because I could

Because I could reach the alarm, I pulled it. Not a yank, but a gentle tug. I was still too young to read, but I knew what the sign said. And I knew the act was forbidden. How could I resist the intense bright red when I was tall enough on my tippy toes and all of my fingers fit perfectly under the handle?
Opening week at Red Lobster was all my parents had talked about. Even though it was snowing and Christmas was coming and my father had recently lost his job, the five of us piled into his van: myself, your exhibitionist of horrors; my father, who would order filet of sole thinking it was like filet mignon; my sister, who would need a diaper change as soon as they placed her in the booster seat; my brother, who slapped my face every few minutes for his own amusement; and my mother, who chain-smoked from Saugerties to Kingston. Her nerves were already tested by my screaming pleas to stop, oh pretty please stop, why can’t we stop, just for a few minutes, at the Hudson Valley Mall, where Mom had banned me from going shopping with her on account of my tendency to disappear as soon as she wasn’t looking. I would often hide inside the circular clothing racks, breathing quiet shallow breaths into the slits of parted blouses, watching as Mom walked by with a security guard, calling out my name. I know you can hear me! She does this all the time.
Decades later, my father explains: For whatever reason, Dina, you went through a phase where you were uncontrollable. Your brother didn’t. Your sister didn’t. We had no idea what to do with you. So we called you Dina Disaster.
I don’t remember pulling the alarm— only that my father had rushed off to the bathroom a minute or so before the idea even crossed my mind. He was sitting on the toilet when the shrill kicked in and an automated voice crackled on the intercom: Attention please. There has been a fire reported in the building. Please proceed to the nearest exit and leave immediately. He wiped his ass quicker than he zipped his jeans. Out in the parking lot, he took one look at me and knew exactly what had happened.
The sirens approached and I pressed my palms hard against my earmuffs. I looked 46 DINA PEONE around at the frowning grown-ups wearing bibs with melted butter dribbling down their chins, my baby sister shivering in her carrier, my parents shaking their heads, and my brother who hadn’t slapped me in at least ten minutes. The fire engines turned around as soon as they entered the lot and I thought, That’s it?!
If only I had known that it was not really a false alarm: that later, my first French kiss would go down in the parking lot of the Glasco Fire House, and that somewhere on the other side of town, the boy who would become my high school sweetheart had already uttered his first word: HOT. I wouldn’t have been so disappointed then, if only I could have seen eleven years into the future— how a candle would grow overnight to swallow my home, disfiguring most of my teenage body: a burn that would eventually lead to the amputation of the same fingers that pulled the alarm at Red Lobster.
I never went back. Yesterday, I called the restaurant to apologize and the manager humored me: Well, I’m so glad you lived to tell the tale! I could have told her about the fire, but I know that would have alarmed her.

DINA PEONE is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, where she currently works as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago and the Summer 2020 Writer-in-Residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida. Dina is working on a memoir about surviving a house fire with fifth-degree burns when she was a morbid teenager.