Girls on Fire Read online

  Don’t feel stupid. You couldn’t have known. No one knew, and when school finally started, Nikki and Craig wouldn’t speak to me in public. I liked that they were ashamed of it. The secret was part of the fun. I liked it when Nikki prowled past me in the hall, like she didn’t know that I could ruin her life with one well-placed rumor. I liked her snot-faced, nose-up public self, because I was the only one who knew how that face looked when Craig’s fingers were inside her, plying their clumsy magic.

  By then, they were doing that in front of me; turned out we all liked to watch. Sometimes it was watching I liked best. There’s something about two people fucking, the way they forget to hide their secret selves. Even after all this time, Nikki and Craig were putting on a show for each other, Nikki playing “excited!” and “turned on!” or “boooooored,” depending on her mood, but never straying too far from “granting you the greatest favor of your life,” Craig doing “gettin’ me some” every time. But there was always a moment. She’d forget to suck in her stomach; he’d forget to gaze lovingly in her eyes; they would each forget the other was there, and the sex became masturbatory, the alien body incidental, just another tool to abuse. I liked turning transparent and immaterial, watching them lose control.

  Nikki liked to watch, too, but not for watching’s sake. It brought out her inner Mussolini. She didn’t watch; she commanded, directing us in her own private puppet show, bossing us into positions meant more for her pleasure than ours.

  I don’t know what Craig liked the best, especially once the novelty of two girls going at it wore off, which it did surprisingly quickly. Sometimes I don’t think he liked much of anything.

  We all took a turn; sometimes, instead, we just drank and talked. The abandoned station was a magic place, a sacred one, where secrets were swallowed by the trees. We were different people in the woods; we were our own shadow selves. Nikki told us about the time her inbred cousin raped her at a Thanksgiving dinner, squashing her against her grandma’s lace-doily quilt and tasting of sweet potatoes and gravy when he forced his mouth against hers to shut her up, as if she would have screamed. I told them how the Bastard wanted to send me away once the baby was born, that I’d read it in the letter he wrote to his pastor back in Jersey, some Billy Graham wannabe with a local radio show. I told them how I’d also intercepted the pastor’s response, godly advice on how to erase me from the family picture for the good of the Bastard’s reputation and spawn—then, because we’d sworn an oath of secrecy, not truth, I told them I didn’t care. Craig told us about the time in junior high he got a blow job from some poor guy on his JV basketball team, then got so freaked out that he spread word that the kid had been sneaking peeks of the other guys in the locker room and had tried to cop a feel during a wrestling bout. After they gave the guy his third beat-down, he transferred to a school in another county.

  “Didn’t even feel guilty about it,” Craig said. “Does that make me, like, a psychopath?”

  “Probably,” I said. Nikki laughed and laughed.

  He’s dead now. It’s strange, isn’t it? He was here, he was inside me, he was sweaty and obnoxious and maybe, like, a psychopath, and now he’s just a corpse. Less than that, soon enough: bones and dust and worms. Not a ghost, certainly. If he were a ghost, I’d know, because he’d never leave me the fuck alone.

  I know how he died; I know why, unless you want to get all existential why, God, why about it, in which case who knows anything, but I can’t say I ever knew Craig. He had a little sister, it turned out, some gap-toothed goofball in pigtails who worshipped him for teaching her to shoot free throws and punch out the playground bully. But I didn’t know that until her gap-toothed eulogy, and by then I couldn’t afford to let myself listen. He was like our doll sometimes, an animatronic jock for us to pose. He was a slobbery kisser and an angry drunk, and he loved Nikki enough to get jealous but not enough, or at least not well enough, to make her love him back.

  Sometimes we still met up without him, and that’s when she told me all the things even he didn’t know, like her secret early-morning runs, which she’d started back when she was fourteen and anorexic, but kept up because she liked the vacant dark of five A.M. Everyone knew that Nikki’s mother had spent a year screwing her father’s racquetball partner, but no one knew how pathetic Nikki thought her for coming back and begging forgiveness, much less for staying with a husband who now stuck it to her every chance he got. Everyone knew Nikki was good at being popular, but only I knew how little she cared. She fucked with people and built her little kingdom because it came easy, and because it was more fun than the alternative, but it didn’t make life any less mind-numbing, or the future any more bearable. She liked to watch people bow and scrape before her for the same reason little kids light anthills on fire. Not because it gave her life meaning, but because sometimes you need to spice up an afternoon.

