Girls on Fire(57)



“Because people tell me things.”

“And why are you telling me?”

“So you’ll trust me.”

“I’ll trust you because you’re spreading gossip—”

“It’s not gossip if it’s true.”

“Okay, so your logic is, I’ll think you’re trustworthy because you’re sharing your best friend’s darkest secret with your worst enemy?”

“Number one, she’s not my best friend. Number two, she has much darker secrets. Number three, you’re seriously underestimating my pool of enemies.”

“God, you really are a bitch, aren’t you?”

Nikki stood. “I told you, I don’t beg. Take it or leave it, your call.”

“You’re absolute crap at being nice, you know that?”

There was something different about her laugh, here, something light and sunny, and it felt good.

“You’ll have to pick me up. I don’t have a license.”

“We’ll take care of that, too.” This time her laugh was more a cackle. “I do love a project.”

I felt that tug of inevitability again, some profound sense that life had come unstuck.

“I have to get back, or my mother will freak,” she said. “But you can stay, if you want. Cut straight through on the other side of the station and your place is only about a mile. I’ll tell your mom you got sick and I gave you a ride home.”

It was less a suggestion than an order. “Nikki—” I didn’t turn to face her. I couldn’t. “Before you go . . .”

“Yeah?”

It would be so easy for all those storybook heroes to avoid adventure, to save themselves from the sorry fate of leading an interesting life. Don’t lean over the well; don’t rub the magic lamp. When the voice calls to you from the dark, don’t listen.

Don’t go into the woods.

“What’s the deal with you and Lacey?”

She paused just long enough to make me nervous. “Maybe we were lovers, Hannah.” She lingered on the operative word, opening her mouth so wide I could see her tongue pry the l from the roof of her mouth. “Hot ’n’ heavy lesbo action, and you’re just some pawn in our lovers’ quarrel. Ever think of that?”

It was like she was too lazy to make an actual joke. She might as well have said insert crass bullshit here, and f*ck you very much for asking.

“Whatever, Nikki.”

“I’m turning over a new leaf. It’s called, who gives a f*ck about the past? The real issue is you and Lacey.”

“And what issue is that?”

“I already told you. She was shitty to you. And for you. It was painful to watch.”

“Who asked you to watch?”

It was the wrong answer. I should have defended Lacey, and then it was too late.

“Why would she let you get so drunk that night, then leave you there on your own? What kind of ‘best friend’ does that?” She squeezed her fingers around the phrase.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“She was shit to you that night, and she’s been shit all along. It’s a power trip for her, you get that, right? Making you think you need her? Poor little Dex, alone and helpless, with big strong Lacey to teach her how life works. You were the only one who couldn’t see it.”

“Fuck you, Nikki.”

“Say I’m wrong. She’s the best friend a girl could have. So where is she? You’re having the worst f*cking time of your life, and she abandons you to go throw her panties at Nirvana? You’re lucky, Hannah. She would have ruined you. That’s what she does. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

“Go back to your party, Nikki.”

She left me alone in the woods to think through her bullshit, or ignore it and imagine all the people who must have passed through the station back when the trains still chugged through Battle Creek: businessmen in fedoras or smutty-cheeked coal miners or grinning teenagers riding off to war, everyone on the way to somewhere else, waving at the sorry town rooted in its place, and I did my best to imagine all of it, until it got dark and I got tired of being alone.


THE MALL. LACEY AND I never went to the mall, which was thirty minutes down the highway, bedecked with bright red and blue banners over the entrances, like a Renaissance faire sponsored by Macy’s and Toys “R” Us. The mall, Lacey said, was brain death. A lobotomy built of fake brass and linoleum. Drones and plebes embalming themselves with fro-yo, middle-aged creepers buying “neck massagers” at the Sharper Image. Lacey believed in small stores tucked into forgotten spaces: attics, garages, a basement where we probably would have been murdered if the guy’s bong hadn’t set off his smoke detector. The chain stores lining the mall were a colonizing force, Lacey said, infecting the populace with bacteria that would breed and spread. The more people were alike, the more alike they’d want to be. Conformity was a drug, the mall its sidewalk pusher, red-eyed and greasy and promising you there was no harm in just a taste.

At the mall, the fro-yo tasted like vanilla-scented shampoo. At the mall they played instrumental versions of Madonna and girls danced along, using moves they’d gleaned from MTV. There were cookies the size of my head and pretzels with chocolate dipping sauce and cream cheese frosting. There was a carousel in the center, where children screamed in circles and bored fathers pretended to watch. Armored knights guarded the exits, fending off toddlers who clung to their shiny limbs. There was a booth selling “mead” at the food court, and beside it a table of scruffy lacrosse guys smashing pizza into gaping maws—“gross but cute,” said Nikki.

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