Girls on Fire(31)
“No? No. I guess not.”
I rapped softly at her head, the safest way I could think to touch her. “What’s going on in there, Lacey? I know it sucks that he’s dead, even if he is Craig, but it’s not like he meant something to you.” As I said it, I was wondering whether it was true. Maybe it all made sense in some seedy, beneath-her kind of way, the fervent and unfounded hatred of Nikki, the unprompted tears for a Neanderthal, the words that seemed snagged in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. “Was he cheating on her with you? You can tell me. I get it, I swear.” I didn’t get it, not a guy like him, his meaty hands fumbling at her bootlaces, but love was meant to be strange. “You can’t think it’s your fault, what happened. Even if he felt guilty, or you dumped him and he freaked out, or whatever it was, it wouldn’t be—” I thought about what it would be like to do something and not be able to take it back. “Even if you told him you wanted him to die or something, that wouldn’t make it your fault that he went and did it. You didn’t put the gun in his hand. You didn’t pull the trigger. Nothing is your fault.”
She looked up at me, face tipping into shadow, and smiled. “You think Craig was cheating on Nikki? With me?” She laughed, then, so beautifully, and I don’t know whether I was more relieved that we’d escaped the moment together or that I’d so plainly been wrong. Then she kissed my cheek. “You always know what to say to cheer me up.”
If not that, then what? I wanted to say, but couldn’t, not when she was happy again, not when she’d taken my hand in hers and pulled us both off the ground, sent us spinning, like the grave was a meadow and the moon was bright summer sun. “I can’t believe you thought I could love him.” Her laugh was a witch’s cackle, our dance a ritual that didn’t need spells, only hot blood rising in our cheeks and burning through our veins, an invocation of the gods of love, of whatever force pressed our palms together and whispered on the night wind, You are one.
AND THEN WE WENT TOO far.
“It’s what Kurt would do,” Lacey whispered, and there was no argument to that.
We eased open her window and dropped down to the bushes below. The car was too noisy, so for the first block we pushed it, gear in neutral and shoulders bruising against the trunk. When it was safe, Lacey gunned it, and I jittered in the passenger seat, cans of spray paint slippery in sweaty palms.
Kurt once got arrested for spray painting homosexual sex rules on the side of a bank, Lacey said, up there big and bright for all the rednecks to see, at least the ones who could read well enough to sound out the words. He grew up in an old logging town, Lacey said, full of *s, their puny brains filled with all the things Kurt smashed with his guitar. Before the guitar, there was spray paint, and there were words. “We have those,” Lacey said. “That’s enough.”
“If we get arrested,” I said, “I swear I will kill you.”
All brick and stone, squat and sad, the Teen Pregnancy Center was deep in last-resort territory. Past the walk-in clinic and the Sunrise rehab center, past the veterans’ hall where it was nothing to cadge free donuts from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a mile past even the boarded-up strip club that had survived three months, flush on the town fathers’ pay, before the town mothers had driven it to ruin. If it was you that let some greasy animal inside you, and you that hit the devil’s jackpot, sperm and egg making their miracle, then it might be you swallowing your panic, flipping through the yellow pages, finding salvation on the highway, in the gray windowless husk just past the Friendly’s. You might come from Battle Creek or Marshall Valley or even as far as Salina. You might wonder if it would hurt, or if you’d be sorry; you might be afraid.
You would definitely be surprised when the good people at the Teen Pregnancy Center gave you a pamphlet with Jesus on the cover and set you straight. The Teen Pregnancy Center would speak of miracles and wonders, and show you pictures of a seed they said was a baby and a sin they said was murder. And then, if you weren’t careful, they would ferret your name and phone number out of you so that when you got home, your parents would be waiting.
It was evil, Lacey said, and her first idea had been burning it to the ground.
Battle Creek wasn’t a sex-ed kind of town. But word got around, in playground diagrams and Sunday school sermons, and by junior high we all knew what to do and that we’d burn in hell for doing it. Just after Easter that year, our health teacher had held two apples before the class, then dropped one on the ground. Picked it up, dropped it again. “Which one would you want to eat?” she asked, finally. “This nice, shiny, clean apple? Or the bruised, dirty, dented one?”
Lacey stole the dirty apple for her lunch that day, and later that month, when Jenny Hallstrom lost it to Brett Koner in a church utility closet, we said she’d dropped her apple. “Guess we know what Brett likes to eat,” Lacey said. Jenny was the one who told us what happened inside the Teen Pregnancy Center. That was before she got sent away; we heard her kid was due by Christmas.
Word always got around. That was the rule of Battle Creek, and maybe that was why our parents spent so much time worrying who was shoving what into where in the backseat of whose car. Because we’d be the ones to burn in hell, but they were the ones who’d have to hear about it in church.
Now we tiptoed toward the Jesus freaks’ evil lair and hoped they were too cheap for security guards. I wore a fleece hoodie; Lacey was in cat burglar drag, all black with a bloody smear of lipstick that was the same color as our spray paint. She shook the can like she’d done this before, and showed me how to hold it and what to press. I waited for her to go first, to see how she did it, her hand steady and her letters smooth. I waited for an alarm, or a siren, or the men in uniforms who would drag us off into the night, but there was only the hiss of paint and Lacey’s cool laughter as the first of our messages glittered under sodium lights.