Girls on Fire(87)

I knew, when we let her out, that we would be safe. She would keep quiet—not to save herself the embarrassment but to save herself the pity. If I could bend her to my will, force her to speak the words I put in her mouth—if she was powerless, and admitted it—then a part of her would always be powerless. Nikki would never tell anyone what happened here, because if she did, it would mean a part of her never left.

It was my idea first, but Lacey was the one who remembered the Barbie tape recorder, and the stack of cassette tapes, and understood what they could mean. What we did next, we did together.

“You’re going to tell us everything,” Lacey said when we’d trekked back to the car and retrieved the equipment, once Nikki had come down from being left once again to scream and weep alone in the dark. “Everything terrible you’ve done, from start to finish. And maybe we’ll play it for the world to hear, or maybe we’ll just keep it for ourselves, for insurance. You’ll never know.”

“Think of it as a confessional,” I said. “Good practice for your audition tape.”

“Why would I ever do that?” It was almost impressive, this skinny, stripped-down girl pretending at defiance. “Because of your stupid knife? What are you going to do, murder me and bury me in the woods?”

“I’m surprised you think that’s beyond me,” Lacey said, but when Nikki held her gaze, Lacey was the one to look away first.

“I’m not doing it,” Nikki said. “You can keep me here as long as you want, but you can’t make me do anything. You can’t.”

“I don’t know about that.” Lacey toed the bucket of water, then bumped shoulders with me. I’d thought we would never do that again, never be so perfectly in sync that we could speak with our bodies instead of our words. “What is it they say about me at school, Dex? Don’t they think I’m some kind of witch?”

“I’ve heard that,” I said.

“Me, I think Nikki’s the witch.”

“Understandable.”

“I know a lot about witches these days,” Lacey said. “You know how they used to tell if someone was a witch? Back in the bad old days?”

“I do,” I said, and I remember feeling clever, and giddy, and not at all afraid. These were moments without consequence; this was a night that would never end.

“How about it, witch?” Lacey lifted the bucket, nasty water sloshing over her hands. “Let’s see if you float.”





LACEY


1991



IT WAS THE DAY I woke up and smelled winter. No frost, no snow, nothing so dramatic as all that, but you could feel the cold crouching in the wings. It had been summer all week, and according to the overtanned idiot on TV, winter was blowing across the Midwest, the sparkly cardboard snowflake inching toward us one corn state at a time.

Winter was our ticking clock. What were we supposed to do, fumble at zippers with wool mittens and Velcro gloves, kiss with frozen tongues and watch our excretions turn to ice? As a novelty act, maybe, but unless you’re Dr. Zhivago, frostbite is a turnoff and f*cking outside, much less lying on the ground in two feet of snow, high on pot and pheromones and trying to connect with the sublime, is a testicle-shrinking failure waiting to happen. We didn’t have to discuss it to understand the obvious: When the cold came, the thing between us would sheathe its fangs, crawl under a rock, and hibernate the winter away.

We used the heat while we had it, and that day, Halloween, Nikki and I skipped school and met in the woods, dressed in costume as each other, to f*ck with Craig’s mind. She always loved role-play the best, and she made me promise that when Craig showed up after practice—always after practice, because however much he loved her and us and the fleshly pleasures that came with it, he loved the team more—we would keep to our roles religiously, though of course by the time he did, we were too drunk to bother. Maybe if we had, we would have played an entirely different game, and Craig would still be alive, or one of us would be dead.

That day, we’d finished with each other. We were waiting for Craig and making snow angels in the mud, and Nikki was amusing me by itemizing the defects of our peers, one by one, in alphabetical order, just to show she could. Theresa Abbot had a harelip and talked like a cartoon character, and she’d once tattled on Nikki, unforgivably, for smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Scotty Bly would have been cute except for the way he chewed with his mouth open and insisted on letting a worm of a mustache crawl across his upper lip, both of which rendered him unf*ckable. I was bored by the time we got to C, but also pleased, because nothing got her hot like talking about people she hated. Maybe you already know that.

We went through Shayna Christopher and Alexandra Caldwell, and then, Dex, we got to you.

“You want to know what’s wrong with Hannah Dexter?” Nikki asked.

“Not particularly.”

Not because I cared about you, Dex, but because I didn’t care at all.

“She’s such a f*cking victim,” Nikki said. “It’s like she’s asking you to screw with her.”

“Funny, she’s never asked me.”

“You know what I mean. Where’s the fun in it? It’s like playing kickball with a dead skunk.”

“It makes you smell?”

“Too easy and it makes you smell. Like, yeah, you feel bad for the skunk, but why’d it run into the road in the first place? Like it wanted to get run over, you know? Like that would be easier than just finding a way across and figuring out what the hell to do next.”