Shining Star
Robert Branch stares at his phone. He skims an article outlining the containment of the fire currently ripping through North Cascades. It’s not looking good. The mountains burn every year, but not typically this early. Rob wonders if he’s ever seen fires before the school year had ended. Apparently, the reason they haven’t gotten any smoke in the lowlands yet is due to the Pineapple Express coming in off the pacific, sending the smoke eastward, while simultaneously fanning the flames.
He’s leaned up against a cinderblock wall in the Performing Arts hallway of Skagit Valley High School, where he teaches 10th grade history (non-honors). More importantly to him, he’s spent the last 5 years as the distance track coach for SVHS. The walls are painted white and lined with posters promoting Prom, Last Day of Classes, “Senior Skip Day”. Paper streamers, in SVHS Blue and Orange, drape from the ceiling in bows, catching the fluorescence of the fluorescents and throwing colored light around the hallway - a tradition of the Drama club for the last week of the school year. It’s five to 7 o’clock, too late to be at the school even by track coach standards. Tonight, there is an after-school PTSA assembly, being held to honor the life of a student athlete, a Junior by the name of Katie Wickens. A week ago, at the district track meet hosted by SVHS, Katie had spontaneously combusted in the midst of her 1600 meter qualifying race. Coach Branch was speaking in her memory tonight, out of obligation more than anything.
“The girl was an asshole, Warren” Robert hears from around the corner. Speaking the words is Morris Holden, gym teacher and athletics director. He says these words to Principal Warren Miller. Miller speaks next, a short man, in a suit, soft-spoken.
“Jesus, Morris, not now.”
“She’s a hitter, she ran with her elbows out like a combine harvester.” Morris demonstrates, sticking his elbows outwards and swinging them back and forth in a mock-running motion. “We were debating not even letting her run, Warren! The whole family are wack jobs. Her father called us, hmm, twelve times this season. ‘Why’s’n’t Katie running the eight?’, ‘Why’s’n’t Katie in the four-by-four?’, ‘can you confirm that the fertilizer on the field isn’t carcinogenic?’, I mean, Rob, what’d he ask you”
Gun to his head, Rob would have sided with Morris. Katie Wickens was not a pleasant girl to be around. Her family, the Wickens, were a reclusive bunch, who lived on the old Schaefer property. By the map, the Schaefer property was the farthest home in the district that still fed into SVHS. It was also the farthest home in the area from any of its surrounding neighbors. It was a 12 acre plot, mostly rocks and weeds, which Mr. Prichard Wickens had been using for his custom off-roader business “4-20 Customs”. Some contorted idea of “Four Score and Twenty Years Ago”, using an AI image of Abe Lincoln in dune-buggy goggles as its logo. The patriotism was retroactive, of course. The name derived originally from Prichard smoking excessive amounts of weed and going to town on his jeep with the welder.
He knows most of this because of the time Prichard forgot to pick Katie up from practice, sometime during the last season, and Rob opted to drive her home. The Wickens did not offer dinner to him, but Prichard did take the opportunity to show off 4-20 Customs to Rob. Inside the decommissioned Schaefer barn, there sat a lineup of old 4Runners and Wranglers, piles of oversized tires, bash plates, bull-bars, and other sorts of badass equipment necessary for making the apocalypse-mobiles that many folks in the area consider the key to freedom. Sure enough, on the work bench by the table saw and the compressor, sat a collection of bongs.
Robert rocks backwards on his heels. “I can’t really remember what he asked me. Look she wasn’t the best kid, but-“
“But didn’t he ask you-“ Morris is interrupted by the principal.
“Is this all to say that we shouldn’t be honoring her? Is that what you’re trying to say, Morris?” Morris goes quiet. Warren checks his watch. “Need I remind you the girl is dead.”
They all proceed through a side door, leading them onto the stage of SVHS’s cafetorium. The lunch tables have been folded up into their mobile, A-frame orientations and rolled to the side of the lunch room, and have been replaced with a grid of plastic chairs that are now populated by parents, teachers, and students. Sniffs and mutters bounce around the crowd. Miller approaches the lectern and clears his throat.
“Good evening everyone. Thank you all for coming.”
Robert looks out towards the crowd. The stage lights, old and tungsten and bright, they blind him immediately. What he sees is only a black mass. To his left is an easel, holding up a foam-core poster. He can only see the back from this position, but he assumes it’s Katie’s yearbook photo. Wreathes, facilitated by Miller’s Flowers (owned and operated by Principal Miller’s Wife, Masha) adorn the area below, beside, and above the easel.