  Everyone knew she and Craig Ellison were destiny, their love mandated by the laws of royal courtship, and everyone was probably right. Craig was seventh-grade Nikki’s first kiss, Nikki was Craig’s first trip to second base, but there’s nothing sexy about inevitability, or at least nothing as sexy as a nameless eighth grader who’ll jerk you off in a roller rink bathroom, and so it wasn’t until sophomore year that they got together for real—fucking each other and fucking each other over, fucking and fighting and then fucking again. No wonder they were bored.

  Craig, somehow, still had his secrets: He could get us anything. We tried heroin—horse, that’s what Craig called it, because he didn’t know how not to be an ass—but only once. People aren’t meant to feel that good, or be that happy. Coke was better. It made the sex better. It made everything better. It was easier to get and substantially harder to screw up, as opposed to the heroin, with which I almost set Nikki’s hair on fire. It was easy to laugh about things back then.

  That’s it, all we did. Watch and fuck and snort and talk, rinse and repeat. Until Craig was dead, and it was all over. I didn’t go back. I couldn’t. Not to the station, not to the woods. It was desecrated. Not haunted—I told you, I don’t believe in that—just ruined.

  No one would know unless Nikki or I told them, and we swore ourselves silent. One last sacred promise, and—stupid me—I assumed it would bind us together for life, but that was the last I saw of her, too. Maybe I was her woods, desecrated and ruined. But you know what I think? I think I was wrong from the start, suckering myself into believing that I’d peeled off Nikki’s mask and glimpsed her true face, when, in fact, there was nothing underneath but more masks. Masks on top of masks, with a hollow space at the center where some higher power forgot to shove in a soul. All animal instinct, no higher function. No capacity for pain.

  SHE BLAMED ME.

  She blamed me.

  I don’t blame myself.

  I refuse.

  I did nothing wrong.

  Pinky swear, Dex. Cross my heart and hope to join Craig on the big basketball court in the sky, nothing is my fucking fault.

  No one is my puppet.

  You promised me that.

  ALONE AGAIN, AFTER. ALONE, IN the dark, with a secret, alone with the nightmares and the ghost of their skin, waking up with him inside me, her crawling down my body, invisible fingers and tongues dissolving into nothing with the dawn light. Alone with my mother and the Bastard and of course the precious fucking baby, who wouldn’t stop crying, the two of them keeping me away from him as if I had some contagious disease, as if I would want to touch or hold or big-sister their screaming, shit-stained midlife crisis, and who could blame me for taking the knife into the bathtub?

  Rhetorical question. The Bastard blamed me for being a drama queen, and my mother blamed me for getting the Bastard riled up, and the cheap-ass therapist blamed me for not wanting to honestly face up to my problems, not wanting to rip the bandage off the seeping wound, but at least he gave me a prescription, and then I didn’t give a shit who blamed me for what, even Nikki Drummond. Especially Nikki Drummond.

  Thos
e were the cloud days. I floated. I played Kurt loud where I could, and quiet, in my head, where I had to. I could have floated forever, Dex; you should know that.

  It’s important you know that I didn’t go looking for you.

  I thought about it sometimes: how she would hate it, seeing me with someone else, watching me lace my arm around a waist or lean close to whisper a secret. It would hurt, and I wanted, more than anything, to make her hurt. I admit that. I could have picked anyone, any of those sad little girls dancing down the hall in their identical denim jackets and neon stirrup pants, bopping to New Kids or maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot because that’s what their boyfriends told them to listen to, saying please and thank you to their teachers and not so hard and fuck me to the boys they’d only be seen with in the woods, sad girls with big bangs and little dreams. I watched them, and I thought about it.

  Then you came to me.

