Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  Nikki turned. “Oh, no. Hannah. You’re here,” she said, with no inflection. “Oh dear, I guess you saw everything.”

  SOMEHOW, I GOT OUT OF there. Somehow, adjusting the mirrors, shifting the gears, signaling the turns, all as Nikki had taught me to do, I got home.

  Locked in my room, on the floor.

  Burning with cold fire.

  What I could say now, if I could speak to her then, that girl on the floor, that girl broken: This is not your fault; this is not your story. This is not the end. This will someday end.

  What I know now, what I knew then: This will never stop burning.

  Hannah, burning.

  Hannah, burned away, hollowed out, scoured clean, Hannah the victim, Hannah the fool, Hannah the body. Hannah, stupid. Hannah, dead.

  Dex, awake.

  LACEY

  Come As You Are

  AFTER SHE HAD HER LITTLE fun making you think I was fucking your father, Nikki came for me. It was over, obviously, whatever it was between him and me, as soon as you knew it existed. You’re lucky you ran off as fast as you did so you didn’t have to see him cry. “God, what the fuck is wrong with me, what was I doing . . .” and on and on, literally ad nauseam, or maybe that’s not what made me throw up all over the parking lot, but at least once I did, he shut up. Then he told me to go home and never come back, and I said and did some things I’m not proud of, until he took my shoulders and pushed his arms out, rigid, all that empty space between us, and gave me a pretty little speech about how I should respect myself more and expect more from others, and stop thinking I’m only valuable for sex, and all the while there was that bulge in his pants that both of us had to pretend didn’t exist.

  Everything as fucked-up as possible, just the way Nikki liked it, so of course that’s when she slipped the note into my locker, asking me to meet her at the lake. If it had been the station, any part of the woods, I wouldn’t have gone. But of course she wouldn’t ask that of herself. The lake seemed okay to me, because even the shitty algae slop that passed for a town lake would remind me of the lake that mattered, yours and mine, clear and blue and ours. Nikki was part of the woods, twisting trails and sinkholes and the smell of rotting bark. You were water.

  I showed up early, but she was there already, sitting on the dock. When she saw me, she pulled a bottle of Malibu from her bag. “Split it?”

  It was too sweet, and the smell made me sick, but I took a couple shots. Judging from the blurriness around her edges, she’d gotten a head start.

  We didn’t talk much until we were both safely drunk.

  “Satan, huh?” she said.

  “Our Dark Lord and Savior. Wanna join up?”

  “What the fuck happened to you?”

  I took another swig. “Figured out I’m all alone in the world, no one loves me, and oh, yeah, a bunch of Jesus-loving psycho bitches force-fed me shit and left me in the woods to die.”

  She toasted me with the Malibu. “Once a drama queen, always a drama queen.”

  “Queen of the underworld now, haven’t you heard?”

  That’s when she started laughing. “You’re not actually fucking Hannah’s dad, are you? I’d kill myself before letting someone that old stick it in me.”

  I went cold. “Don’t say her name.”

  “You really hate me, don’t you?” she said.

  “Even more than you hate me.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Try me.”

  Then her hand was on my thigh, and she was crawling up me like I was a tree, Nikki Drummond, drunk and hungry, straddling me, grinding me, tonguing my lips and tugging at my hair, saying something about how she hated it so short, then cutting off the thought by taking my fingers in her mouth and sucking, hard. Her breasts felt bigger than I remembered them, looser somehow, and there was a trickle of drool at her mouth.

  “Get the fuck off.” I pushed her hard enough to hurt and hoped that it did.

  “Come on, you know you want to.”

  You know how they say desperation isn’t sexy? Bullshit. An ugly drunk without a shirt, wheezing rum and aiming herself at me like a torpedo of need? Pushing her away felt like kicking a puppy, and I got off on that, too.

  “Maybe I’m fucking in love with you,” she said, doing that half-laugh, half-cry thing that middle-aged women do in bad movies. “Did you think of that?”

