Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

She threw it at me. “Of course I’m fucking shallow. But I know it, that’s the difference. Like I know that reading Nietzsche doesn’t make you deep.”

She pronounced his name correctly, almost pretentiously, with the same faux German accent Lacey had used.

“Everything is crap,” Nikki said. “It’s the people who don’t get it that tire me — the ones who think anything fucking matters, whether it’s their nail polish color or the meaning of the fucking universe.”

She was buzzed. Nikki, I understood by then, was always just a little buzzed. I’d seen enough Lifetime movies to know this was not a good thing. She talked about having power over people, how it was dull but necessary, because the only other option was letting people have power over you. Sometimes she even talked about Craig.

We did this only when we went to the train station, which we did only when she was in a very particular mood. I didn’t like it there. They hadn’t told her exactly where they’d found the body, she said, whether it was on the tracks or in the old station office or hanging half in and half out of the boxcar, as if he’d tried at the last minute to flee from himself. We might have been sitting on grass that had been flattened by his body and fed with his blood. I didn’t believe in ghosts — even as a child eager to believe in anything, I never had — but I believed in the power of place, and who was to say there wasn’t something about the old station, something so sad about the sound of the wind rattling through its broken windows that it had infected Craig, attuned him to his own pain? It was the kind of place that whispered.

Nikki said it hurt to be there, but that sometimes pain was good.

“I miss him,” she said once, dangling her legs over the tracks, picking at the dirt under her nails. “I didn’t even like him that much, and I fucking miss him. All the time.”

I’d learned not to say I’m sorry , because it only made her mad. “He should be sorry,” she always said. “Plenty of people should be sorry. Not you.”

Once she lay down along the edge with her head in my lap, and said that maybe she was to blame. Her hair was softer than I’d imagined. I brushed her bangs off her forehead, smoothed them back. The roots were coming in, dirt brown. I wondered when her hair had gone so dark, whether it had ever really been the color of the sun, or if that was just how I’d needed to remember it.

“Don’t be a narcissist,” I said. She liked that.

“Do you worry you’ll never love anyone again?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. But then, “I didn’t, though. Love him. I thought I did, and then I knew better.”

“What happened?” I meant, what happened to make her see, but I meant more than that, too. Like everyone, I wanted to know what happened to make him walk into the woods, what made him bring the gun — and, if she didn’t have the answers, I wanted to know how could she stand it, the certainty she never would.

“Did you know that until Allie was seven years old, her mother lied and told her that carob was actually chocolate?” she said. “This poor kid, for years her mother’s shoveling this health food crap in her mouth and calling it chocolate, and she’s wondering why the whole world makes such a big deal out of something so disgusting. And then you know what happened?”

I shook my head.

“Some babysitter didn’t get the memo and brings over some ice cream and a bottle of chocolate syrup. Allie gets one taste and goes fucking nuts. She got up in the middle of the night and drank the whole thing. I think they had to pump her stomach.”

“Moral of the story, don’t lie to your kids?”

“Who the fuck cares what the moral of the story is? The point is, it’s not like she could go back to carob after that, could she? But her mother wasn’t about to let her have chocolate again. She was fucked.”

Nikki wouldn’t say any more, and I was left to use my imagination: What was her chocolate? Some college guy, a friend of her brother’s visiting for the weekend? Something more illicit, perhaps — a teacher? A friend of her father’s? Someone who’d given her a taste of something she couldn’t have again and couldn’t forget. Whoever he was, he was gone: She hadn’t dated anyone seriously since Craig had died, never seemed to evince a moment of interest, though it occurred to me that was her way of punishing herself.

Maybe she knew exactly why he did it; maybe the worst of the rumors were true, that he’d done it for her, because of her. It would be better never to know, I thought, than to know something like that.

Instead, she occupied herself with imaginary boyfriends: Luke Perry, Johnny Depp, and Keanu Reeves, whose future wedding she had already imagined in great detail, right down to what she’d be wearing as his bride — not that he would give a shit, because he clearly didn’t give a shit about anything. Which, Nikki said, was the key to his appeal.

“Not my type,” I admitted, and she shrugged. But imaginary worked for me, too. I’d scrubbed away those words on my skin, but it felt like the ink was in my blood. Never again: I would be a fortress now, impermeable. I contented myself with the Dead Poets boys, sweet and lyrical and easily cowed, and River Phoenix, the kind of boy who would light candles and read you poetry, who would kiss you softly on the lips and then let the night fade to black, who was never angry, only sad, who cared about the earth and refused to eat animals and eschewed drugs and had such lonely eyes.

Then Nikki made me watch My Own Private Idaho , and there was my River alongside her Keanu, the two of them sky-high on heroin and fucking for cash, and so much for that.

“I thought you’d like it,” she said, halfheartedly, not even trying to disguise the fact that she’d done it on purpose, that she knew it would screw with my head and River-besotted heart, and because I knew, and she knew I knew, somehow that made it all right. I could even laugh.

It wasn’t the same, the two of us. There were no midnight dances in the rain, none of those heart-thumping moments when the tide of wildness washed in and I loosed my grip enough to be swept away. But it gave me an excuse to leave the house, and a heated pool.

“Probably I shouldn’t,” Nikki said one afternoon as we paddled our rafts back and forth across the water. I was wearing a new bikini, courtesy of my mother, who was so happy with the new state of Drummond-related affairs — and her own burgeoning acquaintanceship with Nikki’s mother — that she’d been ready to buy out the store. Blood money, I thought, as she passed the credit card to the cashier. My very own thirty pieces of silver, complete with pink stitching and push-up cups. Too bad: I liked how the suit glowed against my tan, and the cloud of chlorine that clung to me through the day, my hair as crispy as my skin.

“Shouldn’t what?”

Nikki liked to start conversations in the middle, after she’d already hashed them out in her mind, which made it difficult to know whether I’d zoned out or she’d only just started speaking.

“Cut my bangs like that girl on The Real World . You know?”

“Not really.”

“You know. Becky. ”

“I don’t have cable.”

She bolted upright. “Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously.”

We spent the rest of that day in her air-conditioned basement watching Real World tapes on her big-screen TV. Nikki had every episode, carefully labeled, and we watched them all, straight through for six hours, until I felt like I, too, was living in a house, having my life taped, no longer being polite but starting to get real. The next day we started again, and the rest of August unspooled to the sounds of Julie’s cackle, Kevin’s rants, Eric’s Jersey-boy bravado, Heather B.’s hip-hop rhyme.