Girls on Fire(73)

If I’d asked, you would have said: Go. You would have drawn me a map. Like a little kid crushing her tiny fists together and telling her mommy I hope you die. You don’t believe a little girl like that. You pat her on the head and wait for the tantrum to pass. That’s called faith.

You know I think it’s bullshit: faith, superstition, some sixth sense knowing that actually means wishing or pretending or ignoring. But you’ve got to believe in something. I believe gravity will keep me from floating into space and that people came from monkeys. I believe that sixty percent of anything the government says is a lie, and that conspiracy theorists belong in the same nuthouse as alien abductionists and the Elvis lives crowd. I believe that Democrats are criminals but Republicans are sociopaths; I believe that space is infinite and consciousness is finite; I believe that my body is my body and rapists should have their balls cut off; I believe that sex is good and the deterministic universe is a quantum illusion; I believe that global warming is increasing and the hole in the ozone is widening and nuclear proliferation is worsening and germ warfare is coming and we are all ultimately f*cked. Those are my foundations, Dex, my unquestionables. The gospel of Lacey: I believe in choice and words and genius and Kurt. I believe in you.


I DON’T BELIEVE IN OUR DARK Lord of the Underworld or the rising of the Antichrist, I don’t believe in child sacrifice or wild midnight blood rituals, and I don’t believe that I can call on the power of Satan to knock some cheerleader off her pyramid. Wearing black felt safe. Wearing it on my skin, the mark of something vicious, that felt right. All the rest of it, that was crap. But: Sarah, Allie, Paulette, Melanie . . . I wanted them to hurt, and they hurt. That’s power, Dex. You don’t need magic to make people believe what you want them to believe. Believing can hurt most of all.

“What’s with all this Satan shit?” your dad asked me once.

I’d started sneaking off to the movies a few times a week. We talked over boring movies in empty theaters, and talked more in the alley, always sharing a cigarette, like smoking half didn’t count. He told me about the first time he went to the movies and how back in the dark ages it felt like an occasion, and I told him that his beloved Woody Allen was a hack and if he really wanted art he should try Kurosawa or Antonioni. He looked at me the way you used to look at me, like I knew a secret and if I was nice I might spill. We didn’t talk about his wife; we tried not to talk about you. Mostly, we talked about music. I would stick the headphones over his ears and play him snatches of the Melvins or Mudhoney. Never Kurt, though. I saved Kurt for us.

I took a long drag on the Winston. “It’s not what people think, pentagrams and blood sacrifice and all that. As religions go, Satanism makes a lot of sense.”

“Translation: You’re desperate for attention.” He tossed the butt and ground it out with his heel. “Teenagers.”

I liked that he was so sure there could be nothing to it, that I was harmless.

We stayed on the fringes of the day, early matinees or midweek midnight showings that no one bothered to see, and I made sure never to approach him in the presence of witnesses. It didn’t even faze me, the morning I spotted Nikki slumped in the back row. She didn’t see anything; your father was shuffling paperwork and I was half napping through The Last of the Mohicans. Even if she had noticed me, there was nothing to see. So I didn’t tell him about it, and I didn’t stop. I thought we were safe. Too bad I wasn’t the witch they all thought I was, or I would have known better.

He made me mixtapes from old eight-tracks and tried to convince me that the Doors were rebels. A mixtape’s the best kind of love letter, everyone knows that, and I think maybe he loved me a little, or at least he loved who he got to be when he was with me—the old Jimmy Dexter, the one who still had all his hair. He told me all about his band: the time they got fifty bucks to play a wedding, then got so wasted on free wine he puked on the bride’s shoes; the time they came this close to a record deal but lost out because the bass guitarist got drafted; the many times he’d retreated into his parents’ garage with his guitar and tuned out all of existence except the strings, the chords, the music, the joy. I told him he should start it up again, or at least duck into the garage once in a while and turn up the volume on his life—that was for you, Dex. Because music, that’s one place where your father’s more like me than like you; it’s blood and guts for him, and living without it is what makes him pathetic. I thought if he could get it back, maybe you could get him back—the him you never even knew. That Jimmy died in childbirth, and he never even held it against you.




EVERY DAY, I WATCHED YOU pant after Nikki. Every day, I watched out for you, waiting for her to make her move. The Halloween decorations came out and forgetting the woods got harder every day and I knew Nikki would be feeling the same jitters, that she’d be feeling the bad things coming and would do anything to stave them off, especially if it meant hurting me. She knew how to hurt me.

We had made our sacred promise, Nikki and I. We had sworn our blood oath. Confessions swallowed, guilt strangled, sins buried in salted ground. We played our games and waged our proxy wars. We bloodied you in the crossfire.

But we had promised. To leave death in the woods, and to forget.

The Spanish Inquisitors, before they tortured, would lay out their instruments, one cruel blade after another, show you what was to come, and this was considered torture in itself. This was my torture: What she knew. What she might tell you.