Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

“How much is that going to mean, Hannah? You going to believe I’m sorry with a knife to my throat?”

The knife wasn’t at her throat.

And then it was.

“Lacey,” I said.

“It’s fine.”

It was fine.

“Tell her,” Lacey said. “Tell me. Let’s hear your confession.”

When Nikki swallowed, her throat bulged against the knife. “You want me to talk, step back,” she said, barely moving her lips. Keeping her head very, very still.

“I want you to talk carefully,” Lacey said.

Nikki swallowed again. “We were just having fun. You remember fun, don’t you, Lacey?”

Lacey kept her gaze on Nikki. “Did you have fun at that party, Dex?”

“No, I did not.” I’d brought along a bottle of my parents’ scotch, for courage, like they said in the movies, and now I took a burning swig. It was cold outside but hot in our boxcar, or I was hot, at least. Fizzing and tingling. Fire licking my throat.

“You let her drink too much,” Lacey said.

“She’s a grown-up.”

“You let her drink too much, and she passed out, and when she did. .”

Nikki didn’t say anything.

I didn’t see Lacey’s hand move, but Nikki moaned. Then, “When she did, we had a little fun, like I said.”

“You took off her clothes.”

“I guess.”

“You let your idiot friends touch her.”

“Yeah.”

“Feel her up.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck her.”

“Lacey—” I said. “Don’t.”

I wanted to know; I didn’t want to know; I couldn’t know.

I drank more.

“ No ,” Nikki said. “I’m not a fucking sociopath. Unlike some people.”

“Just a perv,” Lacey said, “who filmed the whole thing on her daddy’s camera. Tell us how you made them pose her. That’s still assault, you realize that, right? That’s still called rape.”

“Stop,” I said.

“I never touched her,” Nikki said.

“Of course not,” Lacey said. “Not yourself. You don’t get your hands dirty. You just make things happen.”

“Enough,” I said. Too much.

“It was harmless,” Nikki said. “Look, it was stupid, I know. I’m a bitch, I know . But it was harmless.”

That word. That she could say it. Harmless. It erased me from the picture. Without me, there was no one to be harmed.

“She wants to hear you say you’re sorry,” Lacey said. “And I suggest you try to sound like you mean it.”

I never loved anyone the way I loved Lacey that night. She was like a wild thing, a storm in a bottle, so much rage compressed into a tiny black-eyed body and channeled in my defense. It was glorious. Like watching a sunrise, blazing Crayola pinks birthing a new world, meant only for me.

“I’m sorry,” Nikki said, quietly. “And for what it’s worth, that’s actually true. I am sorry, Hannah.”

“Her name is Dex.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Say it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Dex.”

“You buy that, Dex?” She didn’t ask whether it made anything better. What made it better was forcing Nikki to admit what she’d done. And knowing I had the power to make her suffer for it.

I wasn’t supposed to be that kind of person. I was a good girl, and good girls weren’t supposed to take pleasure in pain. But I did, and I found there was no shame in it.

“I wish everyone could hear what kind of person she really was,” I said. “Imagine if they knew.”

“They know,” Lacey said. “They just don’t give a shit.”

But they didn’t know. It wasn’t just Nikki’s parents who were fooled, the gullible teachers and women at her church, the kids on the outer fringes who looked unto her as a god. It was her own: They knew she was a carnivore, but didn’t understand she was a cannibal. They didn’t know how many of their boyfriends she’d screwed, how many of their hearts she’d contrived to break, how many of their secrets she’d handed to me, how many of them she’d hurt just because she was bored, just because she could. There was no leverage in me knowing that — no use in threatening to expose her. She didn’t care about them, wouldn’t care about alienating them and being left alone; that wasn’t what appealed to me about forcing her to confess. It was the prospect of forcing her to do what I wanted. Anything I wanted: Nikki stripped bare, limp and helpless, a marionette under our control.

I knew, when we let her out, that we would be safe. She would keep quiet — not to save herself the embarrassment but to save herself the pity. If I could bend her to my will, force her to speak the words I put in her mouth — if she was powerless, and admitted it — then a part of her would always be powerless. Nikki would never tell anyone what happened here, because if she did, it would mean a part of her never left.

It was my idea first, but Lacey was the one who remembered the Barbie tape recorder, and the stack of cassette tapes, and understood what they could mean. What we did next, we did together.

“You’re going to tell us everything,” Lacey said when we’d trekked back to the car and retrieved the equipment, once Nikki had come down from being left once again to scream and weep alone in the dark. “Everything terrible you’ve done, from start to finish. And maybe we’ll play it for the world to hear, or maybe we’ll just keep it for ourselves, for insurance. You’ll never know.”

“Think of it as a confessional,” I said. “Good practice for your audition tape.”

“Why would I ever do that?” It was almost impressive, this skinny, stripped-down girl pretending at defiance. “Because of your stupid knife? What are you going to do, murder me and bury me in the woods?”

“I’m surprised you think that’s beyond me,” Lacey said, but when Nikki held her gaze, Lacey was the one to look away first.

“I’m not doing it,” Nikki said. “You can keep me here as long as you want, but you can’t make me do anything. You can’t.”

“I don’t know about that.” Lacey toed the bucket of water, then bumped shoulders with me. I’d thought we would never do that again, never be so perfectly in sync that we could speak with our bodies instead of our words. “What is it they say about me at school, Dex? Don’t they think I’m some kind of witch?”

“I’ve heard that,” I said.

“Me, I think Nikki’s the witch.”

“Understandable.”

“I know a lot about witches these days,” Lacey said. “You know how they used to tell if someone was a witch? Back in the bad old days?”

“I do,” I said, and I remember feeling clever, and giddy, and not at all afraid. These were moments without consequence; this was a night that would never end.

“How about it, witch?” Lacey lifted the bucket, nasty water sloshing over her hands. “Let’s see if you float.”

IT WAS THE DAY I woke up and smelled winter. No frost, no snow, nothing so dramatic as all that, but you could feel the cold crouching in the wings. It had been summer all week, and according to the overtanned idiot on TV, winter was blowing across the Midwest, the sparkly cardboard snowflake inching toward us one corn state at a time.

Winter was our ticking clock. What were we supposed to do, fumble at zippers with wool mittens and Velcro gloves, kiss with frozen tongues and watch our excretions turn to ice? As a novelty act, maybe, but unless you’re Dr. Zhivago, frostbite is a turnoff and fucking outside, much less lying on the ground in two feet of snow, high on pot and pheromones and trying to connect with the sublime, is a testicle-shrinking failure waiting to happen. We didn’t have to discuss it to understand the obvious: When the cold came, the thing between us would sheathe its fangs, crawl under a rock, and hibernate the winter away.