Girls on Fire(28)

“You still got my He-Man?” Jesse asked, and I smiled because it meant he remembered how he used to bring his action figures over to play with my Barbies, and also because, somewhere at the back of my closet, I did.

“You still pretending you didn’t steal my She-Ra?”

In my peripheral vision, I could see him blushing.

“Hey, she was sexy. Metal bikini, Hannah. Metal bikini.”

On-screen, a brunette in a spiked leather corset fellated a drumstick. Now I was blushing.

“Her name is Dex,” Lacey said, without looking away from the screen.

“Sorry.” He elbowed me, gently. “Dex.”

“It’s okay. Whatever.”

“I kind of liked it,” he said. “Your name. But Dex is cool, too.”

Here is how I imagined things might go, if I let it happen: Jesse Gorin would inch his hand across the couch toward mine, ever so casually link our pinkies together, then turn my hand over and tap a message into my palm, in the Morse code we’d taught ourselves one rainy summer week before third grade. It would say: I remember you. It would say: We are still the people we used to be. And when he said he wanted to make some popcorn and did I want to help, I would follow him up to the kitchen, and while I was grabbing the air popper from the cabinet where it used to be, he would slip up behind me, whisper something suitably romantic in my ear, or maybe just my name, maybe just Hannah, then kiss the back of my neck, and when I turned around, I would be in his arms, hair dangling over the sink, lips perfectly parted and tongue knowing what to do. And even though we would return to the basement like nothing had happened, the taste of each other rubbed away by popcorn butter, we would bite down on the inside of our cheeks to prevent secret smiles, and silently understand that something had begun.

That was before Lacey asked Jesse to show her where the bathroom was and they disappeared upstairs together for the rest of the show. When they came back, Jesse’s ballpoint tattoos were bleary with sweat and Lacey’s shirt was on inside out, which she could only have done to prove a point.

“So, you’re welcome,” Lacey told me in the car on the way home.

“For what?”

She seemed surprised I had to ask. “Didn’t you notice the way that skeezer was eyeing you? If I hadn’t gotten it out of his system, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said. “I thought I was supposed to let it happen.”

“With him? God, Dex, learn to recognize a joke.” She pulled up in front of my house. “You deserve so much better.”

I opened the car door, but she grabbed my wrist before I could get out.

“So?” she prompted.

“So?”

“Magic words, please. A little polite recognition for my sacrifice.”

“Right. Thank you.”


LACEY DECIDED TO FIND ME a more satisfactory dick. That’s how she put it when she presented me with a flimsy fake ID and a black lace corset. “Amanda Potter”—born Long Island, 1969, Sagittarius, details I repeated to myself over and over again as we stood in line waiting for the bouncer—“is getting some tonight,” Lacey told me, but didn’t tell me how she’d found this club, a grim concrete block beside the highway, or why it promised to be my sexual salvation. “No argument allowed.”

Her corset was purple, and seemed, at least from where I stood, to offer slightly more room to breathe. She wore a silver pentagram around her neck, another thrift store acquisition to go with the Satanic Bible she’d finally dug up in the basement of some used bookstore along the highway. She loved the way people looked at her when she wore it, the same way I looked at her when she showed me the book for the first time. It didn’t look like any Bible I’d ever seen. It was black, with a red five-pointed star etched onto the cover, and even the author’s name gave me the creeps: Anton Szandor LaVey. It sounded deliberately fake, like a name the devil himself would choose. Lacey had already highlighted several passages.


Man’s carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.

There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes.

Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs.





“You really don’t want to let anyone see that you have this,” I’d told her, when she showed off her purchases, then pressed the pentagram necklace back into her hand. “And you really don’t want to be wearing this.” She still didn’t get it, the rules of a place like Battle Creek. It was one thing being a metalhead with a corpse on his T-shirt and a fetish for black nail polish; it was another thing altogether to be a girl wearing a pentagram. It was always another thing, being a girl.

“The hilarious thing is, they’ve got it all wrong,” Lacey had told me. “Turns out actual Satanism’s just about freethinking and being yourself. Stuart Smalley could’ve written this.”

“Can we not talk about this now?”

“You say now, but you mean ever.”

I did.

“You should read it,” Lacey said. “You’ll see. There’s good stuff in here.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m joking,” she said, and it was easiest to assume it was true.