  “Frankly? No.”

  She sat back. “Why the fuck did you even show up, then?”

  “I want to know what you want.”

  “Was I not clear?”

  “What you want to stay away from her.” I would have given it to her, Dex. Anything.

  “You’re fucking kidding me. You want me to believe you came here to talk about Hannah?”

  “Her name is Dex.”

  “Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.” She laughed again. She’d amped up her acting skills since the last time we talked. She was nearly approximating human. “I get it, what you were doing. But we don’t need her anymore.”

  “Since when is there a fucking we, Nikki?”

  “You’re not serious.” She was touching me again, sweaty hands on hands. “What do you think your precious Dex would say if she actually knew you, Lacey? Is that what you really want, someone who can’t see you? Someone who thinks all your bullshit is for real?”

  “Stop talking.”

  “It’s almost a year,” she said.

  “We don’t talk about that.”

  “You don’t think about him? You don’t think about me?”

  For a second, she almost had me. The stink of desperation, the sheen of moisture in her eyes, the pressure of her hands: She was so good at playing her part that, even knowing everything I knew, I almost bought it, that she missed me, that all this time she’d been secretly in love or lust, that she’d clawed her way into your life for the same reason I’d hung onto your father, that she didn’t hate me anymore for what we knew about each other, that the things we’d done in the woods had meant something, hadn’t been a hateful joke. Maybe I did buy it, just long enough to tell her the truth, and tell it almost gently. “Not anymore.”

  She let go.

  “You came here for her,” she said, and there, in the flat affect, the vacuum of her expression, was the real Nikki. “To tell me to stay away from her.”

  I nodded.

  “But why would I stay away from my good friend Hannah?” She was slurring; it was hard to tell how much was rum and how much was effect. “I’m protecting her. Saving her from the big bad wolf.” She smeared a hand across her nose and wiped the snot on her jeans. “Like I should have saved Craig. I’m good now. I do good works. Like Jesus.”

  “I need to know what you’re going to do, Nikki. Are you going to tell her?”

  Laughing again, she wouldn’t stop laughing. “Tell who? Tell what?” Then she clapped her hands together. “Oh, I get it! All this crap about staying away from Hannah—that’s not about her, that’s about you.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not afraid of what I’ll do to her. You’re afraid of what I’ll tell her.”

  “They’re the same thing.”

  “No, Lacey. One is about her. One is about you. Normal people know the difference.”

  “Don’t hurt her just to fuck with me.”

  “Let’s be clear. I don’t care about fucking with you any more than I care about fucking you.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  She left without an answer. We both knew the answer.

  I made it worse. I tried to warn you, and you didn’t listen, and that part’s your fault, but the rest of it, that’s on me. What she did next. What that made you do. It was all my fault and not my fault at all, same as everything else.

  WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I threw out my retainer with my lunch. Didn’t even notice until it was time to slip it back in my mouth and go to class, and that’s when I freaked the fuck out—because I could see it, wrapped in a napkin on the corner of my tray so it wouldn�
��t get gummy with French bread pizza. Sliding into the garbage on top of Terrence Clay’s leftover spaghetti and the tuna fish salad that Lindsay North, getting the same head start on anorexia she’d gotten on boobs, had tossed out uneaten. You want to know what my life was like before you? It was like, given a choice between going home without the retainer and taking a swim in a Dumpster, I didn’t even have to think. The janitor gave me a boost, and then watched me pick through the banana peels and clumps of spaghetti—I’ve blocked that part out, for the sake of my sanity. What I remember is that I found my retainer. I took it to the bathroom, ran it under some hot water, and—I try not to think about this, because it makes me feel like I’ve got bugs laying eggs inside my skin—I put it back in my mouth.

  “Careless,” the janitor said after he pulled me out, after I’d finally stopped crying. “Means that much to you, why’d you throw it out in the first place?”

  You tell me, Dex. Why would a person do that?

