Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  I never loved anyone the way I loved Lacey that night. She was like a wild thing, a storm in a bottle, so much rage compressed into a tiny black-eyed body and channeled in my defense. It was glorious. Like watching a sunrise, blazing Crayola pinks birthing a new world, meant only for me.

  “I’m sorry,” Nikki said, quietly. “And for what it’s worth, that’s actually true. I am sorry, Hannah.”

  “Her name is Dex.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Say it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Dex.”

  “You buy that, Dex?” She didn’t ask whether it made anything better. What made it better was forcing Nikki to admit what she’d done. And knowing I had the power to make her suffer for it.

  I wasn’t supposed to be that kind of person. I was a good girl, and good girls weren’t supposed to take pleasure in pain. But I did, and I found there was no shame in it.

  “I wish everyone could hear what kind of person she really was,” I said. “Imagine if they knew.”

  “They know,” Lacey said. “They just don’t give a shit.”

  But they didn’t know. It wasn’t just Nikki’s parents who were fooled, the gullible teachers and women at her church, the kids on the outer fringes who looked unto her as a god. It was her own: They knew she was a carnivore, but didn’t understand she was a cannibal. They didn’t know how many of their boyfriends she’d screwed, how many of their hearts she’d contrived to break, how many of their secrets she’d handed to me, how many of them she’d hurt just because she was bored, just because she could. There was no leverage in me knowing that—no use in threatening to expose her. She didn’t care about them, wouldn’t care about alienating them and being left alone; that wasn’t what appealed to me about forcing her to confess. It was the prospect of forcing her to do what I wanted. Anything I wanted: Nikki stripped bare, limp and helpless, a marionette under our control.

  I knew, when we let her out, that we would be safe. She would keep quiet—not to save herself the embarrassment but to save herself the pity. If I could bend her to my will, force her to speak the words I put in her mouth—if she was powerless, and admitted it—then a part of her would always be powerless. Nikki would never tell anyone what happened here, because if she did, it would mean a part of her never left.

  It was my idea first, but Lacey was the one who remembered the Barbie tape recorder, and the stack of cassette tapes, and understood what they could mean. What we did next, we did together.

  “You’re going to tell us everything,” Lacey said when we’d trekked back to the car and retrieved the equipment, once Nikki had come down from being left once again to scream and weep alone in the dark. “Everything terrible you’ve done, from start to finish. And maybe we’ll play it for the world to hear, or maybe we’ll just keep it for ourselves, for insurance. You’ll never know.”

  “Think of it as a confessional,” I said. “Good practice for your audition tape.”

  “Why would I ever do that?” It was almost impressive, this skinny, stripped-down girl pretending at defiance. “Because of your stupid knife? What are you going to do, murder me and bury me in the woods?”

  “I’m surprised you think that’s beyond me,” Lacey said, but when Nikki held her gaze, Lacey was the one to look away first.

  “I’m not doing it,” Nikki said. “You can keep me here as long as you want, but you can’t make me do anything. You can’t.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Lacey toed the bucket of water, then bumped shoulders with me. I’d thought we would never do that again, never be so perfectly in sync that we could speak with our bodies instead of our words. “What is it they say about me at school, Dex? Don’t they think I’m some kind of witch?”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said.

  “Me, I think Nikki’s the witch.”

  “Understandable.”

  “I know a lot about witches these days,” Lacey said. “You know how they used to tell if someone was a witch? Back in the bad old days?”

  “I do,” I said, and I remember feeling clever, and giddy, and not at all afraid. These were moments without consequence; this was a night that would never end.

  “How about it, witch?” Lacey lifted the bucket, nasty water sloshing over her hands. “Let’s see if you float.”

  LACEY

  1991

  IT WAS THE DAY I woke up and smelled winter. No frost, no snow, nothing so dramatic as all that, but you could feel the cold crouching in the wings. It had been summer all week, and according to the overtanned idiot on TV, winter was blowing across the Midwest, the sparkly cardboard snowflake inching toward us one corn state at a time.

