Girls on Fire

  Lacey was gone, and he was still trying to claim a piece of her.

  “Something happened at her house,” he said. When I asked what made him think that, he admitted—and it had the timbre of admission—“She came here, that night. Before she left.”

  Everything went still.

  “What did you say to her?

  “She needed someone to talk to,” he said. “We talked sometimes.”

  What the fuck, the old Dex, the Dex who had Lacey, would have said. What the fuck are you talking about, what the fuck is wrong with you, what the fuck have you done?

  She is mine, that Dex would have said, and believed it.

  “Your friend had some problems,” he said.

  “Everyone has problems.”

  “You didn’t know everything about her, kid.”

  “What did you say to her?” I asked again. “What did you say that made her leave?”

  “All I know is, something happened at home and it upset her. She didn’t want to go back there.”

  “But you made her.” My voice was steady, my face blank; he couldn’t have known what he was doing. What was burning away between us.

  “No—”

  “You told her not to?”

  “No . . .”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop her. A person has to want to be helped.”

  “She didn’t belong to you.” There are things that shouldn’t have to be said.

  “She didn’t belong to you, either, kid. But I know what she meant to you. I would never have made her go.”

  “But you’re glad she’s gone.”

  He shook his head. “She was good for you,” he said, then, sounding less certain, “wasn’t she?”

  I wondered what he thought he knew. Who he thought I’d been before Lacey, and who he thought I’d become in her wake. Who he needed me to be: Daddy’s girl, sassy but not skanky, flirting with boys but never fucking them, breaking curfew, breaking laws, breaking everything but my precious hymen, trying to be more like Lacey and less like Lacey at the same time, rebelling, not against him but with him, giving the finger to the Man and to my mother but coming home in time to curl up on the couch and watch Jeopardy! I saw, then, what I hadn’t seen before, that I wasn’t Hannah or Dex for him; I was wholly Jimmy Dexter’s daughter, reflection of whatever he needed himself to be.

  “We could go to the movies sometime, if you want. Just you and me, kid, like we used to?”

  He wasn’t going to tell me what he’d said to her. Believe what you want, people always say. As if it’s that easy, as if belief and want could dovetail so effortlessly. As if I didn’t want to believe that my father loved me and my parents loved each other, that Lacey was coming home, that I would stop burning with humiliation every time I left the house, that life was fair, tomorrow was another day, Nikki Drummond would burn in hell. Why stop there? I wanted to believe in time travel and ESP and aliens and God, in a world that was more magical than it seemed and a future that beelined out of Battle Creek and into the event horizon. Lacey said believing was the hard part. If you could do that, everything else would follow,

  “You’ll give yourself lung cancer,” I told my father, and stepped over him to get to the door.

  LACEY HAD A THEORY THAT people have a finite capacity for the enjoyment of their favorite things. Songs, movies, books, food: We’re hardwired for specific quantities of pleasure, and once the amount is exceeded, good goes bad. The kicker is, there’s no warning when you’re approaching the limit; the dopamine just flips off like a switch, and there’s one more book for the fire.

  Very rarely, Lacey said, you find something for which your brain has infinite capacity, and that, Lacey said, is the thing we call love.

  I no longer believed in that. But I did believe in overdoses and disappointment, and I wasn’t about to risk either on my favorite books. The house wasn’t a safe space anymore—there were no safe spaces anymore—and that made it easier to leave. When I did, I only ever went to the library. I felt twelve again, fresh out of the kids’ section, stroking the spines in the grown-up stacks as if I could osmose their words through the bindings. I felt almost normal again.

  “God loves you all,” promised the woman with the stack of pamphlets who’d planted herself just outside the front door. “But He cannot protect you if you willingly put yourselves in the path of temptation.” It was beak-faced Barbara Fuller, who wore her clothes like a hanger, who’d snubbed my mother more than once at a PTA bake sale, suggesting not so subtly that someone who settled for store-bought was no more deserving of the title mother than Entenmann’s donuts were of the title food. Barbara Fuller was the type who wrote letters to the editor about loose morals and garish Christmas lights, and she had a voracious hunger for the failures of others. That day, she didn’t seem to care that her audience consisted of a handful of bored retirees and one abashed bald guy who looked like he would gnaw his own arm off if his wife—Barbara Fuller’s only avid listener—didn’t let go.

