“And why is that, Lacey? Why would she go to all that trouble?”
It took me a long time to understand that this expression on her face, the one that made her look like a stranger, was fear. “I can’t tell you.”
“Have you always thought I was this stupid?”
“Can’t you just trust me, Dex? Please?”
That would have been so much easier—and so I did it; I tried.
“I see,” she said, as if she did, and it hurt. “But you can trust her. If it’s between me and her, you pick her.”
I reminded myself it wasn’t her fault that she’d left. That she’d molded me from wet clay, and it was law to honor thy creator. We were Dex and Lacey; we should have been beyond ultimatums. I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t have to trust Nikki. That was the most appealing thing about her: She didn’t ask that of me. She didn’t ask anything.
“It’s stupid to be jealous,” I said.
“Jealous?” She was a wild thing, suddenly. “Jealous of what? Of her? Of you? Do you know what a fucking favor I did for you, Dex, turning you into something? If I wanted a charity project, I could have gone and read to old ladies or joined the fucking Peace Corps, but I didn’t. I chose you. And you? You choose the fucking mall?”
She was the one who’d taught me that words mattered, that words could make worlds, or break them.
“I’m going, Lacey.”
“Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, talking too fast. “The bitch doesn’t matter. You matter, Dex. Me and you, like before. That’s all I want. Just tell me what I should do.”
Tell me what I should do. This was power.
I couldn’t say, Go fuck yourself.
I couldn’t say, Tell me what I should do. Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.
Somewhere below us, the front door opened and closed, hard. A baby screamed, and Lacey’s mother shouted her name in a witch’s howl; it broke the spell.
“I’m going, Lacey,” I said. “I’m done here.”
“Yeah.”
But I didn’t need her permission anymore.
I DIDN’T MEAN FOR IT TO be the end.
Or maybe I did.
She came back to school in head-to-toe black, with a silver pentagram around her neck and a bloody tear painted beneath her eye. We didn’t speak. By lunch, rumor had congealed into fact: Lacey had Satan on speed dial. Lacey had snuck into Mrs. Greer’s room and turned her contraband cross upside down. Lacey had fallen into a trance on the softball field and started speaking in tongues. Lacey drank pig’s blood for breakfast; Lacey kept a bloody rabbit’s foot in her pocket for luck; Lacey had joined a death cult.
“She’s desperate for attention,” Nikki said that night on the phone. “Your attention, probably. Don’t fall for it.”
Nikki didn’t ask me what I thought Lacey was up to, but she was the only one. People who hadn’t spoken to me since junior high accosted me in the halls, wanting to know whether Lacey really thought she could call Satan’s wrath down upon her enemies, whether I thought she could. I liked it.
My mother asked me, occasionally, why Lacey never came around—it didn’t seem like she was disappointed, more like she thought I was hiding something she needed to know—but I usually mumbled something about being busy and hoped she wouldn’t bring it up again. My father pushed harder, told me that whatever Lacey’d done I could forgive, and I wondered what made him think that she was the one at fault. Or why he couldn’t decide whether we were better off with or without her. I didn’t ask. This was how we conversed, now, my father talking at me while I played a wall. I couldn’t remember why I was so angry with him. Because he’d kept things from me; because he hadn’t fixed things for me; because in some indefinable way he’d taken Lacey from me, which seemed an even greater sin now that she was back. Because he didn’t like the Hannah I’d become, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.
Don’t you miss her, he said, and of course I did, and he was also saying without saying, don’t you miss me, and of course I did that, too. But it was safer like this, to be a wall. To be Hannah. My father, Lacey—neither of them understood why that mattered, staying safe. They didn’t know what it was to wake up on damp ground with a stranger’s boot toeing your flesh, to find words on your skin that named your secret self. They didn’t still, sometimes in the shower, rub themselves raw, imagining ink seeping into their skin, invisible brands leaving permanent marks. They didn’t know what it was not to remember.
