Girls on Fire(17)

“Never!”

I waited her out, testing the words in my head, on my tongue.

“Fine. I love you. Even though you’re a sex-crazed lunatic.”

She did not let go.


I KNEW WITHOUT ASKING THAT I wasn’t supposed to leave the room, but Lacey was asleep and the bathroom was down the hall, and there seemed no harm in following the voices, navigating the dark easily enough in this house that mirrored my own. I knew exactly how far down the stairs I could creep without being seen.

The man Lacey called the Bastard stood shorter and skinnier than I’d imagined, with wire-rimmed glasses and a graying military flattop. Lacey’s mother knelt before him in a white bra and panties, palms assuming prayer position, eyes on the Bastard’s black loafers.

“God forgive me,” she said.

“For being a drunk,” he prompted.

“For being a drunk. For being weak. For—”

“For giving into the temptations of my whorish past.”

“For giving into temptations.”

He toed her hard in the belly.

“The temptations of my whorish past,” she corrected herself.

I felt like I was watching TV.

Lacey’s mother was crying. Somewhere beyond me, a baby echoed her.

She tried to stand, but the Bastard pressed two fingers to her shoulder and shook his head. Her knees returned to the tile.

The baby was screaming.

“He needs me,” Lacey’s mother said.

“Should’ve thought of that before.” The Bastard’s voice was so reasonable, as if they were sitting across the table from each other discussing a credit card bill. He was even dressed like an accountant, a pocket protector tucked neatly into his starched white shirt.

“You won’t do with my son what you’ve done with your daughter,” he said.

She nodded.

“Say it.”

“I’ll do better with James Junior.”

“You’ll have some respect for yourself.”

“I’ll have respect.”

“No more of this garbage.”

“No more,” she whispered.

The baby cried.

There was a touch on my shoulder, just gentle enough not to startle, or maybe I wasn’t startled because I knew, of course, Lacey would be there.

“There’s a back way out through the kitchen,” Lacey whispered, though she didn’t have to: Our houses shared the same floor plan, escape route and all. I went first, sliding through the dark, any noise covered up by the baby’s increasingly unhinged screams. I had to tamp down an impulse to turn back for him, carry him and Lacey away, but of course he wasn’t my brother and Lacey was the one with car and license. I wasn’t in a position to rescue anyone.

She eased the door shut behind us, and said nothing as we got into the car and peeled away. There was no music.

“You want to go home,” she said finally, and I knew if I said yes, that’s what it would be. Final.

I understood now: This was a test. Maybe the whole night had been a test. With Lacey, it was hard to tell whether events were unspooling of their own accord or under her behind-the-scenes machinations, but, I reminded myself, it was always safest to assume the latter.

I was good at tests. I reached over to the Barbie recorder and hit play, feinting a head slam with each of Kurt’s downbeats. “Let’s go to the lake.”


THE LAKE IN FEBRUARY, IN sleet and starshine. We had it to ourselves. Wind and water and sky and Lacey. Everything I needed.

“Parents are bullshit,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Everyone’s bullshit but us,” I said.

We called it our lake, but it was only ours the way everything was ours: because the world we created between the two of us was secret and wholly owned.

We were creatures of water, she told me, and those don’t belong in the woods. It was the only explanation she ever offered for why we needed to stay away. Never the forest, always the lake, and that was fine with me. I couldn’t wait for it to get warmer, to watch her swim.

She breathed water, she told me, and I could almost believe it was true.

The sleet was light and oil slick, the kind that made you wonder about acid rain. Lacey preferred storms. A death-black sky, a sizzle in the air, that waiting, breath-holding feeling, like something was about to break. Sometimes we made it to the lake before the storm’s first bellow. We raised our faces to the rain, timed the gap between light and sound, one Mississippi and two and three. Until we knew the storm well enough to breathe with it, to beat with its rhythm, to know after the sky burned white how long to wait before opening our mouths and screaming into the thunder’s roar.

But that was Lacey’s time. I liked it better in the quiet. The storm was like another person between us, angrier and more interesting than I could hope to be. It was best when we were alone.

Lacey watched the water. It was different, in the dark. Fathomless. I imagined eyes glowing in the deep, teeth sharp, hunger and need. Things lurking. I imagined a siren song, a call in the night, Lacey and I answering, wading into icy waters, sucked down into the black.

She scooped up a rock and threw it into the lake. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” I said, like I agreed, because whatever she meant by it, I did.

I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter what her mother and her stepfather did with each other, that I understood they weren’t a part of Lacey, and Lacey was no part of them, had sprung fully grown, goddess-style, blooming in a field or melting from the sun. That other people were irrelevant to us; that they existed only for the pleasure of dismissing them, simulacra of consciousness, walking and talking and pretending at an inner life but hollow inside. Nothing like us. Lacey herself had taught me that, when she read us Descartes. You can only know your own insides, Lacey said. The only real, certified and confirmed, is you and me. I wanted to remind her what she’d taught me, that we could leave together, that life was only as cruel as you allowed it to be, that Battle Creek belonged to us by choice and we could choose to abandon it.