Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

I had dinner with my parents that night, frozen chicken fingers with frozen broccoli, which I ate without comment, knowing they could tell something was wrong, sure neither would have the nerve to ask. My father assumed everything was about him, that if he pushed too hard I’d tattle to my mother. As if I cared, anymore, what he’d been doing with Lacey; as if he could be anything to Lacey but a distraction, a horsefly buzzing at a stallion. What we had together was too big for distractions — I finally understood that. He would never understand, and maybe it was a mercy that he would never realize how much he didn’t. My mother, maybe, had a better guess, but she wouldn’t push it, either. I missed her, sometimes, the long-ago mother who was still bold enough to say, Tell me where it hurts , but maybe I’d only imagined her along with the faeries who’d once lived in the hedges and the monsters snoring under my bed.

I should have hated them both, I thought, for failing. Then I should have forgiven them, for trying. But I couldn’t be bothered. They were cardboard cutouts, Peanuts parents wah-wah-wahhing in the background, and I couldn’t feel anything for them anymore. I couldn’t feel anything but hands on my body. Strangers’ fingers. Strangers’ tongues. I couldn’t stop feeling that.

I brought the knife into the woods because I knew it was safe. Because I knew I would never use it the way it was meant to be used — I wasn’t the kind of girl who would do a thing like that. However much I might have wished otherwise.

ISHOWED NIKKI THE KNIFE. I said, “Take off your clothes.”

“Why?”

“You don’t get to ask that anymore.”

“You want to see me naked? Fine. Whatever. I always figured you were a little gay. You and Lacey both, with your perverted little—”

“Shut up. Take off your shirt, take off your pants, and toss them out the door.”

Miraculously, she did. I felt a rush of something — power, euphoria, satisfaction, maybe the simple wonder of speaking a command and seeing the world comply. There was something godlike about it: Let there be obedience, let there be fear.

I watched her strip down to her pink-laced panties. I closed her into the dark, slipped the dead bolt, and listened to her scream. I stood in the night, quiet and still, breathing and listening, palm pressed to the boxcar, picturing her on the other side, alone and naked in the dark with the pig’s blood and the death metal, her screams bouncing off the metal walls until her throat burned. Nikki, helpless and afraid, cringing from things creeping through the dark, holding on until she had no choice but to let go, and break.

Then I pulled myself away and went in search of Lacey, to make my offering.

LACEY SAID WE SHOULD TIE her up, so we tied her up. Or, rather, Lacey did, and I held onto the knife.

Lacey, Lacey, Lacey — she was back. It was hard to concentrate with her name singing through my head. All I wanted to do was cling to her, whisper apologies, make her promise all over again never to let me go.

But first I had to prove myself. So I held the blade steady while Lacey brought Nikki’s pale wrists together behind her back, wrapping them tight with the extra laces she had in her trunk. She had everything in her trunk. The laces were strong, made for combat, and Lacey bound Nikki’s waist and ankles to a rotting old chair she’d found in the station, using more laces and a bunch of leggings. This is a handcuff knot, Lacey said, twisting in elaborate loops, this is a clove hitch and this is a butterfly, and these knots will hold, Lacey said, inexplicably certain, and even if they didn’t, we still had the knife.

Once Nikki was bound up tight, Lacey held out her hand to me, palm up. She didn’t have to ask: I gave her the knife, and only after it was gone did I feel like I’d given up something that mattered.

“I have to pee,” Nikki said, like pulling out a trump card.

Lacey patted her head. “Go for it.”

Nikki spit at her face, and Lacey laughed when she missed. I laughed, too, until the smell hit me, and the flashlight exposed the dark patch spreading across Nikki’s lace panties. I expected her to look pleased that she’d called Lacey’s bluff, but she just looked like a girl who’d peed her pants and was trying not to cry.

I thought about stopping it, then.

A helpless girl, naked, tied to a chair in a dirty train car with satanic scribbles on the wall. Two wild-eyed girls looming over her, one of them holding a butcher knife. I saw it like I was seeing it onscreen, prom queen brought low, soon to have her throat slashed by monsters of her own creation, audience rooting neither for hero nor villain but only for gore. I saw the Hollywood vision but smelled the urine, half a scent away from comforting, and when I did, the girl wasn’t Nikki Drummond but any girl, sorry and afraid, and if I’d been in the audience, I would have wanted her saved.

THIS IS REAL, I THOUGHT. But many things were real. Foggy memories of hands on skin were real. Evidence captured on videotape was real. The swooping lines of black permanent marker I’d scrubbed off my skin, the taste of puke and stranger I’d brushed out of my mouth, the creeping fingers doing exactly as Nikki commanded. Real, real, real.

Surfaces were deceptive. Nikki had taught me that better than anyone. The trappings of evil were for scary movies and school assemblies; the real devil wore pink and smiled with pastel lips. And here, in the dark, we all knew who she was.

“Don’t think we’re going to feel sorry for you,” Lacey said, and she was right.

Real was the hollow space Lacey had left behind, and the lies Nikki had told me in her wake. I’d believed the witch, let her put a curse on Lacey. All those days and weeks she’d spent sleeping in her car. While I was slurping frozen yogurt at the mall and debating whether Aladdin could be fuckable even if he was a cartoon, Lacey had been alone. Because I left her that way; because Nikki had made me.

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

Lacey snorted. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’ve been here for fucking ever!” Nikki shouted. “And I’m thirsty.”

“Idea,” Lacey said brightly. Lacey loved an idea. “Dex, go get that bucket we saw outside.”

I set the bucket before her. It was corroded by what seemed like centuries of rust, filled almost to the brim with brackish rainwater.

Nikki shook her head. “No.”

“You’re thirsty, right?” Knife in hand, Lacey grabbed her hair and yanked her forward, hard enough that she toppled, chair and all, onto her knees, until her lips were nearly on the bucket rim. “Don’t you want a drink?”

“Let go.” It was a whisper. “Please don’t make me.”

“So picky,” Lacey said.

Together, we righted her; she was heavy, but she wasn’t fighting us anymore. That made it easier.

“You realize this is kidnapping, right?” All the trembly vulnerability was gone from her voice, nothing left beneath the flab but hard, pearly bone. “You’re going to be in huge trouble when you let me out of here.”

“You’re not giving us much incentive,” Lacey said.

“What are you going to do, kill me?”

“It’s so cute when you pretend to be fearless.” Lacey turned to me. “Dex thinks you’ll never tell. She thinks you’ll be too piss-scared of what people would think. Look how well she knows you.”

“Better than she knows you. Not as well as I do.”

Lacey closed in. I held the flashlight steady. The beam glinted off the blade.

“I want you to tell her what you did,” Lacey said.

Nikki tried to laugh. “I really don’t think you do.”

“At that stupid party. You tell her what you did, and you apologize.”