Girls on Fire(18)

I wanted to tell her that nothing I’d seen had scared me, that nothing had changed, but she already knew me well enough to hear a lie in my voice.

I wanted, most of me wanted, to save her.

Beneath that, though, there was a cold, shameful relief. I had come to need Lacey so much that it scared me. But if her life was this broken, if there was nothing beyond our closed circle but ugly mess, then it opened up the unthinkable possibility that Lacey needed something, too. That if I passed her tests, shaped myself to fit against her edges, that something could be me.

“My father loved the water.” She found another rock and fired it hard at the lake. “He liked to take me to Atlantic City, when we lived in Jersey. There was this mechanical pony thing by the casino, and he’d leave me with, like, a bucket of quarters. Enough to ride all day.”

“That’s a lot of pony riding.”

“Seemed like heaven to me. You know what they say about girls and horses.” I could hear a little of the Lacey I knew peeking through, winking at me. “Also, I was an idiot.”

“All six-year-olds are idiots.”

“He promised one day he’d take me to ride a real pony. I guess there are these beaches in Virginia where they run wild in the sand? Just ponies everywhere, like you’re back in time or something.”

“Chincoteague,” I said. I’d read Misty of Chincoteague eleven times.

“Whatever. I don’t know, because we never went.”

I could have told her that my father was the king of broken promises, that I knew all about disappointment, but I was afraid she’d tell me I knew f*ck-all about anything, and she’d be right. “I’ve never been to the ocean,” I told her, and these were the magic words that brought her back.

Lacey squealed. “Unacceptable!” She pointed at the car. “In.”

For six hours, we drove. The Buick bumped and wheezed, the cassette player ate Lacey’s third-favorite bootleg, the crumpled AAA maps beaconed our way, and while I hovered over a suspiciously discolored toilet seat and then washed my hands with sickly gray soap, examining myself in the mirror for some clue that I’d become the kind of girl who lit out for the territories, some trucker tried to feel up Lacey in the Roy Rogers parking lot. We drove until the car swerved off the highway and into a parking lot gritty with sand, and there we were.

The ocean was endless.

The ocean beat and beat and beat against the shore.

We held hands and let the Atlantic wash over our bare feet. We breathed in salt and spray under the dawning sky.

It was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Lacey gave that to me.

“This is how I’d do it,” Lacey said, almost too quiet to hear under the surf. “I’d come out here at night, when the beach was empty, and I’d take an inflatable raft into the water. Then I’d hold on, and let it carry me out. Far enough that no one would ever find me. That I couldn’t change my mind. I’d bring my mother’s sleeping pills, and my Walkman, and a safety pin. And when I was out far enough that I couldn’t hear the waves breaking anymore, that the raft was just bobbing on the water and there was nothing but me and the stars? I’d do it. In order. The order matters. Pills first, then the safety pin, just a tiny hole in the raft, small enough that it would take some time. Then I’d put on the headphones, and lie down on the raft so I could see the stars and feel the water in my hair, and I’d let Kurt sing me home.”

I was supposed to be the one who paid attention, the one who listened to the chaos of the world and understood—that, Lacey said, was the whole joy of me—but so often that year, Lacey talked and I didn’t hear her at all.

“I could never go out there in the dark,” I said, and didn’t tell her how I would do it, even though I had decided, because Lacey said it was important to know. I would jump off something—something high enough that you would break on the way down. There was nothing like that in Battle Creek; there wasn’t even anything high enough for me to find out if I was scared of heights. Lacey thought I probably was. She said I seemed like the type.

I didn’t want to be up there in the sky, seeing everything at once, not unless it was going to be the last time. Because then I wouldn’t be afraid. I would feel powerful, I thought, toes peeking over edge, this most precious thing entirely mine, to protect or destroy. If you did it that way, you’d have power, up to the very end.

If I did it that way, at least before the end I could fly.

We slept in the car, running the heater for as long as we dared, pressed together for warmth. For once Lacey let me pick the music—“within reason,” she said. We turned on R.E.M., because I liked the honey in the singer’s voice, and I liked that Lacey liked it, too. She curled up in the seat and I put my head on her shoulder. Right there in the parking lot, with the water watching, he sang us to sleep.

When I woke up, the sky was gray and the horizon was on fire. Lacey was asleep. I padded barefoot back to the shoreline and stood in the water, needles of ice biting my ankles. The ocean looked kinder in the light, and I wished for Lacey’s raft so we could take it together, float into the sun.

I didn’t hear her come up behind me, but I felt her squeeze my hand. I knew she would find me.

“This is everything I need,” she said. “You’re everything. Just like I’m everything you need, right?” It was an incantation; it sealed us for life.