Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  Maybe she knew exactly why he did it; maybe the worst of the rumors were true, that he’d done it for her, because of her. It would be better never to know, I thought, than to know something like that.

  Instead, she occupied herself with imaginary boyfriends: Luke Perry, Johnny Depp, and Keanu Reeves, whose future wedding she had already imagined in great detail, right down to what she’d be wearing as his bride—not that he would give a shit, because he clearly didn’t give a shit about anything. Which, Nikki said, was the key to his appeal.

  “Not my type,” I admitted, and she shrugged. But imaginary worked for me, too. I’d scrubbed away those words on my skin, but it felt like the ink was in my blood. Never again: I would be a fortress now, impermeable. I contented myself with the Dead Poets boys, sweet and lyrical and easily cowed, and River Phoenix, the kind of boy who would light candles and read you poetry, who would kiss you softly on the lips and then let the night fade to black, who was never angry, only sad, who cared about the earth and refused to eat animals and eschewed drugs and had such lonely eyes.

  Then Nikki made me watch My Own Private Idaho, and there was my River alongside her Keanu, the two of them sky-high on heroin and fucking for cash, and so much for that.

  “I thought you’d like it,” she said, halfheartedly, not even trying to disguise the fact that she’d done it on purpose, that she knew it would screw with my head and River-besotted heart, and because I knew, and she knew I knew, somehow that made it all right. I could even laugh.

  It wasn’t the same, the two of us. There were no midnight dances in the rain, none of those heart-thumping moments when the tide of wildness washed in and I loosed my grip enough to be swept away. But it gave me an excuse to leave the house, and a heated pool.

  “Probably I shouldn’t,” Nikki said one afternoon as we paddled our rafts back and forth across the water. I was wearing a new bikini, courtesy of my mother, who was so happy with the new state of Drummond-related affairs—and her own burgeoning acquaintanceship with Nikki’s mother—that she’d been ready to buy out the store. Blood money, I thought, as she passed the credit card to the cashier. My very own thirty pieces of silver, complete with pink stitching and push-up cups. Too bad: I liked how the suit glowed against my tan, and the cloud of chlorine that clung to me through the day, my hair as crispy as my skin.

  “Shouldn’t what?”

  Nikki liked to start conversations in the middle, after she’d already hashed them out in her mind, which made it difficult to know whether I’d zoned out or she’d only just started speaking.

  “Cut my bangs like that girl on The Real World. You know?”

  “Not really.”

  “You know. Becky.”

  “I don’t have cable.”

  She bolted upright. “Wait, seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  We spent the rest of that day in her air-conditioned basement watching Real World tapes on her big-screen TV. Nikki had every episode, carefully labeled, and we watched them all, straight through for six hours, until I felt like I, too, was living in a house, having my life taped, no longer being polite but starting to get real. The next day we started again, and the rest of August unspooled to the sounds of Julie’s cackle, Kevin’s rants, Eric’s Jersey-boy bravado, Heather B.’s hip-hop rhyme.

  “Imagine if we all stopped pretending there was such a thing as getting real,” Nikki said. “Imagine the fucking relief.”

  Real World housemates were required to lock themselves in a closet and spill their secrets into a camera and—miraculously, as if they assumed no one would ever watch—they did.

  “Let’s do it,” Nikki said, and I could see it sparking in her, the flare of an idea that demanded action. It was the one thing she and Lacey had in common, and the thing I most envied about them both.

  “I’m not telling you my deepest secrets,” I said. “I’m certainly not recording them.”

  “No, we won’t be us, we’ll be them,” she said. We would put on a show, play their parts. It would be practice for her future audition tape; it would be fun.

  Her father had a video camera and a tripod. Nikki played Becky with her pointy cardboard boobs and then Eric, with his Guido swagger. I took on Andre and his flannel angst, lounging on the leather couch, gazing at the ceiling, all woe is me and why, God, why. “The world is pain,” I said, in my druggy Andre voice, while Nikki manned the camera and cheered me on, “but, like, the music, yeah, when it, like, pours out of me, man, that’s just, you know, that’s like my soul on the wind.”

