Robin Wasserman: Girls on Fire

“Maybe,” I said. “Sometimes.”

I’d never said it out loud. It was like carrying around a secret disease, and not wanting to let anyone think you were contagious. I half expected Lacey to scrape her chair away.

Instead she held out her left wrist and flipped it over, exposing the veins. “See that?”

I saw milky flesh, spiderwebbed with blue. “What?”

She tapped her finger against the spot, a pale white line, cutting diagonal, the length of a thumbnail. “Hesitation cut,” she said. “That’s what happens when you lose your nerve.”

I wanted to touch it. To feel the raised edges of the scar, and the pulse beating beneath. “Really?”

A sudden spurt of laughter. “Of course not really. It’s a paper cut. Come on.”

She was making fun of me, or she wasn’t. She was like me, or she wasn’t.

“That’s not how I’d do it, anyway, if I were going to do it,” she said. “Not with a knife.”

“Then how?”

She shook her head and made an uh-uh noise, like I was a kid reaching for a cigarette. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“My what?”

“Your plan, for how you’d do it.”

“But I wouldn’t—”

“Whether you’d actually do it is beside the point,” she said, and I could tell I was running out of chances. “How you would kill yourself is the most personal decision a person can make. It says everything about you. Don’t you think?”

Why I said what I said next: because I could see her getting tired of me, and I needed her not to; because I was desperate and tired and could still feel the wet seeping into my jeans; because I was too tired of not saying all the things I thought were true.

“So shooting yourself in the head is Craig-speak for My girlfriend is a cunt and this is the only way to break up with her for good ?” I said, and then I said, “Might have been the only smart thing he ever did.”

She didn’t have to tell me, later, that this was the moment I won her heart.

“I’m Lacey,” she said, and gave me her wrist again, sideways this time, and we shook hands.

“Hannah.”

“No. I hate that name. What’s your last name?” She was still holding on.

“Dexter.”

She nodded. “Dex. Better. I can work with that.”

WE CUT SCHOOL. “THIS IS a day that calls for large quantities of sugar and alcohol,” she said. “Possibly fries. You in?”

I’d never cut before. Hannah Dexter did not break the rules. Dex, on the other hand, followed Lacey straight out of the school, thinking not about consequences but about stick a tampon up your cunt and how, if Lacey had suggested we burn the place down, Dex might just have gone for it.

Her crap Buick got only AM frequencies, but Lacey had stuck an old Barbie tape recorder to the dash. She turned it up as loud as it would go, some screaming maniac trapped in a hell chamber of jackhammers and electroshock, but when I asked what it was, there was a sacred hush in her voice that suggested she’d mistaken it for music.

“Dex, meet Kurt.”

She flicked her eyes away from the road, long enough to read my face.

“You’ve really never heard Nirvana?” It was a brand of fake incredulity I knew too well: You really didn’t get invited to Nikki’s pool party? You really don’t have a Swatch? You really haven’t kissed/jerked off/blown/fucked anyone? It wasn’t the veiled snobbery I minded but the implied pity, that I could fall so unthinkably short. But with Lacey, I didn’t mind. I accepted the pity as my due, because I saw now that it was unthinkable that I’d never heard Nirvana. I could tell it was making her happy to solidify our roles, she the sculptor and me the clay. In that car, miles opening between us and the school, between Hannah and Dex, between before and after, I wanted nothing more than to make her happy.

“Never,” I said, and then, because it was called for, “but it’s amazing.”

We drove; we listened. Lacey, when the spirit seized her, rolled down a window and screamed lyrics into the sky.

That Buick: ancient and wheezing and spotted with bird shit and, even on that first day, like home. Love at first sight, like I knew already it would be our getaway car. Its glove compartment, with its heap of maps, crusty nail polish bottles, mixtapes, old Burger King wrappers, emergency condoms, dusty pack of candy cigarettes. Its leather seats exhaling cigarette fumes, though Lacey, her grandma dead of lung cancer, refused to smoke. “It belonged to some dead lady,” Lacey explained, that first day. “Three full-body details, and the damn thing still stinks of cigarettes and adult diapers.” It felt haunted, and I liked it.

Lacey was a driver — I would come to understand that. She was always inventing field trips for us: We drove to a UFO landing site, a Democratic rally where we pretended to be Ross Perot groupies and a Republican rally where we pretended to be Communists, a sixties-style drive-in with roller-skating ushers, and the Big Mac Museum, which was lame. They were, more than anything, excuses to drive. That first day, she invented no destination; we drove in circles. Motion was enough.

There was something deliciously numbing about it, the sameness of the clapboard houses and seamed concrete, the day unspooling behind us as we circled the town. I tried to imagine how it looked to her, determinedly idyllic Battle Creek with its antique stores and its ice cream shoppe, its empty storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs, its chest-thumping pride, every forced smile and flapping flag insisting this was the real America, that we were salt of the earth and blood of the heartland, that our flat green corner of Pennsylvania was a walled-off Eden, untouched by the violence and sin endemic to the modern age, that the town mothers worried only over their pie crusts and garden weeds, the town fathers limited themselves to one after-dinner beer and never prowled beneath their secretaries’ skirts, the sons and daughters had only sitcom troubles and, despite their hormones and halter tops, knew enough to wait. When something went awry, when a golden child slipped a gun in his mouth and bled brains on damp earth, it could only be evidence of attack or contagion, an incursion of them , never a fault line through the heart of us . When night came, it was easy to ignore the things the children did in the dark.

It was impossible, seeing home through her eyes, like seeing your own face as a stranger would. This was my greatest fear, that Battle Creek was my mirror. That Lacey would look at one, see the other, and dismiss us both.

“I can’t believe you have a car,” I said. I didn’t even have a license. “If I had one, I’d drive away and never come back.”

“Want to?” Lacey said. Like it would be that easy to Thelma-and-Louise ourselves out of Battle Creek for good. Like I could be a different girl, my own opposite, and all it took was saying yes .

Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, all revealed to me in a single burst of glaringly obvious light. Maybe it took longer than one car ride to slough off a lifetime of Hannah Dexter — a careful study of the right bands, the slow but steady creep of delinquency, flannel and combat boots, hair dye and shrooms and the nerve to violate at least a handful of commandments — but that’s not how I remember it now. That’s not how it felt then. It felt, right there in that car, like I could choose to be Dex. Everything after was paperwork.

“We drive straight through, we could make it to Ohio by midnight,” Lacey said. “We’d be at the Rockies in a day or two.”

“We’re going west?”

“Of course we’re going west.”