Girls on Fire(45)

But I don’t need a father, Dex, so don’t think I was trying to steal yours. Just borrowing him for a bit, just chipping away a little for my own.

“I’ll probably get fired soon,” your dad told me once when I asked why he was around so much during the day. Not like the movie theater does such big business in the afternoon, and not like managing the place qualified as actual work, but still. “Though if you want to know a secret—”

“Always.”

He leaned in, and the whisper floated on a trail of smoke. “I’m thinking I might quit.”

He dreamed big: inventions he didn’t know how to build and franchises he didn’t have the cash to open, dreams of starting up his band again or winning the lottery or getting salad bar botulism and suing his way into a fortune. He’s the one who made you a dreamer, Dex, and maybe that’s why your mother never seemed to like you very much, either.

I told him he should go for it. That I would.

“Yeah, well, you don’t have a mortgage.” He sighed. “Or a wife.”

I was starting to think it wouldn’t be long before he didn’t have a wife, either.

“I shouldn’t have told you all that,” he said. “You can’t tell Dex. We good on that?”

It was insulting. Have I told you any of the other things you weren’t supposed to know? Like how he’d proposed to your mom because he thought she was pregnant, and when their bundle of despair turned out to be a stomach virus, he went through with it anyway. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he was trying his best. He’d gambled away your minuscule college fund on some stock scam before you were old enough to notice, and that was the last time your mom let him touch the checkbook. He liked the stillness of two A.M., when the house slept and he could imagine what it would be like if you were all gone. Sometimes he stayed awake till dawn, imagining himself into that emptier life, the songs he would write, the coke he would snort, the roar of his engine on the open road.

“They make me take these pills,” I told him, to prove myself: a secret for a secret.

“What?”

I didn’t tell him how it started, after my mother found me in the bathtub, the water pink. “You know how it is, you do one thing people don’t understand, and they freak out and drug you up like you’re some kind of crazy person having daily chats with Jesus and the man in the moon.”

“Were you?”

“I don’t f*cking see things that aren’t f*cking there,” I said.

“I meant, were you some kind of crazy person?”

Then I had to smile. “You’re not supposed to say crazy. It’s offensive.”

He held up his hands, like excuuuuuuuse me. “So sorry. Were you nuts?”

“Wouldn’t you go a little f*cking nuts if everyone you knew was calling you crazy?”

It must have been lonely for him in that house, without anyone who knew how to make him laugh.

“So they put me on these pills,” I said. “One a day to keep the little dark uglies away.”

“Do they help?”

I shrugged. They didn’t stop the nightmares. They didn’t make it any easier to breathe when I thought about the woods.

“Dex doesn’t know,” I said.

He slipped a finger across his lips, then X-ed it over his heart. “Hope to die,” he said.

“You’re not going to . . . You won’t try to keep me away from Dex, now that you know I’m totally f*cked-up?”

“I think maybe it’s good for Dex to be around some f*cked-up people,” he said.

No one had ever said I’d be good for someone. “You really think that?”

He sucked down the last drops of whiskey. “I have to, don’t I?”

I reached out.

I took his hand.

For a few seconds, he let me.

“Lacey,” he said.

“Jimmy,” I said.

He let go.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“I did it,” I said.

It’s just something dads do, right? They hold your hand. They hug you and let you lean against their chest and breathe in their dad smell and tickle your nose against the dad hairs poking out from the hole in their ratty dad shirt. There’s nothing f*cked-up about wanting that.




SO THERE I WAS, THAT last night, everything I loved gone to ash in the backyard, the Bastard praying for my immortal soul, and when I got the hell out there and came to find you, there was no you there to find. You’d left without me, and the only one home was your father, beered up and dreaming in the still of the night.

He came out to the car, wanted to know what I was doing there, where you were if you weren’t with me, and that’s how I discovered that you didn’t sneak out; you just asked permission. Good girl to the bitter end. He was the one who’d broken the rules.

I would have left then—come for you—but he said, “You okay, Blondie?” and he looked so worried, so dad-like, that I couldn’t lie.

We sat on the curb.

“Tell me,” he said, and said again, and I couldn’t, because I don’t believe in breaking the f*cking dam.

I wouldn’t have told you, either, probably, but only because if I’d told you about the Bastard, how I felt like Kurt was dead, like I was dead, hollow inside and just f*cking done, there would have been a scene and you would have fallen apart; I would have had to be the tough one, all It’s okay, don’t cry, squeeze my hand as much as it hurts, and you would have been the one to feel better.