  Nikki laughed. “I thought you were doing Andre, not Lacey.”

  Even then, even when it hurt, she was right: It was fun.

  I LEARNED TO PRETEND AWAY almost everything, but I couldn’t will September out of existence. Summer ended without my permission. I went back to school—I put on a show.

  Nikki and I didn’t associate with each other publicly; this was an unspoken mutual agreement. But she’d taught me how to perform, and I performed for her. Summer was long, but not long enough for people to forget what had happened. They all looked at me too hard, and I knew what they saw: spotty nipples, tiny sprouts of hair, secret stretches of skin. Boys, especially, watched me like they knew my function and were waiting for me to figure it out. I knew how to act like I didn’t care, and if I could be all surface, no depth, then the act would be all that mattered. I would not drown.

  It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide. To give up on Dex; to be dull, to live a small, safe life.

  I went to school. I went home. I slurped spaghetti with my family and tuned out my mother. Funny how she’d been so concerned with my first transformation but was so content with the second; there were no more speeches advising me against losing myself. Maybe some long-dormant maternal instinct kicked in, and she understood that I’d already lost too much to risk giving more away. I learned how not to look at my father. He kept offering to treat me to a movie; I took him up on it only once, for a midnight showing of Honeymoon in Vegas that had been sold out for weeks and which my mother had given me special dispensation to see, under my father’s guidance of course. Not since Lacey had I been out so late, and I’d missed the quiet of the sleeping town and its stars. My father bought popcorn and settled in beside me, and we sat in silence until the Elvises flew and the credits rolled.

  He leaned toward me, awkwardly, like a bad date priming to make his move. “No word from Lacey, kid?” Unlike my mother, my father couldn’t stand Nikki.

  I shook my head.

  “Huh.” He cleared his throat. “So that’s it.”

  It had been twenty-two days since I’d last biked past her house, searching her window for signs of life. “Yep. That’s it.”

  He sighed and stretched back, kicking his legs up on the empty seat in front of him. “I love it here, don’t you?”

  “My shoes are sticking to the floor.”

  “It’s not because of the movie, you know? I dunno—maybe it’s just the dark. Two hours, nothing to do but sit here, let the world settle over you.”

  You spend your whole life sitting in the dark doing nothing, I could have said. I’d always assumed he loved his sunglasses for how they made him look, but maybe they just gave him a place to hide.

  A week later, having survived another school day and a long stretch of homework in the library—anywhere was better than home—I biked home through twilight drizzle, feeling, in the surge of wind and adrenaline, that this was manageable, these two-hundred-some days to be endured before the rest of my life.

  I dropped the bike in the driveway and was about to head inside when the horn blasted. I turned to see a car idling at the curb, its high beams flashing an SOS. The horn sounded again, impatient, and the passenger door swung open. Kurt’s voice scratched at the night.

  Lacey was home.

  LACEY

  Smells Like Teen Spirit

  IT TOOK ME MONTHS TO stop thinking
about her lips. I liked them smiling, pussy pink and quirked at the corners, but I liked them every way. Pouting. Sucking. Trembling. I told her that the flask made me think of her, spun her some bullshit about flappers and daring girls sucking the marrow out of life, but—truth? I just wanted to see those lips pursed around the silver spout.

  That’s the kind of thing that came back to me in all those dead hours staring at Jesus, pretending to pray: things I was meant to have forgotten, Nikki’s lips and Craig’s dead eyes and a canopy of leaves the color of blood and fire. Horizons had no horizon. Some girls got sent home after a couple weeks; others were stuck there for years. Your golden ticket: a letter home saying that Jesus had finally turned the bad seed good. No one knew how you got it. There were demerits and credits and an impenetrable algorithm ranking us on a hierarchy of salvation, but nothing to suggest that surviving one day got you closer to anything but more of the same.

