Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  It was the second time she’d said it to me in one night, and possibly in all the time I’d known her. It shouldn’t have felt so good to shrug her off. “I’m staying. You go.”

  “I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”

  That was when I understood. She didn’t want me to be Dex, untamed and magnificent. That was her job. I was to be the sidekick. I was to keep my mouth shut and do as I was told, spin and leap and do tricks like a trained seal. I was to obey and applaud when appropriate. I was to be molded, not into her image but into something less-than.

  Could I be the girl who walked away?

  “Please. Go,” I said.

  “It’s not my job to watch out for you,” I said, “and vice versa.”

  “I don’t care what happens next,” I said. Maybe, finally, I was the one administering the test—maybe I was lying and maybe I wasn’t.

  Lacey believed me.

  She left.

  HOW TO DANCE LIKE NO one is watching. Or dance like everyone is watching, pale flesh jiggling as you grind against denim and polyester and lacrosse muscles and twitching dicks. Writhe in your Docs and jerk to the beat beat beat of the hip-hop blast, and let a hand find its way past a thin cotton waistband and stick its finger into your warm and wet. Wrap your arms around the closest body, press lips to neck and nape and groin, laugh along with and louder than, and if it feels good, do it. Put your hands on yourself, and rub and stroke, let yourself moan. Think, look at these faces, my friends, look at their love and look at me shine. Don’t think. Straddle something, a chair or a body, lower your weight onto it, ride ’em cowboy, ride it hard while they pour beer on your head and you raise your face to the stream and your tongue to the sour splash, then, because they call for it, lick it off yourself, and off the body, and off the ground. Note the heat of skin, the fire that courses beneath, the salt of sweat and tears. Slice your palm on the splintered edge of a broken glass and smear yourself with blood. Let the floor fall away and the horizon spin. Suck at flesh and whirl in place and throw your hands up in the air. This is how to party like you just don’t care.

  Look at yourself, LACEY HAD said, the first time she laced me into the corset, turned me to the mirror, made me see. It’s like you were born to wear it.

  Do you see now, Dex? she had said.

  I saw: A girl’s face, made up with drastic colors and lips pursed in mock defiance. Romance-novel cleavage and black lace. Hair with streaks of icy blue and leather cuff bracelets that whispered tie me up, hold me down.

  Look at yourself, Lacey had said, but myself was gone.

  I thought: I look like someone else, and she is beautiful.

  YOU. GIRL. WAKE UP.”

  I did what I did best and followed orders, waking up slow and in pain, fuzzy mouth and throbbing head and a cavernous feeling like I hadn’t eaten in days, though the thought of food made every organ want to fling itself from my body into a putrid puddle at my feet. I woke up cursing and squinting, wishing someone would turn out the sun. Weeds beneath me, jeans and shirt damp with dew. Strange shirt; a stranger’s shirt.

  An alien landscape: Stretch of overgrown lawn, drained pool, fringe of trees. Dingy white siding, broken windows, stained patio, crushed cans of beer.

  A man, his foot nudging my thigh, his face in shadow, gold badge glinting in the dawn.

  “That’s it. Get up now.”

  When he touched me, I screamed.

  The effort of it nearly made me pass out again, as did the tilt of the world as he dragged me vertical. Then the noise of his words, security guard and trespassing and, he kept saying, trash, trash, trash, but it wouldn’t come clear, whether he meant the empty cans and the broken glass and the used condoms or simply me.

  The party was long over; everyone was gone. They’d left me alone. They’d left me out with the garbage.

  Standing set my insides to sloshing. Thinking was hard, like a toddler unsteady on chubby feet.

  “Get in,” he said, and there was a door with a sedan attached to it and a leather backseat and the thought of a moving car made me want to die.

  “I have my bike,” I said.

  He laughed like a dog.

  “Are you a cop?” I said. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Just give me your address.”

  Don’t get into cars with strange men, I thought, and asked if he at least had any candy, and then I was the one laughing.

  Maybe I was still drunk.

