Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

A trench cut through the clearing, bent and broken track unspooling along its base like a canyon river, and Nikki settled onto its bank, dangling her feet over the edge. “This is where he died, you know.”

It didn’t exactly make the place feel less haunted.

“That’s what they say,” she added. “They didn’t want to make it public, that this was the place. In case freaks wanted to turn it into some kind of shrine. Or do some copycat thing. But they told me. Obviously.”

I didn’t know Craig at all, not really, except that I’d known him for sixteen years and knew plenty: that he could burp the alphabet, that he could fit four Legos up his nose, that he’d once cried when he fell off the seesaw and broke his arm. He was a fixture, like the condemned church on Walnut Street I walked past every day for years, never wondering what was inside, until the day it burned down. That was Craig’s absence, for me: a vacant lot where one shouldn’t have been.

Impossible not to imagine him sitting in the shadow of this abandoned husk, pondering the desiccation of the past, reading existential doom into the graffitied dictates: fuck ronda, suck my cock . Impossible not to imagine him bloody and still, rotting into the dirt.

It belonged to Nikki now, this place. He’d claimed it for her.

“Your boyfriend killing himself doesn’t automatically make you a good person,” I said, because it hurt to feel sorry for her.

She looked like she’d had that thought before. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Because you’d kind of think it would.” She offered me the bottle, but I waved it away. I knew what to do when the witch offered you a bite of her apple.

Nikki downed the rest in a single swallow, then fired the bottle into the trench. There was something immensely satisfying in its shatter. She swung her legs back and forth. Somewhere, birds sang. A mosquito lit on my knee, and Nikki slapped it away. She left behind a slick of sweat, which surprised me. The Nikki Drummonds of the world weren’t supposed to perspire.

“I don’t lie to people here,” she said. “So maybe you’ll believe me this time. I’m not the enemy. There is no enemy.”

“Why do you care so much if I believe you?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was weird, too.”

The witch builds her house out of candy to charm stupid children, I reminded myself.

“I can help you fix it, you know,” she said.

“Fix what?”

“Well, for one, your sullied reputation. For another. .” She flung her hands in my general direction, as if to suggest your essential Hannah Dexter — ness .

“What makes you think I need to be fixed?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“And why would you want to make me your project?”

“Maybe I’m bored.” She was looking at her feet, pointing and flexing them together, like we used to do in gymnastics at the Y. “Maybe I’m tired.”

“Of summer?”

“Of pretending not to be a bitch,” she said. “You’ve obviously already decided I am. It’s relaxing.”

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said, and maybe I was, because at her admission I felt a strange tingle of something adjacent to pride.

She shrugged again, which I took as a yes. “I don’t beg. Come to the mall with me tomorrow. Let the idiots see you not caring what they think. Let them see you with me. It’ll help.”

“Come to the mall with you? Are you high?”

“Marissa is cheating on Austin with Gary Peck. She lets him finger her in the chem lab after school.”

Marissa Mackie and Austin Schnitzler had been a couple since junior high and had been Craig and Nikki’s prime competition for every sweetheart-related yearbook superlative, not to mention my own personal Most Likely to Make You Vomit. Even money had them engaged within a few months of graduation, earlier if the condom broke. “How do you know?”

“Because people tell me things.”

“And why are you telling me?”

“So you’ll trust me.”

“I’ll trust you because you’re spreading gossip—”

“It’s not gossip if it’s true.”

“Okay, so your logic is, I’ll think you’re trustworthy because you’re sharing your best friend’s darkest secret with your worst enemy?”

“Number one, she’s not my best friend. Number two, she has much darker secrets. Number three, you’re seriously underestimating my pool of enemies.”

“God, you really are a bitch, aren’t you?”

Nikki stood. “I told you, I don’t beg. Take it or leave it, your call.”

“You’re absolute crap at being nice, you know that?”

There was something different about her laugh, here, something light and sunny, and it felt good.

“You’ll have to pick me up. I don’t have a license.”

“We’ll take care of that, too.” This time her laugh was more a cackle. “I do love a project.”

I felt that tug of inevitability again, some profound sense that life had come unstuck.

“I have to get back, or my mother will freak,” she said. “But you can stay, if you want. Cut straight through on the other side of the station and your place is only about a mile. I’ll tell your mom you got sick and I gave you a ride home.”

It was less a suggestion than an order. “Nikki—” I didn’t turn to face her. I couldn’t. “Before you go. .”

“Yeah?”

It would be so easy for all those storybook heroes to avoid adventure, to save themselves from the sorry fate of leading an interesting life. Don’t lean over the well; don’t rub the magic lamp. When the voice calls to you from the dark, don’t listen.

Don’t go into the woods.

“What’s the deal with you and Lacey?”

She paused just long enough to make me nervous. “Maybe we were lovers, Hannah.” She lingered on the operative word, opening her jaw so wide I could see her tongue pry the l from the roof of her mouth. “Hot ’n’ heavy lesbo action, and you’re just some pawn in our lovers’ quarrel. Ever think of that?”

It was like she was too lazy to make an actual joke. She might as well have said insert crass bullshit here, and fuck you very much for asking .

“Whatever, Nikki.”

“I’m turning over a new leaf. It’s called, who gives a fuck about the past? The real issue is you and Lacey.”

“And what issue is that?”

“I already told you. She was shitty to you. And for you. It was painful to watch.”

“Who asked you to watch?”

It was the wrong answer. I should have defended Lacey, and then it was too late.

“Why would she let you get so drunk that night, then leave you there on your own? What kind of ‘best friend’ does that?” She squeezed her fingers around the phrase.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“She was shit to you that night, and she’s been shit all along. It’s a power trip for her, you get that, right? Making you think you need her? Poor little Dex, alone and helpless, with big strong Lacey to teach her how life works. You were the only one who couldn’t see it.”

“Fuck you, Nikki.”

“Say I’m wrong. She’s the best friend a girl could have. So where is she? You’re having the worst fucking time of your life, and she abandons you to go throw her panties at Nirvana? You’re lucky, Hannah. She would have ruined you. That’s what she does. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

“Go back to your party, Nikki.”

She left me alone in the woods to think through her bullshit, or ignore it and imagine all the people who must have passed through the station back when the trains still chugged through Battle Creek: businessmen in fedoras or smutty-cheeked coal miners or grinning teenagers riding off to war, everyone on the way to somewhere else, waving at the sorry town rooted in its place, and I did my best to imagine all of it, until it got dark and I got tired of being alone.