  Winter was our ticking clock. What were we supposed to do, fumble at zippers with wool mittens and Velcro gloves, kiss with frozen tongues and watch our excretions turn to ice? As a novelty act, maybe, but unless you’re Dr. Zhivago, frostbite is a turnoff and fucking outside, much less lying on the ground in two feet of snow, high on pot and pheromones and trying to connect with the sublime, is a testicle-shrinking failure waiting to happen. We didn’t have to discuss it to understand the obvious: When the cold came, the thing between us would sheathe its fangs, crawl under a rock, and hibernate the winter away.

  We used the heat while we had it, and that day, Halloween, Nikki and I skipped school and met in the woods, dressed in costume as each other, to fuck with Craig’s mind. She always loved role-play the best, and she made me promise that when Craig showed up after practice—always after practice, because however much he loved her and us and the fleshly pleasures that came with it, he loved the team more—we would keep to our roles religiously, though of course by the time he did, we were too drunk to bother. Maybe if we had, we would have played an entirely different game, and Craig would still be alive, or one of us would be dead.

  That day, we’d finished with each other. We were waiting for Craig and making snow angels in the mud, and Nikki was amusing me by itemizing the defects of our peers, one by one, in alphabetical order, just to show she could. Theresa Abbot had a harelip and talked like a cartoon character, and she’d once tattled on Nikki, unforgivably, for smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Scotty Bly would have been cute except for the way he chewed with his mouth open and insisted on letting a worm of a mustache crawl across his upper lip, both of which rendered him unfuckable. I was bored by the time we got to C, but also pleased, because nothing got her hot like talking about people she hated. Maybe you already know that.

  We went through Shayna Christopher and Alexandra Caldwell, and then, Dex, we got to you.

  “You want to know what’s wrong with Hannah Dexter?” Nikki asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  Not because I cared about you, Dex, but because I didn’t care at all.

  “She’s such a fucking victim,” Nikki said. “It’s like she’s asking you to screw with her.”

  “Funny, she’s never asked me.”

  “You know what I mean. Where’s the fun in it? It’s like playing kickball with a dead skunk.”

  “It makes you smell?”

  “Too easy and it makes you smell. Like, yeah, you feel bad for the skunk, but why’d it run into the road in the first place? Like it wanted to get run over, you know? Like that would be easier than just finding a way across and figuring out what the hell to do next.”

  “That’s the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard,” I said.

  She wasn’t listening. She was on a roll. What does it mean, Dex, that in all the time I’d known her, she’d never mentioned you once? But that day, it’s almost like you were there with us, the future ghosting itself onto the past. “And also! She’s like . . . oatmeal.”

  “Beige and lumpy?” I said, and then there was some talk of lumpiness that’s better left forgotten.

  “No. No! Pudding. Hospital pudding, the kind that comes dry out of a packet and you add water.”

  “So she’s pudding. What do you care?”

  “I don’t care. I . . .�
�

  “What?”

  “Give me a second, I’m thinking.”

  “Slowly.”

  “Fuck you.” She stripped off her shirt, then. It was still warm enough for that. I raised my ass off the ground just enough to shimmy out of my skirt. “Because she doesn’t try, that’s what I hate about her. Because she’s nothing, she’s blah, and fine if that’s what she wants, but she walks around all bitter and sulky that people treat her like she’s nothing—”

  “People meaning you.”

  “Sure, whatever. Me. Acting like it’s somehow my fault that she’s a loser. Like I’m some kind of fucking witch, and I put a curse on her.”

  “Poof!” I zapped her with my magic finger. “You’re pathetic.”

  “Abracadabra!” She waved her arms, accidentally or not whacking me in the boob. “You’re a horny toad.”

  “All that and she’s a horny toad?”

  “No, you’re a toad,” she said. “And I’m horny.”

  Every time was like the first time.

