Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“So, you’re welcome,” Lacey told me in the car on the way home.

“For what?”

She seemed surprised I had to ask. “Didn’t you notice the way that skeezer was eyeing you? If I hadn’t gotten it out of his system, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said. “I thought I was supposed to let it happen .”

“With him? God, Dex, learn to recognize a joke.” She pulled up in front of my house. “You deserve so much better.”

I opened the car door, but she grabbed my wrist before I could get out.

“So?” she prompted.

“So?”

“Magic words, please. A little polite recognition for my sacrifice.”

“Right. Thank you.”

LACEY DECIDED TO FIND ME a more satisfactory dick. That’s how she put it when she presented me with a flimsy fake ID and a black lace corset. “Amanda Potter”—born Long Island, 1969, Sagittarius, details I repeated to myself over and over again as we stood in line waiting for the bouncer—“is getting some tonight,” Lacey told me, but didn’t tell me how she’d found this club, a grim concrete block beside the highway, or why it promised to be my sexual salvation. “No argument allowed.”

Her corset was purple, and seemed, at least from where I stood, to offer slightly more room to breathe. She wore a silver pentagram around her neck, another thrift store acquisition to go with the Satanic Bible she’d finally dug up in the basement of some used bookstore along the highway. She loved the way people looked at her when she wore it, the same way I looked at her when she showed me the book for the first time. It didn’t look like any Bible I’d ever seen. It was black, with a red five-pointed star etched onto the cover, and even the author’s name gave me the creeps: Anton Szandor LaVey . It sounded deliberately fake, like a name the devil himself would choose. Lacey had already highlighted several passages.

Man’s carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.

There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes.

Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs.

“You really don’t want to let anyone see that you have this,” I’d told her, when she showed off her purchases, then pressed the pentagram necklace back into her hand. “And you really don’t want to be wearing this.” She still didn’t get it, the rules of a place like Battle Creek. It was one thing being a metalhead with a corpse on his T-shirt and a fetish for black nail polish; it was another thing altogether to be a girl wearing a pentagram. It was always another thing, being a girl.

“The hilarious thing is, they’ve got it all wrong,” Lacey had told me. “Turns out actual satanism’s just about freethinking and being yourself. Stuart Smalley could’ve written this.”

“Can we not talk about this now?”

“You say now, but you mean ever.”

I did.

“You should read it,” Lacey said. “You’ll see. There’s good stuff in here.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m joking,” she said, and it was easiest to assume it was true.

The club was called Beast, and the bouncer, more interested in my cleavage than my birthdate, waved us both in.

“I see you smiling,” Lacey said, sidling us up to the bar. She tugged at the laces of my corset. “You’re going mad with power.” I could barely hear her over the music, was already losing myself to noise and strobe light and the foul taste of the beer she poured down my throat, and somehow these all seemed like good things. Maybe because she was right; I did love the power of it, my chest, squeezed sausage tight, suddenly capable of miracles. I was used to people looking at Lacey. That night, they looked at me.

Maybe it was the corset, maybe it was the shot, maybe it was Lacey pushing me into the single-stall bathroom with some guy she thought worked behind the counter in our record store. Whether it really was Greg the Sex God, who we’d spent two Saturdays in a row peeking at from behind the Christian gospel shelf, or just some unknown grunger with a down vest and a hemp bracelet, he followed me in, and when I opened my mouth to say my name or maybe sorry my lunatic friend just shoved you into a bathroom , he stuck his tongue in. I let it worm around for a bit, tasting his beer and trying to decide whether the hand squeezing my ass was doing it right. Between that and my mental tally of the bacteria and fecal matter on the bathroom door, I forgot all about our lingual calisthenics, and the distraction must have been obvious, because eventually he stopped.

“Hey,” the guy said, lips still practically touching mine.

“Hey.”

The floor was spattered with urine, the walls with posters: The Screaming Trees. Skin Yard. The Melvins. Soundgarden. Even Babes in Toyland, who Lacey said sucked.

“You like this?”

I shrugged, thinking it was nice, if a little late, of him to ask. “I don’t usually do it in bathrooms, I guess.”

“What?”

The music, even in there, was incredibly loud.

“I don’t do this in bathrooms!” I said, louder.

“No, I mean the song! You like the song?”

“Oh. Sure.”

“It’s the new Love Battery!” He stepped back, did a little air guitar. I winced, thinking of what Lacey would think. “It’s fly, yeah? You should hear the album, it’s like the fucking A-bomb, just a bunch of stuff, and then, boom . Takes you to another dimension. You know?”

“Sure.”

“It’s some Star Trek —level shit there, you know? That’s what my album’s gonna be like.”

“You’re making an album?”

“Well, not yet, obviously. But, I mean, when the band gets there. It’ll happen. Patience, man. That’s the secret.”

“So you’re in a band?”

“I’m telling you, not yet. But I’m working on it. Stuff’s in the works. Big stuff.”

“That’s. . great.”

“You’ve got great boobs. Can I get in there?”

“Not sure that’s physically possible,” I said, more pleased than I wanted to be, but he’d already found a way to fit his fingers into the dark crevice of the corset.

“Huh. That’s kind of. . floppier than it looks.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I mean, that’s just how it goes with the big ones. Most of them are floppier. This is pretty good, actually.”

“Thanks?”

“Do you, like, feel yourself up all the time?”

“Uh, no.”

“That’s what I’d do if I was a girl. Especially if I had your. . you know. All. The. Time.”

“That might get in the way of your recording career.”

He spent some time trying to work out whether that was a joke, then, “You want to blow me?”

“Not especially.”

“Well, you know. A guy’s gotta ask.”

That was when I pushed my way back into the club and found Lacey. The band was starting, the one she’d heard had once opened for Nirvana, but from the opening chords it was clear these guys had only recently learned how their instruments worked. It didn’t matter. Lacey asked me what had happened, whether Mission Fuck had been a success, and instead of answering I threw my arms around her, because the beer buzz was finally heating me up and because I wanted to, simple as that, wanted to be there, with her, sweat-slick bodies swirling around us. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to dance.

“You’re drunk!” she shouted when I wove my fingers through hers and dragged her into the mess of bodies.

“Not drunk enough!” I twirled around, arms in the air, finally understanding what it was to feel a need and seize it. I needed to move. I needed to fly. I needed not to think about dicks and tongues and the gritty wrongness of real life. I needed this to be my real life, me and Lacey, in the smoky dark, strobes bouncing over our head, band screaming and shaking sweat into the crowd. The crowd a single organism, all of us, a hundred arms and legs and heads, a single heart beating, beating. All of us thrashing together, wild and fury in our blood. Lacey’s laughter in my ear, the smell of her shampoo like a cloud, her hair whipping across my cheek, and then nothing but the ecstasy of motion. Anything, everything possible. No one watching.