Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  “I don’t want to be anyone’s sister but yours,” she said, too, which made it okay that, when I left that night, the baby’s forehead still smelled like raw meat.

  She wanted to spend her birthday in the graveyard, and so we did.

  “Scared?” she said as we picked our way through the dark. Narrow lanes wove through rows of tombstones. I saw a stone angel, a spire circled by stone roses, crosses tilting and crumbling, tombs that gleamed in the flashlight beam where names were etched with lacquer and gold.

  “Am I supposed to be scared of ghosts, or of you?”

  “We both know you’re scared shitless of getting caught, Dex.”

  She held the flashlight beneath her chin, casting her face in ghoul glow. “The only scary thing here is me.”

  Maybe it was stupid of me not to be scared—if not by her big plan for the night, then by the intensity with which she’d insisted on it, that we sneak out with our candles and shovels, build a shrine to the Dark Lord, just enough of a show to give the plebes a good scare. “All I want for my birthday is to freak the shit out of Battle Creek,” she’d said, and I was prepared to help.

  She stopped at a small square tombstone and sat, hard, beside the dead flowers at its base.

  “Lacey.” It seemed like bad luck, saying her name out loud, like I might alert some predatory spirit to her identity. The stories had always made it very clear: Names were power. You gave yours away at your own risk. “I thought we were looking for a fresh one.”

  “Look.” She aimed her flashlight at the stone.

  Craig Ellison, it said, b. March 15, 1975, d. October 31, 1991

  Beloved son and brother

  Go Badgers!

  “Go Badgers?” I laughed. Then aimed a cheerleader fist pump at the clouds. “God, that’s tacky. Can you imagine taking Battle Creek Badger pride to your grave?”

  She didn’t say anything. I felt judged by her silhouette.

  “What if it’s not some big joke?” Lacey said then. “Imagine the plebes are right, and there is some devil cult dancing around the woods, faces painted with blood. Acid orgies. If that’s what really happened to him.”

  I tried to picture it, Craig Ellison forming an unholy alliance with the Dumpster Row boys, stripping off his basketball jersey to frolic naked in the woods, Craig Ellison magicked into drawing his own blood. Standing there in the shadow of his gravestone, stone angels judging our trespass, it wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been.

  “And what if aliens are secretly running the country?” I said, desperate now to make my voice a flashlight, guide us both back on track. “What if the mayor is a vampire? What if I’m possessed by Satan and I’m about to suck your brains? It’s like you always say, anything’s possible—”

  “—in the woods. Yeah. It is.”

  That was when I noticed she was crying.

  I almost fell beside her. Lacey wasn’t the kind of girl who cried. “What is it?” I put my hand on her shoulder. Took it off again. “What?”

  “You love me, right?” Her voice was flattened, dead.

  “Of course.”

  “And you’re a good person.”

  “Well, not since I met you.” The joke didn’t land. Her nails dug into my arm.

  “Never say that again.”

  “Okay. Okay, Lacey, it’s fine.” Panic. We were in a graveyard and she was freaking out, needing something I didn’t know how to give her because Lacey wasn’t supposed to need anything. “Of course I love you. And of course I’m a good person. And can you just tell me what’s going on so we can get the hell out of here?” I was crying, too. It was a reflex, like contagious yawning or throwing up at the smell of vomit.

  “If I tell you to do something, and you do it, whose fault is that?” she asked.

  “Depends on what you want me to do, doesn’t it?”

  “It shouldn’t depend. Circumstances shouldn’t matter. If it’s my idea, it’s my fault. Your idea, yours.”

  “Except it would be my idea to do what you told me to do. I get to decide that. I’m not your puppet.”

  “No? No. I guess not.”

