Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  Nothing came out.

  Lacey took my hand. She leaned against me, touched her head to mine. “We’ll work on it.”

  The next morning, Nikki Drummond found a bloody tampon stuffed through the vent of her locker. She cornered me in the girls’ bathroom that afternoon, hissing what the fuck is wrong with you as we washed our hands and tried not to look at each other in the mirror.

  “Today, Nikki?” And then I did look at her, the Gorgon of Battle Creek, and I didn’t turn to stone. “Not a single fucking thing.”

  LACEY

  Me Before You

  IF YOU REALLY WANT TO know everything, Dex—and for what it’s worth, I’m pretty fucking sure your eyes are bigger than your stomach on that one—you should know that, before it all started, I was like you. Maybe not exactly like, not so willfully oblivious that I’d forgotten what I was trying to ignore, but close enough.

  We lived by the beach.

  No, that’s another of those pretty lies, the kind I tell you, the kind real estate developers and sleazy travel agents shill to gullible cheapskates, the kind the local founding fathers sold themselves on when they named their shit sprawl of gas stations and strip malls Shore Village, even though it was a twenty-minute drive from Jersey’s least attractive beach. We lived by a Blockbuster and an off-brand burger joint and a vacant lot that drunks used on Sunday mornings to puke up their Saturday nights. We lived alone, just the two of us, except it was mostly just the one of us. Between waitressing and groupie-ing, boozing and fucking, Loretta didn’t have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn’t notice.

  Poor Lacey, you’re thinking. Poor, unloved Lacey, with her trash mother and deadbeat dad, and this is why I don’t tell you these things, because for you everything is a fairy tale or a Lifetime movie, Technicolor or black-and-white, and I don’t need you imagining me in some sulfurous pit of trailer-trash hell. I don’t need your Oh, Lacey, that must have been so hard for you or Oh, Lacey, what do food stamps look like and how does neglect smell or, worst of all, Oh, Lacey, don’t worry, I understand, I have my pretty little house and my father knows best and my picture-perfect fucking sitcom life, but deep down we’re totally the same.

  I made do with what I had, and what I had was the smell of the ocean when the wind was right, and the beach itself, when I could thumb a ride. I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.

  Mine was a nineteen-year-old dropout with greaser hair and a James Dean jacket, squatting in the empty apartment beneath ours, because his mother was the super and had given him the key. He read Kerouac, of course. Or maybe he didn’t actually read it; maybe he just strategically spread it across his lap while he napped in one of the crappy metal chairs he’d set up in the vacant lot, his own personal tanning zone. He definitely didn’t read Rilke or Nietzsche or Goethe or any of the other moldy paperbacks we passed back and forth while I coughed down his cherry vodka and he taught me how to smoke. He was too lazy to make it past the first chapters of most of them, but I can believe he made it through the Kerouac, because Jack spoke his language, his druggy, pretentious, wastrel nympho native tongue.

  His name was Henry Schafer, but he had me call him Shay, and don’t get me wrong, Dex, even then, fifteen and swoony, I didn’t think it was love. Love was the stack of books piling up in my room, maybe, and the bootlegs he brought me; it was sailing down the Schuylkill in his beat-up Chevy, Philly on the horizon; it was South Street and head shops and smoky nights in a shitty back room listening to slam poetry; it was the heat of flesh the first time I dropped acid, salty skin when I licked my own palm. Love was not what Shay had me do to him in my mother’s bedroom while she was off trying to fuck Metallica; it wasn’t a sticky glob of him in my mouth or the pain of a finger up my ass; it certainly wasn’t finding him with his tongue in his girlfriend’s ear and then pretending, the next night, that I’d assumed a girlfriend all along, that of course I’d understood what this was and wasn’t, that there was no harm and no foul and no reason he couldn’t keep using me to kill time while she was busy, and yes, I should be grateful that he’d always used a condom, what other proof did I need that he was thinking of me.

  This isn’t what you want to hear. You don’t want to hear that I studied those books, at least at first, to impress him. That I listened to Jane’s Addiction and the Stone Roses because he told me that’s what people like us should do, and when he asked me whether the baby’s breath of hair on his upper lip looked cool, I told him it did, even though I thought his girlfriend was right, that it made his mouth look like a peripubescent pussy. He spent that night with me and not her, and that’s what mattered, and still, Dex, that doesn’t mean I thought it was love.

