Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

  “My standards are fucked,” Nikki had said. Trashy language, trashy sentiments: This was not the daughter Nikki’s mother had raised.

  Something was off. A mother always knows.

  So Nikki’s mother waited until her daughter was at school and prowled through her room. She’d never done it before, never had the need, silently judged those parents who were forced to police their daughters, paw through their diaries for secret rendezvous, search underwear drawers for condom packets. Nikki’s mother didn’t need forensic evidence. A mother knows.

  But: All those empty bottles in the closet. Cheap vodka, some gin, and a few tacky wine coolers. Left behind when they so easily could have been disposed of, almost as if Nikki wanted her to see. And the pictures, beneath her mattress, pages torn from magazines, of women doing ungodly things.

  Nikki’s mother thought about all those hours Nikki had spent alone with that Dexter girl, imagining the girl pouring vile liquids down her daughter’s throat, imagining the girl stripping off her daughter’s clothing, climbing up her daughter’s body, trying to pervert her daughter into something she was never meant to be.

  It was not acceptable, she thought.

  “So what did you do?” Kevin asked, stroking his finger along Nikki’s mother’s bare leg, up and up and, almost unbearably, up.

  She had called him in a moment of weakness. She only, always called him in a moment of weakness, and every time was supposed to be the last time, but then there she was again, bedded down in her husband’s gym buddy’s navy sheets, staring at the photo of him with his wife and children at Disney World, Mickey ears perched on all four heads, while he burrowed his face beneath the blanket and did things to her down there in the dark that she could never understand. He’d asked her, once, if she wanted him to put the photo away, and she lied, saying that wouldn’t be appropriate, and that she barely noticed it, when the truth was that the photo was another thing she didn’t understand, a necessary part of the process, that she needed his fingers and his lips, but also their faces, Cheri’s bovine eyes and the twins’ sorry cowlicks, that it was this photo she saw when she closed her eyes and let his tongue guide her over the edge.

  “I put it all back,” she told him.

  “Every girl needs her secrets,” he said, and smiled like they shared something together.

  In therapy, which had been Steven’s condition for taking her back, she had told her husband that the affair meant nothing, the other man couldn’t compare to him, which was true. Kevin was smaller in every way. Poorer, uglier, meaner. She couldn’t tell him that Kevin was the tool that made Steven bearable, which was how she justified continuing it, even now, even after she’d sworn never again, this time I mean it.

  “Maybe I should talk to her about it,” Nikki’s mother said.

  “Maybe,” Kevin agreed. He was nothing if not agreeable. Sometimes Nikki’s mother felt like she was having sex with herself.

  “But a mother shouldn’t know everything about her daughter,” she continued. “I certainly wouldn’t want her to know everything about me.”

  “Certainly not,” Kevin agreed, and they stopped talking.

  She was sore, driving home, but it was the good kind of sore, the kind that would sustain her through her dinner preparations and the inane small talk of family life, a secret and deeply pleasurable ache that would keep the smile fixed on her face. This was what convinced her: Nikki deserved her secrets, as did they all. Hadn’t she taught her daughter that who we are, what we do, is all less important than who we seem to be?

  Dinner was meat loaf, and it was polite. Nikki’s father didn’t ask his wife what she’d done that day. Nikki’s mother didn’t ask her daughter why she smelled, as usual, of breath mints. Nikki didn’t ask her parents why her brother wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. They discussed Halloween, whether to hand out toothbrushes again and risk getting egged, or capitulate to the inevitable and return to the mini Hershey bars of years past. Nikki’s father told a politely funny story about his colleague’s toupee. Nikki said she’d be home late the next day because she was giving a friend a ride to the doctor, which was just the kind of thing Nikki was prone to do. Nikki’s mother offered her daughter dessert and smiled when Nikki turned down the empty calories. She felt better already. Girls went through phases—everyone knew that. Nikki knew what was needed to survive and excel. She would be fine. That’s what Nikki’s mother told herself that night as she endured her husband’s ministrations and went to sleep, and that’s what she told herself the next day when evening darkened into night and the little ghosts and monsters stopped ringing the doorbell and still Nikki didn’t come home.

