Girls on Fire(77)

“I covered for you with your mother,” he said.

“My hero.”

“Hannah—” He leaned in. “Are you drunk?”

“Jealous?”

“Given the . . . circumstances, I won’t tell your mother, but—”

“But? But what? I should be better behaved?”

“If you want to talk about what you saw today . . .”

“No.” I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want him to talk, certainly.

“I can imagine what you thought. But it wasn’t that.”

“Oh, really? What is it you imagine I think? Do I think you’re f*cking her?”

“Hannah!”

“Do you think I’ve got that picture in my head? You and her, naked in some shitty motel? Or just doing it in the empty movie theater? Like some dirty old man at a porn movie. Except it’s in 3D?”

“We can talk in the morning, when you’re feeling”—he cleared his throat—“more yourself. But please know, it was nothing like that.”

“Of course it was nothing like that. You’re a fat old man,” I said, thinking, Hurt. Hurt more. “You can’t think you had a chance there.”

“Lacey needed someone to talk to. That’s all. Swear to God.”

I did believe him. Mostly. Almost entirely. He didn’t want to sleep with Lacey; he wanted to father her. He thought that made it better.

I stepped around him. “You don’t get us both.”

“You, uh . . . You won’t mention this to your mother, right, kid?”

I’d loved it, once, when he called me that. I couldn’t remember why.

“It never happened,” I said, and he must have thought I meant the day, and not everything before it and everything between us, because he looked relieved.


I DIDN’T WAIT AROUND FOR LACEY to apologize. Never apologize—I remembered that much. I avoided her at school and my father at home. Girls got rashes and dizzy spells. Battle Creek cowered from the devil. October continued apace.

Then, a week before Halloween, the thunderstorm. One last gasp of summer before the snows set in. The thunder sounded its summons, and even though I did not want to miss her, did not want to see her, did not want to want her, I gave in. The night felt unreal, the landscape lashed with wind and water. Like temporarily we’d slipped into another world, where nothing had to count.

I waited until my parents were asleep, stole the car keys, drove to our lake. How surprised she would be, I thought, when she saw that I’d learned to drive without her.

There was no question she would be there. For the storm, for me. There are irresistible forces, but there are no immoveable objects. The storm called; we always answered.

She looked inhuman, spattered with mud, slick and shiny in the headlights, some wild, watery creature of the night.

“You weren’t invited,” she said when I reached her. “You’re not welcome.”

It’s a free country, I could have said, like a little kid, but I knew I was trespassing, that everything ours was actually hers. She’d gotten custody of the wild.

I wasn’t welcome, but when I sat on the dock, she lowered herself beside me. We sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough that low voices could cross the void. Her cheek shimmered. Rain hung on her lashes. She dropped her head, hiding her eyes, exposing the soft, pale slope of her neck and shoulders. The tattoo was a black smear, ballpoint rivulets tracing dark veins down her spine.

I touched the smudge that had once been a star. “Everything about you is a lie.”

She raised her head just enough to show her smile. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Then she rag-dolled down again. “I know what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that with him.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking. Not anymore.”

She only laughed.

“You’ve got to quit with this devil stuff, Lacey.”

“What are you worried about? What are they going to do to me? Drown me in a well? Exorcise me?”

“Expel you, for one.”

“Ooh, scary.”

“And, I don’t know. What are you going to do if someone really gets hurt?”

“How could anyone getting hurt be my problem? You don’t actually think I’m doing something to them?” Lacey shook herself like a dog. The spray was colder than the rain.

“You know this town, Lacey.”

“And this is your problem how?”

She had me there.

“I’d save your worry for yourself,” Lacey said.

“I’m fine.”

“Something bad is coming.”

“Is that supposed to be a prophecy?” I said. “Or, what? A threat?”

“Dex—” She breathed. Our shoulders rose and fell together. In, out. Slow, steady. Breathe, Dex. Breathe, Lacey. “I want you safe, Dex. That’s all I want.”

Nikki would have said she was jealous. That she needed me to need her, no matter how much it hurt.

“It wasn’t about you, this thing with your dad,” Lacey said. “And the Nikki thing, that’s not about you, either.”

“Yeah, of course, it’s about whatever mysterious secret conspiracy you can’t let me in on. I got that.”