Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I took a long drag on the Winston. “It’s not what people think, pentagrams and blood sacrifice and all that. As religions go, satanism makes a lot of sense.”

“Translation: You’re desperate for attention.” He tossed the butt and ground it out with his heel. “Teenagers.”

I liked that he was so sure there could be nothing to it, that I was harmless.

We stayed on the fringes of the day, early matinees or midweek midnight showings that no one bothered to see, and I made sure never to approach him in the presence of witnesses. It didn’t even faze me, the morning I spotted Nikki slumped in the back row. She didn’t see anything; your father was shuffling paperwork and I was half napping through The Last of the Mohicans . Even if she had noticed me, there was nothing to see. So I didn’t tell him about it, and I didn’t stop. I thought we were safe. Too bad I wasn’t the witch they all thought I was, or I would have known better.

He made me mixtapes from old eight-tracks and tried to convince me that the Doors were rebels. A mixtape’s the best kind of love letter, everyone knows that, and I think maybe he loved me a little, or at least he loved who he got to be when he was with me — the old Jimmy Dexter, the one who still had all his hair. He told me all about his band: the time they got fifty bucks to play a wedding, then got so wasted on free wine he puked on the bride’s shoes; the time they came this close to a record deal but lost out because the bass guitarist got drafted; the many times he’d retreated into his parents’ garage with his guitar and tuned out all of existence except the strings, the chords, the music, the joy. I told him he should start it up again, or at least duck into the garage once in a while and turn up the volume on his life — that was for you, Dex. Because music, that’s one place where your father’s more like me than like you; it’s blood and guts for him, and living without it is what makes him pathetic. I thought if he could get it back, maybe you could get him back — the him you never knew. That Jimmy died in childbirth, and he never even held it against you.

EVERY DAY, I WATCHED YOU pant after Nikki. Every day, I watched out for you, waiting for her to make her move. The Halloween decorations came out and forgetting the woods got harder every day and I knew Nikki would be feeling the same jitters, that she’d be feeling the bad things coming and would do anything to stave them off, especially if it meant hurting me. She knew how to hurt me.

We had made our sacred promise, Nikki and I. We had sworn our blood oath. Confessions swallowed, guilt strangled, sins buried in salted ground. We played our games and waged our proxy wars. We bloodied you in the crossfire.

But we had promised. To leave death in the woods, and to forget.

The Spanish Inquisitors, before they tortured, would lay out their instruments, one cruel blade after another, show you what was to come, and this was considered torture in itself. This was my torture: What she knew. What she might tell you.

What you would do.

OCTOBER WAS A GOOD TIME for witches. Even a town as frightened of the devil as ours went all out for Halloween. As soon as the sun set on Labor Day, Battle Creek embraced its dark side. Fanged pumpkins grinned from porches, pulpy gap-toothed smiles gleamed in windows, the candles at their hollow center casting every night in brimstone glow. Pale-faced cardboard vampires dangled from lampposts, at least until the raccoons got to them. You’d find them mangled in the street, dappled with rabid blood.

Halloween had been my favorite holiday when I was a little kid. The candy, the masks, the opportunity to disappear into someone else, if only for a night. The possibility that the world held just a little bit of magic, that any door could be a passageway to wonders. That a child could slip into the dark and never be seen again. Things changed once I figured out monsters were real. Battle Creek Halloween wasn’t for the weak: The hours between sundown and sunrise were anarchic, roving gangs of teenagers set free from the bounds of civility giving in to their inner brutes. Rotten eggs flew; toilet paper soared; mailboxes burned and cats screamed. November first’s crime blotter always overflowed its page: trespassing, vandalism, guns fired into the night, houses and people entered without permission, and those were just the sins that someone had bothered to report.

It had never seemed like a coincidence that Craig Ellison killed himself on Halloween. He’d retreated to a haunted sanctum; its ghosts had claimed him. So maybe it wasn’t just Lacey who made October feel like an avalanche, the days rushing all of us toward cliff’s edge. Maybe it was the memory of Halloweens past, the glow of pulpy teeth, the haunted Ellisons shuffling through town pale and gaunt as the season crept closer to the anniversary of their nightmare. Even the sticky, hot weather that refused to turn felt like a warning: Bad things were on their way.

Small wonder that, as one golden girl after another dropped, the town went fucking nuts. The thing had a momentum all its own. Girls I was certain Lacey had never met, girls mousier and twitchier than even I’d been in the days before Lacey, fled to the nurse and eventually the newspaper, having woken to discover a suspiciously shaped rash or strange streaks sparking across their vision. Diagnosis: Satan. Three girls struck simultaneously with laryngitis attributed their silence to Lacey’s dark powers — until it turned out the student council president had given all three of them a key to the student council office, along with gonorrhea of the throat. A third-string goalie insisted Lacey had offered him a blow job in the woods and, in a devilish bait and switch, dragged him to a satanic coven instead. He made it all the way to the local news, spinning a tale of whirling dervishes, bloodletting, face painting, and an orgy in which he wasn’t allowed to take part, that last seeming to be his main complaint. Finally, Battle Creek could put name to its enemy. There was finally something to fight, and fighting was crucial, for if someone didn’t do something soon, it was said, surely it was only a matter of time before another Craig.

We didn’t actually believe it, of course. We believed it without believing it; we made a joke of it, and the joke made it easier to be afraid. We wanted to be scared, like a kid hiding under the covers, screaming, waiting for Daddy to come in and banish the monster — because it was an excuse to stay awake, because it was fun to scream, because it felt good to have a father strong and sure rest a hand on your forehead, because the closet was deep and shadowed and, in the end, who knew what might be hiding in the dark. We didn’t believe it, but we wanted to; we believed it, but we made ourselves laugh it away. It was a joke on Lacey, letting her believe we believed it, a nasty joke on her and on the grown-ups, who didn’t understand the nuances of such belief, who saw black lipstick and pentagram tattoos and fainting girls and were convinced.

I say we , but of course I mean they . After Lacey, I couldn’t go back to being one of them. I couldn’t believe, or let her suspect I did. I could only wonder. Had she lost it so thoroughly — or was it all a show, maybe even for my benefit? To what end, I couldn’t imagine, didn’t want to.

“This is what she does,” Nikki told me, and while she didn’t sound frightened, she didn’t sound entirely unfazed, either. “She plays games. She stirs shit up. Notice how she’s only careless with other people. So that, when the time comes, they’re the ones who get hurt. But you know that. Don’t you?”