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From WikiStory

          I see that big keg of gasoline and I know it isn’t a box of matches. But a box of matches, my matches actually, is what led my friend Jimmy here.

          It was early August, hot and dry, and we had been wading through days of empty hours. Our town was less busy in the summer than in the winter when tourists came to ski. Jimmy and I decided to make a fire on one of those days. I knew where the matches were kept in my house, so I brought out the pack. We didn’t want to burn down the trees or anything, so we went onto the pavement and each lit a match. “Yeah!” shouted Jimmy when his match fizzed into life. He held the thin wooden stick right up next to his eye, admiring the flame, so I said, “Be careful; don’t light your head on fire.” Jimmy was known for his wild red hair, hair which itself seemed to be on fire now that I thought about it.

          “Ha!” he said, “I’ll let it burn right down to my fingers before blowing it out, without catching anything on fire.” And he held it out in front of him, away from his head. He thought for a second, and then he said: “I bet you can’t last as long as me!”

          I didn’t like this idea. You keep your fingers out of the fire, otherwise they will burn off like bits of firewood. But then this danger was the whole point of Jimmy’s dare. Was I afraid of danger? I told myself, “of course not!” and showed Jimmy so. I had to take his dare. I scratched a match crackling along the box, and then Jimmy did the same. I looked at the orange flame shining brightly and dancing a little bit. The flame had turned the top of the wood into ash, but it still looked like a match, with the little bulb just leaning over, ash-colored and glowing. I could feel Jimmy watching me. His green eyes pierced my skinny bones. He wasn’t going to lose. My flame was nearing my fingers. Well, let him lose his fingers, I thought. I blew my flame out.

          “I win!” Jimmy exclaimed, but not before his hands flew apart and open, quickly letting the match fall onto the gray cracked pavement, where the flame went out but the tip still shone.

          “I lit my match before you, it burned sooner,” I pointed out. This didn’t weaken our joy, and we spent the rest of the afternoon burning up that box of matches. We did lots of fun stuff, lighting matches using lit matches, throwing matches in the air, and in the end we lit the box itself on fire.

          I have good memories from the months since then of me and Jimmy making little fires in a circle of rocks in the woods, pretending we were cavemen, and then making bigger fires in a pot filled with twigs and roasting marshmallow s’mores at night.

          Graduating from matches, Jimmy and I experimented with lighters, and propane, alcohol, and gasoline. Always with safety protections that I suggested, and that Jimmy listened to. Always with Jimmy suggesting new things to try and methods he had heard about, and that I eagerly did with him.

          One time we were in Jimmy’s house when he saw a house burning on TV. That got him talking about burning a building. I told him he was crazy, it was going too far, that it wasn’t safe, we could get in trouble. “Well, we wouldn’t do it with people inside. We’d do it safely.” He thought for a minute, then justified, “We can do it to some building no one uses, or that no one likes, or that belongs to someone who deserves it.”

          “Do you want to be a maniac?” I said, referring to a word the TV reporter had used when talking about the burning building. The word was longer than maniac, but I knew maniacs were locked up in places like prisons or mental hospitals.

          “It’s not maniac, it’s a pie-ro-maniac,” Jimmy corrected, though the way he said it made me think he thought it meant some sort of a pie-related man. I asked him if he knew what it meant. “Well, not completely, but it’s different than a maniac,” Jimmy explained, “I mean, ‘tomato’ and ‘toe’ don’t mean the same thing. A word doesn’t mean similar to another just before they sound similar.”

          I stood my ground that it wasn’t a good idea, and Jimmy let it go for a while. But we did enter a time of trying to make fires bigger and higher than we had before. Finally, Jimmy told me that he still wanted to burn a building. He decided to burn an abandoned barn, since this particular barn wasn’t being used for anything but storing food. It seemed alright, I supposed, except for the food being burned, but Jimmy explained that it was locked and there would be no way to get the stuff out. I still felt bad about it, and didn’t want any part in it, so Jimmy said he would do it on his own. “It could spread to the field, or to the fence,” I said, but Jimmy said it would be fine.

          He stormed off, and I haven’t spoken to him in a few days. I thought about telling someone like Mr. Rip, who owned the barn. If I had a barn, I wouldn’t want it to be burned down. I didn’t want Jimmy to get in trouble. Fire was just harmless fun, really, it was just Jimmy going too far and not always being safe that worried me.

          So I have come down to Jimmy’s to talk him out of it. I feel cool under the thick gray sky. I see this large bottle of gasoline in the usual hiding place behind a bush. I look at it and realize that I have to talk Jimmy out of doing this. If he won’t listen to me, then I will have to tell someone, for Jimmy’s sake. Otherwise he’ll burn down a barn and be in real trouble.

          I shout and bang on his door, looking at the slow, heavily rolling clouds above me, not sure what I feel about all this, until he comes out. Jimmy opens the door, looking annoyed and pretending to be uninterested in me. “Jimmy, you can’t set fire to the barn,” I begin straightaway. Jimmy says, “I will if I want to.” We argue angrily for a while, so I finally threaten, “If you don’t give up this idea then I will tell someone.”

          “Fine!” he shouts, “You won’t be my friend, and I’ll still go ahead with it.” With that, he slams the door shut, leaving me to walk off in the cold evening air with my thoughts.

          I don’t want to lose Jimmy’s friendship, but I also don’t want him to get in trouble, and it seems our friendship has already been hurt.

          Arriving home, I step through the door, leaving the wind and the evening behind me. I see my mother setting the table for dinner and my father reading the paper. I tell my parents I need to talk to them. I hesitate, sweating in spite of my walk in the cold, knowing that this will destroy my oldest friendship with my best friend. There would be no skiing with Jimmy this winter. My father looks up, and my mother gently places a napkin on the table and pulls a chair out to sit down. Both of my parents stare at me expectantly, my father’s newspaper flat on his lap, as flat as my lungs feel. I have to speak now but I am frozen.

          “What is it?” asks my father.

          “Jimmy,” I whisper. And then I say it all, the whole story. The words spew into the air. No turning back now.

          I looked anxiously at my parents’ still faces. Were they deciding how to punish me? I think about how, if I were thrown out of the house, where would I live, and how could I get food? My parents seem unsettled. My father takes his hand and rubs his forehead, eyes closed, then pauses before looking at me. He isn’t angry. My mother rises from her chair and puts her arms around me. “You did the right thing by coming to us, honey,” she said.

          My father stands up and squeezes my shoulder. Maybe I’m doing the right thing, but Jimmy doesn’t know that and might never forgive me. It’s a relief to give this problem to my parents, and now they can figure out what to do instead of me. But I’ve given Jimmy away, and I can’t imagine that he will be my friend tomorrow, the empty tomorrow. I can’t decide if I feel better or worse.