Girls on Fire

  “Okay. Dare you to say something true. Really true.”

  “I always speak the truth.”

  “Lie!” I giggled. “Dirty, filthy lie.”

  Nikki sat up. “We can’t all be like you, Hannah, just saying whatever the hell we feel like. No act. No costume. It’s hard to be naked all the time.”

  “I am never naked,” I said, mustering my dignity. “Except in the shower. Always in the shower.”

  “What’s it like?” she asked.

  “What? Showers? How filthy are you?”

  “No. I mean being you.”

  It was truth-telling day. It was the sacred, truth-telling place, that’s what she’d said. “Shitty. Scary. Hard.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  I sat up. Put an arm around her, which was weird, because we never touched, but not so weird, because we’d already made out. “You should try it more often. Naked. People would like you better.”

  “No, they wouldn’t.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Screw them.”

  “Screw them,” she said, and guzzled another wine cooler—one, two, three long gulps and it was gone. I wanted to throw up again just watching her.

  “You know what you’re doing, right?” I meant with the booze; I meant with me; I meant with losing Craig and trying not to lose it entirely and holding her shit together so she could be the Nikki Drummond her whole world needed her to be.

  She grinned, kissed me on the forehead, a quick graze of lip and, so quick I might have imagined it, darting cat tongue. It was such a Lacey move that for just a second I lost the thread, closed my eyes and imagined the three of us together—Lacey, Nikki, and me—fingers threaded, eyes glazed, love buzzing through us, this sacred place with its dead trains and its ghosts a chaos engine to drive us all into the impossible.

  “I always know what I’m doing,” Nikki said, and her voice woke me up.

  I HAD TO GO HOME SOMETIME. When I did, my father was waiting up for me. He sat on the porch, mug in his hand, hiding behind his aviators. There was no reflection, in the dark.

  “I covered for you with your mother,” he said.

  “My hero.”

  “Hannah—” He leaned in. “Are you drunk?”

  “Jealous?”

  “Given the . . . circumstances, I won’t tell your mother, but—”

  “But? But what? I should be better behaved?”

  “If you want to talk about what you saw today . . .”

  “No.” I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want him to talk, certainly.

  “I can imagine what you thought. But it wasn’t that.”

  “Oh, really? What is it you imagine I think? Do I think you’re fucking her?”

  “Hannah!”

  “Do you think I’ve got that picture in my head? You and her, naked in some shitty motel? Or just doing it in the empty movie theater? Like some dirty old man at a porn movie. Except it’s in 3D?”

  “We can talk in the morning, when you’re feeling”—he cleared his throat—“more yourself. But please know, it was nothing like that.”

  “Of course it was nothing like that. You’re a fat old man,” I said, thinking, Hurt. Hurt more. “You can’t think you had a chance there.”

  “Lacey needed someone to talk to. That’s all. Swear to God.”

  I did believe him. Mostly. Almost entirely. He didn’t want to sleep with Lacey; he wanted to father her. He thought that made it better.

  I stepped around him. “You don’t get us both.”

  “You, uh . . . You won’t mention this to your mother, right, kid?”

  I’d loved it, once, when he called me that. I couldn’t remember why.

  “It never happened,” I said, and he must have thought I meant the day, and not everything before it and everything between us, because he looked relieved.

  I DIDN’T WAIT AROUND FOR LACEY to apologize. Never apologize—I remembered that much. I avoided her at school and my father at home. Girls got rashes and dizzy spells. Battle Creek cowered from the devil. October continued apace.

  Then, a week before Halloween, the thunderstorm. One last gasp of summer before the snows set in. The thunder sounded its summons, and even though I did not want to miss her, did not want to see her, did not want to want her, I gave in. The night felt unreal, the landscape lashed with wind and water. Like temporarily we’d slipped into another world, where nothing had to count.

  I waited until my parents were asleep, stole the car keys, drove to our lake. How surprised she would be, I thought, when she saw that I’d learned to drive without her.

