Girls on Fire

  “So basically, keep doing what we’re doing?”

  “Basically.”

  “No regular meetings or anything.”

  “Nope.”

  “And no tree house.”

  “Do you know how to build a tree house?”

  “And the blood-oath thing?”

  “Hello, AIDS?”

  “I don’t think you can actually—”

  “The blood oath is a metaphor, Dex. Keep up.”

  “So not an actual club, then.”

  “No, Dex, not an actual club. That would be lame.”

  If we had started a club for real, ontology would have taken a backseat to Lacey’s preferred activity: dissecting the evil exploits of our shared enemy, Nikki Drummond. For years I’d hated her on principle, but after the incident—which was how we spoke of it, the better to forget words like stain and blood and cunt—I hated her in concrete particulars that Lacey was eager to help me parse. “What kind of person needs a reason to hate the devil?” she liked to say, when I asked what had put Nikki in her sights in the first place, and I was left to conclude that Lacey hated Nikki because Nikki so plainly hated me.

  “She’s a sociopath,” Lacey said now, bicycling her feet in the air. “No emotions. Probably kills small animals, just for fun.”

  “You think she’s got her own little pet cemetery in the backyard? Rabbits with their tails pulled out, that kind of thing?”

  “Imagine the possibilities,” Lacey said. “We could exhume the bodies. Give little Thumper some justice. Show the world what she really is.”

  This was our recurring theme: If only we could expose Nikki’s rotting heart. If only the world knew the truth. If only we had the ammunition for a frontal assault.

  The day before, we’d slouched behind her in the auditorium’s ratty seats, enduring an assembly about satanic cults, the third so far that year. No one in Battle Creek had been foolish enough to invoke the Antichrist since Craig’s death—that is, at least not since the November morning when a gang of grieving jocks jumped Jesse Gorin, Mark Troslop, and Dylan Asp and strung them up by their ankles in a tree. I’d seen them up there, dangling over the school parking lot, we all had, three scrawny stoners stripped to socks and boxers, shivering in the snow. Punishment for satanizing half the churches in town on the same night Craig Ellison died; punishment for trying so hard to scare people, or for succeeding. A sacrificial offering to Nikki, their grieving goddess, and—even if the rumors were wrong, even if she hadn’t commanded it—she’d accepted it in kind. A thing like that in a place like this, people kept saying after they found Craig’s body in the woods, like it was impossible that anything so ugly could happen in our pretty backyard. But ugly things happened all the time in Battle Creek: Boys beat other boys bloody and tied them to branches while girls like Nikki pointed and laughed.

  After that, Jesse, Mark, and Dylan stopped chalking pentagrams on their shirts. They stopped bragging about how dangerous they were, stopped breaking into the bio lab to steal fetal pigs. A couple towns west of us, though, a few cows were found slaughtered under “ritualistic” circumstances; in another town to the east, a girl our age washed up on a riverbank, naked and blue and, in some way no one was willing to specify, defiled; here at home, Craig was still dead. Something was wrong with the children, the latest guest speaker said from the stage, and by the children he meant us. Something was wrong with the children, and so here we were, and here Nikki Drummond was, perched directly in front of us, shiny, pink-scrunchied ponytail defying anyone to suggest the something wrong might be her.

  “Did you hear she fucked Micah Cross in the teachers’ lounge?” Lacey whispered, just loud enough. Then looked at me, expectant.

  “I heard . . . it was Andy Smith.” This was the best I could come up with, and a clumsy lie—if Andy were any more obviously in the closet he’d be a pair of shoes—but Lacey nodded in approval.

  “That was the girls’ locker room,” she whispered.

  “Right. Hard to keep track.”

  “Imagine how she feels.”

  “Hard to imagine she feels at all.” It was easier with Lacey there, finding the right thing to say—and doing so in the moment, not days later in the shower, when there was no one to appreciate it but the mildewed tiles and the face in the mirror.

  “Not that I think there’s anything wrong with a healthy sex life,” Lacey whispered.

