Girls on Fire(60)

“Not my type,” I admitted, and she shrugged. But imaginary worked for me, too. I’d scrubbed away those words on my skin, but it felt like the ink was in my blood. Never again: I would be a fortress now, impermeable. I contented myself with the Dead Poets boys, sweet and lyrical and easily cowed, and River Phoenix, the kind of boy who would light candles and read you poetry, who would kiss you softly on the lips and then let the night to fade to black, who was never angry, only sad, who cared about the earth and refused to eat animals and eschewed drugs and had such lonely eyes.

Then Nikki made me watch My Own Private Idaho, and there was my River alongside her Keanu, the two of them sky-high on heroin and f*cking for cash, and so much for that.

“I thought you’d like it,” she said, halfheartedly, not even trying to disguise the fact that she’d done it on purpose, that she knew it would screw with my head and River-besotted heart, and because I knew, and she knew I knew, somehow that made it all right. I could even laugh.

It wasn’t the same, the two of us. There were no midnight dances in the rain, none of those heart-thumping moments when the tide of wildness washed in and I loosed my grip enough to be swept away. But it gave me an excuse to leave the house, and a heated pool.

“Probably I shouldn’t,” Nikki said one afternoon as we paddled our rafts back and forth across the water. I was wearing a new bikini, courtesy of my mother, who was so happy with the new state of Drummond-related affairs—and her own burgeoning acquaintanceship with Nikki’s mother—that she’d been ready to buy out the store. Blood money, I thought, as she passed the credit card to the cashier. My very own thirty pieces of silver, complete with pink stitching and push-up cups. Too bad: I liked how the suit glowed against my tan, and the cloud of chlorine that clung to me through the day, my hair as crispy as my skin.

“Shouldn’t what?”

Nikki liked to start conversations in the middle, after she’d already hashed them out in her mind, which made it difficult to know whether I’d zoned out or she’d only just started speaking.

“Cut my bangs like that girl on The Real World. You know?”

“Not really.”

“You know. Becky.”

“I don’t have cable.”

She bolted upright. “Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously.”

We spent the rest of that day in her air-conditioned basement watching Real World tapes on her big-screen TV. Nikki had every episode, carefully labeled, and we watched them all, straight through for six hours, until I felt like I, too, was living in a house, having my life taped, no longer being polite but starting to get real. The next day we started again, and the rest of August unspooled to the sounds of Julie’s cackle, Kevin’s rants, Eric’s Jersey-boy bravado, Heather B.’s hip-hop rhyme.

“Imagine if we all stopped pretending there was such a thing as getting real,” Nikki said. “Imagine the f*cking relief.”

Real World housemates were required to lock themselves in a closet and spill their secrets into a camera and—miraculously, as if they assumed no one would ever watch—they did.

“Let’s do it,” Nikki said, and I could see it sparking in her, the flare of an idea that demanded action. It was the one thing she and Lacey had in common, and the thing I most envied about them both.

“I’m not telling you my deepest secrets,” I said. “I’m certainly not recording them.”

“No, we won’t be us, we’ll be them,” she said. We would put on a show, play their parts. It would be practice for her future audition tape; it would be fun.

Her father had a video camera and a tripod. Nikki played Becky with her pointy cardboard boobs and then Eric, with his Guido swagger. I took on Andre and his flannel angst, lounging on the leather couch, gazing at the ceiling, all woe is me and why, God, why. “The world is pain,” I said, in my druggy Andre voice, while Nikki manned the camera and cheered me on, “but, like, the music, yeah, when it, like, pours out of me, man, that’s just, you know, that’s like my soul on the wind.”

Nikki laughed. “I thought you were doing Andre, not Lacey.”

Even then, even when it hurt, she was right: It was fun.




I LEARNED TO PRETEND AWAY ALMOST everything, but I couldn’t will September out of existence. Summer ended without my permission. I went back to school—I put on a show.

Nikki and I didn’t associate with each other publicly; this was an unspoken mutual agreement. But she’d taught me how to perform, and I performed for her. Summer was long, but not long enough for people to forget what had happened. They all looked at me too hard, and I knew what they saw: spotty nipples, tiny sprouts of hair, secret stretches of skin. Boys, especially, watched me like they knew my function and were waiting for me to figure it out. I knew how to act like I didn’t care, and if I could be all surface, no depth, then the act would be all that mattered. I would not drown.

It was almost a relief, no longer having to try to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide. To give up on Dex; to be dull, to live a small, safe life.

I went to school. I went home. I slurped spaghetti with my family and tuned out my mother. Funny how she’d been so concerned with my first transformation but was so content with the second; there were no more speeches advising me against losing myself. Maybe some long-dormant maternal instinct kicked in, and she understood that I’d already lost too much to risk giving more away. I learned how not to look at my father. He kept offering to treat me to a movie; I took him up on it only once, for a midnight showing of Honeymoon in Vegas that had been sold out for weeks and which my mother had given me special dispensation to see, under my father’s guidance of course. Not since Lacey had I been out so late, and I’d missed the quiet of the sleeping town and its stars. My father bought popcorn and settled in beside me, and we sat in silence until the Elvises flew and the credits rolled.