  It wouldn’t surprise you that Nikki told me about you. It would surprise you what she said, something like, “Who, her? That loser’s always glaring at me like I drowned her puppy,” and forgive me, Dex, but I said, “Probably in love with you,” and Nikki said, “Who isn’t?” and then, I’m sure, drunk and high, we both laughed.

  Truth, Dex: She never gave a shit about you. All that energy you put into hating her, and still you were nothing to her. Not until I made you something. You’ve never thanked me for that, either.

  I WATCHED YOU. BILLOW OF HAIR like your very own storm cloud. Interchangeable Kmart T-shirts, always a size too big, like you’d never clued into your best asset, or wanted to make sure no one else did. Always with a book, thick glasses and middling sulk, that smirk you gave people when they said something stupid. I don’t even think you know you’re doing it, slitting your eyes and raising your lip, like the morons cause you physical pain. You told me once that, before me, you wasted half your time wondering why people didn’t like you more, obsessing about your glasses or your hair or the way you rolled the cuffs of your jeans, precisely how tight and how high. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that none of it would have helped. People like to believe they’re beautiful and smart and funny—special. They’ll never like the person whose face reveals the truth.

  What I saw in your face was the truth of Nikki. She was as ugly to you as she was to me. You wanted to make her hurt. And I helped you do it, even if you didn’t realize it. You’re welcome for that, too.

  I knew you before you knew yourself. Imagine if you’d marched through high school and college and a lifetime of diaper changes and mind-numbing jobs and garden clubs and PTA bake sales, and never known yourself, so tough and so, so angry. You were afraid to let yourself feel it, but I could feel it for you, simmering. I could hear the pot lid, that clatter of metal like a rattlesnake warning: Stand back, shit’s about to explode.

  So fucking what if that’s why we started, if you hating her was the thing I loved most, if I held on so tight because I could feel her fury that she’d been replaced—by a nonentity. So Nikki brought us together. So what?

  What matters isn’t how we found each other, Dex, or why. It’s that we did, and what happened next. Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That’s us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

  Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.

  DEX

  Urge Overkill

  THERE WAS A SECURITY CAMERA. Two shadows caught on-screen, faces indistinct, ages readable enough that—the very morning after our graffiti triumph—two cops muscled their way into the principal’s office. By noon, word had gotten around that they were looking for two girls in possession of spray paint, with possible connections to a dark underground, two girls with dangerous intent. God is dead, we had written—I had written—and not realized this would magic us into something to fear. Midway through English class, the PA buzzed, and the principal came on to issue dire warnings: that new evidence suggested agitators in our midst, that we should all be vigilant, that all of us—the misguided perpetrators most of all—were at risk. The rumor mill was delighted, giddy speculation quickly drowning out any buzz about the next big party and Hayley Green’s bulimia-induced laxative incident.

  Two nameless girls heeding the call of the dark; I could feel people watching us.

  We met by the Dumpsters, one of us ice-cold and the other freaking out, three guesses which was which. This wasn’t the year to be a juvenile delinquent. “Worst case, it’s vandalism, that’s got to be a misdemeanor,” Lacey said, every word a shrug, and I wanted to shake reality into her.

  “A misdemeanor? They still arrest you for those, Lacey. We’re so fucked.”

  The refrain had been beating in my head since I saw the cop car pull up to the curb through my homeroom window. So fucked. So fucked. So totally, absurdly, screwed grounded arrested fucked. Lacey pretending otherwise didn’t fix anything.

  “No one’s getting arrested. No one even knows it was us. Stop acting like a crazy person, and they never will.”

  But the way I acted wasn’t the problem. It was Lacey. People knew enough about her to suspect the truth—at least, Nikki Drummond would.

  And it turned out she did.

  “Let me guess: her idea,” Nikki said, snaring me in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, where I’d taken to going ever since she’d cornered me in the one on the ground floor. “She promised no way would you get caught. No consequences.”

  “Do you have some obsession with hearing me pee?”

  “It’s always her idea, but you’re the one who’s going to get screwed. She’ll find some way to make sure of that.”

