Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  “When do you think it’ll start?” I asked her. The last time, we’d chopped up the mushrooms and mixed them in chocolate pudding, to make them go down. This time we were purists. It was like eating a Styrofoam cup.

  “Maybe it already did.” She laughed. “Maybe I’m not even here, and you’re just imagining me.”

  I gave her the finger, and we went inside.

  It had been Lacey’s idea to settle into the wooden pews and wait for something to happen. She’d read about some experiment where a bunch of people got high for Easter Mass and had a transcendent religious experience, so we swallowed and closed our eyes and—for purely scientific purposes, she said—waited for transcendence.

  Lacey always said that other people’s drug trips were almost as boring as other people’s dreams, but when it finally kicked in, inside that church, I’d never felt more wildly and indelibly myself. As if the world were re-creating itself especially for me, the walls whispering a sacred message, the minister’s voice blue light and warm coffee and slipping down my throat to my secret self, and I was an I like no other I had ever been, life was a question and only I knew the answer, and if I closed my eyes, the world outside, the colors and sounds and faces that existed only to please me, would vanish.

  Inside that church, I didn’t discover a god; I became one.

  The minister said the devil walks among you.

  The minister said evil is in this town and the wages of sin is death.

  The minister said cows were dying and chickens were slaughtered and dead cats were hung from flaming trees, and this is the evidence you need that these are the end times, that hell is upon you, that Satan’s cold fingers hold you in their grasp, that here and there and everywhere children are dying and children are killing and children are danger.

  The minister reached out across the congregation, reached for us, and I could feel his cold fingers on Lacey’s lips, because her lips were my lips, because what was hers was mine. The minister said the devil will sing you to hell, but when he raised his hands, the choir sang in Kurt’s voice, hoarse and longing, their robes white, their eyes black, and Kurt’s voice sang my name, said you have always belonged to me. The minister’s eyes glowed, and the walls bled, and the people, the good, churchgoing, God-fearing people, they all turned to us, eyes hungry, and then Lacey’s hand was hot against my mouth, as if she knew before I did that I was going to scream.

  She rested her other hand in my lap, fingers tight in a fist, then blooming open, and there was a flower she’d inked on her palm. I stopped screaming, then. I watched the flower. Its petals leached color from her skin. They glowed green like Lacey eyes and red like Lacey lips and pink like Lacey tongue. The flower whispered to me with Lacey’s voice and told me there was nothing to fear. Believing her was like breathing.

  When the service ended, she held my hand tight and led me out of the church. Her lips brushed my ear and she smelled purple, and when she whispered “Having fun yet?” our laughter tasted like candy.

  Fun was meant to be beneath us. Fun was for Battle Creek, for the losers who dragged their six-packs into the woods and groped each other in the dark. Not for us; we would get high only for a higher purpose, Lacey had decreed. We would be philosophers; we would devote ourselves to all forms of escape. After the service we would retreat to an empty field and spend the hours until we came down groping for Beauty and Truth. We would lie in the grass, search the sky for answers, make art, make something to make ourselves real.

  That was the plan before, when everything had seemed clear—but now was after, silvery and strange. And when we went to the field, bumping and sloshing in the back of a pickup, we didn’t go alone.

  Boys: some of them in church shirts with shiny shoes, some in flannel with jeans and dirty boots. All of them with sticky beer fingers and grubby breath, all of them boys we did not know and would never like, with faces that blurred and shifted, strangers determined to stay strange. I couldn’t keep track: Were there many or few? Had we begged them to bring us or did we beg them to let us go? I waited for Lacey to tell me it wasn’t happening, but Lacey only complained about tramping through the mud and breathing in the shit, then asked if, until it was time, she could carry the axe.

  One of the boys, I saw then, had an axe.

  The sky was pinking and the lowing cows breathed fire like fairy-tale beasts, and I heard my voice saying you can’t.

  “You eat burgers, don’t you?” a boy said.

  I heard Lacey laughing and knew I must be imagining it.

  “They’re my property,” another boy said. “I decide if they live or die. I’m their god.”

  I knew that wasn’t quite right, but the words to prove it were slippery. Before I could snatch them from the fog, an axe whistled through leathery hide, and blood spurted, and with one voice, the beast and I screamed.

