Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  I DON’T BELIEVE IN OUR DARK Lord of the Underworld or the rising of the Antichrist, I don’t believe in child sacrifice or wild midnight blood rituals, and I don’t believe that I can call on the power of Satan to knock some cheerleader off her pyramid. Wearing black felt safe. Wearing it on my skin, the mark of something vicious, that felt right. All the rest of it, that was crap. But: Sarah, Allie, Paulette, Melanie . . . I wanted them to hurt, and they hurt. That’s power, Dex. You don’t need magic to make people believe what you want them to believe. Believing can hurt most of all.

  “What’s with all this Satan shit?” your dad asked me once.

  I’d started sneaking off to see him a few times a week. We talked over boring movies in empty theaters, and talked more in the alley, always sharing a cigarette, like smoking half didn’t count. He told me about the first time he went to the movies and how back in the dark ages it felt like an occasion, and I told him that his beloved Woody Allen was a hack and if he really wanted art he should try Kurosawa or Antonioni. He looked at me the way you used to look at me, like I knew a secret and if I was nice I might spill. We didn’t talk about his wife; we tried not to talk about you. Mostly, we talked about music. I would stick the headphones over his ears and play him snatches of the Melvins or Mudhoney. Never Kurt, though. I saved Kurt for us.

  I took a long drag on the Winston. “It’s not what people think, pentagrams and blood sacrifice and all that. As religions go, satanism makes a lot of sense.”

  “Translation: You’re desperate for attention.” He tossed the butt and ground it out with his heel. “Teenagers.”

  I liked that he was so sure there could be nothing to it, that I was harmless.

  We stayed on the fringes of the day, early matinees or midweek midnight showings that no one bothered to see, and I made sure never to approach him in the presence of witnesses. It didn’t even faze me, the morning I spotted Nikki slumped in the back row. She didn’t see anything; your father was shuffling paperwork and I was half napping through The Last of the Mohicans. Even if she had noticed me, there was nothing to see. So I didn’t tell him about it, and I didn’t stop. I thought we were safe. Too bad I wasn’t the witch they all thought I was, or I would have known better.

  He made me mixtapes from old eight-tracks and tried to convince me that the Doors were rebels. A mixtape’s the best kind of love letter, everyone knows that, and I think maybe he loved me a little, or at least he loved who he got to be when he was with me—the old Jimmy Dexter, the one who still had all his hair. He told me all about his band: the time they got fifty bucks to play a wedding, then got so wasted on free wine he puked on the bride’s shoes; the time they came this close to a record deal but lost out because the bass guitarist got drafted; the many times he’d retreated into his parents’ garage with his guitar and tuned out all of existence except the strings, the chords, the music, the joy. I told him he should start it up again, or at least duck into the garage once in a while and turn up the volume on his life—that was for you, Dex. Because music, that’s one place where your father’s more like me than like you; it’s blood and guts for him, and living without it is what makes him pathetic. I thought if he could get it back, maybe you could get him back—the him you never knew. That Jimmy died in childbirth, and he never even held it against you.

  EVERY DAY, I WATCHED YOU pant after Nikki. Every day, I watched out for you, waiting for her to make her move. The Halloween decorations came out and forgetting the woods got harder every day and I knew Nikki would be feeling the same jitters, that she’d be feeling the bad things coming and would do anything to stave them off, especially if it meant hurting me. She knew how to hurt me.

  We had made our sacred promise, Nikki and I. We had sworn our blood oath. Confessions swallowed, guilt strangled, sins buried in salted ground. We played our games and waged our proxy wars. We bloodied you in the crossfire.

  But we had promised. To leave death in the woods, and to forget.

  The Spanish Inquisitors, before they tortured, would lay out their instruments, one cruel blade after another, show you what was to come, and this was considered torture in itself. This was my torture: What she knew. What she might tell you.

  What you would do.

