Things You Save in a Fire

The captain starts to introduce Cassie, and the crew looks around the room confused, not expecting the other new firefighter to be a woman even though she is the only one in the room unaccounted for. Even though she is in uniform, one of the crew members admits that they all thought she was a stripper. As she is being introduced, all crew members but the rookie complain about the fact that she is a woman. The captain calls her “sweetheart” and says that she’s “supposed to be very good, for a girl” (130). Though she was planning on lying low, Cassie asks the crew how many pull-ups they think she can do, to which they answer only two or three, and again all but the rookie bet against her when she says she can do at least seven. They all go outside to the station’s infamous obstacle course, where she does nine one-handed pull-ups, astounding the whole crew.

Cassie’s makeshift bedroom is a storage closet, as the station had never needed a gender-neutral bunk before. As she expects, the crew comes to prank Cassie her first night there, but they seem hesitant to continue with their plan because she is a woman. Wanting to be treated like everyone else, she tells them to go ahead with it. They duct tape her and the rookie to the basketball hoop, and she reflects on how perfectly he already seems to fit in with the crew based on his thick New England accent and the way he looks like a traditional firefighter. They stay out there the rest of the night until their shift ends hours later, and Cassie is annoyed that she has not learned anything bad about the rookie to alleviate her fixation on him.

Back at Diana’s, Cassie meets their next-door neighbor, Josie, whom she immediately likes. They invite her to stay and talk about her first shift, but Cassie goes to her room to keep her distance and further avoid emotional bonds. In bed, Cassie reflects on the dilapidated state of her new fire station, which lacks working radios and important cyanide poisoning antidote kits. The station’s obstacle course—where the crew holds important competitions—has not been designed for anyone under six feet tall. In addition to these problems, she worries about her infatuation with the rookie.

Cassie is unnerved by the way the men at the department treat her with a twisted form of chivalry, holding back from cursing and talking about things they deem inappropriate for a girl when she enters the room. The men don’t laugh at her jokes on principle, take any equipment they think is too heavy for her, and refuse to let her play their daily game of basketball even though she was captain of her varsity basketball team in high school. She finally challenges the men to a free-throw competition against “Tiny,” a firefighter who is a full foot taller than her and gets 15 hoops in a row. Cassie, however, gets 38 hoops in a row before the station alarm goes off.

They are called to save an “eight-year-old female” who is not breathing, but when they arrive, they learn that the eight-year-old female is an apparently dead chihuahua. Two of the firefighters, “Six-Pack” and “Case,” walk out of the house when they see the scene, but Cassie and the rookie stay to comfort the dog’s owner. For the owner’s sake, Cassie does CPR on the chihuahua. Right when Cassie gives up after seven minutes, the chihuahua jumps back to life and coughs out a thimble. The woman offers them her neighbor’s dog’s puppies as a thank you, and, though Cassie strongly objects, the rookie takes one home in a basket.

Diana tries to hang out with Cassie, who is not at all interested in having a friendly relationship with her. Diana asks Cassie to forgive her for her own sake so she can let go of the anger she had been holding on to, but Cassie admits she doesn’t know how to do that. They rehash the story of how Diana fell in love with another man and left her father and how Wallace, the man she loved, had been dying when she left. Cassie thinks about telling Diana what else happened on her 16th birthday that made it so awful, but she has never told anyone that Heath assaulted her. She changes the subject back to forgiveness, and Diana tries to give her a step-by-step plan for how to forgive her.