Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

THE MALL. LACEY AND I never went to the mall, which was thirty minutes down the highway, bedecked with bright red and blue banners over the entrances, like a Renaissance faire sponsored by Macy’s and Toys “R” Us. The mall, Lacey said, was brain death. A lobotomy built of fake brass and linoleum. Drones and plebes embalming themselves with fro-yo, middle-aged creepers buying “neck massagers” at the Sharper Image. Lacey believed in small stores tucked into forgotten spaces: attics, garages, a basement where we probably would have been murdered if the guy’s bong hadn’t set off his smoke detector. The chain stores lining the mall were a colonizing force, Lacey said, infecting the populace with bacteria that would breed and spread. The more people were alike, the more alike they’d want to be. Conformity was a drug, the mall its sidewalk pusher, red-eyed and greasy and promising you there was no harm in just a taste.

At the mall, the fro-yo tasted like vanilla-scented shampoo. At the mall they played instrumental versions of Madonna and girls danced along, using moves they’d gleaned from MTV. There were cookies the size of my head and pretzels with chocolate dipping sauce and cream cheese frosting. There was a carousel in the center, where children screamed in circles and bored fathers pretended to watch. Armored knights guarded the exits, fending off toddlers who clung to their shiny limbs. There was a booth selling “mead” at the food court, and beside it a table of scruffy lacrosse guys smashing pizza into gaping maws—“gross but cute,” said Nikki.

There was a fountain sparkling with coins. I threw in a penny and didn’t wish for Lacey.

I watched Nikki try on long flowered skirts and denim vests, but I refused the pastels she shoved at me. “I don’t care what other people think,” I said. “I dress for myself.”

“I guess it’s just a coincidence, then, that you dress exactly like Lacey. The goth Sweet Valley twins.”

“We wear what we want,” I said. Present tense. Like grammar could shape reality. “Not some kind of”—I dangled a tank top off my finger, its lace threaded with shimmering silver, the delicate sheath suggesting a fragility Nikki might sometimes want to project but never embody—“costume.”

Nikki rolled her eyes, slipped on the tank top, and somehow, with a shift of her shoulders and a calculated tilt of the head, became someone brand-new, sweet as the orange-blossom perfume she’d spritzed on us both.

“Sorry, I forgot — those hideous boots are an expression of your soul. And just happen to also be an expression of Lacey’s soul, and the souls of every other grunge-girl wannabe Mrs. Cobain. One big flannel-covered coincidence.” She’d produced a vintage silver flask at lunch, the kind of beautifully beat-up artifact Lacey would have loved, and added some vodka to her Diet Dr Pepper, which had buzzed her straight into lecture mode. “By this time next year, half of Battle Creek’s going to be walking around in your stupid flannel shirts, I guarantee it.” She thrust one of her discards at me, a sky blue cashmere sweater I could never afford, even if I might someday decide I wanted to wear something that feminine — something that brought out my eyes, as she pointed out. “Everything’s a costume, Hannah. At least be smart enough to know it.”

The sweater was whisper soft, and it fit perfectly. I didn’t have to tilt my head or shift my posture; between the fairy-tale blue and the cherry-pink gloss Nikki had smeared across my lips with her thumb, I looked like a brand-new person, too.

I didn’t remind her to call me Dex, and she didn’t bring up Lacey for the rest of the day. We stuck to safe spaces: the many ways our mothers embarrassed us, which of the Dead Poets Society boys we’d prefer and in what order, whether the incentive of a real-life Patrick Swayze could teach anyone to dance like Jennifer Grey, whether our ninth-grade biology teacher was sleeping with the principal, whether returning to Battle Creek after college and for the rest of agonizing life should count as tragedy or farce.

It was fun. That was the surprise of it, and the shame. We didn’t excavate the truths of the universe or make a political statement; we did nothing daring or difficult. We simply had fun. She was fun.

All day, I waited for the punch line, but there were only L’Oréal counter makeovers and Express denim sales and an hour of hysteria squeezing ourselves into wedding-cake formal dresses, the more rhinestoned, the better. There was a turn in the Sharper Image massage chairs, and a shared pack of chocolate SnackWell’s in the car on the way home. It was inexplicable and impossible, and then, with that weird summer temporal distortion where one day seems like ten and a week is enough to turn any alien addition into the familiar furniture of life, it was routine.

I got to know her house and its ways. I stopped waiting for her agenda to emerge.

We spent most of our days outside, floating the pool on inflatable rafts, letting the sun crisp our backs and splashing water at Benetton, Nikki’s Labrador retriever. That was what I learned best from Nikki that summer: how to float. To stop drowning, she taught me, I only had to stop fighting. I only had to lie back and decide that no dark shapes swam beneath the surface, that nothing with sharp teeth and insatiable hunger was lurking in the fathomless depths. In the world according to Nikki, there were no depths.

I was already empty; Nikki taught me it was safest to stay that way. That if I pretended hard enough nothing was waiting to claim me, nothing ever would.

SHE PLAYED WITH MY HAIR and vetoed chunks of wardrobe; one sticky afternoon she brought me to the elementary school parking lot and taught me how to drive. She still refused to call me Dex. “Your name is Hannah,” she said. “Who lets some stranger give them a new name? It would be one thing if you didn’t like it. But seriously, to decide to be someone new just because some weirdo tells you to?”

I did like my name — that was the thing of it. I’d forgotten that: I hadn’t known there was anything wrong with Hannah until Lacey told me so.

Nikki was too careful to talk about Lacey. Instead she talked around her, let me creep to my own conclusions. “I don’t know why you listen to this shit when you obviously don’t even like it,” she said when I fast-forwarded through one too many Nirvana songs.

“Of course it matters what people think of you,” she said when I told her I didn’t need her help repairing my reputation, that my reputation was irrelevant. “Anyone who tells you different is trying to screw you.”

“Some people can’t help being freaks, so they’ll try to drag you into freakhood with them,” she said, thrusting an armful of hand-me-downs at me. “But you’re different. You’ve got options.”

She talked about herself, and maybe that was the thing that slowly suckered me into trusting her. She was bored, she told me, not just with Battle Creek and her friends and her dysfunctional parents and her perfect brother with his dull college girlfriend and obedient premed life, but with herself, too, with waking up every morning to perform “Nikki Drummond.”

“You have no fucking idea, Hannah,” she said, in the middle of a rant about the girls who assumed themselves adored members of her royal court. “When I say shallow , I don’t mean like a sandbar. I mean like a puddle.”

“ They’re shallow?” I said, with a pointed look at the issue of Seventeen in her lap. She’d just spent the last thirty-seven minutes gaming the “Who’s Your Perfect Beach Boyfriend?” quiz to ensure she scored high enough to match with “Golden God.”