  “Seriously, are you bathroom stalking me? Because that’s significantly weird.”

  “She’s bad news, Hannah.”

  “What are you, an after-school movie?” I washed my hands, then smeared on some ChapStick, just to show her my hands weren’t shaking. “One more time: I don’t know what you’re talking about. No idea.”

  “Trust me, I believe that.”

  “Fuck off,” I said, and banged out the door. Not my cleverest comeback, but I hated to give her the last word.

  She seized it anyway. When I got to my locker that afternoon, the vice principal was waiting for me, with a cop and a pair of pliers and an “anonymous” tip.

  I was crying before they got the door open, even knowing there’d be nothing to find, because even amateur, self-righteous vandals weren’t dumb enough to stash their spray paint at school, but it was still humiliating and there was a cop forcing open my locker and how the fuck had my life turned into this movie—and in the seconds before they deemed the locker inoffensive and sent me on my way, incriminating tears or not, I cursed Lacey, and thought, if only for a second, Nikki was right.

  Lacey was ebullient when she scooped me up in the parking lot. We’d officially gotten away with it. “Bonnie and Clyde, right?”

  “Bonnie and Clyde ended up dead.”

  “What crawled up your ass?”

  I couldn’t explain that I’d turned on her, however briefly, that I didn’t deserve her or the celebration she proposed, and instead I made her drop me off at home. If I could make it to my room before I started to cry, I thought, I would be safe. The day could end and tomorrow everything would be erased.

  My father was waiting behind the door. “Your mother’s in your room,” he said. His face was doom.

  “What? Why’s she not at work?”

  “Just go up there.”

  “What’s wrong?” It seemed likely someone was dead, or at least on the way there. I could see no other reason for my mother to leave work in the middle of the afternoon, no other end for this shitty, decompensating day.

  He shook his head. “I promised her I’d give her first shot. But . . . let’s just say, officially, I’m very disappointed. Unofficially?” He winked.

  So fucked.

  �
�Any chance we can pretend I never came home?”

  He pointed at the stairs. “Go. And, kid?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Gird your loins.”

  WHAT SHE’D FOUND: TWO CANS of spray paint, which Lacey had insisted we not throw out (but that she not keep). Rolling papers and a glass pipe I’d never used. Condoms, equally unused, extra-large and strawberry-flavored at Lacey’s insistence. Lipstick, too ugly to wear but shoplifted from Woolworth’s just because. Dusty bottles filched from the liquor cabinet. A Polaroid of Lacey’s boobs that had served us some ridiculous purpose I couldn’t remember.

  How she knew to find it: A call to her office from a nameless “concerned friend” who was obviously Nikki Drummond, concerned only about ruining my life.

  What she said: You are a disappointment. You are a disgrace. You are, it goes without saying, grounded.

  You are not the daughter I raised.

  You are lucky I’m not calling the cops.

  You will never see that Lacey again.

  I didn’t cry. I didn’t betray Lacey, not this time, not out loud. I admitted what I’d done, said I’d done it on my own, and if my own mother wanted to turn me in to the police, I’d be happy to tell them exactly the same thing. I told her that she couldn’t keep me away from Lacey, that the only bad influence here was sitting on my bed, holding two cans of spray paint like they were live grenades. I told her I didn’t need anyone, especially Lacey, to give me ideas or bully me into standing up for what was right. I was an adult, and if I wanted to fuck the Man, that was my business.

  She sighed. “This isn’t you, Hannah. I know you better than that.”

  “The name is Dex,” I said, and it was the last thing I would say to her that night or the two that followed. The silent treatment was still the only real weapon I could muster.

  I must have seemed ridiculous. At least as ridiculous to her as my father seemed to me, cheering me on behind my mother’s back and making the occasional frontal assault with vague references to their shared posthippie past, invoking long-lost good causes and heroic stands, though my mother shut him down every time, in a way guaranteed to make both of us feel like shit. “She doesn’t care about feminist politics any more than you do, Jimmy,” I heard her say, after I’d tossed my burnt meat loaf and returned to my room. “She’s simply infatuated. You should know the feeling.”