  “Of course not.”

  “But personally, I think it’s kind of sad to try to fuck your way to popularity.” She was so good at it, acting cold-blooded. The secret of pretending to be someone else, she’d told me, was that you didn’t pretend. You transformed. To defeat a monster, you had to embody one.

  “Tragic,” I said.

  “What’s tragic is trying to fuck yourself into forgetting you’re a miserable bitch.”

  The perfect head never moved. Nikki Drummond wasn’t the kind of girl who flinched. It only added to the fun of trying to make her.

  That afternoon at my house, exactly drunk enough, we lay on the carpet and fantasized about using hidden cameras to make undercover recordings that would expose Nikki’s sins to her doting parents and adoring teachers and every drooling moron lined up to take Craig’s place in her pants. Between that and Kurt and the way the ceiling spun when I stared at it too hard, I didn’t notice the car pull into the driveway or the front door slam or my father’s loafers padding across the rug or much of anything until he leaned over us and spoke.

  “Something wrong with the couch, kids?” He took off his sunglasses and squinted down at us. My father blamed allergies for his sensitive, red-rimmed eyes; my mother blamed hangovers. I thought he just liked how well the knockoff Ray-Bans paired with his goatee. “No, let me guess, you’ve fallen and you can’t get up.”

  “You’re not supposed to be home.”

  I sat up too fast and had to immediately lie down, and that was when the panic crept in, because my father was here and Lacey was here and we were drunk, or at least I was drunk, and he would certainly notice, and there would be a scene, the kind of ugly, uncool scene that would mark me as too much trouble and drive Lacey away for good.

  But somewhere beneath that, secret and still, animal eyes glowing in the dark: I was drunk, and it was good, and if anyone didn’t like it, fuck them.

  My father took Lacey’s hand and hauled her to her feet. “I’m guessing you’re the Pied Piper?”

  “What?” I said.

  Lacey repossessed her hand and blushed.

  “That’s you, isn’t it? Leading my daughter astray in the musical wilds?”

  “What?” I said, again.

  “I’d like to think my purposes are less nefarious,” Lacey said, past me, to him. “And my taste in music significantly more impressive.”

  My father grinned. “If you can call it music.” And just like that, they were off, Lacey leaping to the defense of her god, my father throwing out phrases like new wave, post-punk pop avant-garde, the two of them batting names back and forth I’d never heard, Ian Curtis and Debbie Harry and Robert Smith.

  “Joey Ramone couldn’t lick Kurt Cobain’s shoes.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him live.”

  Her eyes popped. “You saw the Ramones live?”

  “What?” I said again, and fought the sudden urge to climb onto my father’s lap, wheeze whiskey breath in his face, force him to see me.

  “Saw them?” He gave Lacey a patented Jimmy Dexter smile. “I opened for them.”

  “You were in a band?” I said. No one was listening. No one was offering me a gallant hand, either, so I pulled myself upright, and tried not to puke.

  “You opened for the Ramones?” That was Lacey’s Kurt voice; that was awe.

  “Well . . . not technically.” Another smile, an aw shucks shrug. “We played in the parking lot before the Ravers, and they opened for the Ramones. It got us into the after-party, though. Did a shot with Johnny.”

  “Lacey was in a b
and,” I said. Lacey had told me all about it, the Pussycats, like the cartoon, all girls, guitar straps slung over their shoulders, Lacey tonguing the mic, sweaty hair matted to her face, crowd-surfing on a wave of love. Never again, she’d told me, never here in Battle Creek, never anywhere. “The fact that we’ve even heard of grunge all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?” Lacey had said. “It’s like those stars, the ones that explode so far away that by the time you get the news, they’ve been dead for a million years. We’re too late. We missed it. Only the truly pathetic pretend to be artists by making something that’s already made. And I do not intend to be pathetic.”

  I was jealous of Lacey’s band, of those girls who’d been her Pussycats, but glad, too, because I couldn’t be in any band, obviously, and if she’d started a new one it would have carried her away from me.

