Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I needed it to stop. “If someone did something to me , I don’t see how that’s your problem.”

“What is it? What did she say to you?” Lacey asked.

“Who?”

“You know who. The bitch. Nikki. She told you something about me. That’s what this is.”

“No, Lacey. There’s no conspiracy.”

“Whatever she told you, I can explain.”

It was the wrong thing to say; it was an admission.

“Go ahead. Explain.”

“First tell me what she said.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you think she said? Or, even better, the fucking truth.”

“Language, Dex.” She tried another smile. I didn’t. “It’s complicated.”

Fix this , I willed her. Before you can’t.

“She’s using you to get at me,” Lacey said. “Tell me you see that, at least.”

“Because someone like her would never actually want to be friends with someone like me.”

“It’s not you, it’s her! She uses everybody. It’s how people like Nikki operate.”

“Right. People like Nikki. ”

“Believe whatever you want about me, Dex, but promise me you won’t believe her. She’ll do whatever she can to hurt me.”

“And why is that, Lacey? Why would she go to all that trouble?”

It took me a long time to understand that this expression on her face, the one that made her look like a stranger, was fear. “I can’t tell you.”

“Have you always thought I was this stupid?”

“Can’t you just trust me, Dex? Please?”

That would have been so much easier — and so I did it; I tried.

“I see,” she said, as if she did, and it hurt. “But you can trust her . If it’s between me and her, you pick her.”

I reminded myself it wasn’t her fault that she’d left. That she’d molded me from wet clay, and it was law to honor thy creator. We were Dex and Lacey; we should have been beyond ultimatums. I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t have to trust Nikki. That was the most appealing thing about her: She didn’t ask that of me. She didn’t ask anything.

“It’s stupid to be jealous,” I said.

“Jealous?” She was a wild thing, suddenly. “Jealous of what? Of her ? Of you ? Do you know what a fucking favor I did for you, Dex, turning you into something? If I wanted a charity project, I could have gone and read to old ladies or joined the fucking Peace Corps, but I didn’t. I chose you. And you? You choose the fucking mall ?”

She was the one who’d taught me that words mattered, that words could make worlds, or break them.

“I’m going, Lacey.”

“Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, talking too fast. “The bitch doesn’t matter. You matter, Dex. Me and you, like before. That’s all I want. Just tell me what I should do.”

Tell me what I should do. This was power.

I couldn’t say, Go fuck yourself.

I couldn’t say, Tell me what I should do. Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.

Somewhere below us, the front door opened and closed, hard. A baby screamed, and Lacey’s mother shouted her name in a witch’s howl; it broke the spell.

“I’m going, Lacey,” I said. “I’m done here.”

“Yeah.”

But I didn’t need her permission anymore.

IDIDN’T MEAN FOR IT TO be the end.

Or maybe I did.

She came back to school in head-to-toe black, with a silver pentagram around her neck and a bloody tear painted beneath her eye. We didn’t speak. By lunch, rumor had congealed into fact: Lacey had Satan on speed dial. Lacey had snuck into Mrs. Greer’s room and turned her contraband cross upside down. Lacey had fallen into a trance on the softball field and started speaking in tongues. Lacey drank pig’s blood for breakfast; Lacey kept a bloody rabbit’s foot in her pocket for luck; Lacey had joined a death cult.

“She’s desperate for attention,” Nikki said that night on the phone. “ Your attention, probably. Don’t fall for it.”

Nikki didn’t ask me what I thought Lacey was up to, but she was the only one. People who hadn’t spoken to me since junior high accosted me in the halls, wanting to know whether Lacey really thought she could call Satan’s wrath down upon her enemies, whether I thought she could. I liked it.

My mother asked me, occasionally, why Lacey never came around — it didn’t seem like she was disappointed, more like she thought I was hiding something she needed to know — but I usually mumbled something about being busy and hoped she wouldn’t bring it up again. My father pushed harder, told me that whatever Lacey’d done I could forgive, and I wondered what made him think that she was the one at fault. Or why he couldn’t decide whether we were better off with or without her. I didn’t ask. This was how we conversed, now, my father talking at me while I played a wall. I couldn’t remember why I was so angry with him. Because he’d kept things from me; because he hadn’t fixed things for me; because in some indefinable way he’d taken Lacey from me, which seemed an even greater sin now that she was back. Because he didn’t like the Hannah I’d become, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.

Don’t you miss her, he said, and of course I did, and he was also saying without saying, don’t you miss me, and of course I did that, too. But it was safer like this, to be a wall. To be Hannah. My father, Lacey — neither of them understood why that mattered, staying safe. They didn’t know what it was to wake up on damp ground with a stranger’s boot toeing your flesh, to find words on your skin that named your secret self. They didn’t still, sometimes in the shower, rub themselves raw, imagining ink seeping into their skin, invisible brands leaving permanent marks. They didn’t know what it was not to remember.

It was all mine, the power to tell my story, build myself up again from whatever fairy tale I liked. I liked ordinary. Unexceptional. Safe. A story without dragons, without riddles, without a dark witch in the heart of the woods. A boring story about a girl who turned down the quest, stayed home to watch TV.

Now that I was Hannah again, I stayed in the kitchen after dinners, to help my mother with the dishes. You’re such a comfort to me , she would say, and I would smile my fake smile. We rinsed and rubbed, and I feigned interest in her latest self-improvement strategies, the Post-it note plan for the fridge, the poem-a-day calendar, the challenge of how to persuade herself to spend yet another evening sweating and stretching in time with Jane Fonda. She filled me in on her dull office politics and asked my advice on how to handle the asshole at reception who was always stealing her lunch. Sometimes she complained about my father, though she tried to pretend it wasn’t complaining, just idle speculation: “I wonder if your father likes this job enough to stick with it for a while” or “I wonder if your father will ever get around to cleaning out the gutters like he promised.” She was right about him, and I couldn’t understand why I still had to bite back the only answers that wanted to come: Maybe if you didn’t nag him all the time he wouldn’t hate you so much. Maybe he drinks to drown out the sound of your voice. Maybe you’ve told him he’s a failure so many times that he believes it.

He was drinking less but smoking more. He was happier. He’d stopped complaining about the movie theater, even taken on some extra shifts, mostly at night. I overheard my mother on the phone joking that he was probably having an affair.

That week, over a chicken potpie he’d uncharacteristically cooked from scratch, he said he was thinking about starting up his band again.