Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  “And you’re welcome.”

  “And, thanks to you, she’s developing some seriously shitty taste.”

  “Better watch out, old man, you’re starting to sound your age.”

  He jerked to his feet, the chair screeched, and I thought that was it. Too far. Especially when he stalked out of the room and left me there alone to wonder whether I was supposed to see myself out, thinking at least he trusted me to do so without stealing the silver.

  Then he came back, record in hand. He’d also changed his shirt. “I don’t do tapes,” he said. “No tonal fidelity.” He handed me the album. “Call me old again and you’re out on your ass.” He looked so proud of himself for cursing, like a toddler showing off a turd.

  “The Dead Kennedys?”

  “You know them?”

  I shrugged. I learned that much from Shay. Never admit you don’t know.

  “Take it home. Listen to it—at least twice. That’s an order.”

  “Really?” I know music guys and their record collections, Dex. They don’t hand their precious goods off to just anyone.

  “Really,” he said. “Bring me one of yours next time. We’ll pretend it’s an even trade.”

  Next time.

  That’s how it went, Dex, and it kept going. We talked about music. We talked about him.

  Did you know that when he was sixteen, he ditched the guitar for a year and taught himself to play the drums? He wanted to be Ringo Starr. Not because he thought Ringo was the best Beatle or anything, but because you couldn’t wish or will yourself into being a genius—Lennons and McCartneys are born. Ringos, according to your dad, are made, by luck and circumstance and practice in their parents’ garage. I thought that was sweet, that he’d dream of being fourth best.

  I stayed until there was nothing left in my mug but cold milk and soggy chunks of Swiss Miss, then shook his hand. “Thanks for the hot chocolate, Mr. Dexter.”

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing for our Dex.” Our Dex, like you were a secret we shared. He walked me to the door. “And you better listen to that album, young lady. I’m waiting on your report.”

  I saluted. “Yes, sir, Mr. Dexter.”

  “My friends call me Jimmy.” Not Jim but Jimmy, which he probably thought lent him boyish charm but actually made him sound like he needed to live under adult supervision.

  “Are we friends now?”

  “Any friend of Dex’s,” he said. “You know the rest.”

  IT WAS JUST TALK. THERE’S nothing wrong with that.

  Sometimes I cut school without you. Your dad was home a lot during the day. More than he should have been, you and your mom would probably say. Even the first time, he didn’t ask what I was doing there. Neither of us bothered to pretend I was looking for you.

  “Hot chocolate?” he said.

  “How about a smoke?” I tossed him a pack of Winston Lights.

  We took them into the backyard. I liked puffing the smoke into the cold, watching it fog the air. It was like breathing, only better.

  I’d spotted the stains on his fingers, the way he kept tapping his spoon against his mouth. The tiny hole at his knee where the denim had burned away. Secret smokers recognize each other. There’s a whiff of unfulfilled need about us, of unspoken desire. You want my opinion, I don’t even think he likes smoking. I think he just does it because he’s not allowed to.

  “God,” he sighed, blowing it out. “God, that’s good.”

  The first draw is always the best.

  He taught me to puff a smoke ring. I reminded him—later, when we knew each other better—how to roll a joint.

  That day, though, we smoked our cigarettes standing up, leaning against the back wall. The shitty patio furniture seemed like your mother’s territory, all those vinyl flowers and pastel pillows.

  “Can I ask you something, Blondie?” He liked to play with the cigarette, carving up the air with its glowing tip. I liked to watch. He has man hands, your dad. Big enough to curl his fingertips over mine when we pressed palm to palm, crooked like they’re still trying to curl around an invisible guitar. “It’s probably inappropriate.”

  “I think we’re past that, Mr. Dexter.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy.” I liked to make him tell me again.

  “Does Dex have . . . I mean, she’s never brought a boy home, but that doesn’t mean . . . I was wondering—”

  “Why, Jimmy, are you asking me if your daughter has a boyfriend?” I said.