It was all mine, the power to tell my story, build myself up again from whatever fairy tale I liked. I liked ordinary. Unexceptional. Safe. A story without dragons, without riddles, without a dark witch in the heart of the woods. A boring story about a girl who turned down the quest, stayed home to watch TV.
Now that I was Hannah again, I stayed in the kitchen after dinners, to help my mother with the dishes. You’re such a comfort to me, she would say, and I would smile my fake smile. We rinsed and rubbed, and I feigned interest in her latest self-improvement strategies, the Post-it note plan for the fridge, the poem-a-day calendar, the challenge of how to persuade herself to spend yet another evening sweating and stretching in time with Jane Fonda. She filled me in on her dull office politics and asked my advice on how to handle the asshole at reception who was always stealing her lunch. Sometimes she complained about my father, though she tried to pretend it wasn’t complaining, just idle speculation: “I wonder if your father likes this job enough to stick with it for a while” or “I wonder if your father will ever get around to cleaning out the gutters like he promised.” She was right about him, and I couldn’t understand why I still had to bite back the only answers that wanted to come: Maybe if you didn’t nag him all the time he wouldn’t hate you so much. Maybe he drinks to drown out the sound of your voice. Maybe you’ve told him he’s a failure so many times that he believes it.
He was drinking less but smoking more. He was happier. He’d stopped complaining about the movie theater, even taken on some extra shifts, mostly at night. I overheard my mother on the phone joking that he was probably having an affair.
That week, over a chicken potpie he’d uncharacteristically cooked from scratch, he said he was thinking about starting up his band again.
My mother laughed. “Oh, come on, Jimmy,” she said when he pulled a sulk. “I’m sorry, but if you’re going to have a midlife crisis, does it have to be such a cliché?”
“How about you, kid?” he asked me, as if he’d forgotten we weren’t like that anymore; I couldn’t be counted on for backup. “I could always use a drummer.”
It was pathetic, the idea of him jamming in a garage in some torn-up T-shirt with a tie for a bandana, a sad after-hours Springsteen. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, though, and he must have known what it meant.
The charm offensive swung back toward my mother. “You know you’ve always wanted to be my backup singer, Jules.”
“Not exactly my heart’s fondest desire,” she said, but without enough bite for my taste.
“That’s not what you said on our third date.”
Now she was fighting back a smile. “Jimmy, we agreed we would never—”
“Hot Lips here insisted we let her up on stage.” He reached for her hand, and she reminded him not to call her that, and said that he’d pushed her on stage, but when he pulled her out of her chair now, she pantomimed some unconvincing resistance, then let him swing her around and laughed when he started singing in falsetto. “I’m a good singer, I swear, really, let me at the mic,” he said, in his version of my mother’s voice, and she leaned her head against his shoulder and they swayed to music I couldn’t hear.
“To be fair, I’d had quite a bit to drink.” She was, ridiculously, giggling.
“They threw rotten fruit at the stage,” my father said.
She smacked him. “They certainly did not.”
“Cantaloupe. Pineapple. Who brings pineapple to a concert?”
“You loved it.” My father grinned at me over her head. “How about it, kid? We’ll do like the Partridge Family. Get a bus and everything.”
It should have made me happy, seeing them like that, like they must have been before they forgot how. I made it to the upstairs bathroom before my dinner rose up in my throat, but only barely. I let my cheek fall against the cool porcelain of the toilet rim and tried not to taste what was heaving out of me, waited in dread for one of them to come looking for me, but neither one did.
STRANGE THINGS STARTED TO HAPPEN. Stranger, I mean, than Lacey prostrating herself at cloven feet. Stranger than me going to school in a borrowed denim vest and baby blue peasant skirt with a lace hem. I missed my flannel; I missed my Docs. I missed caring about the things that mattered and not caring about anything else; I missed being afraid of what I might do instead of what might be done to me.
I missed Dex.
Dex couldn’t exist without Lacey—but somehow, impossibly, Lacey soldiered on without Dex. As if, in losing me, she’d lost nothing.
