Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  She finished the story herself, more quickly than usual. “They’d gotten a flat tire on their way to a party, and as you can imagine, they were in quite a mood. All of them making stupid jokes, showing off for me, not even because they cared but because I was the only girl in sight and this, apparently, was their biological imperative.”

  Let that be a lesson to you, kid, my father usually said, but mercifully not this time.

  “All of them but Hannah’s father. He was the quiet one, that’s what I noticed first. That he wasn’t a fool, or at least hadn’t proven himself one yet. Then he noticed I was reading Vonnegut, and he pulled a folded paperback out of his coat pocket. Would you believe what it was?”

  “Same book?” Lacey asked.

  “Same exact book.”

  This was the part of the story I loved best, the part I wanted Lacey to hear: That their meeting had been fated. That there was something special about them after all and, by extension, about me.

  “Well, his friends went off to their party, but Jimmy stayed where he was, somehow talked me into closing early. We spent the night on the roof, talking about Vonnegut and showing each other the constellations, neither of us wanting to admit we were just making them up as we went along. And then, at the perfect moment, sun rising over Battle Creek . . .”

  “He kissed you?” Lacey guessed.

  “You’d think! And, I’ll admit, so did I. But instead he only walked me home, shook my hand, and that was it. I waited two days for him to call. When he didn’t, I took myself over to the bookstore where he worked, and said, ‘You forgot something.’ Then I kissed him.”

  “Nice,” Lacey said, then shot me a look saying, Possible your mom is cool, too?

  “That was when he started calling me Hot Lips,” she added, a detail I found gruesomely embarrassing, but also perfect. “It took me years to train him out of it.”

  “Of course, you can guess why I didn’t call,” my father said, and my ears perked up. This was a coda I’d never heard before.

  My mother lost the dreamy smile. “James.”

  “I was so drunk that by morning I’d forgotten the whole thing,” my father said. “Imagine my surprise when some girl shows up claiming to know me, then kisses me before I can tell her any different. I only called her Hot Lips because I’d forgotten her name!”

  “James,” she said again, over his laughter. Then, just like she’d said to me, but in a very different voice, “Stop showing off.”

  It wasn’t until she said it that I understood it was true.

  My father grinned like he’d gotten away with something, and my mother stood, saying she’d forgotten she had to take a work call. “It was very nice to meet you, Lacey.”

  I waited for my father to follow her out; he didn’t.

  “What about your parents, Lacey?” he said, like he hadn’t noticed the door to the torture chamber had been unlocked and we were all free to slip loose our chains and get the hell out.

  “Don’t you think we’ve had enough interrogation for one day?” I said.

  “Chill out, Dex.” Lacey tapped her nails on the side of her glass, then skimmed a finger around the rim until it whined.

  She never talked to me about her parents, or anything else from the time before we’d met. I didn’t mind. I liked imagining the past, the before-us, as a void, as if there had been no Lacey-before-Dex as much as there’d been no Dex-before-Lacey. I knew she’d grown up in New Jersey, nearish the ocean but not near enough; I knew she had a stepfather she called the Bastard and a father she’d liked better who was, in some vague but permanent way, gone; I knew we were better together than we were alone, and better still than everyone else, and that was enough.

  “My dad took off when I was a kid,” she said. “I haven’t seen him since.”

  “I’m sorry,” my father said. I said nothing, because what could I? “That’s an asshole move.”

  Lacey raised her eyebrows at his word choice, then shrugged. “I’m thinking he’s a pirate. Or a bank robber. Or maybe one of those sixties hippie terrorists who had to go on the run. I could get behind that. Or, you know, he’s your typical deadbeat who chose his dick over his daughter and started up a new family on the other side of town.” She laughed, hard and insistently, and I tried not to wither and die just because she’d said the word dick with my father in the room. “Jesus, your faces! It’s no big deal. My mom’s got herself a shiny new husband and a baby to match. Fresh start, she says—best thing that ever happened to her. Of course, a real fresh start would slice me out of the picture, too, but life’s a compromise, right?”