  Sticky beer, sticky blood. Laughing boys, giving the finger to an imaginary face in the sky. Laughing Lacey, asking to hold the axe. Lacey’s hands on the axe and my hands on the axe. What’s hers is mine. Someone’s voice saying don’t be a pussy, someone’s voice saying please don’t make me, someone’s knees in the dirt, someone’s fist in a steaming wound, someone’s bloody fingers inking a five-pointed star across the grass, someone’s breath, someone’s whisper, someone’s tears. Someone’s voice pretending to be Lacey, impossible words carving fire across the sky.

  “We trade this blood for the blood of our enemies. Let us bring them to ruin.”

  THEN IT WAS DARK, AND I was in a barn, lying in the hay, and I came back to myself just as a cold hand slid into my pants.

  Just say no, they’d said in school, back when we were too small to imagine the need, so now I said it, “No,” and pulled the hand out and pushed the body away.

  “C’mon,” the body said, and nuzzled its snout against my chest. Red hair, I noted, and disliked. Lacey was sandwiched between a checkered-shirt farm boy and a hay bale, stripped down to her bra and combat boots.

  Boys from the field, I thought, then shoved the thought away.

  I smacked the copperhead and said no again.

  “She said you thought I was cute,” he whined.

  I took him in, freckles and crooked smile, beady eyes and puffy cheeks, and thought: Maybe. But cute didn’t mean I wanted this animal thing, wet and clumsy, bones and meat. My first kiss had come at the wrong end of a dare, someone else’s punishment; the second came in the dark, someone else’s mistake. This was lucky number three, and when I stood up, he said, “I never get the hot one,” then jerked off in the hay.

  “Lacey,” I said, and I was crying, probably. “Lacey.”

  She made a noise. It’s hard to talk when your tongue is tracing messages in someone else’s mouth.

  “Let ’em be.” Red had crusty nails and oozing zits, and I knew without checking that I didn’t get the hot one, either.

  “Lacey, I want to go.” And maybe I was making myself cry, because crying was a thing Lacey wouldn’t resist.

  “Can it wait?” Lacey wasn’t looking at me. The flannel boy bent her over the bale and kissed her knobby spine. “Just a little longer?”

  He laughed. “You got the long part right.” His dirty hands were on her, fingers smudged with motor oil.

  Lacey giggled. I couldn’t stop smelling blood.

  Hot breath on the back of my neck and “Don’t worry, babe, I won’t let you get bored.”

  “Lacey,” I said. “Lacey. Lacey. Lacey.” That did it. A prayer; a summoning. My witching powers, or the hitch in my voice, or just her name, like the lyrics to a favorite song, calling her home.

  “Can’t you shut her up?” Flannel said, but Lacey slipped through his straddled legs and scooped up her clothes. She touched my cheek. “You really want to go, Dex?”

  I nodded.

  “Then we go.”

  Flannel’s nose went piggy when he sneered. “And what the hell are we supposed to do?”

  “Suck each other off, for all I care,” Lace
y told them, then took my hand, and together we ran.

  “Sorry,” I said, when we were safe in the car, windows down, Kurt’s raw voice streaming in our wake, the boys and the field and the church and the night shrinking to a story we would tell ourselves and laugh.

  “Sorry for what?” Lacey sped up, as she did when she was bored, and I pictured her toes curling on the grimy pedal. She liked driving in bare feet.

  We didn’t apologize—that was a rule. Not to each other, not for each other. We made our own choices. We did what we did with the boys in the field, what we did in the grass and the blood and the hay. We kept moving, without looking back. The day behind us was fogging up, and I tried to let it. I tried to feel no shame.

  WE SLEPT OUTSIDE THAT NIGHT, and woke up damp with dew. I told myself that none of it had happened, not the glint of the axe or the intestines steaming in the moonlight, not the boys in the field or the barn. The way I felt, floating between the cushions of grass and sky, no longer high but not yet grounded, it was easy to believe.

  Lacey had promised there’d be no hangover. She didn’t tell me it would be more like the opposite—that I would wake up still feeling like I could fly.

