Girls on Fire

DEX, Before Lacey

THEY FINALLY FOUND THE BODY on a Sunday night, sometime between 60 Minutes and Married with Children. Probably closer to Andy Rooney than Al Bundy, because it would have taken some time for the news, even news like this, to travel. There would have been business to attend to in the woods, staking out the scene with yellow caution tape, photographing the pools of blood, sliding the body into a useless ambulance and bagging the gun — there was a universal logic to such things, if TV had it right, a script to follow that would get even our sorry Keystone Kops past the hurdle of touching a corpse, seeing and smelling whatever happened to a body after three days and nights in the woods. From there, who knew how it worked, officially: where they took the body, who was tasked with calling the parents, how they extracted the bullet, what they did with the gun, the note. Unofficially, it did what bad news did best: spread. My father always liked to say you couldn’t shit your own bed in Battle Creek without your neighbor showing up to wipe your ass, and though he said it largely to get a rise out of my mother, it had the whiff of truth.

It was always my mother who answered the phone. “They found him, that boy from your school,” she said, once the show had gone to commercial. We were all facing carefully away from one another, toward the giant Coke bottles dancing across the screen.

She said they’d found him in the woods, found him dead. That he’d done it to himself. She asked if he’d been my friend, and my father said that I’d answered that already when the boy went missing, and that I barely knew him, and that I was fine, and my mother said, Let her speak for herself, and my father said, Who’s stopping her, and my mother said, Do you want to talk about it, and my father said, Does she look like she wants to talk about it.

I did not want to talk about it. I told them I might later, which was a lie, and that I wanted to be alone, which was the truth, and that they shouldn’t worry about me, because I was fine. Which was less true or false than it was necessary.

“We’re sorry about this, kid,” my father said as I made my escape, and these were the last words spoken in my house on the subject of Craig Ellison and the thing he did to himself in the woods.

HE WASN’T MY FRIEND. HE was nothing to me, or less than. Alive, Craig was Big Johnson shirts and stupidly baggy jeans that showed off boxers and a hint of crack. He was basketball in the winter and lacrosse in the spring and a dumb blond with a cruel streak all year round, technically a classmate of mine since kindergarten but, in every way that counted, the occupant of some alternate dimension where people cheered at high school sporting events and spent their Saturday nights drinking and jerking off to Color Me Badd instead of sitting at home, watching The Golden Girls. Alive, Craig was arguably just a little less than the sum of his meathead parts, and on the few times our paths crossed and he deigned to notice my existence, he could usually be counted on to drop a polite witticism along the lines of Move it, bee-yotch as he muscled past.

Dead, though, he was transformed: martyr, wonder, victim, cautionary tale. By Monday morning, his locker was a clutter of paper hearts, teddy bears, and basketball pennants, at least until the janitorial staff were instructed to clear it all away amid fears that making too much of a fuss might inspire the trend chasers among us to follow. A school-wide memorial was scheduled; then, under the same paranoid logic, canceled; then scheduled again, until compromise finally took the form of an hour of weepy testaments and a slideshow scored to Bette Midler instrumentals and the flutter of informational pamphlets from a national suicide hotline.

I didn’t cry; it didn’t seem like my place.

All of us in the junior class were required to meet at least once with the school counselor. My appointment came a few weeks after his death, in one of the slots reserved for nonentities, and was perfunctory: Was I having nightmares. Was I unable to stop crying. Was I in need of intervention. Was I happy.

No, no, no, I said, and because there was no upshot to being honest, yes.

The counselor sponged off his pits and asked what disturbed me most about Craig Ellison’s death. No one used the word suicide that year unless absolutely necessary.

“He was out there in the woods for three days,” I said, “just waiting for someone to find him.” I imagined it like a time-lapse video of blooming flowers, the body wheezing out its final gaseous waste, flesh rotting, deer pawing, ants marching. The tree line was only a couple blocks from my house, and I wondered, if the wind had been right, what it might have carried.

The thought of the corpse wasn’t what disturbed me most, not even close. What disturbed me most was the revelation that someone like Craig Ellison had secrets — that he had actual, human emotions not altogether dissimilar from mine. Deeper, apparently, because when I had a bad day, I watched cartoons and hoovered up a bag of Doritos, whereas Craig took his father’s gun into the woods and blew a hole through the back of his head. I’d had a guinea pig once that did nothing but eat and sleep and poop, and if I’d found out the guinea pig’s inner turmoil was stormier than mine, that would have disturbed me, too.

Weirdly, then, the counselor shifted gears and asked whether I knew anything about the three churches that had been vandalized on Halloween, blood-red upside-down crosses painted across their wooden doors. “Of course not,” I said, though what I knew was what everybody knew, which was that a trio of stoners had taken to wearing black nail polish and five-pointed stars, and had spent the week before Halloween bragging how they would put the devil back into the devil’s night.

“Do you think Craig knew anything about it?” he asked.

“Wasn’t that the same night he. . you know?”

The counselor nodded.

“Then I’m guessing, not so much.”

He looked less disappointed than personally affronted, like I’d just ruined his Murder, She Wrote moment: Insightful bystander unveils dark truth behind hideous crime.

Even to people who gave Craig more credit than I did — maybe especially to them — the suicide was a puzzle to be solved. He’d been a good boy, and everyone knew good boys didn’t do bad things like that. He’d been a high school point guard with a winning record and a blow-job-amenable girlfriend: Logic dictated joy. There must have been extenuating circumstances, people said. Drugs, maybe, the kind that made you run for a plate glass window, imagining you could fly. A game of Russian roulette gone wrong; a romantic suicide pact reneged; the summons of darkness, some blood magic that seduced its victims on the devil’s night. Even the ones who accepted it as a straightforward suicide acted like it was less personal decision than communicative disease, something Craig had accidentally caught and might now pass on to the rest of us, like chlamydia.

All my life, Battle Creek had reliably been a place where nothing happened. The strange thing that year wasn’t that something finally did. It was that, as if the town shared some primordial lizard brain capable of divining the future, we all held our breath waiting for something to happen next.

THANKS TO SOME AMBIGUOUS CAUSAL link the school administration drew between depression and godlessness, a new postmortem policy dictated that we spend three minutes of every homeroom in silent prayer. Craig had been in my homeroom, seated diagonally to my right, at a desk we all now knew better than to look at directly. Years before, during a solar eclipse, we’d all made little cardboard viewing boxes to stare up into the dark, having been warned that an unobscured view would burn our retinas. The physics of it never made sense to me, but the poetry did, the need to trick yourself into looking at something without really seeing it. That’s what I did now, letting myself look at the desk only during those three minutes of silent prayer, when the rest of the class had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, as if secret looking somehow didn’t count.

This had been going on for a couple months when something — nothing so bold as a noise, more like an invisible tap on the shoulder, an unspoken whisper promising this way lies fate—pulled my eyes away from the lacquered surface scuffed by Craig’s many etchings of cocks and balls, and toward the girl in the very opposite corner of the room, the girl I still thought of as new even though she’d been with us since September. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on Craig’s desk, until they weren’t anymore. They were on me. She watched me like she was waiting for a performance to begin, and it wasn’t until she rolled her eyes skyward and opportunity slipped away that I realized it was opportunity I’d been waiting for. Then her middle finger ratcheted up, pointing to the ceiling, to the clouds — unmistakably, to the Lord Our God in Heaven — and when her eyes dropped to meet mine again, my finger rose of its own accord in identical salute. She smiled. By the time our teacher called, Time’s up, her hands were folded politely together on the desk again. . until she raised one to propose that school prayer, even the silent kind, was illegal.

Lacey Champlain had a stripper’s name and a trucker’s wardrobe, all flannel shirts and clomping boots that — stranded as we were in what Lacey later called the butt crack of western Pennsylvania—we didn’t yet recognize as a pledge of allegiance to grunge. The new kid in a school that hadn’t had a new kid in four years, she defied categorization. There was a fierceness about her that also defied attack, and so she’d become the two-legged version of Craig’s desk, best glimpsed only from the corner of your eye. I looked at her head-on now, curious how she managed to weather Mr. Callahan’s infamously fearsome glare.

“You have some problem with God?” he said. Callahan was also our history teacher, and had been known to skip over entire decades and wars in favor of explaining how carbon dating was nonsense and all the coincidental mutations in history couldn’t account for the evolution of the human eye.