  I liked him best when he was sleeping. When the lights were out and he was curled into me, kissing my neck in his dreams. Bodies can be anyone, in the dark.

  That was before I turned sixteen, before my mother’s season of rebirth, born again into the loving arms of AA and then again into the Bastard and his Lord. That was the year I discovered no one gave a shit about how many classes I skipped as long as I still scraped through tests with a C-plus and, when I did bother to show, did so in tank tops that erred on the side of boobalicious, a tactic that also proved effective when my mother would put on a Bon Jovi album, spin the dial up to ear-shattering, sing and twirl and drink along until our landlord showed up to whine about volume and rent. That was also the year he started slapping my ass instead of hers, and she stopped noticing me, except for the nights she would sneak home late, sticky with someone else’s sweat, crawl into my bed and whisper that I was all she had and she was all I needed, and I would pretend to be asleep.

  Life with Shay was better, if only marginally. I thought maybe we would run away together. Fuck his girlfriend. We would be Kerouac and Cassady, dance wild across the heartland, sip the Pacific, drive for the sake of driving. I believed we both understood that there, any there, would always be better than here, just like I believed that he’d dropped out of high school because true intelligence can’t be contained, that he let his parents support him because he was writing a novel and true art demanded sacrifice. I showed him some crap poetry, and I believed him when he said it was good.

  Shay doesn’t matter. Shay was a gateway drug, a cheap glue-sniffing high on the pathway to transcendence. Shay was like something ordered out of a catalog: Of course he quoted Allen Ginsberg, of course he got stoned to the Smiths, of course he smoked cloves and wore black eyeliner and had a glass-blowing girlfriend named Willow who’d made him a Valentine’s Day bong. Shay only matters because of the day we camped out in his friend’s attic studio a block from the Schuylkill, and after we got good and stoned, someone turned off the Phillies game and turned on 91.7 and there he was.

  Kurt.

  Kurt screaming, Kurt raging, Kurt in agony, Kurt in bliss. “Fucking pseudo-punk poseurs,” Shay said, and reached over to turn it off, and when I said, “Don’t, please,” he only laughed. It took me another week to find the song again and then steal a copy of Bleach and another few weeks after that to fumigate Shay out of my life, but that was the moment he went from mattering a little to not at all.

  After that, it was like they say about love: Falling. A gravitational inevitability. Even Shitbag Village had one decent record store, with a giant bin of discounts and bootlegs, and it only took thirty bucks and some tongue wrestling with the walking zit behind the counter to get what I needed. Then I closed myself into my room and, except for periodic forays back to the record store and one very inconvenient move to the middle of nowhere, spent that year and the next one catching up: the Melvins, because that was Kurt’s favorite band, and Sonic Youth, because they’re the ones who got Kurt his big deal; the Pixies, because once you knew anything about grunge, you knew that was where it all came from; Daniel Johnston, because Kurt said so and because the guy was in a mental hospita
l so I figured he could use the royalties; and of course bootleg Bikini Kill, for some righteous riot grrrl rage, and Hole, because you got the feeling that if you didn’t, Courtney would come to your house and fuck you up.

  Then, like Kurt knew exactly what I’d need when I needed it, there was Nevermind. I barricaded myself in until I knew every note, beat, and silence—cut school for the purposes of a higher education.

  I loved it. Loved it like Shakespearean sonnets and Hallmark cards and all that shit, like I wanted to buy it flowers and light it candles and fuck it gently with a chainsaw.

  I’m not saying I go around doodling Mrs. Kurt Cobain on my notebooks or that I, like, ohmygod, imagine myself showing up on his doorstep in black lace panties and a trench coat. For one thing, Courtney would gouge my eyes out with barbed wire. For another, I know what’s real and what’s not, and real is not me fucking Kurt Cobain.

