Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  It belonged to Nikki now, this place. He’d claimed it for her.

  “Your boyfriend killing himself doesn’t automatically make you a good person,” I said, because it hurt to feel sorry for her.

  She looked like she’d had that thought before. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Because you’d kind of think it would.” She offered me the bottle, but I waved it away. I knew what to do when the witch offered you a bite of her apple.

  Nikki downed the rest in a single swallow, then fired the bottle into the trench. There was something immensely satisfying in its shatter. She swung her legs back and forth. Somewhere, birds sang. A mosquito lit on my knee, and Nikki slapped it away. She left behind a slick of sweat, which surprised me. The Nikki Drummonds of the world weren’t supposed to perspire.

  “I don’t lie to people here,” she said. “So maybe you’ll believe me this time. I’m not the enemy. There is no enemy.”

  “Why do you care so much if I believe you?”

  She shrugged. “I thought it was weird, too.”

  The witch builds her house out of candy to charm stupid children, I reminded myself.

  “I can help you fix it, you know,” she said.

  “Fix what?”

  “Well, for one, your sullied reputation. For another . . .” She flung her hands in my general direction, as if to suggest your essential Hannah Dexter–ness.

  “What makes you think I need to be fixed?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  “And why would you want to make me your project?”

  “Maybe I’m bored.” She was looking at her feet, pointing and flexing them together, like we used to do in gymnastics at the Y. “Maybe I’m tired.”

  “Of summer?”

  “Of pretending not to be a bitch,” she said. “You’ve obviously already decided I am. It’s relaxing.”

  “You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said, and maybe I was, because at her admission I felt a strange tingle of something adjacent to pride.

  She shrugged again, which I took as a yes. “I don’t beg. Come to the mall with me tomorrow. Let the idiots see you not caring what they think. Let them see you with me. It’ll help.”

  “Come to the mall with you? Are you high?”

  “Marissa is cheating on Austin with Gary Peck. She lets him finger her in the chem lab after school.”

  Marissa Mackie and Austin Schnitzler had been a couple since junior high and had been Craig and Nikki’s prime competition for every sweetheart-related yearbook superlative, not to mention my own personal Most Likely to Make You Vomit. Even money had them engaged within a few months of graduation, earlier if the condom broke. “How do you know?”

  “Because people tell me things.”

  “And why are you telling me?”

  “So you’ll trust me.”

  “I’ll trust you because you’re spreading gossip—”

  “It’s not gossip if it’s true.”

  “Okay, so your logic is, I’ll think you’re trustworthy because you’re sharing your best friend’s darkest secret with your worst enemy?”

  “Number one, she’s not my best friend. Number two, she has much darker secrets. Number three, you’re seriously underestimating my pool of enemies.”

  “God, you really are a bitch, aren’t you?”

  Nikki stood. “I told you, I don’t beg. Take it or leave it, your call.”

  “You’re absolute crap at being nice, you know that?”

  There was something different about her laugh, here, something light and sunny, and it felt good.

  “You’ll have to pick me up. I don’t have a license.”

  “We’ll take care of that, too.” This time her laugh was more a cackle. “I do love a project.”

  I felt that tug of inevitability again, some profound sense that life had come unstuck.

  “I have to get back, or my mother will freak,” she said. “But you can stay, if you want. Cut straight through on the other side of the station and your place is only about a mile. I’ll tell your mom you got sick and I gave you a ride home.”

  It was less a suggestion than an order. “Nikki—” I didn’t turn to face her. I couldn’t. “Before you go . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  It would be so easy for all those storybook heroes to avoid adventure, to save themselves from the sorry fate of leading an interesting life. Don’t lean over the well; don’t rub the magic lamp. When the voice calls to you from the dark, don’t listen.

  Don’t go into the woods.

  “What’s the deal with you and Lacey?”

  She paused just long enough to make me nervous. “Maybe we were lovers, Hannah.” She lingered on the operative word, opening her jaw so wide I could see her tongue pry the l from the roof of her mouth. “Hot ’n’ heavy lesbo action, and you’re just some pawn in our lovers’ quarrel. Ever think of that?”

