Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“I don’t get it,” I said, because the ground was shifting and the air was blurry and my ears buzzed. It was easier to let the words plunk down, drop by drop, no stream of meaning, just disconnected sounds.

“How about Lacey didn’t make you do anything, and I never made you do anything, and you went to that fucking party and took off your fucking clothes and passed the fuck out all on your own, and stop being a fucking victim all the fucking time because it gets. So. Fucking. Tired.”

“Oh.”

I was weaving and spinning, and the heartbeat in my head insisted: Pain, pain, pain.

“Are you going to cry? Hannah? Hannah Banana?” She shook me. “Say something. Don’t cry.” Her lower lip jutted out, and even in a pantomime of a pout, she was still pretty. “You said real talk.”

“ You said real talk.”

“I did? That’s right. I did.” And then she was laughing again, and I was laughing, and we were on our backs looking up at twirling sky, and my brain untethered from my body and spiraled up toward the blue. The day fell away, even Lacey fell away, and I was here, in this moment, with myself, and the ground was wet and the air was warm and everything was exactly enough.

“I forgive you,” I told her. “I forgive everything and everyone. My heart is as big as the world.”

“But not Lacey,” she said.

“Never Lacey,” I said.

“Your turn.”

“My turn what?”

“Your turn real talk,” she said. “Harsh truths. Or truth or dare. Or just dare. Whatever the fuck. Your turn.”

On our backs, staring at the sky, fingers Michelangelo’d toward each other. I’d missed it, that sense of floating away from myself, everything so easy.

“Okay. Dare you to say something true. Really true.”

“I always speak the truth.”

“Lie!” I giggled. “Dirty, filthy lie.”

Nikki sat up. “We can’t all be like you, Hannah, just saying whatever the hell we feel like. No act. No costume. It’s hard to be naked all the time.”

“I am never naked,” I said, mustering my dignity. “Except in the shower. Always in the shower.”

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“What? Showers? How filthy are you?”

“No. I mean being you.”

It was truth-telling day. It was the sacred, truth-telling place, that’s what she’d said. “Shitty. Scary. Hard.”

“That’s what I figured.”

I sat up. Put an arm around her, which was weird, because we never touched, but not so weird, because we’d already made out. “You should try it more often. Naked. People would like you better.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Screw them.”

“Screw them,” she said, and guzzled another wine cooler — one, two, three long gulps and it was gone. I wanted to throw up again just watching her.

“You know what you’re doing, right?” I meant with the booze; I meant with me; I meant with losing Craig and trying not to lose it entirely and holding her shit together so she could be the Nikki Drummond her whole world needed her to be.

She grinned, kissed me on the forehead, a quick graze of lip and, so quick I might have imagined it, darting cat tongue. It was such a Lacey move that for just a second I lost the thread, closed my eyes and imagined the three of us together — Lacey, Nikki, and me — fingers threaded, eyes glazed, love buzzing through us, this sacred place with its dead trains and its ghosts a chaos engine to drive us all into the impossible.

“I always know what I’m doing,” Nikki said, and her voice woke me up.

IHAD TO GO HOME SOMETIME. When I did, my father was waiting up for me. He sat on the porch, mug in his hand, hiding behind his aviators. There was no reflection, in the dark.

“I covered for you with your mother,” he said.

“My hero.”

“Hannah—” He leaned in. “Are you drunk ?”

“Jealous?”

“Given the. . circumstances, I won’t tell your mother, but—”

“But? But what? I should be better behaved?”

“If you want to talk about what you saw today. .”

“No.” I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want him to talk, certainly.

“I can imagine what you thought. But it wasn’t that.”

“Oh, really? What is it you imagine I think? Do I think you’re fucking her?”

“Hannah!”

“Do you think I’ve got that picture in my head? You and her, naked in some shitty motel? Or just doing it in the empty movie theater? Like some dirty old man at a porn movie. Except it’s in 3D?”

“We can talk in the morning, when you’re feeling”—he cleared his throat—“more yourself. But please know, it was nothing like that.”

“Of course it was nothing like that. You’re a fat old man,” I said, thinking, Hurt. Hurt more. “You can’t think you had a chance there.”

“Lacey needed someone to talk to. That’s all. Swear to God.”

I did believe him. Mostly. Almost entirely. He didn’t want to sleep with Lacey; he wanted to father her. He thought that made it better.

I stepped around him. “You don’t get us both.”

“You, uh. . You won’t mention this to your mother, right, kid?”

I’d loved it, once, when he called me that. I couldn’t remember why.

“It never happened,” I said, and he must have thought I meant the day, and not everything before it and everything between us, because he looked relieved.

IDIDN’T WAIT AROUND FOR LACEY to apologize. Never apologize —I remembered that much. I avoided her at school and my father at home. Girls got rashes and dizzy spells. Battle Creek cowered from the devil. October continued apace.

Then, a week before Halloween, the thunderstorm. One last gasp of summer before the snows set in. The thunder sounded its summons, and even though I did not want to miss her, did not want to see her, did not want to want her, I gave in. The night felt unreal, the landscape lashed with wind and water. Like temporarily we’d slipped into another world, where nothing had to count.

I waited until my parents were asleep, stole the car keys, drove to our lake. How surprised she would be, I thought, when she saw that I’d learned to drive without her.

There was no question she would be there. For the storm, for me. There are irresistible forces, but there are no immoveable objects. The storm called; we always answered.

She looked inhuman, spattered with mud, slick and shiny in the headlights, some wild, watery creature of the night.

“You weren’t invited,” she said when I reached her. “You’re not welcome.”

It’s a free country, I could have said, like a little kid, but I knew I was trespassing, that everything ours was actually hers. She’d gotten custody of the wild.

I wasn’t welcome, but when I sat on the dock, she lowered herself beside me. We sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough that low voices could cross the void. Her cheek shimmered. Rain hung on her lashes. She dropped her head, hiding her eyes, exposing the soft, pale slope of her neck and shoulders. The tattoo was a black smear, ballpoint rivulets tracing dark veins down her spine.

I touched the smudge that had once been a star. “Everything about you is a lie.”

She raised her head just enough to show her smile. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Then she rag-dolled down again. “I know what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that with him.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking. Not anymore.”

She only laughed.

“You’ve got to quit with this devil stuff, Lacey.”

“What are you worried about? What are they going to do to me? Drown me in a well? Exorcise me?”