  “Tell him about your band, Lacey.”

  But she didn’t want to tell him, or didn’t hear me. “What was he like?” she said. Breathed the name. “Johnny Ramone.”

  “Drunk. And he smelled like dog shit, but man, he gave me one of his guitar picks and I thought I’d build a shrine to that thing.”

  “Can I see it?” Lacey asked.

  My father reddened, slightly. “Lost it on the way home.”

  I cleared my throat. “When were you in a band? And how did I not know this?”

  He shrugged. “Long time ago, kid. Different life.”

  My mother listened to music only in the car, and then only to Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton, and, if she was feeling frisky, the Eagles. My father, when he drove, alternated between sports radio and silence. We had a stereo no one ever used and a box of records in the basement so warped with damp they’d been deemed unfit for the previous year’s yard sale. For the Dexter family, music was a nonissue. Except that now my father was talking about it the way Lacey did, like music was his religion, and it turned him into a stranger.

  “How did a guy like you spawn someone so musically illiterate?” she asked.

  “I ask myself that every day,” he said.

  “No, I don’t buy it. You see what this means, Dex? It’s in you somewhere. You just needed me to help you get it out.”

  It was a generous assessment. Everyone knew I took after my mother: the beige and blotchy coloring, the stick up the ass. But if Lacey saw him in me, there must have been something to see.

  “Dex? That supposed to be you, kid?” My father examined me, looking for evidence of her.

  “No offense, Mr. Dexter, but Hannah’s a shit name,” Lacey said.

  “Call me Jimmy. And no offense taken. It was her mother’s idea. I always thought it sounded like a little old lady.”

  Lacey laughed. “Exactly.”

  That my father never liked my name: This was another thing I hadn’t known. I’d thought he called me kid because he wanted to claim a piece of me no one else could.

  “But Dex? Yeah, I like that,” he said.

  Dex was supposed to be our secret, a code name for the thing that was growing between us and the person she was shaping me to be. But if Lacey was ready to introduce her to the world, I thought, she must have her reasons.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Dex. Spread the word.”

  “Your mother’s going to love this,” he murmured, and it was clear the thought of it pleased him as much as the name itself.

  “So, Jimmy, maybe you’d like to hear some real music,” Lacey said. “Dex has a copy of Bleach around here somewhere. At least she’d better.”

  He looked at me, clearly trying to read the stay or go in my face, but I couldn’t send a message I didn’t have.

  “Another time,” he said finally, slipping his sunglasses back on. “The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid is calling my name.” He paused on his way up the stairs. “Oh, and Dex, you might want to wash out that glass before your mother comes home.”

  So he had noticed, after all. And he was still on my side.

  “You didn’t tell me your dad was cool,” Lacey said once he was gone. It was like a benediction, and most of me was proud.

  AFTERNOONS AT MY PLACE BECAME, at Lacey’s instigation, a regular thing, and it was only a matter of time before my mother insisted we have “this Lacey” over for dinner, so she could see for herself this miracle worker who had her husband digging through the attic for his guitar and her daughter into what appeared to be a trucker’s castoff wardrobe.

  “Mom’s going to be all weird, isn’t she?” I said, as my father and I sorted through the stack of Publishers Clearing House stickers. My father was the family’s designated dreamer, the buyer of lottery tickets and keeper of an ever-growing list of inventions he’d never build. It was, he always said, why he’d never taken what my mother called a real job. Only make-your-own-hours employment—like his current gig managing Battle Creek’s only movie theater—afforded him the free time he needed to fulfill his yen for get-rich-quick scheming.

  This particular scheme had been our shared private ritual for years, since the days when I thought carefully licking those stamps and sealing the envelope with a lucky kiss might actually summon the oversized million-dollar check to our doorstep. I’d long since lost the slip of paper carefully inscribed with all the treasures I’d buy when I was rich, but I liked the mint chocolate chip ice cream that came along with the tradition, and the way my mother wasn’t part of it. There was music playing now, which wasn’t part of it, either, but my father said that the Cure was a universal cure for what ailed us. Wait till Lacey gets here, he said. She gets it.

