Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

We slept in the car, running the heater for as long as we dared, pressed together for warmth. For once Lacey let me pick the music—“within reason,” she said. We turned on R.E.M., because I liked the honey in the singer’s voice, and I liked that Lacey liked it, too. She curled up in the seat and I put my head on her shoulder. Right there in the parking lot, with the water watching, he sang us to sleep.

When I woke up, the sky was gray and the horizon was on fire. Lacey was asleep. I padded barefoot back to the shoreline and stood in the water, needles of ice biting my ankles. The ocean looked kinder in the light, and I wished for Lacey’s raft so we could take it together, float into the sun.

I didn’t hear her come up behind me, but I felt her squeeze my hand. I knew she would find me.

“This is everything I need,” she said. “You’re everything. Just like I’m everything you need, right?” It was an incantation; it sealed us for life.

“Everything,” I told her, a fire sale on my soul. Everything must go. I wanted her to swallow me whole.

“Only us,” Lacey said.

We would be orphans; we would be ghosts. We would disappear from the mundane world into one of our own making. We would be wild. We would be free. This was the promise we made to each other, and this, if nothing else, we would keep.

YOU SAY YOU WANT TO know. But you don’t, not really. You like me better as some mythical creature you dreamed up, a fucking forest sprite who only came to life because you closed your eyes and wanted it so bad . Maybe I’ve lied to you, Dex, but when it comes to the important things, I didn’t even have to bother because you never think to ask.

LIES I’VE TOLD YOU?

The smoking: I do it. Chimney-style, when you’re not around, a nicotine camel soaking it up to save for a rainy, Dex-filled day. Why do you think the car always smells like smoke? You think it’s the tobacco-stained ghost of the previous owner, breaking in at night just to puff at the windshield and blow smoke signals to the stars? No, either you knew or you didn’t want to.

It wasn’t a lie the day I told you I didn’t smoke, because that day, I didn’t. And it wasn’t a lie that my grandma died of lung cancer, which is why I quit that day, the way I quit a couple months before that and twice the year before that. It didn’t take. Your Lacey, smart and strong, wouldn’t have hidden a pack under the mattress for emergencies, and wouldn’t, after a cold meat loaf dinner with the Bastard, slip the pack from under the mattress, stick her head out the window, and breathe hot smoke into the winter air. It almost didn’t seem to count, that first drag after quitting — it was cold; the smoke looked like a fog of breath. It would be my last one ever.

The first drag is never the last one ever. Maybe I didn’t tell you because I liked having a secret. What’s mine is yours, that’s what we say. But it’s mine first.

I smoke, and the scars are real. The one on my wrist I showed you that first day. The thing I said I did, before I took it back. That was real, too.

Also, there was never any band. I was never some guitar-slinging rock goddess falling back from the stage and surfing a sea of blissed-out hands. You need me to be fearless. When you look at me I am fearless. But you’re not always there.

How I did it, when I did it.

With a knife. Lacey Champlain, in the bathtub, with a knife.

That was after Jersey, after the Bastard, after Battle Creek and Nikki and Craig but still before you. Nikki and Craig, that’s more a lie of omission, but you’d probably say it still counts.

I did it in the bathtub with a knife because that’s how they do it in the movies: warm bath, warm blood, everything slip-sliding away. I ran the water and took off my clothes and then I cut, but only once, and only shallowly, because what they don’t tell you in the movies is that it fucking hurts.

BEFORE LACEY, MY DEAR MOTHER would tell you, life was an all-you-can-eat buffet of bong hits and Pabst hangovers, which is white trash for the Garden of Eden. Just her and my daddy drinking and screwing and shiny-happy-peopling the seventies away, right up until she went and got knocked up. Ever since then, she’d tell you, she’s been starving to death. My mother, Battle Creek’s very own Joan of fucking Arc. One broken condom; one abortive trip to some dismal clinic where she couldn’t even stand to plant her ass on the rusty folding chairs, much less strip down and let the hairy-knuckled doctor scrape her out; one marriage proposal featuring two six-packs and no ring. One peeing, pooping, puking baby who liked screaming better than sleeping. At the wedding, I was a watermelon-sized lump under a cheap lace gown. They married in a park, and because they didn’t believe in all that bad-luck bullshit, they stood together before the ceremony, holding hands next to a Dumpster while the rent-a-minister got his crap together and the fifteen people who’d bothered to show up pretended they weren’t drunk or high, in deference to the groom’s snotty parents, who hadn’t even wanted to come. Mother and father-to-be gazed at each other, playing happy and love-struck—“even though I knew he was thinking, Holy fuck, let’s get this over with so I can get plastered ,” she says, “and you were kicking a fucking hole in my stomach so I was just trying not to puke.”

It was my favorite story when I was a kid, the story of their wedding, of how I was there without being there, of how I came to be. Because my father told it differently, back when he would sit on the edge of my bed, stroke my hair, spin me fairy tales. “Your mother never looked more beautiful,” he told me, “and you know the prettiest part?”

That was my line, and even a four-year-old could remember it: “The watermelon!”

“Damn right. The watermelon. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and rubbed her belly, just like I’m rubbing your head right now, and that frilly dress crinkled against my hand, and that’s when I said it.”

“Lacy.”

“I was talking about the dress. And how beautiful she looked, and how she felt against my hand, and how I wanted— Well, you don’t need to know about that. But she thought—”

“You were talking about me .”

“And that’s how you became you, little watermelon. That’s how you became Lacey.”

When I was ten, my mother told me she pulled my name from some shitty romance novel. “Lucky you weren’t a boy,” she said, “or it could have been Fabio.”

It was her hobby, telling lies about the past. Making up stories to help her feel better and me feel worse.

Your father left because he didn’t love us.

Your father was a useless fuckup and we’re better off without him.

Unless she was in one of her other moods: It ruined everything, a fucking baby, how could it not. No more fucking on the kitchen floor, suddenly it’s all diapers and bills and how can I blame him for fucking off. I would’ve done it myself if I’d thought of it first.

Before you, he drank, but he was no drunk.

Before you, everything was good.

Back in Jersey, when she was in an especially good mood, she would tell me how they met, both drunk off their asses at a Van Halen show. He worked security, she was a groupie, and she’d fuck anyone if it meant getting backstage.

She didn’t talk about it as much with the Bastard around, because he didn’t like the reminder that he wasn’t her first. But sometimes, when he was out bowling for the Lord or whatever, she’d get drunk and misty and want to play another round of This Is Your Life. Your daddy gave me a coat hanger for Valentine’s Day. I should have used it.