Girls on Fire(10)

“Little from column A, little from column B.” She showed me how to pour out an inch or two from each bottle, replacing the liquid with water. We mixed a little of everything together in a single glass, then, one at a time, took a foul swig.

“Juice of the gods,” Lacey managed when she’d finished choking.

I swallowed again. It was the good kind of burn.

The carpet in the family room was a harsh orange-and-brown-striped shag that, until Lacey settled onto it, stretching into a snow angel and pronouncing it not bad, I’d found repulsive. Now, with her approval and a boozy, warm buzz, it seemed almost luxurious. I lay beside her, arms stretched till our fingertips touched, and marinated in the juice of the gods and the hot air gushing from the heating vent. The dissonant chords of Lacey’s latest bootleg washed over us, and I tried to hear in it what she did, the foghorn promise of a ship that would carry us both away.

“We should start a club,” Lacey said.

“But clubs are lame.” I said it like a question.

“Exactly!”

“So . . .”

“I’m not talking about a chess club, Dex. Or, like, some kind of Let’s read to old people so we can get into college thing. I’m talking a club club. You know, like in books. Tree houses and secret codes and shit.”

“Like in Bridge to Terabithia!”

“Let’s pretend I know what that is and say . . . yes.”

“But without someone dying.”

“Yes, Dex, without someone dying. Well . . . at least not someone in the club.”

“Lacey.”

“Joke! Think blood oath, not blood sacrifice.”

“So what would we do? A club has to do something.”

“Other than sacrifice virgins, you mean.”

“Lacey!”

“Clubs are stupid because they’re not about anything that matters. But ours would be. We’d be . . . the ontology club.”

“A club to study the nature of existence?”

“See, Dex, this is why I love you. Think there’s a single other person in this crap town who knows what ontology means?”

“Statistically?”

“Come on, Dex, you can say it. It’s not going to hurt.”

“Say what?”

“That’s why you love me, too.”

“That’s why I . . .”

“Love me, too.”

“Love you, too.”

“Clearly I’ll be club president. You can be vice, and secretary, and treasurer.”

“And no other members.”

“Obviously. Think about it, Dex. We could read Nietzsche together, and Kant, and Kerouac, and figure out why people do what they do and why the universe has something instead of nothing and whether there’s a god, and sneak into the woods and blast Kurt as loud as we can and close our eyes and try to, I don’t know, connect with the life force or whatever. Bonus points if it pisses people off.”

“So basically, keep doing what we’re doing?”

“Basically.”

“No regular meetings or anything.”

“Nope.”

“And no tree house.”

“Do you know how to build a tree house?”

“And the blood-oath thing?”

“Hello, AIDS?”

“I don’t think you can actually—”

“The blood oath is a metaphor, Dex. Keep up.”

“So not an actual club, then.”

“No, Dex, not an actual club. That would be lame.”

If we had started a club for real, ontology would have taken a backseat to Lacey’s preferred activity: dissecting the evil exploits of our shared enemy, Nikki Drummond. For years I’d hated her on principle, but after the incident—which was how we spoke of it, the better to forget words like stain and blood and cunt—I hated her in concrete particulars that Lacey was eager to help me parse. “What kind of person needs a reason to hate the devil?” she liked to say, when I asked what had put Nikki in her sights in the first place, and I was left to conclude that Lacey hated Nikki because Nikki so plainly hated me.

“She’s a sociopath,” Lacey said now, bicycling her feet in the air. “No emotions. Probably kills small animals, just for fun.”

“You think she’s got her own little pet cemetery in the backyard? Rabbits with their tails pulled out, that kind of thing?”

“Imagine the possibilities,” Lacey said. “We could exhume the bodies. Give little Thumper some justice. Show the world what she really is.”

This was our recurring theme: If only we could expose Nikki’s rotting heart. If only the world knew the truth. If only we had the ammunition for a frontal assault.

The day before, we’d slouched behind her in the auditorium’s ratty seats, enduring an assembly about Satanic cults, the third so far that year. No one in Battle Creek had been foolish enough to invoke the Antichrist since Craig’s death—that is, at least not since the November morning when a gang of grieving jocks jumped Jesse Gorin, Mark Troslop, and Dylan Asp and strung them up by their ankles in a tree. I’d seen them up there, dangling over the school parking lot, we all had, three scrawny stoners stripped to socks and boxers, shivering in the snow. Punishment for Satanizing half the churches in town on the same night Craig Ellison died; punishment for trying so hard to scare people, or for succeeding. A sacrificial offering to Nikki, their grieving goddess, and—even if the rumors were wrong, even if she hadn’t commanded it—she’d accepted it in kind. A thing like that in a place like this, people kept saying after they found Craig’s body in the woods, like it was impossible that anything so ugly could happen in our pretty backyard. But ugly things happened all the time in Battle Creek: Boys beat other boys bloody and tied them to branches while girls like Nikki pointed and laughed.