  She would be fine.

  A mother knows.

  US

  Halloween

  DEX

  1992

  THERE HAD TO BE CONSEQUENCES. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.

  And it had been so easy.

  Nikki had called to apologize. Again, when I refused to answer, and again, when I didn’t show up at school. Fuck my parents, fuck obligation and requirement and life; I stayed in bed, I kept the door closed, I waited to feel better or feel something or die.

  She left me a note in an envelope on the front porch, and it said, I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Never again. This time I mean it.

  Never again. At that, I did feel something, and it filled the void. It brought me back to life.

  I couldn’t figure her agenda, why it was so important to make me forgive, but this time I didn’t need to understand it. I only had to use it.

  I laughed; I called her. I let her apologize to me, blame it on grief, blame it on Craig, on Lacey; she’d wanted to teach me a lesson about who I was allowed to talk to and what I was allowed to ask for, that was the explanation for this party; and as for the last one, that was a mistake, ancient history, terrible but past and she was sorry, so that should be enough. She was trying to be a different person, she said, a better person, that’s what all this had been about. She’d been stupid, then. Later, she’d been angry. Now she was just sorry, and couldn’t I just believe it.

  I told her she could apologize to me if she wanted, but only in person, in the place she could be trusted to tell the truth, and on the night her ghosts would howl the loudest. Even ground: We would both be haunted. I swallowed bile and told her to meet me in the woods, and when she showed up, I was waiting.

  She laughed, at first, even when she saw the devil marks I’d painted on the walls of the boxcar, the pentagram I’d smeared on the floor in pig’s blood. She laughed even when I showed her the knife.

  THE KNIFE.

  I brought it, but I never intended to use it. It was generic Kmart crap, its blade the length of my forearm, its edge sharpened once a season, its hilt a cheap black plastic with a leathery feel. I’d used it to chop potatoes and raw chicken, enjoyed the satisfying thwack it made when swung recklessly through the air and into a soft breast or leg or straight into the meat of the cutting board. Before Lacey, the knife was the only recklessness I allowed myself. My mother hated it, but it always made my father laugh when I held the duller edge to my neck and pretended to slit my throat. The knife had always felt like a toy, and that night was no different.

  I wasn’t the kind of person who would use a knife, only the kind who would need one. Without it, Nikki wouldn’t have listened. She wouldn’t have been afraid, and I needed her to be afraid. I needed her to do what I said, to be my puppet. Letting someone else have power over you, Nikki had said, that was the only truly intolerable thing. And so she’d told me exactly how to hurt her without drawing blood.

  I had dinner with my parents that night, frozen chicken fingers with frozen broccoli, which I ate without comment, knowing they could tell something was wrong, sure neither would have the nerve to ask. My father assumed everything was about him, that if he pushed
too hard I’d tattle to my mother. As if I cared, anymore, what he’d been doing with Lacey; as if he could be anything to Lacey but a distraction, a horsefly buzzing at a stallion. What we had together was too big for distractions—I finally understood that. He would never understand, and maybe it was a mercy that he would never realize how much he didn’t. My mother, maybe, had a better guess, but she wouldn’t push it, either. I missed her, sometimes, the long-ago mother who was still bold enough to say, Tell me where it hurts, but maybe I’d only imagined her along with the faeries who’d once lived in the hedges and the monsters snoring under my bed.

  I should have hated them both, I thought, for failing. Then I should have forgiven them, for trying. But I couldn’t be bothered. They were cardboard cutouts, Peanuts parents wah-wah-wahhing in the background, and I couldn’t feel anything for them anymore. I couldn’t feel anything but hands on my body. Strangers’ fingers. Strangers’ tongues. I couldn’t stop feeling that.

