Girls on Fire(25)

I nodded.

“Then we go.”

Flannel’s nose went piggy when he sneered. “And what the hell are we supposed to do?”

“Suck each other off, for all I care,” Lacey told them, then took my hand, and together we ran.

“Sorry,” I said, when we were safe in the car, windows down, Kurt’s raw voice streaming in our wake, the boys and the field and the church and the night shrinking to a story we would tell ourselves and laugh.

“Sorry for what?” Lacey sped up, as she did when she was bored, and I pictured her toes curling on the grimy pedal. She liked driving in bare feet.

We didn’t apologize—that was a rule. Not to each other, not for each other. We made our own choices. We did what we did with the boys in the field, what we did in the grass and the blood and the hay. We kept moving, without looking back. The day behind us was fogging up, and I tried to let it. I tried to feel no shame.


WE SLEPT OUTSIDE THAT NIGHT, and woke up damp with dew. I told myself that none of it had happened, not the glint of the axe or the intestines steaming in the moonlight, not the boys in the field or the barn. The way I felt, floating between the cushions of grass and sky, no longer high but not yet grounded, it was easy to believe.

Lacey had promised there’d be no hangover. She didn’t tell me it would be more like the opposite—that I would wake up still feeling like I could fly.

I listened to her breathe, and tried to time the rise and fall of my chest to hers. I counted the clouds, and waited for her to wake up—not bored, not afraid, simply alive to the tickle of grass and sigh of wind. It was only when she blinked herself awake, when she saw my face and said, brightly, “Good morning, Lizzie Borden,” that I thudded back to earth.

I sat up. “Lacey.” I swallowed. “Last night . . .”

She took in my expression. Recalibrated. “Breathe, Dex. No freak-outs before coffee.”

“But what we did—”

“Technically, you made us leave before we did anything,” she said, and laughed. “The look on their idiot faces.”

“Not in the barn.” I didn’t know why I was still talking. If I didn’t name it, maybe I could erase it. “Before.”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to change before anyone sees us,” Lacey said, looking down at herself, and I realized the stains on her shirt were blood. The stains on mine, too.

I shook my head. Everything was shaking.

“No.” Lacey stilled my hands with hers. “No, Dex. They’d have done it whether we were there or not.”

It was some note of certainty in her voice, maybe, that cued a memory from an assembly past, then half-remembered words from the morning’s service, and the pieces assembled themselves. “You knew,” I said, and of course she knew. She always knew. “You picked that town on purpose.”

“Of course I did. I was curious. Weren’t you?”

I knew the right answer: Curiosity was supposed to be our lifeblood.

“What do you think they do with cows on that farm, Dex?” she said when I didn’t give it to her. “This isn’t Charlotte’s Web.”

“That was a pig.”

“And they were going to butcher it, right?” Lacey said. “That’s how farms work. It’s not like killing someone’s cat or something.”

“Have they killed someone’s cat?”

“Do you want the answer to that?”

Silence between us, then, except for the bugs and the birds and the wind.

“You were having fun,” she said, and it felt like an accusation. “You were laughing. You just don’t remember.”

“No. No.”

“You do know it was all a bad joke, right?” she said. “Just a bunch of * hicks trying to freak out their parents. No one was actually trying to summon the devil.”

“Of course I know that.” What I didn’t know, at least not with the same degree of certainty, was whether it mattered. The sacrifice was a joke, maybe, but wasn’t blood still blood, dead still dead?

“Anyway, it’s not some crime against nature to watch stupid people do stupid shit,” Lacey said.

“But it was more than watching . . . wasn’t it?”

“What do you think?” Lacey laughed. “You think you helped put poor little Bessie out of her misery? You?”

I was sitting cross-legged, and Lacey shifted until she faced me in exactly the same pose. The Mirror Game, I’d called it when I was a kid, springing it on my parents without warning. You scratch your nose; I scratch mine. My mother loathed it. My father, who’d learned in some long-ago acting class how to cry on command, always won. If Lacey and I played, I thought, the game could go on forever.

She cupped my hands again. “How much do you remember, Dex? Seriously.”

I shrugged. “Enough?”

“I remember how it was my first time. Everything feels kind of like a dream, right? You’re not sure what’s real, what’s not?”

I nodded, slowly. “Not for you?” I said. “Everything’s clear for you?”

“Crystal. So I can tell you everything that happened, in graphic detail, or . . .”

“Or.”

“Or you trust me that everything is fine. That all the good stuff happened and all the bad stuff was a dream. You let me remember, and you let yourself forget. You trust me, don’t you?”