Girls on Fire Read online

  I was not among them, and most days that still felt like a point of pride.

  After Craig’s death, Nikki had briefly acquired an aura of sainthood. It must change a person, I’d thought, to be touched by tragedy, and I watched her carefully—in gym class, in homeroom, in the hall by the disappearing, reappearing shrine—wondering what she would become. But Nikki only became more fully Nikki. Not purified but distilled: essence of bitch. I overheard her in the girls’ locker room, two weeks after it happened, talking to two of her ladies-in-waiting in a voice designed for overhearing. “Let them think whatever they want,” she said, and, impossibly, laughed.

  “But they’re saying you were cheating on him,” Allie Cantor said, theatrically scandalized. “Or that you were . . .” Here her voice went subsonic, but I could fill in the gap because I’d heard the rumors, too. In the wake of inexplicable suicide, sainthood didn’t last long. “. . . pregnant.”

  “So?”

  “So, they’re saying he maybe did it because of you.” Kaitlyn Dyer’s voice caught on every other word. Nikki’s girls had been competing over who could put on the biggest show of pain, though I wondered why they assumed this would earn them favor from a queen who had endured so many days of memorials and so much vile gossip, without a flinch.

  “It’s kind of flattering, right?” Nikki paused, and something in her voice implied a bubblegum smile. “I mean, I’m not arrogant enough to think anyone would kill himself for me. But I’ve got to admit it’s possible.”

  Word—especially that word, flattering—spread; the whispers stopped. Months later, I still watched Nikki sometimes, especially when she was alone, trying to catch her in a moment of humanity. Maybe I wanted proof that I should feel sorry for her, because it seemed barbaric not to; maybe it was only animal instinct. Even the dumbest prey knows better than to turn its back on a predator.

  Most of us, by that point in our educational careers, had mastered changing into our gym uniforms without revealing an inch more of bare skin than was necessary. Nikki never bothered. Her bra always matched her panties, and when she tired of showing off the flat stomach and perfect curves she tucked into one pastel set of satins after another, she somehow managed to make even the mandated tennis skirt look good. Me, on the other hand, all saggy granny panties and flabby C-cups bulging from stretched-out lace, dingy white uniform that gave my skin a tubercular pallor—the mirror was my enemy. So that day, the first February afternoon warm enough to play outside, I didn’t inspect myself on the way out of the locker room, didn’t notice until I was on the field and halfway through the first softball inning that all those people laughing were laughing at me, didn’t understand until Nikki Drummond sidled over in the dugout and whispered, giggling, that I might want to stick a tampon up my cunt.

  This was the nightmare with no and then I woke up. This was blood. This was stain. I was sticky and leaking, and if Nikki had slipped me a knife I would happily have slit a vein, but instead she just gave me the one word that girls like Nikki weren’t supposed to say, the word that guaranteed from now on, whenever anyone looked my way, they would see Hannah Dexter and think cunt. My cunt. My dripping, bloody, foul cunt.

  I was supposed to shrug, maybe. The kind of girl who could laugh things off was the kind of girl who lived things down. Instead I burned, hot and teary, hands pressed against my splotchy ass as if I could make them all unsee what they’d seen, and Nikki’s teeth glowed white as her skirt when she laughed, and then somehow I was in the nurse’s office, still crying and still bleeding, while the gym teacher explained to the nurse that there had been an incident, that I had soiled myself, that I perhaps should be wiped and cleaned and collected by a parent or guardian and taken home.

  I locked myself into the handicapped bathroom at the back of the office and stuck a tampon up my cunt, then changed into unstained jeans, tied a jacket around my waist, scrubbed the tears off my face, and dry-heaved into the toilet. When I finally came out, Lacey Champlain was there, waiting for the nurse to decide her so-called headache was bullshit and send her back to class, but—at least this was how we told ourselves the story later, when we needed the story of us to be inevitable—at some deeper, subsonic level, waiting for me.

