I will recount this as best I can, getting a few things wrong. I tried to tell it at a party a few years ago, and people pointed out factual errors. Perhaps we can grant it a coat of folklore and not look too deeply. We have Melissa's recounting, then my memory decades after the events; things are bound to be jumbled.
Melissa, for all the drugs she did (I can name a few I do not think she did -- krokodil and bath salts -- but I cannot promise it), had an affection for Glade, one of the propellants of which is nitrous oxide. It is the same gas given in the dentist's office, carefully monitored by a trained anesthetist. It is also in the canned air used to blow dust from keyboards, so largely scentless, but Melissa liked Glade. She even fantasized about chocolate Glade available in the South, which only existed in scented candles.
She acquired dozens of cans at a time by playing to her faults. Buying so much at a time was suspicious -- not that a checkout clerk would do much. Melissa would put on her best version of a stoned teenage demeanor -- something at which she had ample practice -- and say, "Dude, we had this huge party and trashed my parents' house. They just called! They're coming home early! Now we need to clean it up!" This tack invariably worked, as, wearing torn, massive jeans and a tie-die shirt, she was the sort of woman who would be in this predicament.
One huffs Glade -- though one should not. Usually, this is accomplished with the help of a plastic bag filled with gas and inhaled. I do not know that this is what Melissa did. It seems too mild for her tastes, too banal.
If you have had it at the dentist's office, you know the effects of nitrous oxide: a pleasant haze and mild hallucinations. One is in a waking dream. As a child, dentists gave it to me once when they had to pry a tooth from my jaw. I recall floating out of my body to hang out with Scrooge McDuck. I was aware of what was happening. I felt the pressure, but it did not seem relevant.
One of Melissa's persistent Glade hallucinations was a little girl admonishing her for being a fuck-up. Melissa did not probe what this girl might represent. The child seemed more rational than Melissa by a wide margin, mainly as she told Melissa to stop doing drugs.
One night on a mountain, the child touched Melissa's stomach and said, "I'll see you in nine months!"
We've flashed Chekov's Gun and introduced most characters who need describing. Let us get on with the action.
Melissa had driven her car into a field near her friend's house. She was seventeen and about as emotionally mature as a fourteen-year-old, mainly composed of id. Instead of a bag, she hotboxed her car with Glade. I do not know how many that would take, but the police report noted over a dozen cans. (She swore they hadn't used them all that night but discarded them during previous sessions.)
Three boys were in her car, also awash in hallucinations. The one in her passenger's seat -- who may have been Chris, the guy who cheated with her whenever he felt horny -- said he was sure they were in Hell.
Melissa's hallucinations were not kind. Her little girl demanded that she get out of the car right now. Horned skulls flew at her, also telling her to get out of the car and giving her a countdown.
She needed to take the edge off the pressure of her hallucinations. What better way than a cigarette?
She laid her hand on the window knob. Given the gagging floral perfume, to say nothing of the proportion of gases, they needed fresh air. Cigarette smoke would not help matters.
She looked at the window, then at the cigarette. She decided she would light her cigarette first and then open the window. She flicked the lighter. It did not catch. She briefly contemplated the window, then decided against it.
Flick.
Nitrous oxide is not flammable, but it facilitates combustion. I passed high school chemistry, but not gloriously. As far as I can tell, nitrous condenses oxygen. It is why people use it in their racecars, allowing the fuel better access to burning.
Nitrous is not the only gas in Glade, which also contains butane, propane, and isobutane. Each of these delights in combusting, which is why they are commonly used as lighter fluid and heating fuel.
The car filled with fire. This should be cause for concern, but she had spent half an hour with flying skulls and a man telling her she was in Hell. She didn't want to seem like a lightweight, so it was a relief when the boy beside her started shrieking as though his head were on fire -- because it was. Screaming was the best thing Melissa could have done here. Had she calmly inhaled while deciding on her next course of action, it would have been a lungful of burning gas, which either would have killed her or made her wish she had died.
Melissa and the boys escaped the car. How they did this was less clear. At least one of the doors fused shut. The car's roof had opened like Jiffy Pop, though how could it with relatively mild casualties and no fatalities?
Had I seen pictures of the car? I can remember them. I can picture the melted fast-food toys next to untouched ones, the singed upholstery. That's the frailty of memory. I cannot explain why I would have seen these pictures. Who would have taken them? Melissa told the story enough that my mind may have conjured up corroboration for something more disaster than a miracle.
