Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  “Well, then we’d have to start asking whether that student is struggling to draw the boundaries of her personhood, and whether that struggle puts her at risk.”

  “I’m not on drugs. I don’t even do drugs.”

  “I’m not necessarily talking about drugs. Or sex.”

  Dear God, I thought, please never be talking about sex. He was so solid, so fleshy, so thick with decay. It was impossible to imagine the boys I knew someday evolving into this.

  “Hannah, has your friend Lacey ever tried to engage you in any . . . rituals?”

  “Rituals?”

  “Anything that might have seemed, strange? Perhaps something involving animals? Or”—he lowered his voice to a profane, almost hopeful whisper—“children?”

  I got it then, the temptation she’d succumbed to. I wanted it. To narrow my eyes, make my voice Lacey cool, and say, Well, there was the time we sacrificed the goats and made the children drink their blood . . . does that count? To shove his face into his own prurient appetites and watch him feed.

  Nikki had taught me better.

  “Nothing like that,” I said. Polite, composed, good-girl Hannah Dexter. As interesting as a bowl of oatmeal. “Can I go back to class?”

  HANNAH, HAVE YOU SPOKEN WITH her?” There was maternal concern in the question, but there was also judgment. Once again, in my mother’s eyes, I’d failed.

  I shrugged.

  “Have you considered it? I don’t know what went on between you—”

  “That should be your first clue.”

  Usually that would be enough to derail her, start an argument about my attitude, land safely in my room. Not this time.

  “The girl is obviously troubled. Regardless of your differences, maybe you owe her a little compassion?”

  “Aren’t you the one who forbid me ever to speak to her again?”

  “That was in the heat of anger, Hannah. I was worried about you.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m worried about her.”

  “Fucking unbelievable.” I said it under my breath, loud enough for her to hear.

  “What was that?”

  This time, I enunciated. “Fucking. Unbelievable.”

  “Hannah! Language.”

  “I love how when I wanted her around, Lacey was basically the devil. And now, when she’s literally worshipping the devil, you assume that whatever happened between us is my fault. Or, like, forget fault. It’s just whatever I decide to do is the wrong thing. By definition. Is that it?”

  “I realize that you prefer to see me as a villain when at all possible.”

  I couldn’t stand it, the simpering voice, the affected elocution, every bit of her behavior fake—and that wasn’t even the worst of it. I could have forgiven her fancier-than-thou act if she hadn’t been so bad at it.

  “I’m not saying anyone’s at fault here, Hannah. I’m just worried about her. She’s obviously gotten involved in something she shouldn’t have. The things they say . . . I’m worried something terrible might happen.”

  I could have told her, things didn’t just happen to Lacey. If something terrible happened, it would be because Lacey had willed it to. I could have told her, I was the one things happened to.

  She’d caught me downstairs on the couch, watching TV, which these days I could only do when my father wasn’t hovering. Of course she’d positioned herself squarely in front of the screen. I looked away, at the Sears photo framed on the wall, the most prominent picture of me in the house, if that chunky toddler could be considered in any way contiguous with the lumpen, scowling creature I’d grown up to be. She must have had her doubts sometimes, wondered if I was a changeling, if her perky girl who loved tutus and Parcheesi had been snatched away in the night, an angry monster child slipped into her place. I hated the girl in that photo, because I knew how much easier she was to love, all soft skin and smooth edges. How could my parents not want her back?

  “Lacey’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about her.”

  “That’s patently false. Maybe I should call her mother—”

  “No!”

  “Well, if you won’t talk to her . . .”

  “She’s worshipping the devil, Mother.” I couldn’t remember when I’d last said that word because I needed it, because it meant home. “Any other mother in this town would be taking me in for an exorcism or something, just in case.”

  “Aren’t you fortunate, then, that I’m not every other mother?”

  “Yeah, I won the lottery.”

  “I hope this isn’t really you, Hannah. It’s fine, to put on this little show for me. I understand. But I hope it isn’t you.” She didn’t sound angry, and that somehow made it worse when she gave me what I asked for and left me alone.

