*
How to begin? I guess I’ll start by saying that I’ve never done this before. Literally minutes ago, I asked someone how this all worked and he told me that all anyone really wanted to hear was the truth—the complete and unabashed truth. He told me to start at the beginning, the moment that started it all, and after much thought, I think I’ve finally pinpointed the incident that spurred everything. So I’ll start there.

I lit my first fire when I was four.

Perched in front of her vanity mirror, my mother pouted her lips, painting a faint coat of lipstick over them, and smiled at me through the reflection. I was on the bed, encircled in a sea of silk sheets and down-feather pillows, watching with mild interest. I remember thinking she looked beautiful with her auburn hair pulled up into an effortless bun, her feet adorned with tall, strappy heels, and her body shrouded in a simple, black dress, like a princess or a Hollywood scarlet, while a sick part of me hoped that she wouldn’t come back that night, that both she and her husband, my step-dad George, would get into some sort of terrible accident and die.

I didn’t love them—not really. I know it sounds awful. I know it does, but I wasn’t on the pills back then. My four-year-old brain told me that I would be happier on my own, and I think that’s what drew me to the matches and their destructive quality in the first place.

Lifting her purse from the ground, Mother sauntered over to me and placed a kiss on my forehead. She told me she was going to a charity banquet with George again and that they wouldn’t be back for another couple hours. Then she was gone, leaving me in the care of my nanny, a Hispanic woman who smelt like cigarettes and cheap perfume. That was the thing with my mother, what led to her ultimate demise: she always left once she thought she was being offered something better. She had left my real father, now locked behind bars thanks to her testimony, and she was abandoning me too.

Scowling, I hopped off the bed and ran to my mother’s vanity. I was angry, but for what, I didn’t know. I wanted to hurt her. There were all sorts of powders, and lipsticks in what must have been a hundred different shades, and I chucked each and every one of them across the room as hard as I could, screaming at the top of my lungs. It wasn’t until I turned to leave, surveying the mess I had made, that I saw the matches.

I remember ripping one out and feeling its rough, wooden texture beneath my fingertips. “Never play with matches,” Mother had once told me. “Fire is dangerous in the wrong hands, okay?” I understood, but that didn’t mean I was going to listen. I remember wanting to spite her for shirking her parental responsibilities—then I remember striking the match. Grabbing one of Mom’s pictures, wedged into the frame of the vanity, I held it precariously above the flame. It caught on fire, and as Mom and George’s faces went up in the flame, a silent thrill ran through me, bringing a smile to my face. I dropped the picture onto the carpet and I watched it burn.

George was furious, of course. To him, I was nothing more than “that crazy man’s daughter”, and somehow, based on this description, he had managed to convince my mother to rush me to the nearest children’s psychiatric center, more than an hour’s drive away. I wasn’t stupid, though, and back then, I wasn’t crazy either. When the psychologist asked me questions, I lied, and he believed me. He told my “parents” that I wasn’t anything more than “curious” and that they needed to hide the matches better. Sometimes I laugh at that. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me, to all of us, if he had been able to see the darkness brewing within me.

Maybe I wouldn’t have done it.

My mother had been right when she had said that fire was dangerous in the wrong hands. Some things, like God and pizza chefs, were made to create. Others were made to destroy. Those matches destroyed me that day, because they gave me a small taste—and I wanted more. Being medically “curious” allowed me to get away with almost anything, and for years, I did. It wasn’t until the Baptist church down the road burned down during mass, sending three people to the emergency room, that George arranged another psych consult for me at the hospital.

This time, I didn’t lie. The psychologist, the same one from all those years earlier, concluded that I had become a pyromaniac with Psychosis Not Otherwise Specified. Naturally, I had no clue what Psychosis NOS meant, only that it made my mother cry and it made George mutter something about me inheriting the crazy from my father. I was a nut-case with a penchant for fire. My doctor pulled Mother and George to the side, whispering fervently with a look of concern creasing his face. Then he handed my mother a prescription for some antipsychotics, and for the entire ride home, the weight of the news rendered us all speechless. But I was speechless for other reasons than the ones they had, I’m sure.

Because now I had an excuse.

Really, it was George’s fault they are dead. If he hadn’t insisted that we went to the doctor, I would never have known that I was crazy. I knew if I went to court for killing my “parents” I could plead insanity, and that gave me freedom to do whatever I wanted. And I wanted my mother to learn a lesson: she couldn’t just lie in court and leave us for another man. I knew Father and I weren’t perfect, but nobody is. So after we finished our dinner that night, and they went to sleep, I grabbed George’s extra container of gasoline, went to their room, and struck a match. I couldn’t see them burn, because the smoke was too thick, but as I ran back down the stairs and out the door, I heard their screams.

Yes, I killed my “parents”. Yes, I lit them on fire. But I had crazy on my side. I got it from my father.

He really was crazy. I found out much later that I was the daughter of a serial killer, responsible for the rape and murder of twenty young girls, but I didn’t hate him like I hated my mother or George. I loved my father, and I knew if Mother had the balls to stay, we would have worked through his problems and lived as a happy, normal family one day. With the right drugs, the voices in his head wouldn’t have been so loud and maybe they would have gone away. Maybe. I guess I’ll never know. It’s not like I’m getting out of here anytime soon. That’s what sucks about pleading insanity; the jail time isn’t any shorter.

Right, so there it is. My name is Norah Masters, I’m a seventeen-year-old pyromaniac, Psychosis NOS, and I set my parents on fire.

And I don’t regret a thing.