  It was like she was too lazy to make an actual joke. She might as well have said insert crass bullshit here, and fuck you very much for asking.

  “Whatever, Nikki.”

  “I’m turning over a new leaf. It’s called, who gives a fuck about the past? The real issue is you and Lacey.”

  “And what issue is that?”

  “I already told you. She was shitty to you. And for you. It was painful to watch.”

  “Who asked you to watch?”

  It was the wrong answer. I should have defended Lacey, and then it was too late.

  “Why would she let you get so drunk that night, then leave you there on your own? What kind of ‘best friend’ does that?” She squeezed her fingers around the phrase.

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “She was shit to you that night, and she’s been shit all along. It’s a power trip for her, you get that, right? Making you think you need her? Poor little Dex, alone and helpless, with big strong Lacey to teach her how life works. You were the only one who couldn’t see it.”

  “Fuck you, Nikki.”

  “Say I’m wrong. She’s the best friend a girl could have. So where is she? You’re having the worst fucking time of your life, and she abandons you to go throw her panties at Nirvana? You’re lucky, Hannah. She would have ruined you. That’s what she does. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  “Go back to your party, Nikki.”

  She left me alone in the woods to think through her bullshit, or ignore it and imagine all the people who must have passed through the station back when the trains still chugged through Battle Creek: businessmen in fedoras or smutty-cheeked coal miners or grinning teenagers riding off to war, everyone on the way to somewhere else, waving at the sorry town rooted in its place, and I did my best to imagine all of it, until it got dark and I got tired of being alone.

  THE MALL. LACEY AND I never went to the mall, which was thirty minutes down the highway, bedecked with bright red and blue banners over the entrances, like a Renaissance faire sponsored by Macy’s and Toys “R” Us. The mall, Lacey said, was brain death. A lobotomy built of fake brass and linoleum. Drones and plebes embalming themselves with fro-yo, middle-aged creepers buying “neck massagers” at the Sharper Image. Lacey believed in small stores tucked into forgotten spaces: attics, garages, a basement where we probably would have been murdered if the guy’s bong hadn’t set off his smoke detector. The chain stores lining the mall were a colonizing force, Lacey said, infecting the populace with bacteria that would breed and spread. The more people were alike, the more alike they’d want to be. Conformity was a drug, the mall its sidewalk pusher, red-eyed and greasy and promising you there was no harm in just a taste.

  At the mall, the fro-yo tasted like vanilla-scented shampoo. At the mall they played instrumental versions of Madonna and girls danced along, using moves they’d gleaned from MTV. There were cookies the size of my head and pretzels with chocolate dipping sauce and cream cheese frosting. There was a carousel in the center, where children screamed in circles and bored fathers pretended to watch. Armored
knights guarded the exits, fending off toddlers who clung to their shiny limbs. There was a booth selling “mead” at the food court, and beside it a table of scruffy lacrosse guys smashing pizza into gaping maws—“gross but cute,” said Nikki.

  There was a fountain sparkling with coins. I threw in a penny and didn’t wish for Lacey.

  I watched Nikki try on long flowered skirts and denim vests, but I refused the pastels she shoved at me. “I don’t care what other people think,” I said. “I dress for myself.”

  “I guess it’s just a coincidence, then, that you dress exactly like Lacey. The goth Sweet Valley twins.”

  “We wear what we want,” I said. Present tense. Like grammar could shape reality. “Not some kind of”—I dangled a tank top off my finger, its lace threaded with shimmering silver, the delicate sheath suggesting a fragility Nikki might sometimes want to project but never embody—“costume.”

  Nikki rolled her eyes, slipped on the tank top, and somehow, with a shift of her shoulders and a calculated tilt of the head, became someone brand-new, sweet as the orange-blossom perfume she’d spritzed on us both.

