that, working a few hours a week, wearing my baby in a sling.) Watching Al Pacino grow more and more frantic as he realizes he has no good way out of the bank he is trying to rob, I found myself growing more and more regretful that Beth Crabtree and I hadn’t just gone to see the movie to which we claimed to be headed, out by the mall. We would have shared a giant tub of popcorn, watched the movie, and gone home. I would have spent four years at Middlebury College, and today I would be a college graduate with many friends doing who knows what, living who knows where, and if I were to attend my Middlebury reunions nobody would call me Arson Girl.
    Perhaps Beth Crabtree and I might have remained good friends over all these years. But we never spoke again after that night. If we had gone to the movie we said we were going to see, the Livingstons would have come home from New York the following day to find their spacious,