Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  Maybe I shouldn’t have left you there. Definitely I shouldn’t have left you there alone, in enemy territory, all boozed up and no place to go, thinking you could hold your liquor when all along it’s been me holding you up, holding you back, holding your hair and mopping your puke and letting you believe you could handle things on your own. Maybe I shouldn’t have left you. But you shouldn’t have asked me to.

  GIRL MEETS GIRL, GIRL LOVES girl, girl saves girl. This is the story of us, Dex. The only story that matters.

  The story of us: That night at Beast, before you went all to liquored-up shit, when we let ourselves float on the arms of the crowd, surfing the love of strangers. Love pulsing with the beat, a wave that lifts you up no matter who you are. The ocean doesn’t care. The ocean only wants to slap the shore and then carry you back to the deep.

  The story of us: You need me to turn you wild. And I need you. I need you to be my conscience, Dex, just like you need me to be your id. We don’t work apart.

  Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousnesses will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song, Come down come away with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel’s, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other.

  You always tell me there was no before Lacey, that you were only you once you met me. Now I’m telling you: After Dex, there is no more Lacey. No more Lacey and no more Dex. Only Dex-and-Lacey, only and always. You should have had more faith; you should have known I’d find my way back to you.

  I will always come back for you.

  THEM

  LACEY’S MOTHER THOUGHT THINGS WERE supposed to be different this time. Of course, they were supposed to be different last time. Supposed to be. That was pregnancy; that was motherhood; that was the motherfucking joy and promise of bringing a child into this godforsaken world, a lifetime of supposed-to-bes.

  You were supposed to be healthy; you were supposed to be good. You were supposed to be a person who did not drink, did not smoke, did not snort or shoot up or, God forbid, eat some fucking unpasteurized cheese. You were supposed to be a whale, but not too big a whale. You were supposed to rest your hands on your belly and wait for a kick; you were supposed to have sex, but not too much sex, not so much or so dirty that junior would sense his mother is a whore. You were, above all, supposed to be happy. About the hemorrhoids, the swollen feet, the pineapple-sized lump of screaming flesh tearing its way through your vagina like a fist through pearl-pink tissue paper. You were supposed to be glowing with the fucking ecstasy of giving your body over to someone else—not the baby, no, that you could maybe accept, in all its nipple-sucking, spitting, burping, shitting glory, but to anyone and everyone with an opinion on what you were supposed to do and who you were supposed to be. You, who had been no one of consequence, became someone whose every choice counted, whose every mistake verged on crime against the public interest. You became a mother, and mothers were supposed to be. You were somehow supposed to be happy about even that.

  Sometimes, especially at the beginning, Lacey’s mother sort of was.

  Those nights in the dark, feeling the blast of music from the stage, feeling it inside, where the baby wriggled and kicked, like it wanted to be part of the action, to sweat and spin and scream alongside her—that was when she’d felt it most, the euphoric yes, that same yes she’d felt when she walked out of the clinic and then, after the date of no return, rarely again. She went to as many concerts as she could in those months—Springsteen, Kiss, Quiet Riot—teased her bangs, pulled her shirt over her swollen belly or, toward the end, let it rise up, the flesh glowing with sweat, because fuck it, she was a married woman now, she was practically of the Lord, be fruitful and multiply, and standing there in the dark, with the beat banging away at her, with the lights flashing and the floor shaking, the thing inside her felt alive, made them both powerful. There was magic there, in the hot blood of those nights, and that was something Lacey would never understand, much less thank her for. Those were the nights, the bands, the songs that made her. Fuck the sperm and the egg, fuck biology, fuck the fucking, she’d been conceived in a dark mass of writhing bodies and wild music, a child of black magic forged from heat and noise and lust. Of course she turned out the way she did; she couldn’t have been any other way.

  If only they could have stayed like that, tethered together, everything would have been fine. She was so easy to love, the tiny package tucked neatly in its ready-made carrying case. Lacey’s mother would have freely given of nutrients and blood if Lacey had only stayed inside and let her have more of those black magic nights.

  But no.

  But then.

  You couldn’t bring a baby to Madison Square Garden. You couldn’t even listen to an album in the comfort of your own home—not all the way through, not without waking the baby. The screaming baby. The shit-stained baby. The puking baby. The baby that your husband, who was only your husband because of the baby, couldn’t bring himself to love. The baby who left that gaping hole inside you, who had left you like everyone else, so that even when you dumped her on someone else, when you finally snuck away, back to the music, it wasn’t the same. Once you’d heard it with her inside you, it never sounded the same again. There was a hollow space that the music couldn’t fill, and it wasn’t your fault if you had to look elsewhere for something that did.

  The baby was supposed to be enough.

  There must be something wrong with her, Lacey’s mother thought, because after the baby came, nothing was ever enough.

  She loved Lacey. She couldn’t help it. That was biology, beyond her control.