If I could, I would have willed her out of existence. Instead I haunted the hallway by her locker and drifted past her classrooms in case she’d decided not to cut. The less I saw her, the less it would hurt to see her, until it stopped hurting at all. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stay away.
It felt like we were the only two real people in the building. That the other bodies were automata, simulacra of life that existed only for our entertainment. I watched them watch Lacey. I watched Lacey. I watched her turn our joke into her religion, watched her slip out the emergency exit and into the parking lot with Jesse, Mark, and Dylan, watched her slip an occasional tongue past Jesse’s greasy lips, but I couldn’t watch her all the time, and so I wasn’t there to see the thing she did to Allie Cantor. The thing that, at least, they said she did to Allie Cantor. Plural trumped singular: Whatever they said became truth.
Allie Cantor was, famously, the first girl in our class to have sex—or at least to admit it. At thirteen, she’d briefly intersected with Jim Beech as they moved in opposite directions on the popularity ladder (she now ruled as Nikki Drummond’s right hand whenever Melanie Herman fell from favor; he wore a cape to school and smelled like bacon). Allie had math with Lacey, a class for seniors still muddling through long division—Lacey because she couldn’t be bothered, Allie because she couldn’t remember her own phone number. Her mental energy, as far as I could tell, was expended on teasing her bangs, counting her calories (on her fingers, no doubt), tonguing Jeremy Denner’s balls, and boring people on the subject of her two King Charles spaniels, which would have been prize show dogs had their tails not been crooked as her presurgical nose.
Stranger than strange: Lacey stared at Allie from across the classroom for a week, her gaze never wavering, her lips betraying some silent, unceasing chant. “Cursing her,” she answered, whenever anyone asked what she was doing. Like it should be obvious.
Even Allie Cantor claimed to find it hilarious, until the day she broke down under the weight of Lacey’s gaze, fled the room, and didn’t show up again for a week. Some mystery illness, we heard. Many fluids expelled in many unfortunate ways. When Allie did come back to school, she was ten pounds and several shades lighter. She transferred to a different math class.
“Food poisoning,” Nikki said on the phone that night. “Coincidence.”
We watched Lacey; Lacey watched her targets. Next up was Melanie Herman. Melanie spent half her time trying to knock Allie Cantor out of contention for Nikki’s affections, the other half groping Cash Warner while desperately pretending she didn’t want to date him and marry him and have his little Cash babies. Lacey stared, day in, day out. There was no reason to associate it with the way Melanie’s hair began to fall out, a few strands here and there, as if someone was plucking her in the night. Patches of skull began to show through, sickeningly pale, and she took to wearing hats. The doctors diagnosed alopecia; Melanie diagnosed Lacey.
Sarah Kaye was tolerated only because her deadbeat cousin was always willing to buy her underage friends beer. She went down in gym class, passed out cold on the soccer field, breaking her wrist in the fall. She said that just before everything went black, Lacey had given her a weird look and murmured something under her breath. Sarah, whose diet consisted of celery and Tic Tacs, got a get-out-of-gym-free pass for the rest of the semester. Lacey got a tattoo, a black, five-pointed star at the nape of her neck.
Kaitlyn Dyer, who’d absorbed the concept of “girl next door” from her mother’s amniotic fluid and devoted her life to fulfilling Seventeen’s bouncy, adorable, baseball-capped ideal, found a rash spreading up and down her left arm. This, she claimed, after Lacey spit on her in the hall, a spray of saliva patterning her arm precisely where the rash bloomed. Marissa Mackie borrowed a pen from Lacey in history class, only to wake up the next morning with a knife-shaped burn on the curve of her palm. Or so everyone believed, until her little sister revealed that Marissa had paid her twenty bucks to burn her with a curling iron and keep her mouth shut. Everyone agreed this was pathetic.
I thought it was all pathetic. Waking up to a mysterious stomachache or a tingling sensation in your foot had become a badge of honor, an anointment. No one could prove that Paulette Green was faking it when she fainted by her locker, even if she conveniently managed to land in Rob Albert’s muscled grasp. No one would suggest out loud that Missy Jordan might have deliberately made herself puke her guts all over her chem lab partner. But by the next week, Paulette and Rob were an official item and Missy was ensconced at Nikki’s cafeteria table, because the enemy of mine enemy, et cetera.
