Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

He grunted.

  “You know what’s gay, Craig? Two naked girls writhing around together. Panting. Sucking. Sweating. You don’t mind that, do you? You ever want to see that again?”

  She knew so much, Dex, and yet somehow she hadn’t clued in that he really, really didn’t.

  “You ever want me to touch your gun again? Or you want me to tell the whole school it’s got warts?”

  “Like anyone would believe that.”

  “Have you met me, sweetie? They believe anything I tell them.”

  This, for them, was foreplay.

  “Do I have to?” Even the question was a sign: He’d given in.

  “Take it slow,” she advised. “Flick the tip. Tease it a little, it likes that. Remember what you told me, the first time? Just like eating an ice cream cone. You love ice cream, Craig. You love it.”

  She didn’t need to talk me into anything. I stood steady, kept the gun erect as Craig closed his mouth over it. Maybe I was curious, too.

  Darkness swirled around us, the station hissed with ghosts, and my blood was half vodka. Not an excuse, Dex. Just setting the scene.

  He was tentative, at the start, like a girl sucking it for the first time, not sure where to put his hands or his tongue, licking and flicking in sorry, frog-like spurts, then easing his mouth around the barrel and holding it there, like the mere ambiance of his warm, damp cave would get the job done.

  “Friction!” Nikki shouted, clapping a steady beat. “Friction and rhythm. Get it together. And mind the teeth.”

  I started moaning. A gasp here, a pant there, partly to help him along and partly to mock him, all for show, until, somehow, it wasn’t anymore. Because it felt good, Dex, his head under the palm of my hand, bobbing with my rhythm, his lips finding their pace, his fingers doing their work, one hand wrapped around mine on the gun, the other climbing my thigh and finding its way to where it needed to be, hot against my heat, rubbing in time and pressing hard, harder the louder I moaned, and maybe it was the booze or his fingers or just the fact of the gun, but I’m telling you, Dex, I felt it. Felt him, against me, sucking hard, swirling his tongue around just so, breathing hot and fast, felt him pulling back, pulling away for the hint of a moment, playing with me like I always played with him, then taking it all in his mouth again, swallowing us whole. And it was me, metal but also somehow flesh, and as it came over me—a full-on flash-bang explosion, zero to sixty to holy shit—I thought, this is some kind of black magic at work, this is science fiction and I am a cyborg of skin and steel, this is how it is for them to look down at us on our knees, but it wasn’t just that, one great erotic leap for women everywhere, it was this particular boy on his knees and me on my feet, it was this boy’s girl in the shadows, screaming my name, needing me to see her, to forget about him and need her back, it was the game and the show and the love and the gun, it was a split second of wild, muscle-clenching, teeth-rattling, tip-your-head-back-and-howl-at-the-sky pleasure, and then it was over.

  I was crying and laughing at the same time when he seized up, went rigid—and if I was thinking of him at all, I was thinking how Nikki would never let it go, that he’d gotten off on it, loved the feel of something hard swelling in his mouth as much as any of us—but then he fell away from me, and only when Nikki stopped screaming my name and started screaming his did I realize that the crack of noise had not been some overload of neural circuitry but an actual, world-shattering sound. That the world had shattered. That the wet beneath my fingers was blood.

  You don’t want to know what a dead body looks like, Dex. Or the sound a person can make when she sees one.

  Craig, of course, was silent.

  Craig wasn’t there anymore. The thing in his place, the raw, wormy, bloody thing that had just been cupping my ass and fingering my cunt and wrapping his hand over my hand over the gun . . . that’s the thing that comes after me in my sleep, the thing that kept me out of the woods. That was the reason, later on, that I stopped at one wrist, let the knife drop by the bathtub and the water swirl pink. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I believe you see something when you die, whether the firing of synapses or some groping hand from the great beyond, and I believe that’s what I’ll see, Dex. That thing, that face, that hole. I think that’s the last thing I’ll ever see, and I can never see that again.

  “You killed him.” That’s what she said when she could talk, when I’d slapped her out of her keening and back to reality so we could zip up his pants and deal with the gun. “You killed him you killed him you killed him.”