  “Well . . .”

  “Or if she’s a dyke?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Or are you just concerned with the state of her cherry, whatever drink it’s in?”

  “You’re, uh, mixing your metaphors there, Blondie.” It was cute the way he tried to play it cool, pretend like his skin wasn’t crawling off his bones.

  “Don’t ask me about Dex.”

  This was the week after that night at Beast, when you went a little nuts with the tequila and decided you should put on your own personal bartop strip show. You didn’t even remember it in the morning. What you did or what you wanted, or how you cursed at me for dragging you out of there, so you can’t appreciate that I took you back to my place, tucked you up tight under my covers, rather than dumping you off on your parents’ porch, a drunk, drooling, half-naked and half-catatonic mess for them to clean up. Sometimes I lie to protect you, Dex, so you can keep lying to yourself. You didn’t want to know how you went wild in Beast, just like you didn’t want to know how, in that field with those idiot farm boys, you were jonesing to get your hands on the axe. You don’t want to know that you swung it high and hard and laughed at the blood.

  I kept your secrets for you—from you. I wasn’t about to spill any to him.

  “You don’t want to know whether I have a boyfriend?” I said. “Or whether I’ve been in love, any of that crap?”

  “That crap’s none of my business, Blondie.”

  “They’re all idiots. Guys my age.”

  “Not just your age,” he said.

  “So now you’re suggesting I should look into the lesbian thing?”

  We weren’t looking at each other. We usually didn’t. He preferred leaning against the house, hiding behind his sunglasses and watching the back lawn like he was scanning for movement, that caveman stare, this land is mine and I will protect it. Wild boars, deer, errant mailmen—he was prepared. I focused on the same middle distance and snuck glances at him when I could. Sometimes we caught each other out. I liked it when he blushed.

  “The thing to know about men is that they’re pigs,” he said. “Especially when a pretty girl comes along.”

  “Are you calling me pretty, Jimmy?”

  “Shoe fits, Blondie.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” I told him. “I have a dad of my own, you know.”

  “I know.” He did look at me then. “It must be hard, not having him around.”

  “It’s not like he’s dead.”

  “Of course not.” He looked like he wanted to put his hand on my shoulder. Don’t ask how I knew; I know what it looks like when a man wants to lay hands on me.

  “He didn’t leave because of me, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “My mother made him think he was worthless. Tell someone that enough and they start to believe it.”

  He drew on the cigarette, breathed out a puff of smoke.

  “I hope you don’t believe it, Jimmy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You shouldn’t let her make you feel worthless.”

  I was doing you a favor. He needed someone to remind him that he existed, that he wasn’t just a figment of your mother’s imagination. Let someone start believing they’re not real and, poof, one day they disappear. You wouldn’t want that, Dex.

  We both know the last thing you want is to be like me.

  “Mrs. Dexter has a lot on her plate these days,” he said. “And I’m
not making things any easier.”

  That was when I knew I’d said something wrong, “Mrs. Dexter.” Because usually he called her Julia, as in Julia hates it when I . . . or Julia would have a cow if she knew I . . .

  “Maybe I should go,” I said.

  “Maybe you should, Lacey.”

  I didn’t mind that he said it. Only a screwup lets some strange girl insult his wife. I could be generous, because it didn’t change the truth: I was his secret, and he kept it. He lied to you, and he lied to your mother. I was his truth. I’m not saying that meant he loved me best. But it has to mean something.

  MY FATHER IS NEVER COMING back. I know that. And my resulting daddy issues are not subtle. I didn’t need a therapist to tell me I was looking for paternal replacements, that the “inappropriate” encounter with my band teacher or the time I let that McDonald’s fry guy feel me up beside the Dumpster was all about filling a hole. Pun unintended, guttermind.

  But I don’t need a father, Dex, so don’t think I was trying to steal yours. Just borrowing him for a bit, just chipping away a little for my own.

