Girls on Fire(32)

Fake Abortion Clinic. Beware.

We had written the messages together, ahead of time, while Lacey’s mother was downstairs getting drunk and her stepfather was out bowling for Jesus.

Get your politics out of our *.

God is dead. Lacey had insisted on that one.

God is dead, I wrote, because it was the shortest. The letters wiggled and the d looked more like an o, but I wrote it. I pressed my finger against the nozzle and turned brown stone red and Hannah Dexter into a criminal. Magic.

We couldn’t go home yet, not feeling like that. We drove nowhere; we drove nowhere fast, because speed was what mattered. Speed and music, Nevermind in the player, Kurt’s screams tearing up his voice and our screams even louder. I shouted along with Kurt and didn’t care that according to my father my voice was like a raccoon screech or that according to Lacey I had the lyrics all wrong. I sang like it sounded to me, because those words sounded right: I loved you I’m not going back I killed you I’m not going back.

We drove with the windows up so we could scream as loud as we wanted, and it was easy to imagine we might never go home; we might drive off a cliff or over the rainbow. We might tear across the country, fire and ruin blazing in our wake. Lacey and Dex, like Bonnie and Clyde, like Kurt and Courtney, high on our own madness, burning holes in the night. “We should do this again!” I screamed. “We should do this always!”

“What? Be outlaws?”

“Yes.”

I’m not going back, I shouted, and that night, only that night, I loved Kurt like Lacey loved Kurt, loved Kurt like I loved Lacey.

I’m not going back.

I’m not going back.





LACEY


Good Intentions



THIS IS NOT A CAUTIONARY tale about too much—or the wrong kind—of f*cking. This is not a story of bad things happening to bad girls. I say this because I know you, Dex, and I know how you think.

I’m going to tell you a story, and this time it will be the truth.

Girl meets girl. Girl loves girl, maybe. Girl wants girl, definitely. Girls drink, girls dance, girls f*ck, girls link fingers on a dark night and whisper their secret selves, girls swear a blood oath of loyalty and silence. Girl betrays girl, girl loses girl, girl leaves girl alone. It’s a story you won’t like, Dex, because this is not the story of us.

“Just to watch,” Craig said, that first time he came to our place in the woods.

I’d already started thinking of it like that. Our place.

He brought along his mother’s picnic blanket, a puffy synthetic with lace stitching at the edges—he was, it turned out later, almost pathologically fastidious. It was a pointless effort, trying to make what happened between us clean. But the ground was hard and sparkled with broken glass, and the blanket was silky against bare skin, so we only mocked him a little.

When he said he’d watch, he didn’t say he’d jerk off while we were tangled up in each other, but he was a sixteen-year-old guy, so maybe that was implied. It was equal parts disgusting and hot. Disgusting because obviously. Hot because it’s one thing to get a guy off with your hand or your mouth, the slippery-when-wet mechanics of skin on skin; it’s another to do so without even touching him. That’s power.

Maybe it freaked him out, because it was a while before he came back. Or maybe Nikki didn’t want him back. Maybe she wanted me to herself.

It was different, with a girl. Not as different as you’d expect, not softer, because there was nothing soft about Nikki Drummond. It was still skin and sweat, and I was still her secret, just like I’d been Shay’s secret. I was still the shameful thing, and I was good at that.

Two weeks before Craig came back again. Two weeks, just the two of us, every day, in the woods, rolling in the weeds. Not inside the hollowed-out station, where we might have sunk into the old couch, generations of fluids staining its molding cushions. Not inside the rusting boxcar, where Nikki said she could hear the walls plotting to close in. We stayed in the open, beneath the sky’s prying eyes, putting on a show for the sun and the stars. I didn’t talk to her about Kurt; she didn’t talk to me about prom. We didn’t talk much at all, wink wink nudge bleh, but when she asked me questions, I told the truth, and that made things different, too.

I liked the taste of her, Dex. I liked spelling my name inside her with my tongue. Like I was branding her where no one could see. Mine.

I got good at getting her off, and then I must have gotten too good, because the day before the first day of school, I made her scream, and then she rolled away from me, curled fetal, and started to cry.

“What?” I ran my knuckles down her spine. It always made her shiver. “What is it?”

Nikki didn’t cry. We were the same that way.

She didn’t cry, but she was crying, and when I touched her again, brushed her hair out of her face, because that seemed like the kind of thing to do when you were naked and crying together, she sat up, shook me off along with the mood, found her clothes and her vodka, and we got drunk. The next day she brought Craig with her again, and said it was only fair we let him play.

Both of us or neither of us, that was the implied deal, and I thought: Kurt would do it, Kurt would be proud of me for doing it; the Bastard would keel over and die. I thought she needed me, they needed me, and it was good to be needed.

I thought: Why the f*ck not?