  DEX

  Love Buzz

  OCTOBER WAS A GOOD TIME for witches. Even a town as frightened of the devil as ours went all out for Halloween. As soon as the sun set on Labor Day, Battle Creek embraced its dark side. Fanged pumpkins grinned from porches, pulpy gap-toothed smiles gleamed in windows, the candles at their hollow center casting every night in brimstone glow. Pale-faced cardboard vampires dangled from lampposts, at least until the raccoons got to them. You’d find them mangled in the street, dappled with rabid blood.

  Halloween had been my favorite holiday when I was a little kid. The candy, the masks, the opportunity to disappear into someone else, if only for a night. The possibility that the world held just a little bit of magic, that any door could be a passageway to wonders. That a child could slip into the dark and never be seen again. Things changed once I figured out monsters were real. Battle Creek Halloween wasn’t for the weak: The hours between sundown and sunrise were anarchic, roving gangs of teenagers set free from the bounds of civility giving in to their inner brutes. Rotten eggs flew; toilet paper soared; mailboxes burned and cats screamed. November first’s crime blotter always overflowed its page: trespassing, vandalism, guns fired into the night, houses and people entered without permission, and those were just the sins that someone had bothered to report.

  It had never seemed like a coincidence that Craig Ellison killed himself on Halloween. He’d retreated to a haunted sanctum; its ghosts had claimed him. So maybe it wasn’t just Lacey who made October feel like an avalanche, the days rushing all of us toward cliff’s edge. Maybe it was the memory of Halloweens past, the glow of pulpy teeth, the haunted Ellisons shuffling through town pale and gaunt as the season crept closer to the anniversary of their nightmare. Even the sticky, hot weather that refused to turn felt like a warning: Bad things were on their way.

  Small wonder that, as one golden girl after another dropped, the town went fucking nuts. The thing had a momentum all its own. Girls I was certain Lacey had never met, girls mousier and twitchier than even I’d been in the days before Lacey, fled to the nurse and eventually the newspaper, having woken to discover a suspiciously shaped rash or strange streaks sparking across their vision. Diagnosis: Satan. Three girls struck simultaneously with laryngitis attributed their silence to Lacey’s dark powers—until it turned out the student council president had given all three of them a key to the student council office, along with gonorrhea of the throat. A third-string goalie insisted Lacey had offered him a blow job in the woods and, in a devilish bait and switch, dragged him to a satanic coven instead. He made it all the way to the local news, spinning a tale of whirling dervishes, bloodletting, face painting, and an orgy in which he wasn’t allowed to take part, that last seeming to be his main complaint. Finally, Battle Creek could put name to its enemy. There was finally something to fight, and fighting was crucial, for if someone didn’t do something soon, it was said, surely it was only a matter of time before another Craig.

  We didn’t actually believe it, of course. We believed it without believing it; we made a joke of it, and the joke made it easier to be afraid. We wanted to be scared, like a kid hiding under the covers, screaming, waiting for Daddy to come in and banish the monster—because it was an excuse to stay awake, because it was fun to scream, because it felt good to have a father strong and sure rest a hand on your forehead, because the closet was deep and shadowed and, in the end, who knew what might be hiding in the dark. We didn’t believe it, but we wanted to; we believed it, but we made ourselves laugh it away. It was a joke on Lacey, letting her believe we believed it, a nasty joke on her and on the grown-ups, who didn’t understand the nuances of such belief, who saw black lipstick and pentagram tattoos and fainting girls and were convinced.

  I
say we, but of course I mean they. After Lacey, I couldn’t go back to being one of them. I couldn’t believe, or let her suspect I did. I could only wonder. Had she lost it so thoroughly—or was it all a show, maybe even for my benefit? To what end, I couldn’t imagine, didn’t want to.

  “This is what she does,” Nikki told me, and while she didn’t sound frightened, she didn’t sound entirely unfazed, either. “She plays games. She stirs shit up. Notice how she’s only careless with other people. So that, when the time comes, they’re the ones who get hurt. But you know that. Don’t you?”

