Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was a girl who loved the woods, the cool sweep of browning greens, the canopy of leafy sky. Hidden in the trees, she picked flowers and dug for worms, she recited poems, timing the words to the bounce of her feet in the dirt. In the woods she met a monster, and mistook her for a friend. Into the woods they went, deeper and darker, and carved a sacred ring around a secret place, where the monster dug out pieces of the girl and buried them in the ground so that the girl could never truly leave, and never bear to return.

Once upon a time, another time, there was a girl who screamed in the forest of her dreams and woke up to grasping fingers and dead eyes, more monsters to carry her back home, and this is when the girl realized it was her fate, to live under the rotting bark and the molding stones, that she could escape, but always, somehow, the woods would claim her.

That’s your kind of story, isn’t it, everything tidied up and turned pretty. You wouldn’t like to hear that once upon a time there was a girl who got totally fucked up by what happened to her in the woods, that there was blood and piss and shit and death, that the woods were where the girl turned into a killer and a devil and a witch, and that even the thought of going back, especially to that place, on that night, made bile rise up in her throat and she had to rake her nails down her palm so hard she drew blood just to keep from screaming.

Because you asked, I followed you into the woods.

You put a scratchy tape into the Barbie player and turned Kurt all the way up, and smiled at me like this, too, was a gift. I rolled down the window so I could breathe, and pretended I was doing you a favor by letting you drive.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I said when you parked the car and we took off into the trees.

“You’ll see,” you said, but even then, I knew.

I thought Nikki must have told you the truth after all, because how else would you know about the station, why else would you make me go back?

The station was the same as we’d left it, only more weeds, more rust. You needed me to be strong, and so I was. Your Lacey wouldn’t run away; your Lacey would remember to breathe.

There’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as fate.

But there is justice.

You stopped in front of the boxcar, almost tripping over a rusted bucket brimming with brown rainwater. You rested your hand on a shiny padlock, and in the silence between our breathing, I could hear faint music, and her screams.

“Dex. . what did you do?”

“Just to be clear, this isn’t about what she did to me,” you said. Then you told me what she did to you, and I folded you into me and felt you shaking and wanted her to die. “It’s about what she did to us. That’s what she’s paying for.”

You spun the combination and opened the lock.

Here was Nikki: crouched in a corner, shaky hands splashing light at the shadows, screaming into the noise. Nikki Drummond, a scared animal in the dark.

Here was you: grinning, proud mama showing off your beautiful baby. This scene, this night that you’d made for me, birthed from idea into fact. Hannah Dexter, in the boxcar, with a knife.

“Dex, why is she naked?”

I wasn’t ready to ask you about the knife.

Nikki was on her feet, pressed into a corner, ready to pounce, her body registering something new. Incoherent screaming gave way to words. To: “Lacey.”

She was crying.

“Lacey, get me the fuck out of here, she’s gone fucking crazy, tell her to let me the fuck out .”

You were watching her, not me. You weren’t waiting for me to choose between you; it never occurred to you there was a choice. You believed in us again.

You believed in me again.

“You owe me,” Nikki said. “Look where we are. Look what night it is. You fucking owe me, and you better fucking deal with this.”

It never occurred to Nikki, either — that I might disobey, that I might not choose her, that she might want to say please . If she had, I might have done what she wanted. I’d tasted enough blood in these woods, and maybe Nikki had, too.

I wouldn’t have given her back her clothes. But I might have helped her, because I don’t hurt animals. I might have helped her — if only she hadn’t been so fucking certain that I would.

“Lacey, you have to.”

I closed her back into the dark.

NIKKI’S MOTHER HAD ALWAYS PITIED other mothers. So many of them were less comfortable, less attractive, less skilled at the intricacies of PTA electioneering and bake sale presentation. They were, in a word, less , and it was perhaps no surprise they’d raised lesser daughters. She pitied them all, because they didn’t have Nikki and she did. What good fortune, the other mothers were always saying, that you should get one like her. What a blessing, they would say, which was simply a way of reassuring themselves that they’d done nothing to deserve their inferior offspring as she’d done nothing to deserve her golden child; as if they still believed in an indiscriminate stork dropping bundles on doorsteps at random. Nikki’s mother smiled gracefully at these women, letting them have their delusions. It would be unseemly to correct them, to point out that her daughter was a culmination of good genes and good breeding, and neither of these came down to luck. That she’d worked hard to ensure she had a daughter worthy of her, and raised Nikki to appreciate that hard work and continue it on her behalf. Seventeen years of approximated perfection: hair, skin, teeth, clothes, friends, boys, everything as it should be.

The best of everything, as it should be.

Her daughter couldn’t be blamed for what that boy did in the woods — that was his parents’ cross to bear, and Nikki’s mother hoped they felt suitably guilty for what their second-rate parenting had inflicted on her daughter — but Nikki had endured the episode with dignity, and the small markers of grief, the glossy eyes and the blanching skin, had, if anything, made her even more beautiful. Nikki’s mother had encouraged her, after a suitable time passed, to choose someone else. Life was easier with a solid shoulder to lean on, or seem to, she’d taught her daughter. The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness. I don’t need another boyfriend , Nikki snapped after her mother had urged her once too often. Of course not , Nikki’s mother replied. Need was unseemly; need was itself weakness. The love that you needed was the kind best avoided. No one knew that better than Nikki’s mother. Though, of course, she couldn’t tell her daughter that.

Nikki was doing fine. Nikki was doing great. Nikki, she told herself, standing in the entryway of her daughter’s closet, trying to understand what she’d found there, wasn’t the problem.

It was, she suspected, this Hannah girl, the one who had followed her daughter around all summer like a mangy dog. Hannah Dexter, with her bad genes and worse breeding, her ill-fitting clothing and her abominable hair. It had to be Hannah’s influence that had Nikki acting so erratically. Talking back to her parents. Canceling her dates. Dyeing her hair, of all things, some cheap drugstore purple that had cost Nikki’s mother more than a hundred dollars to dye back to its original color before anyone could see. “She’s not up to your standards,” Nikki’s mother had told her daughter the other night at dinner, and Nikki had actually laughed .

“My standards are fucked,” Nikki had said. Trashy language, trashy sentiments: This was not the daughter Nikki’s mother had raised.