Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“Imagine if we all stopped pretending there was such a thing as getting real ,” Nikki said. “Imagine the fucking relief.”

Real World housemates were required to lock themselves in a closet and spill their secrets into a camera and — miraculously, as if they assumed no one would ever watch — they did.

“Let’s do it,” Nikki said, and I could see it sparking in her, the flare of an idea that demanded action. It was the one thing she and Lacey had in common, and the thing I most envied about them both.

“I’m not telling you my deepest secrets,” I said. “I’m certainly not recording them.”

“No, we won’t be us, we’ll be them,” she said. We would put on a show, play their parts. It would be practice for her future audition tape; it would be fun.

Her father had a video camera and a tripod. Nikki played Becky with her pointy cardboard boobs and then Eric, with his Guido swagger. I took on Andre and his flannel angst, lounging on the leather couch, gazing at the ceiling, all woe is me and why, God, why . “The world is pain,” I said, in my druggy Andre voice, while Nikki manned the camera and cheered me on, “but, like, the music, yeah, when it, like, pours out of me, man, that’s just, you know, that’s like my soul on the wind.”

Nikki laughed. “I thought you were doing Andre, not Lacey.”

Even then, even when it hurt, she was right: It was fun.

ILEARNED TO PRETEND AWAY almost everything, but I couldn’t will September out of existence. Summer ended without my permission. I went back to school — I put on a show.

Nikki and I didn’t associate with each other publicly; this was an unspoken mutual agreement. But she’d taught me how to perform, and I performed for her. Summer was long, but not long enough for people to forget what had happened. They all looked at me too hard, and I knew what they saw: spotty nipples, tiny sprouts of hair, secret stretches of skin. Boys, especially, watched me like they knew my function and were waiting for me to figure it out. I knew how to act like I didn’t care, and if I could be all surface, no depth, then the act would be all that mattered. I would not drown.

It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide. To give up on Dex; to be dull, to live a small, safe life.

I went to school. I went home. I slurped spaghetti with my family and tuned out my mother. Funny how she’d been so concerned with my first transformation but was so content with the second; there were no more speeches advising me against losing myself. Maybe some long-dormant maternal instinct kicked in, and she understood that I’d already lost too much to risk giving more away. I learned how not to look at my father. He kept offering to treat me to a movie; I took him up on it only once, for a midnight showing of Honeymoon in Vegas that had been sold out for weeks and which my mother had given me special dispensation to see, under my father’s guidance of course. Not since Lacey had I been out so late, and I’d missed the quiet of the sleeping town and its stars. My father bought popcorn and settled in beside me, and we sat in silence until the Elvises flew and the credits rolled.

He leaned toward me, awkwardly, like a bad date priming to make his move. “No word from Lacey, kid?” Unlike my mother, my father couldn’t stand Nikki.

I shook my head.

“Huh.” He cleared his throat. “So that’s it.”

It had been twenty-two days since I’d last biked past her house, searching her window for signs of life. “Yep. That’s it.”

He sighed and stretched back, kicking his legs up on the empty seat in front of him. “I love it here, don’t you?”

“My shoes are sticking to the floor.”

“It’s not because of the movie, you know? I dunno — maybe it’s just the dark. Two hours, nothing to do but sit here, let the world settle over you.”

You spend your whole life sitting in the dark doing nothing, I could have said. I’d always assumed he loved his sunglasses for how they made him look, but maybe they just gave him a place to hide.

A week later, having survived another school day and a long stretch of homework in the library — anywhere was better than home — I biked home through twilight drizzle, feeling, in the surge of wind and adrenaline, that this was manageable, these two-hundred-some days to be endured before the rest of my life.

I dropped the bike in the driveway and was about to head inside when the horn blasted. I turned to see a car idling at the curb, its high beams flashing an SOS. The horn sounded again, impatient, and the passenger door swung open. Kurt’s voice scratched at the night.

Lacey was home.

IT TOOK ME MONTHS TO stop thinking about her lips. I liked them smiling, pussy pink and quirked at the corners, but I liked them every way. Pouting. Sucking. Trembling. I told her that the flask made me think of her, spun her some bullshit about flappers and daring girls sucking the marrow out of life, but — truth? I just wanted to see those lips pursed around the silver spout.

That’s the kind of thing that came back to me in all those dead hours staring at Jesus, pretending to pray: things I was meant to have forgotten, Nikki’s lips and Craig’s dead eyes and a canopy of leaves the color of blood and fire. Horizons had no horizon. Some girls got sent home after a couple weeks; others were stuck there for years. Your golden ticket: a letter home saying that Jesus had finally turned the bad seed good. No one knew how you got it. There were demerits and credits and an impenetrable algorithm ranking us on a hierarchy of salvation, but nothing to suggest that surviving one day got you closer to anything but more of the same.

I didn’t think about the future. I refused the past, pink lips and the smell of gunpowder. I thought about you.

My own version of prayer, my own religion. The church of Dex and Lacey. Where the only true sin is faithlessness. I would have faith you could forgive me. I knew I could forgive you anything.

They were big on forgiveness at Horizons. Disclosure of past sins was mandatory, the bigger, the better, so we amped them up. The Screamer’s occasional toke became a drug addiction; the Skank’s ill-advised habit of masturbating to her father’s Soldier of Fortune collection became oedipal lust; even the time Saint Ann kissed some nerd in her church group so he’d help her with her chemistry homework was a gateway to prostitution. The Sodomite’s sins were self-explanatory, and every time she confessed to fantasizing about one of us stripping naked in the outdoor shower, they assigned her to wood-chipper duty and an extra hour of praying away the gay. Imagine if they knew what I’d done in the woods. How good it had felt.

It was fun watching them pretzel-twist themselves trying to forgive our imagined pasts. That was Shawn’s mandate: We were all equal here. We were all, once we’d dipped ourselves in the lake and sworn our fealty to God and country and Shawn, cleansed .

You tell me, Dex, what kind of a bullshit god doesn’t care what you did or who you hurt as long as you say you’re sorry?

Forgiveness for the mistakes of the past, revenge for the trespasses of the present: That was the Horizons way. When you got toilet-toothbrush duty for giving your counselor the finger, or solitary for trying to lubricate your unit with laxatives in the pudding, that wasn’t punishment; it was correction . Curtsy and say thank you, lest you be corrected some more.

It got easier once I found ways to correct myself. Digging into my wrist scar with a paper clip, just a little — that was enough to clear my head. They wanted us fuzzy. Pliable. That’s what the skimpy rations and the middle-of-the-night prayer calls were all about. The hours of verse memorization, the time in the dark place — it was CIA-brand torture. Survival was a matter of maintaining control, staying steady.