  “Satanists slaughter fifty thousand children each year.”

  The bald guy picked something out of his nose.

  “This is a national emergency. And don’t fool yourselves—there is an active satanic cult operating in this town.” She raised her voice. “Your teenagers are at risk.”

  It was a joke, this woman preaching to us about risk—pretending she knew who was in danger, and of what.

  I walked quickly, head down, focusing on the slap of my flip-flops against pavement, the gravel beneath some old lady’s Chevrolet, the crying cicadas, the pulse of blood flushing my cheeks, the jangle of the bike lock as I fumbled with the key.

  “They prey on the vulnerable and confused,” she screeched, and I suspected she wasn’t just trying to penetrate the old folks’ hearing aids. I would not look up to catch her looking at me. “They prey on the fallen.”

  SUMMER STRETCHED ON. OUR HOUSE whirred day and night with the apologetic wheezing of fans. They stirred hot air; we endured. More than once I read through Barbara Fuller’s pamphlet about satanism, a copy of which I’d liberated from the trash. Written by one Isabelle F. Ford, PhD, and jointly published by Parents Against Satanic Teachings and the Cult Crime Research Institution, it suggested that an underground network of tens of thousands of satanists was diligently pursuing a program of grave robbing and child sacrifice.

  If only, I thought, because imagine: If there were such a cabal, veins of dark power threading through Battle Creek. If there were others like me, a coven of girls whose secret selves throbbed with pain, who needed blood to feed their hearts of darkness. I’d always longed for a shadow world, ever since I was a kid, searching out garden sprites and bridge trolls, wishing myself into a faerie changeling waiting for the summons home. Now, a new fantasy: spindly arms carving strange symbols in the night, robed silhouettes against the full moon, a bloody altar and a cloud of incense, ritual and invocation, the promise of power. We laughed, Lacey had told me; we hefted an axe in a moonlit field, loomed over something large and vulnerable, and there was joy in power, joy in drawing blood, slashing and slicing and destroying. When I let myself remember, I could almost believe it, that there was, that we did. If only the Barbara Fullers of the world were right and all I had to do was summon the forces of darkness and let them consume me.

  I threw the pamphlet back in the trash. One more empty promise.

  Lacey never called.

  No one called.

  Until one night—as if the forces of darkness had materialized after all, in response to my silent request—my mother shouted upstairs to tell me I had a call . . . from Nikki Drummond. When I wouldn’t come to the phone, Nikki called again the next night, and the night after.

  On the fourth day, she came to the house.

  HERE WAS NIKKI DRUMMOND, PERCHED prettily on the blue velour couch in my living room, sitting in a spot where I’d peed as a baby, more than once. She was dressed for summ
er in Battle Creek, which meant straddling the narrow line between socially acceptable and buck naked, somehow making a strapped cotton shell and sweaty cutoffs look both girl-next-door sexy and living-room-small-talk appropriate. Kid-tested, mother-approved. I was dressed nearly the same, but looked like a homeless person.

  “So,” Nikki said.

  Lacey had taught me that the best way to unnerve people was to let them marinate in silence. I watched her, waiting, and she watched me, waiting. I broke first.

  “What do you want?”

  “Are you mad at me or something?”

  “Seriously?” It was strange to talk to someone like everything was the same as it had been, like only I was different.

  “Come on, what did I ever do to you, Hannah?”

  “For one, you ratted me out to my fucking mother.” It felt like forever ago; it felt laughably small, considering. But it was easiest to say out loud.

  “That was for your own good.” Her voice, sweet as syrup. Sticky. “She got you to break the law, Hannah. Come on, what kind of friend is that?”

  “Dex.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Dex.”