  I didn’t think about the future. I refused the past, pink lips and the smell of gunpowder. I thought about you.

  My own version of prayer, my own religion. The church of Dex and Lacey. Where the only true sin is faithlessness. I would have faith you could forgive me. I knew I could forgive you anything.

  They were big on forgiveness at Horizons. Disclosure of past sins was mandatory, the bigger, the better, so we amped them up. The Screamer’s occasional toke became a drug addiction; the Skank’s ill-advised habit of masturbating to her father’s Soldier of Fortune collection became oedipal lust; even the time Saint Ann kissed some nerd in her church group so he’d help her with her chemistry homework was a gateway to prostitution. The Sodomite’s sins were self-explanatory, and every time she confessed to fantasizing about one of us stripping naked in the outdoor shower, they assigned her to wood-chipper duty and an extra hour of praying away the gay. Imagine if they knew what I’d done in the woods. How good it had felt.

  It was fun watching them pretzel-twist themselves trying to forgive our imagined pasts. That was Shawn’s mandate: We were all equal here. We were all, once we’d dipped ourselves in the lake and sworn our fealty to God and country and Shawn, cleansed.

  You tell me, Dex, what kind of a bullshit god doesn’t care what you did or who you hurt as long as you say you’re sorry?

  Forgiveness for the mistakes of the past, revenge for the trespasses of the present: That was the Horizons way. When you got toilet-toothbrush duty for giving your counselor the finger, or solitary for trying to lubricate your unit with laxatives in the pudding, that wasn’t punishment; it was correction. Curtsy and say thank you, lest you be corrected some more.

  It got easier once I found ways to correct myself. Digging into my wrist scar with a paper clip, just a little—that was enough to clear my head. They wanted us fuzzy. Pliable. That’s what the skimpy rations and the middle-of-the-night prayer calls were all about. The hours of verse memorization, the time in the dark place—it was CIA-brand torture. Survival was a matter of maintaining control, staying steady.

  That’s why, about three weeks in, I threw out my pills.

  I ALMOST WENT CRAZY, IN THERE, without them, until I came up with the game. Or maybe the game was me going crazy. Either way, it worked. At Horizons, the devil was everywhere. Any time you cursed, lusted, cried yourself to sleep, forgot to ask permission before taking seconds at dinner, that was the devil getting his claws in you. So I figured, they want it so badly, let ’em have it. Something real to hate. Something to fear: me.

  The next time they asked us for confessions, I gave them one to remember. “I killed a boy, once,” I said. The Skank and the Sodomite leaned close, like they knew this one was going to be good, even before the punch line: “I fucked him to death.”

  I’d get it from Heather for that one, later; we all would, the punishment of the one visited on the many, the righteous burning alongside the sinners. But confessions were sacrosanct. Call it my Scheherazade moment, Dex, because I did it to save my own life. “Not literally, of course,” I continued, “but it was the fucking that got him into the woods, and kept him there once he realized what we were all about. A boy like him should have run screaming in the other direction once he saw the altar, the poor little cat, the knife. Nice boys like that don’t mess with the devil.”

  The Skank snickered. She would know.

  I told them of a sacred clearing where moonlight glinted off shining bark and the scent of mossy earth mingled with sweat and breath and blood. I told them that we whispered terrible oaths, promises to each other and to a dark lord, that we invoked the forces of earth and sky and claimed dominion over the natural world, that we raised storms and whirled madly in the lightning. I told them that we’d needed more power and more blood and an ultimate sacrifice, and so I had played the serpent, slithered into a boy’s life and let him slip inside me until he lost all reason and became my plaything, until I could loop a delicate finger around his belt buckle and draw him into the woods, where the girls and I were so hungry, had waited so long, would finally wait no longer to feed.