  Even that last day, when we’d already done everything we could think to do, when we knew how to fit our bodies together and how to slide in a third, when she knew how I tasted and I knew where to rub and when to pause and what would make her wet. It never got old, not married-couple old, because it was always dangerous. Anyone could stumble upon us; animals could attack. There were always new positions, new dares—down on the tracks or rolling on the station floor, dodging the broken glass, finding ants and beetles later in places nothing alive should enter. The illicit charge sparked extra bright when it was just the two of us, because Craig got petulant at the thought of us enjoying things without him. It dented his ego to realize that his dick was superfluous, and while he got off on hearing us describe what it was like—the tidal wave of sensation, the seizing muscles and the curled toes, the Penthouse reality of the full-body shudder—he never really bought it, that it was the same as what he felt, or what we could be made to feel by him. Girls don’t get sex, he always said, not really. It was lucky for us, he said, that we didn’t know what we were missing. Lucky for him, we giggled, when he wasn’t around, and when the wave rippled through, both of us liked to scream.

  I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they were bored; maybe I was an escape route; maybe Craig was in love with Nikki and Nikki was in love with me; maybe together the three of us made something, like a poem, like a song, like a band, that was greater than the sum of its parts, and we all wanted to be greater than. I don’t know why I did it, except that life was small and this seemed huge. They needed me, and no one had ever needed me before. You’ve got to remember, Dex, I’d just found Kurt; I’d sworn to myself that I would be different, that I would live like he sang, that I wouldn’t let anything be easy and experience would be my art. I was brand-new, and there’s a reason babies don’t do anything but poop and suck teat and pee in their parents’ faces. They don’t know any better; they can’t help themselves.

  DEX

  1992

  THE FIRST TIME, IT WAS almost funny. I couldn’t do it myself. I didn’t trust myself to grip her hair, hold her head under the water without letting go, long enough to break her but not long enough to drown her, so Lacey did it while I held the knife. She thrashed around a bit, or as much as she could all tied up, and when Lacey finally let her up for air she was soaked and shuddering, filthy water streaking down her face. Once she’d gotten in one or two good breaths, before she could even agree to offer her confession or put up any more fight, Lacey shoved her under again, holding tight as her body spasmed.

  I held my breath, too, and when my lungs started to hurt, I said, “It’s too long?”

  “Trust me,” she said.

  This time, when Nikki came up, wet and panting, she was ready to talk. “Whatever the fuck you want, just don’t do that again. Please.”

  Sometimes I tried to drown myself in the bathtub—not seriously, just as an experiment, slipping beneath the waterline and staring through it to the cracked ceiling, lips shut tight against the warm water, daring myself to stay down. If I open my mouth, I would think, if I breathe it in. It would be that simple, and it was nothing I hadn’t done by accident a thousand times in a thousand summer pools. But I could never will myself to do it. You can’t ask your body to kill itself. You want it dead, you have to murder it.

  “Ready?” Lacey said, and when Nikki nodded, her wet hair stuck to her face and sending rivulets down her bare chest, I pressed record. Lacey crossed her arms and paced, like a TV lawyer, which felt wrong, somehow. We should be sitting quietly in shadow, I thought, our eyes averted, like priests.

  Lacey told her to start at the beginning, and so Nikki told us how in sixth grade she’d gotten bored with her then best friend, Lauren, and convinced all the other girls in their group to ice her out for the rest of the year. I remembered this: I had joined the I Hate Lauren club—which never existed as anything more than a membership list circulated to half the class, then left anonymously on Lauren’s desk the next morning, just as the I Hate Hannah list had the year before—not because I did hate Lauren, but because it seemed to have slipped into the zeitgeist that Lauren was hateable, and it was safer to be against than for. She told us about how she’d dared Allie to accuse Mr. Lourd of feeling her up in the computer lab, but when Allie came crawling back to complain about the subsequent mess—Mr. Lourd getting fired, then getting drunk and trying to throw himself in front of a bus, Allie landing in therapy with a guy who actually tried to feel her up—Nikki laughed and claimed she’d never dared her, that Allie was just imagining things, and maybe she should do whatever that therapist wanted because she was clearly losing her mind. It went on and on—the time Sarah Clayborn was arrested for shoplifting because someone had slipped a Calvin Klein scarf into her bag; the day Darren Sykes was roughed up by a couple of thugs from Belmont because someone told them he’d screwed their mascot, and the months Darren spent trying to live down the rumor that he’d fucked a goat; the way Jessica Ames dumped Cash Warner without explanation or opportunity for apology because someone had told her he’d cheated with the sexy-for-a-sub replacement math teacher—so many catastrophes, all of them bearing her devil’s mark but not her fingerprints.