  LACEY

  Something in the Way

  WHAT I LEARNED FROM KURT: It can be a good thing, people thinking you’re bad. When Kurt’s neighbors worried they were living next to the devil, Kurt strung up a voodoo doll on a noose and hung it in the window for them to see.

  I’m not what you think I am, Kurt says. I’m worse.

  I won’t tell you what I did that first night, after I sent you inside to your happy family: how empty the car felt on the drive home, how I had to turn off the music and endure the quiet you left behind in case, if I listened hard enough, the night could tell me what to do.

  I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH, NOT ANYMORE. The dreams came for me, came even when I hid under the covers and tried to stay awake. A ring of clasped hands around the bed, singing their love for Jesus; the nightmare girls closing in, fingers like spiders, creepy-crawling across bare skin. I was always naked. I never struggled, in the dream. I went stiff, corpse-like, made myself into dead weight. They chanted about Christ and I chanted to myself, light as a feather stiff as a board light as a feather stiff as a board, magic words from a time when we were all little pagans summoning ghosts.

  They carried me away into the night, into the woods. Down the dark path, where the bad things live. They tore out my beating heart, their jaws sticky with my blood, and buried it in wet ground. They knew my secret self, the scarecrow-Lacey built of twigs and mud and bark, the Lacey who was made of forest and would someday be summoned home.

  SO, FUCK YOU. THAT’S WHAT I thought. Fuck you and your new bitch friend, and don’t think I’ll be waiting around to mop up the blood when a certain treasonous sociopath stabs you in the back. I could have forgiven you for lying to me—maybe, even, for assuming I was so stupid that I wouldn’t clue in to what happened at that party, or at least what people said happened, that the rumors wouldn’t trickle down to me and that I couldn’t understand all the things you must have been, sad and scared and humiliated and angry at yourself for whatever you’d done and whatever’d been done to you and angry at me for letting it. I could have told you about the things hiding inside you, about the secrets I kept for you, the wild you didn’t want to know; I could have held you and remembered with you, and together we would have sworn our revenge and pledged that no one else mattered, that words were only words even when they said whore and slut and trash, that we could endure anything if we did so as us. That’s what was hard to forgive, Dex. That you forgot how much you needed me. And apparently the other side of the equation never even occurred to you.

  So I was angry, and maybe, when I ambushed your father at the movie theater, I was looking for a little vengeance, thinking I could go through with it, could shimmy over in my leather cutoffs and fishnets, let him think it was his idea, make him beg for it, crook a finger into his collar, tug him into the projection room, slide his hand down my shorts, let his fingers root around, get good and wet, lick myself off him, lick him up and down in all his flabby glory, rub his hairy back and tug those sagging balls, let him bend me over a desk or shove me up against a wall, fumble with his belt buckle, whip it out, then slip it in, both of us panting and crying and trying not to scream your name.

  In his defense, he wasn’t happy to see me. />
  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” He looked over his shoulder as he said it, like someone would wander into the manager’s office to catch us, even though the building was empty, no one but us and a couple blue-hairs who had nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon than lose themselves in a movie before slinking home to count the minutes till death.

  “Hi, Lacey,” I said. “So great to see you again after all this time, Lacey. How did the whole getting-tossed-out-of-the-house-and-sent-away-by-a-crazy-bastard thing work out for you, Lacey?”

  “Hi, Lacey.” We were past nicknames; this time, only real words, only truth.

  “Hi, Jimmy.”

  “How about you call me Mr. Dexter.”

  “We wouldn’t want to be inappropriate.”

  I could tell from his twitchy face that he felt guilty, not just about the night he let me kiss him and then threw me out on the street, but also about the fact that he’d kept all of it a secret. I guessed, even before he confessed it, that he felt like shit for shutting his mouth and letting you mope around the house like your dog had gotten chomped up by the lawn mower. He was a liar and a coward, and he’d convinced himself you were better off without me, and once he figured out his mistake it was too late to say anything without revealing himself as a pussy. And here’s something to feel good about, Dex: The last thing your father ever wanted to do was that. Every little girl’s daddy is a superhero, isn’t that right?