  There was no question she would be there. For the storm, for me. There are irresistible forces, but there are no immoveable objects. The storm called; we always answered.

  She looked inhuman, spattered with mud, slick and shiny in the headlights, some wild, watery creature of the night.

  “You weren’t invited,” she said when I reached her. “You’re not welcome.”

  It’s a free country, I could have said, like a little kid, but I knew I was trespassing, that everything ours was actually hers. She’d gotten custody of the wild.

  I wasn’t welcome, but when I sat on the dock, she lowered herself beside me. We sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough that low voices could cross the void. Her cheek shimmered. Rain hung on her lashes. She dropped her head, hiding her eyes, exposing the soft, pale slope of her neck and shoulders. The tattoo was a black smear, ballpoint rivulets tracing dark veins down her spine.

  I touched the smudge that had once been a star. “Everything about you is a lie.”

  She raised her head just enough to show her smile. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Then she rag-dolled down again. “I know what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that with him.”

  “You don’t know what I’m thinking. Not anymore.”

  She only laughed.

  “You’ve got to quit with this devil stuff, Lacey.”

  “What are you worried about? What are they going to do to me? Drown me in a well? Exorcise me?”

  “Expel you, for one.”

  “Ooh, scary.”

  “And, I don’t know. What are you going to do if someone really gets hurt?”

  “How could anyone getting hurt be my problem? You don’t actually think I’m doing something to them?” Lacey shook herself like a dog. The spray was colder than the rain.

  “You know this town, Lacey.”

  “And this is your problem how?”

  She had me there.

  “I’d save your worry for yourself,” Lacey said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Something bad is coming.”

  “Is that supposed to be a prophecy?” I said. “Or, what? A threat?”

  “Dex—” She breathed. Our shoulders rose and fell together. In, out. Slow, steady. Breathe, Dex. Breathe, Lacey. “I want you safe, Dex. That’s all I want.”

  Nikki would have said she was jealous. That she needed me to need her, no matter how much it hurt.

  “It wasn’t about you, this thing with your dad,” Lacey said. “And the Nikki thing, that’s not about you, either.”

  “Yeah, of course, it’s about whatever mysterious secret conspiracy you can’t let me in on. I got that.”

  “What’s between me and Nikki . . . it’s about Craig.”

  “You say that like it means anything. Like I’m supposed to pretend it’s an answer when we both know it’s not.”

  I didn’t actually expect it would make her explain herself; nothing could make Lacey do what she didn’t want to.

  She said it quietly. “She thinks it’s my fault.”

  All the little ways Nikki had tried to turn me against Lacey, the way she’d taken a razor blade, ever so carefully, to my faith in her, shaving it away in impossibly thin slices until there was almost nothing left—all that time, she’d said nothing of this.

  Maybe, I thought, it was just another lie. But that wasn’t Lacey’s way. Lacey lied with
silence.

  “Go ahead.” She sounded ancient with exhaustion, like there was nothing left to do but wait for bones to crumble to dust. “Ask me if it was. My fault.”

  I shivered, and wiped the rain from my forehead. The lake water danced, leaping for the clouds.

  “It wasn’t all bad, was it, Dex?”

  I couldn’t lie in a storm. “None of it was bad.” I took her hand. There was no thought behind it, just bodily need, to press our slippery skin together. To hang on. “Say it, Lacey. Whatever it is. Make it better.” She was the witch, wasn’t she? I willed her: Summon the words.

  She squeezed. “Let’s start fresh, Dex. Fuck the past.”

  I didn’t see how she could say it when the past was everything. The past was where Dex and Lacey lived. If she erased that, there would be nothing left of us.

  “I never tried to hide you away,” Lacey said. “I never kept you a secret.” Somehow we were talking about Nikki again. I didn’t want her there, between us. “People only keep secrets when they’re ashamed.”

  “You keep plenty of secrets.”

  “But you were never one of them, Dex.”

  I couldn’t say it made no difference.

