Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

We used the heat while we had it, and that day, Halloween, Nikki and I skipped school and met in the woods, dressed in costume as each other, to fuck with Craig’s mind. She always loved role-play the best, and she made me promise that when Craig showed up after practice — always after practice, because however much he loved her and us and the fleshly pleasures that came with it, he loved the team more — we would keep to our roles religiously, though of course by the time he did, we were too drunk to bother. Maybe if we had, we would have played an entirely different game, and Craig would still be alive, or one of us would be dead.

That day, we’d finished with each other. We were waiting for Craig and making snow angels in the mud, and Nikki was amusing me by itemizing the defects of our peers, one by one, in alphabetical order, just to show she could. Theresa Abbot had a harelip and talked like a cartoon character, and she’d once tattled on Nikki, unforgivably, for smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Scotty Bly would have been cute except for the way he chewed with his mouth open and insisted on letting a worm of a mustache crawl across his upper lip, both of which rendered him unfuckable. I was bored by the time we got to C , but also pleased, because nothing got her hot like talking about people she hated. Maybe you already know that.

We went through Shayna Christopher and Alexandra Caldwell, and then, Dex, we got to you.

“You want to know what’s wrong with Hannah Dexter?” Nikki asked.

“Not particularly.”

Not because I cared about you, Dex, but because I didn’t care at all.

“She’s such a fucking victim,” Nikki said. “It’s like she’s asking you to screw with her.”

“Funny, she’s never asked me.”

“You know what I mean. Where’s the fun in it? It’s like playing kickball with a dead skunk.”

“It makes you smell?”

“Too easy and it makes you smell. Like, yeah, you feel bad for the skunk, but why’d it run into the road in the first place? Like it wanted to get run over, you know? Like that would be easier than just finding a way across and figuring out what the hell to do next.”

“That’s the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard,” I said.

She wasn’t listening. She was on a roll. What does it mean, Dex, that in all the time I’d known her, she’d never mentioned you once? But that day, it’s almost like you were there with us, the future ghosting itself onto the past. “And also! She’s like. . oatmeal.”

“Beige and lumpy?” I said, and then there was some talk of lumpiness that’s better left forgotten.

“No. No! Pudding. Hospital pudding, the kind that comes dry out of a packet and you add water.”

“So she’s pudding. What do you care?”

“I don’t care . I. .”

“What?”

“Give me a second, I’m thinking.”

“Slowly.”

“Fuck you.” She stripped off her shirt, then. It was still warm enough for that. I raised my ass off the ground just enough to shimmy out of my skirt. “Because she doesn’t try , that’s what I hate about her. Because she’s nothing, she’s blah, and fine if that’s what she wants, but she walks around all bitter and sulky that people treat her like she’s nothing—”

“People meaning you.”

“Sure, whatever. Me. Acting like it’s somehow my fault that she’s a loser. Like I’m some kind of fucking witch, and I put a curse on her.”

“Poof!” I zapped her with my magic finger. “You’re pathetic.”

“Abracadabra!” She waved her arms, accidentally or not whacking me in the boob. “You’re a horny toad.”

“All that and she’s a horny toad?”

“No, you’re a toad,” she said. “And I’m horny.”

Every time was like the first time.

Even that last day, when we’d already done everything we could think to do, when we knew how to fit our bodies together and how to slide in a third, when she knew how I tasted and I knew where to rub and when to pause and what would make her wet. It never got old, not married-couple old, because it was always dangerous. Anyone could stumble upon us; animals could attack. There were always new positions, new dares — down on the tracks or rolling on the station floor, dodging the broken glass, finding ants and beetles later in places nothing alive should enter. The illicit charge sparked extra bright when it was just the two of us, because Craig got petulant at the thought of us enjoying things without him. It dented his ego to realize that his dick was superfluous, and while he got off on hearing us describe what it was like — the tidal wave of sensation, the seizing muscles and the curled toes, the Penthouse reality of the full-body shudder — he never really bought it, that it was the same as what he felt, or what we could be made to feel by him. Girls don’t get sex, he always said, not really. It was lucky for us, he said, that we didn’t know what we were missing. Lucky for him, we giggled, when he wasn’t around, and when the wave rippled through, both of us liked to scream.