  But: Kurt. Kurt with his watery blue eyes and his angel hair, the halo of stubble and the way the rub of it would burn. Kurt, who sleeps in striped pajamas with a teddy bear to keep him company, who frenched Krist on national TV to fuck with the rednecks back home and wore a dress on Headbangers Ball just because he could, who has enough money to buy and smash a hundred top-line guitars but likes a Fender Mustang because it’s a cheap piece of crap you have to abuse as much as you love if you want it to play nice. Rock god, sex god, angel, saint: Kurt, who always looks at you from the side, from beneath that golden curtain of hair, looks at you like he knows all the bad things scuttling around inside. Kurt’s voice, and how it hurts. I could live and die inside that voice, Dex. I wanted to crawl inside it, soft and razor raw at the same time, his voice cutting me bloody, warm and slippery and alive. I don’t need Kurt—the real living, breathing Courtney-screwing Kurt—to throw me down on the bed and brush his hair out of his eyes and lay his naked body on mine, miles of translucent skin glowing white. I don’t need that Kurt, because I have his voice. I have the part of him that matters. That Kurt, I own. Like he owns me.

  I know you don’t like him, Dex. It’s cute how you try to fake it, but I see you glaring at his poster, like some jealous boyfriend. Which is ironic. And unnecessary. Because the way I felt when I found Kurt? That’s how it felt when I found you.

  DEX

  Story of Us

  THE BOOTS WERE STURDY BLACK leather, rubber heel, yellow-threaded sole, eight eyelets with ragged laces, classic Docs exactly like Lacey’s, except these were mine.

  “Really?” I was afraid to touch them. “Not really.”

  “Really.” She looked like she’d shot me a bear, slinging it over her shoulder and carrying it single-handedly back to our cave to roast and feed on, and that was how it felt. Like sustenance. “Try them on.”

  After two weeks, I knew Lacey well enough not to ask where they’d come from. She was prone to liberation, as she called it, a redistribution of goods to wherever they most wanted to belong. These boots, she said, wanted to belong to me. To Dex.

  Here, then, was Dex: frizzy hair chopped short and sprung free, beige streaked with blue, neck ringed by black leather choker, thrift store glasses with Buddy Holly frames, flannel shirts preowned and a size too big layered over checkered baby-doll dresses and scarlet tights and now, perfectly, black combat stomping boots. Dex knew about grunge and Seattle and Kurt and Courtney, and what she didn’t know, she could fake. Dex cut class, drank wine coolers, ignored homework in favor of Lacey-work—studying guitar riffs, deciphering philosophy and poetry; waiting, always waiting, for Lacey to realize her mistake. Hannah Dexter wanted to follow the rules. Never lied to her parents because she had no need. Was afraid of what people thought of her; didn’t want people to think of her, lest they register her big nose, her weak chin, her gut her hips her brows her thighs her chewed nails her flat ass her alternately oozing and flaking and ever-erupting skin. Hannah wanted to be invisible. Dex wanted to be seen. Dex was a rule breaker, a liar, a secret keeper; Dex was wild, or wanted to be. Hannah Dexter had believed in right and wrong, an ordered world of justice. Dex would make her own justice. Lacey would show her how.

  It wasn’t transformation, Lacey told me. It was revelation. I was no good at masks, Lacey told me. I wasn’t built for a world that insisted I hide who I really was. I’d been hiding so long I’d forgotten where to look for myself. Lacey would find me, she promised. Ready or not, here I come.

  “I know, you’re thinking I’m the most magnanimous person you’ve ever met,” Lacey said as I laced up the boots. “You’re thinking how lucky you are that I deign to share my impeccable taste with you.”

  “It’s like I won the friendship sweepstakes,” I said, sarcasm being the safest route to truth. “I fall asleep every night whispering my thanks to the universe.”

  This was the first time she’d been to my house. I would happily have postponed it indefinitely, not because there was anything so revealing but because there wasn’t. Our house was lush and half-assed, stuffed with all the leftovers my father’d grown tired of: an unfinished jungle gym, stacks of unframed photos and unread books, unused appliances bought on midnight infomercial whims, unhung “native masks” from an ill-advised sojourn in anthropological sculpting. My mother’s detritus was devoted to self-discipline and improvement, calendars and double-underlined Post-it notes, forgotten to-do lists, meditation and relaxation pamphlets, aerobics videos. Home was two homes in one, bridged by a sea of unclaimed clutter, ashtrays no one had used since my grandfather died, needlepoint throw pillows, tacky souvenirs from trips we barely remembered taking, all of it enclosed by a moat of browning weeds and an eyesore of an overgrown vegetable garden whose inception each of my parents blamed on the other. Beige-and-tan-striped wallpaper, my grandparents’ hand-me-down coffee table layered with Time-Life books, posters of exotic landscapes we’d never seen. Through Lacey’s eyes, I could see the house for what it was: a generic split-level of quiet desperation, ground zero for a family with no particular passion for anything but living as much as possible like the people they saw on TV.

