I saw it coming the day before and I probably should have said something and stopped it. It was bright. One of those clear afternoons where there’s just enough of a breeze to trick you into thinking it’s nice and cool. On a day like that you can forget that the sun is still up there, on top of the breeze, still coming straight down. Most people have been caught at least once by a trick day like that and it’s worse now. Now it’s over before you feel anything. You can get permanently hurt if you don’t pay attention.

I watched it happen. I watched that burn going into him – the pink blotches moving across his shoulders and down the backs of his arms. He was turning colours right in front of me and I didn’t say a word. Instead, I just sat there and thought about how it’s strange that you really can’t feel a burn like that when it’s going in. Or you feel it only like a nice comfortable kind of all-over warm. Everything seems fine when you’re out there in the daytime, but at night – when a bad burn starts to come out – that’s a total different thing. That’s a special kind of trouble. I’ve been there. Probably everyone’s been there.

First it’s nothing. You flip over on your stomach and just try to stay still. You pick that one steady position and try to hold it. But it gets worse, and even though you take the cold bath and pile on the Noxema, you still think you’re going to come bursting right out of your body. Your skin feels too tight. In the end you have to give up on sleeping because now it’s four in the morning and you can see the sun coming up for another round. Every time you breathe there’s a separate stretching pain.

I let him burn because I thought I’d never see him again. But when he came back the next morning – when he came back again, all scorched like that but still ready to go – that turned me around on him for good. I felt sorry for him now and I kept thinking that some of this was my fault. I felt like I did it to him myself – held him down and poured boiling water all over his back or pushed a plugged in iron onto his skin. He had no way of knowing what he was getting into. His name was Robbie.