Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  When he stopped coming, I knew he had a good reason. I liked to imagine him on a ship somewhere, the merchant marines or maybe cabin boy on some private yacht, my father swinging through the riggings, shouting Ahoy there! and Land ho!, making his fortune so he could come back for real and take me away.

  Except how would he know to find me in Battle Creek? We were doing fine in Jersey, just the two of us, me doing whatever I wanted and my mother letting me. I gave her the same courtesy, pretending to buy her flexible definition of “waitressing” and ignoring the parade of sad, lonely men, the local car dealers and the drunk tourists. Then along came the Bastard, something wicked this way in a velour suit. The Bastard James Troy, and how ironic is it that your real daddy and my fake one have the same name, like how a double-wide trailer and Buckingham Palace are both called a home.

  My James acted like he was still in the military, even though he’d never actually been in the military, unless you counted getting dishonorably discharged from the reserves after less than six months. Who needed a Purple Heart when you could be a soldier in the army of God, fighting the good fight by phone-banking for the Christian Coalition? The man’s most valuable possession was a framed, signed photo of George Bush. Reagan, even Nixon, maybe I could have respected—but what kind of middle management weenie has a hard-on for George H. W. Bush?

  My James, she called him from the beginning: My James knows how it is, unlike that bitch sponsor always up her ass about the Xanax, as if she didn’t need something to take the edge off without the beer. My James will drive; my James will make dinner; my James says abortion’s a sin—and anyway he’s always wanted to be a daddy and you’ve always wanted to be a big sister and look at the pretty ring.

  People will assume it’s mine, I told her. That you’re mothering your own grandson for propriety’s sake, and she said people knew her better than to believe she did anything for propriety’s sake.

  She thought she was better with him than without him, and maybe it was true, but just because dog food tastes better than dog shit doesn’t mean you want it for dinner. When dog food gets a transfer to corporate headquarters, conveniently located twenty miles past bumblefuck, it doesn’t mean you hitch up the U-Haul and speed into the sunset, listening to Barry Manilow and stopping to pee every twenty minutes because little-bro-to-be is kneeing your bladder.

  No one should move to Battle Creek in the summer. I mean, obviously, no one should move to Battle Creek at all, but some of us had no choice in the matter, and should at least have been excused from arriving in summer, piling out of the shit-paneled van to get a good look at the shit-paneled house and almost spontaneously combusting before we made it halfway up the driveway.

  In the summer, Battle Creek smelled like fried dog shit. No one who lived there seemed to notice, maybe because it’s all you’d ever known. Like the so-called lake covered in so much algae you wouldn’t know there was water under there unless you stepped in it, which not even one of the native morons would do, because God knew what was living in the toxic sludge underneath. Or the public pool with its sick green water, the color of chlorine mixed with pee. But it was between the pool, or the lake, or the 7-Eleven that reeked of those disgusting meat pockets roasting in the heater case—because in the summer, in Battle Creek, there was literally nothing else to do. Unless I wanted to lock myself in the house for two months, and when it came to a house containing the Bastard and his not-technically-a-bastard fetus, agoraphobia was not an option.

  I took to walking. It’s not a walking town, not in any weather and especially not in summer, but it was as good a way as any to mark time. If you’re embedded in enemy territory, it’s safest to know the lay of the land. Not that there was much to know: main street literally called fucking Main Street, the shithole neighborhood to its south and slightly less shithole neighborhood to its north, too many secondhand shops and even more boarded-up storefronts, prison-shaped school and that gas station with the giant hot dog on top. All that walking and I didn’t even notice until I looked at a map that the town is shaped like a gun, with the woods curving out like a trigger.

  It was a wet-blanket-heat day when I came across Nikki in the woods, air tailpipe hot, both of us slouching toward junior year, both of our tops basically see-through, nipples poking at sweat-stained cotton, though she was in no condition to notice. Come September, we’d be in the same class, which made me her subject and her my queen, but I didn’t know it and wouldn’t have cared if I did, and maybe it was that unfathomable glimpse of obscurity that got her attention.