I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they were bored; maybe I was an escape route; maybe Craig was in love with Nikki and Nikki was in love with me; maybe together the three of us made something, like a poem, like a song, like a band, that was greater than the sum of its parts, and we all wanted to be greater than. I don’t know why I did it, except that life was small and this seemed huge. They needed me, and no one had ever needed me before. You’ve got to remember, Dex, I’d just found Kurt; I’d sworn to myself that I would be different, that I would live like he sang, that I wouldn’t let anything be easy and experience would be my art. I was brand-new, and there’s a reason babies don’t do anything but poop and suck teat and pee in their parents’ faces. They don’t know any better; they can’t help themselves.

THE FIRST TIME, IT WAS almost funny. I couldn’t do it myself. I didn’t trust myself to grip her hair, hold her head under the water without letting go, long enough to break her but not long enough to drown her, so Lacey did it while I held the knife. She thrashed around a bit, or as much as she could all tied up, and when Lacey finally let her up for air she was soaked and shuddering, filthy water streaking down her face. Once she’d gotten in one or two good breaths, before she could even agree to offer her confession or put up any more fight, Lacey shoved her under again, holding tight as her body spasmed.

I held my breath, too, and when my lungs started to hurt, I said, “It’s too long?”

“Trust me,” she said.

This time, when Nikki came up, wet and panting, she was ready to talk. “Whatever the fuck you want, just don’t do that again. Please.”

Sometimes I tried to drown myself in the bathtub — not seriously, just as an experiment, slipping beneath the waterline and staring through it to the cracked ceiling, lips shut tight against the warm water, daring myself to stay down. If I open my mouth, I would think, if I breathe it in. It would be that simple, and it was nothing I hadn’t done by accident a thousand times in a thousand summer pools. But I could never will myself to do it. You can’t ask your body to kill itself. You want it dead, you have to murder it.

“Ready?” Lacey said, and when Nikki nodded, her wet hair stuck to her face and sending rivulets down her bare chest, I pressed record . Lacey crossed her arms and paced, like a TV lawyer, which felt wrong, somehow. We should be sitting quietly in shadow, I thought, our eyes averted, like priests.

Lacey told her to start at the beginning, and so Nikki told us how in sixth grade she’d gotten bored with her then best friend, Lauren, and convinced all the other girls in their group to ice her out for the rest of the year. I remembered this: I had joined the I Hate Lauren club — which never existed as anything more than a membership list circulated to half the class, then left anonymously on Lauren’s desk the next morning, just as the I Hate Hannah list had the year before — not because I did hate Lauren, but because it seemed to have slipped into the zeitgeist that Lauren was hateable, and it was safer to be against than for. She told us about how she’d dared Allie to accuse Mr. Lourd of feeling her up in the computer lab, but when Allie came crawling back to complain about the subsequent mess — Mr. Lourd getting fired, then getting drunk and trying to throw himself in front of a bus, Allie landing in therapy with a guy who actually tried to feel her up — Nikki laughed and claimed she’d never dared her, that Allie was just imagining things, and maybe she should do whatever that therapist wanted because she was clearly losing her mind. It went on and on — the time Sarah Clayborn was arrested for shoplifting because someone had slipped a Calvin Klein scarf into her bag; the day Darren Sykes was roughed up by a couple of thugs from Belmont because someone told them he’d screwed their mascot, and the months Darren spent trying to live down the rumor that he’d fucked a goat; the way Jessica Ames dumped Cash Warner without explanation or opportunity for apology because someone had told her he’d cheated with the sexy-for-a-sub replacement math teacher — so many catastrophes, all of them bearing her devil’s mark but not her fingerprints.