Girls on Fire(53)

I tried.

I dedicated my life to Christ. I memorized Bible passages. I sang that my God was an awesome god and learned the hand motions to prove it. When we stood in a circle for Squeeze Prayer, I said my line, “I pray that the Lord helps me fight off the devil and his temptations,” then squeezed Skank’s hand and pretended to listen while she told her own lie. I dedicated myself to craft projects, because Jesus was a carpenter and handiwork was noble work; I sawed wood and carved soap, and when we practiced tying knots I did my best not to dream of a noose. I confessed to lascivious thoughts and agreed with Heather that I’d squandered my life. I racked up two weeks’ worth of privileges, and I didn’t let myself think of Battle Creek or of you until I was safe in bed, because that was my reward for making it through each day—that and Kurt, who sang me to sleep. Two weeks, and I scored enough privileges to write two letters. One to the Bastard, promising to be good if he’d let me come home. The other to you.

Dear Dex, I wrote, then stopped.

Dear Dex, I’ve given up. Dear Dex, Everything I told you about myself was a lie. Dear Dex, Everything I do is so I can come home to you, but I don’t deserve you if I come home like this.

No. I needed to be your Lacey. Strong. So the next morning, during the dawn service, I stood up in my pew and cursed Jesus Christ my Lord for this season in hell, and our whole bunk got rewarded with an afternoon scrubbing shit out of the toilet bowls. The next day I gave Shawn the finger, and Heather tasked us with mucking out the cow stalls, to remind us what it meant to be befouled by sin. I thought of you, Dex, and I thought of Kurt, and knew I would roll in my own shit before living their vision of salvation.

The next time I f*cked up, they tried something new.


THERE’S A HIDDEN TRACK ON Nevermind. You’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. First “Something in the Way” fades out, with a final soft crash of cymbals and Kurt’s dying hum and then nothing.

Nothing for thirteen minutes and fifty-one seconds. What comes next is only for us, the ones who care enough to endure the silence. First the drumbeat, thrumming into the too-quiet like jungle cannibals. Then the lion roars: Kurt’s voice, pure and gleaming; Kurt’s voice like a knife scything the sky. It’s the raging of a man not going gentle into that good night. The silence is part of it, those thirteen minutes of agony, and Kurt’s in it with you, muzzled and frenzied as the seconds tick by and the pressure mounts and finally, when he can’t bear it any more than you can, he tears off the muzzle and goes f*cking nuts. Thirteen minutes, fifty-one seconds. It doesn’t seem like it would be that long. But time stretches.

Remember what we read about black holes, Dex? How from the outside, from a safe distance away, when you watch someone fall into a black hole, they fall slower and slower, until they seem to freeze at the event horizon? How they’ll stay there forever, suspended over the dark, the future always just out of reach?

It’s a trick. If you’re the one falling, time keeps right on going. You sail past the event horizon; you get sucked into the black. And no one on the outside will ever know.

That’s how it was, in the dark place. No boundary between yourself and the dark, past and future, something and nothing. You could scream all you wanted, and the dark would swallow it whole. In the dark place, silence was the same as noise.


IN PRISON THEY CALL IT the hole, at least if you want to believe prison movies, and if you can’t believe the movies, then half of what I know about the world is bullshit. But in prison movies, the hole is just some cell like all the others. At Horizons, it’s a f*cking hole in the ground.

In the dark place, you tell yourself, This time I will hold on. This time you’ll keep it together, remember that time passes and there are no monsters hiding in the dark. When the slab creaks open each day and the food drops down, you’ll fling it back in their faces, along with fistfuls of your own shit. When they lower the rope and offer to lift you back into the sun, if only you’ll apologize and say thank you, you’ll laugh and tell them to come back later, you were in the middle of a nap. This time the dark place will be your gift, your vacation from the torments of daily life. This time will be your time.

Bullshit.

The dark place is always the same.

First it’s boring. Then it’s lonely. Then the fear washes in, and when that tide ebbs, there’s nothing left. Silence fills with all the thoughts you spend your daylight life trying not to think. The bad things you’ve done. The blue of the sky. The bodies rotting away in coffins, the maggots feasting on skeletal remains. What happened to the body when you left it behind, and whether now is your time to return. Your food is damp with tears. It tastes like shit and piss, because that’s all you can smell, that and your rotting sweat and shame. The air is hot and stale, thick with your own breath. When the darkness breaks and a voice cracks the silence, you tell them whatever they want to hear.

No, not you. That’s cheating. I don’t know what you would do, Dex. This is what I did.

“I accept Jesus into my heart.”

“I renounce Satan.”

“I have sinned and I will sin no more.”

I always gave in—and that’s something I’ll never not know about myself—but at least I held out longer than most. It was because of Kurt. He was down there with me. Down there is where he lives. Singing was better than screaming. I sang with him; I remembered you. I lived for you, down in that dark place, and I survived knowing you were somewhere up in the light, living for me.