“I have a problem with you asking me that question in a building funded by public taxes.” Lacey Champlain had dark hair, almost true black, that curled over her face and bobbed at her chin flapper-style. Pale skin and blood-red lips, like she didn’t have to bother dressing goth because she came by it naturally, vampire by birthright. Her nails were the same color as her lips, as were her boots, which laced up her calves and looked made for stomping. Where I had a misshapen assemblage of lumps and craters, she had what could reasonably be called a figure, peaks and valleys all of appropriate size and direction.

“Any other objections from the peanut gallery?” Callahan said, fixing us all with his look one by one, defying us to raise a hand. Callahan’s glare wasn’t as intimidating as it had been before the morning he officially informed us Craig wasn’t coming back, when his face crumbled in on itself and never quite came back together, but it was still grim enough to shut everyone up. Smiling like he’d won a round, he told Lacey that if praying made her uncomfortable, she was welcome to leave.

She did. And, rumor had it, stopped in the library, then headed straight for the principal’s office, constitutional law book in one hand, the ACLU’s phone number in the other. So ended Battle Creek High’s brief flirtation with silent prayer.

I thought something might come of it, that silent second we’d shared. For days afterward, I kept a stalker’s eye on her, waiting for some acknowledgment of whatever had passed between us. If she noticed, she showed no sign of it, and when I turned to look, she was never looking back. Eventually I felt stupid about the whole thing, and rather than be the feeble friendless loser who fuses a few bread crumbs of chance encounter into an elaborate fantasy of intimacy, I officially forgot that Lacey Champlain existed.

Not that I was feeble or friendless, certainly not by the Hollywood standards that pegged us all as either busty cheerleaders or lonely geeks. I was always able to find a spot at one table or another at lunch, could rely on a handful of interchangeable girls to swap homework or partner on the occasional group project. Still, I’d filed the dream of a best friend away with my Barbies and the rest of my childish things, and given up expecting Battle Creek to supply me with anything resembling a soul mate. Which is to say, I’d been lonely for so long, I’d forgotten that I was.

That feeling of disconnection, of grief for something I’d never had, of screaming into a void and knowing no one would hear me — I’d forgotten that was anything other than the basic condition of life.

OUTSIDE OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL EARTH science illustrations, plateaus aren’t unremittingly flat. Even my carefully curated existence of school, homework, TV, and nonintrospection had its peaks and troughs. Gym class was a twice-a-week valley, and that winter, shivering on a softball field in our stupid white skirts every time the temperature rose above fifty degrees, it was more like the valley of the shadow of death, where Craig’s girlfriend and her obsequious posse stood manning the bases while I lingered in left field, fearing much evil.

Craig’s girlfriend: Referring to Nikki Drummond that way was like referring to Madonna as Sean Penn’s ex-wife. Despite his MVP trophies, before his memorable closing act, Craig was inconsequential; Nikki Drummond, at least within the limited cosmology of the Battle Creek High School student body, was God. A spit-shined princess with who, me? eyes and a cherry-red pout, Nikki floated the halls on a cloud of adoration and dessert-themed perfumes — vanilla or cinnamon or gingerbread — though she gave no indication that she did anything so vulgar as eat. Like the girls who worshipped at her altar, Nikki streaked her bangs with Sun-In and flowered her LA Gear sneakers with felt-tipped markers, red and yellow daisies dancing across immaculate white. The girls she favored, and a number that she didn’t, made themselves over in her image, but the chain of command was never in doubt. Nikki commanded; her subjects obeyed.

I was not among them, and most days that still felt like a point of pride.

After Craig’s death, Nikki had briefly acquired an aura of sainthood. It must change a person, I’d thought, to be touched by tragedy, and I watched her carefully — in gym class, in homeroom, in the hall by the disappearing, reappearing shrine — wondering what she would become. But Nikki only became more fully Nikki. Not purified but distilled: essence of bitch. I overheard her in the girls’ locker room, two weeks after it happened, talking to two of her ladies-in-waiting in a voice designed for overhearing. “Let them think whatever they want,” she said, and, impossibly, laughed.

“But they’re saying you were cheating on him,” Allie Cantor said, theatrically scandalized. “Or that you were. .” Here her voice went subsonic, but I could fill in the gap because I’d heard the rumors, too. In the wake of inexplicable suicide, sainthood didn’t last long. “. . pregnant.”

“So?”

“So, they’re saying he maybe did it because of you.” Kaitlyn Dyer’s voice caught on every other word. Nikki’s girls had been competing over who could put on the biggest show of pain, though I wondered why they assumed this would earn them favor from a queen who had endured so many days of memorials and so much vile gossip, without a flinch.

“It’s kind of flattering, right?” Nikki paused, and something in her voice implied a bubblegum smile. “I mean, I’m not arrogant enough to think anyone would kill himself for me. But I’ve got to admit it’s possible.”

Word — especially that word, flattering—spread; the whispers stopped. Months later, I still watched Nikki sometimes, especially when she was alone, trying to catch her in a moment of humanity. Maybe I wanted proof that I should feel sorry for her, because it seemed barbaric not to; maybe it was only animal instinct. Even the dumbest prey knows better than to turn its back on a predator.

Most of us, by that point in our educational careers, had mastered changing into our gym uniforms without revealing an inch more of bare skin than was necessary. Nikki never bothered. Her bra always matched her panties, and when she tired of showing off the flat stomach and perfect curves she tucked into one pastel set of satins after another, she somehow managed to make even the mandated tennis skirt look good. Me, on the other hand, all saggy granny panties and flabby C-cups bulging from stretched-out lace, dingy white uniform that gave my skin a tubercular pallor — the mirror was my enemy. So that day, the first February afternoon warm enough to play outside, I didn’t inspect myself on the way out of the locker room, didn’t notice until I was on the field and halfway through the first softball inning that all those people laughing were laughing at me, didn’t understand until Nikki Drummond sidled over in the dugout and whispered, giggling, that I might want to stick a tampon up my cunt.

This was the nightmare with no and then I woke up. This was blood. This was stain. I was sticky and leaking, and if Nikki had slipped me a knife I would happily have slit a vein, but instead she just gave me the one word that girls like Nikki weren’t supposed to say, the word that guaranteed from now on, whenever anyone looked my way, they would see Hannah Dexter and think cunt. My cunt. My dripping, bloody, foul cunt.

I was supposed to shrug, maybe. The kind of girl who could laugh things off was the kind of girl who lived things down. Instead I burned, hot and teary, hands pressed against my splotchy ass as if I could make them all unsee what they’d seen, and Nikki’s teeth glowed white as her skirt when she laughed, and then somehow I was in the nurse’s office, still crying and still bleeding, while the gym teacher explained to the nurse that there had been an incident, that I had soiled myself, that I perhaps should be wiped and cleaned and collected by a parent or guardian and taken home.

I locked myself into the handicapped bathroom at the back of the office and stuck a tampon up my cunt, then changed into unstained jeans, tied a jacket around my waist, scrubbed the tears off my face, and dry-heaved into the toilet. When I finally came out, Lacey Champlain was there, waiting for the nurse to decide her so-called headache was bullshit and send her back to class, but — at least this was how we told ourselves the story later, when we needed the story of us to be inevitable — at some deeper, subsonic level, waiting for me.

The room smelled like rubbing alcohol. Lacey smelled like Christmas, ginger and cloves. I could hear the nurse on the phone in her inner office, complaining about overtime and how someone somewhere was a total bitch.

Then Lacey was looking at me. “Who was it?”

It was no one; it was me; it was bad timing and heavy flow and the cruel dictates of white cotton, but because it was the laughter as much as the stain, the cunt as much as its leak, it was also Nikki Drummond — and when I said her name Lacey’s lip curled up on one side, her finger playing at her face like it was twirling an invisible mustache, and somehow I knew this was as close as I’d get to a smile.

“You ever think about just doing it? Like he did?” she said.

“Doing what?”

That got me a look I’d see a lot of, later on. It said you’d disappointed her; it said Lacey had expected better, but she would give you one more chance. “Offing yourself.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Sometimes.”