  The room smelled like rubbing alcohol. Lacey smelled like Christmas, ginger and cloves. I could hear the nurse on the phone in her inner office, complaining about overtime and how someone somewhere was a total bitch.

  Then Lacey was looking at me. “Who was it?”

  It was no one; it was me; it was bad timing and heavy flow and the cruel dictates of white cotton, but because it was the laughter as much as the stain, the cunt as much as its leak, it was also Nikki Drummond—and when I said her name Lacey’s lip curled up on one side, her finger playing at her face like it was twirling an invisible mustache, and somehow I knew this was as close as I’d get to a smile.

  “You ever think about just doing it? Like he did?” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  That got me a look I’d see a lot of, later on. It said you’d disappointed her; it said Lacey had expected better, but she would give you one more chance. “Offing yourself.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Sometimes.”

  I’d never said it out loud. It was like carrying around a secret disease, and not wanting to let anyone think you were contagious. I half expected Lacey to scrape her chair away.

  Instead she held out her left wrist and flipped it over, exposing the veins. “See that?”

  I saw milky flesh, spiderwebbed with blue. “What?”

  She tapped her finger against the spot, a pale white line, cutting diagonal, the length of a thumbnail. “Hesitation cut,” she said. “That’s what happens when you lose your nerve.”

  I wanted to touch it. To feel the raised edges of the scar, and the pulse beating beneath. “Really?”

  A sudden spurt of laughter. “Of course not really. It’s a paper cut. Come on.”

  She was making fun of me, or she wasn’t. She was like me, or she wasn’t.

  “That’s not how I’d do it, anyway, if I were going to do it,” she said. “Not with a knife.”

  “Then how?”

  She shook her head and made an uh-uh noise, like I was a kid reaching for a cigarette. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  “My what?”

  “Your plan, for how you’d do it.”

  “But I wouldn’t—”

  “Whether you’d actually do it is beside the point,” she said, and I could tell I was running out of chances. “How you would kill yourself is the most personal decision a person can make. It says everything about you. Don’t you think?”

  Why I said what I said next: because I could see her getting tired of me, and I needed her not to; because I was desperate and tired and could still feel the wet seeping into my jeans; because I was too tired of not saying all the things I thought were true.

  “So shooting yourself in the head is Craig-speak for My girlfriend is a cunt and this is the only way to break up with her for good?” I said, and then I said, “Might have been the only smart thing he ever did.”

  She didn’t have to tell me, later, that this was the moment I won her heart.

  “I’m Lacey,” she said, and gave me her wrist again, sideways this time, and we shook hands.

  “Hannah.”

  “No. I hate that name. What’s your last name?” She was still holding on.

  “Dexter.”

  She nodded. “Dex. Better. I can work with that.”

  WE CUT SCHOOL. “THIS IS a day that calls for large quantities of sugar and alcohol,” she said. “Possibly fries. You in?”

  I’d never cut before. Hannah Dexter did not break the rules. Dex, on the other hand, followed Lacey straight out of the school, thinking not about consequences but about stick a tampon up your cunt and how, if Lacey had suggested we burn the place down, Dex might just have gone for it.

  Her crap Buick got only AM frequencies, but Lacey had stuck an
old Barbie tape recorder to the dash. She turned it up as loud as it would go, some screaming maniac trapped in a hell chamber of jackhammers and electroshock, but when I asked what it was, there was a sacred hush in her voice that suggested she’d mistaken it for music.

  “Dex, meet Kurt.”

  She flicked her eyes away from the road, long enough to read my face.

  “You’ve really never heard Nirvana?” It was a brand of fake incredulity I knew too well: You really didn’t get invited to Nikki’s pool party? You really don’t have a Swatch? You really haven’t kissed/jerked off/blown/fucked anyone? It wasn’t the veiled snobbery I minded but the implied pity, that I could fall so unthinkably short. But with Lacey, I didn’t mind. I accepted the pity as my due, because I saw now that it was unthinkable that I’d never heard Nirvana. I could tell it was making her happy to solidify our roles, she the sculptor and me the clay. In that car, miles opening between us and the school, between Hannah and Dex, between before and after, I wanted nothing more than to make her happy.