  “Miss me?” she asked.

  “You’re right here.”

  Lacey took my face in her hands. Her fingers were spindlier than I remembered. Everything about Lacey, I realized, had become more angular. Her collarbone jutted out; her shoulders and elbows looked sharp enough to cut.

  “You really don’t,” she said, wonder in her voice.

  My chest hurt. I couldn’t speak with her fingertips burning against my chin and cheek and lip. When I didn’t correct her, she launched herself off the dock and into the lake.

  I screamed her name.

  Splashes in the dark. The familiar laugh. Thunder. “Come on in!” she shouted. “The water’s fine.”

  “It’s a fucking lightning storm!”

  “Still a coward,” she shouted, and disappeared into the black.

  Those long seconds of still water and empty night, nothing but rain and lightning and me, and Lacey somewhere beneath; seconds and seconds waiting for her to surface, gasping and laughing and alive.

  There was time to wonder: Whether she could be trusted to save herself. Whether I could. Dive into dark water, impenetrable as sky. Weightless, kicking down and down, reaching for something limbed and heavy sinking to muddy bottom. Lacey would fight me, that was Lacey’s way, pull at my hair, climb up my body, so desperate for surface, for air, for life, that she would drag us both down.

  I stood at the edge of the dock, heels on the wood, toes hanging over air, willing myself to jump.

  The lake was endless dark. And there she was, floating moon of a face. Another game. Now we both knew who had won, because there she was in the water, and here I was on the shore.

  Inside the car it was warm and dry, enough so that I was tempted to curl up in the front seat and sleep. Instead I started the engine and left her there, with her water and her storm, knowing the lightning would never dare strike.

  SHE GOT IN MY HEAD. That Friday, when Nikki called me to bitch about the sleepover she’d been suckered into throwing, the tedious effort of putting on a happy face for her supposed friends and said, “I’m tired of all this crap, wish you could just come over and watch bad movies,” I broke our unspoken agreement and said, “Well, I could.”

  “Could what?”

  “Come over. Watch bad movies, or whatever.”

  “I told you, I can’t get out of this party.”

  She wasn’t so stupid; she was making me spell it out. “No, I mean, I could come to the party.”

  “Oh, Hannah, you know you would hate that. Like, actively, puke your guts out. You hate those bitches.”

  “So do you.”

  “And trust me, if I could run away to your place and let the animals take over the zoo, I would, but my mother would kill me if one of them peed on the carpet.”

  I was lying on my bed, watching the ceiling, counting the cracks, trying not to care.

  “You remember that pool party this summer,” she said. “A fucking train wreck.”

  When I didn’t answer, she added, “And the other party.”

  Now we’d both crossed a line.

  There were seventy-two cracks, and also a yellowed patch in the corner where something must have been dripping from a hidden pipe. If the ceiling collapsed, I wondered, would it kill me, a blanket of plaster and dust smothering me in the night? Or would I wake up coated in asbestos, wondering why I could see the sky?

  “Why aren’t you saying anything, Hannah? Tell me you understand I’m doing you a favor.”

  “Sure. Thank you.”

  “You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”

  “I’m not being weird.”

  “Good. Don’t. Now you tell me something. What tells of Hannah Dexter’s excellent adventure?” She affected a Keanu drawl. “Did you have a most awesome week? Or totally bogus?”

  “I talked to Lacey.”

  There was a hissing on the line. It was the bad connection, but it was too easy to imagine Nikki herself, reverting to snake. She breathed out the word. “Fuck.”

  “It was fine.”

  “No wonder you’re being so fucking weird. Please tell me you’re not feeling sorry for her.”

  “She said something about you and her,” I said, which was almost true. “And Craig.”

  The snake uncoiled, struck.

  “You talked to Lacey about Craig? You talked to Lacey about Craig?” She was yelling, and Nikki never yelled. “About what I’ve told you? Things I’ve never told anyone? How could you even think that was okay?”

  “I didn’t! I wouldn’t!”