  Nikki Drummond, drunk at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, Battle Creek princess in disgrace. She’d propped herself up against a tree in the swamp, bottle of vodka in her lap, cigarette in her mouth, and only that overdried blond hair—literally brushed a hundred strokes a night, it turns out—clued me in that this was probably, in the sober light of fall, not my kind of people. But fall was two months away, and I was bored, so when Nikki offered me her bottle I sat down beside her and took a slug.

  Would it surprise you to know that I walked in the woods all the time back then? There’s another pretty lie for you, that I was some mythical creature of the water, constitutionally afraid of trees. The woods weren’t just my kind of place, with their shadows and the music of whispers on the breeze; they were my place, this green labyrinth I could escape into and spin a little fantasy of my own. The closest path through the trees picked up less than a mile from the house, but inside the green it was dense and silent and felt about a million miles away from the Bastard and his Battle Creek. I could be the last person on earth, everyone and everything scorched away except for me and the trees, the worms and the deer. I liked when the leaves got so thick you couldn’t see the sky.

  The first day I came across the old train station, I took a breath and wondered whether I’d willed it into existence. Because here was the end of civilization, forgotten station and rusty tracks and a behemoth of a boxcar sleeping in the weeds. You probably would have wasted your time trying to imagine yourself into the past, some booming, bustling era of ladies with parasols and men with briefcases and fedoras and important places to go, but I liked it the way it was, sprayed with fading graffiti, full of broken glass and jagged edges, lost in time. It was the first place I found that felt dangerous—the rotting heart of Battle Creek. This was apocalypse country, and it felt like home.

  You can imagine how it felt when I found Nikki trespassing in my story.

  “I don’t know you,” Nikki said, like existing without her awareness was the worst kind of sin. Like I was the intruder.

  “Don’t know you, either.” I took one more slug before she stole the bottle back.

  “I know everyone.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Everyone. Everything. What are you supposed to do when you’ve done everything? Huh? What then?” Nikki Drummond slurring her words, baring her existential crisis to the newest trash in town.

  “I highly doubt you’ve done everything. You live here.”

  “I rule here,” Nikki corrected me.

  At that, I laughed. I didn’t know her well enough then to realize how drunk she must have been not to claw my eyes out.

  “I’ve done Craig,” she said. “I’ve done him and done him and done him and dull dull dull.”

  “Whereas I bet he finds you fascinating.”

  She blinked big blue eyes up at me; she smiled. Nikki stalked the world like a cat, but that afternoon she looked more like the tiger cub dangling from a branch in some lame inspirational poster: Hang in there! Clawed, but cuddly.

  Lacey Champlain, in the woods, with a knife to your heart, because here’s the truth: Before you, there was Nikki Drummond.

  We drank; she talked. I got an A-to-Z of the world according to Nikki, what it was like to be perfect and popular, to be Nikki-and-Craig, like Barbie-and-Ken, to be written in the stars, if the stars were a staple-bound yearbook and the ink was semen and beer. She told me they belonged togethe
r, and that if she couldn’t love him she couldn’t love anyone.

  “Break up with him,” I said.

  “Done that, too. It didn’t take.”

  Too lazy and too bored to do anything but get blackout drunk and whine on a Tuesday afternoon. Such a tragedy, right? Where were the inspirational Sally Struthers commercials, the promise that even you could pimp out poor Nikki for just pennies a day?

  “Sometimes I’m so bored I could fucking die,” she said. We were sitting side by side, dangling our legs over the tracks. “You ever feel that way?”

