Girls on Fire(50)

“No—”

“You told her not to?”

“No . . .”

“So what did you say?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop her. A person has to want to be helped.”

“She didn’t belong to you.” There are things that shouldn’t have to be said.

“She didn’t belong to you, either, kid. But I know what she meant to you. I would never have made her go.”

“But you’re glad she’s gone.”

He shook his head. “She was good for you,” he said, then, sounding less certain, “wasn’t she?”

I wondered what he thought he knew. Who he thought I’d been before Lacey, and who he thought I’d become in her wake. Who he needed me to be: Daddy’s girl, sassy but not skanky, flirting with boys but never f*cking them, breaking curfew, breaking laws, breaking everything but my precious hymen, trying to be more like Lacey and less like Lacey at the same time, rebelling, not against him but with him, giving the finger to the Man and to my mother but coming home in time to curl up on the couch and watch The Price Is Right. I saw, then, what I hadn’t seen before, that I wasn’t Hannah or Dex for him; I was wholly Jimmy Dexter’s daughter, reflection of whatever he needed himself to be.

“We could go to the movies sometime, if you want. Just you and me, kid, like we used to?”

He wasn’t going to tell me what he’d said to her. Believe what you want, people always say. As if it’s that easy, as if belief and want could dovetail so effortlessly. As if I didn’t want to believe that my father loved me and my parents loved each other, that Lacey was coming home, that I would stop burning with humiliation every time I left the house, that life was fair, tomorrow was another day, Nikki Drummond would burn in hell. Why stop there? I wanted to believe in time travel and ESP and aliens and God, in a world that was more magical than it seemed and a future that beelined out of Battle Creek and into the event horizon. Lacey said believing was the hard part. If you could do that, everything else would follow,

“You’ll give yourself lung cancer,” I told my father, and stepped over him to get to the door.


LACEY HAD A THEORY THAT people have a finite capacity for the enjoyment of their favorite things. Songs, movies, books, food: We’re hardwired for specific quantities of pleasure, and once the amount is exceeded, good goes bad. The kicker is, there’s no warning when you’re approaching the limit; the dopamine just flips off like a switch, and there’s one more book for the fire.

Very rarely, Lacey said, you find something for which your brain has infinite capacity, and that, Lacey said, is the thing we call love.

I didn’t believe in that anymore, but I did believe in overdoses and disappointment, and I wasn’t about to risk either on my favorite books. The house wasn’t a safe space anymore—there were no safe spaces anymore—and that only made it easier to leave. When I did, I only ever went to the library. I felt twelve again, fresh out of the kids’ section, stroking the spines in the grown-up stacks as if I could osmose their words through the bindings. I felt almost normal again.

“God loves you all,” promised the woman with the stack of pamphlets who’d planted herself just outside the front door. “But He cannot protect you if you willingly put yourselves in the path of temptation.” It was beak-faced Barbara Fuller, who wore her clothes like a hanger, who’d snubbed my mother more than once at a PTA bake sale, suggesting not so subtly that someone who settled for store-bought was no more deserving of the title mother than Entenmann’s donuts were of the title food. Barbara Fuller was the type who wrote letters to the editor about loose morals and garish Christmas lights, and she had a voracious hunger for the failures of others. That day, she didn’t seem to care that her audience consisted of a handful of bored retirees and one abashed bald guy who looked like he would gnaw his own arm off if his wife—Barbara Fuller’s only avid listener—didn’t let go.

“Satanists slaughter fifty thousand children each year.”

The bald guy picked something out of his nose.

“This is a national emergency. And don’t fool yourselves—there is an active Satanic cult operating in this town.” She raised her voice. “Your teenagers are at risk.”

It was a joke, this woman preaching to us about risk—pretending she knew who was in danger, and of what.

I walked quickly, head down, focusing on the slap of my flip-flops against pavement, the gravel beneath some old lady’s Chevrolet, the crying cicadas, the pulse of blood flushing my cheeks, the jangle of the bike lock as I fumbled with the key.

“They prey on the vulnerable and confused,” she screeched, and I suspected she wasn’t just trying to penetrate the old folks’ hearing aids. I would not look up to catch her looking at me. “They prey on the fallen.”


SUMMER STRETCHED ON. OUR HOUSE whirred day and night with the apologetic wheezing of fans. They stirred hot air; we endured. More than once I read through Barbara Fuller’s pamphlet about Satanism, a copy of which I’d liberated from the trash. Written by one Isabelle F. Ford, PhD, and jointly published by Parents Against Satanic Teachings and the Cult Crime Research Institution, it suggested that an underground network of tens of thousands of Satanists was diligently pursuing a program of grave robbing and child sacrifice.