They escaped, though, and trudged to her friend's house. The friend's mother looked at these burnt teenagers, shouted, "Oh, you poor babies," and did one of those well-meaning, sweet things that make matters far worse. She soaked towels and blankets in water and tossed them on the burn victims. Melissa did not state if this threw them into shock, but it might have. If not that, she described it as more painful than the fire. The burning must have taken only seconds, as none died from inhaling it. The sodden blankets were on them until authorities arrived.
The fire trucks arrived to put out the cinders of her car. The ambulances arrived to cart off the cinders of the teens.
Melissa said, when the nurses triaged and heard what had caused the explosion, they told her that she would have to wait. She could simmer in her stupidity. She was also simmering more literally as her burns worsened without treatment. When she healed enough to see people, she showed me the pale, smooth dome on her knee about the size of a quarter, which she said was a second-degree burn that nurses could have relieved the moment she showed up at the ER but instead allowed to become a third-degree. I don't know if that makes sense -- it radically contradicts the nurses' vow to do their best for their patients -- but she said it.
She called me from the hospital. That can't be true, but it feels that way. If not, she called me too shortly after. It was before this could have become gossip, before any of her friends might have called me to tell me, if they would have. Her parents would not have called. Melissa's friends were a disreputable amalgam, and they were disinterested in any of us as individuals.
Melissa was already boastful at her survival, but the shock of having almost died -- not the first time, but the most dramatically -- dulled her boisterousness.
When the story began -- I have no memory of the finer point of this first telling -- I bunched up in the corner of my parents' kitchen, my back against the Lazy Susan. I tangled the phone cord around my arm and rocked left and right.
She had almost died, I knew. It wasn't in the form of a story then. I understood that a girl I called my best friend came close to actual death. I could see the path when this call came another night from someone telling me she had perished in an explosion. I could envision her funeral, the unsurprising tragedy of burning so bright, figuratively and literally. The weight of awareness fell on me that she might have died then if one factor or another had shifted a fraction.
I leaned heavily on my left shoulder, pushing the Lazy Susan that way in acknowledgment. I pushed it right again, but there was no relief that a tiny change -- her opening the window, not hotboxing that night -- could have prevented this from happening. It might not have happened that night, in this way, but it was inevitable.
A part of her never escaped that car, and she knew it. From that moment, she always felt the threat of death barely avoided, her survival a debt she could never repay. One day, the bill would come due. A different person would turn to repentance as though it could further delay this looming death, but that was never her nature.
I received a voicemail from one of her friends six years ago, telling me that Melissa had died. When I called one of our friends, I asked, "Overdose or suicide?" She said it was an overdose, but it could only ever have been a suicide. The fire would have been a turning point if she had wanted to live. Instead, she survived, waiting for death to finally have the guts to kill her, daring it with every pill and snort.
When I saw her after the fire, the flames had cut her hair short (which a hairstylist who must not have minded the fast-food fryer aroma of her healing skin fixed). She had the burn on her knee but seemed otherwise little worse for wear. Her parents bought her a new car, something more indulgent than she deserved. I do not recall what parental sanctions she received if she did, if her parents believed any longer that punishment could affect her if an explosion hadn't.
The male occupants of the car did not fare so well. One needed reconstruction of his ears. I do not recall what happened to the others, but the image of ears melting like candle wax stayed with me.
Their misadventure made the pages of the Poughkeepsie Journal, Melissa and her occupants named despite three of them being underage. When I said I was sure it was not legal to name juvenile culprits of crimes, she reminded me that the police charged no one. Their stupidity had punished them well enough that the police didn't bother. (I am sure there were fines assessed and tow trucks paid, but she did not mention these, as they were less sexy in a narrative.)
I cannot say she learned any lessons from this. She gained a phobia of fire -- genuine or contrived for effect. She adored telling the story of the time she exploded. She authored an account of this experience titled "Click Click BOOM," though I do not know it exists anywhere. When classmates mentioned this in one of the few community college classes she attempted before dropping out, Melissa was overjoyed to explain she knew this story because she had been in the driver's seat. This was her legacy, an urban legend around long enough to appreciate the horror.
Shortly after this, Melissa had an unusually heavy period, likely a miscarriage, either from drug use or trauma. She no longer hallucinated the little girl when she huffed Glade -- fire had not deterred her desire to huff, though she kept to the more open air after.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.