  Lacey would have said: Skip the name, rank, serial number. No identification, no address, no consequences. He would have to dump me by the side of the road, and then I could sleep.

  I couldn’t remember the night.

  I couldn’t remember enough of the night.

  I remembered hands gathering me up, I remembered floating in strange arms, chandeliers overhead and then stars, and laughter that wasn’t mine. I remembered fingers tugging at zippers and lace, a voice saying leave her over there, another saying turn her over so she doesn’t drown in her own puke, all the voices chanting puke puke puke and my trained-seal pride when I performed on command.

  I ached everywhere, but hurt nowhere specific. That seemed important.

  “Learn to have a little pride in yourself,” the man said after I gave him my address, after he led me through the front yard, pausing to let me vomit up everything left inside. “You keep acting like a whore, people will keep treating you like one.”

  He deposited me at the door, which flew open at the bell, like my parents had been waiting. Of course, I thought, slowly, they had been waiting. The sun was up. I’d been missing. I felt like I still was.

  The cop was a security guard for the housing development. The development would not be pressing charges. “Next time, though, we won’t be so generous.”

  My mother was steel. “There won’t be a next time.”

  “You sure you don’t want to take me to jail?” I asked the not-cop, brain kicked into gear enough to smile. “Might be easier on me.”

  Then I heaved again. There was nothing left.

  Once he was gone, my parents closed the door behind us, and there was a long stint of hugging. I tried to speak—probably it seemed like I wanted to explain myself, when I only wanted to say please be gentle and can someone turn out the lights—but my mother said no, firmly enough that it was the end of it, then held on tight, and then it was my father’s turn, and for endless time I was closed in by their love, and it was almost enough to keep me on my feet.

  Then, “Go get yourself cleaned up. You smell like the town dump,” my mother said.

  “Sleep,” my father said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  I lurched up the stairs. I’d been hungover before, but this was like some New Coke version of a hangover, different and deeply wrong. I closed myself into the bathroom, turned on the shower, waited for the water to heat, for the night to return to me.

  I wanted to be clean; I wanted to sleep. Ahead of me, I knew, was the grueling interrogation by my parents, lectures and scolding, that I’d stayed out all night, made them worry, lost their trust all over again, and I’d have to sit through it while knowing my father was desperately hoping I wouldn’t give him up, that if I kept quiet about him letting me go to the party he’d find a way to compensate. No matter what, I’d be grounded all over again. Grounding, of course, wouldn’t extend to school, and I’d have to face all those faces who’d seen me lose control, who knew what I did, whatever it was. There would be whispers and rumors I would have to ignore; there would be stories of what and who, and I would, against my will, pay attention, try to piece together the night. I would be the story; I would be the joke; I would be the thing they’d left outside with the trash. All of that I knew.

  I couldn’t know about the letter to the editor some Officially Concerned old woman would publish in the local paper, about girls gone wild and the corrupting modern moral climate as encapsulated by the drunk sex fiend who’d been found passed out half naked outside the old Foster place, or that even thou
gh the girl went unnamed in the letter, my kindly security guard would spread my name to his nearest and dearest until half the town was calling me a whore, parents fish-eyeing my parents, their kids, chafing under draconian new curfews and rules, blaming me for all the ways in which they’d gotten screwed, that even my teachers would look at me differently, like they’d seen me naked. I couldn’t know that I would be famous, the Mary Magdalene of Battle Creek, without my own personal savior, without anyone to rescue me from my own inequities except the judgment of the town, for my own good.

  I couldn’t know that I would go through it on my own. That when I called Lacey to tell her what had happened, to apologize or let her apologize or simply sit on the phone until I unclenched enough to let the tears fall, she wouldn’t be there. That she’d packed up in the middle of the night, just like she’d told me she would. That I was on my own now, because I’d told Lacey to go and Lacey was gone.

  I didn’t know.