I’d never said it out loud. It was like carrying around a secret disease, and not wanting to let anyone think you were contagious. I half expected Lacey to scrape her chair away.

Instead she held out her left wrist and flipped it over, exposing the veins. “See that?”

I saw milky flesh, spiderwebbed with blue. “What?”

She tapped her finger against the spot, a pale white line, cutting diagonal, the length of a thumbnail. “Hesitation cut,” she said. “That’s what happens when you lose your nerve.”

I wanted to touch it. To feel the raised edges of the scar, and the pulse beating beneath. “Really?”

A sudden spurt of laughter. “Of course not really. It’s a paper cut. Come on.”

She was making fun of me, or she wasn’t. She was like me, or she wasn’t.

“That’s not how I’d do it, anyway, if I were going to do it,” she said. “Not with a knife.”

“Then how?”

She shook her head and made an uh-uh noise, like I was a kid reaching for a cigarette. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“My what?”

“Your plan, for how you’d do it.”

“But I wouldn’t—”

“Whether you’d actually do it is beside the point,” she said, and I could tell I was running out of chances. “How you would kill yourself is the most personal decision a person can make. It says everything about you. Don’t you think?”

Why I said what I said next: because I could see her getting tired of me, and I needed her not to; because I was desperate and tired and could still feel the wet seeping into my jeans; because I was too tired of not saying all the things I thought were true.

“So shooting yourself in the head is Craig-speak for My girlfriend is a cunt and this is the only way to break up with her for good?” I said, and then I said, “Might have been the only smart thing he ever did.”

She didn’t have to tell me, later, that this was the moment I won her heart.

“I’m Lacey,” she said, and gave me her wrist again, sideways this time, and we shook hands.

“Hannah.”

“No. I hate that name. What’s your last name?” She was still holding on.

“Dexter.”

She nodded. “Dex. Better. I can work with that.”

WE CUT SCHOOL. “THIS IS a day that calls for large quantities of sugar and alcohol,” she said. “Possibly fries. You in?”

I’d never cut before. Hannah Dexter did not break the rules. Dex, on the other hand, followed Lacey straight out of the school, thinking not about consequences but about stick a tampon up your cunt and how, if Lacey had suggested we burn the place down, Dex might just have gone for it.

Her crap Buick got only AM frequencies, but Lacey had stuck an old Barbie tape recorder to the dash. She turned it up as loud as it would go, some screaming maniac trapped in a hell chamber of jackhammers and electroshock, but when I asked what it was, there was a sacred hush in her voice that suggested she’d mistaken it for music.

“Dex, meet Kurt.”

She flicked her eyes away from the road, long enough to read my face.

“You’ve really never heard Nirvana?” It was a brand of fake incredulity I knew too well: You reallydidn’t get invited to Nikki’s pool party? You really don’t have a Swatch? You really haven’t kissed/jerked off/blown/fucked anyone? It wasn’t the veiled snobbery I minded but the implied pity, that I could fall so unthinkably short. But with Lacey, I didn’t mind. I accepted the pity as my due, because I saw now that it was unthinkable that I’d never heard Nirvana. I could tell it was making her happy to solidify our roles, she the sculptor and me the clay. In that car, miles opening between us and the school, between Hannah and Dex, between before and after, I wanted nothing more than to make her happy.

“Never,” I said, and then, because it was called for, “but it’s amazing.”

We drove; we listened. Lacey, when the spirit seized her, rolled down a window and screamed lyrics into the sky.

That Buick: ancient and wheezing and spotted with bird shit and, even on that first day, like home. Love at first sight, like I knew already it would be our getaway car. Its glove compartment, with its heap of maps, crusty nail polish bottles, mixtapes, old Burger King wrappers, emergency condoms, dusty pack of candy cigarettes. Its leather seats exhaling cigarette fumes, though Lacey, her grandma dead of lung cancer, refused to smoke. “It belonged to some dead lady,” Lacey explained, that first day. “Three full-body details, and the damn thing still stinks of cigarettes and adult diapers.” It felt haunted, and I liked it.

Lacey was a driver — I would come to understand that. She was always inventing field trips for us: We drove to a UFO landing site, a Democratic rally where we pretended to be Ross Perot groupies and a Republican rally where we pretended to be Communists, a sixties-style drive-in with roller-skating ushers, and the Big Mac Museum, which was lame. They were, more than anything, excuses to drive. That first day, she invented no destination; we drove in circles. Motion was enough.

There was something deliciously numbing about it, the sameness of the clapboard houses and seamed concrete, the day unspooling behind us as we circled the town. I tried to imagine how it looked to her, determinedly idyllic Battle Creek with its antique stores and its ice cream shoppe, its empty storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs, its chest-thumping pride, every forced smile and flapping flag insisting this was the real America, that we were salt of the earth and blood of the heartland, that our flat green corner of Pennsylvania was a walled-off Eden, untouched by the violence and sin endemic to the modern age, that the town mothers worried only over their pie crusts and garden weeds, the town fathers limited themselves to one after-dinner beer and never prowled beneath their secretaries’ skirts, the sons and daughters had only sitcom troubles and, despite their hormones and halter tops, knew enough to wait. When something went awry, when a golden child slipped a gun in his mouth and bled brains on damp earth, it could only be evidence of attack or contagion, an incursion of them, never a fault line through the heart of us. When night came, it was easy to ignore the things the children did in the dark.

It was impossible, seeing home through her eyes, like seeing your own face as a stranger would. This was my greatest fear, that Battle Creek was my mirror. That Lacey would look at one, see the other, and dismiss us both.

“I can’t believe you have a car,” I said. I didn’t even have a license. “If I had one, I’d drive away and never come back.”

“Want to?” Lacey said. Like it would be that easy to Thelma-and-Louise ourselves out of Battle Creek for good. Like I could be a different girl, my own opposite, and all it took was saying yes.

Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, all revealed to me in a single burst of glaringly obvious light. Maybe it took longer than one car ride to slough off a lifetime of Hannah Dexter — a careful study of the right bands, the slow but steady creep of delinquency, flannel and combat boots, hair dye and shrooms and the nerve to violate at least a handful of commandments — but that’s not how I remember it now. That’s not how it felt then. It felt, right there in that car, like I could choose to be Dex. Everything after was paperwork.

“We drive straight through, we could make it to Ohio by midnight,” Lacey said. “We’d be at the Rockies in a day or two.”

“We’re going west?”

“Of course we’re going west.”

West, Lacey said, was the frontier. West was the edge of the world, the place you fled in search of gold or God or freedom; it was cowboys and movie stars, surfboards and earthquakes and pitiless desert sun.

“So, you want to?”

Three times that year, like some fairy-tale temptress, Lacey asked me to leave with her, and every time I refused, imagining I was being prudent, refusing to give in to the temptation of running wild. Not understanding that the wild was waiting for me in Battle Creek — the danger was in staying.

That time, I didn’t say yes or no. I only laughed, and so instead of the promised land, she drove us to a lake. Twenty miles out of town, it had a swimming beach for families, a dock for fishermen, reeds and shadows for lovers, a muddy bed of empty beer cans for the rest. That day it was all silence and space, leafless branches overhanging a gray shore, abandoned docks where ghosts of children past bounced on invisible rafts and dove into sparkling blue. Winter had come, and the lake belonged to us. I’d been there before, though not often, because my mother hated the beach and my father the water. Building mounds in the sand beside a beach full of kids living in an L.L.Bean ad, shaded by beach umbrellas, tossed from fathers’ shoulders into the water, I always felt like the defective half of a Goofus and Gallant comic: Gallant builds a castle with a moat; Gallant buries her mother in the sand; Gallant practices her dead man’s float and does handstands on the muddy lake bottom. Goofus lies on a towel with a book while her mother pencils through work files and her father opens another beer; Goofus teaches herself to tread water and wonders who would rescue her from drowning, since neither parent knows how to swim.

Lacey shut off the engine and the music, dousing us in awkward silence.

She breathed deep. “I love it here in the winter. Everything dead. It feels like being inside a poem, you know?”

I said I did.

“Do you write?” she asked. “I can tell you’re the type. The word type.”

I said I did, again, though it had only the most tenuous connection to truth. Somewhere in my room was a pile of abandoned diaries, each filled with a few stilted entries and several hundred blank pages, each a reminder of how little I had to say. I preferred other people’s stories. For Lacey, though, I could be a girl who made her own.

