Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

She’d unplugged my phone and was monitoring the ones downstairs.

“No, Hannah can’t come to the phone,” I heard her say that Saturday morning. “Please stop calling.”

Lacey, I knew, would never stop calling.

Maybe this was it, the catalyst we needed to escape. Maybe I could finally shake off my suburban shackles, fuck high school and college and my permanent record, climb into Lacey’s Buick, slam my fist on the dashboard, and grant the permission I’d withheld for so long, say Go west, young man , and chart a course to freedom.

When I packed for school that Monday, I slipped my escape fund, all $237 of it, into my backpack, along with my copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and the first mix Lacey had made me, the one with HOW TO BE DEX scribbled across it in permanent marker — all the essentials, just in case. I waited for her in the parking lot, desperate for proof that she existed, and as I waited, I composed revenge plans in my head, a gift for Lacey, because before we escaped we’d need to avenge ourselves against the enemy. We would sneak through Nikki’s window and shave her head; we would slit the seams of her prom dress, just enough that the gown would dissolve as they placed the crown on her perfectly coiffed head; we would frame her for cheating; we would find someone to break her heart.

They were lame schemes, cribbed from Sweet Valley High books and half-remembered teen movies, but evidence of my will. Lacey would supply the way.

Except that when Lacey finally showed up — not a half hour early, as I had, bouncing with eagerness and certain she was feeling the same way, but twenty minutes after the start of homeroom — and I cornered her in the parking lot, she didn’t want to hear about my revenge schemes, and she wasn’t full of sympathy for my weekend of torment. She didn’t, in fact, seem particularly concerned about my problems at all.

“How worried do I have to be?” she said. “Is your mother the kind who’s going to call mine?”

“Depends whether she thinks it’ll torture me or not.”

“Fuck, this is serious, Dex. You have to ask her if she’s planning to tell. Get her not to.”

“That’s going to be hard when I’m not speaking to her.”

“So fucking speak to her. What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know, Lacey, maybe being a prisoner in my own home has driven me crazy? Maybe it’s been a little difficult , having my own mother look at me like I’m some criminal who’s going to shiv her in the night? Maybe I’m a little worried that she’s forbidden me from seeing my best friend, and I thought my best friend might be a little worried about that, too.”

“You’re seeing me right now.” She sounded distracted, as if there could be anything more important to think about.

“How are you not getting this?”

“How are you not getting it, Dex? I can’t have the Bastard finding out about this. I can’t.”

“Oh, but it’s totally fine when I get caught?”

“That’s not what I meant. But, okay, yeah. You seem pretty fine to me.”

“Oh, I’m awesome, Lacey. Everything is fantastic.”

“You don’t get it—”

“I get that it’s okay for me to get in trouble as long as you don’t get in trouble. Even though this whole fucking thing was your idea.”

“Can you for one millisecond entertain the hypothesis that not everything is about you, Dex?”

I heard myself spit out the world’s ugliest laugh. “Tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”

She didn’t say anything. I willed her to. Say something; say anything. Fix this.

“Well?” I said. “Really? Nothing?”

“Please ask your mother not to tell mine.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

SCHOOL HURT WITHOUT LACEY THERE, even more because she was there, just no longer mine.

I was the angry one. I was the righteous one. I was the one avoiding her in the halls and getting on the bus after school instead of waiting for her car. So why did it feel like she’d abandoned me?

Temporary, I told myself. She would apologize, I would forgive, all would be the same. But when I saw Nikki, I couldn’t say anything. It felt different, not having Lacey at my back. All the things I wanted to say, all the fuck you, how dare you, what gives you the right curdled in my throat, and I knew how they would come out if I tried.

You won.

IDID SPEAK TO MY MOTHER that week, just once, just to ask her not to tell Lacey’s parents what she suspected. Because there was no evidence Lacey had done anything, I reminded her, and being my mother only gave her the right to ruin my life.

I didn’t speak to Lacey.

I didn’t call anyone, for that matter; I didn’t go anywhere. I came straight home after school and watched TV until it was time for bed. Life grounded was a lot like life before Lacey, and it terrified me.

“Like old times, right?” my father said, during a commercial, while we waited to see which inbred family would win their feud. And my face must have revealed what I thought of that, because he added, “I know. I miss her, too.”

This did not help.

What did: Friday afternoon the phone rang, and after he answered it, he handed it to me. My mother was down at the Y, tapping into her inner artist at a pottery class — and the customary liquor-fueled wallow that followed — that would reliably keep her occupied through midnight. We were alone in the house. No one to stop him from breaking her rules; no one to stop me from saying, cautiously, hello , and finally breathing again when I heard her voice.

“I’m sorry.”

I wanted to wait for her to say it first, but I was too puppy dog eager, and so we chimed together, overlapping, desperate, both of us so, so sorry, both of us so quick to dismiss and fast-forward, whatever, it was nothing, ancient history, stupid, inessential, inconsequential to the epic and never-ending story of us.

“I have it, Dex,” she finally said. “The perfect revenge.”

“Nikki?”

“Of course, Nikki. You think we let her do this to you and get away with it?”

“So, what’s this perfect plan?”

“Not now. Tonight. You heard about the foreclosure party, right?”

Everyone had heard about the foreclosure party. An abandoned house at the edge of a half-built development, guaranteed empty, out of the way, and equipped with ample bedrooms. Nikki’s father worked at the villainous bank, and every month or two she managed to snag an address and a key. Lacey and I were supposed to be above such things.

“I’m grounded,” I told her, even as my father mouthed, It’s okay , and nodded.

“Sneak out. I promise, it’ll be worth it.”

It’s not that I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t know what it was. “Lacey—”

“Pick you up at nine.” She hung up before I could answer.

“I don’t want to know where you’re going,” my father said. The dial tone was still droning in my ear. “Plausible deniability. Just be back before your mother.”

So I was going to a party.

By nine P.M., I had laced myself into the black corset, which I hadn’t worn since the night of the Beast. Lacey said it made me into a warrior, ready for battle. It did; I was. She didn’t show. I sat on the porch steps, waiting, lipstick congealing, hair wilting in the humidity, time ticking, heart beating, cars passing and never stopping, none of them her. I’d poured some of my parents’ scotch into a water bottle — our own private pre-party, or that was the plan.

I drank most of it myself.

Nine, nine thirty, ten — no Lacey. No answer at her house when I called. No fucking way I was going back inside, changing into pajamas, explaining to my father why I’d chosen rules over rebellion, staring at the ceiling, wondering why Lacey had flaked. The party was only a couple miles away, and I had a bike.