  I’d figured on the absent father. I knew about the Bastard. But not the baby. She’d never said anything about that.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said again.

  “She just told you it’s no big deal,” I said, because I had to say something.

  “I heard what she said.” He stood up. “How about some hot chocolate? A Jimmy Dexter Special.”

  That was our thing, his and mine, hot chocolate on winter nights with a fingerful of pepper stirred in just for the sake of having a secret ingredient.

  “I’m full.” I hated how much I sounded like my mother, her diet always absenting her from the room whenever chocolate entered the discussion, leaving my father and me another thing to call our own.

  “And I should go,” Lacey said.

  As soon as she did, I wanted to take it back, say yes enthusiastically—Yes, let’s drown ourselves in hot chocolate and gorge ourselves on cookies, whatever you want, whatever will make you stay—partly because she didn’t have a father and I felt evil for even momentarily refusing to share mine, but mostly because she was Lacey, and every time she slipped out of my sight I was worried she’d never reappear.

  My father hugged her good-bye. It was a precise copy of the hugs he gave me, solid and all-consuming. I loved him then, for loving her on my behalf. For being not just the kind of dad who would want to hug Lacey but the kind she would deign to hug back. Still, the next day after school, I suggested we go to the lake instead of back to my place, and the day after that her favorite record store, and that weekend, when she asked about sleeping over, I said, knowing she’d hate it but suspecting she’d be too proud to say so, “Let’s do it at your place instead.”

  THERE ARE THINGS YOU NEED to know,” Lacey said.

  We’d been sitting in the Buick for twenty minutes, engine off, music silenced, house looming at the end of the driveway. I could say something to let her out of this gracefully, but I wanted to see inside.

  She cleared her throat. “The Bastard is . . .”

  “A bastard? Got it.”

  Lacey uncomfortable was a strange sight. I didn’t like it, or at least didn’t want to.

  “I just want to be clear on the fact that I consider everyone in that house an accident of birth and circumstance. Nothing to do with me. Clear?”

  “Clear. As far as I’m concerned, we’re basically orphans, raising ourselves in the wild.”

  She snorted. “If only.” And then, “Let’s do this.”

  But we didn’t, quite, not until she turned the cassette player on again and we listened to one more track, Lacey’s eyes closed and her head tipped back as she disappeared into that place only Kurt could take her. When his screams died out, she pressed stop. “Follow me.”

  Lacey’s split-level was a mirror image of mine, right down to the shitty aluminum siding and single-car garage, two and a half bedrooms and bathroom down the hall, all of it reversed, like the parallel-dimension version of home.

  The house was schizophrenic. Outside was Bastard territory, everything straight lines and sterile surfaces. Precisely trimmed grass, gleaming gutters, an economical distribution of hedges and evenly spaced potted plants. Inside, Loretta land, was wall-to-wall sixties tack, as if an alien had tried to piece together the American homestead by mainlining Nick at Nite. Flowered upholstery was zipped into clear plastic slipcovers; heavy gilt frames showed off motel art o
f lighthouses and dour livestock; a menagerie of china figurines grinned at me from behind beveled glass. There were lace doilies. Lots of doilies. A heavy wooden cross hung over the fireplace, and a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer was propped up on the mantel. Which made it slightly surprising when Lacey’s mother wandered into the room, breath stinking of what, by that point in our friendship, I could recognize as gin.

  Lacey looked like she wanted to unlock the glass cabinet and take a sledgehammer to a few porcelain cats. “God, Mom, did you take a bath in it?”

  Lacey’s mother had long black hair, longer than a mother’s was supposed to be, girlishly flippable and ratted at the ends. She was loaded down with clumpy mascara and cheap gold chains that disappeared into her red camisoled cleavage, and bleary-eyed in a way I would have read as new-baby exhaustion, were it not for the smell.

  “And can you cover that up?” Lacey flicked a hand at the sodden circles around her mother’s nipples. “It’s disgusting.”