  You could love something and still understand it had ruined your life. You could love something, something small and pink and helpless and nestled ever so gently in your arms, and still want to ugly-cry and give it back, or press its helpless little lips together and hold its nostrils tight until it stopped struggling. You could love something and still feel that pillow-snuffing impulse so powerfully that you would have to guard yourself against it for the rest of your life, even after the helpless thing was big enough to help itself. You could love something and still hate it for turning you into a person who could feel those things, because you weren’t supposed to be a monster.

  This time was supposed to be different. This time, she longed for supposed to be. James was the living personification of supposed to be, and he was supposed to help her be the same.

  She would be a magazine cutout, commercial ready. She would wear aprons and wash dishes and say her prayers. She would not take another drink. She would love this man, with his flattop and his polyester pants. She would love him for knowing what was right and teaching her to do it. She would find the serenity to accept the things she could not change. She would not expose this fetus to wild music, nor dance in the dark beneath flashing lights and angry skies. She would not enjoy sex, but would perform it as duty required. She would clip coupons. She would dress for church. She would not drink. She would not drink. She would not drink.

  She made these promises, and James ensured she would follow them, and she was supposed to be happy.

  She did not drink or smoke or dance. She did place her hands on her belly and beam, and still, when the baby came out, his fingers and toes and little penis so perfectly intact, she hated him for splitting her open and wanted to give him back. She loved him too much and hated him for it, and he was just as angry and shitty and pukey and boring as Lacey had been, and this time she’d done it to herself on purpose. She had no one else to blame.

  Lacey’s mother was, perhaps, not supposed to be a mot
her. Some people probably weren’t. It was too late to get that kind of clue. Bad mothers abandoned their children, and she was supposed to be a good mother, and so she stayed. And if sometimes she yelled and sometimes she drank and sometimes she fantasized about castrating her husband in his sleep and stuffing the testicles in the baby’s mouth until he stopped crying and fellated himself into a silent eternity, then that was the price of her mothering. That was the best she had to give. Some days, she woke up and swore, I will be better. Some days, she was.

  US

  July–October 1992

  DEX

  Paper Cuts

  LACEY WAS GONE.

  Lacey was gone and I was alone.

  Lacey would never have left without me, but Lacey had left without me. Left me alone with the things I’d done. The things done to me, or not done to me. Swallowed by the black hole of memory.

  I had fragments to piece together: The ink on my skin. The whispers. Slivers of the night—bodies pressed together, music, voices—all in a broken filmstrip. That must have been the worst of it, I told myself. If there’d been worse, my body would remember, would ache or bleed. The worst left a stain, so the worst must not have been.

  The worst thing that could happen, I thought, and never gave it a name.

  The girl on the other side of the night, the girl I was now: The girl who’d torn off her shirt and danced on a table. The girl who’d grabbed bulges through jeans and moaned filthy things, who said dick and pussy and lick my cunt.

  It was a wonder, that I could do those things. There was a box in the basement where we kept stray jigsaw pieces, all of them parts of different pictures, none of their edges lining up. That was me. A Picasso person. The wrong parts in the wrong places. Lacey would have known how to make them fit. Lacey had named me: This is who you are, this is who you will be.

  She would have known, but she was gone.

  I WENT TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, because going to school on Monday was a thing I’d always done.

  I didn’t go back.

  As long as the homework got done, no one objected to me spending the final three weeks of the semester in my room. No one wanted to look at me.

  Everyone wanted to look at me.

  In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

  Lacey said it mattered, how you chose to do it, and now I understood that, too: why you might choose the bullet and the gun, choose ugliness and hurt instead of slipping away sweetly into the black. Some pain dictated violence, bloodshed. Oblivion required obliterating not just the pain but its source. Justice necessitated leaving behind a mess. A scream of blood and bone and rage.

  It scared me, how much I understood.

  IF I HAD LET LACEY set the house on fire. If I had watched it burn. Sometimes I dreamed of the flames and woke up with the smell of charred flesh, and sometimes I woke up smiling.

  I tried to dream of Lacey, dream myself into our life in Seattle, but I couldn’t get there. Seattle was a ghost, and Lacey was like something conjured from one of my books. If it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been at the party; if it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been so angry and so drunk; if it weren’t for Lacey, I would have been safe.

  I hated her. I loved her. I wished she’d never come back, and I wished she would. That was how I lived, after: not one thing and not the other. Canceling myself out.

