Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  “I like the new look,” Jesse said, and scuffed a toe against my boots. “It’s dark.”

  “He means it makes your boobs pop,” Mark said.

  “Fuck off, asshole.”

  “You fuck off.”

  Lacey rolled her eyes, and I tried to check out my cleavage as surreptitiously as possible. No part of me wanted to be in this alley.

  “Can you help us or not?” Lacey said.

  “Your friend’s mental, you know that?” Jesse told me.

  “She thinks we’re going to teach her how to worship the fucking devil,” Dylan said.

  Mark traced a cross against his chest and adopted a Transylvanian accent. “I vant to suck your bloooooood.”

  “She doesn’t think we’re fucking vampires,” Jesse said. “She’s not a fucking moron.”

  “Thank you,” Lacey said.

  “Except you are a fucking moron if you’re planning to start messing around with that shit. Not in this town. And if anyone asks, you tell them we’ve got nothing to do with that anymore.”

  It had been half a year since golden boy Craig turned up in the woods, brains leaking into the dirt, and five months since Jesse and the others had discovered exactly how much Battle Creek wanted to believe in the devil. Battle Creek still watched us closely, like we were walking grenades, hands hovering recklessly close to the pin. Us as in all of us, anyone under the age of eighteen automatically under suspicion; us as in them, most of all, the Dumpster Row boys, because Craig Ellison was dead when he shouldn’t have been and that demanded a rational explanation, even if rational, according to the pamphleteers in the Woolworth’s parking lot and the Concerned Parents League, who’d cornered the market on op-eds, meant teen football star falls prey to satanic cult blood orgy.

  Lacey knew all this—she had to. But I understood her now. I understood that it only made it more tempting, that anything that frightened the plebes this much merited further investigation. That anyone stupid enough to be scared deserved it. I understood that I was supposed to know better.

  “I know what you say.” Lacey reached forward and tapped Jesse’s chest, at the spot where blood gushed from Ozzy Osbourne’s silkscreened face. It amazed me, how she didn’t hesitate to touch him. “And I know what I see.”

  “It’s just music, get it?” Jesse sounded weary. “Slayer, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, they’re all putting on a show.”

  “First off, there’s no such thing as just music,” Lacey said. “Second, that’s not music. Biting the head off a live bat isn’t music, it’s a pathetic plea for attention.”

  “What is this shit?” Dylan said. “You come to our house to talk this kind of shit?”

  “Your house?” Lacey echoed, glancing at the nearest Dumpster. “Nice furniture.”

  I grabbed her, tugged. “Let’s just go.”

  “I got some Headbangers Ball on tape,” Jesse said. “Back at my place. You guys want to watch, I’ll show what you’re missing. But no animal sacrifice. No matter how hard you beg.”

  I thought: Enough. “That’s okay, we’re not—”

  “We’d love to,” Lacey said.

  IN THE CAR, BUMPING ALONG toward the house I hadn’t been in since third grade, Lacey said she was pretty sure Jesse wanted to get in my pants and that I should let it happen—let it happen, that’s how she put it, like sex was a force of nature and I simply needed to get out of its way.

  I thought about it, on the couch in the wood-paneled basement, everything the same as it had been years before. Mark and Dylan rolled joints, riveted to their Megadeth videos. Lacey stretched herself out in the leather armchair, closest to the speakers, and fixed on the screen, her Kurt face on, waiting for enlightenment. Jesse was next to me, his arm millimeters from mine, and much hairier than the last time I’d seen it.

  “Remember Kids Incorporated?” I said, because that’s what we’d watched when I came over after school. It had been my idea, because I didn’t have the Disney Channel at my place, but he was the one who’d taught me the choreography so we could dance along.

  Jesse grunted. This, I thought, was not letting it happen.

  He had a square head. Greasy lips, and those stupid fake tattoos. I could maybe, almost, imagine kissing him. If it were dark and I could, immediately after, dematerialize. I was turning seventeen that summer; such things were supposed to appeal.

  There was a look my mother had given me when some neighbor was over, complaining about lesbian jokes on TV, and since then I’d been wondering what she thought but, more than that, wondering if she’d recognized something in me I couldn’t see for myself. I said as much once, to Lacey, who crossed her eyes. “Do girls turn you on?” she said, and when I said I didn’t think so, she shrugged. “Then you’re probably not gay. I hear that’s a prerequisite.”

  Nothing turned me on, as far as I could tell. Lacey thought there was probably something wrong with me, and I thought she was probably right.

  Now I think it wasn’t my fault, that my younger self can be excused for reading phrases like fire in my loins and stumbling over the idea of pleasurable burning. But then it shamed me, the ease with which Lacey could spider her fingers down her stomach, across her thighs, into the dark space that remained a sticky mystery to me, and instinctively know how to feel. When, under duress, I’d locked myself in the bathroom and played around with the showerhead while Lacey cheered me on from the other side of the door, I had felt only ridiculous.

  “You still got my He-Man?” Jesse asked, and I smiled because it meant he remembered how he used to bring his action figures over to play with my Barbies, and also because, somewhere at the back of my closet, I did.