  Lacey’s mother pressed a palm to each of the wet spots. It was always unsettling when parents of a certain age produced a new offspring, its existence undeniable evidence of copulation. But Lacey’s mother didn’t need a baby to broadcast her message: This was a woman who had sex.

  “Never get pregnant, girls,” she said. “Motherhood turns you into a freaking cow.”

  “I love you, too,” Lacey said dryly. Then, to me, “Upstairs.”

  “Girls,” her mother said. “Girls! Girls!” It was like the word compelled her as much as we did. “Stay.” The couch squeaked as she settled her weight. “Sit. Keep an old cow company. Tell her what it is to be young and free.”

  “No one forced you to procreate at your age,” Lacey said.

  “The stack of abortion pamphlets you left for me made your position on that very clear, darling.” Then Lacey’s mother threw back her head and laughed, a laugh so uncannily like Lacey’s it was impossible to pretend they weren’t related. “But if it weren’t for little Jamie, I wouldn’t have all this.” Her hands flopped to her sides, lazily taking in the house, maybe the town, the life.

  “You wouldn’t have Big Jamie, either,” Lacey said. “The horror.”

  A boozy stage whisper: “Lacey’s a little jealous of her baby brother.”

  Lacey whispered back, loud. “Lacey can hear you.”

  “That’s the problem with only children,” her mother said. “No matter what you do, they end up as spoiled little bitches.”

  “That’s right, Mom, you spoiled me. That’s my problem.”

  “See?”

  “Upstairs, Dex,” Lacey said. “Now.”

  “Dex?” Her mother’s voice flew to a heavenly register. “You’re the famous Dex?”

  That she had heard of me; that I was known. That I mattered, this was proof. When she told me again to sit, I obeyed.

  Lacey, disgusted; Lacey, reconciled. She sat, too.

  “So, what’s she told you about me?” her mother asked.

  I said nothing, which was true enough.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. I know how it is with you girls. You think it’s your job to hate your mothers.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Lacey said.

  “Didn’t used to be that way, did it, Lace? Kid never wanted to leave my side. Would cry and hang onto my leg if I didn’t take her out with me. So what did I do?”

  “We’re waiting with bated breath,” Lacey said.

  “Took her with me. Every party, every concert. You should’ve seen her, swimming in a Metallica T-shirt, bangs sprayed up to here,” she said, saluting the air a foot over her head. “Even got me backstage a few times. Bouncers couldn’t resist.”

  “Ask her what she did with me then,” Lacey said. “Hard to keep track of a toddler when you’re fucking a roadie.”

  “You shut your mouth,” her mother snapped. Then, summoning a full measure of dignity, “I have never in my life fucked a roadie.”

  “Standards,” Lacey said.

  “She won’t admit it now, but she loved it. How do you think she ended up so musical? It’s in her blood.”

  Lacey snorted. “That trash is hardly music.”

  “How did I raise you to be such a snob?”

  “How did I raise you to get knocked up by Jersey’s biggest dickhead? Somebody call Unsolved Mysteries.”

  If I’d talked to my mother like that, and it was a gargantuan if, I could only assume she’d duct-tape my mouth shut and sell me to the circus. Lacey’s mother, on the other hand, smiled fondly. Mother-daughter bonding, Champlain-style.

  “She was less whiny then,” Lacey’s mother confided. “Didn’t complain when I let her stay up until two A.M., dancing around the apartment. We were good then, weren’t we, Lace?”

  Lacey’s face softened, almost imperceptibly. Maybe she was even about to say yes, acknowledge a sliver of good, but then the front door rattled, a key turned, and both of them went rigid.

  “Shit,” Lacey said.

  “Shit,” her mother agreed. “He’s not supposed to be home this early.”

  Already on her feet, Lacey tossed her mother a pack of gum. “We’ll be upstairs,” she said, and this time she didn’t wait for me to follow.

  I bolted up the stairs after her, behind me a steady murmur—pull it together, pull it together, pull it together—as the front door creaked open, horror-movie-style. Lacey tugged me into her room before I could catch sight of the monster.

