Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

She would be a magazine cutout, commercial ready. She would wear aprons and wash dishes and say her prayers. She would not take another drink. She would love this man, with his flattop and his polyester pants. She would love him for knowing what was right and teaching her to do it. She would find the serenity to accept the things she could not change. She would not expose this fetus to wild music, nor dance in the dark beneath flashing lights and angry skies. She would not enjoy sex, but would perform it as duty required. She would clip coupons. She would dress for church. She would not drink. She would not drink. She would not drink.

She made these promises, and James ensured she would follow them, and she was supposed to be happy.

She did not drink or smoke or dance. She did place her hands on her belly and beam, and still, when the baby came out, his fingers and toes and little penis so perfectly intact, she hated him for splitting her open and wanted to give him back. She loved him too much and hated him for it, and he was just as angry and shitty and pukey and boring as Lacey had been, and this time she’d done it to herself on purpose. She had no one else to blame.

Lacey’s mother was, perhaps, not supposed to be a mother. Some people probably weren’t. It was too late to get that kind of clue. Bad mothers abandoned their children, and she was supposed to be a good mother, and so she stayed. And if sometimes she yelled and sometimes she drank and sometimes she fantasized about castrating her husband in his sleep and stuffing the testicles in the baby’s mouth until he stopped crying and fellated himself into a silent eternity, then that was the price of her mothering. That was the best she had to give. Some days, she woke up and swore, I will be better. Some days, she was.

LACEY WAS GONE.

Lacey was gone and I was alone.

Lacey would never have left without me, but Lacey had left without me. Left me alone with the things I’d done. The things done to me, or not done to me. Swallowed by the black hole of memory.

I had fragments to piece together: The ink on my skin. The whispers. Slivers of the night — bodies pressed together, music, voices — all in a broken filmstrip. That must have been the worst of it, I told myself. If there’d been worse, my body would remember, would ache or bleed. The worst left a stain, so the worst must not have been.

The worst thing that could happen, I thought, and never gave it a name.

The girl on the other side of the night, the girl I was now: The girl who’d torn off her shirt and danced on a table. The girl who’d grabbed bulges through jeans and moaned filthy things, who said dick and pussy and lick my cunt .

It was a wonder, that I could do those things. There was a box in the basement where we kept stray jigsaw pieces, all of them parts of different pictures, none of their edges lining up. That was me. A Picasso person. The wrong parts in the wrong places. Lacey would have known how to make them fit. Lacey had named me: This is who you are, this is who you will be.

She would have known, but she was gone.

IWENT TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, because going to school on Monday was a thing I’d always done.

I didn’t go back.

As long as the homework got done, no one objected to me spending the final three weeks of the semester in my room. No one wanted to look at me.

Everyone wanted to look at me.

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

Lacey said it mattered, how you chose to do it, and now I understood that, too: why you might choose the bullet and the gun, choose ugliness and hurt instead of slipping away sweetly into the black. Some pain dictated violence, bloodshed. Oblivion required obliterating not just the pain but its source. Justice necessitated leaving behind a mess. A scream of blood and bone and rage.

It scared me, how much I understood.

IF I HAD LET LACEY set the house on fire. If I had watched it burn. Sometimes I dreamed of the flames and woke up with the smell of charred flesh, and sometimes I woke up smiling.

I tried to dream of Lacey, dream myself into our life in Seattle, but I couldn’t get there. Seattle was a ghost, and Lacey was like something conjured from one of my books. If it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been at the party; if it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been so angry and so drunk; if it weren’t for Lacey, I would have been safe.

I hated her. I loved her. I wished she’d never come back, and I wished she would. That was how I lived, after: not one thing and not the other. Canceling myself out.

ISTAYED IN MY ROOM. SAFE territory. My room: fifteen feet wide, thirteen feet short, beige from floor to ceiling, with matted knots in the carpet from where our cat had puked her life away. A twin bed with Strawberry Shortcake sheets, because, according to my mother, sheets were expensive and grown-up was a matter of opinion. Shuttered windows that let through slats of light in the early afternoon and a rusty full-length mirror papered with remnants of Lacey: wrinkled postcards from Paris and California and Istanbul written by people long dead and rescued from yard sale bins; deep thoughts courtesy of deep thinkers, inscribed by Lacey in stern black marker; for Lacey’s sake, a cutout of Kurt, his granny cardigan matching his eyes; at the center of it all, a Dex-and-Lacey photo collage that captured none of the important moments, because for those we were always alone, no one to hold the camera. A particleboard bureau stickered with glow-in-the-dark stars that three years of scraping couldn’t clear away. Stacks of books pressed up against beige wallpaper, spines stretching to the ceiling, every book an adventure that meant climbing or toppling or ever so gently working one out of the middle of a stack, Jenga for giants. There was a card table desk in the corner, stacked neatly with the year’s final papers (failures) and report card (“disappointing”), and buried beneath them, for some future scrapbook of shame, two copies of the local paper — the edition with the letter to the editor telling the story of the wild girl passed out in the ruins of an abandoned party, and the weekend edition with the editorial, with its anonymous but all-knowing first person plural: We believe the girls in this town are up to no good, we believe modern music and television and drugs and sex and atheism are rotting our youth, we believe this girl is as much to blame as her toxic culture and her lax parents, we can’t blame her but we can’t afford to excuse her , so it follows that we must use her as a warning, lest we lose another of our brightest youth, and we the people of Battle Creek , the parents and teachers and churchgoers and goodhearted folk, we must do better .

ICALLED HER LINE IN THE middle of the night, after my parents were asleep. Every night. All night, sometimes, just to hear it ring. No one ever answered.

No, her mother finally said, she didn’t know where Lacey went. No, I shouldn’t call back.

MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY ALL the time. Not at me, she said. Or not just at me.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” my father said, standing in the doorway of my room a few days after — and maybe not, but he’d never stood like that before, like a trainer at the mouth of a cage, waiting for something wild to make its move. “You’ll always be a good girl. Maybe without Lacey around. . things will settle.”