Girls on Fire(76)

“Who the f*ck knows, Hannah? Why does anyone blame themselves for anything? Oh, wait—I forgot who I was talking to.” She tossed back her head and laughed out a cloud of spittle and fumes.

I punched her. It could be this way between us, today, after what we’d seen. No walls. “What?”

She choked on the words, but I was patient. I waited.

“You. You, of all people. Telling me I’m not responsible for what someone else does.”

“You’re not.”

She seized my shoulders. “Real talk, Hannah?”

“Okay.” I thought she might kiss me again. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t not want it, either.

“Kettle, meet black pot. Or, I mean, you’re like the kettle calling the pot—Wait.”

I giggled. “You’re drunk, Nikki.”

“You’re drunk.” Which was what a drunk would say, and also true.

“It’s pot calling the kettle black.”

“Yes! That! You! You.” She poked me hard, just above my left nipple. “How about you take responsibility? Lacey’s got you so f*cking brainwashed, poor little Dex, can’t do anything on her own, needs big bad Lacey to protect her. You ever ask yourself why she’d bother with you if you were that pathetic? Where’s the fun in that? What’s fun is fooling someone who’s strong into forgetting that she is. And it must have been so f*cking easy for her. You want to forget. You’re begging for it.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, because the ground was shifting and the air was blurry and my ears buzzed. It was easier to let the words plunk down, drop by drop, no stream of meaning, just disconnected sounds.

“How about Lacey didn’t make you do anything, and I never made you do anything, and you went to that f*cking party and took off your f*cking clothes and passed the f*ck out all on your own, and stop being a f*cking victim all the f*cking time because it gets. So. Fucking. Tired.”

“Oh.”

I was weaving and spinning, and the heartbeat in my head insisted: Pain, pain, pain.

“Are you going to cry? Hannah? Hannah Banana?” She shook me. “Say something. Don’t cry.” Her lower lip jutted out, and even in a pantomime of a pout, she was still pretty. “You said real talk.”

“You said real talk.”

“I did? That’s right. I did.” And then she was laughing again, and I was laughing, and we were on our backs looking up at twirling sky, and my brain untethered from my body and spiraled up toward the blue. The day fell away, even Lacey fell away, and I was here, in this moment, with myself, and the ground was wet and the air was warm and everything was exactly enough.

“I forgive you,” I told her. “I forgive everything and everyone. My heart is as big as the world.”

“But not Lacey,” she said.

“Never Lacey,” I said.

“Your turn.”

“My turn what?”

“Your turn real talk,” she said. “Harsh truths. Or truth or dare. Or just dare. Whatever the f*ck. Your turn.”

On our backs, staring at the sky, fingers Michelangelo’d toward each other. I’d missed it, that sense of floating away from myself, everything so easy.

“Okay. Dare you to say something true. Really true.”

“I always speak the truth.”

“Lie!” I giggled. “Dirty, filthy lie.”

Nikki sat up. “We can’t all be like you, Hannah, just saying whatever the hell we feel like. No act. No costume. It’s hard to be naked all the time.”

“I am never naked,” I said, mustering my dignity. “Except the shower. Always in the shower.”

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“What? Showers? How filthy are you?”

“No. I mean being you.”

It was truth-telling day. It was the sacred, truth-telling place, that’s what she’d said. “Shitty. Scary. Hard.”

“That’s what I figured.”

I sat up. Put an arm around her, which was weird, because we never touched, but not so weird, because we’d already made out. “You should try it more often. Naked. People would like you better.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Screw them.”

“Screw them,” she said, and guzzled another wine cooler—one, two, three long gulps and it was gone. I wanted to throw up again just watching her.

“You know what you’re doing, right?” I meant with the booze; I meant with me; I meant with losing Craig and trying not to lose it entirely and holding her shit together so she could be the Nikki Drummond her whole world needed her to be.

She grinned, kissed me on the forehead, a quick graze of lip and, so quick I might have imagined it, darting cat tongue. It was such a Lacey move that for just a second I lost the thread, closed my eyes and imagined the three of us together—Lacey, Nikki, and me—fingers threaded, eyes glazed, love buzzing through us, this sacred place with its dead trains and its ghosts a chaos engine to drive us all into the impossible.

“I always know what I’m doing,” Nikki said, and her voice woke me up.


I HAD TO GO HOME SOMETIME, and when I did, my father was waiting up for me. He sat on the porch, mug in his hand, hiding behind his aviators. There was no reflection, in the dark.