  In the hush after I’d finished speaking, they all tried very hard to laugh, and I tried not to. They pretended not to believe me. Heather aborted the confessional and we spent the rest of the day in the sun, holding buckets of water—which, I know, doesn’t exactly sound like the Spanish Inquisition, but don’t try this at home. After about an hour it feels like your arms are going to fall off. Then, in the late-summer heat, the thirst kicks in, and your head goes all foggy, black dots creeping across your vision, and still, your hands sweaty and raw, you hold tight, because you know if you let go they’ll toss you in the dark place until God knows when. We lasted long enough for Heather—who got off on torture in the name of the Lord—to giggle through la petite mort, and for three of us to pass out.

  They treated me differently after that. I felt different, too. Like I really had fucked a boy to death, and was not sorry.

  The rest was easy. I’d read Satan’s bible; I knew what to do. A few stupid made-up prayers to the Dark One, some bloody pentagrams on the floor, a lot of crap about how my Lord would rain fire and darkness down upon the whole operation. One afternoon I spotted a dying squirrel writhing in the gutter outside our cabin. It was dead by the time I snuck out in the night to retrieve it, and I’ll spare your delicate ears the details. Blood is blood, even if you have to dig your hands into some matted fur and rotting innards to get at it. Once I speared the squirrel with the stick, it was almost like using a paintbrush. No one woke up, not even Heather, when I painted the sign of the Antichrist over her bed, then left the squirrel on her pillow.

  The way they all looked at me then, Dex—the girls, the counselors, even Shawn. Like I was dangerous. Not troubled, just trouble. Eve and Lilith, the serpent in the grass. Down in the dark place I chanted imaginary prayers; in the depths of night I whispered in the girls’ ears: the things I would do to them, the things I knew their dark hearts had done.

  I promised them we would be prisoners here forever, that Horizons was our birth and death, that as long as I lived among them, the devil would have a home. Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs. This is what the Satanic Bible teaches, and this much is true.

  MAYBE IT WAS THE GAME. Maybe it was something in me that woke up when I stopped taking the pills, opening my mouth pink and wide for inspection every morning, mother’s little helper nestled safely in fleshy cheek. Who the fuck knows, maybe it was the devil himself. It’s not the why of it that matters; it’s the what: It’s the dreams.

  I dreamed of animals eating my face.

  I dreamed of the woods, never lovely, only deep. Dead things rotting. I dreamed of a bird, with inky feathers and a smirking beak, talons perched on my breasts, pecking at my stomach, ripping into my intestines, digging out the thing they call a womb.

  I dreamed of a man. He climbed through the bunk’s window, slid into my bed, and he held me, and I was a child, but I was not afraid.

  Or I was afraid, and I screamed, and he la
id his heavy hand across my mouth and his body across my body and had his way in the dark.

  He wore your father’s face, or mine; he wore the Bastard’s face; he wore Kurt’s face, and this was how I liked him best. He was always the same man.

  He was no man at all.

  I told him what I’d done and what I wanted to do. He told me sleep is where you find the people you’ve lost, and where the dead come home to you.

  In your dreams, it’s easy to be a god.

  When he wore the face I liked, the Kurt face, I liked to touch the hair, blond as a child’s. His eyes were blue like the plastic stone on a gumball-machine ring. I liked to lean my cheek against his stubble. He said I would hurt less if someone else hurt, too, and that I already knew. It was safe to want that; it was safe to want anything, in a dream.

  I dreamed of death.

  I dreamed of maggots crawling out of Craig’s hollow eye sockets, feeding on the raw meat of his brain. I tasted metal in my mouth and felt my finger twitch. I saw three bodies in the dirt, three holes, blood pooling together as it sank into the earth.

  I dreamed of things that could have been. Some nights, I dreamed what was. The weight of his body when it went limp on mine, the seconds that passed as the skin cooled, as time did not reverse itself and the rupture in his skull did not heal.

  In my dreams, the man with the blue eyes and the angel skin told me I had power, and his voice was the kind that only told the truth. He asked what I wanted, and I said I wanted control, and I wanted pain for my enemies, and I wanted you.