Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“Lacey’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about her.”

“That’s patently false. Maybe I should call her mother—”

“No!”

“Well, if you won’t talk to her. .”

“She’s worshipping the devil, Mother .” I couldn’t remember when I’d last said that word because I needed it, because it meant home. “Any other mother in this town would be taking me in for an exorcism or something, just in case.”

“Aren’t you fortunate, then, that I’m not every other mother?”

“Yeah, I won the lottery.”

“I hope this isn’t really you, Hannah. It’s fine, to put on this little show for me. I understand. But I hope it isn’t you.” She didn’t sound angry, and that somehow made it worse when she gave me what I asked for and left me alone.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM KURT: It can be a good thing, people thinking you’re bad. When Kurt’s neighbors worried they were living next to the devil, Kurt strung up a voodoo doll on a noose and hung it in the window for them to see.

I’m not what you think I am , Kurt says. I’m worse.

I won’t tell you what I did that first night, after I sent you inside to your happy family: how empty the car felt on the drive home, how I had to turn off the music and endure the quiet you left behind in case, if I listened hard enough, the night could tell me what to do.

IDIDN’T SLEEP MUCH, NOT ANYMORE. The dreams came for me, came even when I hid under the covers and tried to stay awake. A ring of clasped hands around the bed, singing their love for Jesus; the nightmare girls closing in, fingers like spiders, creepy-crawling across bare skin. I was always naked. I never struggled, in the dream. I went stiff, corpse-like, made myself into dead weight. They chanted about Christ and I chanted to myself, light as a feather stiff as a board light as a feather stiff as a board , magic words from a time when we were all little pagans summoning ghosts.

They carried me away into the night, into the woods. Down the dark path, where the bad things live. They tore out my beating heart, their jaws sticky with my blood, and buried it in wet ground. They knew my secret self, the scarecrow-Lacey built of twigs and mud and bark, the Lacey who was made of forest and would someday be summoned home.

SO, FUCK YOU. THAT’S WHAT I thought. Fuck you and your new bitch friend, and don’t think I’ll be waiting around to mop up the blood when a certain treasonous sociopath stabs you in the back. I could have forgiven you for lying to me — maybe, even, for assuming I was so stupid that I wouldn’t clue in to what happened at that party, or at least what people said happened, that the rumors wouldn’t trickle down to me and that I couldn’t understand all the things you must have been, sad and scared and humiliated and angry at yourself for whatever you’d done and whatever’d been done to you and angry at me for letting it. I could have told you about the things hiding inside you, about the secrets I kept for you, the wild you didn’t want to know; I could have held you and remembered with you, and together we would have sworn our revenge and pledged that no one else mattered, that words were only words even when they said whore and slut and trash , that we could endure anything if we did so as us . That’s what was hard to forgive, Dex. That you forgot how much you needed me. And apparently the other side of the equation never even occurred to you.

So I was angry, and maybe, when I ambushed your father at the movie theater, I was looking for a little vengeance, thinking I could go through with it, could shimmy over in my leather cutoffs and fishnets, let him think it was his idea, make him beg for it, crook a finger into his collar, tug him into the projection room, slide his hand down my shorts, let his fingers root around, get good and wet, lick myself off him, lick him up and down in all his flabby glory, rub his hairy back and tug those sagging balls, let him bend me over a desk or shove me up against a wall, fumble with his belt buckle, whip it out, then slip it in, both of us panting and crying and trying not to scream your name.

In his defense, he wasn’t happy to see me.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” He looked over his shoulder as he said it, like someone would wander into the manager’s office to catch us, even though the building was empty, no one but us and a couple blue-hairs who had nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon than lose themselves in a movie before slinking home to count the minutes till death.

“Hi, Lacey,” I said. “So great to see you again after all this time, Lacey. How did the whole getting-tossed-out-of-the-house-and-sent-away-by-a-crazy-bastard thing work out for you, Lacey?”

“Hi, Lacey.” We were past nicknames; this time, only real words, only truth.

“Hi, Jimmy.”

“How about you call me Mr. Dexter.”

“We wouldn’t want to be inappropriate.”

I could tell from his twitchy face that he felt guilty, not just about the night he let me kiss him and then threw me out on the street, but also about the fact that he’d kept all of it a secret. I guessed, even before he confessed it, that he felt like shit for shutting his mouth and letting you mope around the house like your dog had gotten chomped up by the lawn mower. He was a liar and a coward, and he’d convinced himself you were better off without me, and once he figured out his mistake it was too late to say anything without revealing himself as a pussy. And here’s something to feel good about, Dex: The last thing your father ever wanted to do was that. Every little girl’s daddy is a superhero, isn’t that right?

“You got your small talk, Lacey. You can go now.”

“Please, can we talk for a second? For real?” I let him hear some keening underneath, the dog whistle of desperation. Men are men, Dex, all of them. “Please, Mr. Dexter.”

That got him.

I put on a good show. Begged him to make you give me another chance, remember how good I was for you. To do whatever it is that good fathers do to guide their daughters down the righteous path, to guide you back to me.

“I’m sorry, Lacey,” he said, and sounded it. “Dex is a big girl now. She picks her own friends.”

It was him calling you Dex that did it, like even if he couldn’t come right out and admit it, he was rooting for us, and the part of you that belonged to me.

Men are predictable. He hugged me. It was a dad hug, and don’t think I don’t know what that feels like. To feel so small, so safe, to feel a warm body and steady breathing and accept it as an end in itself, not an offer or a promise or a debt. I got snot on his shirt, and neither of us cared, and nothing twitched below his waist. It was a caesura, like the silence before a hidden track, a dark to hide in. The good kind of dark.

“Let’s watch a movie,” he said when we let go.

“Don’t you have to work?”

He shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

We slipped into the theater midway through Sneakers and watched Robert Redford save the day, then ventured out to the alley and shared a cigarette, and it would have been that easy, just the way I’d wanted it, except I didn’t want it anymore, didn’t want him for the purpose of hurting you, didn’t want him at all.

Wanted you.

Missed you .

Took what I could get.

THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR me in the house anymore. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and while I was gone James Jr. filled up the empty space. Little baby, big lungs. Lots of blue plastic crap, bright with stars and monkeys and terrifying clowns. Unwashed bottles, filthy diapers, the smell of lotion and shit, dried trickles of drool and puke, and, of course, the baby himself, the fucking baby, bright-eyed and apple-cheeked and looking at me like he remembered the time I baptized him into the church of Satan and was just waiting till he was old enough to tattle.