Girls on Fire(46)

I’m not blaming you, Dex—you are what you are.

You are not the strong one. So I have to be.

“I can’t go back there,” I said.

“Home? What happened? You want me to call someone?”

“God, no! Maybe—maybe I can just live here with Dex.” I laughed, like it was a joke. He looked like I’d asked him to f*ck me.

“Kidding,” I said.

“Let’s call your mom,” he said. “We’ll talk it all through. Figure it out.”

“No! Please.”

“Okay . . .” Maybe if we hadn’t been sitting out on the street, in front of everyone, he would have rubbed my back, like dads do. “Let’s go inside, then. I’ll call Julia. She’ll know what to do.”

“Your wife? The one who hates me?”

“She doesn’t—”

“Dex is forbidden to see me. Or did you forget?”

“She’s upset,” he said. “She’ll cool off.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure she’ll be real cool when she finds out her husband’s been palling around with the town slut.”

“Don’t call yourself that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Lacey—”

“Face it, your wife hates me. And that’s before she even knows about this.”

“This what?”

“This.” Like I was going to spell it out.

“Lacey.”

“Jimmy.” I said his name the same way he said mine, heavy and patronizing.

“Lacey, what, exactly, do you think is going on here?”

I snorted.

“This”—he wagged a finger back and forth between us: me, him, me—“is not a secret. Dex’s mother is the one who thought you might need—”

“What? A new daddy? A good f*ck?”

He cleared his throat. “Someone to talk to.”

I was on my feet then. Fuck him f*ck them f*ck you f*ck middle-aged middle-class self-satisfied judgmental oh-so-proud of their charity to the less-fortunate f*ckfaces.

“So she put you up to it? What, did she bribe you? How many blow jobs is an hour with me worth?”

“Whoa. Blondie. Sit down. Chill.”

Like he could just choose when to be a responsible grown-up. Like he cared about anything but making sure the neighbors didn’t hear. When I didn’t sit down like a good little dog, he stood up, but he couldn’t look me in the eye, not now that he’d admitted it—that I was some kind of chore for him, a way to get out of cleaning the gutters.

“I guess this is good-bye, Jimmy,” I said.

“Look, I’m obviously not handling this very well, but if you’d just come inside—”

“I can say good-bye right out here, no problem,” I said, and when I opened my arms and he came in for the hug, I put my hands on his shoulders, rose on my tiptoes, tilted my head, and kissed him.

I don’t care that he pushed me away, hard, or that he didn’t say anything after that, just shook his head and went back into the house and locked the door between us, that when he finally saw the real me he ran away. I don’t give a shit about any of it, but you might, because before he did all that? Before he remembered who he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do? He kissed me back.


I CAME TO FIND YOU.

I came to find you and take you away, because I couldn’t go home again, and after I’d done what I’d done, I couldn’t very well let you go home again, either.

I couldn’t go without you.

That was always the plan, that we would go, and we would go together. We were supposed to be two parts of the same whole. Conjoined twins without the freak factor, one mind and one soul.

I would have told you everything. Once we were safe on our way, the past gnashing its teeth at our backs. Once we’d driven far enough to hit tomorrow, I would have told you my story, because I would know you’d chosen me, you’d chosen us, and you could be trusted with the truth.

Maybe I shouldn’t have left you there. Definitely I shouldn’t have left you there alone, in enemy territory, all boozed up and no place to go, thinking you could hold your liquor when all along it’s been me holding you up, holding you back, holding your hair and mopping your puke and letting you believe you could handle things on your own. Maybe I shouldn’t have left you. But you shouldn’t have asked me to.


GIRL MEETS GIRL, GIRL LOVES girl, girl saves girl. This is the story of us, Dex. The only story that matters.

The story of us: That night at Beast, before you went all to liquored-up shit, when we let ourselves float on the arms of the crowd, surfing the love of strangers. Love pulsing with the beat, a wave that lifts you up no matter who you are. The ocean doesn’t care. The ocean only wants to slap the shore and then carry you back to the deep.

The story of us: You need me to turn you wild. And I need you. I need you to be my conscience, Dex, just like you need me to be your id. We don’t work apart.

Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousnesses will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song, Come down come away come with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel’s, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other.