Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“I like the new look,” Jesse said, and scuffed a toe against my boots. “It’s dark.”

“He means it makes your boobs pop,” Mark said.

“Fuck off, asshole.”

“You fuck off.”

Lacey rolled her eyes, and I tried to check out my cleavage as surreptitiously as possible. No part of me wanted to be in this alley.

“Can you help us or not?” Lacey said.

“Your friend’s mental, you know that?” Jesse told me.

“She thinks we’re going to teach her how to worship the fucking devil,” Dylan said.

Mark traced a cross against his chest and adopted a Transylvanian accent. “I vant to suck your bloooooood.”

“She doesn’t think we’re fucking vampires ,” Jesse said. “She’s not a fucking moron.”

“Thank you,” Lacey said.

“Except you are a fucking moron if you’re planning to start messing around with that shit. Not in this town. And if anyone asks, you tell them we’ve got nothing to do with that anymore.”

It had been half a year since golden boy Craig turned up in the woods, brains leaking into the dirt, and five months since Jesse and the others had discovered exactly how much Battle Creek wanted to believe in the devil. Battle Creek still watched us closely, like we were walking grenades, hands hovering recklessly close to the pin. Us as in all of us, anyone under the age of eighteen automatically under suspicion; us as in them, most of all, the Dumpster Row boys, because Craig Ellison was dead when he shouldn’t have been and that demanded a rational explanation, even if rational, according to the pamphleteers in the Woolworth’s parking lot and the Concerned Parents League, who’d cornered the market on op-eds, meant teen football star falls prey to satanic cult blood orgy .

Lacey knew all this — she had to. But I understood her now. I understood that it only made it more tempting, that anything that frightened the plebes this much merited further investigation. That anyone stupid enough to be scared deserved it. I understood that I was supposed to know better.

“I know what you say.” Lacey reached forward and tapped Jesse’s chest, at the spot where blood gushed from Ozzy Osbourne’s silkscreened face. It amazed me, how she didn’t hesitate to touch him. “And I know what I see.”

“It’s just music , get it?” Jesse sounded weary. “Slayer, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, they’re all putting on a show.”

“First off, there’s no such thing as just music ,” Lacey said. “Second, that’s not music. Biting the head off a live bat isn’t music, it’s a pathetic plea for attention.”

“What is this shit?” Dylan said. “You come to our house to talk this kind of shit?”

“Your house?” Lacey echoed, glancing at the nearest Dumpster. “Nice furniture.”

I grabbed her, tugged. “Let’s just go.”

“I got some Headbangers Ball on tape,” Jesse said. “Back at my place. You guys want to watch, I’ll show what you’re missing. But no animal sacrifice. No matter how hard you beg.”

I thought: Enough. “That’s okay, we’re not—”

“We’d love to,” Lacey said.

IN THE CAR, BUMPING ALONG toward the house I hadn’t been in since third grade, Lacey said she was pretty sure Jesse wanted to get in my pants and that I should let it happen— let it happen , that’s how she put it, like sex was a force of nature and I simply needed to get out of its way.

I thought about it, on the couch in the wood-paneled basement, everything the same as it had been years before. Mark and Dylan rolled joints, riveted to their Megadeth videos. Lacey stretched herself out in the leather armchair, closest to the speakers, and fixed on the screen, her Kurt face on, waiting for enlightenment. Jesse was next to me, his arm millimeters from mine, and much hairier than the last time I’d seen it.

“Remember Kids Incorporated ?” I said, because that’s what we’d watched when I came over after school. It had been my idea, because I didn’t have the Disney Channel at my place, but he was the one who’d taught me the choreography so we could dance along.

Jesse grunted. This, I thought, was not letting it happen .

He had a square head. Greasy lips, and those stupid fake tattoos. I could maybe, almost, imagine kissing him. If it were dark and I could, immediately after, dematerialize. I was turning seventeen that summer; such things were supposed to appeal.

There was a look my mother had given me when some neighbor was over, complaining about lesbian jokes on TV, and since then I’d been wondering what she thought but, more than that, wondering if she’d recognized something in me I couldn’t see for myself. I said as much once, to Lacey, who crossed her eyes. “Do girls turn you on?” she said, and when I said I didn’t think so, she shrugged. “Then you’re probably not gay. I hear that’s a prerequisite.”

Nothing turned me on, as far as I could tell. Lacey thought there was probably something wrong with me, and I thought she was probably right.

Now I think it wasn’t my fault, that my younger self can be excused for reading phrases like fire in my loins and stumbling over the idea of pleasurable burning. But then it shamed me, the ease with which Lacey could spider her fingers down her stomach, across her thighs, into the dark space that remained a sticky mystery to me, and instinctively know how to feel. When, under duress, I’d locked myself in the bathroom and played around with the showerhead while Lacey cheered me on from the other side of the door, I had felt only ridiculous.

“You still got my He-Man?” Jesse asked, and I smiled because it meant he remembered how he used to bring his action figures over to play with my Barbies, and also because, somewhere at the back of my closet, I did.

“You still pretending you didn’t steal my She-Ra?”

In my peripheral vision, I could see him blushing.

“Hey, she was sexy. Metal bikini, Hannah. Metal bikini. ”

On-screen, a brunette in a spiked leather corset fellated a drumstick. Now I was blushing.

“Her name is Dex,” Lacey said, without looking away from the screen.

“Sorry.” He elbowed me, gently. “ Dex. ”

“It’s okay. Whatever.”

“I kind of liked it,” he said. “Your name. But Dex is cool, too.”

Here is how I imagined things might go, if I let it happen : Jesse Gorin would inch his hand across the couch toward mine, ever so casually link our pinkies together, then turn my hand over and tap a message into my palm, in the Morse code we’d taught ourselves one rainy summer week before third grade. It would say: I remember you. It would say: We are still the people we used to be. And when he said he wanted to make some popcorn and did I want to help, I would follow him up to the kitchen, and while I was grabbing the air popper from the cabinet where it used to be, he would slip up behind me, whisper something suitably romantic in my ear, or maybe just my name, maybe just Hannah , then kiss the back of my neck, and when I turned around, I would be in his arms, hair dangling over the sink, lips perfectly parted and tongue knowing what to do. And even though we would return to the basement like nothing had happened, the taste of each other rubbed away by popcorn butter, we would bite down on the inside of our cheeks to prevent secret smiles, and silently understand that something had begun.

That was before Lacey asked Jesse to show her where the bathroom was and they disappeared upstairs together for the rest of the show. When they came back, Jesse’s ballpoint tattoos were bleary with sweat and Lacey’s shirt was on inside out, which she could only have done to prove a point.