Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

She climbed out of the car and smoothed down her bathing suit cover-up, a blue terry cloth drape I was sure looked nothing like anything the other mothers were wearing. “Just because you leave high school doesn’t mean high school leaves you.”

I had to laugh. “That may be the most depressing thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She laughed, too. “Then I suppose I’m doing my job.”

“Mother of the year.”

I could see it on her face, the moment she decided to press her luck and go for it, a mother-daughter moment. “It’s nice to see you smile, Hannah.”

“Tell me we can get back in the car and go home. I’ll smile like I’m in a toothpaste commercial.”

“Tempting,” she said, pausing just long enough for me to get my hopes up.

Then we went to the party.

BEDECKED IN FULL-ON RICH GUY leisurewear — Ralph Lauren khakis and a polo shirt — Nikki Drummond’s father opened the door and grunted us toward the pool deck. I crossed through the house head down, not wanting to spot some domestic artifact — an ancient finger painting on the fridge or a therapist’s appointment on the calendar — that might render Nikki human. We padded across fancy tiles, the kind with barely perceptible swirls that make you feel like you’re walking on water, and stopped short in the back doorway, a mother-daughter pair in matched contemplation of their dark fate.

Mothers wore artfully draped sarongs or Esprit tracksuits, nails manicured and hair dutifully bobbed into Hamill-esque mom cuts, like they’d sworn a sacred pact to go frumpy at forty; daughters frolicked in designer cutoffs, tan, coltish legs poking through artfully frayed denim. Pink or purple jellies squished on manicured feet; oversized T-shirts belted low or tied in a knot just above the belly button, except on those girls who — despite the absence of any Y chromosomes to impress — had bothered stripping down to bikinis. Nikki’s usual crowd was absent, replaced by scattered clutches of second-tiers dangling their feet in the pool or poking suspiciously at plastic Jell-O cups of shrimp cocktail.

If there’s a hell, it smells like suntan lotion and sweaty Benetton cotton, and tastes like warm Coke; it sounds like easy listening and urgent whispers; it feels like being X-rayed, radioactive stares penetrating baggy clothes to the naked flesh beneath. I could feel myself mutating; I was the hideous swamp monster come to crash the soiree, and the Lacey in me wanted to play the part, tear a swath of destruction, give them a reason to stare.

Instead, I drifted toward the closest thing to a safe harbor: Jenna Sterling, Conny Morazan, and Kelly Cho, who styled themselves so aggressively as the Three Musketeers that they’d dressed the part every Halloween since they’d met. They were a self-contained unit, occasionally glomming in lockstep onto creatures a little higher up the food chain but never breaking formation. Jenna, with her Barbie hair and chunky field hockey legs, had once cried when forced to partner with me on some fourth-grade math project — memorably demonstrating the concept of remainders. Able lieutenant Conny was an expert at completing Jenna’s sentences when Jenna found herself unable, which was often. And then there was Kelly, who’d appeared in second grade, still learning the English for recess and blackboard and weirdo , suffering the boys who pulled their eyes into slits and spoke in nonsense syllables they called Karate Kid Chinese even after she reminded them, yet again, that she was Korean. Somewhere along the way she’d lost the accent and the baby fat, and now was the only one of the three to consistently have a boyfriend, even if it was usually some youth group kid she’d picked up at church.

They hadn’t been at the foreclosure party; girls like these didn’t go to parties like those. Whatever they’d heard afterward, they hadn’t seen it happen.

I’d never quite mastered the art of joining a conversation in progress, so I stood there creeping on their huddle, waiting for one of them to acknowledge my existence.

“So where did she go, anyway?”

It took me a beat too long to realize the question was directed at me. “Who?”

“She probably has no clue,” Jenna said. “She’s like. .”

“Clueless,” Conny offered, and Jenna nodded her assent.

“So do you or don’t you?” Kelly said.

“What do you think?” I said, with a tone that suggested duh , of course I did.

Result: eagerness. “So? Where?”

“Juvie, right?” Jenna had a wholesome midwestern look I’d never trusted. She was the kind of girl who brought her field hockey stick to class and experimented with Body Shop perfume combinations until she found the one that made her smell most like apple pie.

Conny snorted. “Mental institution, more like.”

“New York City, that’s where they all go,” Kelly said.

“They who?” I asked.

“You know. .” Less confident now. “Girls like Lacey. Who. .”

“. . run away,” Conny supplied. “Like in Pretty Woman .”

“ Pretty Woman is about LA.” Nikki had suddenly materialized by my shoulder in her witchy way. “And I highly doubt Lacey ran away to be a prostitute.” She hooked a finger around one of my belt loops and tugged me away from the Musketeers. “Hannah Dexter. You want to get out of here?”

It took me a moment to realize this was an invitation, not a command — or maybe that’s just a convenient excuse for why, instead of coming up with a clever retort or giving her the finger, I said yes.

IDON’T KNOW WHY MY MOTHER insists on this crap,” Nikki said, monologuing us through the woods. Complaints about finger food and her mother’s friends led to the laundry list of adventures for which all Nikki’s actual friends had abandoned her: tennis camp, arts camp, Jewish camp, Allie Cantor on a teen tour of the Grand Canyon, Kaitlyn Dyer shopping (and doubtless fucking) her way across the Continent, less Virginia Woolf, more Fergie. (It destabilized my world to hear Nikki Drummond reference Virginia Woolf.) She complained about the humidity and the gnat swarms, the creepy pool cleaner whose gaze always lingered one second too long, the hassle of shaving her bikini line, the tedium of reruns, the gall of her parents to refuse to pay for call-waiting on her personal line. She whined and sipped from an airplane bottle of something brown and illicit, and seemed not nearly as concerned as she should have been about what I might do to her in the woods.

The trees closed around us, dark and lush and whispering. The afternoon had taken on a fairy-tale inexorability: The witch told me where to go, and like a child lost in the woods, I followed. Until, finally, she stopped — walking and talking both, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the endless stream of complaint might indicate some jangling of nerves until she abruptly fell silent.

We’d paused at the edge of a clearing, its center occupied by a sagging structure, its walls crayoned with black hearts and bubbled tags, its windows jagged black holes. A few yards away, a rusting freight car tilted on bare axles twisted with weeds, like some ancient mechanical beast had crawled into the forest to die. It was no gingerbread house, but it still felt enchanted.

I knew about the old train station, of course. Everyone did. It had been abandoned since the seventies, and whatever cozy charm the architect had been aiming for with its sculpted iron railings and gabled roof was long lost to history and the encroaching woods. Somewhere in the darkness below the platform were broken and weedy tracks, and rumor had it that there were people living down there, storybook hobos who warmed themselves over trash fires and stabbed one another with iron nails. The station loomed large in Battle Creek childhoods, a landmark for bored and daring kids, easy initiation ritual for secret clubs: Brave the haunted station, return with a talisman, a sliver of glass or torn condom wrapper. Try not to get hepatitis. It was a place of possibility, the threat of shadows or even sentience, like the slouching station might be keeping counsel of its own. It was the kind of sacred place Lacey might have tried to make ours, if not for her thing about the woods.