  “I’ll probably get fired soon,” your dad told me once when I asked why he was around so much during the day. Not like the movie theater does such big business in the afternoon, and not like managing the place qualified as actual work, but still. “Though if you want to know a secret—”

  “Always.”

  He leaned in, and the whisper floated on a trail of smoke. “I’m thinking I might quit.”

  He dreamed big: inventions he didn’t know how to build and franchises he didn’t have the cash to open, dreams of starting up his band again or winning the lottery or getting salad bar botulism and suing his way into a fortune. He’s the one who made you a dreamer, Dex, and maybe that’s why your mother never seemed to like you very much, either.

  I told him he should go for it. That I would.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t have a mortgage.” He sighed. “Or a wife.”

  I was starting to think it wouldn’t be long before he didn’t have a wife, either.

  “I shouldn’t have told you all that,” he said. “You can’t tell Dex. We good on that?”

  It was insulting. Had I told you any of the other things you weren’t supposed to know? Like how he’d proposed to your mom because he thought she was pregnant, and when their bundle of despair turned out to be a stomach virus, he went through with it anyway. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he was trying his best. He’d gambled away your minuscule college fund on some stock scam before you were old enough to notice, and that was the last time your mom let him touch the checkbook. He liked the stillness of two A.M., when the house slept and he could imagine what it would be like if you were all gone. Sometimes he stayed awake till dawn, imagining himself into that emptier life, the songs he would write, the coke he would snort, the roar of his engine on the open road.

  “They make me take these pills,” I told him, to prove myself: a secret for a secret.

  “What?”

  I didn’t tell him how it started, after my mother found me in the bathtub, the water pink. “You know how it is, you do one thing people don’t understand, and they freak out and drug you up like you’re some kind of crazy person having daily chats with Jesus and the man in the moon.”

  “Were you?”

  “I don’t fucking see things that aren’t fucking there,” I said.

  “I meant, were you some kind of crazy person?”

  Then I had to smile. “You’re not supposed to say crazy. It’s offensive.”

  He held up his hands, like excuuuuuuuse me. “So sorry. Were you nuts?”

  “Wouldn’t you go a little fucking nuts if everyone you knew was calling you crazy?”

  It must have been lonely for him in that house, without anyone who knew how to make him laugh.

  “So they put me on these pills,” I said. “One a day to keep the little dark uglies away.”

  “Do they help?”

  I shrugged. They didn’t stop the nightmares. They didn’t make it any easier to breathe when I thought about the woods.

  “Dex doesn’t know,” I said.

  He slipped a finger across his lips, then X-ed it over his heart. “Hope to die,” he said.

  “You’re not going to . . . You won’t try to keep me away from Dex, now that you know I’m totally fucked-up?”

  “I think maybe it’s good for Dex to be around some fucked-up people,” he said.

  No one had ever said I’d be good for someone. “You really think that?”

  He sucked down the last drops of whiskey. “I have to, don’t I?”

  I reached out.

  I took his hand.

  For a few seconds, he let me.

  “Lacey,” he said.

  “Jimmy,” I said.

  He let go.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  “I did it,” I said.

  It’s just something dads do, right? They hold your hand. They hug you and let you lean against their chest and breathe in their dad smell and tickle your nose against the dad hairs poking out from the hole in their ratty dad shirt. There’s nothing fucked-up about wanting that.

  SO THERE I WAS, THAT last night, everything I loved gone to ash in the backyard, the Bastard praying for my immortal soul, and when I got the hell out of there and came to find you, there was no you there to find. You’d left without me, and the only one home was your father, beered up and dreaming in the still of the night.

  He came out to the car, wanted to know what I was doing there, where you were if you weren’t with me, and that’s how I discovered that you didn’t sneak out; you just asked permission. Good girl to the bitter end. He was the one who’d broken the rules.

