Girls on Fire(24)

She rested her other hand in my lap, fingers tight in a fist, then blooming open, and there was a flower she’d inked on her palm. I stopped screaming, then. I watched the flower. Its petals leached color from her skin. They glowed green like Lacey eyes and red like Lacey lips and pink like Lacey tongue. The flower whispered to me with Lacey’s voice and told me there was nothing to fear. Believing her was like breathing.

When the service ended, she held my hand tight and led me out of the church. Her lips brushed my ear and she smelled purple, and when she whispered “Having fun yet?” our laughter tasted like candy.

Fun was meant to be beneath us. Fun was for Battle Creek, for the losers who dragged their six-packs into the woods and groped each other in the dark. Not for us; we would get high only for a higher purpose, Lacey had decreed. We would be philosophers; we would devote ourselves to all forms of escape. After the service we would retreat to an empty field and spend the hours until we came down groping for Beauty and Truth. We would lie in the grass, search the sky for answers, make art, make something to make ourselves real.

That was the plan before, when everything had seemed clear—but now was after, silvery and strange. And when we went to the field, bumping and sloshing in the back of a pickup, we didn’t go alone.

Boys: some of them in church shirts with shiny shoes, some in flannel with jeans and dirty boots. All of them with sticky beer fingers and grubby breath, all of them boys we did not know and would never like, with faces that blurred and shifted, strangers determined to stay strange. I couldn’t keep track: Were there many or few? Had we begged them to bring us or did we beg them to let us go? I waited for Lacey to tell me it wasn’t happening, but Lacey only complained about tramping through the mud and breathing in the shit, then asked if, until it was time, she could carry the axe.

One of the boys, I saw then, had an axe.

The sky was pinking and the lowing cows breathed fire like fairy-tale beasts, and I heard my voice saying you can’t.

“You eat burgers, don’t you?” a boy said.

I heard Lacey laughing and knew I must be imagining it.

“They’re my property,” another boy said. “I decide if they live or die. I’m their god.”

I knew that wasn’t quite right, but the words to prove it were slippery. Before I could snatch them from the fog, an axe whistled through leathery hide, and blood spurted, and with one voice, the beast and I screamed.

Sticky beer, sticky blood. Laughing boys, giving the finger to an imaginary face in the sky. Laughing Lacey, asking to hold the axe. Lacey’s hands on the axe and my hands on the axe. What’s hers is mine. Someone’s voice saying don’t be a *, someone’s voice saying please don’t make me, someone’s knees in the dirt, someone’s fist in a steaming wound, someone’s bloody fingers inking a five-pointed star across the grass, someone’s breath, someone’s whisper, someone’s tears. Someone’s voice pretending to be Lacey, impossible words carving fire across the sky.

“We trade this blood for the blood of our enemies. Let us bring them to ruin.”


THEN IT WAS DARK, AND I was in a barn, lying in the hay, and I came back to myself just as a cold hand slid into my pants.

Just say no, they’d said in school, back when we were too small to imagine the need, so now I said it, “No,” and pulled the hand out and pushed the body away.

“C’mon,” the body said, and nuzzled its snout against my chest. Red hair, I noted, and disliked. Lacey was sandwiched between a checkered-shirt farm boy and a hay bale, stripped down to her bra and combat boots.

Boys from the field, I thought, then shoved the thought away.

I smacked the copperhead and said no again.

“She said you thought I was cute,” he whined.

I took him in, freckles and crooked smile, beady eyes and puffy cheeks, and thought: Maybe. But cute didn’t mean I wanted this animal thing, wet and clumsy, bones and meat. My first kiss had come at the wrong end of a dare, someone else’s punishment; the second came in the dark, someone else’s mistake. This was lucky number three, and when I stood up, he said, “I never get the hot one,” then jerked off in the hay.

“Lacey,” I said, and I was crying, probably. “Lacey.”

She made a noise. It’s hard to talk when your tongue is tracing messages in someone else’s mouth.

“Let ’em be.” Red had crusty nails and oozing zits, and I knew without checking that I didn’t get the hot one, either.

“Lacey, I want to go.” And maybe I was making myself cry, because crying was a thing Lacey wouldn’t resist.

“Can it wait?” Lacey wasn’t looking at me. The flannel boy bent her over the bale and kissed her knobby spine. “Just a little longer?”

He laughed. “You got the long part right.” His dirty hands were on her, fingers smudged with motor oil.

Lacey giggled. I couldn’t stop smelling blood.

Hot breath on the back of my neck and “Don’t worry, babe, I won’t let you get bored.”

“Lacey,” I said. “Lacey. Lacey. Lacey.” That did it. A prayer; a summoning. My witching powers, or the hitch in my voice, or just her name, like the lyrics to a favorite song, calling her home.

“Can’t you shut up?” Flannel said, but Lacey slipped through his straddled legs and scooped up her clothes. She touched my cheek. “You really want to go, Dex?”