  “You still pretending you didn’t steal my She-Ra?”

  In my peripheral vision, I could see him blushing.

  “Hey, she was sexy. Metal bikini, Hannah. Metal bikini.”

  On-screen, a brunette in a spiked leather corset fellated a drumstick. Now I was blushing.

  “Her name is Dex,” Lacey said, without looking away from the screen.

  “Sorry.” He elbowed me, gently. “Dex.”

  “It’s okay. Whatever.”

  “I kind of liked it,” he said. “Your name. But Dex is cool, too.”

  Here is how I imagined things might go, if I let it happen: Jesse Gorin would inch his hand across the couch toward mine, ever so casually link our pinkies together, then turn my hand over and tap a message into my palm, in the Morse code we’d taught ourselves one rainy summer week before third grade. It would say: I remember you. It would say: We are still the people we used to be. And when he said he wanted to make some popcorn and did I want to help, I would follow him up to the kitchen, and while I was grabbing the air popper from the cabinet where it used to be, he would slip up behind me, whisper something suitably romantic in my ear, or maybe just my name, maybe just Hannah, then kiss the back of my neck, and when I turned around, I would be in his arms, hair dangling over the sink, lips perfectly parted and tongue knowing what to do. And even though we would return to the basement like nothing had happened, the taste of each other rubbed away by popcorn butter, we would bite down on the inside of our cheeks to prevent secret smiles, and silently understand that something had begun.

  That was before Lacey asked Jesse to show her where the bathroom was and they disappeared upstairs together for the rest of the show. When they came back, Jesse’s ballpoint tattoos were bleary with sweat and Lacey’s shirt was on inside out, which she could only have done to prove a point.

  “So, you’re welcome,” Lacey told me in the car on the way home.

  “For what?”

  She seemed surprised I had to ask. “Didn’t you notice the way that skeezer was eyeing you? If I hadn’t gotten it out of his system, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said. “I thought I was supposed to let it happen.”

  “With him? God, Dex, learn to recognize a joke.” She pulled up in front of my house. “Yo
u deserve so much better.”

  I opened the car door, but she grabbed my wrist before I could get out.

  “So?” she prompted.

  “So?”

  “Magic words, please. A little polite recognition for my sacrifice.”

  “Right. Thank you.”

  LACEY DECIDED TO FIND ME a more satisfactory dick. That’s how she put it when she presented me with a flimsy fake ID and a black lace corset. “Amanda Potter”—born Long Island, 1969, Sagittarius, details I repeated to myself over and over again as we stood in line waiting for the bouncer—“is getting some tonight,” Lacey told me, but didn’t tell me how she’d found this club, a grim concrete block beside the highway, or why it promised to be my sexual salvation. “No argument allowed.”

  Her corset was purple, and seemed, at least from where I stood, to offer slightly more room to breathe. She wore a silver pentagram around her neck, another thrift store acquisition to go with the Satanic Bible she’d finally dug up in the basement of some used bookstore along the highway. She loved the way people looked at her when she wore it, the same way I looked at her when she showed me the book for the first time. It didn’t look like any Bible I’d ever seen. It was black, with a red five-pointed star etched onto the cover, and even the author’s name gave me the creeps: Anton Szandor LaVey. It sounded deliberately fake, like a name the devil himself would choose. Lacey had already highlighted several passages.

  Man’s carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.

  There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes.

  Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs.

  “You really don’t want to let anyone see that you have this,” I’d told her, when she showed off her purchases, then pressed the pentagram necklace back into her hand. “And you really don’t want to be wearing this.” She still didn’t get it, the rules of a place like Battle Creek. It was one thing being a metalhead with a corpse on his T-shirt and a fetish for black nail polish; it was another thing altogether to be a girl wearing a pentagram. It was always another thing, being a girl.

  “The hilarious thing is, they’ve got it all wrong,” Lacey had told me. “Turns out actual satanism’s just about freethinking and being yourself. Stuart Smalley could’ve written this.”

  “Can we not talk about this now?”

  “You say now, but you mean ever.”

  I did.

  “You should read it,” Lacey said. “You’ll see. There’s good stuff in here.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “I’m joking,” she said, and it was easiest to assume it was true.

  The club was called Beast, and the bouncer, more interested in my cleavage than my birthdate, waved us both in.

  “I see you smiling,” Lacey said, sidling us up to the bar. She tugged at the laces of my corset. “You’re going mad with power.” I could barely hear her over the music, was already losing myself to noise and strobe light and the foul taste of the beer she poured down my throat, and somehow these all seemed like good things. Maybe because she was right; I did love the power of it, my chest, squeezed sausage tight, suddenly capable of miracles. I was used to people looking at Lacey. That night, they looked at me.

  Maybe it was the corset, maybe it was the shot, maybe it was Lacey pushing me into the single-stall bathroom with some guy she thought worked behind the counter in our record store. Whether it really was Greg the Sex God, who we’d spent two Saturdays in a row peeking at from behind the Christian gospel shelf, or just some unknown grunger with a down vest and a hemp bracelet, he followed me in, and when I opened my mouth to say my name or maybe sorry my lunatic friend just shoved you into a bathroom, he stuck his tongue in. I let it worm around for a bit, tasting his beer and trying to decide whether the hand squeezing my ass was doing it right. Between that and my mental tally of the bacteria and fecal matter on the bathroom door, I forgot all about our lingual calisthenics, and the distraction must have been obvious, because eventually he stopped.

