Free Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt

é nue slapped another in our history seminar upon finding out she’d been dropped in favor of a rival classmate. For the whole hour, the slapped girl sat stiff and tall, her face shining red but still triumphant. I didn’t haveany friends I could ask—it was exhausting enough to speak to strangers in a language I struggled to understand, never mind confidantes—and I didn’t want to learn any new behaviors around sharing toiletries and room temperature and ambient sound. In Moscow the heat was controlled by the state, turned on each fall to identical levels city-wide, give or take the functionality of your building’s furnace, so the idea that you could adjust a room to suit your exact—even momentary—pleasure was new to me, and I saw how quickly this power went to people’s heads. Temperature was at the heart of many domestic battles royale, with girls daily arriving to class covered in sweat, or shivering and wearing fingerless typing gloves. Girls came down with unnecessary head colds. Each room had a gas coil heater that clicked and hissed, burping out alarming sounds in the middle of the night if their settings had been recently changed, and I let Margaret keep ours a bit too high—“I have lizard blood,” she told me, “I need to sit on a hot rock”—because otherwise I couldn’t sleep for all the clinking. The idea of adjusting to a new and unpredictable set of preferences alarmed me.
    Still, Margaret had plenty of followers, and I figured she’d drop me as soon as she could. Social dynamics among the girls required constant maintenance, and choosing a roommate had the potential to elevate or destroy you, depending. Someone as popular as Margaret might choose a classmate with access to good contraband, or a pretty girl to decorate her room like a flower. Or a less pretty girl, to help herself shine in comparison. She was smart enough not to need a study buddy, or a patsy to do her homework, but everyone needs something. I figured she’d choose to room with her friend Sharon, whose father owned a plant that manufactured skin cream, or Lucy, who had a pert nose and a lisp. Or any of the other moon-faced things that scurried to vacate my bed when I came through the door every night. But no.
    â€œOh, you,” she said one afternoon near the end of our first year together, returning from class. Always the tone of surprise when we ran across one another in the middle of the day. I was tearing apart my side of the room, throwing thin-elbowed sweaters onto the floor and shaking out textbooks by the spine.
    â€œHave you seen my form?” I asked, not bothering to stop in my search. “Room requests are due.”
    Margaret clicked her tongue and sat down in her desk chair, twisting her neck so she could still face me. “I turned it in for you,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
    â€œWhat?” I inspected the sock in my hand. Unmatched, and unmatchable. I balled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. “Why would you do that?”
    â€œWell, technically I threw it out.” She flipped her hair down over her face and then back up, catching it into a voluminous ponytail. “You only have to submit one if you’re requesting together.”
    â€œWhat?” I said again.
    â€œYeah, so because of your whole orphan thing, we got early pick. St. Paul’s Tower, third floor.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Not bad, right?”
    I gaped, speechless, and Margaret took this for agreement. Fair enough, I suppose, given our relationship pattern of silence and distance. She turned her back to me and propped open her French textbook, proceeding to read aloud in an atrocious accent about going to the cinema, meeting at the cinema, having been at the cinema, having met.
    When I arrived at the Donne School I thought I’d be embraced. Looking up at the tall stone halls after stepping out of the taxi that