And then there was Jade. Curled into an armchair, wearing a loose, old-fashioned blouse and a pair of unflattering shorts that reached almost to the knee. She looked chaste, sleepy, and had the disenfranchised air of a sixteen-year-old girl at home with her family on a Saturday night. I scarcely dared look at her; I thought I might simply hurtle myself through the window and reclaim her as my own. It had been seventeen days since I’d been banished from their home and I tried not to wonder what changes had taken place in my absence. Jade looked at the wall; her face seemed waxy, blank; the nervous knee jiggle was gone—cured by my banishment?—and she sat unnervingly still. She had a clipboard wedged between her narrow hip and the side of the chair, and she held in her hand one of those fat ballpoint pens that have three separate cartridges, a black, a blue, and a red.
I still believe the statement that gives the truest sense of my state of mind that night is that I started the fire so the Butterfields would have to leave their house and confront me. The trouble with excuses, however, is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple of times. It’s like that word game children discover: you repeat a word often enough and it loses all meaning. Foot. Foot. A hundred times foot, until finally what is foot? But even though the truth of my motive has worn a little thin (and through its diaphanous middle I can detect other possible motives), I can still say that indeed the clearest thought I had when I lit the match was that starting a fire on the porch was somehow a better way of rousing the Butterfields from their exclusive evening than a shout from the sidewalk or a stone against the window—or any other desperate, potentially degrading signal I might make.