  I would have left then—come for you—but he said, “You okay, Blondie?” and he looked so worried, so dad-like, that I couldn’t lie.

  We sat on the curb.

  “Tell me,” he said, and said again, and I couldn’t, because I don’t believe in breaking the fucking dam.

  I wouldn’t have told you, either, probably, but only because if I’d told you about the Bastard, how I felt like Kurt was dead, like I was dead, hollow inside and just fucking done, there would have been a scene and you would have fallen apart; I would have had to be the tough one, all It’s okay, don’t cry, squeeze my hand as much as it hurts, and you would have been the one to feel better.

  I’m not blaming you, Dex—you are what you are.

  You are not the strong one. So I have to be.

  “I can’t go back there,” I said.

  “Home? What happened? You want me to call someone?”

  “God, no! Maybe—maybe I can just live here with Dex.” I laughed, like it was a joke. He looked like I’d asked him to fuck me.

  “Kidding,” I said.

  “Let’s call your mom,” he said. “We’ll talk it all through. Figure it out.”

  “No! Please.”

  “Okay . . .” Maybe if we hadn’t been sitting out on the street, in front of everyone, he would have rubbed my back, like dads do. “Let’s go inside, then. I’ll call Julia. She’ll know what to do.”

  “Your wife? The one who hates me?”

  “She doesn’t—”

  “Dex is forbidden to see me. Or did you forget?”

  “She’s upset,” he said. “She’ll cool off.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m sure she’ll be real cool when she finds out her husband’s been palling around with the town slut.”

  “Don’t call yourself that.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Lacey—”

  “Face it, your wife hates me. And that’s before she even knows about this.”

  “This what?”

  “This.” Like I was going to spell it out.

  “Lacey.”

  “Jimmy.” I said his name the same way he said mine, heavy and patronizing.

  “Lacey, what, exactly, do you think is going on here?”

 
I snorted.

  “This”—he wagged a finger back and forth between us: me, him, me—“is not a secret. Dex’s mother is the one who thought you might need—”

  “What? A new daddy? A good fuck?”

  He cleared his throat. “Someone to talk to.”

  I was on my feet then. Fuck him fuck them fuck you fuck middle-aged middle-class self-satisfied judgmental oh-so-proud of their charity to the less-fortunate fuckfaces.

  “So she put you up to it? What, did she bribe you? How many blow jobs is an hour with me worth?”

  “Whoa. Blondie. Sit down. Chill.”

  Like he could just choose when to be a responsible grown-up. Like he cared about anything but making sure the neighbors didn’t hear. When I didn’t sit down like a good little dog, he stood up, but he couldn’t look me in the eye, not now that he’d admitted it—that I was some kind of chore for him, a way to get out of cleaning the gutters.

  “I guess this is good-bye, Jimmy,” I said.

  “Look, I’m obviously not handling this very well, but if you’d just come inside—”

  “I can say good-bye right out here, no problem,” I said, and when I opened my arms and he came in for the hug, I put my hands on his shoulders, rose on my tiptoes, tilted my head, and kissed him.

  I don’t care that he pushed me away, hard, or that he didn’t say anything after that, just shook his head and went back into the house and locked the door between us, that when he finally saw the real me he ran away. I don’t give a shit about any of it, but you might, because before he did all that? Before he remembered who he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do? He kissed me back.

  I CAME TO FIND YOU.

  I came to find you and take you away, because I couldn’t go home again, and after I’d done what I’d done, I couldn’t very well let you go home again, either.

  I couldn’t go without you.

  That was always the plan, that we would go, and we would go together. We were supposed to be two parts of the same whole. Conjoined twins without the freak factor, one mind and one soul.

  I would have told you everything. Once we were safe on our way, the past gnashing its teeth at our backs. Once we’d driven far enough to hit tomorrow, I would have told you my story, because I would know you’d chosen me, you’d chosen us, and you could be trusted with the truth.