Girls on Fire(56)

The trees closed around us, dark and lush and whispering. The afternoon had taken on a fairy-tale inexorability: The witch told me where to go, and like a child lost in the woods, I followed. Until, finally, she stopped—walking and talking both, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the endless stream of complaint might indicate some jangling of nerves until she abruptly fell silent.

We’d paused at the edge of a clearing, its center occupied by a sagging structure, its walls crayoned with black hearts and bubbled tags, its windows jagged black holes. A few yards away, a rusting freight car tilted on bare axles twisted with weeds, like some ancient mechanical beast had crawled into the forest to die. It was no gingerbread house, but it still felt enchanted.

I knew about the old train station, of course. Everyone did. It had been abandoned since the seventies, and whatever cozy charm the architect had been aiming for with its sculpted iron railings and gabled roof was long lost to history and the encroaching woods. Somewhere in the darkness below the platform were broken and weedy tracks, and rumor had it that there were people living down there, storybook hobos who warmed themselves over trash fires and stabbed one another with iron nails. The station loomed large in Battle Creek childhoods, a landmark for bored and daring kids, easy initiation ritual for secret clubs: Brave the haunted station, return with a talisman, a sliver of glass or torn condom wrapper. Try not to get hepatitis. It was a place of possibility, the threat of shadows or even sentience, like the slouching station might be keeping counsel of its own. It was the kind of sacred place Lacey might have tried to make ours, if not for her thing about the woods.

A trench cut through the clearing, bent and broken track unspooling along its base like a canyon river, and Nikki settled onto its bank, dangling her feet over the edge. “This is where he died, you know.”

It didn’t exactly make the place feel less haunted.

“That’s what they say,” she added. “They didn’t want to make it public, that this was the place. In case freaks wanted to turn it into some kind of shrine. Or do some copycat thing. But they told me. Obviously.”

I didn’t know Craig at all, not really, except that I’d known him for sixteen years and knew plenty: that he could burp the alphabet, that he could fit four Legos up his nose, that he’d once cried when he fell off the seesaw and broke his arm. He was a fixture, like the condemned church on Walnut Street I walked past every day for years, never wondering what was inside, until the day it burned down. That was Craig’s absence, for me: a vacant lot where one shouldn’t have been.

Impossible not to imagine him sitting in the shadow of this abandoned husk, pondering the desiccation of the past, reading existential doom into the graffitied dictates: f*ck ronda, suck my cock. Impossible not to imagine him bloody and still, rotting into the dirt.

It belonged to Nikki now, this place. He’d claimed it for her.

“Your boyfriend killing himself doesn’t automatically make you a good person,” I said, because it hurt to feel sorry for her.

She looked like she’d had that thought before. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Because you’d kind of think it would.” She offered me the bottle, but I waved it away. I knew what to do when the witch offered you a bite of her apple.

Nikki downed the rest in a single swallow, then fired the bottle into the trench. There was something immensely satisfying in its shatter. She swung her legs back and forth. Somewhere, birds sang. A mosquito lit on my knee, and Nikki slapped it away. She left behind a slick of sweat, which surprised me. The Nikki Drummonds of the world weren’t supposed to perspire.

“I don’t lie to people here,” she said. “So maybe you’ll believe me this time. I’m not the enemy. There is no enemy.”

“Why do you care so much if I believe you?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was weird, too.”

The witch builds her house out of candy to charm stupid children, I reminded myself.

“I can help you fix it, you know,” she said.

“Fix what?”

“Well, for one, your sullied reputation. For another . . .” She flung her hands in my general direction, as if to suggest your essential Hannah Dexter–ness.

“What makes you think I need to be fixed?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“And why would you want to make me your project?”

“Maybe I’m bored.” She was looking at her feet, pointing and flexing them together, like we used to do in gymnastics at the Y. “Maybe I’m tired.”

“Of summer?”

“Of pretending not to be a bitch,” she said. “You’ve obviously already decided I am. It’s relaxing.”

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said, and maybe I was, because at her admission I felt a strange tingle of something adjacent to pride.

She shrugged again, which I took as a yes. “I don’t beg. Come to the mall with me tomorrow. Let the idiots see you not caring what they think. Let them see you with me. It’ll help.”

“Come to the mall with you? Are you high?”

“Marissa is cheating on Austin with Gary Peck. She lets him finger her in the chem lab after school.”

Marissa Mackie and Austin Schnitzler had been a couple since junior high and had been Craig and Nikki’s prime competition for every sweetheart-related yearbook superlative, not to mention my own personal Most Likely to Make You Vomit. Even money had them engaged within a few months of graduation, earlier if the condom broke. “How do you know?”