Educated

no question it was human. I’d never heard an animal bellow like that, with
such fluctuations in tone and pitch.
I ran outside and saw Luke hobbling across the grass. He screamed for
Mother, then collapsed. That’s when I saw that the jeans on his left leg were
gone, melted away. Parts of the leg were livid, red and bloody; others were
bleached and dead. Papery ropes of skin wrapped delicately around his thigh
and down his calf, like wax dripping from a cheap candle.
His eyes rolled back in his head.
I bolted back into the house. I’d packed the new bottles of Rescue Remedy,
but the base formula still sat on the counter. I snatched it and ran outside,
then dumped half the bottle between Luke’s twitching lips. There was no
change. His eyes were marble white.
One brown iris slipped into view, then the other. He began to mumble,
then to scream. “It’s on fire! It’s on fire!” he roared. A chill passed through
him and his teeth clattered; he was shivering.
I was only ten, and in that moment I felt very much a child. Luke was my
big brother; I thought he would know what to do, so I grabbed his shoulders
and shook him, hard. “Should I make you cold or make you hot?” I shouted.
He answered with a gasp.
The burn was the injury, I reasoned. It made sense to treat it first. I fetched
a pack of ice from the chest freezer on the patio, but when the pack touched
his leg he screamed—a back-arching, eye-popping scream that made my
brain claw at my skull. I needed another way to cool the leg. I considered
unloading the chest freezer and putting Luke inside it, but the freezer would
work only if the lid was shut, and then he’d suffocate.
I mentally searched the house. We had a large garbage can, a blue whale of
a bin. It was splattered with bits of rotted food, so rank we kept it shut away
in a closet. I sprinted into the house and emptied it onto the linoleum, noting
the dead mouse Richard had tossed in the day before, then I carried the bin
outside and sprayed it out with the garden hose. I knew I should clean it more
thoroughly, maybe with dish soap, but looking at Luke, the way he was
writhing on the grass, I didn’t feel I had time. With the last bit of slop blasted
away, I righted the bin and filled it with water.
Luke was scrambling toward me to put his leg in when I heard an echo of
my mother’s voice. She was telling someone that the real worry with a burn
isn’t the damaged tissue, but infection.
“Luke!” I shouted. “Don’t! Don’t put your leg in!”