  She laughed. I’d never actually punched anyone—growing up an only child had deprived me of the wrestling and black eyes that came with siblings—but I could imagine it, the bite of nails against my palm, the crunch of knuckles against cartilage, the spatter of blood, her wide-eyed surprise, her pain, her awe. That I had it in me to break something. That she could be broken.

  She must have seen it, because she swallowed the giggle.

  “Sorry. Dex.”

  “Please go.”

  “Not yet. I came by to see if you were doing okay, and you’re not even giving me a chance to ask.”

  “Lacey’s gone,” I said. It was the first time I’d said it out loud. “So you don’t have to worry about me anymore. No more bad influence.”

  “God, Hannah, I don’t give a shit about Lacey, I’m talking about you. How are you? After . . . you know?”

  I did know, and I didn’t. Maybe that was why I’d let Nikki Drummond sit on my couch and scuff her flip-flops into my rug. So she could tell me.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Yeah, so fine you’ve been playing hermit all summer. You look like an albino.”

  I stood up. “You came to the circus, you’ve seen the freak. Now you can go.”

  Nikki sighed. “Look, Hannah—”

  “Dex.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. It was my party, sort of. Okay? So I feel responsible for how it ended up. For you.” She said it like she was expecting credit.

  “How it ended up,” I said, slowly. Lacey would say: Show no fear. Lacey would say: She should be afraid. “With me dumped out back like garbage?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Nikki said. “I left way before then, don’t you remember?”

  I shrugged.

  She leaned forward. “Wait, you don’t remember? Oh my God, you totally blacked out!”

  What I did remember: How it felt, to want to touch, to be touched. The heat and prickle of it, the fire.

  “It must be killing you,” Nikki said. “Not knowing.”

  I said nothing.

  “You want my advice?” She said it like she wanted to help, and it was all upside down, Lacey leaving me, Nikki refusing to go away. “Decide nothing happened. Decide you’re fine, and you will be.”

  Believing was the hard part, Lacey always said.

  “I told you. I am fine.”

  “Any of us could have gotten snagged by that rent-a-cop,” Nikki said. “Don’t think we don’t know that. You have more friends than you realize.”

  “I have enough friends.”

  She snorted. “Come to my place this weekend. My mom’s throwing some god-awful mother-daughter pool party, it’ll be a nightmare. You’ll love it.”

  “I would rather jab a hot knife in my eye.”

  “Too bad for you, then, because your mom already said yes.”

  LACEY

  Endless, Nameless

  I BLAME JESUS. AND BEFORE YOU get all uptight about sacrilege, remember that it would be just as easy to blame you.

  I should have left without you. I could have: I had the car. Shame on me for giving you more time, for assuming the Bastard would calm himself down. For going home.

  Call it a failure of the imagination.

  HORIZONS. THAT’S WHAT THE SHITHOLE was called. As in Expand your. As in Learn to see Christ on the. As in Unless you want to be a brainwashed Jesus-freak head case, better run for the.

  They dumped me off just inside the barbed wire gate, and I knew exactly what kind of place it was once I saw the pony-tailed blonde with the lobotomized smile flanked by two thugs just waiting for a chance to test out their Tasers. I let Thing One and Thing Two frog-march me in to see the man in charge—also blond; they were all fucking blond. He told me to call him Shawn. The people at Horizons said Shawn the way Shawn said Jesus. This puny, pasty gym-teacher wannabe with the cross-shaped whistle around his neck and the gigantic mahogany desk that said more than he intended about the size of his dick, this was the only guy with the power to send me back to you.

  “Welcome to your safe haven,” he said, and I wondered how many of the girls he’d fucked, hoping it was a lot, because it’s the kind of guy who’s in it for other reasons that you really have to worry about.

  He issued me a Horizons handbook and my very own teen Bible, complete with a couple neutered blonds frolicking on the cover, bone-white horse teeth testifying to their oneness with the Lord. “We’ve made a space for you in bunk six, Ecclesiastes. Chastity will take you over there. I’m sure you have many questions—”

  “Starting with, are you fucking kidding me that her name is Chastity?” I had more questions—did he really believe that a few coils of barbed wire could keep out the devil, how much had the Bastard paid for the privilege of dumping me in this shithole, how long would it be before I could go home—but Shawn’s game-show-host grin had gone full jack-o’-lantern.