  I wanted to be a different person. I wasn’t the girl I’d been in Jersey. I wasn’t Shay’s girl anymore, the kind who followed a foot behind if the wrong people were watching and said Yes, whatever you want when the answer was No fucking way; I hadn’t been Daddy’s girl, not in a long time, and my mother had a new kid to screw up. I was Kurt’s girl, and I needed that to mean something. So maybe I was the one who crossed the space between us and smeared her pastel gloss, but the way I remember it, she was already there, and our lips and then our tongues and then the rest of us came together like it had been the plan from the beginning.

  You’re probably picturing something porny, exploding feather-pillow fights and pizza delivery girls who want a taste of your pepperoni. It felt like porn, which made it interesting. It felt filthy, literally, rolling around in the dirt, our hair tangled with twigs, our flesh matted with gravel and moss, both of us panting and sweating and moaning, two wild girls raised by wolves.

  So that’s how it started: by accident, but also not. We made a plan to meet the next day, same time, same place, same bottle of vodka—only this time she showed up with Craig Ellison in tow, Mr. Hot and Boring, as she introduced him. He’d heard about the action and wanted in on it.

  “Just to watch,” he said, and that first time, it was all he did.

  THEM

  DEX’S MOTHER KNEW SHE SHOULD be afraid for her daughter. This, she’d been told, was the tragedy of birthing a girl. To live in fear—it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It’s a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.

  So she’d been told.

  Now she was supposed to be more afraid than ever. Now they were all more afraid than ever, the mothers of Battle Creek, because whatever illusions they’d had about their children and their home and the inevitability that the future would unfold as uneventfully as the past had been punctured by the bullet that Ellison boy blew through his brainstem. And Dex’s mother had been afraid, that first night. She and Jimmy had stood in their daughter’s doorway, watching her sleep, dipping a toe in the unimaginable. They’d counted her breaths, the easy rise and fall of her chest, and Dex’s mother felt her own lungs sighing in time with her daughter’s, breathing for her the way she had when her daughter was a newborn, when she’d sat by the bassinet, fingertips resting lightly on infant chest, because only by feeling the rhythm of breath and the flutter of heartbeat, one moment after the next, could she reassure herself that the baby was still alive.

  They’d resolved everything would be different, after the tragedy. Nothing was different, of course, because it wasn’t their tragedy, and Dex’s mother had little patience for the mothers of Battle Creek who seemed unable to comprehend this basic fact. Boys weren’t supposed to be vulnerable; it overturned the natural order of things, a boy falling prey to pain. That was a girl’s purview. So maybe it was understandable that they groped for other answers, these mothers, still twittering all these months later about what had “really” happened, about demonic influences and satanic cults, about heavy metal and blood sacrifice, but it infuriated her, all these ginned-up monsters under the bed, as if that would recuse them from worrying about anything that mattered, overdoses and car crashes and AIDS and, especially in the case of those mothers of sons who thought only daughters should be worried for, accidentally raising little proto-rapists who thought wining and dining a girl meant getting her drunk enough that she’d swallow a mouthful of ejaculate without complaint. Dex’s mother hadn’t known the Ellison boy, but she’d known plenty of boys like him. There had always been boys like him. And she knew whatever trouble he’d gotten into, if there had been trouble, he’d probably brought it on himself. All these mothers, so concerned about the terrible things that could happen to their children—so unwilling to think about the things their children might make happen. Maybe this was why Dex’s mother never had managed to muster up much fear for her daughter. Her daughter wasn’t the type to make things happen.

  Dex’s mother was well aware that she embarrassed her daughter. But her daughter couldn’t know how much she embarrassed her mother. How she, too, often dreamed of some other, prettier, happier daughter, imagined showing her off to an admiring world, gaze at my lovely creation and marvel at what I have wrought.

  You created a child; you nursed her, bathed her, wiped her, loved her, kept her alive until she grew up; then she grew up. Ugly and sullen and wanting nothing more than to be a motherless child.