  “You got your small talk, Lacey. You can go now.”

  “Please, can we talk for a second? For real?” I let him hear some keening underneath, the dog whistle of desperation. Men are men, Dex, all of them. “Please, Mr. Dexter.”

  That got him.

  I put on a good show. Begged him to make you give me another chance, remember how good I was for you. To do whatever it is that good fathers do to guide their daughters down the righteous path, to guide you back to me.

  “I’m sorry, Lacey,” he said, and sounded it. “Dex is a big girl now. She picks her own friends.”

  It was him calling you Dex that did it, like even if he couldn’t come right out and admit it, he was rooting for us, and the part of you that belonged to me.

  Men are predictable. He hugged me. It was a dad hug, and don’t think I don’t know what that feels like. To feel so small, so safe, to feel a warm body and steady breathing and accept it as an end in itself, not an offer or a promise or a debt. I got snot on his shirt, and neither of us cared, and nothing twitched below his waist. It was a caesura, like the silence before a hidden track, a dark to hide in. The good kind of dark.

  “Let’s watch a movie,” he said when we let go.

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  He shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  We slipped into the theater midway through Sneakers and watched Robert Redford save the day, then ventured out to the alley and shared a cigarette, and it would have been that easy, just the way I’d wanted it, except I didn’t want it anymore, didn’t want him for the purpose of hurting you, didn’t want him at all.

  Wanted you.

  Missed you.

  Took what I could get.

  THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR me in the house anymore. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and while I was gone James Jr. filled up the empty space. Little baby, big lungs. Lots of blue plastic crap, bright with stars and monkeys and terrifying clowns. Unwashed bottles, filthy diapers, the smell of lotion and shit, dried trickles of drool and puke, and, of course, the baby himself, the fucking baby, bright-eyed and apple-cheeked and looking at me like he remembered the time I baptized him into the church of Satan and was just waiting till he was old enough to tattle.

  Home sweet home: The house was the Bastard incarnated in brick and vinyl. Fake siding outside and fake wood floors inside, grimy kitchen that never got clean. Wallpaper that looked like little James had puked it up, paisley blotches of half-digested peas and corn. I hated that most of all, because I knew my mother hated it even more but was too lazy and cheap to do anything about it. That wallpaper, Dex, that’s everything my life is not going to be.

  The Bastard wasn’t around as much as he used to be, but when he was home, his mood was foul enough to make up for it. While I was gone he’d apparently discovered the limits of paper pushing. It turned out getting to play Mussolini to an office of stoned telemarketers wasn’t as much fun as he’d expected, and his election campaign for an open slot on the school board had—praise be to whatever saint watches over public education—stalled out at the signature-collection stage. Maybe even the dim bulbs of Battle Creek could sense he was a repellent toad; more likely, my reputation preceded him. Let him rant all he wanted about satanism being a phantom of an overheated imagination, about the devil wearing subtler costumes; he wore his costume and I wore mine, and too bad for him if mine was more effective, because when he called Horizons they told him I was saved and refused to take me back.

  Meanwhile, Mother of the Year had started drinking again for real. I kept her secret. I had plenty of practice picking up her slack, though this was the first time the slack was the kind that habitually shit itself. I’m not going to say we bonded, me and baby brother, but helpless things are genetically designed to be cute. Big head, big eyes, some kind of protect me pheromone; there was even the occasional moment when I would bounce him on my shoulder and whisper in his ear and not be tempted to drown him in the tub while Mommy Dearest slept it off.