  “Never,” I said, and then, because it was called for, “but it’s amazing.”

  We drove; we listened. Lacey, when the spirit seized her, rolled down a window and screamed lyrics into the sky.

  That Buick: ancient and wheezing and spotted with bird shit and, even on that first day, like home. Love at first sight, like I knew already it would be our getaway car. Its glove compartment, with its heap of maps, crusty nail polish bottles, mixtapes, old Burger King wrappers, emergency condoms, dusty pack of candy cigarettes. Its leather seats exhaling cigarette fumes, though Lacey, her grandma dead of lung cancer, refused to smoke. “It belonged to some dead lady,” Lacey explained, that first day. “Three full-body details, and the damn thing still stinks of cigarettes and adult diapers.” It felt haunted, and I liked it.

  Lacey was a driver—I would come to understand that. She was always inventing field trips for us: We drove to a UFO landing site, a Democratic rally where we pretended to be Ross Perot groupies and a Republican rally where we pretended to be Communists, a sixties-style drive-in with roller-skating ushers, and the Big Mac Museum, which was lame. They were, more than anything, excuses to drive. That first day, she invented no destination; we drove in circles. Motion was enough.

  There was something deliciously numbing about it, the sameness of the clapboard houses and seamed concrete, the day unspooling behind us as we circled the town. I tried to imagine how it looked to her, determinedly idyllic Battle Creek with its antique stores and its ice cream shoppe, its empty storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs, its chest-thumping pride, every forced smile and flapping flag insisting this was the real America, that we were salt of the earth and blood of the heartland, that our flat green corner of Pennsylvania was a walled-off Eden, untouched by the violence and sin endemic to the modern age, that the town mothers worried only over their pie crusts and garden weeds, the town fathers limited themselves to one after-dinner beer and never prowled beneath their secretaries’ skirts, the sons and daughters had only sitcom troubles and, despite their hormones and halter tops, knew enough to wait. When something went awry, when a golden child slipped a gun in his mouth and bled brains on damp earth, it could only be evidence of attack or contagion, an incursion of them, never a fault line through the heart of us. When night came, it was easy to ignore the things the children did in the dark.

  It was impossible, seeing home through her eyes, like seeing your own face as a stranger would. This was my greatest fear, that Battle Creek was my mirror. That Lacey would look at one, see the other, and dismiss us both.

  “I can’t believe you have a car,” I said. I didn’t even have a license. “If I had one, I’d drive away and never come back.”

  “Want to?” Lacey said. Like it would be that easy to Thelma-and-Louise ourselves out of Battle Creek for good. Like I could be a different girl, my own opposite, and all it took was saying yes.

  Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, all revealed to me in a single burst of glaringly obvious light. Maybe it took longer than one car ride to slough off a lifetime of Hannah Dexter—a careful study of the right bands, the slow but steady creep of delinquency, flannel and combat boots, hair dye and shrooms and the nerve to violate at least a handful of commandments—but that’s not how I remember it now. That’s not how it felt then. It felt, right there in that car, like I could choose to be Dex. Everything after was paperwork.

  “We drive straight through, we could make it to Ohio by midnight,” Lacey said. “We’d be at the Rockies in a day or two.”

  “We’re going west?”

  “Of course we’re going west.”

  West, Lacey said, was the frontier. West was the edge of the world, the place you fled in search of gold or God or freedom; it was cowboys and movie stars, surfboards and earthquakes and pitiless desert sun.

  “So, you want to?”

  Three times that year, like some fairy-tale temptress, Lacey asked me to leave with her, and every time I refused, imagining I was being prudent, refusing to give in to the temptation of running wild. Not understanding that the wild was waiting for me in Battle Creek—the danger was in staying.

