Girls on Fire(30)

“This is disgusting, Lacey.” It wasn’t the right word, but it was the easiest one.

The baby whimpered and pulled away from her bloody finger, but she shushed him and stroked his tiny ears, and he didn’t cry. “Just hold him still.”

The blood smeared watery pink across his forehead, running into his eyes. I held him still.

Lacey gently tapped his right shoulder, his left shoulder, his sternum, his forehead, solemn as any priest. “In the name of the Dark Father and the unholy demons, I baptize you into the church of Lucifer.”

They were just words, I reminded myself. They had only as much power as we gave them.

Lacey said she couldn’t wait to see the look on the Bastard’s face when he found out, though she was careful to wipe off every trace of blood before we laid James Jr. to bed for the night. Lacey said the Bastard thought the Battle Creek hysterics were an embarrassing sideshow, blind to the true war for their children’s souls, against the modern Cerberus of liberalism, atheism, and sexual revolution. The Bastard didn’t believe in Satanism, Lacey said, only in Satan, and claimed anyone who thought differently was doing the devil’s work.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s sister but yours,” she said, too, which made it okay that, when I left that night, the baby’s forehead still smelled like raw meat.

She wanted to spend her birthday in the graveyard, and so we did.

“Scared?” she said as we picked our way through the dark. Narrow lanes wove through rows of tombstones. I saw a stone angel, a spire circled by stone roses, crosses tilting and crumbling, tombs that gleamed in the flashlight beam where names were etched with lacquer and gold.

“Am I supposed to be scared of ghosts, or of you?”

“We both know you’re scared shitless of getting caught, Dex.”

She held the flashlight beneath her chin, casting her face in ghoul glow. “The only scary thing here is me.”

Maybe it was stupid of me not to be scared—if not by her big plan for the night, then by the intensity with which she’d insisted on it, that we sneak out with our candles and shovels, build a shrine to the Dark Lord, just enough of a show to give the plebes a good scare. “All I want for my birthday is to freak the shit out of Battle Creek,” she’d said, and I was prepared to help.

She stopped at a small square tombstone and sat, hard, beside the dead flowers at its base.

“Lacey.” It seemed like bad luck, saying her name out loud, like I might alert some predatory spirit to her identity. The stories had always made it very clear: Names were power. You gave yours away at your own risk. “I thought we were looking for a fresh one.”

“Look.” She aimed her flashlight at the stone.

Craig Ellison, it said, b. March 15, 1975, d. October 31, 1991

Beloved son and brother

Go Badgers!

“Go Badgers?” I laughed. Then aimed a cheerleader fist pump at the clouds. “God, that’s tacky. Can you imagine taking Battle Creek Badger pride to your grave?”

She didn’t say anything. I felt judged by her silhouette.

“What if it’s not some big joke?” Lacey said then. “Imagine the plebes are right, and there is some devil cult dancing around the woods, faces painted with blood. Acid orgies. If that’s what really happened to him.”

I tried to picture it, Craig Ellison forming an unholy alliance with the Dumpster Row boys, stripping off his basketball jersey to frolic naked in the woods, Craig Ellison magicked into drawing his own blood. Standing there in the shadow of his gravestone, stone angels judging our trespass, it wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been.

“And what if aliens are secretly running the country?” I said, desperate now to make my voice a flashlight, guide us both back on track. “What if the mayor is a vampire? What if I’m possessed by Satan and I’m about to suck your brains? It’s like you always say, anything’s possible—”

“—in the woods. Yeah. It is.”

That was when I noticed she was crying.

I almost fell beside her. Lacey wasn’t the kind of girl who cried. “What is it?” I put my hand on her shoulder. Took it off again. “What?”

“You love me, right?” Her voice was flattened, dead.

“Of course.”

“And you’re a good person.”

“Well, not since I met you.” The joke didn’t land. Her nails dug into my arm.

“Never say that again.”

“Okay. Okay, Lacey, it’s fine.” Panic. We were in a graveyard and she was freaking out, needing something I didn’t know how to give her because Lacey wasn’t supposed to need anything. “Of course I love you. And of course I’m a good person. And can you just tell me what’s going on so we can get the hell out of here?” I was crying, too. It was a reflex, like contagious yawning or throwing up at the smell of vomit.

“If I tell you to do something, and you do it, whose fault is that?” she asked.

“Depends on what you want me to do, doesn’t it?”

“It shouldn’t depend. Circumstances shouldn’t matter. If it’s my idea, it’s my fault. Your idea, yours.”

“Except it would be my idea to do what you told me to do. I get to decide that. I’m not your puppet.”