  I brought the knife into the woods because I knew it was safe. Because I knew I would never use it the way it was meant to be used—I wasn’t the kind of girl who would do a thing like that. However much I might have wished otherwise.

  I SHOWED NIKKI THE KNIFE. I said, “Take off your clothes.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t get to ask that anymore.”

  “You want to see me naked? Fine. Whatever. I always figured you were a little gay. You and Lacey both, with your perverted little—”

  “Shut up. Take off your shirt, take off your pants, and toss them out the door.”

  Miraculously, she did. I felt a rush of something—power, euphoria, satisfaction, maybe the simple wonder of speaking a command and seeing the world comply. There was something godlike about it: Let there be obedience, let there be fear.

  I watched her strip down to her pink-laced panties. I closed her into the dark, slipped the dead bolt, and listened to her scream. I stood in the night, quiet and still, breathing and listening, palm pressed to the boxcar, picturing her on the other side, alone and naked in the dark with the pig’s blood and the death metal, her screams bouncing off the metal walls until her throat burned. Nikki, helpless and afraid, cringing from things creeping through the dark, holding on until she had no choice but to let go, and break.

  Then I pulled myself away and went in search of Lacey, to make my offering.

  LACEY SAID WE SHOULD TIE her up, so we tied her up. Or, rather, Lacey did, and I held onto the knife.

  Lacey, Lacey, Lacey—she was back. It was hard to concentrate with her name singing through my head. All I wanted to do was cling to her, whisper apologies, make her promise all over again never to let me go.

  But first I had to prove myself. So I held the blade steady while Lacey brought Nikki’s pale wrists together behind her back, wrapping them tight with the extra laces she had in her trunk. She had everything in her trunk. The laces were strong, made for combat, and Lacey bound Nikki’s waist and ankles to a rotting old chair she’d found in the station, using more laces and a bunch of leggings. This is a handcuff knot, Lacey said, twisting in elaborate loops, this is a clove hitch and this is a butterfly, and these knots will hold, Lacey said, inexplicably certain, and even if they didn’t, we still had the knife.

  Once Nikki was bound up tight, Lacey held out her hand to me, palm up. She didn’t have to ask: I gave her the knife, and only after it was gone did I feel like I’d given up something that mattered.

  “I have to pee,” Nikki said, like pulling out a trump card.

  Lacey patted her head. “Go for it.”

  Nikki spit at her face, and Lacey laughed when she missed. I laughed, too, until the smell hit me, and the flashlight exposed the dark patch spreading across Nikki’s lace panties. I expected her to look pleased that she’d called Lacey’s bluff, but she just looked like a girl who’d peed her pants and was trying not to cry.

  I thought about stopping it, then.

  A helpless girl, naked, tied to a chair in a dirty train car with satanic scribbles on the wall. Two wild-eyed girls looming over her, one of them holding a butcher knife. I saw it like I was seeing it onscreen, prom queen brought low, soon to have her throat slashed by monsters of her own creation, audience rooting neither for hero nor villain but only for gore. I saw the Hollywood vision but smelled the urine, half a scent away from comforting, and when I did, the girl wasn’t Nikki Drummond but any girl, sorry and afraid, and if I’d been in the audience, I would have wanted her saved.

  THIS IS REAL, I THOUGHT. But many things were real. Foggy memories of hands on skin were real. Evidence captured on videotape was real. The swooping lines of black permanent marker I’d scrubbed off my skin, the taste of puke and stranger I’d brushed out of my mouth, the creeping fingers doing exactly as Nikki commanded. Real, real, real.

  Surfaces were deceptive. Nikki had taught me that better than anyone. The trappings of evil were for scary movies and school assemblies; the real devil wore pink and smiled with pastel lips. And here, in the dark, we all knew who she was.

  “Don’t think we’re going to feel sorry for you,” Lacey said, and she was right.

  Real was the hollow space Lacey had left behind, and the lies Nikki had told me in her wake. I’d believed the witch, let her put a curse on Lacey. All those days and weeks she’d spent sleeping in her car. While I was slurping frozen yogurt at the mall and debating whether Aladdin could be fuckable even if he was a cartoon, Lacey had been alone. Because I left her that way; because Nikki had made me.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said.