  We had yet another assembly, of course. This time, Principal Portnoy warned us that it was a matter of our souls. He called Barbara Fuller to the stage—“concerned parent,” though her kid was six—who in turn introduced the great Dr. Isabelle Ford herself, national devil-worship expert, renowned pamphleteer. Probably got her PhD in bullshit, Lacey would have said if she’d been next to me in the back row rather than hiding out by the Dumpsters with her new friends and a joint. Ford and Fuller acted out a skit in which the doctor invited Mrs. Fuller to a coven. Satanism was contagious, they warned, and the eyes of the audience turned to me. “Just say no,” the doctor reminded us. Nancy Reagan’s magic bullet; it was all they knew, and for all they knew, it worked.

  IT WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE Halloween when Nikki cornered me in the bathroom and suggested we cut school. The Ides of October. I should have been more careful.

  “I’m desperately craving a movie,” she said.

  “Pretty sure the only thing playing during the day is The Mighty Ducks, Nikki.”

  “I’ll endure,” she said, and because I had several free coupons tucked into my wallet and those days my father mostly worked nights, I went for it.

  It wasn’t until the lights went up—on a movie that managed to kill my enervated crush on Emilio Estevez for good—that I saw them. I’d noticed their silhouettes in the front row, but hadn’t recognized them, his boxy and hers elfin, the two of them bent together in conversation, her shoulders bouncing with laughter. The credits unspooled. They stood up. They turned around.

  It was like walking in on a scene from your own life and realizing the details weren’t anything like what you remembered—the seats blue instead of red, the floor sticky with nacho cheese instead of soda, the father older and balder, the girl wearing the wrong face. My father, with the wrong daughter. My father, with a beer in one hand and Lacey in the other.

  “Dex,” Lacey said, then stopped.

  There was a tugging on my arm. I remembered Nikki. Remembered that my legs could move, that I could carry myself away, and so I did, running, not listening to the thud of boots as she came after me or the absence where he didn’t, running flat out until I got to Nikki’s car, pressed myself against it, home base, all safe, cool metal holding me up, and then somehow I was inside the car and we were driving away.

  “God, she is disgusting,” Nikki said. “What is wrong with her? And him! I mean, God.”

  I made some kind of noise, something squeaky and mouse-like. Most of me was still back there with them in the dark.

  “I’m getting you drunk,” Nikki said.

  “I don’t drink,” I said, because I didn’t, not anymore—it wasn’t safe. Then I remembered that nothing was safe and so what the fuck was the difference.

  We went to the train station.

  We went to the train station and got drunk off the wine coolers that Nikki had in her trunk, tucked beside her father’s video camera, which those days she rarely left home without. We sat on the edge of the tracks and guzzled the wine coolers, letting the ground go wobbly beneath our feet and the world turn fuzzy at its corners. We didn’t talk about what my father was doing with Lacey or what Lacey was doing with my father.

  I did not think about what they had done when I left, whether they’d parted ways or whether they’d sat down together, were still together, talking about me and what made me so difficult to love. Whether Lacey put her hand over his and assured him he was still a good father; whether my father rubbed her back in slow circles, like he did when I was little and needed to be sick, promising her that everything would be all right, he would always love her, his special girl.

  I was sick, straight down into the tracks, which had surely seen worse.

  “Gross,” Nikki said, and by then we were drunk enough that all we could do was laugh.

  We were drunk enough to set up the camera and put on a show.

  This time, Nikki played herself. She let me be Craig.

  “I killed you.” She slung an arm around me, her breath hot on my neck. “And now you’re back to haunt me, and I can’t blame you, because I fucking killed you.”

  “I did it to myself,” I said, because whatever she thought she’d done, it was physics that sealed the deal: cause and effect, finger on trigger, trigger on bullet, bullet on skull.

  “You could never do anything yourself. You made me do it all for you so you could blame me, and now I get to blame myself, thanks a fucking lot, and that’s why I hate you. I always fucking hated you.”

  “I loved you,” I said, and she kissed me, and we were slippery and wine-tongued together, and she tasted sweet, and before I could wrap my muddy head around it or touch my palm to her neck or feel her fingers scrape against the fuzz at the back of mine, it was over.