  “—but as you’ll learn from your handbook, you haven’t yet earned the privilege of asking questions.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “This is a hard transition process, I know. So I’ll give you a pass on the language. But my leniency ends now.”

  “Is that supposed to scare me?” I said.

  He jerked his head at She-Who-Would-Not-Be-Penetrated. “One demerit,” he said, shaking his head in what I eventually came to recognize as Shawn’s Special Recipe Sorrow, because it hurt him ever so much to hurt us.

  One demerit meant one chore, of my counselor’s choosing, and my counselor, a mini-Mussolini named Heather, never met a toilet she didn’t think needed a good toothbrush-scrub. So that’s how I spent my first morning at Horizons: on my knees, bent over the bowl, swallowing bile because I was pretty sure that if I threw up I’d have to clean that, too. As I scrubbed, she walked me through my dos and don’ts: Do love Jesus, do follow the rules, don’t think for yourself, don’t imagine your life is your own, don’t fuck up or you’ll be sorry.

  For each day of not fucking up, you earned a privilege, and privileges were everything. You needed them to speak to other campers, to leave your cabin without supervision, to send letters, to spend your free time outside rather than sitting at your desk reading the Bible, to go to the bathroom without supervision—“and I don’t want to waste any more time than I have to watching you pee,” Heather said, “so get it together.” No amount of privileges would get you five minutes of any music but Christian rock. You earned privileges by memorizing Bible passages, making your bed with hospital corners, sucking up to your counselor, publicly confessing your sins and taking Jesus into your heart, writing antiabortion letters to your local congressman, and tattling on your fellow campers when they momentarily forgot themselves and started acting like human beings rather than zombies. We lived in bunkhouses named for the books of the Bible, a
dozen of us in Ecclesiastes: twelve little girls in two straight lines, call it Madeline and the Jesus Freaks.

  Mornings were for Bible study, afternoons were for exercise, then the sing-alongs and sharing sessions that comprised mandatory fun. Meals were for watching your back and learning your place. Twelve girls, and I didn’t need to learn their names or their stories because I didn’t intend to be one of them for long. It was enough to know that the Screamer jerked us all awake at three every morning; that the Sodomite had been caught in flagrante with her soccer team captain; that the Skank was a sex addict, or at least had a diary-reading mother who thought so; that the Virgin had remained so—if only by her own technical definition—by restricting herself to copious amounts of anal sex; that Saint Ann had shipped herself off to Horizons voluntarily, in search of some sinners to save.

  The Bastard would have liked the regimented schedule, the drill-sergeant counselors whipping us into shape, a boot camp for the army of God; he would have loved the fact that any trespass was met with flamboyant, Old Testament–style consequences. This wasn’t hippie worship, the guitar-playing, turn-the-other-cheek kind of lovefest he detested, and it wasn’t the bingo-playing, potlucking, pamphleteering morality play that enraged him in Battle Creek. This was a camp created as if in his own image, complete with brimstone and fire and daily viewings of The 700 Club. All I had to do, they told me, was learn respect for authority and for the Lord, and they would send me home.

  I tried.

  I dedicated my life to Christ. I memorized Bible passages. I sang that my God was an awesome god and learned the hand motions to prove it. When we stood in a circle for Squeeze Prayer, I said my line, “I pray that the Lord helps me fight off the devil and his temptations,” then squeezed Skank’s hand and pretended to listen while she told her own lie. I dedicated myself to craft projects, because Jesus was a carpenter and handiwork was noble work; I sawed wood and carved soap, and when we practiced tying knots I did my best not to dream of a noose. I confessed to lascivious thoughts and agreed with Heather that I’d squandered my life. I racked up two weeks’ worth of privileges, and I didn’t let myself think of Battle Creek or of you until I was safe in bed, because that was my reward for making it through each day—that and Kurt, who sang me to sleep. Two weeks, and I scored enough privileges to write two letters. One to the Bastard, promising to be good if he’d let me come home. The other to you.