  I STAYED IN MY ROOM. SAFE territory. My room: fifteen feet wide, thirteen feet short, beige from floor to ceiling, with matted knots in the carpet from where our cat had puked her life away. A twin bed with Strawberry Shortcake sheets, because, according to my mother, sheets were expensive and grown-up was a matter of opinion. Shuttered windows that let through slats of light in the early afternoon and a rusty full-length mirror papered with remnants of Lacey: wrinkled postcards from Paris and California and Istanbul written by people long dead and rescued from yard sale bins; deep thoughts courtesy of deep thinkers, inscribed by Lacey in stern black marker; for Lacey’s sake, a cutout of Kurt, his granny cardigan matching his eyes; at the center of it all, a Dex-and-Lacey photo collage that captured none of the important moments, because for those we were always alone, no one to hold the camera. A particleboard bureau stickered with glow-in-the-dark stars that three years of scraping couldn’t clear away. Stacks of books pressed up against beige wallpaper, spines stretching to the ceiling, every book an adventure that meant climbing or toppling or ever so gently working one out of the middle of a stack, Jenga for giants. There was a card table desk in the corner, stacked neatly with the year’s final papers (failures) and report card (“disappointing”), and buried beneath them, for some future scrapbook of shame, two copies of the local paper—the edition with the letter to the editor telling the story of the wild girl passed out in the ruins of an abandoned party, and the weekend edition with the editorial, with its anonymous but all-knowing first person plural: We believe the girls in this town are up to no good, we believe modern music and television and drugs and sex and atheism are rotting our youth, we believe this girl is as much to blame as her toxic culture and her lax parents, we can’t blame her but we can’t afford to excuse her, so it follows that we must use her as a warning, lest we lose another of our brightest youth, and we the people of Battle Creek, the parents and teachers and churchgoers and goodhearted folk, we must do better.

  I CALLED HER LINE IN THE middle of the night, after my parents were asleep. Every night. All night, sometimes, just to hear it ring. No one ever answered.

  No, her mother finally said, she didn’t know where Lacey went. No, I shouldn’t call back.

  MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY ALL the time. Not at me, she said. Or not just at me.

  “I don’t care what anyone says,” my father said, standing in the doorway of my room a few days after—and maybe not, but he’d never stood like that before, like a trainer at the mouth of a cage, waiting for something wild to make its move. “You’ll always be a good girl. Maybe without Lacey around . . . things will settle.”

  Without Lacey, I was incapable of wildness, that’s what he was telling me. When I had Lacey, he had a little piece of her, too, could love me more for the things she saw in me. Now that she was gone, he expected I would revert to form. I would be the good girl, his good girl, boring but safe. He was supposed to want that.

  I READ.

  Lacey had always discouraged reading that was, as she put it, beneath us. We should spend our time on mind-expanding pursuits, she said. Our mission, and we were obligated to accept it, was an investigation into the nature of things. The fundamentals. Together we paged through Nietzsche and Kant, pretending to understand. We read Beckett aloud and waited for Godot. Lacey memorized the first six stanzas of “Howl” and shouted it over our lake, casting her voice into the wind. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, she would scream, and then tell me that Allen Ginsberg was the oldest man she would be willing to fuck. I memorized the opening and closing lines of “The Hollow Men” for her, and I whispered it to myself when the dark closed in.

  This is the way the world ends.

  This is the way the world ends.

  This is the way the world ends.

  It sounded like a promise.

  Without Lacey, I slid backward. I tessered with Meg Murry; I crept through the wardrobe and nuzzled my face into Aslan’s fur. I swept the dust and warmed the fires in Howl’s moving castle; I turned half invisible with half magic, drank tea with the Mad Hatter, battled Captain Hook, even, occasionally, hugged the Velveteen Rabbit back to life. I was a stranger in a strange land. I was an orphan, abandoned and found and saved, until I closed the book, and was lost all over again.

  I read, and I wrote.

  Dear Lacey, I wrote, sometimes, in letters I hid in an old Sears
sweater box, just in case. In my terrible handwriting, with smearing ink, unstained by unfallen tears, I’m sorry, I wrote. I should have known better.

  Please come home.

  THE LAST SUNDAY IN JULY, I went outside. Just a ride around the block, on the bike my father had quietly collected from the postparty wreckage. The sun felt good. The air smelled good, like grass and summer. The wind sounded good, that thunder you could hear only when you were in motion. When I was a kid, bike riding was an adventure, bad guys on my tail and the wind rushing through a mountain pass, passageway to enchantment. The bike itself was magic back then, the only thing other than a book that could carry me away. But that was kid logic, the kind that ignored the simple physics of vectors. It didn’t matter how fast I pedaled if I was turning in circles. The bike always carried me home.

  My father was smoking on the porch steps; he’d started in June, after. The cigarettes made the house smell like a stranger.

  I dumped the bike on the lawn, and he stubbed the butt into the cement stair.

  “Hannah,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just . . . It’s good to see you out.”

  “Don’t get used to it.” I said it with my best take-no-shit Lacey front.

  He lit up another cigarette. Chain-smoking now. Home in the middle of the day. Probably only a matter of time before he got fired again, or maybe he already had and was afraid to admit it. That used to be the kind of secret we kept. It had seemed romantic, the Don Quixote of it all, his conviction that the present was just prologue to some star-spangled future, but these days he only seemed pathetic. Lacey would have said I was starting to sound like my mother.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t think she’s coming back. Lacey. And I don’t want you thinking it’s about you, that she left.”