Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

He’s dead now. It’s strange, isn’t it? He was here, he was inside me, he was sweaty and obnoxious and maybe, like, a psychopath, and now he’s just a corpse. Less than that, soon enough: bones and dust and worms. Not a ghost, certainly. If he were a ghost, I’d know, because he’d never leave me the fuck alone.

I know how he died; I know why, unless you want to get all existential why, God, why about it, in which case who knows anything, but I can’t say I ever knew Craig. He had a little sister, it turned out, some gap-toothed goofball in pigtails who worshipped him for teaching her to shoot free throws and punch out the playground bully. But I didn’t know that until her gap-toothed eulogy, and by then I couldn’t afford to let myself listen. He was like our doll sometimes, an animatronic jock for us to pose. He was a slobbery kisser and an angry drunk, and he loved Nikki enough to get jealous but not enough, or at least not well enough, to make her love him back.

Sometimes we still met up without him, and that’s when she told me all the things even he didn’t know, like her secret early-morning runs, which she’d started back when she was fourteen and anorexic, but kept up because she liked the vacant dark of five A.M. Everyone knew that Nikki’s mother had spent a year screwing her father’s racquetball partner, but no one knew how pathetic Nikki thought her for coming back and begging forgiveness, much less for staying with a husband who now stuck it to her every chance he got. Everyone knew Nikki was good at being popular, but only I knew how little she cared. She fucked with people and built her little kingdom because it came easy, and because it was more fun than the alternative, but it didn’t make life any less mind-numbing, or the future any more bearable. She liked to watch people bow and scrape before her for the same reason little kids light anthills on fire. Not because it gave her life meaning, but because sometimes you need to spice up an afternoon.

Everyone knew she and Craig Ellison were destiny, their love mandated by the laws of royal courtship, and everyone was probably right. Craig was seventh-grade Nikki’s first kiss, Nikki was Craig’s first trip to second base, but there’s nothing sexy about inevitability, or at least nothing as sexy as a nameless eighth grader who’ll jerk you off in a roller rink bathroom, and so it wasn’t until sophomore year that they got together for real — fucking each other and fucking each other over, fucking and fighting and then fucking again. No wonder they were bored.

Craig, somehow, still had his secrets: He could get us anything. We tried heroin — horse, that’s what Craig called it, because he didn’t know how not to be an ass — but only once. People aren’t meant to feel that good, or be that happy. Coke was better. It made the sex better. It made everything better. It was easier to get and substantially harder to screw up, as opposed to the heroin, with which I almost set Nikki’s hair on fire. It was easy to laugh about things back then.

That’s it, all we did. Watch and fuck and snort and talk, rinse and repeat. Until Craig was dead, and it was all over. I didn’t go back. I couldn’t. Not to the station, not to the woods. It was desecrated. Not haunted — I told you, I don’t believe in that — just ruined.

No one would know unless Nikki or I told them, and we swore ourselves silent. One last sacred promise, and — stupid me — I assumed it would bind us together for life, but that was the last I saw of her, too. Maybe I was her woods, desecrated and ruined. But you know what I think? I think I was wrong from the start, suckering myself into believing that I’d peeled off Nikki’s mask and glimpsed her true face, when, in fact, there was nothing underneath but more masks. Masks on top of masks, with a hollow space at the center where some higher power forgot to shove in a soul. All animal instinct, no higher function. No capacity for pain.

SHE BLAMED ME.

She blamed me .

I don’t blame myself.

I refuse.

I did nothing wrong.

Pinky swear, Dex. Cross my heart and hope to join Craig on the big basketball court in the sky, nothing is my fucking fault.

No one is my puppet.

You promised me that.

ALONE AGAIN, AFTER. ALONE, IN the dark, with a secret, alone with the nightmares and the ghost of their skin, waking up with him inside me, her crawling down my body, invisible fingers and tongues dissolving into nothing with the dawn light. Alone with my mother and the Bastard and of course the precious fucking baby, who wouldn’t stop crying, the two of them keeping me away from him as if I had some contagious disease, as if I would want to touch or hold or big-sister their screaming, shit-stained midlife crisis, and who could blame me for taking the knife into the bathtub?

Rhetorical question. The Bastard blamed me for being a drama queen, and my mother blamed me for getting the Bastard riled up, and the cheap-ass therapist blamed me for not wanting to honestly face up to my problems, not wanting to rip the bandage off the seeping wound, but at least he gave me a prescription, and then I didn’t give a shit who blamed me for what, even Nikki Drummond. Especially Nikki Drummond.

Those were the cloud days. I floated. I played Kurt loud where I could, and quiet, in my head, where I had to. I could have floated forever, Dex; you should know that.

It’s important you know that I didn’t go looking for you.

I thought about it sometimes: how she would hate it, seeing me with someone else, watching me lace my arm around a waist or lean close to whisper a secret. It would hurt, and I wanted, more than anything, to make her hurt. I admit that. I could have picked anyone, any of those sad little girls dancing down the hall in their identical denim jackets and neon stirrup pants, bopping to New Kids or maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot because that’s what their boyfriends told them to listen to, saying please and thank you to their teachers and not so hard and fuck me to the boys they’d only be seen with in the woods, sad girls with big bangs and little dreams. I watched them, and I thought about it.

Then you came to me.

It wouldn’t surprise you that Nikki told me about you. It would surprise you what she said, something like, “Who, her? That loser’s always glaring at me like I drowned her puppy,” and forgive me, Dex, but I said, “Probably in love with you,” and Nikki said, “Who isn’t?” and then, I’m sure, drunk and high, we both laughed.

Truth, Dex: She never gave a shit about you. All that energy you put into hating her, and still you were nothing to her. Not until I made you something. You’ve never thanked me for that, either.

IWATCHED YOU. BILLOW OF HAIR like your very own storm cloud. Interchangeable Kmart T-shirts, always a size too big, like you’d never clued into your best asset, or wanted to make sure no one else did. Always with a book, thick glasses and middling sulk, that smirk you gave people when they said something stupid. I don’t even think you know you’re doing it, slitting your eyes and raising your lip, like the morons cause you physical pain. You told me once that, before me, you wasted half your time wondering why people didn’t like you more, obsessing about your glasses or your hair or the way you rolled the cuffs of your jeans, precisely how tight and how high. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that none of it would have helped. People like to believe they’re beautiful and smart and funny— special . They’ll never like the person whose face reveals the truth.

What I saw in your face was the truth of Nikki. She was as ugly to you as she was to me. You wanted to make her hurt. And I helped you do it, even if you didn’t realize it. You’re welcome for that, too.