Girls on Fire(97)

Girls had to believe in everything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

They told themselves that this was for the girls’ own good. Sometimes they resented the responsibility; sometimes they resented the girls.

Girls today thought they could do anything. Girls burned bright, knew what they wanted, imagined they could take it, and it was glorious and it was terrifying.

They couldn’t remember ever burning so bright.

Or they did remember, and remembering made things worse.

They wanted, for their girls. They wanted for their girls more than they wanted for themselves; this was the sacrifice they’d made. They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say f*ck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true.

They wondered, sometimes, if they’d made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequence of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened to need that couldn’t be satisfied, to pain that couldn’t be felt, to rage that couldn’t be spoken. They wondered most about that girl, a good girl, who’d nonetheless carried herself away to some secret place, taken knife to pale flesh, drawn blood. They wondered about that girl, what she’d known and what she’d discovered, what story she’d been told or told herself that could only end this way, with a girl alone in the dark, with a knife, in the woods.





US


After





US


Best Friends Forever



THREE GIRLS WENT INTO THE woods; two came out.

It sounds like the start of a joke, or a riddle. But it was only, would ever after be, the rest of our life.


WE THOUGHT ABOUT DUMPING THE body in the lake. It would have been comforting, having it gone, bloated and rotting in the deep. But imagine if they’d dredged the lake or some unlucky fisherman had dragged a corpse to shore.

It had to look like a suicide. And, after all, one of us knew how that was done.

We wiped the prints off the knife. We curled her fingers around it and untied the corpse. The deepest of cuts ran from her wrist nearly to her elbow, down the road, not across the tracks. As for the shallower cuts, the bloody slashes that bounced up and down her forearms, they would be read as hesitation cuts, we hoped, aborted attempts by a girl new to pain. We burned our bloody clothes; we erased the night.

The pieces fit. It was one year after her boyfriend had given himself to the woods. The note beside her body was written in her own hand.

I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Never again. This time I mean it.

The girl was troubled; the girl was trouble. As all girls were troubled, as all girls were trouble. They wanted to believe it, and so they did.


SOMETIMES WE WAKE UP SCREAMING. Sometimes we swallow our cries and lie alone, staring at the ceiling, reminding ourselves that we were all innocent, and we were all to blame, and that included Nikki Drummond.

We never say her name.


WHILE WE WERE ARRANGING THE body and wiping fingerprints off the knife, the pope was busy pardoning Galileo. We were unimpressed. We doubted that the maggoty dust of Galileo’s four-hundred-year-old corpse much cared that the church had finally gotten a clue. But we tried to celebrate the triumph of reason, ventured into an empty field where we could see the stars, passed a bottle of wine back and forth, scanned the sky for the rings of Saturn and listened to the Indigo Girls sing his elegy. The night was hollow and cold, the grass damp. Wine no longer made us pleasantly blurry, no matter how much we drank.

Out there, in the unimaginable world beyond Battle Creek, the army of reason marched on. We knew it was true, because we saw it on TV. Up with the separation of church and state; down with supply-side economics. Up with sex and drugs and the saxophonic approximation of rock and roll; down with the death penalty and “gay cancer” and Dan “Potatoe” Quayle. Our Democrat took the White House, a hippie boomer with his finger on the button. We were all living in Satan’s America now, at least according to Pat Buchanan. We’d always liked Clinton, the man with the honeyed voice and the McDonald’s jowls who worshipped at the altar of indulgence. He was our kind, we thought once, but not anymore, because he still believed in a place called hope.


WE WENT TO THE FUNERAL, obviously. People stared. Nikki killed herself—everyone believed that—but she’d done it on Halloween, the devil’s night; she’d done it in a boxcar scribbled with Satanic symbols; she’d done in it the same season one of her fellow seniors had turned Satanist and cursed half the class. The devil’s fingerprints were all over. Only Nikki’s parents and brother didn’t stare. They sat in the front row with their heads down. Her father cried. We wanted to, but we didn’t.


MAYBE, DEEP DOWN, WE LIKED it. They were afraid of us, and there was always pleasure in that.

We saw that they liked it, too. You could hear it in the curbside sermons, the barely concealed pride of being proven right. If Battle Creek did have an underground cabal, it was a cabal of shameful joy, and these were its members: the ministers, the principal, the guy who kept writing all those editorials in the local paper, the cops, the experts brought in from Harrisburg to advise on cults, everyone who got to be on TV. We heard that after Geraldo came to town, Kaitlyn Dyer’s mother had a viewing party, with seven-layer dip, like it was the Fourth of July. We weren’t invited.