  I listened to her breathe, and tried to time the rise and fall of my chest to hers. I counted the clouds, and waited for her to wake up—not bored, not afraid, simply alive to the tickle of grass and sigh of wind. It was only when she blinked herself awake, when she saw my face and said, brightly, “Good morning, Lizzie Borden,” that I thudded back to earth.

  I sat up. “Lacey.” I swallowed. “Last night . . .”

  She took in my expression. Recalibrated. “Breathe, Dex. No freak-outs before coffee.”

  “But what we did—”

  “Technically, you made us leave before we did anything,” she said, and laughed. “The look on their idiot faces.”

  “Not in the barn.” I didn’t know why I was still talking. If I didn’t name it, maybe I could erase it. “Before.”

  “Yeah, we’re going to have to change before anyone sees us,” Lacey said, looking down at herself, and I realized the stains on her shirt were blood. The stains on mine, too.

  I shook my head. Everything was shaking.

  “No.” Lacey stilled my hands with hers. “No, Dex. They’d have done it whether we were there or not.”

  It was some note of certainty in her voice, maybe, that cued a memory from an assembly past, then half-remembered words from the morning’s service, and the pieces jigsawed themselves. “You knew,” I said, and of course she knew. She always knew. “You picked that town on purpose.”

  “Of course I did. I was curious. Weren’t you?”

  I knew the right answer: Curiosity was supposed to be our lifeblood.

  “What do you think they do with cows on that farm, Dex?” she said when I didn’t give it to her. “This isn’t Charlotte’s Web.”

  “That was a pig.”

  “And they were going to butcher it, right?” Lacey said. “That’s how farms work. It’s not like killing someone’s cat or something.”

  “Have they killed someone’s cat?”

  “Do you want the answer to that?”

  Silence between us, then, except for the bugs and the birds and the wind.

  “You were having fun,” she said, and it felt like an accusation. “You were laughing. You just don’t remember.”

  “No. No.”

  “You do know it was all a bad joke, right?” she said. “Just a bunch of asshole hicks trying to freak out their parents. No one was actually trying to summon the devil.”

  “Of course I know that.” What I didn’t know, at least not with the same degree of certainty, was whether it mattered. The sacrifice was a joke, maybe, but wasn’t blood still blood, dead still dead?

  “Anyway, it’s not some crime against nature to watch stupid people do stupid shit,” Lacey said.

  “But it was more than watching . . . wasn’t it?”

  “What do you think?” Lacey laughed. “You think you helped put poor little Bessie out of her misery? You?”

  I was sitting cross-legged, and Lacey shifted until she faced me in exactly the same pose. The Mirror Game, I’d called it when I was a kid, springing it on my parents without warning. You scratch your nose; I scratch mine. My mother loathed it. My father, who’d learned in some long-ago acting class how to cry on command, always won. If Lacey and I played, I thought, the game could go on forever.

  She cupped my hands again. “How much do you remember, Dex? Seriously.”

  I shrugged. “Enough?”

  “I remember how it was my first time. Everything feels kind of like a dream, right? You’re not sure what’s real, what’s not?”

  I nodded, slowly. “Not for you?” I said. “Everything’s clear for you?”

  “Crystal. So I can tell you everything that happened, in graphic detail, or . . .”

  “Or.”

  “Or you trust me that everything is fine. That all the good stuff happened and all the bad stuff was a dream. You let me remember, and you let yourself forget. You trust me, don’t you?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then?”

  “Then okay. Yes. Everything is fine.”

  She smiled—I smiled. That was how the game worked.

  “You’re not sorry, are you?” Lacey asked, and I knew, because I always knew, what she really meant. Was I sorry not just about the things that happened in the field and the things that didn’t happen in the barn, and not just about the church and the mushrooms, but sorry for everything that led up to it, sorry about Lacey and Dex, sorry to be here with her in this field, damp and shaky and stained with blood, sorry to be with her anywhere?

  I knew what she needed to hear. “Never be sorry, remember?”

  Never be sorry, never be frightened, never be careful—those were the rules of Lacey. Play by the rules, win the game: Never be alone.