Even back when Jesse Gorin was inking pentagrams on his forehead and sacrificing Dumpster rats, it would never have occurred to anyone to believe, even half jokingly, that he’d developed psychic powers. The jocks who’d slung him in a tree were more than willing to believe he worshipped the devil, but no one suggested the devil was returning his calls. Jesse, Mark, Dylan, they were known quantities—as were we all. We’d known one another since preschool, through cooties, boogers, cracking voices, diagnoses. We knew one another like family, by scent and by rote, so wholly that it seemed less knowledge than embodiment. We were a single, self-hating organism. Lacey would always be a foreign body. Capable of anything.
Nikki wouldn’t dignify it with speculation. “Do I think she’s a fucking witch?” I heard her say to Jess Haines, as they were passing by my locker. “Sure. And I think you’re a fucking moron.”
Her mask was slipping, I’d noticed. She wasn’t as good at playing nice as she used to be; the silky smooth exterior had taken on a certain gritty texture. Sometimes I caught spearmint on her breath, her preferred flavor for covering up the smell of her parents’ gin. Lacey—or neuroses and desperate striving—picked off the minions one by one, but Nikki Drummond herself escaped unscathed. People, as they say, began to talk.
This is what they say happened when Nikki caught Lacey outside the orchestra room, just after lunch. That Nikki dared her to do something, then and there, to bring down the wrath of Satan. Prove it. Lacey stood by, silent and impassive, watching her melt down.
“Well?” Nikki said, and they say she seemed on the verge of violence, that there was something off-kilter about her. “Go ahead. Do it. None of this rash shit. No fainting. Just ask your friend the devil to strike me down dead, right here.”
Lacey said nothing.
“Show them all what you are,” Nikki said.
“I know how to hurt you,” Nikki said. “Don’t forget that.”
Then Lacey spoke. And she said this: “Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.” It had the sound of memorized scripture. Then, they say, she smiled. “Don’t be so impatient.”
PARENTS WROTE LETTERS AND LEFT messages and raised an alarm, and the school sent Lacey home for inappropriate dress or behavior, and sometimes suspended her, but she alwa
ys came back, and it would begin again. They tried sending her to the school’s counselor, but rumor had it that she spent the whole session in spooky silence, mouthing hexes and sending him home early for the day with a suspicious migraine. After that, they sent me.
He had no office, so we met in the empty gym, dragging two metal folding chairs beneath one of the baskets. It smelled like shoe polish and boy sweat, while Dr. Gill, pit stains seeping through his pink shirt, smelled vaguely of VapoRub.
“I’m told you’re very close with Lacey Champlain,” he said. He wasn’t extraordinarily ugly, not in a Dickensian way—that would have suited me—but ugly enough, his throat wattled, his gut bulging slightly over a pleather belt, a swell of man boob filling out his plaid shirt. “How do you think she’s doing?”
I shrugged.
“She seems a bit . . . disturbed,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Should you be talking to me about other people’s problems? Isn’t that illegal or something?”
“Are there problems of your own that you’d rather discuss? I know this last year’s been somewhat difficult for you . . .”
I imagined filling in his pause. Resting my secrets at his feet one by one. Lacey. Nikki. My father. The party. My body. My beast. Without them weighing me down, I worried I might float away.
“Why would you think anything’s been difficult?” I said.
“Your teachers have reported some erratic behavior over the months, and there was that, er, incident in the spring.”
I almost wanted to make him spell it out.
“It’s natural, at your age, to test out new identities. But when a student goes through radical transformations in such a short period of time, well . . .”
Well, then, that wouldn’t be natural—that was the implication. You shouldn’t be able to so thoroughly change who you are. Natural was having a shape of your own, not living like Jell-O, conforming to any mold.
“Well, what?” I said.
Girls on Fire Page 21