Girls on Fire(21)

I took to walking. It’s not a walking town, not in any weather and especially not in summer, but it was as good a way as any to mark time. If you’re embedded in enemy territory, it’s safest to know the lay of the land. Not that there was much to know: main street literally called f*cking Main Street, the shithole neighborhood to its south and slightly less shithole neighborhood to its north, too many secondhand shops and even more boarded-up storefronts, prison-shaped school and that gas station with the giant hot dog on top. All that walking and I didn’t even notice until I looked at a map that the town is shaped like a gun, with the woods curving out like a trigger.

It was a wet-blanket-heat day when I came across Nikki in the woods, air tailpipe hot, both of us slouching toward junior year, both of our tops basically see-through, nipples poking at sweat-stained cotton, though she was in no condition to notice. Come September, we’d be in the same class, which made me her subject and her my queen, but I didn’t know it and wouldn’t have cared if I did, and maybe it was that unfathomable glimpse of obscurity that got her attention.

Nikki Drummond, drunk at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, Battle Creek princess in disgrace. She’d propped herself up against a tree in the swamp, bottle of vodka in her lap, cigarette in her mouth, and only that overdried blond hair—literally brushed a hundred strokes a night, it turns out—clued me in that this was probably, in the sober light of fall, not my kind of people. But fall was two months away, and I was bored, so when Nikki offered me her bottle I sat down beside her and took a slug.

Would it surprise you to know that I walked in the woods all the time back then? There’s another pretty lie for you, that I was some mythical creature of the water, constitutionally afraid of trees. The woods weren’t just my kind of place, with their shadows and the music of whispers on the breeze; they were my place, this green labyrinth I could escape into and spin a little fantasy of my own. The closest path through the trees picked up less than a mile from the house, but inside the green it was dense and silent and felt about a million miles away from the Bastard and his Battle Creek. I could be the last person on earth, everyone and everything scorched away except for me and the trees, the worms and the deer. I liked when the leaves got so thick you couldn’t see the sky.

The first day I came across the old train station, I took a breath and wondered whether I’d willed it into existence. Because here was the end of civilization, forgotten station and rusty tracks and a behemoth of a boxcar sleeping in the weeds. You probably would have wasted your time trying to imagine yourself into the past, some booming, bustling era of ladies with parasols and men with briefcases and fedoras and important places to go, but I liked it the way it was, sprayed with fading graffiti, full of broken glass and jagged edges, lost in time. It was the first place I found that felt dangerous—the rotting heart of Battle Creek. This was apocalypse country, and it felt like home.

You can imagine how it felt when I found Nikki trespassing in my story.

“I don’t know you,” Nikki said, like existing without her awareness was the worst kind of sin. Like I was the intruder.

“Don’t know you, either.” I took one more slug before she stole the bottle back.

“I know everyone.”

“Apparently not.”

“Everyone. Everything. What are you supposed to do when you’ve done everything? Huh? What then?” Nikki Drummond slurring her words, baring her existential crisis to the newest trash in town.

“I highly doubt you’ve done everything. You live here.”

“I rule here,” Nikki corrected me.

At that, I laughed. I didn’t know her well enough then to realize how drunk she must have been not to claw my eyes out.

“I’ve done Craig,” she said. “I’ve done him and done him and done him and dull dull dull.”

“Whereas I bet he finds you fascinating.”

She blinked big blue eyes up at me; she smiled. Nikki stalked the world like a cat, but that afternoon she looked more like the tiger cub dangling from a branch in some lame inspirational poster: Hang in there! Clawed, but cuddly.

Lacey Champlain, in the woods, with a knife to your heart, because here’s the truth: Before you, there was Nikki Drummond.

We drank; she talked. I got an A-to-Z of the world according to Nikki, what it was like to be perfect and popular, to be Nikki-and-Craig, like Barbie-and-Ken, to be written in the stars, if the stars were a staple-bound yearbook and the ink was semen and beer. She told me they belonged together, and that if she couldn’t love him she couldn’t love anyone.

“Break up with him,” I said.

“Done that, too. It didn’t take.”

Too lazy and too bored to do anything but get blackout drunk and whine on a Tuesday afternoon. Such a tragedy, right? Where were the inspirational Sally Struthers commercials, the promise that even you could pimp out poor Nikki for just pennies a day?

“Sometimes I’m so bored I could just f*cking die,” she said. We were sitting side by side, dangling our legs over the tracks. “You ever feel that way?”

I wanted to be a different person. I wasn’t the girl I’d been in Jersey. I wasn’t Shay’s girl anymore, the kind who followed a foot behind if the wrong people were watching and said Yes, whatever you want when the answer was No f*cking way; I hadn’t been Daddy’s girl, not in a long time, and my mother had a new kid to screw up. I was Kurt’s girl, and I needed that to mean something. So maybe I was the one who crossed the space between us and smeared her pastel gloss, but the way I remember it, she was already there, and our lips and then our tongues and then the rest of us came together like it had been the plan from the beginning.