  Nikki was beautiful. Nikki had always been beautiful. I’d always known that, but I tried to know it differently now, to take in the specifics of her long eyelashes and the silk of her hair, the pull of her shirt against her skin and the expanses where pale flesh peeked through, soft and warm. I asked myself if I wanted more, if this was, finally, the shape of me.

  “You can never tell anyone,” Nikki said softly.

  “We were acting. It was no big deal.” It didn’t count when you were playing let’s pretend; nothing counted when you were drunk.

  “Not the fucking kiss. I mean what I said. That I killed him. This is the secret place. No one can know what happens here.”

  “You didn’t kill him, Nikki. You know that, right? Unless you came here with him and pulled the trigger. Did you do that?”

  “I did not pull the trigger. I did not do that. I did not.”

  “Then you didn’t kill him. Say it.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  There wouldn’t be another moment, not like this. “What happened here, Nikki? What happened to him?”

  I’d never asked her so directly before, and I thought she’d be angry, or at least surprised, but she only looked bored. “Everyone knows what happened, Hannah. Old news. Bang bang, you’re dead, et cetera. Next question.”

  “Why, then?” Which was, of course, the same question. The only question.

  She shrugged, elaborately.

  “Then why blame yourself?”

  “Who the fuck knows, Hannah? Why does anyone blame themselves for anything? Oh, wait—I forgot who I was talking to.” She tossed back her head and laughed out a cloud of spittle and fumes.

  I punched her. It could be this way between us, today, after what we’d seen. No walls. “What?”

  She choked on the words, but I was patient. I waited.

  “You. You, of all people. Telling me I’m not responsible for what someone else does.”

  “You’re not.”

  She seized my shoulders. “Real talk, Hannah?”

  “Okay.” I thought she might kiss me again. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t not want it, either.

  “Kettle, meet black pot. Or, I mean, you’re like the kettle calling the pot— Wait.”

  I giggled. “You’re drunk, Nikki.”

  “You’re drunk.” Which was what a drunk would say, and also true.

  “It’s pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Yes! That! You! You.” She poked me hard, just above my left nipple. “How about you take responsibility? Lacey’s got you so fucking brainwashed, poor little Dex, can’t do anything on her own, needs big bad Lacey to protect her. You ever ask yourse
lf why she’d bother with you if you were that pathetic? Where’s the fun in that? What’s fun is fooling someone who’s strong into forgetting that she is. And it must have been so fucking easy for her. You want to forget. You’re begging for it.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, because the ground was shifting and the air was blurry and my ears buzzed. It was easier to let the words plunk down, drop by drop, no stream of meaning, just disconnected sounds.

  “How about Lacey didn’t make you do anything, and I never made you do anything, and you went to that fucking party and took off your fucking clothes and passed the fuck out all on your own, and stop being a fucking victim all the fucking time because it gets. So. Fucking. Tired.”

  “Oh.”

  I was weaving and spinning, and the heartbeat in my head insisted: Pain, pain, pain.

  “Are you going to cry? Hannah? Hannah Banana?” She shook me. “Say something. Don’t cry.” Her lower lip jutted out, and even in a pantomime of a pout, she was still pretty. “You said real talk.”

  “You said real talk.”

  “I did? That’s right. I did.” And then she was laughing again, and I was laughing, and we were on our backs looking up at twirling sky, and my brain untethered from my body and spiraled up toward the blue. The day fell away, even Lacey fell away, and I was here, in this moment, with myself, and the ground was wet and the air was warm and everything was exactly enough.

  “I forgive you,” I told her. “I forgive everything and everyone. My heart is as big as the world.”

  “But not Lacey,” she said.

  “Never Lacey,” I said.

  “Your turn.”

  “My turn what?”

  “Your turn real talk,” she said. “Harsh truths. Or truth or dare. Or just dare. Whatever the fuck. Your turn.”

  On our backs, staring at the sky, fingers Michelangelo’d toward each other. I’d missed it, that sense of floating away from myself, everything so easy.