When the first one happened, we were almost relieved.  After years of fire safety videos, all those instructional tapes shown to us since we were four years old, about escape ladders, how to stop drop and roll, carbon monoxide poisoning, it felt good to finally be close to a real fire.  It was like the car crash victim who, jolting upright after being knocked unconscious from head trauma, exclaims “Finally, finally, something has happened.”

            
            And on those curious nights, I remember waiting in parking lots, looking up at the winter sky and seeing all those stars, thinking each one is just another house, smoldering, sadly, far away.

            
            I had just begun to accept the polite world we live in, where things from action movies and horror shows are some sublime fiction.  And I was getting used to disappointment, seeing those car crashes and robberies on television and keeping them at a distance; they weren’t mine.  I secretly wanted to come home from a quiet day to find blood stained carpet, blood splattered walls, anything to shock me away from banal everyday disappointments, empty milk cartons left in the fridge, pennies falling out of pockets, un-matching socks.  And then, just when this has set in, I am reminded that these things happen.

            
            In this same polite world, fires didn’t happen.  And after the police began investigating and couldn’t find a single lead, we all started thinking magically.  The houses were setting themselves on fire. 

            
            My mother always told me bad things happen in threes.  I told this to a friend, Ashley, who replied “But there’s already been three.”

            
            “Maybe it was multiples of three.”  I said back.  So we kept counting.  Fire, Fire, Fire.

            
            Our anxious was collective.  We all slept scared that our own houses were next.  If, in the night, we awoke in a sweat, we feared we were baking or broiling, and we would run out of the place in a panic, only to turn around and see no embers, no flames, just the front lawn, the door, the whole façade of the house looming angrily over us.  If we awoke the next morning to a gloomy sky, we feared it was ashes, not clouds, hanging above us like a big grey veil over our heads.

            
            And when each fire came, well it reminded me of all those accounts of Hiroshima after the atom bomb.  People running in the streets, aimless and confused, but oddly polite.  Everyone offered each other water.

            
            I started seeing these fires as the only way out of this polite world, the only magical thing that will ever happen to me.  Even if there was some explanation, I wouldn’t have it.  These were the things that would save me.

            
            Because this town, because Coatesville, it eats people like a fire eats wood.  I’ve spent too many nights in parking lots waiting, just waiting.  I’ve heard too many suicide stories.  I’ve wasted too many days in coffee shops, because where else is there to go?  And some days we would follow cars, for hours, cruising slowly behind them as they pulled into the driveway of their own ranch houses, just because.  It’s just one of those places that everyone knows is terrible but can’t articulate why.  It’s the suburbs, it’s home, it’s malignant. 

            
            At the high school, our new favorite game was “What-would-you-save-in-the-fire?”  We would talk about it in between classes, ask teachers before a test to distract them from the imminent exam, whisper the phrase like it was some protective mantra, because bad things won’t happen if you think about them enough.  And this is when I realized: we save the things that hurt the most.  The t-shirt of a dead relative, a bracelet from an ex, an unused birthday gift.  These things, they hang around us like ghosts.

            
            When Ashley lost her house, she was upset because she didn’t get to say goodbye, as if the thing were some distant aunt dying of cancer.  What did Ashley manage to save in her fire?  A hand full of jewelry, three books, and one shoe.  She couldn’t find the other in time.  I went with her to the still-smoldering ashes.  She grieved that structure, all of her stuff.  She half-joked that she wanted to have a funeral.  And it reminded me of too many things, of all the problems we keep to ourselves, how we hang on to them like that same stuff that hurts us too.  Because we have too much trouble letting go, and not enough trouble moving on.

            
            And it felt so strange, to see all these hotels and churches offering housing to victims.  For some reason, it felt like the victims should be staying in the cinders of their former residences, pitching tents and using the charcoal like a dusty blanket, it was too soon for all this migration.  Everyone planned on leaving.

            
            After the thirty-third house, a state of emergency was declared.  The next day our streets looked like all those post-apocalypses, like the world had ended a thousand times over, the police instituted a curfew, cars were banned and left in the middle of streets in odd diagonals that intersected the yellow lines of the road.  At night the siren lights on top of the patrol vehicles would refract into our windows: tiny doomsday nightlights.

            
            “The more we caught, the more fires were set,” says the chief of police, referring to the six teenagers arrested.  Copycats or terrorists, the fires continued.

            
            And when my house was finally victim, I knew where I wanted to be.  I had heard the stories, seen too many of these movies, thought about what I would rescue and what I would leave to the embers.  And with everyone moving away, all of these people leaving the remains of their houses hoping for someone else to rebuild; well, it was too easy to move on.  It was too easy to leave.  And I knew I wanted to stay right here, stay right here, stay right here, because bad things come in threes.