  You came for me, like nothing had happened, like we were still Lacey and Dex, you and me forever. I felt more like a witch than usual, because I’d commanded it, you need me, and there you were. Needing me. You pretended it was a gift, like you were giving for once instead of taking, but you needed me to tell you what to do next.

  You told me what my mother said when you went looking for me at the house: Lacey doesn’t live here anymore. But you didn’t say how she said it, regretful or worried or relieved. Lacey doesn’t live here anymore. Turns out that, even in Battle Creek, some secrets keep—especially when they’re about something people would rather not know.

  You took her suggestion and came for me in the Giant parking lot, and when you found me, you didn’t look at me like I was some charity case, and you didn’t ask me stupid questions, you just said, Lacey, I have a surprise for you, something you’re going to like.

  Lacey, trust me.

  What would you have done if you’d known the truth, Dex? That when you tapped on my window, you were—for the first time in months—not even a speck on my mind. It was Halloween, and that night, of all nights, I was thinking about Craig, and about Nikki. I was thinking kind thoughts about Nikki and how I’d held her while she cried. I wondered if she felt it, on this night, dressed up somewhere in some stupid slutty kitten costume, laughing and drinking and finding someone else to make hurt as much as she did. If she’d been the one to tap at my window that night, I would have let her in, and I would have taken her into my arms and sung her to sleep. I would have given her what I owed her, because I couldn’t give her what I’d taken, and maybe she would have done the same for me.

  It wasn’t her. It was you.

  Your face, a ghost materializing on the other side of the glass, that hopeful smile, same as the first time I ever talked to you, like maybe, if you pressed your hand to the window, I would meet it with mine.

  You had a surprise for me, you said. That night, of all nights, a surprise in the woods.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was a girl who loved the woods, the cool sweep of browning greens, the canopy of leafy sky. Hidden in the trees, she picked flowers and dug for worms, she recited poems, timing the words to the bounce of her feet in the dirt. In the woods she met a monster, and mistook her for a friend. Into the woods they went, deeper and darker, and carved a sacred ring around a secret place, where the monster dug out pieces of the girl and buried them in the ground so that the girl could never truly leave, and never bear to return.

  Once upon a time, another time, there was a girl who screamed in the forest of her dreams and woke up to grasping fingers and dead eyes, more monsters to carry her back home, and this is when the girl realized it was her fate, to live under the rotting bark and the molding stones, that she could escape, but always, somehow, the woods would claim her.

  That’s your kind of story, isn’t it, everything tidied up and turned pretty. You wouldn’t like to hear that once upon a time there was a girl who got totally fucked up by what happened to her in the woods, that there was blood and piss and shit and death, that the woods were where the girl turned into a killer and a devil and a witch, and that even the thought of going back, especially to that place, on that night, made bile rise up in her throat and she had to rake her nails down her palm so hard she drew blood just to keep from screaming.

  Because you asked, I followed you into the woods.

  You put a scratchy tape into the Barbie player and turned Kurt all the way up, and smiled at me like this, too, was a gift. I rolled down the window so I could breathe, and pretended I was doing you a favor by letting you drive.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I said when you parked the car and we took off into the trees.

  “You’ll see,” you said, but even then, I knew.

  I thought Nikki must have told you the truth after all, because how else would you know about the station, why else would you make me go back?

  The station was the same as we’d left it, only more weeds, more rust. You needed me to be strong, and so I was. Your Lacey wouldn’t run away; your Lacey would remember to breathe.

  There’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as fate.

  But there is justice.

  You stopped in front of the boxcar, almost tripping over a rusted bucket brimming with brown rainwater. You rested your hand on a shiny padlock, and in the silence between our breathing, I could hear faint music, and her screams.

  “Dex . . . what did you do?”

  “Just to be clear, this isn’t about what she did to me,” you said. Then you told me what she did to you, and I folded you into me and felt you shaking and wanted her to die. “It’s about what she did to us. That’s what she’s paying for.”

  You spun the combination and opened the lock.