“See that!” She was triumphant. “You’re a total stranger, but it’s like we already know each other. You feel that, too?”

Although almost everything I’d told her since we got into the car had been a favor-currying lie, it all felt true. It did seem like she knew me, or was conjuring a new me into existence, one question at a time, and it made perfect sense for her to know that girl inside and out. Knowledge is a creator’s prerogative.

“What number am I thinking of?” I said.

She squinted her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples. “You’re not thinking of any number. You’re thinking about what happened at school.”

“Am not.”

“Bullshit. You’re thinking about it, but trying not to think about it with everything you’ve got, because if you let yourself do it, really marinate in it, you’ll start crying and screaming and polishing up the brass knuckles, and that would be messy. You hate messy.”

It wasn’t wholly appealing, being known.

“What are you afraid of, Dex? You get angry, really angry, what’s the worst that happens? You think you’ll make Nikki Drummond’s brain leak out of her ears, just by wanting it?”

“I should probably get home,” I said.

“God, look at you, all pale and squirmy. It’s not a mortal sin, getting fucking mad. I swear.”

But anger like that, it wasn’t smart. There was no upshot to letting myself feel it.

Feeling it hurt.

“Stick a tampon up your cunt,” I said, because maybe that was the way to exorcise it. Get it out of my head and into the world.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what she said. Nikki. Today.”

Lacey whistled. “That’s fucked.” She started to laugh then, but not at me. I was sure of that. “Little Miss Perfect Pottymouth. Fucking ridiculous.” And then, miraculously, we were both laughing.

“You know why I brought you here?” she said, finally, as we sobered up.

“To psychoanalyze me to death?”

She lowered her voice to a serial killer pitch. “Because here, no one can hear you scream.”

As I was wondering whether I’d just entered act three of a Lifetime movie, the kind where the heroine accepts a ride with a stranger and ends up floating facedown in the lake, Lacey stepped to the edge of the water, threw her head back, and screamed. It was a beautiful thing, a tide of righteous fury, and I wanted it for my own.

Then it stopped, and she turned to me. “Your turn.”

I tried.

I stood where Lacey had stood, my Keds ghosting her boot prints. I looked out at the water, skimmed with patches of ice, something primordial in their shimmer. I watched my breath fog the air and fisted my fingers inside my gloves, for warmth, for power.

I stood at the edge of the water and wanted, so much, to scream for her. To prove her right, that we were the same. What she felt, I felt. What she said, I would do.

Nothing came out.

Lacey took my hand. She leaned against me, touched her head to mine. “We’ll work on it.”

The next morning, Nikki Drummond found a bloody tampon stuffed through the vent of her locker. She cornered me in the girls’ bathroom that afternoon, hissing what the fuck is wrong with you as we washed our hands and tried not to look at each other in the mirror.

“Today, Nikki?” And then I did look at her, the Gorgon of Battle Creek, and I didn’t turn to stone. “Not a single fucking thing.”

LACEY, Me Before You

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO know everything, Dex — and for what it’s worth, I’m pretty fucking sure your eyes are bigger than your stomach on that one — you should know that, before it all started, I was like you. Maybe not exactly like, not so willfully oblivious that I’d forgotten what I was trying to ignore, but close enough.

We lived by the beach.

No, that’s another of those pretty lies, the kind I tell you, the kind real estate developers and sleazy travel agents shill to gullible cheapskates, the kind the local founding fathers sold themselves on when they named their shit sprawl of gas stations and strip malls Shore Village, even though it was a twenty-minute drive from Jersey’s least attractive beach. We lived by a Blockbuster and an off-brand burger joint and a vacant lot that drunks used on Sunday mornings to puke up their Saturday nights. We lived alone, just the two of us, except it was mostly just the one of us. Between waitressing and groupie-ing, boozing and fucking, Loretta didn’t have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn’t notice.

Poor Lacey, you’re thinking. Poor, unloved Lacey, with her trash mother and deadbeat dad, and this is why I don’t tell you these things, because for you everything is a fairy tale or a Lifetime movie, Technicolor or black-and-white, and I don’t need you imagining me in some sulfurous pit of trailer-trash hell. I don’t need your Oh, Lacey, that must have been so hard for you or Oh, Lacey, what do food stamps look like and how does neglect smell or, worst of all, Oh, Lacey, don’t worry, I understand, I have my pretty little house and my father knows best and my picture-perfect fucking sitcom life, but deep down we’re totally the same.

I made do with what I had, and what I had was the smell of the ocean when the wind was right, and the beach itself, when I could thumb a ride. I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.

Mine was a nineteen-year-old dropout with greaser hair and a James Dean jacket, squatting in the empty apartment beneath ours, because his mother was the super and had given him the key. He read Kerouac, of course. Or maybe he didn’t actually read it; maybe he just strategically spread it across his lap while he napped in one of the crappy metal chairs he’d set up in the vacant lot, his own personal tanning zone. He definitely didn’t read Rilke or Nietzsche or Goethe or any of the other moldy paperbacks we passed back and forth while I coughed down his cherry vodka and he taught me how to smoke. He was too lazy to make it past the first chapters of most of them, but I can believe he made it through the Kerouac, because Jack spoke his language, his druggy, pretentious, wastrel nympho native tongue.

His name was Henry Schafer, but he had me call him Shay, and don’t get me wrong, Dex, even then, fifteen and swoony, I didn’t think it was love. Love was the stack of books piling up in my room, maybe, and the bootlegs he brought me; it was sailing down the Schuylkill in his beat-up Chevy, Philly on the horizon; it was South Street and head shops and smoky nights in a shitty back room listening to slam poetry; it was the heat of flesh the first time I dropped acid, salty skin when I licked my own palm. Love was not what Shay had me do to him in my mother’s bedroom while she was off trying to fuck Metallica; it wasn’t a sticky glob of him in my mouth or the pain of a finger up my ass; it certainly wasn’t finding him with his tongue in his girlfriend’s ear and then pretending, the next night, that I’d assumed a girlfriend all along, that of course I’d understood what this was and wasn’t, that there was no harm and no foul and no reason he couldn’t keep using me to kill time while she was busy, and yes, I should be grateful that he’d always used a condom, what other proof did I need that he was thinking of me.

This isn’t what you want to hear. You don’t want to hear that I studied those books, at least at first, to impress him. That I listened to Jane’s Addiction and the Stone Roses because he told me that’s what people like us should do, and when he asked me whether the baby’s breath of hair on his upper lip looked cool, I told him it did, even though I thought his girlfriend was right, that it made his mouth look like a peripubescent pussy. He spent that night with me and not her, and that’s what mattered, and still, Dex, that doesn’t mean I thought it was love.

I liked him best when he was sleeping. When the lights were out and he was curled into me, kissing my neck in his dreams. Bodies can be anyone, in the dark.

That was before I turned sixteen, before my mother’s season of rebirth, born again into the loving arms of AA and then again into the Bastard and his Lord. That was the year I discovered no one gave a shit about how many classes I skipped as long as I still scraped through tests with a C-plus and, when I did bother to show, did so in tank tops that erred on the side of boobalicious, a tactic that also proved effective when my mother would put on a Bon Jovi album, spin the dial up to ear-shattering, sing and twirl and drink along until our landlord showed up to whine about volume and rent. That was also the year he started slapping my ass instead of hers, and she stopped noticing me, except for the nights she would sneak home late, sticky with someone else’s sweat, crawl into my bed and whisper that I was all she had and she was all I needed, and I would pretend to be asleep.

Life with Shay was better, if only marginally. I thought maybe we would run away together. Fuck his girlfriend. We would be Kerouac and Cassady, dance wild across the heartland, sip the Pacific, drive for the sake of driving. I believed we both understood that there, any there, would always be better than here, just like I believed that he’d dropped out of high school because true intelligence can’t be contained, that he let his parents support him because he was writing a novel and true art demanded sacrifice. I showed him some crap poetry, and I believed him when he said it was good.