  Dex’s mother, despite claims by her husband and daughter to the contrary, did in fact have a healthy sense of humor. She had for many years, for example, found her life hilarious. That everything she had been and wanted had been whittled away, her edges smoothed into a featureless surface without a name of its own. Hannah Dexter’s mother. Jimmy Dexter’s wife. You when something was needed; she when something was not. She felt, at times, that what had seemed like an infinity of choice turned out to be a funnel, life narrowing itself one bad decision at a time, each mistake cutting the options by half, spiraling her ever downward until there was nowhere left to fall but into a small, dark hole that had no bottom.

  Choosing a life for yourself, that was the joke. She had chosen Jimmy Dexter, yes, but only after the state had chosen to yank her scholarship because the governor had chosen to cut educational funding; she had chosen the charming guitar player with the lopsided smile, yes, the one who kept her up all night declaiming Vonnegut and debating Vietnam and allowing her, through a haze of smoke and pseudointellectual acid rants on the doors of perception, to pretend she was still in college—but she had chosen that Jimmy, not the one who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t to play his guitar while the baby slept or why the changing table wasn’t an appropriate surface for rolling joints. They’d fallen in love because they both desperately wanted the same thing: Better lives. Bigger lives. It never occurred to her that it should matter how they expected to get there. She believed in work; he believed in hope. Here was the biggest joke: It turned out this wasn’t wanting the same thing at all.

  They’d hollowed each other out, she and Jimmy, and now they were good for no one but each other. Most days, she thought that was no worse than anyone else had it, that the world was full of empty husks, smiling and following through. Some days, though, the bad ones and the best ones, she thought about running.

  Her daughter would leave for college soon. When the time came, Dex’s mother thought, she would leave, too. She was almost worried that he’d leave her first, except that if Jimmy still had it in him to leave, she might have found it in herself to love him again, and to stay. She wanted her daughter gone so they could get on with it; she wanted her daughter to stay, wanted to hold on and scream stop growing stop changing stop leaving—then Lacey came along and soon there would be nothing left to hold onto, because piece by piece, Lacey was taking her daughter away.

  Dex’s mother knew what it was to lose herself in someone brighter, to be trapped by the gravitational field of another sun. She knew what happened when it emerged that the sun was only a lightbulb, and what happened when the lightbulb burned out. It didn’t seem fair that her mistakes hadn’t been genetically encoded in her daughter, that there’d been no evolutionary adaptation, no innate biological resistance to light and charm. It made her
shamefully jealous, watching her daughter fall in love, and what else could you call it—jealous and wistful and mindful of younger days, and maybe it even made her a little nostalgic for the strum of Jimmy’s guitar and the way his eyes had always found her in a sparse crowd, fixing her with every sorry lyric he sang. But more than anything, it made her feel like the mother of a daughter, like she’d taken Communion and joined a fellowship of women across distance and time, because finally, as had long been promised, Dex’s mother was afraid.

  US

  April–July 1992

  DEX

  The Devil’s Playground

  THE FIRST TIME LACEY GOT me high, nothing much happened. Lacey said the mushrooms were too old, and anyway her mailman’s cousin’s friend wasn’t exactly the most reliable supplier, so who knew what we were getting. I had angled for pot instead; pot was everywhere, and as far as I knew it couldn’t turn your brain into scrambled eggs, no matter what the commercials said. But Lacey said pot was for plebes.

  The second time Lacey got me high, we went to church.

  Nothing local, obviously. We drove to Dickinson, three towns over, and pulled over to the first cross-topped building we could find. We waved at a couple old ladies hobbling across the parking lot, and because they weren’t Battle Creek old ladies, they didn’t know any better than to wave back. What nice girls, I bet they thought.

  We nibbled on the mushrooms. Lacey licked me on the cheek, which she did sometimes when she was in a good mood, quick and darting, like a cat. “What you are to do without me, I cannot imagine,” she purred. We’d just read Pygmalion in English, and the line delighted her. I liked another one—I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.—but it was harder to slip into conversation.