Girls on Fire(35)

I thought about it sometimes: how she would hate it, seeing me with someone else, watching me lace my arm around a waist or lean close to whisper a secret. It would hurt, and I wanted, more than anything, to make her hurt. I admit that. I could have picked anyone, any of those sad little girls dancing down the hall in their identical denim jackets and neon stirrup pants, bopping to New Kids or maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot because that’s what their boyfriends told them to listen to, saying please and thank you to their teachers and not so hard and f*ck me to the boys they’d only be seen with in the woods, sad girls with big bangs and little dreams. I watched them, and I thought about it.

Then you came to me.

It wouldn’t surprise you that Nikki told me about you. It would surprise you what she said, something like, “Who, her? That loser’s always glaring at me like I drowned her puppy,” and forgive me, Dex, but I said, “Probably in love with you,” and Nikki said, “Who isn’t?” and then, I’m sure, drunk and high, we both laughed.

Truth, Dex: She never gave a shit about you. All that energy you put into hating her, and still you were nothing to her. Not until I made you something. You’ve never thanked me for that, either.


I WATCHED YOU. BILLOW OF HAIR like your very own storm cloud. Interchangeable Kmart T-shirts, always a size too big, like you’d never clued into your best asset, or wanted to make sure no one else did. Always with a book, thick glasses and middling sulk, that smirk you gave people when they said something stupid. I don’t even think you know you’re doing it, slitting your eyes and raising your lip, like the morons cause you physical pain. You told me once that, before me, you wasted half your time wondering why people didn’t like you more, obsessing about your glasses or your hair or the way you rolled the cuffs of your jeans, precisely how tight and how high. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that none of it would have helped. People like to believe they’re beautiful and smart and funny—special. They’ll never like the person whose face reveals the truth.

What I saw in your face was the truth of Nikki. She was as ugly to you as she was to me. You wanted to make her hurt. And I helped you do it, even if you didn’t realize it. You’re welcome for that, too.

I knew you before you knew yourself. Imagine if you’d marched through high school and college and a lifetime of diaper changes and mind-numbing jobs and garden clubs and PTA bake sales, and never known yourself, so tough and so, so angry. You were afraid to let yourself feel it, but I could feel it for you, simmering. I could hear the pot lid, that clatter of metal like a rattlesnake warning: Stand back, shit’s about to explode.

So f*cking what if that’s why we started, if you hating her was the thing I loved most, if I held on so tight because I could feel her fury that she’d been replaced—by a nonentity. So Nikki brought us together. So what?

What matters isn’t how we found each other, Dex, or why. It’s that we did, and what happened next. Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That’s us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.





DEX


Urge Overkill



THERE WAS A SECURITY CAMERA. Two shadows caught on-screen, faces indistinct, ages readable enough that—the very morning after our graffiti triumph—two cops muscled their way into the principal’s office. By noon, word had gotten around that they were looking for two girls in possession of spray paint, with possible connections to a dark underground, two girls with dangerous intent. God is dead, we had written—I had written—and not realized this would magic us into something to fear. Midway through English class, the PA buzzed, and the principal came on to issue dire warnings: that new evidence suggested agitators in our midst, that we should all be vigilant, that all of us—the misguided perpetrators most of all—were at risk. The rumor mill was delighted, giddy speculation quickly drowning out any buzz about the next big party and Hayley Green’s bulimia-induced laxative incident.

Two nameless girls heeding the call of the dark; I could feel people watching us.

We met by the Dumpsters, one of us ice-cold and the other freaking out, three guesses which was which. This wasn’t the year to be a juvenile delinquent. “Worst case, it’s vandalism, that’s got to be a misdemeanor,” Lacey said, every word a shrug, and I wanted to shake reality into her.

“A misdemeanor? They still arrest you for those, Lacey. We’re so f*cked.”

The refrain had been beating in my head since I saw the cop car pull up to the curb through my homeroom window. So f*cked. So f*cked. So totally, absurdly, screwed grounded arrested f*cked. Lacey pretending otherwise didn’t fix anything.

“No one’s getting arrested. No one even knows it was us. Stop acting like a crazy person, and they never will.”

But the way I acted wasn’t the problem. It was Lacey. People knew enough about her to suspect the truth—at least, Nikki Drummond would.

And it turned out she did.

“Let me guess: her idea,” Nikki said, snaring me in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, where I’d taken to going ever since she’d cornered me in the one on the ground floor. “She promised no way would you get caught. No consequences.”