Girls on Fire(90)

“You’re not special. You’re not even relevant. You’re just some sad, clueless deer wandering onto the highway. Roadkill waiting to happen.”

“I’m serious, Nikki, stop talking. Or else.”

“Or else what, Dex? I’m f*cked either way, thanks to your batshit friend out there. And so are you. Don’t you want to know who’s f*cking you?”

Somehow, Nikki was naked and tied to a chair and she was still beating me. And what if Lacey never came back, I thought. How long, I wondered, would I wait?

I’d learned my lesson. This time, I would wait forever.

“I know her,” Nikki said, and she was crying again, as if that would make me believe her. She was crying, but her voice was hard, as if her lips didn’t know what her eyes were doing, had divorced themselves from the shine of panic and would stand their cruel ground until the end. “I know she runs hot. I know, when she puts her arms around you, it’s like curling up against a hot water bottle. It’s like she’s on fire.”

“This is pathetic, Nikki.”

“I know what it feels like to have her hands on my body, and how her tongue feels in my mouth, and how she looks when she’s getting f*cked. This face she makes, the way her eyes go all surprised and you think she’s going to scream but she just makes this kind of breathy sigh and then it’s over.”

Come back, Lacey.

Come back and make her stop.

It didn’t make sense, except for how it made all the sense—what else but this, what else could it have been, what else was there, and where did it leave me.

Come back.

“I know what makes her wet. What she tastes like, Hannah. You know all that, too? No, I don’t think you do. I can see it in your face. What you don’t have. What you want.”

If the door hadn’t creaked open. If Lacey hadn’t climbed in, reeking of smoke. If she hadn’t taken the knife from my hand. If Nikki had kept talking, her garbage piling up between us, steaming and rotting until I couldn’t take it anymore and the knife had found its way on its own to her gut or her face or her throat, anything to make it stop. If I’d been left on my own to decide, I would have stopped her. There would have been blood.

Instead there was only Lacey, back in time, holding me, whispering, why was I shaking, then shouting at Nikki, what did you do?

“What could I have done?” she said, sweetly. Then, “I’m glad you’re back. I’m ready to confess a little bit more. How about we start with what happened to Craig?”





LACEY


1991



HE BROUGHT HIS FATHER’S GUN. It was Halloween, after all. He was a Goodfella, and he wanted to look the part. That’s what he said, at least, because that way he didn’t have to say he was giving in to Nikki, who’d been whining about getting her hands on the gun ever since Craig let slip that it existed. You can see, can’t you, that it couldn’t have been my fault entirely? That Craig was the one who set Chekhov’s Law in motion? (And this is a guy who only knew Chekhov the Star Trek character.) The Bastard would tell me not to speak ill of the dead. But if, hypothetically, someone drifted into the great beyond due to his own ape-headed stupidity, and left the rest of us behind to mop up the blood and wipe away the fingerprints—not to mention zip up his pants—he couldn’t exactly resent a little postmortem scorn.

Craig showed me how to shoot. Stood behind me with his arms around mine, closed his hands over my grip, and together, we raised the gun. He showed me how to sight it, line up the mouth of the gun with the beer can we’d propped on a branch, and I could feel him getting hard as we fingered the trigger. What do you think turned him on? The fact of my body against his, the heft of the gun, the anticipation of the shot, or the power of knowing something I didn’t, pulling my strings for once, pull back, breathe, relax, steady, go?

The weight of it. The cold metal realness of it. The knowing that I could turn it on him, on either of them, pull the trigger, and, simply as that, wipe them from existence. Who wouldn’t get hard?

Nikki refused to touch the gun. She just liked watching us shoot it. She always loved to watch.

Craig was the jealous type. Pawing at us when we got too close to each other, sliding in between, his every pore oozing Look at me. Want me. Craig, with his égo?ste cologne and his crooked front tooth, textbook dim, meathead sure of himself, but somewhere deep beneath the roided-up muscle meat—somewhere in the blood or marrow—he must have sensed the truth. He was an appendage. He was Nikki’s Velveteen Rabbit, all of us waiting for him to turn real. She was done with him, bored with him, didn’t love him. If I knew it, he must have known it, too.

Sometimes he ignored her and went at me like an octopus, tentacles grasping with a need neither of us actually felt. And always, when he pawed me, he watched her, hoping it would hurt. You could feel him deflate when she cheered him on. It was supposed to be every guy’s dream, two girls, one dick, everyone rooting for a home run. He wasn’t allowed to say no. To say, Too weird, too twisted, too freaky for me. To say, I want you to myself in the backseat of a car or the empty locker room or even, on a special occasion, in some honeymoon suite rented by the hour. He wasn’t allowed to say, I don’t want adventure, I want crabs-infested upholstery and a vibrating bed. So he did as he was told. And maybe he had to drink himself sick or get stoned off his head to deal; maybe he thought there was something wrong with him; maybe we made him think there was something wrong with him, teased and flicked him when he couldn’t get it up, devised demented games and awarded ourselves points when we pushed him too far, spiked his drink now and then to give ourselves some time alone, enjoying the spectacle of King Jock brought low by his concubines. Maybe there actually was something wrong with him, ever think of that?