  WE MUST HAVE GONE TO class; we must have scribbled down an English paper or two, made small talk with parents and teachers, emptied dishwashers and mowed lawns, nuked frozen pizza for lonely TV dinners, snooze-buttoned our way through six A.M. alarms, waded through all the mundane detritus of high school life, but that’s not what I remember. Somewhere out there, line dancing swept the nation, LA exploded over Rodney King, Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, George Bush threw up on Japan, a Long Island nutcase shot her boyfriend’s wife in the face, a new Europe chewed its way out of the corpse of the USSR, and history officially met its end. None of it penetrated. We were our own world. I remember: riding down the highway in Lacey’s Buick, trying to shove her lone Pearl Jam tape into the player, rain pelting my face on stormy nights because the passenger window was stuck halfway down, the two of us one with the car and with the road, Lacey always at the wheel despite daily promises that she would teach me how to drive. We were at our best when we were in motion.

  Once, we drove all night, Lacey slugging back Diet Cokes while I searched for exit signs and inscribed our names on the dewy window. When we hit the George Washington Bridge, Lacey stopped the car on the Jersey side, and we watched the city groan into morning. Then we turned around and drove home. Because it wasn’t about going to New York City, Lacey said. It was about proving we could. Actually going to New York, that was another thing for plebes. Too obvious, Lacey said. When we escaped, it would be to Seattle. We would get an apartment near the Crocodile café, where we’d waitress so we could score free booze and sleep with the bands. We would have a beanbag chair and a cat named Ginsberg. We would sell the car to pay the first month’s rent, then buy a bottle of wine with whatever was left over and toast to the fact that there was no turning back.

  I fell asleep nights thinking about it, imagining highways ribboning across flat brown land, afraid we wouldn’t go, afraid she’d go without me. Some mornings I woke with the sun, convinced I’d dreamed her into my life, and called her house just to make sure she was still there.

  WE DIDN’T TRY MUSHROOMS AGAIN; we
never talked about the night in the field. Not directly, at least, and that made it easier for memory to recede into shared dream. But after that night, Lacey had two new fixations: finding out more about what she called the devil-worship thing and getting me laid. Both made my skin creep, but when she grabbed me outside the cafeteria to tell me she had two birds and one stone waiting for us in the parking lot, I did as I was told.

  “Three birds, if you want to get technical,” she said. “Though one of them doesn’t believe in showers, so he’s out.”

  Three birds, scuzzy and greased, one with a pube-stache, one with a shaved head, one with “prison tats” he’d meticulously inked up and down his arm: Jesse, Mark, and Dylan. Boys I’d known since they were still boys enough to play with dolls; boys who’d grown into almost-men who wanted to be dangerous and persuaded the wrong people they were.

  I didn’t think they deserved it, what had been done to them in the fall and the way people acted after—as if the three of them had dragged Craig into the woods and whispered satanic prayers to him till he cracked, then beat themselves up and lofted themselves into that tree as penance. As if whatever happened to them was just, even merciful. But I also didn’t want to be out there in the alley with them alone.

  Not alone, I reminded myself. With Lacey.

  Never alone.

  “You want?” Jesse offered Lacey a hit off his dwindling blunt. She waved him away. He didn’t ask me.

  “You guys know Dex, right?”

  Mark snorted. “Yeah. You still crying over that dead Barbie, Dex?”

  Jesse whacked the back of his head. “You still playing with dolls, Mark?”

  I’d known the three of them since nursery school, since the days when Mark lit dolls on fire, Dylan collected Garbage Pail Kids, and Jesse took a shit beneath the elementary school seesaw, just to prove he could. Jesse and I had ridden bikes and woven grass jewelry for our mothers on May Day. Then he’d hooked up with Mark and Dylan, and while individually they’d seemed comprehensible and unintimidating and like the type of boy you might one day grow up to kiss, together they went feral, roaming the streets, baring teeth and brandishing sticks. They bashed bats into mailboxes and left dog shit on neighbors’ doorsteps and eventually graduated from skateboards to death metal. Before Craig died, they were so proud of their rotting-skull T-shirts and black trench coats, their car stereos blasting lyrics about bleeding eyes and demon hearts. I thought now about all those dolls and trading cards and that sorry lemonade stand, Jesse and me selling twenty-five-cent cups of water stained with yellow dye, and it felt stupid to be wary of them—but then I thought of bloody symbols on church doors and bloody axes in dark fields, and it felt equally stupid not to.