Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  The man Lacey called the Bastard stood shorter and skinnier than I’d imagined, with wire-rimmed glasses and a graying military flattop. Lacey’s mother knelt before him in a white bra and panties, palms assuming prayer position, eyes on the Bastard’s black loafers.

  “God forgive me,” she said.

  “For being a drunk,” he prompted.

  “For being a drunk. For being weak. For—”

  “For giving in to the temptations of my whorish past.”

  “For giving in to temptations.”

  He toed her hard in the belly.

  “The temptations of my whorish past,” she corrected herself.

  I felt like I was watching TV.

  Lacey’s mother was crying. Somewhere beyond me, a baby echoed her.

  She tried to stand, but the Bastard pressed two fingers to her shoulder and shook his head. Her knees returned to the tile.

  The baby was screaming.

  “He needs me,” Lacey’s mother said.

  “Should’ve thought of that before.” The Bastard’s voice was so reasonable, as if they were sitting across the table from each other discussing a credit card bill. He was even dressed like an accountant, a pocket protector tucked neatly into his starched white shirt.

  “You won’t do with my son what you’ve done with your daughter,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “I’ll do better with James Junior.”

  “You’ll have some respect for yourself.”

  “I’ll have respect.”

  “No more of this garbage.”

  “No more,” she whispered.

  The baby cried.

  There was a touch on my shoulder, just gentle enough not to startle, or maybe I wasn’t startled because I knew, of course, Lacey would be there.

  “There’s a back way out through the kitchen,” Lacey whispered, though she didn’t have to: Our houses shared the same floor plan, escape route and all. I went first, sliding through the dark, any noise covered up by the baby’s increasingly unhinged screams. I had to tamp down an impulse to turn back for him, carry him and Lacey away, but of course he wasn’t my brother and Lacey was the one with car and license. I wasn’t in a position to rescue anyone.

  She eased the door shut behind us, and said nothing as we got into the car and peeled away. There was no music.

  “You want to go home,” she said finally, and I knew if I said yes, that’s what it would be. Final.

  I understood now: This was a test. Maybe the whole night had been a test. With Lacey, it was hard to tell whether events were unspooling of their own accord or under her behind-the-scenes machinations, but, I reminded myself, it was always safest to assume the latter.

  I was good at tests. I reached over to the Barbie recorder and hit play, feinting a head slam with each of Kurt’s downbeats. “Let’s go to the lake.”

  THE LAKE IN FEBRUARY, IN sleet and starshine. We had it to ourselves. Wind and water and sky and Lacey. Everything I needed.

  “Parents are bullshit,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Everyone’s bullshit but us,” I said.

  We called it our lake, but it was only ours the way everything was ours: because the world we created between the two of us was secret and wholly owned.

  We were creatures of water, she told me, and those don’t belong in the woods. It was the only explanation she ever offered for why we needed to stay away. Never the forest, always the lake, and that was fine with me. I couldn’t wait for it to get warmer, to watch her swim.

  She breathed water, she told me, and I could almost believe it was true.

  The sleet was light and oil slick, the kind that made you wonder about acid rain. Lacey preferred storms. A death-black sky, a sizzle in the air, that waiting, breath-holding feeling, like something was about to break. Sometimes we made it to the lake before the storm’s first bellow. We raised our faces to the rain, timed the gap between light and sound, one Mississippi and two and three. Until we knew the storm well enough to breathe with it, to beat with its rhythm, to know after the sky burned white how long to wait before opening our mouths and screaming into the thunder’s roar.

  But that was Lacey’s time. I liked it better in the quiet. The storm was like another person between us, angrier and more interesting than I could hope to be. It was best when we were alone.

  Lacey watched the water. It was different, in the dark. Fathomless. I imagined eyes glowing in the deep, teeth sharp, hunger and need. Things lurking. I imagined a siren song, a call in the night, Lacey and I answering, wading into icy waters, sucked down into the black.

  She scooped up a rock and threw it into the lake. “Fuck.”

  “Fuck,” I said, like I agreed, because whatever she meant by it, I did.

