Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I knew you before you knew yourself. Imagine if you’d marched through high school and college and a lifetime of diaper changes and mind-numbing jobs and garden clubs and PTA bake sales, and never known yourself, so tough and so, so angry. You were afraid to let yourself feel it, but I could feel it for you, simmering. I could hear the pot lid, that clatter of metal like a rattlesnake warning: Stand back, shit’s about to explode.

So fucking what if that’s why we started, if you hating her was the thing I loved most, if I held on so tight because I could feel her fury that she’d been replaced — by a nonentity. So Nikki brought us together. So what?

What matters isn’t how we found each other, Dex, or why. It’s that we did, and what happened next. Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That’s us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.

THERE WAS A SECURITY CAMERA. Two shadows caught on-screen, faces indistinct, ages readable enough that — the very morning after our graffiti triumph — two cops muscled their way into the principal’s office. By noon, word had gotten around that they were looking for two girls in possession of spray paint, with possible connections to a dark underground, two girls with dangerous intent. God is dead , we had written — I had written — and not realized this would magic us into something to fear. Midway through English class, the PA buzzed, and the principal came on to issue dire warnings: that new evidence suggested agitators in our midst, that we should all be vigilant, that all of us — the misguided perpetrators most of all — were at risk. The rumor mill was delighted, giddy speculation quickly drowning out any buzz about the next big party and Hayley Green’s bulimia-induced laxative incident.

Two nameless girls heeding the call of the dark; I could feel people watching us.

We met by the Dumpsters, one of us ice-cold and the other freaking out, three guesses which was which. This wasn’t the year to be a juvenile delinquent. “Worst case, it’s vandalism, that’s got to be a misdemeanor,” Lacey said, every word a shrug, and I wanted to shake reality into her.

“A misdemeanor ? They still arrest you for those, Lacey. We’re so fucked.”

The refrain had been beating in my head since I saw the cop car pull up to the curb through my homeroom window. So fucked. So fucked. So totally, absurdly, screwed grounded arrested fucked. Lacey pretending otherwise didn’t fix anything.

“No one’s getting arrested. No one even knows it was us. Stop acting like a crazy person, and they never will.”

But the way I acted wasn’t the problem. It was Lacey. People knew enough about her to suspect the truth — at least, Nikki Drummond would.

And it turned out she did.

“Let me guess: her idea,” Nikki said, snaring me in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, where I’d taken to going ever since she’d cornered me in the one on the ground floor. “She promised no way would you get caught. No consequences.”

“Do you have some obsession with hearing me pee?”

“It’s always her idea, but you’re the one who’s going to get screwed. She’ll find some way to make sure of that.”

“Seriously, are you bathroom stalking me? Because that’s significantly weird.”

“She’s bad news, Hannah.”

“What are you, an after-school movie?” I washed my hands, then smeared on some ChapStick, just to show her my hands weren’t shaking. “One more time: I don’t know what you’re talking about. No idea.”

“Trust me, I believe that.”

“Fuck off,” I said, and banged out the door. Not my cleverest comeback, but I hated to give her the last word.

She seized it anyway. When I got to my locker that afternoon, the vice principal was waiting for me, with a cop and a pair of pliers and an “anonymous” tip.

I was crying before they got the door open, even knowing there’d be nothing to find, because even amateur, self-righteous vandals weren’t dumb enough to stash their spray paint at school, but it was still humiliating and there was a cop forcing open my locker and how the fuck had my life turned into this movie — and in the seconds before they deemed the locker inoffensive and sent me on my way, incriminating tears or not, I cursed Lacey, and thought, if only for a second, Nikki was right.

Lacey was ebullient when she scooped me up in the parking lot. We’d officially gotten away with it. “Bonnie and Clyde, right?”

“Bonnie and Clyde ended up dead.”

“What crawled up your ass?”

I couldn’t explain that I’d turned on her, however briefly, that I didn’t deserve her or the celebration she proposed, and instead I made her drop me off at home. If I could make it to my room before I started to cry, I thought, I would be safe. The day could end and tomorrow everything would be erased.

My father was waiting behind the door. “Your mother’s in your room,” he said. His face was doom.

“What? Why’s she not at work?”

“Just go up there.”

“What’s wrong?” It seemed likely someone was dead, or at least on the way there. I could see no other reason for my mother to leave work in the middle of the afternoon, no other end for this shitty, decompensating day.

He shook his head. “I promised her I’d give her first shot. But. . let’s just say, officially, I’m very disappointed. Unofficially?” He winked.

So fucked.

“Any chance we can pretend I never came home?”

He pointed at the stairs. “Go. And, kid?”

“Yeah?”

“Gird your loins.”

WHAT SHE’D FOUND: TWO CANS of spray paint, which Lacey had insisted we not throw out (but that she not keep). Rolling papers and a glass pipe I’d never used. Condoms, equally unused, extra-large and strawberry-flavored at Lacey’s insistence. Lipstick, too ugly to wear but shoplifted from Woolworth’s just because. Dusty bottles filched from the liquor cabinet. A Polaroid of Lacey’s boobs that had served us some ridiculous purpose I couldn’t remember.

How she knew to find it: A call to her office from a nameless “concerned friend” who was obviously Nikki Drummond, concerned only about ruining my life.

What she said: You are a disappointment. You are a disgrace. You are, it goes without saying, grounded.

You are not the daughter I raised.

You are lucky I’m not calling the cops.

You will never see that Lacey again.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t betray Lacey, not this time, not out loud. I admitted what I’d done, said I’d done it on my own, and if my own mother wanted to turn me in to the police, I’d be happy to tell them exactly the same thing. I told her that she couldn’t keep me away from Lacey, that the only bad influence here was sitting on my bed, holding two cans of spray paint like they were live grenades. I told her I didn’t need anyone, especially Lacey, to give me ideas or bully me into standing up for what was right. I was an adult, and if I wanted to fuck the Man, that was my business.

She sighed. “This isn’t you, Hannah. I know you better than that.”

“The name is Dex ,” I said, and it was the last thing I would say to her that night or the two that followed. The silent treatment was still the only real weapon I could muster.

I must have seemed ridiculous. At least as ridiculous to her as my father seemed to me, cheering me on behind my mother’s back and making the occasional frontal assault with vague references to their shared posthippie past, invoking long-lost good causes and heroic stands, though my mother shut him down every time, in a way guaranteed to make both of us feel like shit. “She doesn’t care about feminist politics any more than you do, Jimmy,” I heard her say, after I’d tossed my burnt meat loaf and returned to my room. “She’s simply infatuated. You should know the feeling.”