“I know this has been a very difficult week for everyone. I know you folks have a lot of questions, and I know wounds are still fresh. We hope that tonight, we can bring some answers to those questions. But most importantly, today, we want to honor the life and legacy of Kaitlyn Wickens… Kaitlyn was a treasured member of our community here at Skagit Valley. Her loss has been felt by the entirety of the student body, and by its faculty.
Our motto here at SV is “Knowledge is truth, and truth is power.” I say this because, in recent days, some dangerous rumors have been spread about the events surrounding last Friday. I would like to put these matters to rest, so that we may all grieve together. For that reason, we have invited Police Chief O’Connor and Fire Marshall Kimball here tonight, to answer questions and deliver their findings after their in-depth investigation. Chief, Marshall, I want to thank you two for coming out to bring these nice folks some peace of mind.”
Miller gestures towards the seats at the front of the assembly. A spotty applause ripples through the crowd. Chief of Police Sandra O’Connor is sat there, in her formal dress blues, looking disaffected. An empty chair, meant for the Fire Marshall, sits next to her.
Shading the stage lights’ glare with his hand, Robert scans the crowd for her peer. He finds Marshall Kimball at the refreshments stand, balancing a small paper plate of oily two-bite brownies, which are his favorite, in one of his bulky hands. The other hand dabs away at a stain on his tie, from the Dr. Pepper he had been drinking.
The two civil servants had been invited to the evening in order to dispel the myriad rumors that had arisen around Katie’s combustion, which was all but inevitable to happen considering that this was the American Public School system. A sophomore sprinter, Arthur McCaffree, had claimed he had seen someone throw a match from the stands when Katie was coming around the back straight. As overtly stupid as that claim was - considering a match wouldn’t stay lit from the apparent wind, let alone the fact that the runners were suffering from significant headwinds on the home stretch, the rumor took a hold within the student body. By the time it reached parents back home, it had evolved and mutated into about 20 different renditions of the story, ranging between jealous boyfriends, competing schools, and aliens.
Marshall Kimball was the next to take the stage. The Dr. Pepper stain that he hoped would disappear into the navy of his tie was much more prominent under the stage lighting. A Skagit Valley local for 40 years and a graduate of SVHS some decades ago. Kimball proceeds to give an account of the joint-investigation which had been conducted between the Fire and Police Departments, into the possible causes for this great accident.
The first factor Kimball pointed out was the weather. The Skagit Valley was suffering from an unusually dry May. Typically they would get between 15 and 20 days of rain in May, but this year, they had only seen 5. In the grassy farmland around SVHS, dryness and grass is known to create a lot of static electricity, making things more prone to burning if an ignition source is introduced.
Following this, Kimball points out an investigation by the police department concluded that Katie likely suffered from a condition called hypohidrosis - meaning, her body released far less sweat than an average person of her age. This meant that at the time of ignition, her running clothes were completely dry. Kimball credits this for the rapid rate at which the fire spread.
He finally got to his conclusion about the source of the fire. It’s at this time that he begins to stutter in his speech - an impediment he struggled with during his student years at SVHS, and which now only occurs when he is experiencing great deals of stress. His explanation was this: Katie’s track spikes had created a spark when she mis-stepped during the race. Her one foot went off-track, into the track’s gutter, striking metal-on-metal. The evidence for this was found in the shoe they recovered from Katie, which appeared to have scrape marks indicative of an applied force strong enough to generate a spark. This, Kimball claims, was where our spontaneous flame came from.
He ended his address with a rushed technical declaration: this was a “uniquely tragic and unforeseeable scenario”, then went through the details about some new SVFD policy, something about more fire engines being deployed to high school events.
The just-the-facts speech left the assembly puzzled and silent. Coach Branch was amongst those puzzled. This “track spike spark” theory was a lot to digest, given that only 20 minutes prior, the very same Marshall Kimball, back in the Performing Arts hallway, had called this “The clearest case of spontaneous combustion he’d ever seen”. Branch asked Kimball what he meant, to which Kimball responded “No discernible ignition source. We know why she burned, the girl wasn’t sweating, and those uniforms dry are basically jet fuel, but how it all started is a total mystery.”
*cover photo painting by Jake Longstreth - Track and Field, 2008