This was collapse.
THEM
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.
US
After
US
Best Friends Forever
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.
Out there, in the unimaginable world beyond Battle Creek, the army of reason marched on. We knew it was true, because we saw it on TV. Up with the separation of church and state; down with supply-side economics. Up with sex and drugs and the saxophonic approximation of rock and roll; down with the death penalty and “gay cancer” and Dan “Potatoe” Quayle. Our Democrat took the White House, a hippie boomer with his finger on the button. We were all living in Satan’s America now, at least according to Pat Buchanan. We’d always liked Clinton, the man with the honeyed voice and the McDonald’s jowls who worshipped at the altar of indulgence. He was our kind, we thought once, but not anymore, because he still believed in a place called hope.
WE WENT TO THE FUNERAL, obviously. People stared. Nikki killed herself—everyone believed that—but she’d done it on Halloween, the devil’s night; she’d done it in a boxcar scribbled with satanic symbols; she’d done in it the same season one of her fellow seniors had turned satanist and cursed half the class. The devil’s fingerprints were all over. Only Nikki’s parents and brother didn’t stare. They sat in the front row with their heads down. Her father cried. We wanted to, but we didn’t.
MAYBE, DEEP DOWN, WE LIKED it. They were afraid of us, and there was always pleasure in that.
We saw that they liked it, too. You could hear it in the curbside sermons, the barely concealed pride of being proven right. If Battle Creek did have an underground cabal, it was a cabal of shameful joy, and these were its members: the ministers, the principal, the guy who kept writing all those editorials in the local paper, the cops, the experts brought in from Harrisburg to advise on cults, everyone who got to be on TV. We heard that after Geraldo came to town, Kaitlyn Dyer’s mother had a viewing party, with seven-layer dip, like it was the Fourth of July. We weren’t invited.
WE SHARED A BEDROOM, MARKING time till graduation, until we could leave without drawing suspicion. All of our parents had been accommodating; in the days after Nikki, no one liked the idea of a girl living on the streets. We slept side by s
ide. We smelled of the same conditioner and toothpaste; we wore each other’s clothes. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but we had to stay in sight. We had to make sure our secrets would stay locked up, which meant watching each other, always. We dreamed with our eyes open, remembering the noise she’d made as the blood was spilling out of her, the whale song of pain.
We still drove, in those endless days. Never toward something. Always away. We would drive into emptiness, then set out a blanket, lie down in the middle of a dead sunflower field. A yellowing void we could scan from horizon to horizon, wizened stalks swaying in the breeze.
The buzz and chitter of insects. Our goose-bumped skin. Spring on its way, all too slowly. Seconds ticking by, measured and loud. Life inside a grandfather clock.
We talked about the devil, and whether there was such a thing. Once we had speculated that God and the devil were the same, that they were contained in the holy sound of Kurt’s voice, but we didn’t need them anymore, our god or our devil. We understood now what we were meant to be, a church of two, worshipping only each other.
WHEN THE TIME WAS RIGHT, we left. Exactly as we’d planned, in the dark of night, bags piled into the trunk, car pointed west. We didn’t go to Seattle. Seattle wasn’t ours anymore. But we paid attention, and we saw what became of it.
Seattle was a commercial. Seattle was a movie set and a Gap ad. Grunge was ascendant; the revolution was televised. Seattle took over the world, all its possibility and promise made manifest, and didn’t survive it.
Neither did Kurt. We didn’t cry. We wondered, for a moment, at the rumors about Courtney, because we knew how easy it was to make one thing look like another, to take a cold hand and curl it around a gun. But deep down, we knew: It was Kurt. His finger. His trigger. He owned his death, and it turned out the death of a god was like any other. It was not rage or sorrow or love; it was neither beautiful nor deep. It was the one thing Kurt had never been: pointless noise, pointless silence.