  Lacey had told me of quantum incompatibilities, qualities so opposed to each other that the very existence of one eliminated all possibility of the other. I didn’t understand it any better than the other brain-knotting theories she liked to regurgitate, convinced that knowing the universe in all its weird particularity was key to rising above what she called our middlebrow zombie hell, but I could recognize Lacey’s presence in my bedroom as its ultimate illustration, Lacey’s combat boots crushing my turquoise shag carpeting, her eyes alighting briefly on the stuffed turtle I still kept tucked between my pillows, Hannah Dexter’s past and future in a doomed collision, matter and antimatter collapsing into a black hole that would consume us both. Translation: I was pretty sure that once Lacey saw me in my natural habitat, she would disappear.

  “Your parents have a liquor cabinet, right?” she said. “Let’s check it out.”

  There was no lock on it, of course. There was no question that I could be trusted around my parents’ dusty quantities of brandy, scotch, and cheap wine. Maybe it was the boots that gave me the courage to clomp downstairs and show Lacey the dark crevice behind the abandoned board games and unread Time-Life books where the bottles lived.

  “Scotch or rum?” I asked, and hoped it sounded like I knew the difference.

  “Little from column A, little from column B.” She showed me how to pour out an inch or two from each bottle, replacing the liquid with water. We mixed a little of everything together in a single glass, then, one at a time, took a foul swig.

  “Juice of the gods,” Lacey managed when she’d finished choking.

  I swallowed again. It was the good kind of burn.

  The carpet in the family room was a harsh orange-and-brown-striped shag that, until Lacey settled onto it, stretching into a snow angel and pronouncing it not bad, I’d found repulsive. Now, with her approval and a boozy, warm buzz, it seemed almost luxurious. I lay beside her, arms stretched till our fingertips touched, and mari
nated in the juice of the gods and the hot air gushing from the heating vent. The dissonant chords of Lacey’s latest bootleg washed over us, and I tried to hear in it what she did, the foghorn promise of a ship that would carry us both away.

  “We should start a club,” Lacey said.

  “But clubs are lame.” I said it like a question.

  “Exactly!”

  “So . . .”

  “I’m not talking about a chess club, Dex. Or, like, some kind of Let’s read to old people so we can get into college thing. I’m talking a club club. You know, like in books. Tree houses and secret codes and shit.”

  “Like in Bridge to Terabithia!”

  “Let’s pretend I know what that is and say . . . yes.”

  “But without someone dying.”

  “Yes, Dex, without someone dying. Well . . . at least not someone in the club.”

  “Lacey.”

  “Joke! Think blood oath, not blood sacrifice.”

  “So what would we do? A club has to do something.”

  “Other than sacrifice virgins, you mean.”

  “Lacey!”

  “Clubs are stupid because they’re not about anything that matters. But ours would be. We’d be . . . the ontology club.”

  “A club to study the nature of existence?”

  “See, Dex, this is why I love you. Think there’s a single other person in this crap town who knows what ontology means?”

  “Statistically?”

  “Come on, Dex, you can say it. It’s not going to hurt.”

  “Say what?”

  “That’s why you love me, too.”

  “That’s why I . . .”

  “Love me, too.”

  “Love you, too.”

  “Clearly I’ll be club president. You can be vice, and secretary, and treasurer.”

  “And no other members.”

  “Obviously. Think about it, Dex. We could read Nietzsche together, and Kant, and Kerouac, and figure out why people do what they do and why the universe has something instead of nothing and whether there’s a god, and sneak into the woods and blast Kurt as loud as we can and close our eyes and try to, I don’t know, connect with the life force or whatever. Bonus points if it pisses people off.”