  She was due in an hour. My mother had made lasagna, the one thing she knew how to cook.

  “Go easy on your mother, kid. I think one thing we can agree she’s not is weird.”

  He was right: Normal was her religion. She’d never implied that she wanted me to be popular—the impossibility of that probably spoke for itself—but she encouraged me, at every turn, to fit in, to be careful, to save my mistakes for later. “You’ll have more to lose when you’re older, but at least then you’ll have something left when you lose it,” she told me once while we were flipping through photo albums, old ones that showed her awkwardly jutting into adolescence, bulging in all the wrong places, only a single page turn between apple-cheeked college freshman and bleary-eyed mother with an infant on her caftanned hip, as if all the pages that should have been between had fallen out, and maybe that was how she felt about her life, that something had gone missing. “The younger you are, the easier it is to give everything away.”

  Dinner was a fright show. The four of us in the wood-paneled dining room huddled at one lonely corner of the long table we never used, pushing around burnt lasagna on chipped Kmart plates, my mother scowling every time a mist of garlic bread crumbs floated from Lacey’s mouth onto the plastic tablecloth, Lacey pretending not to notice, too busy fielding rapid-fire questions about her mother’s job and her stepfather’s church and her nonexistent college plans, each of them more excruciatingly conventional than the last, all of them humiliating enough—but nothing compared to the withering look on my mother’s face when I volunteered that I’d also been thinking about taking a year off after graduation, because, like Lacey said, college had been co-opted by a capitalist system only invested in producing more drones for its financial machine, and my mother said, “Stop showing off.”

  I wondered if mortification qualified as an excuse for justifiable homicide.

  Lacey said yes and no and please and thanks so much for the delicious and not at all overcooked and underseasoned food. Lacey said that small towns bred small-minded people and she was waging a one-woman war against shrinkage—two-woman now that she’d rallied me to her side. Lacey said she never accompanied her stepfather to church because religion was a destructive influence on impressionable masses and she refused to support any institution with a commitment to intellectual oppression, and when my mother, semiapostate granddaughter of a minister, suggested that it was the arrogant moral cowardice of youth that led us to dismiss t
hings we didn’t understand, Lacey said, And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, then said that accusing your enemies of ignorance was the coward’s way out of honest argument, which made my father laugh, at which point I began to seriously doubt whether any of us would make it out alive.

  “So how did you two crazy kids meet?” Lacey asked. “You seem like the type to have a good story.” Which was how I knew that Lacey, too, sensed things were running off the rails, because if there was anything my mother didn’t seem like, it was the type with a good story.

  Except that, of course, she did have one—and it was this one. Love at first sight, a story I’d always loved to hear, less because of the details than because of the way they liked to tell it together, and the way they looked at each other when they did, as if they were suddenly remembering that this was a life they’d chosen.

  My mother smiled. “It was shortly after college, and I was filling in, temporarily, at a subsidiary of my employer, an auto repair facility in town.”

  This was Julia Dexter–speak for dropping out of college when the financial aid ran dry and taking a crap paper-shuffling job that was supposed to last a summer, not a lifetime. My mother applied the same cardinal rule to autobiography she did to interior design: Accentuate the positive and hang a curtain over everything else.

  “It had been, to say the least, an unpleasant afternoon. I was looking forward to locking the doors and finishing my book in peace, when in strolls a gang of hooligans, smelling like an ashtray and dressed like they thought they were Bruce Springsteen.” She said it fondly, as she always did. “Your father was wearing this silly grin . . .”

  Here, always, she paused, so my father could jump in to say he was wasted, and she would then clarify that he wasn’t driving drunk, of course, his friend Todd was at the wheel, a teetotaler Christian they’d only befriended because he was always willing to drive. This time, though, my father said nothing.