  I protested; I swore I would never break her confidence, that Lacey had asked nothing and told even less, that it’s not like I had anything real to tell. I couldn’t ask her, not then, why she would blame Lacey for anything; I could only say I was sorry. She hung up on me.

  On TV, this was the moment to throw the phone across the room, and so I did and felt like a fool.

  So did she, she said, when she called back an hour later. “That was unfair of me. I’m a little sensitive about . . . you know.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I know you would never tell Lacey anything. Right?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t.”

  “And I’ve been thinking about this sleepover party crap. You should come—I mean, if you really want to. It’s going to be totally lame, and you’re going to hate me for inviting you, but at least it’ll be more fun for me.”

  “You actually mean it?”

  “I don’t do things I don’t mean, Hannah. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

  I GOT THERE AT NINE, as I’d been told, but I was the last to arrive. I’d cobbled together an outfit from the Nikki-approved corner of my closet, sleeveless velour shirt in forest green, black cardigan with flared sleeves, a gray choker. I wore vanilla-scented perfume and Gorilla Grape–flavored Lip Smackers. We would all taste the same in the dark.

  Mrs. Drummond fluttered a hand toward the basement. “The girls are downstairs.”

  The girls: lazy cats sprawled across couches and sleeping bags, all smiles and claws, same as they were at school, same as they’d been since kindergarten, same as I remembered from the party I couldn’t remember.

  The girls: Paulette Green, who no one much liked but everyone tolerated because her parents had a secret patch of pot in their vegetable garden and enthusiastically believed in pharmaceutically raising the consciousness of their daughter and her friends. Sarah Kaye, whose father had multiple sclerosis and never left the house. Kaitlyn Dyer, the sweetheart everyone loved, even me, because she was short enough to be tossed around, short and bouncy and seemingly harmless, who was such a klepto she’d tried to steal the prom fund, and who’d gotten away with super-secret double probation because when the school tried to expel her, her parents had threaten
ed to sue. Melanie Herman, who was sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. Allie Cantor, who had herpes, and would forever.

  I knew these things about them because Nikki had told me, and because she told me, I trusted her. Forgetting, eventually, that they weren’t her secrets. That the girls had trusted her, too.

  The girls were laughing at something on TV, and the something was me.

  Me, unconscious and drooling in the dark. Shadows, then faces, grainy on the screen, grainy in a way I recognized. That was Nikki’s father’s video camera, the one she loved so much. That was Melanie and Andy and Micah. That was a voice, in the dark, shrieking “Weekend at Bernie’s!” as brawny arms hoisted me up, danced me around, floppy and bare.

  “Slut,” someone said, and a hand reached into the frame, carved a Sharpie across my stomach, S-L-U-T, then made a smiley face out of a nipple.

  Girls’ laughter on the TV; girls’ laughter in the basement. Freeze-frame, rewind, fast-forward, play.

  “She wants it,” a voice said off camera, and on-screen, Andy Smith lowered himself over the rag doll, ground against her, hip to hip, chest to chest, tongue slurped up her cheek, then down her sternum, then ringing the smiley face, round and round it goes.

  “Take off her panties,” a voice said.

  “Slip in a finger,” a voice said. “Make her wet.”

  “See? She wants it,” a voice said. “She’s dripping with it.”

  “Make her suck it,” a voice said. “She wants to taste it.”

  Different hands, different fingers and tongues. But always the same voice. Always obeyed. And the Dex doll did whatever they made it do.

  Nikki loved to direct.

  “Here comes the gross part!” sweetheart Kaitlyn giggled in the basement as vomit trickled out of the girl on-screen, and that was how I knew they’d watched it before, knew it by heart.

  On-screen there were groans and retching sounds, and Melanie said, “There goes the boner,” and Nikki’s voice said you can get it back and don’t be a pussy and we can’t stop now and then there was a flashing red battery light and fade to black.

  Maybe I made some kind of noise.

  Maybe Nikki had always known.

  Of course she had known.