  IN THE DARK, IN LACEY’S room, with Kurt’s voice turned up to drown out whatever was happening below. Her in black lacy pajamas, me in my Snoopy T-shirt and Goodwill boxers. Our sleeping bags kissing, head to toe. Voices in the dark. Orphans, alone together.

  “Never?” Lacey said.

  “Never,” I said.

  “Is it killing you?”

  “It’s not like I’m in this huge hurry.”

  “Oh, God, you’re not . . . you’re not waiting for marriage, are you?”

  “I’m just not in a hurry. Plus, it’s not like there’s some guy banging down my door.”

  “But if there was?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Who?”

  “This guy, Lacey. The one who wants to ravish me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, he’s some guy. Who thinks you’re hot.”

  “Do I love him?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Does he love me? Is it his first time, too? Does he think that matters? Is he going to notice how I kind of look pregnant from the side—”

  “You do not look pregnant.”

  “After I eat a lot—”

  “Everyone looks pregnant after they eat a lot.”

  “I’m just saying, what does he think when he sees me naked? And do I know what he’s thinking? Can I read his mind when I look in his eyes? Does he—”

  “Jesus, I don’t know, okay? He’s freaking imaginary. But I get it. You’re holding out for the fairy tale. Candles, flowers, Prince Charming. Et cetera.” She laughed. “It’s not like that, Dex. It’s weird and gross and awesome and messy,” she said, and told me a story about the time some guy’s thing had blown its wad when she popped a zit for him, because guys were weird, and you could never overestimate how much. Blown its wad was hers, along with popped its top, went Old Faithful, and fizzed its whizz, which made very little sense to me. She was a poet of ejaculation.

  “I don’t need a fairy tale. Just . . . something better than your average Battle Creek doofus jerking off in his father’s Oldsmobile. Something better than, like . . .”

  “Nikki and Craig?”

  “Exactly. The most expected people falling into the most expected thing. Like some depressing fairy tale. Boring and the Beast.”

  “People can surprise you, Dex. You never know what kind of wild, kinky sex they might have been having in that Oldsmobile—”

  I cut her off with a pillow to the face, because the last thing I needed to think about was Nikki’s naked body writhing in porno
graphic positions beneath a soon-to-be corpse. “I just think there’s got to be something better out there,” I said.

  “Dex, my friend, for once you have a point.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you’ve, like, made out with people, right?”

  “Obviously.” I had not.

  “What base?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously, Dex. What base?”

  “I’m not having this conversation.”

  “Sure, okay, we don’t have to talk about this. I’m not some kind of sex-crazed lunatic, I can discuss plenty of other things, you know. Politics. Philosophy. Gardening.”

  “Good. Pick one.”

  “So when you’re home, alone, do you ever, I don’t know, dig out that old Kirk Cameron poster I know you keep hidden at the back of your closet—”

  “Do not.”

  “Totally do too, and I bet you stroke his face and stare into those dopey big brown eyes and slide your hand under the covers and—”

  “Lacey! God, shut up!”

  “What, it’s totally normal. Healthy, even.”

  “I’m not listening to you anymore.”

  “You’re a growing woman, with womanly urges—”

  “I hate you.”

  “Oh, you love me.”

  “You wish.”

  “Come on, Dex, I’m sorry, you know you love me, you know you do. Say it. Say it.”

  “I’m not saying it.”

  “You love me you love me you love me you love me.”

  “Lacey, get off me.”

  “Not till you say it.”

  “And then you’ll let go?”

  “Never!”

  I waited her out, testing the words in my head, on my tongue.

  “Fine. I love you. Even though you’re a sex-crazed lunatic.”

  She did not let go.

  I KNEW WITHOUT ASKING THAT I wasn’t supposed to leave the room, but Lacey was asleep and the bathroom was down the hall, and there seemed no harm in following the voices, navigating the dark easily enough in this house that mirrored my own. I knew exactly how far down the stairs I could creep without being seen.