Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I ached everywhere, but hurt nowhere specific. That seemed important.

“Learn to have a little pride in yourself,” the man said after I gave him my address, after he led me through the front yard, pausing to let me vomit up everything left inside. “You keep acting like a whore, people will keep treating you like one.”

He deposited me at the door, which flew open at the bell, like my parents had been waiting. Of course, I thought, slowly, they had been waiting. The sun was up. I’d been missing. I felt like I still was.

The cop was a security guard for the housing development. The development would not be pressing charges. “Next time, though, we won’t be so generous.”

My mother was steel. “There won’t be a next time.”

“You sure you don’t want to take me to jail?” I asked the not-cop, brain kicked into gear enough to smile. “Might be easier on me.”

Then I heaved again. There was nothing left.

Once he was gone, my parents closed the door behind us, and there was a long stint of hugging. I tried to speak — probably it seemed like I wanted to explain myself, when I only wanted to say please be gentle and can someone turn out the lights —but my mother said no , firmly enough that it was the end of it, then held on tight, and then it was my father’s turn, and for endless time I was closed in by their love, and it was almost enough to keep me on my feet.

Then, “Go get yourself cleaned up. You smell like the town dump,” my mother said.

“Sleep,” my father said. “Then we’ll talk.”

I lurched up the stairs. I’d been hungover before, but this was like some New Coke version of a hangover, different and deeply wrong. I closed myself into the bathroom, turned on the shower, waited for the water to heat, for the night to return to me.

I wanted to be clean; I wanted to sleep. Ahead of me, I knew, was the grueling interrogation by my parents, lectures and scolding, that I’d stayed out all night, made them worry, lost their trust all over again, and I’d have to sit through it while knowing my father was desperately hoping I wouldn’t give him up, that if I kept quiet about him letting me go to the party he’d find a way to compensate. No matter what, I’d be grounded all over again. Grounding, of course, wouldn’t extend to school, and I’d have to face all those faces who’d seen me lose control, who knew what I did, whatever it was. There would be whispers and rumors I would have to ignore; there would be stories of what and who, and I would, against my will, pay attention, try to piece together the night. I would be the story; I would be the joke; I would be the thing they’d left outside with the trash. All of that I knew.

I couldn’t know about the letter to the editor some Officially Concerned old woman would publish in the local paper, about girls gone wild and the corrupting modern moral climate as encapsulated by the drunk sex fiend who’d been found passed out half naked outside the old Foster place, or that even though the girl went unnamed in the letter, my kindly security guard would spread my name to his nearest and dearest until half the town was calling me a whore, parents fish-eyeing my parents, their kids, chafing under draconian new curfews and rules, blaming me for all the ways in which they’d gotten screwed, that even my teachers would look at me differently, like they’d seen me naked. I couldn’t know that I would be famous, the Mary Magdalene of Battle Creek, without my own personal savior, without anyone to rescue me from my own inequities except the judgment of the town, for my own good .

I couldn’t know that I would go through it on my own. That when I called Lacey to tell her what had happened, to apologize or let her apologize or simply sit on the phone until I unclenched enough to let the tears fall, she wouldn’t be there. That she’d packed up in the middle of the night, just like she’d told me she would. That I was on my own now, because I’d told Lacey to go and Lacey was gone.

I didn’t know.

So when I stripped naked in the bathroom and saw myself — saw the words that had been Sharpie’d all over my body, the things someone had written across my stomach and breasts and ass, the labels that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard I scrubbed, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, but could recognize as the work of more than one person, slut and whore and skank and, graffitied neatly just below my belly button with an arrow pointing straight down, we wuz here —I thought: Lacey.

Lacey will save me.

Lacey will avenge me.

Lacey will hold me and whisper the magic words that will make all of this okay.

I climbed into the shower and sagged against the wall and watched the words shine in the water, the words strange hands had inscribed on bare skin while I slept. Strange hands redressing me, pulling underpants over my thighs, snapping strapless bra in place, lacing corset. Before that, strange hands doing things. Strange lips, strange fingers, strange dicks, all of them, I tried, hot water streaming over me, to remember what I had done, what I had let them do, who I had become in the night. The water burned and my skin burned, and still, I believed I could endure it, because soon I would have Lacey, and I would not be alone.

THE BASTARD BURNED IT ALL. In a fucking fire. Like a Nazi.

“Heil fucking Hitler,” I told him, which stopped him just long enough to slap me across the face, a nice sharp blow to make my ears sing but which we both knew wouldn’t leave a mark. Then Herr Bastard went back to his bonfire, and I spat and screamed and choked on the smell of Kurt melting in the flames. Plastic cases warping with heat, fire eating through Kurt’s eyes, Nietzsche and Sartre going up in smoke. It would have been cool — very Seattle, very Kurt — if it hadn’t been my whole life disintegrating while the Bastard splashed gasoline. And my mother. Hiding out in the kitchen, probably rustling up some marshmallows and graham crackers so the Bastard could make s’mores over the ruins of the world.

That’s why I was late picking you up for the party, Dex. My oh-so-unforgiveable crime. The Bastard found my Satanic Bible and lost his fucking shit. Which looks nothing like what you’re imagining, I can assure you. In your G-rated imagination, I’m sure, parents rant and rage and ground you for a week and then everyone has spaghetti for dinner and goes to bed.

Let me paint you a picture, Dex. Life according to Lacey. There’s me, bedhead and short shorts, nipples standing at attention, and he wasn’t even looking, that’s how hypnotized he was by his precious fire. I couldn’t stop watching it, either, the fire consuming every song, every page, every piece of me, everything that carried me away from this shit life. Is that how you felt that night, Dex, when your mother found those stupid cans of paint, when she yelled at you, poor baby, and took away your phone privileges? Did you go cold inside, like the night was an ice-covered pond, and you knew if you weren’t careful, the surface would crack open and you’d sink into the deep? Were you disgusted by it, by the way your body betrayed you with its goose-bumped shuddering and the sad little croaks and moans you made instead of words? Did you think: I’m better than this ? Did you think: Now I am empty? Now I have nothing left ?

You didn’t. You did have something left. You had me.

The day the music died. It’s supposed to be a metaphor. Not a live show in my backyard, the Bastard’s bloated face red in reflected light, miniature flames dancing in his eyes, hands stinking of gasoline, the devil in penny loafers and a polyester suit. I thought about those wailing widows in India, the ones who throw themselves onto the funeral pyre, because what’s left to live for when the thing you’re living for is a column of smoke? Think about that, skin flayed away, bare muscle and pearly bone, flesh fused with plastic, all of us ash together.