  I didn’t remind her who’d made him get on his knees. I was trying to be kind.

  I wanted to move the body. We both did. Away from our place, deep into the woods. I thought we both wanted to exorcise our station of his ghost so we could return. They say you sober up fast in a crisis, but that hasn’t been my experience. I must have been drunk off my ass to imagine the two of us would want to come back.

  Moving the body meant touching the body, hoisting the body, dragging the body into the woods. Cleaning the trail of blood and brain bits the body left behind. We couldn’t do that. Any of it. We would leave him there in our place; we would leave him behind.

  Nikki wiped down the gun; I put it in his hand. This was Battle Creek; this was a disturbed teenager alone in the woods with his father’s gun; this was a pretty enough picture, and when Nikki added the note he’d written her the day before, after he’d unforgivably forgotten her half birthday, the note that said, in Craig’s painstaking block letters, I love you and I’m sorry, the picture was perfect.

  “Now what?” Nikki said. “We just leave him here?” She swallowed. “There are animals . . .”

  “They’ll come looking. They’ll find him. Eventually.”

  “Eventually.”

  She thought I was the heartless one. Because I kept going, because someone had to. If she was going to be the mess, then I had to be the one who cleaned up. If she was going to cling, then someone had to be clung to, and that was me. I am a rock, Dex, like the song says. I’m a fucking island. I do what I have to do, and that night, I had to hold Nikki Drummond while she cried. I had to collect our clothes, our empties, our cigarette butts, anything that would connect us to the body. I had to sit with her in the car while we sobered up and the body cooled, not so far away.

  I wasn’t the one who suggested we frame it up like a suicide. We never talked about doing anything else. The truth wasn’t an acceptable option. What we did was too obvious, too easy, not to be the way.

  That’s not how Nikki remembered it.

  In her version, I’m Machiavelli. I murder him in cold blood, dupe her into covering it up so she’ll seem equally to blame. She’s the victim, I’m the devil, he’s the corpse.

  In every story, he ends up dead.

  No one made him get on his knees. And if anyone did make him, it was Nikki.

  It was their fault as much as it was mine. I stand by that. I will always stand by that.

  Murder requires intent; I know because I looked it up. Legally, killing someone by accident is no worse than hitting a deer with your car. Lots of blood and mess and guilt, but no one’s to blame except maybe the deer for being dumb enough to step into the road.

  I couldn’t have killed him because I wasn’t trying to kill him. I didn’t want him to die.

  Believe that.

  If you believe anything, Dex, believe that.

  But.

  In the dark.

  At night.

  When I let myself remember.

  I feel it beneath my finger.

  The trigger.

  And I know.

  The gun in his mouth, the gun in my hands: It doesn’t matter what I wanted. It doesn’t matter why. Accident, purpose, motive, mistake, unconscious wish, muscle contraction: It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was in his mouth, and in my hands. It was my finger on the trigger. It was my finger that moved, just a little, just enough. Then he was gone.

  DEX

 
; 1992

  BEFORE LACEY, I WASN’T HAPPY. I wasn’t anything. Except that’s not possible, is it? I took up space; I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents’ expectations and evidence of their disappointments; I was Hannah Dexter, middling everything, on track for an uneventful life and only just sharp enough to care.

  A world without Lacey: I would have spent my days doodling and chewing gum to keep from falling asleep in class until I could come home and settle in front of the TV for the night. There would have been a few hundred days to endure, then college, somewhere compatibly middling, High School: The Sequel, Battle Creek U. That Hannah Dexter might have gathered up enough spunk to move to Pittsburgh or Philly after graduation, make a go of it in the big city, barhop with her gaggle of young single girls until one by one each scored herself a ring and fled to the suburbs. She would have made an excellent bridesmaid, a bit of a pill at the bachelorette party but always reliable for a sober ride home. She would not have complained; she would have thought it unseemly, thought that pretending to be happy was close enough. She would have returned to Battle Creek rarely, only to endure holidays with her parents and eventually to bury them. She would, perhaps, have run into Nikki Drummond at the drugstore before leaving town, and they would have offered each other the wincing approximation of a smile, as you do when you’re too old for grudges but still seething with them. Her real smile would come later, whenever she remembered those extra thirty pounds Nikki wore around her middle and the strip of pale skin on her left ring finger; she would be smugly certain it was better to avoid love than to lose it.

