Girls on Fire(80)

On-screen there were groans and retching sounds, and Melanie said, “There goes the boner,” and Nikki’s voice said you can get it back and don’t be a * and we can’t stop now and then there was a flashing red battery light and fade to black.

Maybe I made some kind of noise.

Maybe Nikki had always known I was there.

Of course she had known I was there.

Nikki turned. “Oh, no. Hannah. You’re here,” she said, with no inflection. “Oh dear, I guess you saw everything.”


SOMEHOW, I GOT OUT OF there. Somehow, adjusting the mirrors, shifting the gears, signaling the turns, all as Nikki had taught me to do, I got home.

Locked in my room, on the floor.

Burning with cold fire.

What I could say now, if I could speak to her then, that girl on the floor, that girl broken: This is not your fault; this is not your story. This is not the end. This will someday end.

What I know now, what I knew then: This will never stop burning.

Hannah, burning.

Hannah, burned away, hollowed out, scoured clean, Hannah the victim, Hannah the fool, Hannah the body. Hannah, stupid. Hannah, dead.

Dex, awake.





LACEY


Come As You Are



AFTER SHE HAD HER LITTLE fun making you think I was f*cking your father, Nikki came for me. It was over, obviously, whatever it was between him and me, as soon as you knew it existed. You’re lucky you ran off as fast as you did so you didn’t have to see him cry. “God, what the f*ck is wrong with me, what was I doing . . .” and on and on, literally ad nauseam, or maybe that’s not what made me throw up all over the parking lot, but at least once I did, he shut up. Then he told me to go home and never come back, and I said and did some things I’m not proud of, until he took my shoulders and pushed his arms out, rigid, all that empty space between us, and gave me a pretty little speech about how I should respect myself more and expect more from others, and stop thinking I’m only valuable for sex, and all the while there was that bulge in his pants that both of us had to pretend didn’t exist.

Everything as f*cked-up as possible, just the way Nikki liked it, so of course that’s when she slipped the note into my locker, asking me to meet her at the lake. If it had been the station, any part of the woods, I wouldn’t have gone. But of course she wouldn’t ask that of herself. The lake seemed okay to me, because even the shitty algae slop that passed for a town lake would remind me of the lake that mattered, yours and mine, clear and blue and ours. Nikki was part of the woods, twisting trails and sinkholes and the smell of rotting bark. You were water.

I showed up early, but she was there already, sitting on the dock. When she saw me, she pulled a bottle of Malibu from her bag. “Split it?”

It was too sweet, and the smell made me sick, but I took a couple shots. Judging from the blurriness around her edges, she’d gotten a head start.

We didn’t talk much until we were both safely drunk.

“Satan, huh?” she said.

“Our Dark Lord and Savior. Wanna join up?”

“What the f*ck happened to you?”

I took another swig. “Figured out I’m all alone in the world, no one loves me, and oh, yeah, a bunch of Jesus-loving psycho bitches force-fed me shit and left me in the woods to die.”

She toasted me with the Malibu. “Once a drama queen, always a drama queen.”

“Queen of the underworld now, haven’t you heard?”

That’s when she started laughing. “You’re not actually f*cking Hannah’s dad, are you? I’d kill myself before letting someone that old stick it in me.”

I went cold. “Don’t say her name.”

“You really hate me, don’t you?” she said.

“Even more than you hate me.”

“Not possible.”

“Try me.”

Then her hand was on my thigh, and she was crawling up me like I was a tree, Nikki Drummond, drunk and hungry, straddling me, grinding me, tonguing my lips and tugging at my hair, saying something about how she hated it so short, then cutting off the thought by taking my fingers in her mouth and sucking, hard. Her breasts felt bigger than I remembered them, looser somehow, and there was a trickle of drool at her mouth.

“Get the f*ck off.” I pushed her hard enough to hurt and hoped that it did.

“Come on, you know you want to.”

You know how they say desperation isn’t sexy? Bullshit. An ugly drunk without a shirt, wheezing rum and aiming herself at me like a torpedo of need? Pushing her away felt like kicking a puppy, and I got off on that, too.

“Maybe I’m f*cking in love with you,” she said, doing that half-laugh, half-cry thing that middle-aged women do in bad movies. “Did you think of that?”

“Frankly? No.”

She sat back. “Why the f*ck did you even show up, then?”

“I want to know what you want.”

“Was I not clear?”

“What you want to stay away from her.” I would have given it to her, Dex. Anything.

“You’re f*cking kidding me. You want me to believe you came here to talk about Hannah?”

“Her name is Dex.”

“Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.” She laughed again. She’d amped up her acting skills since the last time we talked. She was nearly approximating human. “I get it, what you were doing. But we don’t need her anymore.”