Girls on Fire(79)

“Why aren’t you saying anything, Hannah? Tell me you understand I’m doing you a favor.”

“Sure. Thank you.”

“You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird.”

“Good. Don’t. Now you tell me something. What tells of Hannah Dexter’s excellent adventure?” She affected a Keanu drawl. “Did you have a most awesome week? Or totally bogus?”

“I talked to Lacey.”

There was a hissing on the line. It was the bad connection, but it was too easy to imagine Nikki herself, reverting to snake. She breathed out the word. “Fuck.”

“It was fine.”

“No wonder you’re being so f*cking weird. Please tell me you’re not feeling sorry for her.”

“She said something about you and her,” I said, which was almost true. “And Craig.”

The snake uncoiled, struck.

“You talked to Lacey about Craig? You talked to Lacey about Craig?” She was yelling, and Nikki never yelled. “About what I’ve told you? Things I’ve never told anyone? How could you even think that was okay?”

“I didn’t! I wouldn’t!”

I protested; I swore I would never break her confidence, that Lacey had asked nothing and told even less, that it’s not like I had anything real to tell. I couldn’t ask her, not then, why she would blame Lacey for anything; I could only say I was sorry. She hung up on me.

On TV, this was the moment to throw the phone across the room, and so I did and felt like a fool.

So did she, she said, when she called back an hour later. “That was unfair of me. I’m a little sensitive about . . . you know.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I know you would never tell Lacey anything. Right?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“And I’ve been thinking about this sleepover party crap. You should come—I mean, if you really want to. It’s going to be totally lame, and you’re going to hate me for inviting you, but at least it’ll be more fun for me.”

“You actually mean it?”

“I don’t do things I don’t mean, Hannah. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”




I GOT THERE AT NINE, AS I’d been told, but I was the last to arrive. I’d cobbled together an outfit from the Nikki-approved corner of my closet, sleeveless velour shirt in forest green, black cardigan with flared sleeves, a gray choker. I wore vanilla-scented perfume and Gorilla Grape–flavored Lip Smackers. We would all taste the same in the dark.

Mrs. Drummond fluttered a hand toward the basement. “The girls are downstairs.”

The girls: lazy cats sprawled across couches and sleeping bags, all smiles and claws, same as they were at school, same as they’d been since kindergarten, same as I remembered from the party I couldn’t remember.

The girls: Paulette Green, who no one much liked but everyone tolerated because they didn’t want to seem racist, who never spoke to the only other black girl in our grade—Hollywood black, with braids and a beeper—because her parents had forbid it. Sarah Kaye, whose father had multiple sclerosis and never left the house. Kaitlyn Dyer, the sweetheart everyone loved, even me, because she was short enough to be tossed around, short and bouncy and seemingly harmless, who was such a klepto she’d tried to steal the prom fund, and who’d gotten away with super-secret double probation because when the school tried to expel her, her parents had threatened to sue. Melanie Herman, who was sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. Allie Cantor, who had herpes, and would forever.

I knew these things about them because Nikki had told me, and because she told me, I trusted her. Forgetting, eventually, that they weren’t her secrets. That the girls had trusted her, too.

The girls were laughing at something on TV, and the something was me.

Me, unconscious and drooling in the dark. Shadows, then faces, grainy on the screen, grainy in a way I recognized. That was Nikki’s father’s video camera, the one she loved so much. That was Melanie and Andy and Micah. That was a voice, in the dark, shrieking “Weekend at Bernie’s!” as brawny arms hoisted me up, danced me around, floppy and bare.

“Slut,” someone said, and a hand reached into the frame, carved a Sharpie across my stomach, S-L-U-T, then made a smiley face out of a nipple.

Girls’ laughter on the TV; girls’ laughter in the basement. Freeze-frame, rewind, fast-forward, play.

“She wants it,” a voice said off camera, and on-screen, Andy Smith lowered himself over the rag doll, ground against her, hip to hip, chest to chest, tongue slurped up her cheek, then down her sternum, then ringing the smiley face, round and round it goes.

“Take off her panties,” a voice said.

“Slip in a finger,” a voice said. “Make her wet.”

“See? She wants it,” a voice said. “She’s dripping with it.”

“Make her suck it,” a voice said. “She wants to taste it.”

Different hands, different fingers and tongues. But always the same voice. Always obeyed. And the Dex doll did whatever they made it do.

Nikki loved to direct.

“Here comes the gross part!” sweetheart Kaitlyn giggled in the basement as vomit trickled out of the girl on-screen, and that was how I knew they’d watched it before, knew it by heart.