  “You’d be better off,” I told him, and then, because no one was watching, kissed that soft little baby head and let him wrap his warm little baby fingers around my thumb. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”

  It was James Jr. that did it, in the end. Or maybe it was just me, fucked by habit, the lie slipping out before I had a chance to think. My mother had gotten drunk, left the baby alone, and that’s how the Bastard found him, squealing in a soggy diaper in an empty house, and “What kind of mother?” and “I should call the police” and “If you think I’m letting you anywhere near my son again” and “How many times do I need to teach you the same fucking lesson” and the Bastard thought cursing was spitting in the face of Jesus—that’s how mad he was—what was I supposed to do but say it was my fault?

  “I promised I would babysit,” I told him. “I thought I could just sneak out for a few minutes and no one would know.”

  She let me lie for her, and I let his hand crack hard across my cheek, and I guess we both thought it would end there, but when it didn’t, when he made her choose, her daughter or his son, she let the lie sit, and so I did as I was told, packed up my shit and left.

  “You’re an adult now,” she said. That’s all she said. “You can handle it.”

  WHEN KURT’S MOTHER KICKED HIM out, he had to live under a fucking bridge. At least I had the Buick. I could shower in the locker rooms before school or, if I felt like it, at Jesse Gorin’s house. He didn’t even make me suck him for the privilege. Once I caught him jerking off, and he liked that so much that occasionally I watched, but it was never a quid pro quo kind of thing. More of a favor, like how I kept him company while he listened to his death metal shit and pretended it didn’t make my ears bleed. Sometimes we’d drag the action figures out from the back of the closet and make He-Man blow Skeletor or G.I. Joe take it in the ass, then watch old metal videos until the sun came up.

  It wasn’t the safest thing for him, for any of them, being seen with me. Considering what people thought they were. Considering what I was trying pretty fucking hard to be. I even apologized once, if you can believe it. “Sorry,” I said—and you’ll have an even tougher time believing this, but I actually was—“if I’m bringing down extra shit on you guys.”

  He shook his head. “Do what you do. They deserve it.” Then he showed me the box in the basement where he’d stowed all his old devil crap, the incense and the blades and some cheap polyester hoods, and told me to knock myself out.

  Jesse got me a job at the Giant, where they didn’t give a shit about
devil worship as long as I remembered to double bag. If life were a movie, I would have gotten a job at some down-and-out record store, enlightening losers who were still jonesing for New Kids on the Block and learning valuable life lessons from my grizzled yet sexy boss, who would hold out for a few months, like a gentleman, before hoisting me onto the counter and ringing me up. Instead I got Bart the produce guy, who looked a little like Paul McCartney if you squinted; Linda the meat lady, who was pretty sure she could convert me back to the Lord with a couple pot roast dinners; and Jeremy, our sleaze of a manager, who hit on every double-X chromosome in sight except for me.

  Sleep was hard; everything hurt too much. There were noises. Engines and sirens and crickets and planes, nothing to keep out the night. I waited for footsteps, a tap on the glass, a face at the window. When it happened, and sometimes it did, I could rev the engine and go.

  I could have gone for good. I stayed for you. The two of us heading west, together, that was always the plan.

  If I’d asked, you would have said: Go. You would have drawn me a map. Like a little kid crushing her tiny fists together and telling her mommy I hope you die. You don’t believe a little girl like that. You pat her on the head and wait for the tantrum to pass. That’s called faith.

  You know I think it’s bullshit: faith, superstition, some sixth sense knowing that actually means wishing or pretending or ignoring. But you’ve got to believe in something. I believe gravity will keep me from floating into space and that people came from monkeys. I believe that sixty percent of anything the government says is a lie, and that conspiracy theorists belong in the same nuthouse as alien abductionists and the Elvis lives crowd. I believe that Democrats are criminals but Republicans are sociopaths; I believe that space is infinite and consciousness is finite; I believe that my body is my body and rapists should have their balls cut off; I believe that sex is good and the deterministic universe is a quantum illusion; I believe that global warming is increasing and the hole in the ozone is widening and nuclear proliferation is worsening and germ warfare is coming and we are all ultimately fucked. Those are my foundations, Dex, my unquestionables. The gospel of Lacey: I believe in choice and words and genius and Kurt. I believe in you.