  That time, I didn’t say yes or no. I only laughed, and so instead of the promised land, she drove us to a lake. Twenty miles out of town, it had a swimming beach for families, a dock for fishermen, reeds and shadows for lovers, a muddy bed of empty beer cans for the rest. That day it was all silence and space, leafless branches overhanging a gray shore, abandoned docks where ghosts of children past bounced on invisible rafts and dove into sparkling blue. Winter had come, and the lake belonged to us. I’d been there before, though not often, because my mother hated the beach and my father the water. Building mounds in the sand beside a beach full of kids living in an L.L.Bean ad, shaded by beach umbrellas, tossed from fathers’ shoulders into the water, I always felt like the defective half of a Goofus and Gallant comic: Gallant builds a castle with a moat; Gallant buries her mother in the sand; Gallant practices her dead man’s float and does handstands on the muddy lake bottom. Goofus lies on a towel with a book while her mother pencils through work files and her father opens another beer; Goofus teaches herself to tread water and wonders who would rescue her from drowning, since neither parent knows how to swim.

  Lacey shut off the engine and the music, dousing us in awkward silence.

  She breathed deep. “I love it here in the winter. Everything dead. It feels like being inside a poem, you know?”

  I said I did.

  “Do you write?” she asked. “I can tell you’re the type. The word type.”

  I said I did, again, though it had only the most tenuous connection to truth. Somewhere in my room was a pile of abandoned diaries, each filled with a few stilted entries and several hundred blank pages, each a reminder of how little I had to say. I preferred other people’s stories. For Lacey, though, I could be a girl who made her own.

  “See that!” She was triumphant. “You’re a total stranger, but it’s like we already know each other. You feel that, too?”

  Although almost everything I’d told her since we got into the car had been a favor-currying lie, it all felt true. It did seem like she knew me, or was conjuring a new me into existence, one question at a time, and it made perfect sense for her to know that girl inside and out. Knowledge is a creator’s prerogative.

  “What number am I thinking of?” I said.

  She squinted her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples. “You’re not thinking of any number. You’re thinking about what happened at school.”

  “Am not.”

  “Bullshit. You’re thinking about it, but trying not to think about it with everything you’ve got, because if you let yourself do it, really marinate in it, you’ll start crying and screaming and polishing up the brass knuckles, and that would be messy. You hate messy.”

  It wasn’t wholly appealing, being known.

  “What are you afraid of, Dex? You get angry, really angry, what’s the worst
that happens? You think you’ll make Nikki Drummond’s brain leak out of her ears, just by wanting it?”

  “I should probably get home,” I said.

  “God, look at you, all pale and squirmy. It’s not a mortal sin, getting fucking mad. I swear.”

  But anger like that, it wasn’t smart. There was no upshot to letting myself feel it.

  Feeling it hurt.

  “Stick a tampon up your cunt,” I said, because maybe that was the way to exorcise it. Get it out of my head and into the world.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what she said. Nikki. Today.”

  Lacey whistled. “That’s fucked.” She started to laugh then, but not at me. I was sure of that. “Little Miss Perfect Pottymouth. Fucking ridiculous.” And then, miraculously, we were both laughing.

  “You know why I brought you here?” she said, finally, as we sobered up.

  “To psychoanalyze me to death?”

  She lowered her voice to a serial killer pitch. “Because here, no one can hear you scream.”

  As I was wondering whether I’d just entered act three of a Lifetime movie, the kind where the heroine accepts a ride with a stranger and ends up floating facedown in the lake, Lacey stepped to the edge of the water, threw her head back, and screamed. It was a beautiful thing, a tide of righteous fury, and I wanted it for my own.

  Then it stopped, and she turned to me. “Your turn.”

  I tried.

  I stood where Lacey had stood, my Keds ghosting her boot prints. I looked out at the water, skimmed with patches of ice, something primordial in their shimmer. I watched my breath fog the air and fisted my fingers inside my gloves, for warmth, for power.

  I stood at the edge of the water and wanted, so much, to scream for her. To prove her right, that we were the same. What she felt, I felt. What she said, I would do.