Girls on Fire(59)
“You have no f*cking idea, Hannah,” she said, in the middle of a rant about the girls who assumed themselves adored members of her royal court. “When I say shallow, I don’t mean like a sandbar. I mean like a puddle.”
“They’re shallow?” I said, with a pointed look at the issue of Seventeen in her lap. She’d just spent the last thirty-seven minutes gaming the “Who’s Your Perfect Beach Boyfriend?” quiz to ensure she scored high enough to match with “Golden God.”
She threw it at me. “Of course I’m f*cking shallow. But I know it, that’s the difference. Like I know that reading Nietzsche doesn’t make you deep.”
She pronounced his name correctly, almost pretentiously, with the same faux German accent Lacey had used.
“Everything is crap,” Nikki said. “It’s the people who don’t get it that tire me—the ones who think anything f*cking matters, whether it’s their nail polish color or the meaning of the f*cking universe.”
She was buzzed. Nikki, I understood by then, was always just a little buzzed. I’d seen enough Lifetime movies to know this was not a good thing. She talked about having power over people, how it was dull but necessary, because the only other option was letting people have power over you. Sometimes she even talked about Craig.
We did this only when we went to the train station, which we did only when she was in a very particular mood. I didn’t like it there. They hadn’t told her exactly where they’d found the body, she said, whether it was on the tracks or in the old station office or hanging half in and half out of the boxcar, as if he’d tried at the last minute to flee from himself. We might have been sitting on grass that had been flattened by his body and fed with his blood. I didn’t believe in ghosts—even as a child eager to believe in anything, I never had—but I believed in the power of place, and who was to say there wasn’t something about the old station, something so sad about the sound of the wind rattling through its broken windows that it had infected Craig, attuned him to his own pain? It was the kind of place that whispered.
Nikki said it hurt to be there, but that sometimes pain was good.
“I miss him,” she said once, dangling her legs over the tracks, picking at the dirt under her nails. “I didn’t even like him that much, and I f*cking miss him. All the time.”
I’d learned not to say I’m sorry, because it only made her mad. “He should be sorry,” she always said. “Plenty of people should be sorry. Not you.”
Once she lay down along the edge with her head in my lap, and said that maybe she was to blame. Her hair was softer than I’d imagined. I brushed her bangs off her forehead, smoothed them back. The roots were coming in, dirt brown. I wondered when her hair had gone so dark, whether it had ever really been the color of the sun, or if that was just how I’d needed to remember it.
“Don’t be a narcissist,” I said. She liked that.
“Do you worry you’ll never love anyone again?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. But then, “I didn’t, though. Love him. I thought I did, and then I knew better.”
“What happened?” I meant, what happened to make her see, but I meant more than that, too. Like everyone, I wanted to know what happened to make him walk into the woods, what made him bring the gun—and, if she didn’t have the answers, I wanted to know how could she stand it, the certainty she never would.
“Did you know that until Allie was seven years old, her mother lied and told her that carob was actually chocolate?” she said. “This poor kid, for years her mother’s shoveling this health food crap in her mouth and calling it chocolate, and she’s wondering why the whole world makes such a big deal out of something so disgusting. And then you know what happened?”
I shook my head.
“Some babysitter didn’t get the memo and brings over some ice cream and a bottle of chocolate syrup. Allie gets one taste and goes f*cking nuts. She got up in the middle of the night and drank the whole thing. I think they had to pump her stomach.”
“Moral of the story, don’t lie to your kids?”
“Who the f*ck cares what the moral of the story is? The point is, it’s not like she could go back to carob after that, could she? But her mother wasn’t about to let her have chocolate again. She was f*cked.”
Nikki wouldn’t say any more, and I was left to use my imagination: What was her chocolate? Some college guy, a friend of her brother’s visiting for the weekend? Something more illicit, perhaps—a teacher? A friend of her father’s? Someone who’d given her a taste of something she couldn’t have again and couldn’t forget. Whoever he was, he was gone: She hadn’t dated anyone seriously since Craig had died, never seemed to evince a moment of interest, though it occurred to me that was her way of punishing herself.
Maybe she knew exactly why he did it; maybe the worst of the rumors were true, that he’d done it for her, because of her. It would be better never to know, I thought, than to know something like that.
Instead, she occupied herself with imaginary boyfriends: Luke Perry, Johnny Depp, and Keanu Reeves, whose future wedding she had already imagined in great detail, right down to what she’d be wearing as his bride—not that he would give a shit, because he clearly didn’t give a shit about anything. Which, Nikki said, was the key to his appeal.