Girls on Fire(63)

In my dreams, the man with the blue eyes and the angel skin told me I had power, and his voice was the kind that only told the truth. He asked what I wanted, and I said I wanted control, and I wanted pain for my enemies, and I wanted you.

Sometimes, as I was trying to fall asleep or trying not to, listening to the other girls dream, I remembered home and the people who’d driven me away from it. I counted the trespasses of mine enemies.

I made lists.

It’s important to remember who your enemies are. What you would do to them if you could.

What would you do if you could do anything? What would you do in the dark if you knew you would never be seen?

What would I do if I got to go home?

Awake, I made lists; in my dreams, I crossed off names. I laid waste to my enemies.

His eyes were always watching.

They approved.


THE GIRLS WORE PILLOWCASES OVER their heads when they came for me. Moonlit ghosts closing me into a silent ring, pale arms reaching for me, cold fingers tugging back sheets, grasping for purchase on slick skin, pressing me down, holding me still, nails digging into flesh, hands clamping my jaw shut, teeth slicing tongue, the tang of blood dripping down my throat, and I blinked and writhed and thought foggily that I’d dreamed them into reality, that this was my coven, come to claim me for the dark. I was lofted in their arms and floating into the night before I grasped that the ghosts were watching me through eyeholes cut from cotton. Heather will seriously f*ck them up for shredding those sheets, I thought, and that was how I understood: They no longer cared. Fear could no longer stop them.

Then my hands were tied together and my ankles lashed tight, and I was lying on my back in the mud, homemade Klan masks blotting out the stars. No one could exorcise what was inside me; that I was there, down on the ground beneath them, that they so desperately needed me frightened and weak was proof enough of that.

I made this happen, I thought.

I willed it to life with my words and my deeds, I transformed myself into a dangerous creature, and there was almost power in that, and almost comfort.

“O Lord, we beseech you, help us banish this evil,” one of them intoned. I knew her by voice: Peppy, a beefy cheerleader from Harrisburg who’d been caught blowing her gym teacher and had about as much respect for the Lord as I did. “Devil, be gone!”

“We anoint thee with holy water,” said someone who sounded suspiciously like the Skank.

With a ritualistic solemnity, she raised a plastic cup over my head and dumped warm piss all over my face.

“Amen,” the others chorused. That part had clearly been rehearsed.

The rest they made up as they went along.


ALONE AND NAKED IN THE woods. Curled up against mud and bark, twitching at every whisper and crack of branches. Vision tunneled to the next second, and the one after that. Imagining red eyes in the dark. Waiting for someone to come back. Waiting for dawn.

Flies are drawn to the smell of pee and shit and blood. Mosquitos, too, and squirrels, and rats, and when your hands are tied together, you can’t exactly wave them off. All you can do is scream.

A search party of counselors found me, eventually—it took all night and most of the next day, but then, who knows how hard they bothered to look.

They found me with shit smeared across my forehead and lips, with EVIL written across my breasts in my own dried blood, with stigmata cut into my palms and feet, sliced by the same scissors used to hack off my hair. The next morning, I signed something saying it never happened, and in return Horizons called and told the Bastard I’d turned over a new leaf, that I was shining with the light of the Lord. They sent me home.

I decided: It never happened. I would not allow it to have happened.

It was erased.

Still, everything leaves a stain.

And if there is such a thing as possession, if I really do have the devil in me, now you know who put it there.





DEX


Negative Creep



“YOU GETTING IN, OR WHAT?”

The car was the same; Lacey was different. Her hair had been cropped close to her scalp; from the uneven look of it, she’d done it herself. Her eyes were unlined, her nails flesh-colored. Lacey without makeup looked naked. She’d always been thin, but now she was skinny, almost gaunt, deep hollows carving her face into a skull. Her favorite dress, a blue-and-green-plaid baby doll, hung sack-like, and the leather jacket that had hugged her curves now gave her the look of a kid swimming in her father’s coat. Even her voice sounded alien, maybe because it was nothing like the one I’d been ignoring in my head. That Lacey was reptilian cool. Lacey in the flesh was warm-blooded, sweat beading at her collarbone, fingers twitching against the dash. “Now or never, Dex.”

I got in the car.

“You’re back,” I said.

“I’m back.”

I hugged her, because it seemed the thing to do. She leaned in at the wrong time; our skulls clunked together. “Sorry,” I said.

“Never apologize, remember?”

It had never been awkward between us.

“It’s late,” I said. “I should probably get inside. Maybe we can hang out tomorrow after school or something?”

Her voice flew to a simpering register. “Maybe we can hang out after school? Or something?” A weary sigh. “I thought I’d trained you better than that.”