Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

Lacey told me everything. What she’d done — what they’d both done — to Craig Ellison. What they’d done with each other. The ghosts of them in that place. The body they’d left behind in the woods.

It was the body that should have made the difference. Not the thought of them laughing together in the grass; not the reality that they came first, that I was the thing tossed back and forth between them, incidental.

“It doesn’t matter how it started,” Lacey said. “It was only about Nikki in the beginning. Then it was us. Just us .”

Lacey was the reason Nikki had tried so hard to hurt me, but then, that wasn’t news. News was, Lacey belonging to her first.

“I did this for you,” I said, stretching my arms wide, because it wasn’t just the night, the boxcar — it was life. It was Dex .

“Dex, you have to understand—”

“No. I have to. .” I stopped. What did I?

“I have to go outside for a minute,” I said. “I need air.”

I didn’t want air. I wanted sky, stars poking through branches, the space to run at the night, the freedom to flee, even if I wasn’t planning to, and maybe I was.

“What did I tell you?” It was Nikki, thinking she still mattered. “She can’t handle it. You think she’s going out for air ? She’s going straight for the cops. You know she is.”

“No, she’s not,” Lacey said, so sure. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I repeated. They were just sounds.

“You’re fucked and you know it,” Nikki said. “Look around you. All this Satan shit — who’s taking the fall for that? She couldn’t have set you up better if she tried. Maybe she did try, Lacey. Think of that? Let me out of here now and we’ll take care of it.”

“Don’t leave, Dex.”

“She’s going to ruin everything,” Nikki said. “Untie me, and we can deal with it together. Make her see that she should keep her mouth shut.”

“Stop.” I was backing toward the door.

“Don’t leave, Dex,” Lacey said, and she took a step toward me, and she was raising the knife.

“Look at her!” Nikki crowed. “Jesus, Hannah, look at her, she’s actually thinking about it. Killing you to shut you up. She’s psychotic , Hannah. You get it now?”

“Don’t leave,” Lacey said again, and I didn’t leave.

“It’s her or us,” Nikki said, and I didn’t know which us she meant. “Only one person killed Craig, and she’s the one who’s got the most to lose here. Untie me. Untie me and I can protect you.”

“Stop talking!” Lacey slashed the air with the knife. “Stop talking. I need to think!”

The blood on Nikki’s shoulder had dried into a long brown streak, as if she’d tattooed it to remind herself of past wounds.

We were silent. Three of us, waiting.

It was like living inside one of those logic puzzles they gave us in elementary school, a menagerie of animals needing to be ferried across a river in a specific order so no one would be eaten; a sinking hot air balloon with ballast to be tossed overboard, ballast that would keep you aloft, but only if you chose the right thing to sacrifice. Those puzzles were always bloody; failure invited catastrophe, the bloody shreds of a chicken on the riverbank, broken bodies in a cornfield.

Maybe, I thought, we would stand here together until the sun rose. Light would restore sanity, brush away the wild thoughts you only have at night. But the boxcar had no windows; sunrise or not, we would stay in the dark.

Then Lacey spoke. “Nikki’s right. We’ve gone too far. If people knew. .” She tipped the knife toward Nikki. “We can’t trust her. That’s obvious. But you, Dex?” The blade swiveled toward me. “Can I trust you?”

I made some kind of noise that didn’t sound like anything of mine, more animal than human. Animal in pain.

“I trust you to love me, Dex, but you’re a good person. You might think you have some kind of obligation to tell. Unless. .” She nodded. “Yeah.”

I reminded myself to breathe. “Unless what?”

“Unless you had a secret, too.”

Nikki got it before I did. “No. No no no no. Hannah, no .”

“Mutually assured destruction,” Lacey said. “And if we’ve both done something terrible. . we’ll be the same , Dex. We’ll be in it together.”

She offered it to me like a gift — like a promise.

All I had to do was take it.

“We tied her up, Dex. We tied her up and locked her in a fucking train car and tried to drown her. You think she’s not going to tell someone? You think you’re not getting in trouble for this if we let her out of here?”

“We don’t know that.”

“She flat out told us she would.”

“I was bluffing,” Nikki said quickly. “And what I did at the party, and what happened to Craig, I’m fucked if you tell any of it. Mutually assured destruction, right? No one will ever know about this. You have my word.”

Lacey laughed. “What’s that you said before? All promises are void.”

“Hannah, don’t,” Nikki said. “Don’t let her talk you into something you can’t take back.”

Lacey, somehow, was still laughing. “You see that? She’s still trying to turn you against me. That’s what I’m afraid of, Dex. Not getting in trouble. Not what she’ll do to me — what she’ll do to us . She’ll break us again. She will.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Nikki said. “This is what she does , Hannah. She wants you to believe it, that everything is my fault. Nothing is yours. You’re the one who walked away from Lacey. You. Lacey knows you don’t want to see that. She knows you like it better the way she tells it, where you’re not responsible. You don’t like what you saw on that video? Don’t let it happen here. Don’t just lie there and let her fuck us both. Please. ”

Lacey smiled. “See? She can’t help herself. She hates that we have each other.” Lacey wanted me to hear it, because she believed that I believed in us. “This can only end one way, Dex. Take the knife.”

“Take it!” Nikki shouted. “Take it and use it, because if you think she’s ever letting you out of here, you’re as nuts as she is.”

Lacey set it down on the floor between us.

“I said I was sorry. But you have to be sorry, too. Then everything can be like it used to be. Better.”

Better, because there would be nothing between them anymore. Better, because we would have a secret of our own to protect; because we would be indivisible; because we would, finally, be the same.

“You love me, Dex?”

I couldn’t not love her. Even then.

“Then prove it,” she said.

That night we did the mushrooms, after we’d looked into the face of God, after the cows in the field and the boys in the barn, Lacey had spirited me away, had parked the car for the night on the side of a deserted road, deciding, with our minds still reeling and eyes still following invisible angels, that would be safer than driving home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but Lacey said it would be better in the grass, under the stars. It was cold and damp, but we weren’t in a state to care. I curled up on my side, and she pressed her chest to my back and curved an arm around me, holding on. Do I belong to you? she’d whispered into my neck, and I’d said yes, of course, yes. You won’t leave me , she said then, and it was command, and it was request, and it was truth, and it was prayer.

“Don’t make me do this,” I said.

“I won’t make you do anything,” she said, and not enough of me was relieved.

“You pick up that knife, and you do whatever you want with it,” Lacey said then. “Your choice, not mine.”