Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

Even back when Jesse Gorin was inking pentagrams on his forehead and sacrificing Dumpster rats, it would never have occurred to anyone to believe, even half jokingly, that he’d developed psychic powers. The jocks who’d slung him in a tree were more than willing to believe he worshipped the devil, but no one suggested the devil was returning his calls. Jesse, Mark, Dylan, they were known quantities — as were we all. We’d known one another since preschool, through cooties, boogers, cracking voices, diagnoses. We knew one another like family, by scent and by rote, so wholly that it seemed less knowledge than embodiment. We were a single, self-hating organism. Lacey would always be a foreign body. Capable of anything.

Nikki wouldn’t dignify it with speculation. “Do I think she’s a fucking witch?” I heard her say to Jess Haines, as they were passing by my locker. “Sure. And I think you’re a fucking moron.”

Her mask was slipping, I’d noticed. She wasn’t as good at playing nice as she used to be; the silky smooth exterior had taken on a certain gritty texture. Sometimes I caught spearmint on her breath, her preferred flavor for covering up the smell of her parents’ gin. Lacey — or neuroses and desperate striving — picked off the minions one by one, but Nikki Drummond herself escaped unscathed. People, as they say, began to talk.

This is what they say happened when Nikki caught Lacey outside the orchestra room, just after lunch. That Nikki dared her to do something, then and there, to bring down the wrath of Satan. Prove it. Lacey stood by, silent and impassive, watching her melt down.

“Well?” Nikki said, and they say she seemed on the verge of violence, that there was something off-kilter about her. “Go ahead. Do it. None of this rash shit. No fainting. Just ask your friend the devil to strike me down dead, right here.”

Lacey said nothing.

“Show them all what you are,” Nikki said.

“I know how to hurt you,” Nikki said. “Don’t forget that.”

Then Lacey spoke. And she said this: “ Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. ” It had the sound of memorized scripture. Then, they say, she smiled. “Don’t be so impatient.”

PARENTS WROTE LETTERS AND LEFT messages and raised an alarm, and the school sent Lacey home for inappropriate dress or behavior, and sometimes suspended her, but she always came back, and it would begin again. They tried sending her to the school’s counselor, but rumor had it that she spent the whole session in spooky silence, mouthing hexes and sending him home early for the day with a suspicious migraine. After that, they sent me.

He had no office, so we met in the empty gym, dragging two metal folding chairs beneath one of the baskets. It smelled like shoe polish and boy sweat, while Dr. Gill, pit stains seeping through his pink shirt, smelled vaguely of VapoRub.

“I’m told you’re very close with Lacey Champlain,” he said. He wasn’t extraordinarily ugly, not in a Dickensian way — that would have suited me — but ugly enough, his throat wattled, his gut bulging slightly over a pleather belt, a swell of man boob filling out his plaid shirt. “How do you think she’s doing?”

I shrugged.

“She seems a bit. . disturbed,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Should you be talking to me about other people’s problems? Isn’t that illegal or something?”

“Are there problems of your own that you’d rather discuss? I know this last year’s been somewhat difficult for you. .”

I imagined filling in his pause. Resting my secrets at his feet one by one. Lacey. Nikki. My father. The party. My body. My beast. Without them weighing me down, I worried I might float away.

“Why would you think anything’s been difficult?” I said.

“Your teachers have reported some erratic behavior over the months, and there was that, er, incident in the spring.”

I almost wanted to make him spell it out.

“It’s natural, at your age, to test out new identities. But when a student goes through radical transformations in such a short period of time, well. .”

Well, then, that wouldn’t be natural —that was the implication. You shouldn’t be able to so thoroughly change who you are. Natural was having a shape of your own, not living like Jell-O, conforming to any mold.

“Well, what?” I said.

“Well, then we’d have to start asking whether that student is struggling to draw the boundaries of her personhood, and whether that struggle puts her at risk.”

“I’m not on drugs. I don’t even do drugs.”

“I’m not necessarily talking about drugs. Or sex.”

Dear God, I thought, please never be talking about sex. He was so solid, so fleshy , so thick with decay. It was impossible to imagine the boys I knew someday evolving into this.

“Hannah, has your friend Lacey ever tried to engage you in any. . rituals ?”

“Rituals?”

“Anything that might have seemed, strange? Perhaps something involving animals? Or”—he lowered his voice to a profane, almost hopeful whisper—“children?”

I got it then, the temptation she’d succumbed to. I wanted it. To narrow my eyes, make my voice Lacey cool, and say, Well, there was the time we sacrificed the goats and made the children drink their blood. . does that count? To shove his face into his own prurient appetites and watch him feed.

Nikki had taught me better.

“Nothing like that,” I said. Polite, composed, good-girl Hannah Dexter. As interesting as a bowl of oatmeal. “Can I go back to class?”

HANNAH, HAVE YOU SPOKEN WITH her?” There was maternal concern in the question, but there was also judgment. Once again, in my mother’s eyes, I’d failed.

I shrugged.

“Have you considered it? I don’t know what went on between you—”

“That should be your first clue.”

Usually that would be enough to derail her, start an argument about my attitude, land safely in my room. Not this time.

“The girl is obviously troubled. Regardless of your differences, maybe you owe her a little compassion?”

“Aren’t you the one who forbid me ever to speak to her again?”

“That was in the heat of anger, Hannah. I was worried about you.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m worried about her.”

“Fucking unbelievable.” I said it under my breath, loud enough for her to hear.

“What was that?”

This time, I enunciated. “ Fucking. Unbelievable. ”

“Hannah! Language.”

“I love how when I wanted her around, Lacey was basically the devil. And now, when she’s literally worshipping the devil , you assume that whatever happened between us is my fault. Or, like, forget fault. It’s just whatever I decide to do is the wrong thing. By definition. Is that it?”

“I realize that you prefer to see me as a villain when at all possible.”

I couldn’t stand it, the simpering voice, the affected elocution, every bit of her behavior fake — and that wasn’t even the worst of it. I could have forgiven her fancier-than-thou act if she hadn’t been so bad at it.

“I’m not saying anyone’s at fault here, Hannah. I’m just worried about her. She’s obviously gotten involved in something she shouldn’t have. The things they say. . I’m worried something terrible might happen.”

I could have told her, things didn’t just happen to Lacey. If something terrible happened, it would be because Lacey had willed it to. I could have told her, I was the one things happened to.

She’d caught me downstairs on the couch, watching TV, which these days I could only do when my father wasn’t hovering. Of course she’d positioned herself squarely in front of the screen. I looked away, at the Sears photo framed on the wall, the most prominent picture of me in the house, if that chunky toddler could be considered in any way contiguous with the lumpen, scowling creature I’d grown up to be. She must have had her doubts sometimes, wondered if I was a changeling, if her perky girl who loved tutus and Parcheesi had been snatched away in the night, an angry monster child slipped into her place. I hated the girl in that photo, because I knew how much easier she was to love, all soft skin and smooth edges. How could my parents not want her back?