  Midnight came and midnight went.

  When the stories trailed off, somewhere toward the end of tenth grade, and she said that was enough, she was hungry, she was bored, she was done, Lacey dunked her again, holding her down longer this time, until the thrashing stopped.

  When she came up, she was still breathing, and I had a momentary lapse, wondering if I should stop Lacey before things went too far, whatever that meant. That Nikki could make me feel for her, fear for her, even for that one moment—maybe she really was a witch.

  I reminded myself it had to look real. Nikki had to believe we meant to hurt her.

  She was dripping wet, and crying too hard to speak.

  “I’m going out to pee,” Lacey murmured. “Watch her.”

  And then there were two.

  “It’ll be a while,” Nikki said, tears drying. “She probably needs a smoke.”

  “Lacey doesn’t smoke.”

  Nikki only smiled, or tried to.

  She coughed hard, and spit. I aimed the flashlight at the ground. It was harder to look at her without Lacey there. Harder to remember that we weren’t the bad guys.

  “You can just untie me before she comes back,” Nikki said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “If you’re scared to piss her off, tell her I got away somehow. She’ll believe it.”

  “I don’t need to lie to Lacey,” I said. “I’m not the one who should be scared.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Hannah? Look around you! You should be fucking scared out of your mind. She’s nuts. You think she’s ever letting either of us out of here? She’s totally lost it. Sane Lacey is gone. Sane Lacey has left the building. Look what she’s making you do, for God’s sake.”

  “She’s not maki
ng me do anything.”

  “I’ll be sure to explain that to the cops.”

  “What cops? I thought neither of us was ever getting out of here.”

  “Listen, we were friends, right? We were friends, I know that was fucked-up of me, I know it, but it was also real. You know me now enough to know I’m just fucked-up enough for that. I felt bad about . . . you know, everything, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t remember and, yeah, I wanted to fuck with Lacey, but then, Jesus, turns out I actually liked you.” She was talking so fast, the words running together, lying at the speed of light. “You liked me, too, Hannah, you know you did. You can lie to her all you want, but I know that.”

  “There’s something very wrong with you,” I told her.

  “Fuck.” She started crying again. “Fuck.”

  Come back, Lacey, I thought. I could go to her now, but I couldn’t be that girl, not for either of them. I had to be the girl who could hold onto the flashlight and the knife, who could stand guard in the dark, who could fend off all enemies.

  This time, I would keep the faith. Lacey was in control; we both were. This night would go only where we wanted it, and no further.

  Then Nikki spoke again. “She was mine first, you know. Lacey was mine.”

  “Shut up.” A knife is only as powerful as the person holding it. Even then, she knew the truth of me.

  “She used to drive me around in that shit Buick, just like you. She still have those candy cigarettes in the glove compartment? She still like to listen to ‘Something in the Way’ when she’s sad?”

  She did.

  “Oh, I’ve been in her car,” Nikki said. “And in her room. Watched her make out with that stupid Kurt Cobain poster, kneel in front of it like he’s some kind of god. Did you think you were the first to catch her act? Did you think you were special?”

  “I said shut up.”

  “You’re not special. You’re not even relevant. You’re just some sad, clueless deer wandering onto the highway. Roadkill waiting to happen.”