The Burning Boy by Zon Fatima

[[Winner of the 2016 Hub City Teen Writers Contest]]

The burning boy had been on the news for years now.  Every morning, right after I grab a banana from our sorry excuse for a fruit basket and right before I slip into my ratty sneakers to walk four and a half blocks to school, I make sure to glance at the TV.  My grandmother always sits on the left end of the love seat facing the rickety old television set, walker set out before her and shoes placed inches away, right off the rug.  God bless her soul, should she ever decide to move and allow me to see the whole TV from the door without blocking the bottom right corner.  But, I’m never too worried about her.  For the past four years, all of America has only been worried about the burning boy.

This morning, Anderson Cooper straightened his papers and takes a shuddering breath as he looks into the camera.  Everyone always gets a little nervous when they talk about the burning boy.  “Four years ago, second grader Wallace Trevor was burned alive in a car accident that killed both of his parents and his younger brother.”

My fingers tighten around the banana.  An old, familiar chill, one that was born four years ago, the night Wallace’s burnt body was on the news for the first time, crawls up my back and houses itself into my neck.

“With third degree burns on 75% of his body, Wallace shouldn’t have made it alive through the accident, according to Dr. Courtier,” Anderson continued. “Miraculously, however, he was able to survive Hundreds of operations and countless hours of excruciating pain later, here we are, on January 16th, 2017, witnessing Wallace step foot out of the hospital for the first time in four years.”

Like that, I forget all about school.  I forget that if I’m late one more time, I’ll be cited for detention.  I forget that I have a surprise birthday party for a teacher that I have to attend.  I forget it all as I step around the couch to sit beside my grandmother and my eyes fixate on Wallace on the TV screen.

I like his shirt, is the first thing that comes to mind, as my eyes glaze over his Avengers shirt and shift to the rest of him.  He stands on the front steps of the children’s hospital, holding the hand of his 22-year-old sister, the only family he has left.  And they look so happy.  His sister has tears in her eyes.  She’s a round women, wearing a matching shirt and a long, black skirt with frills that should’ve been left in the last decade but at the moment, no one cares.  We’re all happy for her, happy for her and her brother.  Wallace Trevor, the burning boy.

He’s 11 years old now.  His arms are wiry and the small patch of black hair he has is matted with sweat as he stands in the Orleans heat.  For four years, the stories of all his operations were everywhere and now, everyone can see their results.  To say he looks good would be putting it nicely.  Grafts had to be taken from any salvageable parts of his body to create and plaster the skin over his burns.  Doctors flew in from all over the world to give this boy at least a semblance of the handsome face he once had.  But that’s all it really is, a semblance, and not the best one.  Tight, shiny skin is stretched over his face and his arms, the only naked parts of his body to the cameras at the moment.  Over the years, some people could barely stand the sight of him because in full honesty, it was alien, to look like that.  “If this is a price for his life,” his sister said defensively into the cameras one day two years ago when the rest of America was asking if she was happy with how her brother was looking after all the surgeries, “then, I will pay it over and over and over again.”

Rectangular glasses are perches on Wallace’s’ nose. With one hand tight in his sister’s, he smiles, stretching the new skin on his face, and shies behind her frilly skirt. And like that, tears spring up in my eyes.  My trembling hand finds my mouth and I press down to keep from sobbing. Four years we were all rooting for this boy to live. Four years we only saw blurry pictures of the operating room.  Four years we lived off of a photography of him on his sixth birthday to pass the time. And here we all are, watching our alien hero standing on the steps of an Orleans hospital, shy and wiry and eleven years old with a brand new set of skin. And I promise you, cross my heart and hope to die, that right now, he’s the most beautiful boy on the face of the planet.

So what if I might have to pass on the opportunity of going to college to take care of my grandmother?  So what if my father lives in the Hamptons now and left us in this old townhouse in Baltimore after the divorce? So what if I can barely keep a C in Calculus? So what? So what? So what?

Right now, I’m looking at Wallace Trevor, a boy I don’t know, a boy whose story is reverberating through the chests of everyone in the world, a boy I’ve been stealing fleeting glances at on the TV for four years, and I’m seeing him smile and hid behind his sister and looking absolutely alien, and right now, I’m the happiest person in the world.