Robin Wasserman: Girls on Fire

I know you don’t like him, Dex. It’s cute how you try to fake it, but I see you glaring at his poster, like some jealous boyfriend. Which is ironic. And unnecessary. Because the way I felt when I found Kurt? That’s how it felt when I found you.

THE BOOTS WERE STURDY BLACK leather, rubber heel, yellow-threaded sole, eight eyelets with ragged laces, classic Docs exactly like Lacey’s, except these were mine.

“Really?” I was afraid to touch them. “Not really.”

“Really.” She looked like she’d shot me a bear, slinging it over her shoulder and carrying it single-handedly back to our cave to roast and feed on, and that was how it felt. Like sustenance. “Try them on.”

After two weeks, I knew Lacey well enough not to ask where they’d come from. She was prone to liberation, as she called it, a redistribution of goods to wherever they most wanted to belong. These boots, she said, wanted to belong to me. To Dex.

Here, then, was Dex: frizzy hair chopped short and sprung free, beige streaked with blue, neck ringed by black leather choker, thrift store glasses with Buddy Holly frames, flannel shirts preowned and a size too big layered over checkered baby-doll dresses and scarlet tights and now, perfectly, black combat stomping boots. Dex knew about grunge and Seattle and Kurt and Courtney, and what she didn’t know, she could fake. Dex cut class, drank wine coolers, ignored homework in favor of Lacey-work — studying guitar riffs, deciphering philosophy and poetry; waiting, always waiting, for Lacey to realize her mistake. Hannah Dexter wanted to follow the rules. Never lied to her parents because she had no need. Was afraid of what people thought of her; didn’t want people to think of her, lest they register her big nose, her weak chin, her gut her hips her brows her thighs her chewed nails her flat ass her alternately oozing and flaking and ever-erupting skin. Hannah wanted to be invisible. Dex wanted to be seen. Dex was a rule breaker, a liar, a secret keeper; Dex was wild, or wanted to be. Hannah Dexter had believed in right and wrong, an ordered world of justice. Dex would make her own justice. Lacey would show her how.

It wasn’t transformation, Lacey told me. It was revelation. I was no good at masks, Lacey told me. I wasn’t built for a world that insisted I hide who I really was. I’d been hiding so long I’d forgotten where to look for myself. Lacey would find me, she promised. Ready or not, here I come.

“I know, you’re thinking I’m the most magnanimous person you’ve ever met,” Lacey said as I laced up the boots. “You’re thinking how lucky you are that I deign to share my impeccable taste with you.”

“It’s like I won the friendship sweepstakes,” I said, sarcasm being the safest route to truth. “I fall asleep every night whispering my thanks to the universe.”

This was the first time she’d been to my house. I would happily have postponed it indefinitely, not because there was anything so revealing but because there wasn’t. Our house was lush and half-assed, stuffed with all the leftovers my father’d grown tired of: an unfinished jungle gym, stacks of unframed photos and unread books, unused appliances bought on midnight infomercial whims, unhung “native masks” from an ill-advised sojourn in anthropological sculpting. My mother’s detritus was devoted to self-discipline and improvement, calendars and double-underlined Post-it notes, forgotten to-do lists, meditation and relaxation pamphlets, aerobics videos. Home was two homes in one, bridged by a sea of unclaimed clutter, ashtrays no one had used since my grandfather died, needlepoint throw pillows, tacky souvenirs from trips we barely remembered taking, all of it enclosed by a moat of browning weeds and an eyesore of an overgrown vegetable garden whose inception each of my parents blamed on the other. Beige-and-tan-striped wallpaper, my grandparents’ hand-me-down coffee table layered with Time-Life books, posters of exotic landscapes we’d never seen. Through Lacey’s eyes, I could see the house for what it was: a generic split-level of quiet desperation, ground zero for a family with no particular passion for anything but living as much as possible like the people they saw on TV.

Lacey had told me of quantum incompatibilities, qualities so opposed to each other that the very existence of one eliminated all possibility of the other. I didn’t understand it any better than the other brain-knotting theories she liked to regurgitate, convinced that knowing the universe in all its weird particularity was key to rising above what she called our middlebrow zombie hell , but I could recognize Lacey’s presence in my bedroom as its ultimate illustration, Lacey’s combat boots crushing my turquoise shag carpeting, her eyes alighting briefly on the stuffed turtle I still kept tucked between my pillows, Hannah Dexter’s past and future in a doomed collision, matter and antimatter collapsing into a black hole that would consume us both. Translation: I was pretty sure that once Lacey saw me in my natural habitat, she would disappear.

“Your parents have a liquor cabinet, right?” she said. “Let’s check it out.”

There was no lock on it, of course. There was no question that I could be trusted around my parents’ dusty quantities of brandy, scotch, and cheap wine. Maybe it was the boots that gave me the courage to clomp downstairs and show Lacey the dark crevice behind the abandoned board games and unread Time-Life books where the bottles lived.

“Scotch or rum?” I asked, and hoped it sounded like I knew the difference.

“Little from column A, little from column B.” She showed me how to pour out an inch or two from each bottle, replacing the liquid with water. We mixed a little of everything together in a single glass, then, one at a time, took a foul swig.

“Juice of the gods,” Lacey managed when she’d finished choking.

I swallowed again. It was the good kind of burn.

The carpet in the family room was a harsh orange-and-brown-striped shag that, until Lacey settled onto it, stretching into a snow angel and pronouncing it not bad , I’d found repulsive. Now, with her approval and a boozy, warm buzz, it seemed almost luxurious. I lay beside her, arms stretched till our fingertips touched, and marinated in the juice of the gods and the hot air gushing from the heating vent. The dissonant chords of Lacey’s latest bootleg washed over us, and I tried to hear in it what she did, the foghorn promise of a ship that would carry us both away.

“We should start a club,” Lacey said.

“But clubs are lame.” I said it like a question.

“Exactly!”

“So. .”

“I’m not talking about a chess club, Dex. Or, like, some kind of Let’s read to old people so we can get into college thing. I’m talking a club club. You know, like in books. Tree houses and secret codes and shit.”

“Like in Bridge to Terabithia !”

“Let’s pretend I know what that is and say. . yes.”

“But without someone dying.”

“Yes, Dex, without someone dying. Well. . at least not someone in the club.”

“ Lacey. ”

“Joke! Think blood oath, not blood sacrifice.”

“So what would we do? A club has to do something.”

“Other than sacrifice virgins, you mean.”

“Lacey!”

“Clubs are stupid because they’re not about anything that matters. But ours would be. We’d be. . the ontology club.”

“A club to study the nature of existence?”

“See, Dex, this is why I love you. Think there’s a single other person in this crap town who knows what ontology means?”

“Statistically?”