Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

That was the plan before, when everything had seemed clear — but now was after, silvery and strange. And when we went to the field, bumping and sloshing in the back of a pickup, we didn’t go alone.

Boys: some of them in church shirts with shiny shoes, some in flannel with jeans and dirty boots. All of them with sticky beer fingers and grubby breath, all of them boys we did not know and would never like, with faces that blurred and shifted, strangers determined to stay strange. I couldn’t keep track: Were there many or few? Had we begged them to bring us or did we beg them to let us go? I waited for Lacey to tell me it wasn’t happening, but Lacey only complained about tramping through the mud and breathing in the shit, then asked if, until it was time, she could carry the axe.

One of the boys, I saw then, had an axe.

The sky was pinking and the lowing cows breathed fire like fairy-tale beasts, and I heard my voice saying you can’t .

“You eat burgers, don’t you?” a boy said.

I heard Lacey laughing and knew I must be imagining it.

“They’re my property,” another boy said. “I decide if they live or die. I’m their god.”

I knew that wasn’t quite right, but the words to prove it were slippery. Before I could snatch them from the fog, an axe whistled through leathery hide, and blood spurted, and with one voice, the beast and I screamed.

Sticky beer, sticky blood. Laughing boys, giving the finger to an imaginary face in the sky. Laughing Lacey, asking to hold the axe. Lacey’s hands on the axe and my hands on the axe. What’s hers is mine. Someone’s voice saying don’t be a pussy , someone’s voice saying please don’t make me , someone’s knees in the dirt, someone’s fist in a steaming wound, someone’s bloody fingers inking a five-pointed star across the grass, someone’s breath, someone’s whisper, someone’s tears. Someone’s voice pretending to be Lacey, impossible words carving fire across the sky.

“We trade this blood for the blood of our enemies. Let us bring them to ruin.”

THEN IT WAS DARK, AND I was in a barn, lying in the hay, and I came back to myself just as a cold hand slid into my pants.

Just say no , they’d said in school, back when we were too small to imagine the need, so now I said it, “No,” and pulled the hand out and pushed the body away.

“C’mon,” the body said, and nuzzled its snout against my chest. Red hair, I noted, and disliked. Lacey was sandwiched between a checkered-shirt farm boy and a hay bale, stripped down to her bra and combat boots.

Boys from the field, I thought, then shoved the thought away.

I smacked the copperhead and said no again.

“She said you thought I was cute,” he whined.

I took him in, freckles and crooked smile, beady eyes and puffy cheeks, and thought: Maybe. But cute didn’t mean I wanted this animal thing, wet and clumsy, bones and meat. My first kiss had come at the wrong end of a dare, someone else’s punishment; the second came in the dark, someone else’s mistake. This was lucky number three, and when I stood up, he said, “I never get the hot one,” then jerked off in the hay.

“Lacey,” I said, and I was crying, probably. “Lacey.”

She made a noise. It’s hard to talk when your tongue is tracing messages in someone else’s mouth.

“Let ’em be.” Red had crusty nails and oozing zits, and I knew without checking that I didn’t get the hot one, either.

“Lacey, I want to go.” And maybe I was making myself cry, because crying was a thing Lacey wouldn’t resist.

“Can it wait?” Lacey wasn’t looking at me. The flannel boy bent her over the bale and kissed her knobby spine. “Just a little longer?”

He laughed. “You got the long part right.” His dirty hands were on her, fingers smudged with motor oil.

Lacey giggled. I couldn’t stop smelling blood.

Hot breath on the back of my neck and “Don’t worry, babe, I won’t let you get bored.”

“Lacey,” I said. “Lacey. Lacey. Lacey.” That did it. A prayer; a summoning. My witching powers, or the hitch in my voice, or just her name, like the lyrics to a favorite song, calling her home.

“Can’t you shut her up?” Flannel said, but Lacey slipped through his straddled legs and scooped up her clothes. She touched my cheek. “You really want to go, Dex?”

I nodded.

“Then we go.”

Flannel’s nose went piggy when he sneered. “And what the hell are we supposed to do?”

“Suck each other off, for all I care,” Lacey told them, then took my hand, and together we ran.

“Sorry,” I said, when we were safe in the car, windows down, Kurt’s raw voice streaming in our wake, the boys and the field and the church and the night shrinking to a story we would tell ourselves and laugh.

“Sorry for what?” Lacey sped up, as she did when she was bored, and I pictured her toes curling on the grimy pedal. She liked driving in bare feet.

We didn’t apologize — that was a rule. Not to each other, not for each other. We made our own choices. We did what we did with the boys in the field, what we did in the grass and the blood and the hay. We kept moving, without looking back. The day behind us was fogging up, and I tried to let it. I tried to feel no shame.

WE SLEPT OUTSIDE THAT NIGHT, and woke up damp with dew. I told myself that none of it had happened, not the glint of the axe or the intestines steaming in the moonlight, not the boys in the field or the barn. The way I felt, floating between the cushions of grass and sky, no longer high but not yet grounded, it was easy to believe.

Lacey had promised there’d be no hangover. She didn’t tell me it would be more like the opposite — that I would wake up still feeling like I could fly.

I listened to her breathe, and tried to time the rise and fall of my chest to hers. I counted the clouds, and waited for her to wake up — not bored, not afraid, simply alive to the tickle of grass and sigh of wind. It was only when she blinked herself awake, when she saw my face and said, brightly, “Good morning, Lizzie Borden,” that I thudded back to earth.

I sat up. “Lacey.” I swallowed. “Last night. .”

She took in my expression. Recalibrated. “Breathe, Dex. No freak-outs before coffee.”

“But what we did—”

“Technically, you made us leave before we did anything,” she said, and laughed. “The look on their idiot faces.”

“Not in the barn.” I didn’t know why I was still talking. If I didn’t name it, maybe I could erase it. “Before.”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to change before anyone sees us,” Lacey said, looking down at herself, and I realized the stains on her shirt were blood. The stains on mine, too.

I shook my head. Everything was shaking.

“No.” Lacey stilled my hands with hers. “No, Dex. They’d have done it whether we were there or not.”

It was some note of certainty in her voice, maybe, that cued a memory from an assembly past, then half-remembered words from the morning’s service, and the pieces jigsawed themselves. “You knew ,” I said, and of course she knew. She always knew. “You picked that town on purpose.”

“Of course I did. I was curious. Weren’t you?”

I knew the right answer: Curiosity was supposed to be our lifeblood.

“What do you think they do with cows on that farm, Dex?” she said when I didn’t give it to her. “This isn’t Charlotte’s Web .”

“That was a pig.”

“And they were going to butcher it, right?” Lacey said. “That’s how farms work. It’s not like killing someone’s cat or something.”

“ Have they killed someone’s cat?”