  I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter what her mother and her stepfather did with each other, that I understood they weren’t a part of Lacey, and Lacey was no part of them, had sprung fully grown, goddess-style, blooming in a field or melting from the sun. That other people were irrelevant to us; that they existed only for the pleasure of dismissing them, simulacra of consciousness, walking and talking and pretending at an inner life but hollow inside. Nothing like us. Lacey herself had taught me that, when she read us Descartes. You can only know your own insides, Lacey said. The only real, certified and confirmed, is you and me. I wanted to remind her what she’d taught me, that we could leave together, that life was only as cruel as you allowed it to be, that Battle Creek belonged to us by choice and we could choose to abandon it.

  I wanted to tell her that nothing I’d seen had scared me, that nothing had changed, but she already knew me well enough to hear a lie in my voice.

  I wanted, most of me wanted, to save her.

  Beneath that, though, there was a cold, shameful relief. I had come to need Lacey so much that it scared me. But if her life was this broken, if there was nothing beyond our closed circle but ugly mess, then it opened up the unthinkable possibility that Lacey needed something, too. That if I passed her tests, shaped myself to fit against her edges, that something could be me.

  “My father loved the water.” She found another rock and fired it hard at the lake. “He liked to take me to Atlantic City, when we lived in Jersey. There was this mechanical pony thing by the casino, and he’d leave me with, like, a bucket of quarters. Enough to ride all day.”

  “That’s a lot of pony riding.”

  “Seemed like heaven to me. You know what they say about girls and horses.” I could hear a little of the Lacey I knew peeking through, winking at me. “Also, I was an idiot.”

  “All six-year-olds are idiots.”

  “He promised one day he’d take me to ride a real pony. I guess there are these beaches in Virginia where they run wild in the sand? Just ponies everywhere, like you’re back in time or something.”

  “Chincoteague,” I said. I’d read Misty of Chincoteague eleven times.

  “Whatever. I don’t know, because we never went.”

  I could have told her that my father was the king of broken promises, that I knew all about disappointment, but I was afraid she’d tell me I knew fuck-all about anything, and she’d be right. “I’ve never been to the ocean,” I told her, and these were the magic words that brought her back.

  Lacey squealed. “Unacceptable!” She pointed at the car. “In.”

  For six hours, we drove. The Buick bumped and wheezed, the cassette player ate Lacey’s third-favorite bootleg, the crumpled AAA maps beaconed our way, and while I hovered over a suspiciously discolored toilet seat and then washed my hands with sickly gray soap, examining myself in the mirror for some clue that I’d become the kind of girl who lit out for the territories, some trucker tried to feel up Lacey in the Roy Rogers parking lot. We drove until the car swerved off the highway and into a parking lot gritty with sand, and there we were.

  The ocean was endless.

  The ocean beat and beat and beat against the shore. />
  We held hands and let the Atlantic wash over our bare feet. We breathed in salt and spray under the dawning sky.

  It was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Lacey gave that to me.

  “This is how I’d do it,” Lacey said, almost too quiet to hear under the surf. “I’d come out here at night, when the beach was empty, and I’d take an inflatable raft into the water. Then I’d hold on, and let it carry me out. Far enough that no one would ever find me. That I couldn’t change my mind. I’d bring my mother’s sleeping pills, and my Walkman, and a safety pin. And when I was out far enough that I couldn’t hear the waves breaking anymore, that the raft was just bobbing on the water and there was nothing but me and the stars? I’d do it. In order. The order matters. Pills first, then the safety pin, just a tiny hole in the raft, small enough that it would take some time. Then I’d put on the headphones, and lie down on the raft so I could see the stars and feel the water in my hair, and I’d let Kurt sing me home.”

  I was supposed to be the one who paid attention, the one who listened to the chaos of the world and understood—that, Lacey said, was the whole joy of me—but so often that year, Lacey talked and I didn’t hear her at all.

