Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

We had yet another assembly, of course. This time, Principal Portnoy warned us that it was a matter of our souls. He called Barbara Fuller to the stage—“concerned parent,” though her kid was six — who in turn introduced the great Dr. Isabelle Ford herself, national devil-worship expert, renowned pamphleteer. Probably got her PhD in bullshit, Lacey would have said if she’d been next to me in the back row rather than hiding out by the Dumpsters with her new friends and a joint. Ford and Fuller acted out a skit in which the doctor invited Mrs. Fuller to a coven. Satanism was contagious, they warned, and the eyes of the audience turned to me. “Just say no,” the doctor reminded us. Nancy Reagan’s magic bullet; it was all they knew, and for all they knew, it worked.

IT WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE Halloween when Nikki cornered me in the bathroom and suggested we cut school. The Ides of October. I should have been more careful.

“I’m desperately craving a movie,” she said.

“Pretty sure the only thing playing during the day is The Mighty Ducks , Nikki.”

“I’ll endure,” she said, and because I had several free coupons tucked into my wallet and those days my father mostly worked nights, I went for it.

It wasn’t until the lights went up — on a movie that managed to kill my enervated crush on Emilio Estevez for good — that I saw them. I’d noticed their silhouettes in the front row, but hadn’t recognized them, his boxy and hers elfin, the two of them bent together in conversation, her shoulders bouncing with laughter. The credits unspooled. They stood up. They turned around.

It was like walking in on a scene from your own life and realizing the details weren’t anything like what you remembered — the seats blue instead of red, the floor sticky with nacho cheese instead of soda, the father older and balder, the girl wearing the wrong face. My father, with the wrong daughter. My father, with a beer in one hand and Lacey in the other.

“Dex,” Lacey said, then stopped.

There was a tugging on my arm. I remembered Nikki. Remembered that my legs could move, that I could carry myself away, and so I did, running, not listening to the thud of boots as she came after me or the absence where he didn’t, running flat out until I got to Nikki’s car, pressed myself against it, home base, all safe, cool metal holding me up, and then somehow I was inside the car and we were driving away.

“God, she is disgusting,” Nikki said. “What is wrong with her? And him! I mean, God.”

I made some kind of noise, something squeaky and mouse-like. Most of me was still back there with them in the dark.

“I’m getting you drunk,” Nikki said.

“I don’t drink,” I said, because I didn’t, not anymore — it wasn’t safe. Then I remembered that nothing was safe and so what the fuck was the difference.

We went to the train station.

We went to the train station and got drunk off the wine coolers that Nikki had in her trunk, tucked beside her father’s video camera, which those days she rarely left home without. We sat on the edge of the tracks and guzzled the wine coolers, letting the ground go wobbly beneath our feet and the world turn fuzzy at its corners. We didn’t talk about what my father was doing with Lacey or what Lacey was doing with my father.

I did not think about what they had done when I left, whether they’d parted ways or whether they’d sat down together, were still together, talking about me and what made me so difficult to love. Whether Lacey put her hand over his and assured him he was still a good father; whether my father rubbed her back in slow circles, like he did when I was little and needed to be sick, promising her that everything would be all right, he would always love her, his special girl.

I was sick, straight down into the tracks, which had surely seen worse.

“Gross,” Nikki said, and by then we were drunk enough that all we could do was laugh.

We were drunk enough to set up the camera and put on a show.

This time, Nikki played herself. She let me be Craig.

“I killed you.” She slung an arm around me, her breath hot on my neck. “And now you’re back to haunt me, and I can’t blame you, because I fucking killed you.”

“I did it to myself,” I said, because whatever she thought she’d done, it was physics that sealed the deal: cause and effect, finger on trigger, trigger on bullet, bullet on skull.

“You could never do anything yourself. You made me do it all for you so you could blame me, and now I get to blame myself, thanks a fucking lot, and that’s why I hate you. I always fucking hated you.”

“I loved you,” I said, and she kissed me, and we were slippery and wine-tongued together, and she tasted sweet, and before I could wrap my muddy head around it or touch my palm to her neck or feel her fingers scrape against the fuzz at the back of mine, it was over.

Nikki was beautiful. Nikki had always been beautiful. I’d always known that, but I tried to know it differently now, to take in the specifics of her long eyelashes and the silk of her hair, the pull of her shirt against her skin and the expanses where pale flesh peeked through, soft and warm. I asked myself if I wanted more, if this was, finally, the shape of me.

“You can never tell anyone,” Nikki said softly.

“We were acting. It was no big deal.” It didn’t count when you were playing let’s pretend; nothing counted when you were drunk.

“Not the fucking kiss. I mean what I said. That I killed him. This is the secret place. No one can know what happens here.”

“You didn’t kill him, Nikki. You know that, right? Unless you came here with him and pulled the trigger. Did you do that?”

“I did not pull the trigger. I did not do that. I did not.”

“Then you didn’t kill him. Say it.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

There wouldn’t be another moment, not like this. “What happened here, Nikki? What happened to him?”

I’d never asked her so directly before, and I thought she’d be angry, or at least surprised, but she only looked bored. “Everyone knows what happened, Hannah. Old news. Bang bang, you’re dead, et cetera. Next question.”

“Why, then?” Which was, of course, the same question. The only question.

She shrugged, elaborately.

“Then why blame yourself?”

“Who the fuck knows, Hannah? Why does anyone blame themselves for anything? Oh, wait — I forgot who I was talking to.” She tossed back her head and laughed out a cloud of spittle and fumes.

I punched her. It could be this way between us, today, after what we’d seen. No walls. “What?”

She choked on the words, but I was patient. I waited.

“You. You , of all people. Telling me I’m not responsible for what someone else does.”

“You’re not.”

She seized my shoulders. “Real talk, Hannah?”

“Okay.” I thought she might kiss me again. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t not want it, either.

“Kettle, meet black pot. Or, I mean, you’re like the kettle calling the pot— Wait.”

I giggled. “You’re drunk, Nikki.”

“ You’re drunk.” Which was what a drunk would say, and also true.

“It’s pot calling the kettle black.”

“Yes! That! You! You. ” She poked me hard, just above my left nipple. “How about you take responsibility? Lacey’s got you so fucking brainwashed, poor little Dex, can’t do anything on her own, needs big bad Lacey to protect her. You ever ask yourself why she’d bother with you if you were that pathetic? Where’s the fun in that? What’s fun is fooling someone who’s strong into forgetting that she is. And it must have been so fucking easy for her. You want to forget. You’re begging for it.”