Girls on Fire(62)

I’d get it from Heather for that one, later; we all would, the punishment of the one visited on the many, the righteous burning alongside the sinners. But confessions were sacrosanct. Call it my Scheherazade moment, Dex, because I did it to save my own life. “Not literally, of course,” I continued, “but it was the f*cking that got him into the woods, and kept him there once he realized what we were all about. A boy like him should have run screaming in the other direction once he saw the altar, the poor little cat, the knife. Nice boys like that don’t mess with the devil.”

The Skank snickered. She would know.

I told them of a sacred clearing where moonlight glinted off shining bark and the scent of mossy earth mingled with sweat and breath and blood. I told them that we whispered terrible oaths, promises to each other and to a dark lord, that we invoked the forces of earth and sky and claimed dominion over the natural world, that we raised storms and whirled madly in the lightning. I told them that we’d needed more power and more blood and an ultimate sacrifice, and so I had played the serpent, slithered into a boy’s life and let him slip inside me until he lost all reason and became my plaything, until I could loop a delicate finger around his belt buckle and draw him into the woods, where the girls and I were so hungry, had waited so long, would finally wait no longer to feed.

In the hush after I’d finished speaking, they all tried very hard to laugh, and I tried not to. They pretended not to believe me. Heather aborted the confessional and we spent the rest of the day in the sun, holding buckets of water—which, I know, doesn’t exactly sound like the Spanish Inquisition, but don’t try this at home. After about an hour it feels like your arms are going to fall off. Then, in the late-summer heat, the thirst kicks in, and your head goes all foggy, black dots creeping across your vision, and still, your hands sweaty and raw, you hold tight, because you know if you let go they’ll toss you in the dark place until God knows when. We lasted long enough for Heather—who got off on torture in the name of the Lord—to giggle through la petite mort, and for three of us to pass out.

They treated me differently after that. I felt different, too. Like I really had f*cked a boy to death, and was not sorry.

The rest was easy. I’d read Satan’s bible; I knew what to do. A few stupid made-up prayers to the Dark One, some bloody pentagrams on the floor, a lot of crap about how my Lord would rain fire and darkness down upon the whole operation. One afternoon I spotted a dying squirrel writhing in the gutter outside our cabin. It was dead by the time I snuck out in the night to retrieve it, and I’ll spare your delicate ears the details. Blood is blood, even if you have to dig your hands into some matted fur and rotting innards to get at it. Once I speared the squirrel with the stick, it was almost like using a paintbrush. No one woke up, not even Heather, when I painted the sign of the Antichrist over her bed, then left the squirrel on her pillow.

The way they all looked at me then, Dex—the girls, the counselors, even Shawn. Like I was dangerous. Not troubled, just trouble. Eve and Lilith, the serpent in the grass. Down in the dark place I chanted imaginary prayers; in the depths of night I whispered in the girls’ ears: the things I would do to them, the things I knew their dark hearts had done.

I promised them we would be prisoners here forever, that Horizons was our birth and death, that as long as I lived among them, the devil would have a home. Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs. This is what The Satanic Bible teaches, and this much is true.


MAYBE IT WAS THE GAME. Maybe it was something in me that woke up when I stopped taking the pills, opening my mouth pink and wide for inspection every morning, mother’s little helper nestled safely in fleshy cheek. Who the f*ck knows, maybe it was the devil himself. It’s not the why of it that matters; it’s the what: It’s the dreams.

I dreamed of animals eating my face.

I dreamed of the woods, never lovely, only deep. Dead things rotting. I dreamed of a bird, with inky feathers and a smirking beak, talons perched on my breasts, pecking at my stomach, ripping into my intestines, digging out the thing they call a womb.

I dreamed of a man. He climbed through the bunk’s window, slid into my bed, and he held me, and I was a child, but I was not afraid.

Or I was afraid, and I screamed, and he laid his heavy hand across my mouth and his body across my body and had his way in the dark.

He wore your father’s face, or mine; he wore the Bastard’s face; he wore Kurt’s face, and this was how I liked him best. He was always the same man.

He was no man at all.

I told him what I’d done and what I wanted to do. He told me sleep is where you find the people you’ve lost, and where the dead come home to you.

In your dreams, it’s easy to be a god.

When he wore the face I liked, the Kurt face, I liked to touch the hair, blond as a child’s. His eyes were blue like the plastic stone on a gumball-machine ring. I liked to lean my cheek against his stubble. He said I would hurt less if someone else hurt, too, and that I already knew. It was safe to want that; it was safe to want anything, in a dream.

I dreamed of death.

I dreamed of maggots crawling out of Craig’s hollow eye sockets, feeding on the raw meat of his brain. I tasted metal in my mouth and felt my finger twitch. I saw three bodies in the dirt, three holes, blood pooling together as it sank into the earth.

I dreamed of things that could have been. Some nights, I dreamed what was. The weight of his body when it went limp on mine, the seconds that passed as the skin cooled, as time did not reverse itself and the rupture in his skull did not heal.