  “I could never go out there in the dark,” I said, and didn’t tell her how I would do it, even though I had decided, because Lacey said it was important to know. I would jump off something—something high enough that you would break on the way down. There was nothing like that in Battle Creek; there wasn’t even anything high enough for me to find out if I was scared of heights. Lacey thought I probably was. She said I seemed like the type.

  I didn’t want to be up there in the sky, seeing everything at once, not unless it was going to be the last time. Because then I wouldn’t be afraid. I would feel powerful, I thought, toes peeking over edge, this most precious thing entirely mine, to protect or destroy. If you did it that way, you’d have power, up to the very end.

  If I did it that way, at least before the end I could fly.

  We slept in the car, running the heater for as long as we dared, pressed together for warmth. For once Lacey let me pick the music—“within reason,” she said. We turned on R.E.M., because I liked the honey in the singer’s voice, and I liked that Lacey liked it, too. She curled up in the seat and I put my head on her shoulder. Right there in the parking lot, with the water watching, he sang us to sleep.

  When I woke up, the sky was gray and the horizon was on fire. Lacey was asleep. I padded barefoot back to the shoreline and stood in the water, needles of ice biting my ankles. The ocean looked kinder in the light, and I wished for Lacey’s raft so we could take it together, float into the sun.

  I didn’t hear her come up behind me, but I felt her squeeze my hand. I knew she would find me.

  “This is everything I need,” she said. “You’re everything. Just like I’m everything you need, right?” It was an incantation; it sealed us for life.

  “Everything,” I told her, a fire sale on my soul. Everything must go. I wanted her to swallow me whole.

  “Only us,” Lacey said.

  We would be orphans; we would be ghosts. We would disappear from the mundane world into one of our own making. We would be wild. We would be free. This was the promise we made to each other, and this, if nothing else, we would keep.

  LACEY

  If I Lied

  YOU SAY YOU WANT TO know. But you don’t, not really. You like me better as some mythical creature you dreamed up, a fucking forest sprite who only came to life because you closed your eyes and wanted it so bad. Maybe I’ve lied to you, Dex, but when it comes to the important things, I didn’t even have to bother because you never think to ask.

  LIES I’VE TOLD YOU?

  The smoking: I do it. Chimney-style, when you’re not around, a nicotine camel soaking it up to save for a rainy, Dex-filled day. Why do you think the car always smells like smoke? You think it’s the tobacco-stained ghost of the previous owner, breaking in at night just to puff at the windshield and blow smoke signals to the stars? No, either you knew or you didn’t want to.

  It wasn’t a lie the day I told you I didn’t smoke, because that day, I didn’t. And it wasn’t a lie that my grandma died of lung cancer, which is why I quit that day, the way I quit a couple months before that and twice the year before that. It didn’t take. Your Lacey, smart and strong, wouldn’t have hidden a pack under the mattress for emergencies, and wouldn’t, after a cold meat loaf dinner with the Bastard, slip the pack from under the mattress, stick her head out the window, and breathe hot smoke into the winter air. It almost didn’t seem to count, that first drag after quitting—it was cold; the smoke looked like a fog of breath. It would be my last one ever.

  The first drag is never the last one ever. Maybe I didn’t tell you because I liked having a secret. What’s mine is yours, that’s what we say. But it’s mine first.

  I smoke, and the scars are real. The one on my wrist I showed you that first day. The thing I said I did, before I took it back. That was real, too.

  Also, there was never any band. I was never some guitar-slinging rock goddess falling back from the stage and surfing a sea of blissed-out hands. You need me to be fearless. When you look at me I am fearless. But you’re not always there.

  How I did it, when I did it.

  With a knife. Lacey Champlain, in the bathtub, with a knife.

  That was after Jersey, after the Bastard, after Battle Creek and Nikki and Craig but still before you. Nikki and Craig, that’s more a lie of omission, but you’d probably say it still counts.

  I did it in the bathtub with a knife because that’s how they do it in the movies: warm bath, warm blood, everything slip-sliding away. I ran the water and took off my clothes and then I cut, but only once, and only shallowly, because what they don’t tell you in the movies is that it fucking hurts.