  So when I stripped naked in the bathroom and saw myself—saw the words that had been Sharpie’d all over my body, the things someone had written across my stomach and breasts and ass, the labels that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard I scrubbed, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, but could recognize as the work of more than one person, slut and whore and skank and, graffitied neatly just below my belly button with an arrow pointing straight down, we wuz here—I thought: Lacey.

  Lacey will save me.

  Lacey will avenge me.

  Lacey will hold me and whisper the magic words that will make all of this okay.

  I climbed into the shower and sagged against the wall and watched the words shine in the water, the words strange hands had inscribed on bare skin while I slept. Strange hands redressing me, pulling underpants over my thighs, snapping strapless bra in place, lacing corset. Before that, strange hands doing things. Strange lips, strange fingers, strange dicks, all of them, I tried, hot water streaming over me, to remember what I had done, what I had let them do, who I had become in the night. The water burned and my skin burned, and still, I believed I could endure it, because soon I would have Lacey, and I would not be alone.

  LACEY

  Blood Ties

  THE BASTARD BURNED IT ALL. In a fucking fire. Like a Nazi.

  “Heil fucking Hitler,” I told him, which stopped him just long enough to slap me across the face, a nice sharp blow to make my ears sing but which we both knew wouldn’t leave a mark. Then Herr Bastard went back to his bonfire, and I spat and screamed and choked on the smell of Kurt melting in the flames. Plastic cases warping with heat, fire eating through Kurt’s eyes, Nietzsche and Sartre going up in smoke. It would have been cool—very Seattle, very Kurt—if it hadn’t been my whole life disintegrating while the Bastard splashed gasoline. And my mother. Hiding out in the kitchen, probably rustling up some marshmallows and graham crackers so the Bastard could make s’mores over the ruins of the world.

  That’s why I was late picking you up for the party, Dex. My oh-so-unforgiveable crime. The Bastard found my Satanic Bible and lost his fucking shit. Which looks nothing like what you’re imagining, I can assure you. In your G-rated imagination, I’m sure, parents rant and rage and ground you for a week and then everyone has spaghetti for dinner and goes to bed.

  Let me paint you a picture, Dex. Life according to Lacey. There’s me, bedhead and short shorts, nipples standing at attention, and he wasn’t even looking, that’s how hypnotized he was by his precious fire. I couldn’t stop watching it, either, the fire consuming every song, every page, every piece of me, everything that carried me away from this shit life. Is that how you felt that night, Dex, when your mother found those stupid cans of paint, when she yelled at you, poor baby, and took away your phone privileges? Did you go cold inside, like the night was an ice-covered pond, and you knew if you weren’t careful, the surface would crack open and you’d sink into the deep? Were you disgusted by it, by the way your body betrayed you with its goose-bumped shuddering and the sad little croaks and moans you made instead of words? Did you think: I’m better than this? Did you think: Now I am empty? Now I have nothing left?

  You didn’t. You did have something left. You had me.

  The day the music died. It’s supposed to be a metaphor. Not a live show in my backyard, the Bastard’s bloated face red in reflected light, miniature flames dancing in his eyes, hands stinking of gasoline, the devil in penny loafers and a polyester suit. I thought about those wailing widows in India, the ones who throw themselves onto the funeral pyre, because what’s left to live for when the thing you’re living for is a column of smoke? Think about that, skin flayed away, bare muscle and pearly bone, flesh fused with plastic, all of us ash together.

  “You’ve got the devil in you,” the Bastard said when he shoved me into the corner of my bedroom and made me watch while he tore it apart. “We’re going to burn it out of this house, and then we’re going to burn it out of you.”

  WE EACH HAVE OUR JAMES. My fake dad and your real one. Except that fake dad is what you call the kind of guy who bribes you with imitation pearls and Amy Grant CDs, who won’t shut up about How was your day? and Who are your favorite teachers? and Won’t you just give me a chance to prove I can love you?

  The Bastard pretended to be nice to me for precisely as long as it took to get into my mother’s pants. Your James, on the other hand. Your Jimmy Dexter. Your dear old dad.