  Lacey told me everything. What she’d done—what they’d both done—to Craig Ellison. What they’d done with each other. The ghosts of them in that place. The body they’d left behind in the woods.

  It was the body that should have made the difference. Not the thought of them laughing together in the grass; not the reality that they came first, that I was the thing tossed back and forth between them, incidental.

  “It doesn’t matter how it started,” Lacey said. “It was only about Nikki in the beginning. Then it was us. Just us.”

  Lacey was the reason Nikki had tried so hard to hurt me, but then, that wasn’t news. News was, Lacey belonging to her first.

  “I did this for you,” I said, stretching my arms wide, because it wasn’t just the night, the boxcar—it was life. It was Dex.

  “Dex, you have to understand—”

  “No. I have to . . .” I stopped. What did I?

  “I have to go outside for a minute,” I said. “I need air.”

  I didn’t want air. I wanted sky, stars poking through branches, the space to run at the night, the freedom to flee, even if I wasn’t planning to, and maybe I was.

  “What did I tell you?” It was Nikki, thinking she still mattered. “She can’t handle it. You think she’s going out for air? She’s going straight for the cops. You know she is.”

  “No, she’s not,” Lacey said, so sure. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I repeated. They were just sounds.

  “You’re fucked and you know it,” Nikki said. “Look around you. All this Satan shit—who’s taking the fall for that? She couldn’t have set you up better if she tried. Maybe she did try, Lacey. Think of that? Let me out of here now and we’ll take care of it.”

  “Don’t leave, Dex.”

  “She’s going to ruin everything,” Nikki said. “Untie me, and we can deal with it together. Make her see that she should keep her mouth shut.”

  “Stop.” I was backing toward the door.

  “Don’t leave, Dex,” Lacey said, and she took a step toward me, and she was raising the knife.

  “Look at her!” Nikki crowed. “Jesus, Hannah, look at her, she’s actually thinking about it. Killing you to shut you up. She’s psychotic, Hannah. You get it now?”

  “Don’t leave,” Lacey said again, and I didn’t leave.

  “It’s her or us,” Nikki said, and I didn’t know which us she meant. “Only one person killed Craig, and she’s the one who’s got the most to lose here. Untie me. Untie me and I can protect you.”

  “Stop talking!” Lacey slashed the air with the knife. “Stop talking. I need to think!”

  The blood on Nikki’s shoulder had dried into a long brown streak, as if she’d tattooed it to remind herself of past wounds.

  We were silent. Three of us, waiting.

  It was like living inside one of those logic puzzles they gave us in elementary school, a menagerie of animals needing to be ferried across a river in a specific order so no one would be eaten; a sinking hot air balloon with ballast to be tossed overboard, ballast that would keep you aloft, but only if you chose the right thing to sacrifice. Those puzzles were always bloody; failure invited catastrophe, the bloody shreds of a chicken on the riverbank, broken bodies in a cornfield.

  Maybe, I thought, we would stand here together until the sun rose. Light would restore sanity, brush away the wild thoughts you only have at night. But the boxcar had no windows; sunrise or not, we would stay in the dark.

  Then Lacey spoke. “Nikki’s right. We’ve gone too far. If people knew . . .” She tipped the knife toward Nikki. “We can’t trust her. That’s obvious. But you, Dex?” The blade swiveled toward me. “Can I trust you?”

  I made some kind of noise that didn’t sound like anything of mine, more animal than human. Animal in pain.

  “I trust you to love me, Dex, but you’re a good person. You might think you have some kind of obligation to tell. Unless . . .” She nodded. “Yeah.”

  I reminded myself to breathe. “Unless what?”