  BEFORE LACEY, MY DEAR MOTHER would tell you, life was an all-you-can-eat buffet of bong hits and Pabst hangovers, which is white trash for the Garden of Eden. Just her and my daddy drinking and screwing and shiny-happy-peopling the seventies away, right up until she went and got knocked up. Ever since then, she’d tell you, she’s been starving to death. My mother, Battle Creek’s very own Joan of fucking Arc. One broken condom; one abortive trip to some dismal clinic where she couldn’t even stand to plant her ass on the rusty folding chairs, much less strip down and let the hairy-knuckled doctor scrape her out; one marriage proposal featuring two six-packs and no ring. One peeing, pooping, puking baby who liked screaming better than sleeping. At the wedding, I was a watermelon-sized lump under a cheap lace gown. They married in a park, and because they didn’t believe in all that bad-luck bullshit, they stood together before the ceremony, holding hands next to a Dumpster while the rent-a-minister got his crap together and the fifteen people who’d bothered to show up pretended they weren’t drunk or high, in deference to the groom’s snotty parents, who hadn’t even wanted to come. Mother and father-to-be gazed at each other, playing happy and love-struck—“even though I knew he was thinking, Holy fuck, let’s get this over with so I can get plastered,” she says, “and you were kicking a fucking hole in my stomach so I was just trying not to puke.”

  It was my favorite story when I was a kid, the story of their wedding, of how I was there without being there, of how I came to be. Because my father told it differently, back when he would sit on the edge of my bed, stroke my hair, spin me fairy tales. “Your mother never looked more beautiful,” he told me, “and you know the prettiest part?”

  That was my line, and even a four-year-old could remember it: “The watermelon!”

  “Damn right. The watermelon. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and rubbed her belly, just like I’m rubbing your head right now, and that frilly dress crinkled against my hand, and that’s when I said it.”

  “Lacy.”

  “I was talking about the dress. And how beautiful she looked, and how she felt against my hand, and how I wanted— Well, you don’t need to know about that. B
ut she thought—”

  “You were talking about me.”

  “And that’s how you became you, little watermelon. That’s how you became Lacey.”

  When I was ten, my mother told me she pulled my name from some shitty romance novel. “Lucky you weren’t a boy,” she said, “or it could have been Fabio.”

  It was her hobby, telling lies about the past. Making up stories to help her feel better and me feel worse.

  Your father left because he didn’t love us.

  Your father was a useless fuckup and we’re better off without him.

  Unless she was in one of her other moods: It ruined everything, a fucking baby, how could it not. No more fucking on the kitchen floor, suddenly it’s all diapers and bills and how can I blame him for fucking off. I would’ve done it myself if I’d thought of it first.

  Before you, he drank, but he was no drunk.

  Before you, everything was good.

  Back in Jersey, when she was in an especially good mood, she would tell me how they met, both drunk off their asses at a Van Halen show. He worked security, she was a groupie, and she’d fuck anyone if it meant getting backstage.

  She didn’t talk about it as much with the Bastard around, because he didn’t like the reminder that he wasn’t her first. But sometimes, when he was out bowling for the Lord or whatever, she’d get drunk and misty and want to play another round of This Is Your Life. Your daddy gave me a coat hanger for Valentine’s Day. I should have used it.

  I know what I know.

  Lacey, he said, when he put his hand on my unformed head, only that thin layer of lace and womb between us, and he said it because even then he thought I was beautiful.

  I’d stay if I could, he whispered, that last night. I’ll come back for you.

  He did come back for me, four times that year, twice the next one, always when she was at work or asleep, and I never told her, not once. Sometimes he showed up at night and threw pebbles at my window, like we were fucking Romeo and Juliet, and he would climb up the trellis and crawl into my bedroom with a stuffed animal in his mouth, some limp bunny or three-legged cat that he’d found and saved just for me, because he knew I liked them wounded. He’d put his finger to his lips, and I’d zip mine shut, and we would play in the moonlight, quiet as mice, pretending that maybe this one time, the sun would never rise.