Shay doesn’t matter. Shay was a gateway drug, a cheap glue-sniffing high on the pathway to transcendence. Shay was like something ordered out of a catalog: Of course he quoted Allen Ginsberg, of course he got stoned to the Smiths, of course he smoked cloves and wore black eyeliner and had a glass-blowing girlfriend named Willow who’d made him a Valentine’s Day bong. Shay only matters because of the day we camped out in his friend’s attic studio a block from the Schuylkill, and after we got good and stoned, someone turned off the Phillies game and turned on 91.7 and there he was.

Kurt.

Kurt screaming, Kurt raging, Kurt in agony, Kurt in bliss. “Fucking pseudo-punk poseurs,” Shay said, and reached over to turn it off, and when I said, “Don’t, please,” he only laughed. It took me another week to find the song again and then steal a copy of Bleach and another few weeks after that to fumigate Shay out of my life, but that was the moment he went from mattering a little to not at all.

After that, it was like they say about love: Falling. A gravitational inevitability. Even Shitbag Village had one decent record store, with a giant bin of discounts and bootlegs, and it only took thirty bucks and some tongue wrestling with the walking zit behind the counter to get what I needed. Then I closed myself into my room and, except for periodic forays back to the record store and one very inconvenient move to the middle of nowhere, spent that year and the next one catching up: the Melvins, because that was Kurt’s favorite band, and Sonic Youth, because they’re the ones who got Kurt his big deal; the Pixies, because once you knew anything about grunge, you knew that was where it all came from; Daniel Johnston, because Kurt said so and because the guy was in a mental hospital so I figured he could use the royalties; and of course bootleg Bikini Kill, for some righteous riot grrrl rage, and Hole, because you got the feeling that if you didn’t, Courtney would come to your house and fuck you up.

Then, like Kurt knew exactly what I’d need when I needed it, there was Nevermind. I barricaded myself in until I knew every note, beat, and silence — cut school for the purposes of a higher education.

I loved it. Loved it like Shakespearean sonnets and Hallmark cards and all that shit, like I wanted to buy it flowers and light it candles and fuck it gently with a chainsaw.

I’m not saying I go around doodling Mrs. Kurt Cobain on my notebooks or that I, like, ohmygod, imagine myself showing up on his doorstep in black lace panties and a trench coat. For one thing, Courtney would gouge my eyes out with barbed wire. For another, I know what’s real and what’s not, and real is not me fucking Kurt Cobain.

But: Kurt. Kurt with his watery blue eyes and his angel hair, the halo of stubble and the way the rub of it would burn. Kurt, who sleeps in striped pajamas with a teddy bear to keep him company, who frenched Krist on national TV to fuck with the rednecks back home and wore a dress on Headbangers Ball just because he could, who has enough money to buy and smash a hundred top-line guitars but likes a Fender Mustang because it’s a cheap piece of crap you have to abuse as much as you love if you want it to play nice. Rock god, sex god, angel, saint: Kurt, who always looks at you from the side, from beneath that golden curtain of hair, looks at you like he knows all the bad things scuttling around inside. Kurt’s voice, and how it hurts. I could live and die inside that voice, Dex. I wanted to crawl inside it, soft and razor raw at the same time, his voice cutting me bloody, warm and slippery and alive. I don’t need Kurt — the real living, breathing Courtney-screwing Kurt — to throw me down on the bed and brush his hair out of his eyes and lay his naked body on mine, miles of translucent skin glowing white. I don’t need that Kurt, because I have his voice. I have the part of him that matters. That Kurt, I own. Like he owns me.

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.

DEX, Story of Us

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?”

“Come on, Dex, you can say it. It’s not going to hurt.”

“Say what?”

“That’s why you love me, too.”

“That’s why I. .”

“Love me, too.”

“Love you, too.”

“Clearly I’ll be club president. You can be vice, and secretary, and treasurer.”

“And no other members.”

“Obviously. Think about it, Dex. We could read Nietzsche together, and Kant, and Kerouac, and figure out why people do what they do and why the universe has something instead of nothing and whether there’s a god, and sneak into the woods and blast Kurt as loud as we can and close our eyes and try to, I don’t know, connect with the life force or whatever. Bonus points if it pisses people off.”

“So basically, keep doing what we’re doing?”

“Basically.”

“No regular meetings or anything.”

“Nope.”

“And no tree house.”

“Do you know how to build a tree house?”

“And the blood-oath thing?”

“Hello, AIDS?”

“I don’t think you can actually—”

“The blood oath is a metaphor, Dex. Keep up.”

“So not an actual club, then.”

“No, Dex, not an actual club. That would be lame.”

If we had started a club for real, ontology would have taken a backseat to Lacey’s preferred activity: dissecting the evil exploits of our shared enemy, Nikki Drummond. For years I’d hated her on principle, but after the incident—which was how we spoke of it, the better to forget words like stain and blood and cunt—I hated her in concrete particulars that Lacey was eager to help me parse. “What kind of person needs a reason to hate the devil?” she liked to say, when I asked what had put Nikki in her sights in the first place, and I was left to conclude that Lacey hated Nikki because Nikki so plainly hated me.

“She’s a sociopath,” Lacey said now, bicycling her feet in the air. “No emotions. Probably kills small animals, just for fun.”

“You think she’s got her own little pet cemetery in the backyard? Rabbits with their tails pulled out, that kind of thing?”

“Imagine the possibilities,” Lacey said. “We could exhume the bodies. Give little Thumper some justice. Show the world what she really is.”

This was our recurring theme: If only we could expose Nikki’s rotting heart. If only the world knew the truth. If only we had the ammunition for a frontal assault.

The day before, we’d slouched behind her in the auditorium’s ratty seats, enduring an assembly about satanic cults, the third so far that year. No one in Battle Creek had been foolish enough to invoke the Antichrist since Craig’s death — that is, at least not since the November morning when a gang of grieving jocks jumped Jesse Gorin, Mark Troslop, and Dylan Asp and strung them up by their ankles in a tree. I’d seen them up there, dangling over the school parking lot, we all had, three scrawny stoners stripped to socks and boxers, shivering in the snow. Punishment for satanizing half the churches in town on the same night Craig Ellison died; punishment for trying so hard to scare people, or for succeeding. A sacrificial offering to Nikki, their grieving goddess, and — even if the rumors were wrong, even if she hadn’t commanded it — she’d accepted it in kind. A thing like that in a place like this, people kept saying after they found Craig’s body in the woods, like it was impossible that anything so ugly could happen in our pretty backyard. But ugly things happened all the time in Battle Creek: Boys beat other boys bloody and tied them to branches while girls like Nikki pointed and laughed.

After that, Jesse, Mark, and Dylan stopped chalking pentagrams on their shirts. They stopped bragging about how dangerous they were, stopped breaking into the bio lab to steal fetal pigs. A couple towns west of us, though, a few cows were found slaughtered under “ritualistic” circumstances; in another town to the east, a girl our age washed up on a riverbank, naked and blue and, in some way no one was willing to specify, defiled; here at home, Craig was still dead. Something was wrong with the children, the latest guest speaker said from the stage, and by the children he meant us. Something was wrong with the children, and so here we were, and here Nikki Drummond was, perched directly in front of us, shiny, pink-scrunchied ponytail defying anyone to suggest the something wrong might be her.

“Did you hear she fucked Micah Cross in the teachers’ lounge?” Lacey whispered, just loud enough. Then looked at me, expectant.

“I heard. . it was Andy Smith.” This was the best I could come up with, and a clumsy lie — if Andy were any more obviously in the closet he’d be a pair of shoes — but Lacey nodded in approval.

“That was the girls’ locker room,” she whispered.

“Right. Hard to keep track.”

“Imagine how she feels.”

“Hard to imagine she feels at all.” It was easier with Lacey there, finding the right thing to say — and doing so in the moment, not days later in the shower, when there was no one to appreciate it but the mildewed tiles and the face in the mirror.

“Not that I think there’s anything wrong with a healthy sex life,” Lacey whispered.

“Of course not.”

“But personally, I think it’s kind of sad to try to fuck your way to popularity.” She was so good at it, acting cold-blooded. The secret of pretending to be someone else, she’d told me, was that you didn’t pretend. You transformed. To defeat a monster, you had to embody one.

“Tragic,” I said.

“What’s tragic is trying to fuck yourself into forgetting you’re a miserable bitch.”

The perfect head never moved. Nikki Drummond wasn’t the kind of girl who flinched. It only added to the fun of trying to make her.