  “Unless you had a secret, too.”

  Nikki got it before I did. “No. No no no no. Hannah, no.”

  “Mutually assured destruction,” Lacey said. “And if we’ve both done something terrible . . . we’ll be the same, Dex. We’ll be in it together.”

  She offered it to me like a gift—like a promise.

  All I had to do was take it.

  “We tied her up, Dex. We tied her up and locked her in a fucking train car and tried to drown her. You think she’s not going to tell someone? You think you’re not getting in trouble for this if we let her out of here?”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “She flat out told us she would.”

  “I was bluffing,” Nikki said quickly. “And what I did at the party, and what happened to Craig, I’m fucked if you tell any of it. Mutually assured destruction, right? No one will ever know about this. You have my word.”

  Lacey laughed. “What’s that you said before? All promises are void.”

  “Hannah, don’t,” Nikki said. “Don’t let her talk you into something you can’t take back.”

  Lacey, somehow, was still laughing. “You see that? She’s still trying to turn you against me. That’s what I’m afraid of, Dex. Not getting in trouble. Not what she’ll do to me—what she’ll do to us. She’ll break us again. She will.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Nikki said. “This is what she does, Hannah. She wants you to believe it, that everything is my fault. Nothing is yours. You’re the one who walked away from Lacey. You. Lacey knows you don’t want to see that. She knows you like it better the way she tells it, where you’re not responsible. You don’t like what you saw on that video? Don’t let it happen here. Don’t just lie there and let her fuck us both. Please.”

  Lacey smiled. “See? She can’t help herself. She hates that we have each other.” Lacey wanted me to hear it, because she believed that I believed in us. “This can only end one way, Dex. Take the knife.”

  “Take it!” Nikki shouted. “Take it and use it, because if you think she’s ever letting you out of here, you’re as nuts as she is.”

  Lacey set it down on the floor between us.

  “I said I was sorry. But you have to be sorry, too. Then everything can be like it used to be. Better.”r />
  Better, because there would be nothing between them anymore. Better, because we would have a secret of our own to protect; because we would be indivisible; because we would, finally, be the same.

  “You love me, Dex?”

  I couldn’t not love her. Even then.

  “Then prove it,” she said.

  That night we did the mushrooms, after we’d looked into the face of God, after the cows in the field and the boys in the barn, Lacey had spirited me away, had parked the car for the night on the side of a deserted road, deciding, with our minds still reeling and eyes still following invisible angels, that would be safer than driving home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but Lacey said it would be better in the grass, under the stars. It was cold and damp, but we weren’t in a state to care. I curled up on my side, and she pressed her chest to my back and curved an arm around me, holding on. Do I belong to you? she’d whispered into my neck, and I’d said yes, of course, yes. You won’t leave me, she said then, and it was command, and it was request, and it was truth, and it was prayer.

  “Don’t make me do this,” I said.

  “I won’t make you do anything,” she said, and not enough of me was relieved.

  “You pick up that knife, and you do whatever you want with it,” Lacey said then. “Your choice, not mine.”

  “No, Hannah,” Nikki said. “You can’t do that.”

  But I could, that was the thing of it. I could do anything. It was simple physics, biology: kneel, pick up the knife, carve. I could make my body perform each of those steps, and inanimate objects—floor, knife, skin—would give way to my will. It would be simple, and then it would be done.

  And I would have been the one to do it. That was the thing of it, too.

  As simply as picking up the knife, I could have walked to the door and kept going. But where would I go, without Lacey, and who would I be when I got there? Lacey thought she knew who I was, deep down, Nikki, too, and I couldn’t see how it was so easy for them to believe there was such a thing, a me without them, a deep down where no one was watching. That I wasn’t just Lacey’s friend, Nikki’s enemy, my father’s daughter; that somewhere, floating in the void, was a real Hannah Dexter, an absolute, with things she could or could not do. As if I was either the girl who would pick up the knife or the girl who would not; the girl who would turn on one or turn on the other, or turn and run. Light is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It’s the act of witnessing that turns nothing into something, collapses possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.