The last word: Then my classroom exploded

IT WAS THE first day of Summer Discovery Camp, held at Washington, D.C.’s Murch Elementary, at which I had finished second grade only a few weeks before. I didn’t want to go to camp. I wanted to spend my summer at home doing nothing, as I’d done every previous summer. I remember clinging to my brother as children filtered in that morning.

We were divided into groups, and my brother was separated from me.

My group began the day in a science class. The instructor was a graduate student at American University. I remember him being short and somewhat muscular. His hair was brown, I think, and curly.

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One of my responses to the explosion was to lose the ability to express, and perhaps even to feel, anger. I have not raised my voice to anyone since I was 9 years old. But thinking about the instructor now brings something ugly to my skin. I hope that one of his friends, with whom he’s never shared the story, is reading this and will bring it to his attention. That won’t happen, of course, as I am not able to use his name for legal reasons. And even if I could have, there’s another part of me, which he also had a hand in creating, that wants to protect even him.

The chemistry class was supposed to be an astronomy class, but was switched at the last minute when an instructor took ill. Our first project was to make sparklers, which we would use at the festival at the end of camp.

The class was divided into groups of four, each of which had a table with a bowl in the middle of it. At my table were my best friend, Stewart, one of my classmates, Puja, and a boy I’d never met. At the front of the room, by the chalkboard, were glass vials containing various chemicals. The sparkler “recipe” was written on the board, and I remember (and have had my memory corroborated by various legal documents) that we were to use half of the amounts instructed. I remember thinking that was strange. Why not just write out the proper amounts? The instructor said it was “basically a recipe for gunpowder, with a little extra.”

I was by the door. It was a sunny day. I remember looking out the window across the room, and envisioning the celebration at the end of camp. Our table was covered in newspaper. I remember how we took turns mixing the chemicals that, less than an hour later, would be removed from the school by a bomb-disposal unit of the Washington, D.C., police. What did we mix with? Why was I by the door? What were the headlines of the newspaper on our table? The explosion burned them, and us, and the following day we were in the paper.

AT SOME POINT, maybe 10 minutes into class, I went to the bathroom. I didn’t have to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to be in the classroom anymore. I have a very distinct memory of hearing a boy whistle at the urinal as he peed. (I later learned that the boy was in the hallway when the explosion happened.) I dawdled a bit on my way back, and drank some water I didn’t really want. I remember counting the holes that made the fountain’s drain. Eventually I went back into the room.

My table was closest to the door, but I didn’t go to it. I lingered, reading the list of chemicals on the chalkboard.

I remember a flash of light becoming many flashes of light, quickly and powerfully. When I try to put myself there, I remember it as being similar to the feeling of being jolted from half-sleep by the sensation of falling. I don’t remember colors or sounds so much as force. I remember screaming. I don’t remember the door, but I must have opened it to get out of the room. I was the first one out. Did sparks shower the room? Somehow I know that they did.

I remember running but getting nowhere. Minutes passed that I can’t account for. Strong hands on my shoulders. Someone grabbed me. An adult. Who? I remember seeing my older brother in a line of students evacuating a nearby classroom. (Yellow smoke, I later read, poured out of the room I’d just left.) He was toward the end of the line. He called my name. We waved to each other, the kinds of waves people give toward the windows of departing trains.

Then I remember seeing Stewart, who was my best friend, with whom I had spent thousands of hours of my childhood making movies, and discussing the relative values of comic books, and looking up bad words in the dictionary, and playing H-O-R-S-E on the 7-foot hoop above his parents’ garage, and eating candy on curbs, and playing Nintendo, and honing our plans to dominate the world. He, too, had dark hair. And he, too, wore glasses. One Halloween we wore no costumes and told everyone we were each other.

Stewart was slumped on the floor, his back against a locker. His feet were straight in front of him. His glasses were crusted over with a hard black ash, like burnt sugar. He said, “Jonny?” breaking a film around his mouth.

“Stewart?”

“Is that you?”

I said, “Your skin is peeling off of your face.”

He didn’t move.

“What do I look like?” I asked.

“You look normal.”

“Is the skin peeling off of my face?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I asked him again.

He said, “Your skin is red. Your forehead and nose.”

“My skin isn’t peeling off?”

“No.”

“Do I have skin on my face?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

He promised.

He was 9 years old, and his promise must have been informed by shock, and fear, and confusion, and pain, and wanting his mother, and the distance the uttering of which would create between us. It was the most good thing anyone has ever done.