That afternoon at my house, exactly drunk enough, we lay on the carpet and fantasized about using hidden cameras to make undercover recordings that would expose Nikki’s sins to her doting parents and adoring teachers and every drooling moron lined up to take Craig’s place in her pants. Between that and Kurt and the way the ceiling spun when I stared at it too hard, I didn’t notice the car pull into the driveway or the front door slam or my father’s loafers padding across the rug or much of anything until he leaned over us and spoke.

“Something wrong with the couch, kids?” He took off his sunglasses and squinted down at us. My father blamed allergies for his sensitive, red-rimmed eyes; my mother blamed hangovers. I thought he just liked how well the knockoff Ray-Bans paired with his goatee. “No, let me guess, you’ve fallen and you can’t get up.”

“You’re not supposed to be home.”

I sat up too fast and had to immediately lie down, and that was when the panic crept in, because my father was here and Lacey was here and we were drunk, or at least I was drunk, and he would certainly notice, and there would be a scene, the kind of ugly, uncool scene that would mark me as too much trouble and drive Lacey away for good.

But somewhere beneath that, secret and still, animal eyes glowing in the dark: I was drunk, and it was good, and if anyone didn’t like it, fuck them.

My father took Lacey’s hand and hauled her to her feet. “I’m guessing you’re the Pied Piper?”

“What?” I said.

Lacey repossessed her hand and blushed.

“That’s you, isn’t it? Leading my daughter astray in the musical wilds?”

“What?” I said, again.

“I’d like to think my purposes are less nefarious,” Lacey said, past me, to him. “And my taste in music significantly more impressive.”

My father grinned. “If you can call it music.” And just like that, they were off, Lacey leaping to the defense of her god, my father throwing out phrases like new wave, post-punk pop avant-garde, the two of them batting names back and forth I’d never heard, Ian Curtis and Debbie Harry and Robert Smith.

“Joey Ramone couldn’t lick Kurt Cobain’s shoes.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him live.”

Her eyes popped. “You saw the Ramones live?”

“What?” I said again, and fought the sudden urge to climb onto my father’s lap, wheeze whiskey breath in his face, force him to see me.

“Saw them?” He gave Lacey a patented Jimmy Dexter smile. “I opened for them.”

“You were in a band?” I said. No one was listening. No one was offering me a gallant hand, either, so I pulled myself upright, and tried not to puke.

“You opened for the Ramones?” That was Lacey’s Kurt voice; that was awe.

“Well. . not technically.” Another smile, an aw shucks shrug. “We played in the parking lot before the Ravers, and they opened for the Ramones. It got us into the after-party, though. Did a shot with Johnny.”

“Lacey was in a band,” I said. Lacey had told me all about it, the Pussycats, like the cartoon, all girls, guitar straps slung over their shoulders, Lacey tonguing the mic, sweaty hair matted to her face, crowd-surfing on a wave of love. Never again, she’d told me, never here in Battle Creek, never anywhere. “The fact that we’ve even heard of grunge all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?” Lacey had said. “It’s like those stars, the ones that explode so far away that by the time you get the news, they’ve been dead for a million years. We’re too late. We missed it. Only the truly pathetic pretend to be artists by making something that’s already made. And I do not intend to be pathetic.”

I was jealous of Lacey’s band, of those girls who’d been her Pussycats, but glad, too, because I couldn’t be in any band, obviously, and if she’d started a new one it would have carried her away from me.

“Tell him about your band, Lacey.”

But she didn’t want to tell him, or didn’t hear me. “What was he like?” she said. Breathed the name. “Johnny Ramone.”

“Drunk. And he smelled like dog shit, but man, he gave me one of his guitar picks and I thought I’d build a shrine to that thing.”

“Can I see it?” Lacey asked.

My father reddened, slightly. “Lost it on the way home.”

I cleared my throat. “When were you in a band? And how did I not know this?”

He shrugged. “Long time ago, kid. Different life.”

My mother listened to music only in the car, and then only to Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton, and, if she was feeling frisky, the Eagles. My father, when he drove, alternated between sports radio and silence. We had a stereo no one ever used and a box of records in the basement so warped with damp they’d been deemed unfit for the previous year’s yard sale. For the Dexter family, music was a nonissue. Except that now my father was talking about it the way Lacey did, like music was his religion, and it turned him into a stranger.

“How did a guy like you spawn someone so musically illiterate?” she asked.

“I ask myself that every day,” he said.

“No, I don’t buy it. You see what this means, Dex? It’s in you somewhere. You just needed me to help you get it out.”

It was a generous assessment. Everyone knew I took after my mother: the beige and blotchy coloring, the stick up the ass. But if Lacey saw him in me, there must have been something to see.

“Dex? That supposed to be you, kid?” My father examined me, looking for evidence of her.

“No offense, Mr. Dexter, but Hannah’s a shit name,” Lacey said.

“Call me Jimmy. And no offense taken. It was her mother’s idea. I always thought it sounded like a little old lady.”

Lacey laughed. “Exactly.”

That my father never liked my name: This was another thing I hadn’t known. I’d thought he called me kid because he wanted to claim a piece of me no one else could.

“But Dex? Yeah, I like that,” he said.

Dex was supposed to be our secret, a code name for the thing that was growing between us and the person she was shaping me to be. But if Lacey was ready to introduce her to the world, I thought, she must have her reasons.

“That’s right,” I said. “Dex. Spread the word.”

“Your mother’s going to love this,” he murmured, and it was clear the thought of it pleased him as much as the name itself.

“So, Jimmy, maybe you’d like to hear some real music,” Lacey said. “Dex has a copy of Bleach around here somewhere. At least she’d better.”

He looked at me, clearly trying to read the stay or go in my face, but I couldn’t send a message I didn’t have.

“Another time,” he said finally, slipping his sunglasses back on. “The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid is calling my name.” He paused on his way up the stairs. “Oh, and Dex, you might want to wash out that glass before your mother comes home.”

So he had noticed, after all. And he was still on my side.

“You didn’t tell me your dad was cool,” Lacey said once he was gone. It was like a benediction, and most of me was proud.

AFTERNOONS AT MY PLACE BECAME, at Lacey’s instigation, a regular thing, and it was only a matter of time before my mother insisted we have “this Lacey” over for dinner, so she could see for herself this miracle worker who had her husband digging through the attic for his guitar and her daughter into what appeared to be a trucker’s castoff wardrobe.

“Mom’s going to be all weird, isn’t she?” I said, as my father and I sorted through the stack of Publishers Clearing House stickers. My father was the family’s designated dreamer, the buyer of lottery tickets and keeper of an ever-growing list of inventions he’d never build. It was, he always said, why he’d never taken what my mother called a real job. Only make-your-own-hours employment — like his current gig managing Battle Creek’s only movie theater — afforded him the free time he needed to fulfill his yen for get-rich-quick scheming.

This particular scheme had been our shared private ritual for years, since the days when I thought carefully licking those stamps and sealing the envelope with a lucky kiss might actually summon the oversized million-dollar check to our doorstep. I’d long since lost the slip of paper carefully inscribed with all the treasures I’d buy when I was rich, but I liked the mint chocolate chip ice cream that came along with the tradition, and the way my mother wasn’t part of it. There was music playing now, which wasn’t part of it, either, but my father said that the Cure was a universal cure for what ailed us. Wait till Lacey gets here, he said. She gets it.

She was due in an hour. My mother had made lasagna, the one thing she knew how to cook.

“Go easy on your mother, kid. I think one thing we can agree she’s not is weird.”

He was right: Normal was her religion. She’d never implied that she wanted me to be popular — the impossibility of that probably spoke for itself — but she encouraged me, at every turn, to fit in, to be careful, to save my mistakes for later. “You’ll have more to lose when you’re older, but at least then you’ll have something left when you lose it,” she told me once while we were flipping through photo albums, old ones that showed her awkwardly jutting into adolescence, bulging in all the wrong places, only a single page turn between apple-cheeked college freshman and bleary-eyed mother with an infant on her caftanned hip, as if all the pages that should have been between had fallen out, and maybe that was how she felt about her life, that something had gone missing. “The younger you are, the easier it is to give everything away.”