  Here was Nikki: crouched in a corner, shaky hands splashing light at the shadows, screaming into the noise. Nikki Drummond, a scared animal in the dark.

  Here was you: grinning, proud mama showing off your beautiful baby. This scene, this night that you’d made for me, birthed from idea into fact. Hannah Dexter, in the boxcar, with a knife.

  “Dex, why is she naked?”

  I wasn’t ready to ask you about the knife.

  Nikki was on her feet, pressed into a corner, ready to pounce, her body registering something new. Incoherent screaming gave way to words. To: “Lacey.”

  She was crying.

  “Lacey, get me the fuck out of here, she’s gone fucking crazy, tell her to let me the fuck out.”

  You were watching her, not me. You weren’t waiting for me to choose between you; it never occurred to you there was a choice. You believed in us again.

  You believed in me again.

  “You owe me,” Nikki said. “Look where we are. Look what night it is. You fucking owe me, and you better fucking deal with this.”

  It never occurred to Nikki, either—that I might disobey, that I might not choose her, that she might want to say please. If she had, I might have done what she wanted. I’d tasted enough blood in these woods, and maybe Nikki had, too.

  I wouldn’t have given her back her clothes. But I might have helped her, because I don’t hurt animals. I might have helped her—if only she hadn’t been so fucking certain that I would.

  “Lacey, you have to.”

  I closed her back into the dark.

  THEM

  NIKKI’S MOTHER HAD ALWAYS PITIED other mothers. So many of them were less comfortable, less attractive, less skilled at the intricacies of PTA electioneering and bake sale presentation. They were, in a word, less, and it was perhaps no surprise they’d raised lesser daughters. She pitied them all, because they didn’t have Nikki and she did. What good fortune, the other mothers were always saying, that you should get one like her. What a blessing, they would say, which was simply a way of reassuring themselves that they’d done nothing to deserve their inferior offspring as she’d done nothing to deserve her golden child; as if they still believed in an indiscriminate stork dropping bundles on doors
teps at random. Nikki’s mother smiled gracefully at these women, letting them have their delusions. It would be unseemly to correct them, to point out that her daughter was a culmination of good genes and good breeding, and neither of these came down to luck. That she’d worked hard to ensure she had a daughter worthy of her, and raised Nikki to appreciate that hard work and continue it on her behalf. Seventeen years of approximated perfection: hair, skin, teeth, clothes, friends, boys, everything as it should be.

  The best of everything, as it should be.

  Her daughter couldn’t be blamed for what that boy did in the woods—that was his parents’ cross to bear, and Nikki’s mother hoped they felt suitably guilty for what their second-rate parenting had inflicted on her daughter—but Nikki had endured the episode with dignity, and the small markers of grief, the glossy eyes and the blanching skin, had, if anything, made her even more beautiful. Nikki’s mother had encouraged her, after a suitable time passed, to choose someone else. Life was easier with a solid shoulder to lean on, or seem to, she’d taught her daughter. The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness. I don’t need another boyfriend, Nikki snapped after her mother had urged her once too often. Of course not, Nikki’s mother replied. Need was unseemly; need was itself weakness. The love that you needed was the kind best avoided. No one knew that better than Nikki’s mother. Though, of course, she couldn’t tell her daughter that.

  Nikki was doing fine. Nikki was doing great. Nikki, she told herself, standing in the entryway of her daughter’s closet, trying to understand what she’d found there, wasn’t the problem.

  It was, she suspected, this Hannah girl, the one who had followed her daughter around all summer like a mangy dog. Hannah Dexter, with her bad genes and worse breeding, her ill-fitting clothing and her abominable hair. It had to be Hannah’s influence that had Nikki acting so erratically. Talking back to her parents. Canceling her dates. Dyeing her hair, of all things, some cheap drugstore purple that had cost Nikki’s mother more than a hundred dollars to dye back to its original color before anyone could see. “She’s not up to your standards,” Nikki’s mother had told her daughter the other night at dinner, and Nikki had actually laughed.