Robin Wasserman: Girls on Fire

“No, Hannah,” Nikki said. “You can’t do that.”

But I could, that was the thing of it. I could do anything. It was simple physics, biology: kneel, pick up the knife, carve. I could make my body perform each of those steps, and inanimate objects — floor, knife, skin — would give way to my will. It would be simple, and then it would be done.

And I would have been the one to do it. That was the thing of it, too.

As simply as picking up the knife, I could have walked to the door and kept going. But where would I go, without Lacey, and who would I be when I got there? Lacey thought she knew who I was, deep down, Nikki, too, and I couldn’t see how it was so easy for them to believe there was such a thing, a me without them, a deep down where no one was watching. That I wasn’t just Lacey’s friend, Nikki’s enemy, my father’s daughter; that somewhere, floating in the void, was a real Hannah Dexter, an absolute, with things she could or could not do. As if I was either the girl who would pick up the knife or the girl who would not; the girl who would turn on one or turn on the other, or turn and run. Light is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It’s the act of witnessing that turns nothing into something, collapses possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.

This was collapse.

THEY HAD ALL BEEN GIRLS, once upon a time. If they were afraid now, of their girls, it was only because they remembered what it was like. Girls grew up; girls grew wild. Girls didn’t know themselves and the sharp-toothed needs breeding within, and it was a mother’s job not to let them.

Girls today thought they didn’t need their mothers, thought their mothers didn’t understand, when their mothers understood too well. Girls today didn’t know what it was to march through crowded streets hoisting signs and screaming slogans, to kiss boys off to war, to watch the news and see boys burn, to lie in browning weeds and weave a crown of thorns, to wrinkle and bloat and sag, to watch doors close, life narrow, circumstances harden, to hate the girl you were for the life she chose for you, to want her back. Girls today wanted to believe they were different, that girls like them could never grow up into mothers like these.

They let their girls believe this was true.

They lied to their girls, and taught their girls how to lie to themselves.

Girls today had to be made to believe. Not just in a higher power, a permanent record, someone always watching — girls had to believe that the world was hungry and waited to consume them. They had to believe in depravity and fragility, in longing as a force that acted upon them, a force to be resisted. They had to believe that they were the fairer, the weaker, the vulnerable, that they could only be good girls or bad, and that the choice, once made, could never be revoked. They had to believe in the consequence of incursion. Girls had to believe there were limits on what a girl could be, and that trespass would lead to punishment. They had to believe they could find themselves in a doctor’s office with scalpel and suction, or in an alley with panties at their ankles, or in a plastic bag tossed out with the trash; they had to believe that life was danger, and that it was their own responsibility to stay safe, and that nothing they did could guarantee that they would. If they believed this, they would build fortresses, they would wall themselves in, they would endure.

Girls had to believe in everything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

They told themselves that this was for the girls’ own good. Sometimes they resented the responsibility; sometimes they resented the girls.

Girls today thought they could do anything. Girls burned bright, knew what they wanted, imagined they could take it, and it was glorious and it was terrifying.

They couldn’t remember ever burning so bright.

Or they did remember, and remembering made things worse.

They wanted, for their girls. They wanted for their girls more than they wanted for themselves; this was the sacrifice they’d made. They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true.

They wondered, sometimes, if they’d made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequence of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened to need that couldn’t be satisfied, to pain that couldn’t be felt, to rage that couldn’t be spoken. They wondered most about that girl, a good girl, who’d nonetheless carried herself away to some secret place, taken knife to pale flesh, drawn blood. They wondered about that girl, what she’d known and what she’d discovered, what story she’d been told or told herself that could only end this way, with a girl alone in the dark, with a knife, in the woods.

THREE GIRLS WENT INTO THE woods; two came out.

It sounds like the start of a joke, or a riddle. But it was only, would ever after be, the rest of our life.

WE THOUGHT ABOUT DUMPING THE body in the lake. It would have been comforting, having it gone, bloated and rotting in the deep. But imagine if they’d dredged the lake or some unlucky fisherman had dragged a corpse to shore.

It had to look like a suicide. And, after all, one of us knew how that was done.

We wiped the prints off the knife. We curled her fingers around it and untied the corpse. The deepest of cuts ran from her wrist nearly to her elbow, down the road, not across the tracks . As for the shallower cuts, the bloody slashes that bounced up and down her forearms, they would be read as hesitation cuts, we hoped, aborted attempts by a girl new to pain. We burned our bloody clothes; we erased the night.

The pieces fit. It was one year after her boyfriend had given himself to the woods. The note beside her body was written in her own hand.

I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Never again. This time I mean it.

The girl was troubled; the girl was trouble. As all girls were troubled, as all girls were trouble. They wanted to believe it, and so they did.

SOMETIMES WE WAKE UP SCREAMING. Sometimes we swallow our cries and lie alone, staring at the ceiling, reminding ourselves that we were all innocent, and we were all to blame, and that included Nikki Drummond.

We never say her name.

WHILE WE WERE ARRANGING THE body and wiping fingerprints off the knife, the pope was busy pardoning Galileo. We were unimpressed. We doubted that the maggoty dust of Galileo’s four-hundred-year-old corpse much cared that the church had finally gotten a clue. But we tried to celebrate the triumph of reason, ventured into an empty field where we could see the stars, passed a bottle of wine back and forth, scanned the sky for the rings of Saturn and listened to the Indigo Girls sing his elegy. The night was hollow and cold, the grass damp. Wine no longer made us pleasantly blurry, no matter how much we drank.