  “Sorry, I forgot—those hideous boots are an expression of your soul. And just happen to also be an expression of Lacey’s soul, and the souls of every other grunge-girl wannabe Mrs. Cobain. One big flannel-covered coincidence.” She’d produced a vintage silver flask at lunch, the kind of beautifully beat-up artifact Lacey would have loved, and added some vodka to her Diet Dr Pepper, which had buzzed her straight into lecture mode. “By this time next year, half of Battle Creek’s going to be walking around in your stupid flannel shirts, I guarantee it.” She thrust one of her discards at me, a sky blue cashmere sweater I could never afford, even if I might someday decide I wanted to wear something that feminine—something that brought out my eyes, as she pointed out. “Everything’s a costume, Hannah. At least be smart enough to know it.”

  The sweater was whisper soft, and it fit perfectly. I didn’t have to tilt my head or shift my posture; between the fairy-tale blue and the cherry-pink gloss Nikki had smeared across my lips with her thumb, I looked like a brand-new person, too.

  I didn’t remind her to call me Dex, and she didn’t bring up Lacey for the rest of the day. We stuck to safe spaces: the many ways our mothers embarrassed us, which of the Dead Poets Society boys we’d prefer and in what order, whether the incentive of a real-life Patrick Swayze could teach anyone to dance like Jennifer Grey, whether our ninth-grade biology teacher was sleeping with the principal, whether returning to Battle Creek after college and for the rest of agonizing life should count as tragedy or farce.

  It was fun. That was the surprise of it, and the shame. We didn’t excavate the truths of the universe or make a political statement; we did nothing daring or difficult. We simply had fun. She was fun.

  All day, I waited for the punch line, but there were only L’Oréal counter makeovers and Express denim sales and an hour of hysteria squeezing ourselves into wedding-cake formal dresses, the more rhinestoned, the better. There was a turn in the Sharper Image massage chairs, and a shared pack of chocolate SnackWell’s in the car on the way home. It was inexplicable and impossible, and then, with that weird summer temporal distortion where one day seems like ten and a week is enough to turn any alien addition into the familiar furniture of life, it was routine.

  I got to know her house and its ways. I stopped waiting for her agenda to emerge.

  We spent most of our days outside, floating the pool on inflatable rafts, letting the sun crisp our backs and splashing water at Benetton, Nikki’s Labrador retriever. That was what I learned best from Nikki that summer: how to float. To stop drowning, she taught me, I only had to stop fighting. I only had to lie back and decide that no dark shapes swam beneath the surface, that nothing with sharp teeth and insatiable hunger was lurking in the fathomless depths. In the world according to Nikki, there were no depths.

  I was already empty; Nikki taught me it was safest to stay that way. That if I pretended hard enough nothing was waiting to claim me, nothing ever would.

  SHE PLAYED WITH MY HAIR and vetoed chunks of wardrobe; one sticky afternoon she brought me to the elementary school parking lot and taught me how to drive. She still refused to call me Dex. “Your name is Hannah,” she said. “Who lets some stranger give them a new name? It would be one thing if you didn’t like it. But seriously, to decide to be someone new just because some weirdo tells you to?”

  I did like my name—that was the thing of it. I’d forgotten that: I hadn’t known there was anything wrong with Hannah until Lacey told me so.

  Nikki was too careful to talk about Lacey. Instead she talked around her, let me creep to my own conclusions. “I don’t know why you listen to this shit when you obviously don’t even like it,” she said when I fast-forwarded through one too many Nirvana songs.

  “Of course it matters what people think of you,” she said when I told her I didn’t need her help repairing my reputation, that my reputation was irrelevant. “Anyone who tells you different is trying to screw you.”

  “Some people can’t help being freaks, so they’ll try to drag you into freakhood with them,” she said, thrusting an armful of hand-me-downs at me. “But you’re different. You’ve got options.”

  She talked about herself, and maybe that was the thing that slowly suckered me into trusting her. She was bored, she told me, not just with Battle Creek and her friends and her dysfunctional parents and her perfect brother with his dull college girlfriend and obedient premed life, but with herself, too, with waking up every morning to perform “Nikki Drummond.”

