Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“Expel you, for one.”

“Ooh, scary.”

“And, I don’t know. What are you going to do if someone really gets hurt?”

“How could anyone getting hurt be my problem? You don’t actually think I’m doing something to them?” Lacey shook herself like a dog. The spray was colder than the rain.

“You know this town, Lacey.”

“And this is your problem how?”

She had me there.

“I’d save your worry for yourself,” Lacey said.

“I’m fine.”

“Something bad is coming.”

“Is that supposed to be a prophecy?” I said. “Or, what? A threat?”

“Dex—” She breathed. Our shoulders rose and fell together. In, out. Slow, steady. Breathe, Dex. Breathe, Lacey. “I want you safe, Dex. That’s all I want.”

Nikki would have said she was jealous. That she needed me to need her, no matter how much it hurt.

“It wasn’t about you, this thing with your dad,” Lacey said. “And the Nikki thing, that’s not about you, either.”

“Yeah, of course, it’s about whatever mysterious secret conspiracy you can’t let me in on. I got that.”

“What’s between me and Nikki. . it’s about Craig.”

“You say that like it means anything. Like I’m supposed to pretend it’s an answer when we both know it’s not.”

I didn’t actually expect it would make her explain herself; nothing could make Lacey do what she didn’t want to.

She said it quietly. “She thinks it’s my fault.”

All the little ways Nikki had tried to turn me against Lacey, the way she’d taken a razor blade, ever so carefully, to my faith in her, shaving it away in impossibly thin slices until there was almost nothing left — all that time, she’d said nothing of this.

Maybe, I thought, it was just another lie. But that wasn’t Lacey’s way. Lacey lied with silence.

“Go ahead.” She sounded ancient with exhaustion, like there was nothing left to do but wait for bones to crumble to dust. “Ask me if it was. My fault.”

I shivered, and wiped the rain from my forehead. The lake water danced, leaping for the clouds.

“It wasn’t all bad, was it, Dex?”

I couldn’t lie in a storm. “None of it was bad.” I took her hand. There was no thought behind it, just bodily need, to press our slippery skin together. To hang on. “Say it, Lacey. Whatever it is. Make it better.” She was the witch, wasn’t she? I willed her: Summon the words.

She squeezed. “Let’s start fresh, Dex. Fuck the past.”

I didn’t see how she could say it when the past was everything. The past was where Dex and Lacey lived. If she erased that, there would be nothing left of us.

“I never tried to hide you away,” Lacey said. “I never kept you a secret.” Somehow we were talking about Nikki again. I didn’t want her there, between us. “People only keep secrets when they’re ashamed.”

“You keep plenty of secrets.”

“But you were never one of them, Dex.”

I couldn’t say it made no difference.

“Miss me?” she asked.

“You’re right here.”

Lacey took my face in her hands. Her fingers were spindlier than I remembered. Everything about Lacey, I realized, had become more angular. Her collarbone jutted out; her shoulders and elbows looked sharp enough to cut.

“You really don’t,” she said, wonder in her voice.

My chest hurt. I couldn’t speak with her fingertips burning against my chin and cheek and lip. When I didn’t correct her, she launched herself off the dock and into the lake.

I screamed her name.

Splashes in the dark. The familiar laugh. Thunder. “Come on in!” she shouted. “The water’s fine.”

“It’s a fucking lightning storm!”

“Still a coward,” she shouted, and disappeared into the black.

Those long seconds of still water and empty night, nothing but rain and lightning and me, and Lacey somewhere beneath; seconds and seconds waiting for her to surface, gasping and laughing and alive.

There was time to wonder: Whether she could be trusted to save herself. Whether I could. Dive into dark water, impenetrable as sky. Weightless, kicking down and down, reaching for something limbed and heavy sinking to muddy bottom. Lacey would fight me, that was Lacey’s way, pull at my hair, climb up my body, so desperate for surface, for air, for life, that she would drag us both down.

I stood at the edge of the dock, heels on the wood, toes hanging over air, willing myself to jump.

The lake was endless dark. And there she was, floating moon of a face. Another game. Now we both knew who had won, because there she was in the water, and here I was on the shore.

Inside the car it was warm and dry, enough so that I was tempted to curl up in the front seat and sleep. Instead I started the engine and left her there, with her water and her storm, knowing the lightning would never dare strike.

SHE GOT IN MY HEAD. That Friday, when Nikki called me to bitch about the sleepover she’d been suckered into throwing, the tedious effort of putting on a happy face for her supposed friends and said, “I’m tired of all this crap, wish you could just come over and watch bad movies,” I broke our unspoken agreement and said, “Well, I could .”

“Could what?”

“Come over. Watch bad movies, or whatever.”

“I told you, I can’t get out of this party.”

She wasn’t so stupid; she was making me spell it out. “No, I mean, I could come to the party.”

“Oh, Hannah, you know you would hate that. Like, actively, puke your guts out. You hate those bitches.”

“So do you.”

“And trust me, if I could run away to your place and let the animals take over the zoo, I would, but my mother would kill me if one of them peed on the carpet.”

I was lying on my bed, watching the ceiling, counting the cracks, trying not to care.

“You remember that pool party this summer,” she said. “A fucking train wreck.”

When I didn’t answer, she added, “And the other party.”

Now we’d both crossed a line.

There were seventy-two cracks, and also a yellowed patch in the corner where something must have been dripping from a hidden pipe. If the ceiling collapsed, I wondered, would it kill me, a blanket of plaster and dust smothering me in the night? Or would I wake up coated in asbestos, wondering why I could see the sky?

“Why aren’t you saying anything, Hannah? Tell me you understand I’m doing you a favor.”

“Sure. Thank you.”

“You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird.”

“Good. Don’t. Now you tell me something. What tells of Hannah Dexter’s excellent adventure?” She affected a Keanu drawl. “Did you have a most awesome week? Or totally bogus?”

“I talked to Lacey.”

There was a hissing on the line. It was the bad connection, but it was too easy to imagine Nikki herself, reverting to snake. She breathed out the word. “Fuck.”

“It was fine.”

“No wonder you’re being so fucking weird. Please tell me you’re not feeling sorry for her.”

“She said something about you and her,” I said, which was almost true. “And Craig.”

The snake uncoiled, struck.

“You talked to Lacey about Craig? You talked to Lacey about Craig ?” She was yelling, and Nikki never yelled. “About what I’ve told you? Things I’ve never told anyone? How could you even think that was okay?”

“I didn’t! I wouldn’t!”

I protested; I swore I would never break her confidence, that Lacey had asked nothing and told even less, that it’s not like I had anything real to tell. I couldn’t ask her, not then, why she would blame Lacey for anything; I could only say I was sorry. She hung up on me.