Girls on Fire(95)

Lacey told me everything. What she’d done—what they’d both done—to Craig Ellison. What they’d done with each other. The ghosts of them in that place. The body they’d left behind in the woods.

It was the body that should have made the difference. Not the thought of them laughing together in the grass; not the reality that they came first, that I was the thing tossed back and forth between them, incidental.

“It doesn’t matter how it started,” Lacey said. “It was only about Nikki in the beginning. Then it was us. Just us.”

Lacey was the reason Nikki had tried so hard to hurt me, but then, that wasn’t news. News was, Lacey belonging to her first.

“I did this for you,” I said, stretching my arms wide, because it wasn’t just the night, the boxcar—it was life. It was Dex.

“Dex, you have to understand—”

“No. I have to . . .” I stopped. What did I?

“I have to go outside for a minute,” I said. “I need air.”

I didn’t want air. I wanted sky, stars poking through branches, the space to run at the night, the freedom to flee, even if I wasn’t planning to, and maybe I was.

“What did I tell you?” It was Nikki, thinking she still mattered. “She can’t handle it. You think she’s going out for air? She’s going straight for the cops. You know she is.”

“No, she’s not,” Lacey said, so sure. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I repeated. They were just sounds.

“You’re f*cked and you know it,” Nikki said. “Look around you. All this Satan shit—who’s taking the fall for that? She couldn’t have set you up better if she tried. Maybe she did try, Lacey. Think of that? Let me out of here now and we’ll take care of it.”

“Don’t leave, Dex.”

“She’s going to ruin everything,” Nikki said. “Untie me, and we can deal with it together. Make her see that she should keep her mouth shut.”

“Stop.” I was backing toward the door.

“Don’t leave, Dex,” Lacey said, and she took a step toward me, and she was raising the knife.

“Look at her!” Nikki crowed. “Jesus, Hannah, look at her, she’s actually thinking about it. Killing you to shut you up. She’s psychotic, Hannah. You get it now?”

“Don’t leave,” Lacey said again, and I didn’t leave.

“It’s her or us,” Nikki said, and I didn’t know which of us she was talking to. “Only one person killed Craig, and she’s the one who’s got the most to lose here. Untie me. Untie me and I can protect you.”

“Stop talking!” Lacey slashed the air with the knife. “Stop talking. I need to think!”

The blood on Nikki’s shoulder had dried into a long brown streak, as if she’d tattooed it to remind herself of past wounds.

We were silent. Three of us, waiting.

It was like living inside one of those logic puzzles they gave us in elementary school, a menagerie of animals needing to be ferried across a river in a specific order so no one would be eaten; a sinking hot air balloon with ballast to be tossed overboard, ballast that would keep you afloat, but only if you chose the right thing to sacrifice. Those puzzles were always bloody; failure invited catastrophe, the bloody shreds of a chicken on the riverbank, broken bodies in a cornfield.

Maybe, I thought, we would stand here together until the sun rose. Light would restore sanity, brush away the wild thoughts you only have at night. But the boxcar had no windows; sunrise or not, we would stay in the dark.

Then Lacey spoke. “Nikki’s right. We’ve gone too far. If people knew . . .” She tipped the knife toward Nikki. “We can’t trust her. That’s obvious. But you, Dex?” The blade swiveled toward me. “Can I trust you?”

I made some kind of noise that didn’t sound like anything of mine, more animal than human. Animal in pain.

“I trust you to love me, Dex, but you’re a good person. You might think you have some kind of obligation to tell. Unless . . .” She nodded. “Yeah.”

I reminded myself to breathe. “Unless what?”

“Unless you had a secret, too.”

Nikki got it before I did. “No. No no no no. Hannah, no.”

“Mutually assured destruction,” Lacey said. “And if we’ve both done something terrible . . . we’ll be the same, Dex. We’ll be in it together.”

She offered it to me like a gift—like a promise.

All I had to do was take it.

“We tied her up, Dex. We tied her up and locked her in a f*cking train car and tried to drown her. You think she’s not going to tell someone? You think you’re not getting in trouble for this if we let her out of here?”

“We don’t know that.”

“She flat out told us she would.”

“I was bluffing,” Nikki said quickly. “And what I did at the party, and what happened to Craig, I’m f*cked if you tell any of it. Mutually assured destruction, right? No one will ever know about this. You have my word.”

Lacey laughed. “What’s that you said before? All promises are void.”

“Hannah, don’t,” Nikki said. “Don’t let her talk you into something you can’t take back.”