Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I know what I know.

Lacey , he said, when he put his hand on my unformed head, only that thin layer of lace and womb between us, and he said it because even then he thought I was beautiful.

I’d stay if I could , he whispered, that last night. I’ll come back for you.

He did come back for me, four times that year, twice the next one, always when she was at work or asleep, and I never told her, not once. Sometimes he showed up at night and threw pebbles at my window, like we were fucking Romeo and Juliet, and he would climb up the trellis and crawl into my bedroom with a stuffed animal in his mouth, some limp bunny or three-legged cat that he’d found and saved just for me, because he knew I liked them wounded. He’d put his finger to his lips, and I’d zip mine shut, and we would play in the moonlight, quiet as mice, pretending that maybe this one time, the sun would never rise.

When he stopped coming, I knew he had a good reason. I liked to imagine him on a ship somewhere, the merchant marines or maybe cabin boy on some private yacht, my father swinging through the riggings, shouting Ahoy there! and Land ho! , making his fortune so he could come back for real and take me away.

Except how would he know to find me in Battle Creek? We were doing fine in Jersey, just the two of us, me doing whatever I wanted and my mother letting me. I gave her the same courtesy, pretending to buy her flexible definition of “waitressing” and ignoring the parade of sad, lonely men, the local car dealers and the drunk tourists. Then along came the Bastard, something wicked this way in a velour suit. The Bastard James Troy, and how ironic is it that your real daddy and my fake one have the same name, like how a double-wide trailer and Buckingham Palace are both called a home.

My James acted like he was still in the military, even though he’d never actually been in the military, unless you counted getting dishonorably discharged from the reserves after less than six months. Who needed a Purple Heart when you could be a soldier in the army of God, fighting the good fight by phone-banking for the Christian Coalition? The man’s most valuable possession was a framed, signed photo of George Bush. Reagan, even Nixon, maybe I could have respected — but what kind of middle management weenie has a hard-on for George H. W. Bush?

My James , she called him from the beginning: My James knows how it is, unlike that bitch sponsor always up her ass about the Xanax, as if she didn’t need something to take the edge off without the beer. My James will drive; my James will make dinner; my James says abortion’s a sin— and anyway he’s always wanted to be a daddy and you’ve always wanted to be a big sister and look at the pretty ring.

People will assume it’s mine, I told her. That you’re mothering your own grandson for propriety’s sake, and she said people knew her better than to believe she did anything for propriety’s sake.

She thought she was better with him than without him, and maybe it was true, but just because dog food tastes better than dog shit doesn’t mean you want it for dinner. When dog food gets a transfer to corporate headquarters, conveniently located twenty miles past bumblefuck, it doesn’t mean you hitch up the U-Haul and speed into the sunset, listening to Barry Manilow and stopping to pee every twenty minutes because little-bro-to-be is kneeing your bladder.

No one should move to Battle Creek in the summer. I mean, obviously, no one should move to Battle Creek at all, but some of us had no choice in the matter, and should at least have been excused from arriving in summer, piling out of the shit-paneled van to get a good look at the shit-paneled house and almost spontaneously combusting before we made it halfway up the driveway.

In the summer, Battle Creek smelled like fried dog shit. No one who lived there seemed to notice, maybe because it’s all you’d ever known. Like the so-called lake covered in so much algae you wouldn’t know there was water under there unless you stepped in it, which not even one of the native morons would do, because God knew what was living in the toxic sludge underneath. Or the public pool with its sick green water, the color of chlorine mixed with pee. But it was between the pool, or the lake, or the 7-Eleven that reeked of those disgusting meat pockets roasting in the heater case — because in the summer, in Battle Creek, there was literally nothing else to do. Unless I wanted to lock myself in the house for two months, and when it came to a house containing the Bastard and his not-technically-a-bastard fetus, agoraphobia was not an option.

I took to walking. It’s not a walking town, not in any weather and especially not in summer, but it was as good a way as any to mark time. If you’re embedded in enemy territory, it’s safest to know the lay of the land. Not that there was much to know: main street literally called fucking Main Street, the shithole neighborhood to its south and slightly less shithole neighborhood to its north, too many secondhand shops and even more boarded-up storefronts, prison-shaped school and that gas station with the giant hot dog on top. All that walking and I didn’t even notice until I looked at a map that the town is shaped like a gun, with the woods curving out like a trigger.

It was a wet-blanket-heat day when I came across Nikki in the woods, air tailpipe hot, both of us slouching toward junior year, both of our tops basically see-through, nipples poking at sweat-stained cotton, though she was in no condition to notice. Come September, we’d be in the same class, which made me her subject and her my queen, but I didn’t know it and wouldn’t have cared if I did, and maybe it was that unfathomable glimpse of obscurity that got her attention.

Nikki Drummond, drunk at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, Battle Creek princess in disgrace. She’d propped herself up against a tree in the swamp, bottle of vodka in her lap, cigarette in her mouth, and only that overdried blond hair— literally brushed a hundred strokes a night, it turns out — clued me in that this was probably, in the sober light of fall, not my kind of people. But fall was two months away, and I was bored, so when Nikki offered me her bottle I sat down beside her and took a slug.

Would it surprise you to know that I walked in the woods all the time back then? There’s another pretty lie for you, that I was some mythical creature of the water, constitutionally afraid of trees. The woods weren’t just my kind of place, with their shadows and the music of whispers on the breeze; they were my place, this green labyrinth I could escape into and spin a little fantasy of my own. The closest path through the trees picked up less than a mile from the house, but inside the green it was dense and silent and felt about a million miles away from the Bastard and his Battle Creek. I could be the last person on earth, everyone and everything scorched away except for me and the trees, the worms and the deer. I liked when the leaves got so thick you couldn’t see the sky.

The first day I came across the old train station, I took a breath and wondered whether I’d willed it into existence. Because here was the end of civilization, forgotten station and rusty tracks and a behemoth of a boxcar sleeping in the weeds. You probably would have wasted your time trying to imagine yourself into the past, some booming, bustling era of ladies with parasols and men with briefcases and fedoras and important places to go, but I liked it the way it was, sprayed with fading graffiti, full of broken glass and jagged edges, lost in time. It was the first place I found that felt dangerous — the rotting heart of Battle Creek. This was apocalypse country, and it felt like home.