THERE WAS NO PLACE TO go but LA, where you could live on the surface and get lost beneath it, all at once. We found an apartment in the shadow of a freeway and jobs that made our feet hurt and our hair smell of smoke; we paid rent and taught ourselves to surf, trying to pretend we were having fun.
This is what we wanted, we told ourselves, and also, we will be okay, and also, I still love you.
We liked how we looked with platinum hair, and even more we liked how we looked like everyone else. Sometimes we even liked how much we looked like each other, like sisters, people said for the first time. LA was a place to lose yourself and be reborn. It was as far as we could get from Battle Creek without drowning ourselves in the Pacific, and we waited, we wait, for the tide to carry Nikki into the past.
LA doesn’t believe in the past any more than it believes in the future, and so neither do we. We pretend away the days to come, when our skin will loosen, our breasts will sag, our eyes will be rimmed by lines and hollows that makeup can’t disguise, when we will no longer be girls who’ve done something terrible but women atoning for the sins of the strangers they used to be. We will never go back; we will search for ourselves on milk cartons and miss the home we were so desperate to escape. We will be waitresses and receptionists and the chirpy voice on the end of the line thanking you for your time and telling you have a nice day. We will worship the girls we used to be. We will never have children; we will never have daughters. Someday, maybe, one of us will walk into the sea, and the other will finally be alone.
Not yet. We refuse the future. We hang onto our moment, freeze ourselves in this time, when we are still girls, when we still know pain and its pleasures. We walk in the ocean and dig our toes into sand that comes from far away, from ages past. We scan the horizon for pirate ships and glass bottles, for unlikely miracles washing to shore. We have no secrets from each other; we are two parts of a whole. We have everything we wanted; we have only each other, and we can only trust the girls we used to be, who whisper to us from the past and promise that will be enough.
Acknowledgments
THANKS TO THE DREAM TEAM: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff understood what this story wanted to be and somehow bamboozled me into believing I could write it. Cal Morgan’s wisdom, insight, persistence, and refusal to let a single semi-colon pass without careful consideration and occasional debate made the revision process a terrifying joy. There’s not enough gourmet chocolate in the world to repay my debt to either of them, but I’m working on it. I also owe a substantial amount of chocolate—and maybe some tea scones—to Clare Smith, for her transatlantic encouragement, support, and razor-sharp editorial insight.
Thanks also to Jennifer Barth for the extroardinary enthusiasm with which she guided this book into the world, and to the wonderful Jonathan Burnham, Robin Bilardello, Stephanie Cooper, Lydia Weaver, Katherine Beitner, Laura Brown, Erin Wicks, and everyone at HarperCollins; to the indefatigable Poppy Stimpson, Rachel Wilkie, and everyone at Little Brown UK; and to all the amazing cheerleaders at DeFiore and Company, especially Colin Farstad.
Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Erin Downing, Barry Goldblatt, Erin Downing, Jo Knowles, E. Lockhart, Ilana Manaster, Mark Sundeen, and Adam Wilson all took the time and effort to read stacks of pages, helping me figure out which ones not to light on fire. They, and so many others, kept me afloat while I was kicking and flailing my way through this book: Dan Dine, Brendan Duffy, Leslie Jamison, Anica Rissi, Lynn Weingarten—thank you, a million times over, for keeping me well stocked in ideas, motivation, ambition, love, hope, and baked goods.
Finally, thank you to the MacDowell Colony, for giving me such a beautiful space in which to finish this book—and to the Park Slope coffee shop where, one rainy morning in a different life, I began it.
About the Author
ROBIN WASSERMAN IS A GRADUATE of Harvard University and the author of several successful novels for young adults. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, the New York Times, on TheAtlantic.com, and elsewhere. A recent recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Girls on Fire is her first novel for adults.
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Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © knape / Getty Images
Copyright
Interior art © Apimook 1983 / Shutterstock
GIRLS ON FIRE. Copyright © 2016 by Robin Wasserman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-241548-6
EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN 9780062417169
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