  “You have no fucking idea, Hannah,” she said, in the middle of a rant about the girls who assumed themselves adored members of her royal court. “When I say shallow, I don’t mean like a sandbar. I mean like a puddle.”

  “They’re shallow?” I said, with a pointed look at the issue of Seventeen in her lap. She’d just spent the last thirty-seven minutes gaming the “Who’s Your Perfect Beach Boyfriend?” quiz to ensure she scored high enough to match with “Golden God.”

  She threw it at me. “Of course I’m fucking shallow. But I know it, that’s the difference. Like I know that reading Nietzsche doesn’t make you deep.”

  She pronounced his name correctly, almost pretentiously, with the same faux German accent Lacey had used.

  “Everything is crap,” Nikki said. “It’s the people who don’t get it that tire me—the ones who think anything fucking matters, whether it’s their nail polish color or the meaning of the fucking universe.”

  She was buzzed. Nikki, I understood by then, was always just a little buzzed. I’d seen enough Lifetime movies to know this was not a good thing. She talked about having power over people, how it was dull but necessary, because the only other option was letting people have power over you. Sometimes she even talked about Craig.

  We did this only when we went to the train station, which we did only when she was in a very particular mood. I didn’t like it there. They hadn’t told her exactly where they’d found the body, she said, whether it was on the tracks or in the old station office or hanging half in and half out of the boxcar, as if he’d tried at the last minute to flee from himself. We might have been sitting on grass that had been flattened by his body and fed with his blood. I didn’t believe in ghosts—even as a child eager to believe in anything, I never had—but I believed in the power of place, and who was to say there wasn’t something about the old station, something so sad about the sound of the wind rattling through its broken windows that it had infected Craig, attuned him to his own pain? It was the kind of place that whispered.

  Nikki said it hurt to be there, but that sometimes pain was good.

  “I miss him,” she said once, dangling her legs over the tracks, picking at the dirt under her nails. “I didn’t even like him that much, and I fucking miss him. All the time.”

  I’d learned not to say I’m sorry, because it only made her mad. “He should be sorry,” she always
said. “Plenty of people should be sorry. Not you.”

  Once she lay down along the edge with her head in my lap, and said that maybe she was to blame. Her hair was softer than I’d imagined. I brushed her bangs off her forehead, smoothed them back. The roots were coming in, dirt brown. I wondered when her hair had gone so dark, whether it had ever really been the color of the sun, or if that was just how I’d needed to remember it.

  “Don’t be a narcissist,” I said. She liked that.

  “Do you worry you’ll never love anyone again?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. But then, “I didn’t, though. Love him. I thought I did, and then I knew better.”

  “What happened?” I meant, what happened to make her see, but I meant more than that, too. Like everyone, I wanted to know what happened to make him walk into the woods, what made him bring the gun—and, if she didn’t have the answers, I wanted to know how could she stand it, the certainty she never would.

  “Did you know that until Allie was seven years old, her mother lied and told her that carob was actually chocolate?” she said. “This poor kid, for years her mother’s shoveling this health food crap in her mouth and calling it chocolate, and she’s wondering why the whole world makes such a big deal out of something so disgusting. And then you know what happened?”

  I shook my head.

  “Some babysitter didn’t get the memo and brings over some ice cream and a bottle of chocolate syrup. Allie gets one taste and goes fucking nuts. She got up in the middle of the night and drank the whole thing. I think they had to pump her stomach.”

  “Moral of the story, don’t lie to your kids?”

  “Who the fuck cares what the moral of the story is? The point is, it’s not like she could go back to carob after that, could she? But her mother wasn’t about to let her have chocolate again. She was fucked.”

  Nikki wouldn’t say any more, and I was left to use my imagination: What was her chocolate? Some college guy, a friend of her brother’s visiting for the weekend? Something more illicit, perhaps—a teacher? A friend of her father’s? Someone who’d given her a taste of something she couldn’t have again and couldn’t forget. Whoever he was, he was gone: She hadn’t dated anyone seriously since Craig had died, never seemed to evince a moment of interest, though it occurred to me that was her way of punishing herself.