Girls on Fire(68)
“Cantaloupe. Pineapple. Who brings pineapple to a concert?”
“Most humiliating experience of my life,” she said, fondly.
“You loved it.” My father grinned at me over her head. “How about it, kid? We’ll do like the Partridge Family. Get a bus and everything.”
It should have made me happy, seeing them like that, like they must have been before they forgot how. I made it to the upstairs bathroom before my dinner rose up in my throat, but only barely. I let my cheek fall against the cool porcelain of the toilet rim and tried not to taste what was heaving out of me, waited in dread for one of them to come looking for me, but neither one did.
STRANGE THINGS STARTED TO HAPPEN. Stranger, I mean, than Lacey prostrating herself at cloven feet. Stranger than me going to school in a borrowed denim vest and baby blue peasant skirt with a lace hem. I missed my flannel; I missed my Docs. I missed caring about the things that mattered and not caring about anything else; I missed being afraid of what I might do instead of what might be done to me.
I missed Dex.
Dex couldn’t exist without Lacey—but somehow, impossibly, Lacey soldiered on without Dex. As if, in losing me, she’d lost nothing.
If I could, I would have willed her out of existence. Instead I haunted the hallway by her locker and drifted past her classrooms in case she’d decided not to cut. The less I saw her, the less it would hurt to see her, until it stopped hurting at all. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stay away.
It felt like we were the only two real people in the building. That the other bodies were automata, simulacra of life that existed only for our entertainment. I watched them watch Lacey. I watched Lacey. I watched her turn our joke into her religion, watched her slip out the emergency exit and into the parking lot with Jesse, Mark, and Dylan, watched her slip an occasional tongue past Jesse’s greasy lips, but I couldn’t watch her all the time, and so I wasn’t there to see the thing she did to Allie Cantor. The thing that, at least, they said she did to Allie Cantor. Plural trumped singular: Whatever they said became truth.
Allie Cantor was, famously, the first girl in our class to have sex—or at least to admit it. At thirteen, she’d briefly intersected with Jim Beech as they moved in opposite directions on the popularity ladder (she now ruled as Nikki Drummond’s right hand whenever Melanie Herman fell from favor; he wore a cape to school and smelled like bacon). Allie had math with Lacey, a class for seniors still muddling through long division—Lacey because she couldn’t be bothered, Allie because she couldn’t remember her own phone number. Her mental energy, as far as I could tell, was expended on teasing her bangs, counting her calories (on her fingers, no doubt), tonguing Jeremy Denner’s balls, and boring people on the subject of her two King Charles spaniels, which would have been prize show dogs had their tails not been crooked as her presurgical nose.
Stranger than strange: Lacey stared at Allie from across the classroom for a week, her gaze never wavering, her lips betraying some silent, unceasing chant. “Cursing her,” she answered, whenever anyone asked what she was doing. Like it should be obvious.
Even Allie Cantor claimed to find it hilarious, until the day she broke down under the weight of Lacey’s gaze, fled the room, and didn’t show up again for a week. Some mystery illness, we heard. Many fluids expelled in many unfortunate ways. When Allie did come back to school, she was ten pounds and several shades lighter. She transferred to a different math class.
“Food poisoning,” Nikki said on the phone that night. “Coincidence.”
We watched Lacey; Lacey watched her targets. Next up was Melanie Herman. Melanie spent half her time trying to knock Allie Cantor out of contention for Nikki’s affections, the other half groping Cash Warner while desperately pretending she didn’t want to date him and marry him and have his little Cash babies. Lacey stared, day in, day out. There was no reason to associate it with the way Melanie’s hair began to fall out, a few strands here and there, as if someone was plucking her in the night. Patches of skull began to show through, sickeningly pale, and she took to wearing hats. The doctors diagnosed alopecia; Melanie diagnosed Lacey.
Sarah Kaye was tolerated only because her deadbeat cousin was always willing to buy her underage friends beer. She went down in gym class, passed out cold on the soccer field, breaking her wrist in the fall. She said that just before everything went black, Lacey had given her a weird look and murmured something under her breath. Sarah, whose diet consisted of celery and Tic Tacs, got a get-out-of-gym-free pass for the rest of the semester. Lacey got a tattoo, a black, five-pointed star at the nape of her neck.
Kaitlyn Dyer, who’d absorbed the concept of “girl next door” from her mother’s amniotic fluid and devoted her life to fulfilling Seventeen’s bouncy, adorable, baseball-capped ideal, found a rash spreading up and down her left arm. This, she claimed, after Lacey spit on her in the hall, a spray of saliva patterning her arm precisely where the rash bloomed. Marissa Mackie borrowed a pen from Lacey in history class, only to wake up the next morning with a knife-shaped burn on the curve of her palm. Or so everyone believed, until her little sister revealed that Marissa had paid her twenty bucks to burn her with a curling iron and keep her mouth shut. Everyone agreed this was pathetic.
I thought it was all pathetic. Waking up to a mysterious stomachache or a tingling sensation in your foot had become a badge of honor, an anointment. No one could prove that Paulette Green was faking it when she fainted by her locker, even if she conveniently managed to land in Rob Albert’s muscled grasp. No one would suggest out loud that Missy Jordan might have deliberately made herself puke her guts all over her chem lab and partner. But by the next week, Paulette and James were an official item and Missy was ensconced at Nikki’s cafeteria table, because the enemy of mine enemy, et cetera.