  I rapped softly at her head, the safest way I could think to touch her. “What’s going on in there, Lacey? I know it sucks that he’s dead, even if he is Craig, but it’s not like he meant something to you.” As I said it, I was wondering whether it was true. Maybe it all made sense in some seedy, beneath-her kind of way, the fervent and unfounded hatred of Nikki, the unprompted tears for a Neanderthal, the words that seemed snagged in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. “Was he cheating on her with you? You can tell me. I get it, I swear.” I didn’t get it, not a guy like him, his meaty hands fumbling at her bootlaces, but love was meant to be strange. “You can’t think it’s your fault, what happened. Even if he felt guilty, or you dumped him and he freaked out, or whatever it was, it wouldn’t be—” I thought about what it would be like to do something and not be able to take it back. “Even if you told him you wanted him to die or something, that wouldn’t make it your fault that he went and did it. You didn’t put the gun in his hand. You didn’t pull the trigger. Nothing is your fault.”

  She looked up at me, face tipping into shadow, and smiled. “You think Craig was cheating on Nikki? With me?” She laughed, then, so beautifully, and I don’t know whether I was more relieved that we’d escaped the moment together or that I’d so plainly been wrong. Then she kissed my cheek. “You always know what to say to cheer me up.”

  If not that, then what? I wanted to say, but couldn’t, not when she was happy again, not when she’d taken my hand in hers and pulled us both off the ground, sent us spinning, like the grave was a meadow and the moon was bright summer sun. “I can’t believe you thought I could love him.” Her laugh was a witch’s cackle, our dance a ritual that didn’t need spells, only hot blood rising in our cheeks and burning through our veins, an invocation of the gods of love, of whatever force pressed our palms together and whispered on the night wind, You are one.

  AND THEN WE WENT TOO far.

  “It’s what Kurt would do,” Lacey whispered, and there was no argument to that.

  We eased open her window and dropped down to the bushes below. The car was too noisy, so for the first block we pushed it, gear in neutral and shoulders bruising against the trunk. When it was safe, Lacey gunned it, and I jittered in the passenger seat, cans of spray paint slippery in sweaty palms.

  Kurt once got arrested for spray painting homosexual sex rules on the side of a bank, Lacey said, up there big and bright for all the rednecks to see, at least the ones who could read well enough to sound out the words. He grew up in an old logging town, Lacey said, full of assholes, their puny brains filled with all the things Kurt smashed with his guitar. Before the guitar, there was spray paint, and there were words. “We have those,” Lacey said. “That’s enough.”

  “If we get arrested,” I said, “I swear I will kill you.”

  All brick and stone, squat and sad, the Teen Pregnancy Center was deep in last-resort territory. Past the walk-in clinic and the Sunrise rehab center, past the veterans’ hall where it was nothing to cadge free donuts from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a mile past even the boarded-up strip club that had survived three months, flush on the town fathers’ pay, before the town mothers had driven it to ruin. If it was you that let some greasy animal inside you, and you that hit the devil’s jackpot, sperm and egg making their miracle, then it might be you swallowing your panic, flipping through the yellow pages, finding salvation on the highway, in the gray windowless husk just past the Friendly’s. You might come from Battle Creek or Marshall Valley or even as far as Salina. You might wonder if it would hurt, or if you’d be sorry; you might be afraid.

  You would definitely be surprised when the good people at the Teen Pregnancy Center gave you a pamphlet with Jesus on the cover and set you straight. The Teen Pregnancy Center would speak of miracles and wonders, and show you pictures of a seed they said was a baby and a sin they said was mur
der. And then, if you weren’t careful, they would ferret your name and phone number out of you so that when you got home, your parents would be waiting.

  It was evil, Lacey said, and her first idea had been burning it to the ground.

  Battle Creek wasn’t a sex-ed kind of town. But word got around, in playground diagrams and Sunday school sermons, and by junior high we all knew what to do and that we’d burn in hell for doing it. Just after Easter that year, our health teacher had held two apples before the class, then dropped one on the ground. Picked it up, dropped it again. “Which one would you want to eat?” she asked, finally. “This nice, shiny, clean apple? Or the bruised, dirty, dented one?”

  Lacey stole the dirty apple for her lunch that day, and later that month, when Jenny Hallstrom lost it to Brett Koner in a church utility closet, we said she’d dropped her apple. “Guess we know what Brett likes to eat,” Lacey said. Jenny was the one who told us what happened inside the Teen Pregnancy Center. That was before she got sent away; we heard her kid was due by Christmas.

