Girls on Fire(84)

Dinner was meat loaf, and it was polite. Nikki’s father didn’t ask his wife what she’d done that day. Nikki’s mother didn’t ask her daughter why she smelled, as usual, of breath mints. Nikki didn’t ask her parents why her brother wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. They discussed Halloween, whether to hand out toothbrushes again and risk getting egged, or capitulate to the inevitable and return to the mini Hershey bars of years past. Nikki’s father told a politely funny story about his client’s toupee. Nikki said she’d be home late the next day because she was giving a friend a ride to the doctor, which was just the kind of thing Nikki was prone to do. Nikki’s mother offered her daughter dessert and smiled when Nikki turned down the empty calories. She felt better already. Girls went through phases—everyone knew that. Nikki knew what was needed to survive and excel. She would be fine. That’s what Nikki’s mother told herself that night as she endured her husband’s ministrations and went to sleep, and that’s what she told herself the next day when evening darkened into night and the little ghosts and monsters stopped ringing the doorbell and still Nikki didn’t come home.

She would be fine.

A mother knows.





US


Halloween





DEX


1992



THERE HAD TO BE CONSEQUENCES. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.

And it had been so easy.

Nikki had called to apologize. Again, when I refused to answer, and again, when I didn’t show up at school. Fuck my parents, f*ck obligation and requirement and life; I stayed in bed, I kept the door closed, I waited to feel better or feel something or die.

She left me a note in an envelope on the front porch, and it said, I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Never again. This time I mean it.

Never again. At that, I did feel something, and it filled the void. It brought me back to life.

I couldn’t figure her agenda, why it was so important to make me forgive, but this time I didn’t need to understand it. I only had to use it.

I laughed; I called her. I let her apologize to me, blame it on grief, blame it on Craig, on Lacey; she’d wanted to teach me a lesson about who I was allowed to talk to and what I was allowed to ask for, that was the explanation for this party; and as for the last one, that was a mistake, ancient history, terrible but past and she was sorry, so that should be enough. She was trying to be a different person, she said, a better person, that’s what all this had been about. She’d been stupid, then. Later, she’d been angry. Now she was just sorry, and couldn’t I just believe it.

I told her she could apologize to me if she wanted, but only in person, in the place she could be trusted to tell the truth, and on the night her ghosts would howl the loudest. Even ground: We would both be haunted. I swallowed bile and told her to meet me in the woods, and when she showed up, I was waiting.

She laughed, at first, even when she saw the devil marks I’d painted on the walls of the boxcar, the pentagram I’d smeared on the floor in pig’s blood. She laughed even when I showed her the knife.


THE KNIFE.

I brought it, but I never intended to use it. It was generic Kmart crap, its blade the length of my forearm, its edge sharpened once a season, its hilt a cheap black plastic with a leathery feel. I’d used it to chop potatoes and raw chicken, enjoyed the satisfying thwack it made when swung recklessly through the air and into a soft breast or leg or straight into the meat of the cutting board. Before Lacey, the knife was the only recklessness I allowed myself. My mother hated it, but it always made my father laugh when I held the duller edge to my neck and pretended to slit my throat. The knife had always felt like a toy, and that night was no different.

I wasn’t the kind of person who would use a knife, only the kind who would need one. Without it, Nikki wouldn’t have listened. She wouldn’t have been afraid, and I needed her to be afraid. I needed her to do what I said, to be my puppet. Letting someone else have power over you, Nikki had said, that was the only truly intolerable thing. And so she’d told me exactly how to hurt her without drawing blood.

I had dinner with my parents that night, frozen chicken fingers with frozen broccoli, which I ate without comment, knowing they could tell something was wrong, sure neither would have the nerve to ask. My father assumed everything was about him, that if he pushed too hard I’d tattle to my mother. As if I cared, anymore, what he’d been doing with Lacey; as if he could be anything to Lacey but a distraction, a horsefly buzzing at a stallion. What we had together was too big for distractions—I finally understood that. He would never understand, and maybe it was a mercy that he would never realize how much he didn’t. My mother, maybe, had a better guess, but she wouldn’t push it, either. I missed her, sometimes, the long-ago mother who was still bold enough to say, Tell me where it hurts, but maybe I’d only imagined her along with the faeries who’d once lived in the hedges and the monsters snoring under my bed.

I should have hated them both, I thought, for failing. Then I should have forgiven them, for trying. But I couldn’t be bothered. They were cardboard cutouts, Peanuts parents wah-wah-wahhing in the background, and I couldn’t feel anything for them anymore. I couldn’t feel anything but hands on my body. Strangers’ fingers. Strangers’ tongues. I couldn’t stop feeling that.