Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“Do you want the answer to that?”

Silence between us, then, except for the bugs and the birds and the wind.

“You were having fun,” she said, and it felt like an accusation. “You were laughing. You just don’t remember.”

“No. No. ”

“You do know it was all a bad joke, right?” she said. “Just a bunch of asshole hicks trying to freak out their parents. No one was actually trying to summon the devil.”

“Of course I know that.” What I didn’t know, at least not with the same degree of certainty, was whether it mattered. The sacrifice was a joke, maybe, but wasn’t blood still blood, dead still dead?

“Anyway, it’s not some crime against nature to watch stupid people do stupid shit,” Lacey said.

“But it was more than watching. . wasn’t it?”

“What do you think?” Lacey laughed. “You think you helped put poor little Bessie out of her misery? You? ”

I was sitting cross-legged, and Lacey shifted until she faced me in exactly the same pose. The Mirror Game, I’d called it when I was a kid, springing it on my parents without warning. You scratch your nose; I scratch mine. My mother loathed it. My father, who’d learned in some long-ago acting class how to cry on command, always won. If Lacey and I played, I thought, the game could go on forever.

She cupped my hands again. “How much do you remember, Dex? Seriously.”

I shrugged. “Enough?”

“I remember how it was my first time. Everything feels kind of like a dream, right? You’re not sure what’s real, what’s not?”

I nodded, slowly. “Not for you?” I said. “Everything’s clear for you?”

“Crystal. So I can tell you everything that happened, in graphic detail, or. .”

“Or.”

“Or you trust me that everything is fine. That all the good stuff happened and all the bad stuff was a dream. You let me remember, and you let yourself forget. You trust me, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

“Then?”

“Then okay. Yes. Everything is fine.”

She smiled — I smiled. That was how the game worked.

“You’re not sorry, are you?” Lacey asked, and I knew, because I always knew, what she really meant. Was I sorry not just about the things that happened in the field and the things that didn’t happen in the barn, and not just about the church and the mushrooms, but sorry for everything that led up to it, sorry about Lacey and Dex, sorry to be here with her in this field, damp and shaky and stained with blood, sorry to be with her anywhere?

I knew what she needed to hear. “Never be sorry, remember?”

Never be sorry, never be frightened, never be careful — those were the rules of Lacey. Play by the rules, win the game: Never be alone.

WE MUST HAVE GONE TO class; we must have scribbled down an English paper or two, made small talk with parents and teachers, emptied dishwashers and mowed lawns, nuked frozen pizza for lonely TV dinners, snooze-buttoned our way through six A.M. alarms, waded through all the mundane detritus of high school life, but that’s not what I remember. Somewhere out there, line dancing swept the nation, LA exploded over Rodney King, Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, George Bush threw up on Japan, a Long Island nutcase shot her boyfriend’s wife in the face, a new Europe chewed its way out of the corpse of the USSR, and history officially met its end. None of it penetrated. We were our own world. I remember: riding down the highway in Lacey’s Buick, trying to shove her lone Pearl Jam tape into the player, rain pelting my face on stormy nights because the passenger window was stuck halfway down, the two of us one with the car and with the road, Lacey always at the wheel despite daily promises that she would teach me how to drive. We were at our best when we were in motion.

Once, we drove all night, Lacey slugging back Diet Cokes while I searched for exit signs and inscribed our names on the dewy window. When we hit the George Washington Bridge, Lacey stopped the car on the Jersey side, and we watched the city groan into morning. Then we turned around and drove home. Because it wasn’t about going to New York City, Lacey said. It was about proving we could . Actually going to New York, that was another thing for plebes. Too obvious, Lacey said. When we escaped, it would be to Seattle. We would get an apartment near the Crocodile café, where we’d waitress so we could score free booze and sleep with the bands. We would have a beanbag chair and a cat named Ginsberg. We would sell the car to pay the first month’s rent, then buy a bottle of wine with whatever was left over and toast to the fact that there was no turning back.

I fell asleep nights thinking about it, imagining highways ribboning across flat brown land, afraid we wouldn’t go, afraid she’d go without me. Some mornings I woke with the sun, convinced I’d dreamed her into my life, and called her house just to make sure she was still there.

WE DIDN’T TRY MUSHROOMS AGAIN; we never talked about the night in the field. Not directly, at least, and that made it easier for memory to recede into shared dream. But after that night, Lacey had two new fixations: finding out more about what she called the devil-worship thing and getting me laid. Both made my skin creep, but when she grabbed me outside the cafeteria to tell me she had two birds and one stone waiting for us in the parking lot, I did as I was told.

“Three birds, if you want to get technical,” she said. “Though one of them doesn’t believe in showers, so he’s out.”

Three birds, scuzzy and greased, one with a pube-stache, one with a shaved head, one with “prison tats” he’d meticulously inked up and down his arm: Jesse, Mark, and Dylan. Boys I’d known since they were still boys enough to play with dolls; boys who’d grown into almost-men who wanted to be dangerous and persuaded the wrong people they were.

I didn’t think they deserved it, what had been done to them in the fall and the way people acted after — as if the three of them had dragged Craig into the woods and whispered satanic prayers to him till he cracked, then beat themselves up and lofted themselves into that tree as penance. As if whatever happened to them was just, even merciful. But I also didn’t want to be out there in the alley with them alone.

Not alone, I reminded myself. With Lacey.

Never alone.

“You want?” Jesse offered Lacey a hit off his dwindling blunt. She waved him away. He didn’t ask me.

“You guys know Dex, right?”

Mark snorted. “Yeah. You still crying over that dead Barbie, Dex ?”

Jesse whacked the back of his head. “You still playing with dolls, Mark ?”

I’d known the three of them since nursery school, since the days when Mark lit dolls on fire, Dylan collected Garbage Pail Kids, and Jesse took a shit beneath the elementary school seesaw, just to prove he could. Jesse and I had ridden bikes and woven grass jewelry for our mothers on May Day. Then he’d hooked up with Mark and Dylan, and while individually they’d seemed comprehensible and unintimidating and like the type of boy you might one day grow up to kiss, together they went feral, roaming the streets, baring teeth and brandishing sticks. They bashed bats into mailboxes and left dog shit on neighbors’ doorsteps and eventually graduated from skateboards to death metal. Before Craig died, they were so proud of their rotting-skull T-shirts and black trench coats, their car stereos blasting lyrics about bleeding eyes and demon hearts. I thought now about all those dolls and trading cards and that sorry lemonade stand, Jesse and me selling twenty-five-cent cups of water stained with yellow dye, and it felt stupid to be wary of them — but then I thought of bloody symbols on church doors and bloody axes in dark fields, and it felt equally stupid not to.