  “Hey,” the guy said, lips still practically touching mine.

  “Hey.”

  The floor was spattered with urine, the walls with posters: The Screaming Trees. Skin Yard. The Melvins. Soundgarden. Even Babes in Toyland, who Lacey said sucked.

  “You like this?”

  I shrugged, thinking it was nice, if a little late, of him to ask. “I don’t usually do it in bathrooms, I guess.”

  “What?”

  The music, even in there, was incredibly loud.

  “I don’t do this in bathrooms!” I said, louder.

  “No, I mean the song! You like the song?”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “It’s the new Love Battery!” He stepped back, did a little air guitar. I winced, thinking of what Lacey would think. “It’s fly, yeah? You should hear the album, it’s like the fucking A-bomb, just a bunch of stuff, and then, boom. Takes you to another dimension. You know?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s some Star Trek–level shit there, you know? That’s what my album’s gonna be like.”

  “You’re making an album?”

  “Well, not yet, obviously. But, I mean, when the band gets there. It’ll happen. Patience, man. That’s the secret.”

  “So you’re in a band?”

  “I’m telling you, not yet. But I’m working on it. Stuff’s in the works. Big stuff.”

  “That’s . . . great.”

  “You’ve got great boobs. Can I get in there?”

  “Not sure that’s physically possible,” I said, more pleased than I wanted to be, but he’d already found a way to fit his fingers into the dark crevice of the corset.

  “Huh. That’s kind of . . . floppier than it looks.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I mean, that’s just how it goes with the big ones. Most of them are floppier. This is pretty good, actually.”

  “Thanks?”

  “Do you, like, feel yourself up all the time?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “That’s what I’d do if I was a girl. Especially if I had your . . . you know. All. The. Time.”

  “That might get in the way of your recording career.”

  He spent some time trying to work out whether that was a joke, then, “You want to blow me?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, you know. A guy’s gotta ask.”

  That was when I pushed my way back into the club and found Lacey. The band was starting, the one she’d heard had once opened for Nirvana, but from the opening chords it was clear these guys had only recently learned how their instruments worked. It didn’t matter. Lacey asked me what had happened, whether Mission Fuck had been a success, and instead of answering I threw my arms around her, because the beer buzz was finally heating me up and because I wanted to, simple as that, wanted to be there, with her, sweat-slick bodies swirling around us. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to dance.

  “You’re drunk!” she shouted when I wove my fingers through hers and dragged her into the mess of bodies.

  “Not drunk enough!” I twirled around, arms in the air, finally understanding what it was to feel a need and seize it. I needed to move. I needed to fly. I needed not to think about dicks and tongues and the gritty wrongness of real life. I needed this to be my real life, me and Lacey, in the smoky dark, strobes bouncing over our head, band screaming and shaking sweat into the crowd. The crowd a single organism, all of us, a hundred arms and legs and heads, a single heart beating, beating. All of us thrashing together, wild and fury in our blood. Lacey’s laughter in my ear, the smell of her shampoo like a cloud, her hair whipping across my cheek, and then nothing but the ecstasy of motion. Anything, everything possible. No one watching.

  SHE LIKED TO TEST ME, and it was hard to tell the difference sometimes, between game and truth. Kurt was real, that was nonnegotiable. So were we, Dex-and-Lacey. Sacred ground. Boys, tho
ugh, were for playing and trading, were equivalent to the sum of their parts, tongues and fingers and dicks. God was a bad joke, Satan a usefully pointy stick. She liked people to think she was dangerous. This didn’t explain why, one night when we’d been saddled with babysitting the junior Bastard, she had me hold the wriggling baby over the bathroom sink while she used the blood of a raw steak to paint an upside-down cross on his tiny forehead.

  “This is disgusting, Lacey.” It wasn’t the right word, but it was the easiest one.

  The baby whimpered and pulled away from her bloody finger, but she shushed him and stroked his tiny ears, and he didn’t cry. “Just hold him still.”

  The blood smeared watery pink across his forehead, running into his eyes. I held him still.

  Lacey gently tapped his right shoulder, his left shoulder, his sternum, his forehead, solemn as any priest. “In the name of the Dark Father and the unholy demons, I baptize you into the church of Lucifer.”

  They were just words, I reminded myself. They had only as much power as we gave them.

  Lacey said she couldn’t wait to see the look on the Bastard’s face when he found out, though she was careful to wipe off every trace of blood before we laid James Jr. to bed for the night. Lacey said the Bastard thought the Battle Creek hysterics were an embarrassing sideshow, blind to the true war for their children’s souls, against the modern Cerberus of liberalism, atheism, and sexual revolution. The Bastard didn’t believe in satanism, Lacey said, only in Satan, and claimed anyone who thought differently was doing the devil’s work.