  Word always got around. That was the rule of Battle Creek, and maybe that was why our parents spent so much time worrying who was shoving what into where in the backseat of whose car. Because we’d be the ones to burn in hell, but they were the ones who’d have to hear about it in church.

  Now we tiptoed toward the Jesus freaks’ evil lair and hoped they were too cheap for security guards. I wore a fleece hoodie; Lacey was in cat burglar drag, all black with a bloody smear of lipstick that was the same color as our spray paint. She shook the can like she’d done this before, and showed me how to hold it and what to press. I waited for her to go first, to see how she did it, her hand steady and her letters smooth. I waited for an alarm, or a siren, or the men in uniforms who would drag us off into the night, but there was only the hiss of paint and Lacey’s cool laughter as the first of our messages glittered under sodium lights.

  Fake Abortion Clinic. Beware.

  We had written the messages together, ahead of time, while Lacey’s mother was downstairs getting drunk and her stepfather was out bowling for Jesus.

  Get your politics out of our pussy.

  God is dead. Lacey had insisted on that one.

  God is dead, I wrote, because it was the shortest. The letters wiggled and the G looked more like an o, but I wrote it. I pressed my finger against the nozzle and turned brown stone red and Hannah Dexter into a criminal. Magic.

  We couldn’t go home yet, not feeling like that. We drove nowhere; we drove nowhere fast, because speed was what mattered. Speed and music, Nevermind in the player, Kurt’s screams tearing up his voice and our screams even louder. I shouted along with Kurt and didn’t care that according to my father my voice was like a raccoon screech or that according to Lacey I had the lyrics all wrong. I sang like it sounded to me, because those words sounded right: I loved you I’m not going back I killed you I’m not going back.

  We drove with the windows up so we could scream as loud as we wanted, and it was easy to imagine we might never go home; we might drive off a cliff or over the rainbow. We might tear across the country, fire and ruin blazing in our wake. Lacey and Dex, like Bonnie and Clyde, like Kurt and Courtney, high on our own madness, burning holes in the night. “We should do this again!” I screamed. “We should do this always!”

  “What? Be outlaws?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m not going back, I shouted, and that night, only that night, I loved Kurt like Lacey loved Kurt, loved Kurt like I loved Lacey.

  I’m not going back.

  I’m not going back.

  LACEY

  Good Intentions

  THIS IS NOT A CAUTIONARY tale about too much—or the wrong kind—of fucking. This is not a story of bad things happening to bad girls. I say this because I know you, Dex, and I know how you think.

  I’m going to tell you a story, and this time it will be the truth.

  Girl meets girl. Girl loves girl, maybe. Girl wants girl, definitely. Girls drink, girls dance, girls fuck, girls link fingers on a dark night and whisper their secret selves, girls swear a blood oath of loyalty and silence. Girl betrays girl, girl loses girl, girl leaves girl alone. It’s a story you won’t like, Dex, because this is not the story of us.

  “Just to watch,” Craig said, that first time he came to our place in the woods.

  I’d already started thinking of it like that. Our place.

  He brought along his mother’s picnic blanket, a puffy synthetic with lace stitching at the edges—he was, it turned out later, almost pathologically fastidious. It was a pointless effort, trying to make what happened between us clean. But the ground was hard and sparkled with broken glass, and the blanket was silky against bare skin, so we only mocked him a little.

  When he said he’d watch, he didn’t say he’d jerk off while we were tangled up in each other, but he was a sixteen-year-old guy, so maybe that was implied. It was equal parts disgusting and hot. Disgusting because obviously. Hot because it’s one thing to get a guy off with your hand or your mouth, the slippery-when-wet mechanics of skin on skin; it’s another to do so without even touching him. That’s power.

  Maybe it freaked him out, because it was a while before he came back. Or maybe Nikki didn’t want him back. Maybe she wanted me to herself.

