Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

SHE LIKED TO TEST ME, and it was hard to tell the difference sometimes, between game and truth. Kurt was real, that was nonnegotiable. So were we, Dex-and-Lacey. Sacred ground. Boys, though, were for playing and trading, were equivalent to the sum of their parts, tongues and fingers and dicks. God was a bad joke, Satan a usefully pointy stick. She liked people to think she was dangerous. This didn’t explain why, one night when we’d been saddled with babysitting the junior Bastard, she had me hold the wriggling baby over the bathroom sink while she used the blood of a raw steak to paint an upside-down cross on his tiny forehead.

“This is disgusting, Lacey.” It wasn’t the right word, but it was the easiest one.

The baby whimpered and pulled away from her bloody finger, but she shushed him and stroked his tiny ears, and he didn’t cry. “Just hold him still.”

The blood smeared watery pink across his forehead, running into his eyes. I held him still.

Lacey gently tapped his right shoulder, his left shoulder, his sternum, his forehead, solemn as any priest. “In the name of the Dark Father and the unholy demons, I baptize you into the church of Lucifer.”

They were just words, I reminded myself. They had only as much power as we gave them.

Lacey said she couldn’t wait to see the look on the Bastard’s face when he found out, though she was careful to wipe off every trace of blood before we laid James Jr. to bed for the night. Lacey said the Bastard thought the Battle Creek hysterics were an embarrassing sideshow, blind to the true war for their children’s souls, against the modern Cerberus of liberalism, atheism, and sexual revolution. The Bastard didn’t believe in satanism, Lacey said, only in Satan, and claimed anyone who thought differently was doing the devil’s work.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s sister but yours,” she said, too, which made it okay that, when I left that night, the baby’s forehead still smelled like raw meat.

She wanted to spend her birthday in the graveyard, and so we did.

“Scared?” she said as we picked our way through the dark. Narrow lanes wove through rows of tombstones. I saw a stone angel, a spire circled by stone roses, crosses tilting and crumbling, tombs that gleamed in the flashlight beam where names were etched with lacquer and gold.

“Am I supposed to be scared of ghosts, or of you?”

“We both know you’re scared shitless of getting caught, Dex.”

She held the flashlight beneath her chin, casting her face in ghoul glow. “The only scary thing here is me.”

Maybe it was stupid of me not to be scared — if not by her big plan for the night, then by the intensity with which she’d insisted on it, that we sneak out with our candles and shovels, build a shrine to the Dark Lord, just enough of a show to give the plebes a good scare. “All I want for my birthday is to freak the shit out of Battle Creek,” she’d said, and I was prepared to help.

She stopped at a small square tombstone and sat, hard, beside the dead flowers at its base.

“Lacey.” It seemed like bad luck, saying her name out loud, like I might alert some predatory spirit to her identity. The stories had always made it very clear: Names were power. You gave yours away at your own risk. “I thought we were looking for a fresh one.”

“Look.” She aimed her flashlight at the stone.

Craig Ellison , it said, b. March 15, 1975, d. October 31, 1991

Beloved son and brother

Go Badgers!

“ Go Badgers ?” I laughed. Then aimed a cheerleader fist pump at the clouds. “God, that’s tacky. Can you imagine taking Battle Creek Badger pride to your grave?”

She didn’t say anything. I felt judged by her silhouette.

“What if it’s not some big joke?” Lacey said then. “Imagine the plebes are right, and there is some devil cult dancing around the woods, faces painted with blood. Acid orgies. If that’s what really happened to him.”

I tried to picture it, Craig Ellison forming an unholy alliance with the Dumpster Row boys, stripping off his basketball jersey to frolic naked in the woods, Craig Ellison magicked into drawing his own blood. Standing there in the shadow of his gravestone, stone angels judging our trespass, it wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been.

“And what if aliens are secretly running the country?” I said, desperate now to make my voice a flashlight, guide us both back on track. “What if the mayor is a vampire? What if I’m possessed by Satan and I’m about to suck your brains? It’s like you always say, anything’s possible—”

“—in the woods. Yeah. It is.”

That was when I noticed she was crying.

I almost fell beside her. Lacey wasn’t the kind of girl who cried. “What is it?” I put my hand on her shoulder. Took it off again. “ What? ”

“You love me, right?” Her voice was flattened, dead.

“Of course.”

“And you’re a good person.”

“Well, not since I met you.” The joke didn’t land. Her nails dug into my arm.

“Never say that again.”

“Okay. Okay, Lacey, it’s fine.” Panic. We were in a graveyard and she was freaking out, needing something I didn’t know how to give her because Lacey wasn’t supposed to need anything. “Of course I love you. And of course I’m a good person. And can you just tell me what’s going on so we can get the hell out of here?” I was crying, too. It was a reflex, like contagious yawning or throwing up at the smell of vomit.

“If I tell you to do something, and you do it, whose fault is that?” she asked.

“Depends on what you want me to do, doesn’t it?”

“It shouldn’t depend. Circumstances shouldn’t matter. If it’s my idea, it’s my fault. Your idea, yours.”

“Except it would be my idea to do what you told me to do. I get to decide that. I’m not your puppet.”

“No? No. I guess not.”

I rapped softly at her head, the safest way I could think to touch her. “What’s going on in there, Lacey? I know it sucks that he’s dead, even if he is Craig , but it’s not like he meant something to you.” As I said it, I was wondering whether it was true. Maybe it all made sense in some seedy, beneath-her kind of way, the fervent and unfounded hatred of Nikki, the unprompted tears for a Neanderthal, the words that seemed snagged in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. “Was he cheating on her with you? You can tell me. I get it, I swear.” I didn’t get it, not a guy like him, his meaty hands fumbling at her bootlaces, but love was meant to be strange. “You can’t think it’s your fault, what happened. Even if he felt guilty, or you dumped him and he freaked out, or whatever it was, it wouldn’t be—” I thought about what it would be like to do something and not be able to take it back. “Even if you told him you wanted him to die or something, that wouldn’t make it your fault that he went and did it. You didn’t put the gun in his hand. You didn’t pull the trigger. Nothing is your fault.”

She looked up at me, face tipping into shadow, and smiled. “You think Craig was cheating on Nikki? With me ?” She laughed, then, so beautifully, and I don’t know whether I was more relieved that we’d escaped the moment together or that I’d so plainly been wrong. Then she kissed my cheek. “You always know what to say to cheer me up.”

If not that, then what? I wanted to say, but couldn’t, not when she was happy again, not when she’d taken my hand in hers and pulled us both off the ground, sent us spinning, like the grave was a meadow and the moon was bright summer sun. “I can’t believe you thought I could love him.” Her laugh was a witch’s cackle, our dance a ritual that didn’t need spells, only hot blood rising in our cheeks and burning through our veins, an invocation of the gods of love, of whatever force pressed our palms together and whispered on the night wind, You are one.