I asked for Stewart’s blessing before embarking on this essay. He said, “I figured you’d write about the explosion one day.” When I had a draft to turn in, I wrote to him again, to make sure he was still comfortable with my publishing a piece. He said, “By all means, go ahead with the essay.”

Despite him being so fundamental to this story, I never asked for his memories. Whatever were my intentions, this piece is a mirror in which I can examine the extent to which I have recovered from that event of 25 years ago. Asking Stewart to help me construct this mirror would feel too close to asking him if there was skin on my face.

I HAVE NO memory of screaming “Help!” But while in the hospital I saw a news report in which a student described seeing a boy running through the halls screaming “Help!” I knew it was me.

Someone picked me up and carried me downstairs. A teacher, probably. Or a parent. I remember hearing, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” while we descended the stairs. Firemen were already streaming into the building.

I was taken by a fireman into the school office. The other boy from my table was stretched out on the principal’s sofa, with four or five emergency medical technicians working on him.

I remember large peels of skin hanging loosely from his body. I remember the bright pink of the exposed flesh. His hair had been singed. I smelled it. His fingernails were missing. Had they melted? He was flailing wildly. Two firemen were holding down his shoulders, and two his ankles. He looked directly at me, but I don’t know if he saw me. He screamed without sound.

What scares me most, when I think about that boy, is not the image of him flailing on the couch, or his silent scream, but the thought of those 15 minutes between the explosion and arrival of the fire department, the possibility of him being alone with his suffering.

THERE WERE FIRST- and second-degree burns across my face, neck, and hands. For reasons no one was ever able to explain, the dispersion of chemicals through the room had turned my exposed skin silver. It stayed that way for a couple of days. I wore gauze over my hands for a couple of weeks, and the skin blistered and molted.

I spent the first night in the hospital, my mother in bed with me, my father on the floor. Doctors were in and out all night. One thought I could go home the next day. Another thought I would need skin grafts on my hands. I remember my mother going for walks around the hospital with Stewart’s father, Richard, who had arrived in the late afternoon. She offered to let him stay in my room with us. I told her I didn’t want anyone else in the room. She said something about friendship or loneliness or need. What does it even mean to be a good person in a situation like that? I was hurt, but not badly, and not hurt at all when compared to what happened to Stewart. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t hurt.

I remember a nurse taking me from my parents at the burns unit’s swinging doors when I first visited Stewart. I made them repeat that they would wait there until I came back. I was led down a long hallway. A young girl, no older than 5, passed. Half of her face had been burned off.

Stewart was completely wrapped in gauze, with only his eyes, nose, and mouth exposed. Machines surrounded him. His parents were sitting at his side.

I must have gone to visit Stewart 30 times while he was in the hospital. As he recovered, I was sent in with toys for him. They—his family, his doctors—were trying to encourage him to use his hands. They knew that he’d be more inclined if he thought he was playing with me, rather than performing exercises. They asked me to tell him he was looking better and better.

Sometimes Stewart and I talked like adults, sometimes like children. I used to ask him what it was like to be bathed by nurses. He told me it was embarrassing at first, but actually really nice once you got used to it. I told him about school—I’d gone back the following fall, while he was still in the hospital. He had such voracious curiosity, such supernatural composure. I can’t remember him once telling me that something hurt, or that there was anything unfair about what had happened.

Did I ever actually say to my parents that I didn’t want to go? Did I ever utter the words themselves? Is it possible that they didn’t see or intuit the profundity of my fear, that it was death to me?

I HAD SOMETHING like a nervous breakdown drawn out over the next three years. I developed an intense fear of having to speak in public, which I have almost completely gotten over. I had an extremely difficult time separating from my parents, and only attended half of my classes. The other half of the time I spent in the principal’s office, unable to explain anything.

I remember a friend’s sleepover birthday party. This must have been 1988—three years after the explosion. There were about 15 children there, roughhousing, playing videogames. I went up to bed early, but couldn’t sleep. I cried in my sleeping bag. I was afraid that one of the other children was going to play a prank and light me on fire.

All these years later, I can’t think of anything I’m more ashamed of than having asked Stewart to describe my face to me, or anything I am more grateful for than our having been together for those minutes.

Stewart was conscious, and able to talk, that first time I visited him in the hospital. I had been afraid of silence between us. I feared silence as much as I feared the machines, and doctors, and children without skin.

From a longer story that appeared in the London Observer and The Washington Post. Used with permission of the author. All rights reserved.