  That’s a different story, isn’t it?

  SOMETIMES I KEEP THINGS FROM you to protect you, Dex. But this is truth: I never meant for it to happen. Cliché, but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can’t blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life.

  You buying any of this?

  Okay, try this one: My mother and the Bastard are right, I’m the harlot of Battle Creek. I’ve got the devil in me. I’ve done terrible things, but this is not one of them.

  Here’s another cliché for you: Nothing happened. That should count for something.

  THE FIRST TIME. EARLY SPRING, one of those perfect mornings that fool you into believing that winter never happened and summer might not suck. The door opened as soon as I took my finger off the bell. Like he’d been waiting for me. “Can Dex come out and play?”

  “Dex isn’t here right now.” That was the first thing I liked about your father, the way he called you Dex. Not like your mother, who was always throwing around Hannah this and Hannah that in that pinched voice, like what she really wanted to say was She’s mine and you can’t have her. “Her mother took her outlet shopping. Blazing-hot clearance sales, I hear.”

  “Sounds thrilling,” I said.

  “I begged them to bring me along.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  He grinned. Like we were friends. “Story of my life, always left out in the cold.”

  “It’s a cruel world.”

  “Cutthroat.” He was wearing a Cosby sweater and dad jeans, and his hair was a black scruff of weeds, like he’d just woken up, even though it was noon. Stubble inching down his chin, a little crud in the corner of one eye. I was wearing cutoffs over black leggings, the ones you said gave me buns of steel, and a tank that cut my boobs about a centimeter above the nipple. He could have gotten some show, if he’d bothered to look. But he wasn’t that kind of dad.

  “Guess I should go,” I said.

  “Don’t get into trouble out there.” He reconsidered. “Not too much, at least.”

  “The thing is . . . ,” I said, and maybe I took a deep breath and held it, because I kind of wanted him to look.

  The thing was, I couldn’t go home.

  The thing was, the Bastard had found my condoms.

  That’s why I came looking for you, Dex. So we could go to the lake, and I could sink into the icy water until it hurt enough to make me forget. It’s not my fault you weren’t there when I needed you.

  “The thing
is?” your father said when I didn’t.

  “The thing is . . .” I wasn’t crying or anything. I was just doing me, leaning against the doorway, one hand slipped into the back pocket of my cutoffs, cupping my ass, eyes on his dad shoes. Ugly blue sneakers, both unlaced. That was the thing that got me, the laces. Like he had no one to save him from falling. “Your shoes are untied.”

  He shrugged. “I like ’em that way.” He stepped out of the doorway, opening a space for me. “Want to come in? Have something to drink?”

  We had hot chocolate. No whiskey in it, not that time.

  The mugs steamed. We watched each other. He smiled. Dad smile.

  “So, what’s the verdict, Blondie?”

  If you’d ever heard him call me that, you would have looked cluelessly at me, at my black hair, and I would have had to explain about Debbie Harry at the microphone and “Heart of Glass” and how I was really more of a Runaways girl, but what kind of nickname is Joan, and anyway, that didn’t matter as much as the fact that he could see the kind of girl I was, the kind who should have a mic to tongue and a guitar to smash and a stage to light on fire, that he looked at me and understood. But I didn’t have to explain, because we both knew, without saying, that this wasn’t for you.

  The nickname: That was our first secret, and another thing we had in common. We liked to give things their secret names. We knew there was power in that.

  “How are you liking our little town?”

  “It sucks,” I said.

  “Ha.” It wasn’t a laugh, more like an acknowledgment that a laugh might be called for.

  “I like Dex, though,” I said.

  “Smart girl. Beauty and brains. I approve.”

  If he’d been someone else, just a guy rather than a dad, or even if he’d been most dads, I would have taken that as my cue, offered up my serpent smile, sipped my drink, and wiped away the chocolate mustache with one slow lick.

  “Thanks, Mr. Dexter,” I said.

  “You should know you’ve broken my heart.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Dex finally discovers music, thanks to you, and—”