Dinner was a fright show. The four of us in the wood-paneled dining room huddled at one lonely corner of the long table we never used, pushing around burnt lasagna on chipped Kmart plates, my mother scowling every time a mist of garlic bread crumbs floated from Lacey’s mouth onto the plastic tablecloth, Lacey pretending not to notice, too busy fielding rapid-fire questions about her mother’s job and her stepfather’s church and her nonexistent college plans, each of them more excruciatingly conventional than the last, all of them humiliating enough — but nothing compared to the withering look on my mother’s face when I volunteered that I’d also been thinking about taking a year off after graduation, because, like Lacey said, college had been co-opted by a capitalist system only invested in producing more drones for its financial machine, and my mother said, “Stop showing off.”

I wondered if mortification qualified as an excuse for justifiable homicide.

Lacey said yes and no and please and thanks so much for the delicious and not at all overcooked and underseasoned food. Lacey said that small towns bred small-minded people and she was waging a one-woman war against shrinkage — two-woman now that she’d rallied me to her side. Lacey said she never accompanied her stepfather to church because religion was a destructive influence on impressionable masses and she refused to support any institution with a commitment to intellectual oppression, and when my mother, semiapostate granddaughter of a minister, suggested that it was the arrogant moral cowardice of youth that led us to dismiss things we didn’t understand, Lacey said, And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, then said that accusing your enemies of ignorance was the coward’s way out of honest argument, which made my father laugh, at which point I began to seriously doubt whether any of us would make it out alive.

“So how did you two crazy kids meet?” Lacey asked. “You seem like the type to have a good story.” Which was how I knew that Lacey, too, sensed things were running off the rails, because if there was anything my mother didn’t seem like, it was the type with a good story.

Except that, of course, she did have one — and it was this one. Love at first sight, a story I’d always loved to hear, less because of the details than because of the way they liked to tell it together, and the way they looked at each other when they did, as if they were suddenly remembering that this was a life they’d chosen.

My mother smiled. “It was shortly after college, and I was filling in, temporarily, at a subsidiary of my employer, an auto repair facility in town.”

This was Julia Dexter — speak for dropping out of college when the financial aid ran dry and taking a crap paper-shuffling job that was supposed to last a summer, not a lifetime. My mother applied the same cardinal rule to autobiography she did to interior design: Accentuate the positive and hang a curtain over everything else.

“It had been, to say the least, an unpleasant afternoon. I was looking forward to locking the doors and finishing my book in peace, when in strolls a gang of hooligans, smelling like an ashtray and dressed like they thought they were Bruce Springsteen.” She said it fondly, as she always did. “Your father was wearing this silly grin. .”

Here, always, she paused, so my father could jump in to say he was wasted, and she would then clarify that he wasn’t driving drunk, of course, his friend Todd was at the wheel, a teetotaler Christian they’d only befriended because he was always willing to drive. This time, though, my father said nothing.

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 of 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 pornographic 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.

The man Lacey called the Bastard stood shorter and skinnier than I’d imagined, with wire-rimmed glasses and a graying military flattop. Lacey’s mother knelt before him in a white bra and panties, palms assuming prayer position, eyes on the Bastard’s black loafers.

“God forgive me,” she said.

“For being a drunk,” he prompted.

“For being a drunk. For being weak. For—”

“For giving in to the temptations of my whorish past.”

“For giving in to temptations.”

He toed her hard in the belly.

“The temptations of my whorish past,” she corrected herself.

I felt like I was watching TV.

Lacey’s mother was crying. Somewhere beyond me, a baby echoed her.

She tried to stand, but the Bastard pressed two fingers to her shoulder and shook his head. Her knees returned to the tile.

The baby was screaming.

“He needs me,” Lacey’s mother said.

“Should’ve thought of that before.” The Bastard’s voice was so reasonable, as if they were sitting across the table from each other discussing a credit card bill. He was even dressed like an accountant, a pocket protector tucked neatly into his starched white shirt.

“You won’t do with my son what you’ve done with your daughter,” he said.

She nodded.

“Say it.”

“I’ll do better with James Junior.”

“You’ll have some respect for yourself.”

“I’ll have respect.”

“No more of this garbage.”

“No more,” she whispered.

The baby cried.

There was a touch on my shoulder, just gentle enough not to startle, or maybe I wasn’t startled because I knew, of course, Lacey would be there.

“There’s a back way out through the kitchen,” Lacey whispered, though she didn’t have to: Our houses shared the same floor plan, escape route and all. I went first, sliding through the dark, any noise covered up by the baby’s increasingly unhinged screams. I had to tamp down an impulse to turn back for him, carry him and Lacey away, but of course he wasn’t my brother and Lacey was the one with car and license. I wasn’t in a position to rescue anyone.

She eased the door shut behind us, and said nothing as we got into the car and peeled away. There was no music.

“You want to go home,” she said finally, and I knew if I said yes, that’s what it would be. Final.

I understood now: This was a test. Maybe the whole night had been a test. With Lacey, it was hard to tell whether events were unspooling of their own accord or under her behind-the-scenes machinations, but, I reminded myself, it was always safest to assume the latter.

I was good at tests. I reached over to the Barbie recorder and hit play, feinting a head slam with each of Kurt’s downbeats. “Let’s go to the lake.”

THE LAKE IN FEBRUARY, IN sleet and starshine. We had it to ourselves. Wind and water and sky and Lacey. Everything I needed.

“Parents are bullshit,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Everyone’s bullshit but us,” I said.

We called it our lake, but it was only ours the way everything was ours: because the world we created between the two of us was secret and wholly owned.

We were creatures of water, she told me, and those don’t belong in the woods. It was the only explanation she ever offered for why we needed to stay away. Never the forest, always the lake, and that was fine with me. I couldn’t wait for it to get warmer, to watch her swim.

She breathed water, she told me, and I could almost believe it was true.

The sleet was light and oil slick, the kind that made you wonder about acid rain. Lacey preferred storms. A death-black sky, a sizzle in the air, that waiting, breath-holding feeling, like something was about to break. Sometimes we made it to the lake before the storm’s first bellow. We raised our faces to the rain, timed the gap between light and sound, one Mississippi and two and three. Until we knew the storm well enough to breathe with it, to beat with its rhythm, to know after the sky burned white how long to wait before opening our mouths and screaming into the thunder’s roar.

But that was Lacey’s time. I liked it better in the quiet. The storm was like another person between us, angrier and more interesting than I could hope to be. It was best when we were alone.

Lacey watched the water. It was different, in the dark. Fathomless. I imagined eyes glowing in the deep, teeth sharp, hunger and need. Things lurking. I imagined a siren song, a call in the night, Lacey and I answering, wading into icy waters, sucked down into the black.

She scooped up a rock and threw it into the lake. “Fuck.”

“Fuck,” I said, like I agreed, because whatever she meant by it, I did.

I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter what her mother and her stepfather did with each other, that I understood they weren’t a part of Lacey, and Lacey was no part of them, had sprung fully grown, goddess-style, blooming in a field or melting from the sun. That other people were irrelevant to us; that they existed only for the pleasure of dismissing them, simulacra of consciousness, walking and talking and pretending at an inner life but hollow inside. Nothing like us. Lacey herself had taught me that, when she read us Descartes. You can only know your own insides, Lacey said. The only real, certified and confirmed, is you and me. I wanted to remind her what she’d taught me, that we could leave together, that life was only as cruel as you allowed it to be, that Battle Creek belonged to us by choice and we could choose to abandon it.

I wanted to tell her that nothing I’d seen had scared me, that nothing had changed, but she already knew me well enough to hear a lie in my voice.

I wanted, most of me wanted, to save her.

Beneath that, though, there was a cold, shameful relief. I had come to need Lacey so much that it scared me. But if her life was this broken, if there was nothing beyond our closed circle but ugly mess, then it opened up the unthinkable possibility that Lacey needed something, too. That if I passed her tests, shaped myself to fit against her edges, that something could be me.

“My father loved the water.” She found another rock and fired it hard at the lake. “He liked to take me to Atlantic City, when we lived in Jersey. There was this mechanical pony thing by the casino, and he’d leave me with, like, a bucket of quarters. Enough to ride all day.”

“That’s a lot of pony riding.”

