Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

Then my hands were tied together and my ankles lashed tight, and I was lying on my back in the mud, homemade Klan masks blotting out the stars. No one could exorcise what was inside me; that I was there, down on the ground beneath them, that they so desperately needed me frightened and weak was proof enough of that.

I made this happen, I thought.

I willed it to life with my words and my deeds, I transformed myself into a dangerous creature, and there was almost power in that, and almost comfort.

“O Lord, we beseech you, help us banish this evil,” one of them intoned. I knew her by voice: Peppy, a beefy cheerleader from Harrisburg who’d been caught blowing her gym teacher and had about as much respect for the Lord as I did. “Devil, be gone !”

“We anoint thee with holy water,” said someone who sounded suspiciously like the Skank.

With a ritualistic solemnity, she raised a plastic cup over my head and dumped warm piss all over my face.

“Amen,” the others chorused. That part had clearly been rehearsed.

The rest they made up as they went along.

ALONE AND NAKED IN THE woods. Curled up against mud and bark, twitching at every whisper and crack of branches. Vision tunneled to the next second, and the one after that. Imagining red eyes in the dark. Waiting for someone to come back. Waiting for dawn.

Flies are drawn to the smell of pee and shit and blood. Mosquitos, too, and squirrels, and rats, and when your hands are tied together, you can’t exactly wave them off. All you can do is scream.

A search party of counselors found me, eventually — it took all night and most of the next day, but then, who knows how hard they bothered to look.

They found me with shit smeared across my forehead and lips, with EVIL written across my breasts in my own dried blood, with stigmata cut into my palms and feet, sliced by the same scissors used to hack off my hair. The next morning, I signed something saying it never happened, and in return Horizons called and told the Bastard I’d turned over a new leaf, that I was shining with the light of the Lord. They sent me home.

I decided: It never happened. I would not allow it to have happened.

It was erased.

Still, everything leaves a stain.

And if there is such a thing as possession, if I really do have the devil in me, now you know who put it there.

YOU GETTING IN, OR WHAT?”

The car was the same; Lacey was different. Her hair had been cropped close to her scalp; from the uneven look of it, she’d done it herself. Her eyes were unlined, her nails flesh-colored. Lacey without makeup looked naked. She’d always been thin, but now she was skinny, almost gaunt, deep hollows carving her face into a skull. Her favorite dress, a blue-and-green-plaid baby doll, hung sack-like, and the leather jacket that had hugged her curves now gave her the look of a kid swimming in her father’s coat. Even her voice sounded alien, maybe because it was nothing like the one I’d been ignoring in my head. That Lacey was reptilian cool. Lacey in the flesh was warm-blooded, sweat beading at her collarbone, fingers twitching against the dash. “Now or never, Dex.”

I got in the car.

“You’re back,” I said.

“I’m back.”

I hugged her, because it seemed the thing to do. She leaned in at the wrong time; our skulls clunked together. “Sorry,” I said.

“Never apologize, remember?”

It had never been awkward between us.

“It’s late,” I said. “I should probably get inside. Maybe we can hang out tomorrow after school or something?”

Her voice flew to a simpering register. “Maybe we can hang out after school? Or something ?” A weary sigh. “I thought I’d trained you better than that.”

“I’m not your dog.” It came out harsher than I meant it — I was the only one who flinched. I saw her see it in my face, the wish that I could take it back. Only then did she smile.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

I didn’t argue. How come you never get to decide anything? Nikki would have asked. But deciding was what Lacey was for.

“I don’t know where,” she said, as if I’d asked. “Anywhere. Everywhere. Like we used to.”

She rolled down the windows, turned up the volume, launched us into the night. Just like old times.

WE WENT TO THE LAKE. Not our lake, but the swampy pond on the east side covered in a layer of algae and golf balls. Lacey had always treated its water as a personal affront.

“Here,” she said, picking her way through the weeds to a rotting dock. There were no streetlights there, no moon behind the thinning summer clouds. Without the radio, there was nothing left to fill the space between us.

“You missed me,” Lacey said.

“Of course I did.”

“You’ve been counting the days until I came home, marking them on the wall in lipstick like a lovesick convict.”

“Not lipstick. Blood.”

“Naturally.”

It was a game we played, narrating the story of me better than I could do it myself.

“I know you too well to ask,” she’d said once. “It would be like asking my elbow, How do you feel? ”

When something’s a part of you, she told me, you just know. But I didn’t; I had to squint through the dark, searching the shadows of her face, and ask. “Where were you?” Whatever the game, I’d lost. “Why come back?”

There was a plunking splash, then another. She’d kicked off her shoes, blue polka-dotted flip-flops we’d lifted from Woolworth’s in the spring. Bare feet settled in my lap. “Don’t you know, Dex?” It was strange to hear her say my name. “I’ll always come back.”

“But where did you go? Why?”

I stopped myself before I could say it: Why did you leave without me? Small victories.

The sound of a car streaking past, then another. That was how long it took her to answer.

“God, Dex, why do you think? The Bastard and his joke of a wife sent me away.”

This was the one possibility that hadn’t occurred to me. That she hadn’t betrayed me. That I had betrayed her all the more by not, somehow, knowing it.

“They told me they didn’t know where you went.”

“Gosh, they lied to you? Shocking.”

“Sent you away where?”

She snorted. “To the kind of place you send wayward daughters. Think of it as a Club Med. With extra Jesus.”

Not Seattle, not New York, not starring in music videos or living on the streets but this . I waited to feel something.

“You’re thinking, Oh, no, Lacey, that’s horrible! If only I had known, I would have come to rescue you. ”

“Was it. . was it bad?”

“Oh, Dex, your face.” She circled my cheeks with her finger and squeezed. “It’s adorable when you do that worried thing with your mouth.”

I’d forgotten the sound of her laugh.

“You think the Bastard has the power to make me suffer? Please. It was a shitty summer camp with brainwashed sheep. Ten minutes and I was running the place.”

“Good. I guess?”

“And you, Dex? What did you do on your summer vacation? Other than miss me desperately?”

I shrugged.

I wanted to tell her everything: the foreclosure party and its fallout, the strangeness of Nikki, the chill at home, my father and me and the space between. At least, I wanted to want to tell her.

“Normal summer,” I said. “You know.”

Lacey scooped up a clump of dirt and tossed it at the lake.

“Forget the past. Let’s talk future. You ready to hear the plan?”

“What plan?”

“You’ve gotten so slow , Dex. We’ll have to work on that. What were we doing back in June when we got so rudely interrupted? What was number one on our agenda?”