Girls on Fire(6)

It was impossible, seeing home through her eyes, like seeing your own face as a stranger would. This was my greatest fear, that Battle Creek was my mirror. That Lacey would look at one, see the other, and dismiss us both.

“I can’t believe you have a car,” I said. I didn’t even have a license. “If I had one, I’d drive away and never come back.”

“Want to?” Lacey said. Like it would be that easy to Thelma-and-Louise ourselves out of Battle Creek for good. Like I could be a different girl, my own opposite, and all it took was saying yes.

Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, all revealed to me in a single burst of glaringly obviously light. Maybe it took longer than one car ride to slough off a lifetime of Hannah Dexter—a careful study of the right bands, the slow but steady creep of delinquency, flannel and combat boots, hair dye and shrooms and the nerve to violate at least a handful of commandments—but that’s not how I remember it now. That’s not how it felt then. It felt, right there in that car, like I could choose to be Dex. Everything after was paperwork.

“We drive straight through, we could make it to Ohio by midnight,” Lacey said. “We’d be at the Rockies in a day or two.”

“We’re going west?”

“Of course we’re going west.”

West, Lacey said, was the frontier. West was the edge of the world, the place you fled in search of gold or God or freedom; it was cowboys and movie stars, surfboards and earthquakes and pitiless desert sun.

“So, you want to?”

Three times that year, like some fairy-tale temptress, Lacey asked me to leave with her, and every time I refused, imagining I was being prudent, refusing to give into the temptation of running wild. Not understanding that the wild was waiting for me in Battle Creek—the danger was in staying.

That time, I didn’t say yes or no. I only laughed, and so instead of the promised land, she drove us to a lake. Twenty miles out of town, it had a swimming beach for families, a dock for fishermen, reeds and shadows for lovers, a muddy bed of empty beer cans for the rest. That day it was all silence and space, leafless branches overhanging a gray shore, abandoned docks where ghosts of children past bounced on invisible rafts and dove into sparkling blue. Winter had come, and the lake belonged to us. I’d been there before, though not often, because my mother hated the beach and my father the water. Building mounds in the sand beside a beach full of kids living in an L.L.Bean ad, shaded by beach umbrellas, tossed from fathers’ shoulders into the water, I always felt like the defective half of a Goofus and Gallant comic: Gallant builds a castle with a moat; Gallant buries her mother in the sand; Gallant practices her dead man’s float and does handstands on the muddy lake bottom. Goofus lies on a towel with a book while her mother pencils through work files and her father opens another beer; Goofus teaches herself to tread water and wonders who would rescue her from drowning, since neither parent knows how to swim.

Lacey shut off the engine and the music, dousing us in awkward silence.

She breathed deep. “I love it here in the winter. Everything dead. It feels like being inside a poem, you know?”

I said I did.

“Do you write?” she asked. “I can tell you’re the type. The word type.”

I said I did, again, though it had only the most tenuous connection to truth. Somewhere in my room was a pile of abandoned diaries, each filled with a few stilted entries and several hundred blank pages, each a reminder of how little I had to say. I preferred other people’s stories. For Lacey, though, I could be a girl who made her own.

“See that!” She was triumphant. “You’re a total stranger, but it’s like we already know each other. You feel that, too?”

Although almost everything I’d told her since we got into the car had been a favor-currying lie, it all felt true. It did seem like she knew me, or was conjuring a new me into existence, one question at a time, and it made perfect sense for her to know that girl inside and out. Knowledge is a creator’s prerogative.

“What number am I thinking of?” I said.

She squinted her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples. “You’re not thinking of any number. You’re thinking about what happened at school.”

“Am not.”

“Bullshit. You’re thinking about it, but trying not to think about it with everything you’ve got, because if you let yourself do it, really marinate in it, you’ll start crying and screaming and polishing up the brass knuckles, and that would be messy. You hate messy.”

It wasn’t wholly appealing, being known.

“What are you afraid of, Dex? You get angry, really angry, what’s the worst that happens? You think you’ll make Nikki Drummond’s brain leak out of her ears, just by wanting it?”

“I should probably get home,” I said.

“God, look at you, all pale and squirmy. It’s not a mortal sin, getting f*cking mad. I swear.”

But anger like that, it wasn’t smart. There was no upshot to letting myself feel it.

Feeling it hurt.

“Stick a tampon up your cunt,” I said, because maybe that was the way to exorcise it. Get it out of my head and into the world.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what she said. Nikki. Today.”

Lacey whistled. “That’s f*cked.” She started to laugh then, but not at me. I was sure of that. “Little Miss Perfect Pottymouth. Fucking ridiculous.” And then, miraculously, we were both laughing.