  Lacey snorted. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’ve been here for fucking ever!” Nikki shouted. “And I’m thirsty.”

  “Idea,” Lacey said brightly. Lacey loved an idea. “Dex, go get that bucket we saw outside.”

  I set the bucket before her. It was corroded by what seemed like centuries of rust, filled almost to the brim with brackish rainwater.

  Nikki shook her head. “No.”

  “You’re thirsty, right?” Knife in hand, Lacey grabbed her hair and yanked her forward, hard enough that she toppled, chair and all, onto her knees, until her lips were nearly on the bucket rim. “Don’t you want a drink?”

  “Let go.” It was a whisper. “Please don’t make me.”

  “So picky,” Lacey said.

  Together, we righted her; she was heavy, but she wasn’t fighting us anymore. That made it easier.

  “You realize this is kidnapping, right?” All the trembly vulnerability was gone from her voice, nothing left beneath the flab but hard, pearly bone. “You’re going to be in huge trouble when you let me out of here.”

  “You’re not giving us much incentive,” Lacey said.

  “What are you going to do, kill me?”

  “It’s so cute when you pretend to be fearless.” Lacey turned to me. “Dex thinks you’ll never tell. She thinks you’ll be too piss-scared of what people would think. Look how well she knows you.”

  “Better than she knows you. Not as well as I do.”

  Lacey closed in. I held the flashlight steady. The beam glinted off the blade.

  “I want you to tell her what you did,” Lacey said.

  Nikki tried to laugh. “I really don’t think you do.”

  “At that stupid party. You tell her what you did, and you apologize.”

  “How much is that going to mean, Hannah? You going to believe I’m sorry with a knife to my throat?”

  The knife wasn’t at her throat.

  And then it was.

  “Lacey,” I said.

  “It’s fine.”

  It was fine.

  “Tell her,” Lacey said. “Tell me. Let’s hear your confession.”

  When Nikki swallowed, her throat bulged against the knife. “You want me to talk, step back,” she said, barely moving her lips. Keeping her head very, very still.

  “I want you to talk carefully,” Lacey said.

  Nikki swallowed again. “We were just having fun
. You remember fun, don’t you, Lacey?”

  Lacey kept her gaze on Nikki. “Did you have fun at that party, Dex?”

  “No, I did not.” I’d brought along a bottle of my parents’ scotch, for courage, like they said in the movies, and now I took a burning swig. It was cold outside but hot in our boxcar, or I was hot, at least. Fizzing and tingling. Fire licking my throat.

  “You let her drink too much,” Lacey said.

  “She’s a grown-up.”

  “You let her drink too much, and she passed out, and when she did . . .”

  Nikki didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t see Lacey’s hand move, but Nikki moaned. Then, “When she did, we had a little fun, like I said.”

  “You took off her clothes.”

  “I guess.”

  “You let your idiot friends touch her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Feel her up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck her.”

  “Lacey—” I said. “Don’t.”

  I wanted to know; I didn’t want to know; I couldn’t know.

  I drank more.

  “No,” Nikki said. “I’m not a fucking sociopath. Unlike some people.”

  “Just a perv,” Lacey said, “who filmed the whole thing on her daddy’s camera. Tell us how you made them pose her. That’s still assault, you realize that, right? That’s still called rape.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “I never touched her,” Nikki said.

  “Of course not,” Lacey said. “Not yourself. You don’t get your hands dirty. You just make things happen.”

  “Enough,” I said. Too much.

  “It was harmless,” Nikki said. “Look, it was stupid, I know. I’m a bitch, I know. But it was harmless.”

  That word. That she could say it. Harmless. It erased me from the picture. Without me, there was no one to be harmed.

  “She wants to hear you say you’re sorry,” Lacey said. “And I suggest you try to sound like you mean it.”