  It was different, with a girl. Not as different as you’d expect, not softer, because there was nothing soft about Nikki Drummond. It was still skin and sweat, and I was still her secret, just like I’d been Shay’s secret. I was still the shameful thing, and I was good at that.

  Two weeks before Craig came back again. Two weeks, just the two of us, every day, in the woods, rolling in the weeds. Not inside the hollowed-out station, where we might have sunk into the old couch, generations of fluids staining its molding cushions. Not inside the rusting boxcar, where Nikki said she could hear the walls plotting to close in. We stayed in the open, beneath the sky’s prying eyes, putting on a show for the sun and the stars. I didn’t talk to her about Kurt; she didn’t talk to me about prom. We didn’t talk much at all, wink wink nudge bleh, but when she asked me questions, I told the truth, and that made things different, too.

  I liked the taste of her, Dex. I liked spelling my name inside her with my tongue. Like I was branding her where no one could see. Mine.

  I got good at getting her off, and then I must have gotten too good, because the day before the first day of school, I made her scream, and then she rolled away from me, curled fetal, and started to cry.

  “What?” I ran my knuckles down her spine. It always made her shiver. “What is it?”

  Nikki didn’t cry. We were the same that way.

  She didn’t cry, but she was crying, and when I touched her again, brushed her hair out of her face, because that seemed like the kind of thing to do when you were naked and crying together, she sat up, shook me off along with the mood, found her clothes and her vodka, and we got drunk. The next day she brought Craig with her again, and said it was only fair we let him play.

  Both of us or neither of us, that was the implied deal, and I thought: Kurt would do it, Kurt would be proud of me for doing it; the Bastard would keel over and die. I thought she needed me, they needed me, and it was good to be needed.

  I thought: Why the fuck not?

  Craig was never sweet, but he could look it, with a kid’s cowlick and a practiced sidelong glance through those long lashes that were criminally wasted on a guy. Bulky for a basketball player, with a neck like a gangster. But he could smile like everything was exactly as easy as you let it be. He knew how to make people love him, when he cared to. He and Nikki had that in common, I guess, but Nikki had to make an effort, transform herself into whatever kind of girl was needed. Craig only had to act intensely himself, more the guy everyone imagined him to be.

  He couldn’t get hard at first, not with me there watching, and not with the condom, which he’d given up on back when Nikki got herself on the pill. We were shy, then, or at least he was, and though I h
eard him talking to it while he rubbed, whispering sweet nothings into its flaccid flap of skin, he never would tell me what he was saying. Nikki gave it a few soft kisses, which didn’t help; then she gave me a few soft kisses, which did. It didn’t take long, watching us go at it, before he wanted into the mix, and then, with Nikki gasping in my ear as his fingers did their work, he was inside me, and maybe I was shy, too, because that first time, it hurt. It was messy, then, and confusing. Bodies are supposed to come in twos, ark-like.

  Six legs, six arms, thirty fingers, nine holes, the math was tough to contend with, but we did our best, and when Nikki chomped down on my nipple and Craig crushed my fingers under his ass, I didn’t complain—it was all too interesting, too new, to stop.

  You never like the bare facts, Dex, not when it comes to this. You like to forget that you’re an animal, too, that you burp and fart and shit and every month you bleed. You think it’s not nice to talk about those things, and not much nicer to do them, except in the dark where no one can see. So you probably don’t want to know that Craig was hairy like a gorilla, at least until he let us shave it all off, just to see how it would feel. You might want to know how he looked in Nikki’s lace panties, but you don’t want to hear that his dick curved ever so slightly to the left and his sac had an old man’s complexion. Or that he apologized as soon as he shoved it in, and again when he took it out, like he thought I was going to cry or cry rape, like he literally couldn’t believe this was playing out as it seemed.

  We were acting out our parts, that first time, waiting for the soundtrack to kick in and for things to go slow and romantically blurry instead of herky-jerky ugly real. We were waiting for sepia tones and candlelight, but eventually we got used to sticky clothes and awkward pokes and the pock sound Nikki’s thighs made when they slapped together too hard, that and the sound of grunting, and mingled laughter.