“Seemed like heaven to me. You know what they say about girls and horses.” I could hear a little of the Lacey I knew peeking through, winking at me. “Also, I was an idiot.”

“All six-year-olds are idiots.”

“He promised one day he’d take me to ride a real pony. I guess there are these beaches in Virginia where they run wild in the sand? Just ponies everywhere, like you’re back in time or something.”

“Chincoteague,” I said. I’d read Misty of Chincoteague eleven times.

“Whatever. I don’t know, because we never went.”

I could have told her that my father was the king of broken promises, that I knew all about disappointment, but I was afraid she’d tell me I knew fuck-all about anything, and she’d be right. “I’ve never been to the ocean,” I told her, and these were the magic words that brought her back.

Lacey squealed. “Unacceptable!” She pointed at the car. “In.”

For six hours, we drove. The Buick bumped and wheezed, the cassette player ate Lacey’s third-favorite bootleg, the crumpled AAA maps beaconed our way, and while I hovered over a suspiciously discolored toilet seat and then washed my hands with sickly gray soap, examining myself in the mirror for some clue that I’d become the kind of girl who lit out for the territories, some trucker tried to feel up Lacey in the Roy Rogers parking lot. We drove until the car swerved off the highway and into a parking lot gritty with sand, and there we were.

The ocean was endless.

The ocean beat and beat and beat against the shore.

We held hands and let the Atlantic wash over our bare feet. We breathed in salt and spray under the dawning sky.

It was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Lacey gave that to me.

“This is how I’d do it,” Lacey said, almost too quiet to hear under the surf. “I’d come out here at night, when the beach was empty, and I’d take an inflatable raft into the water. Then I’d hold on, and let it carry me out. Far enough that no one would ever find me. That I couldn’t change my mind. I’d bring my mother’s sleeping pills, and my Walkman, and a safety pin. And when I was out far enough that I couldn’t hear the waves breaking anymore, that the raft was just bobbing on the water and there was nothing but me and the stars? I’d do it. In order. The order matters. Pills first, then the safety pin, just a tiny hole in the raft, small enough that it would take some time. Then I’d put on the headphones, and lie down on the raft so I could see the stars and feel the water in my hair, and I’d let Kurt sing me home.”

I was supposed to be the one who paid attention, the one who listened to the chaos of the world and understood — that, Lacey said, was the whole joy of me — but so often that year, Lacey talked and I didn’t hear her at all.

“I could never go out there in the dark,” I said, and didn’t tell her how I would do it, even though I had decided, because Lacey said it was important to know. I would jump off something — something high enough that you would break on the way down. There was nothing like that in Battle Creek; there wasn’t even anything high enough for me to find out if I was scared of heights. Lacey thought I probably was. She said I seemed like the type.

I didn’t want to be up there in the sky, seeing everything at once, not unless it was going to be the last time. Because then I wouldn’t be afraid. I would feel powerful, I thought, toes peeking over edge, this most precious thing entirely mine, to protect or destroy. If you did it that way, you’d have power, up to the very end.

If I did it that way, at least before the end I could fly.

We slept in the car, running the heater for as long as we dared, pressed together for warmth. For once Lacey let me pick the music—“within reason,” she said. We turned on R.E.M., because I liked the honey in the singer’s voice, and I liked that Lacey liked it, too. She curled up in the seat and I put my head on her shoulder. Right there in the parking lot, with the water watching, he sang us to sleep.

When I woke up, the sky was gray and the horizon was on fire. Lacey was asleep. I padded barefoot back to the shoreline and stood in the water, needles of ice biting my ankles. The ocean looked kinder in the light, and I wished for Lacey’s raft so we could take it together, float into the sun.

I didn’t hear her come up behind me, but I felt her squeeze my hand. I knew she would find me.

“This is everything I need,” she said. “You’re everything. Just like I’m everything you need, right?” It was an incantation; it sealed us for life.

“Everything,” I told her, a fire sale on my soul. Everything must go. I wanted her to swallow me whole.

“Only us,” Lacey said.

We would be orphans; we would be ghosts. We would disappear from the mundane world into one of our own making. We would be wild. We would be free. This was the promise we made to each other, and this, if nothing else, we would keep.

LACEY, If I Lied

YOU SAY YOU WANT TO know. But you don’t, not really. You like me better as some mythical creature you dreamed up, a fucking forest sprite who only came to life because you closed your eyes and wanted it so bad. Maybe I’ve lied to you, Dex, but when it comes to the important things, I didn’t even have to bother because you never think to ask.

LIES I’VE TOLD YOU?

The smoking: I do it. Chimney-style, when you’re not around, a nicotine camel soaking it up to save for a rainy, Dex-filled day. Why do you think the car always smells like smoke? You think it’s the tobacco-stained ghost of the previous owner, breaking in at night just to puff at the windshield and blow smoke signals to the stars? No, either you knew or you didn’t want to.

It wasn’t a lie the day I told you I didn’t smoke, because that day, I didn’t. And it wasn’t a lie that my grandma died of lung cancer, which is why I quit that day, the way I quit a couple months before that and twice the year before that. It didn’t take. Your Lacey, smart and strong, wouldn’t have hidden a pack under the mattress for emergencies, and wouldn’t, after a cold meat loaf dinner with the Bastard, slip the pack from under the mattress, stick her head out the window, and breathe hot smoke into the winter air. It almost didn’t seem to count, that first drag after quitting — it was cold; the smoke looked like a fog of breath. It would be my last one ever.

The first drag is never the last one ever. Maybe I didn’t tell you because I liked having a secret. What’s mine is yours, that’s what we say. But it’s mine first.

I smoke, and the scars are real. The one on my wrist I showed you that first day. The thing I said I did, before I took it back. That was real, too.

Also, there was never any band. I was never some guitar-slinging rock goddess falling back from the stage and surfing a sea of blissed-out hands. You need me to be fearless. When you look at me I am fearless. But you’re not always there.

How I did it, when I did it.

With a knife. Lacey Champlain, in the bathtub, with a knife.

That was after Jersey, after the Bastard, after Battle Creek and Nikki and Craig but still before you. Nikki and Craig, that’s more a lie of omission, but you’d probably say it still counts.

I did it in the bathtub with a knife because that’s how they do it in the movies: warm bath, warm blood, everything slip-sliding away. I ran the water and took off my clothes and then I cut, but only once, and only shallowly, because what they don’t tell you in the movies is that it fucking hurts.

BEFORE LACEY, MY DEAR MOTHER would tell you, life was an all-you-can-eat buffet of bong hits and Pabst hangovers, which is white trash for the Garden of Eden. Just her and my daddy drinking and screwing and shiny-happy-peopling the seventies away, right up until she went and got knocked up. Ever since then, she’d tell you, she’s been starving to death. My mother, Battle Creek’s very own Joan of fucking Arc. One broken condom; one abortive trip to some dismal clinic where she couldn’t even stand to plant her ass on the rusty folding chairs, much less strip down and let the hairy-knuckled doctor scrape her out; one marriage proposal featuring two six-packs and no ring. One peeing, pooping, puking baby who liked screaming better than sleeping. At the wedding, I was a watermelon-sized lump under a cheap lace gown. They married in a park, and because they didn’t believe in all that bad-luck bullshit, they stood together before the ceremony, holding hands next to a Dumpster while the rent-a-minister got his crap together and the fifteen people who’d bothered to show up pretended they weren’t drunk or high, in deference to the groom’s snotty parents, who hadn’t even wanted to come. Mother and father-to-be gazed at each other, playing happy and love-struck—“even though I knew he was thinking, Holy fuck, let’s get this over with so I can get plastered,” she says, “and you were kicking a fucking hole in my stomach so I was just trying not to puke.”

It was my favorite story when I was a kid, the story of their wedding, of how I was there without being there, of how I came to be. Because my father told it differently, back when he would sit on the edge of my bed, stroke my hair, spin me fairy tales. “Your mother never looked more beautiful,” he told me, “and you know the prettiest part?”

That was my line, and even a four-year-old could remember it: “The watermelon!”

“Damn right. The watermelon. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and rubbed her belly, just like I’m rubbing your head right now, and that frilly dress crinkled against my hand, and that’s when I said it.”

“Lacy.”

“I was talking about the dress. And how beautiful she looked, and how she felt against my hand, and how I wanted— Well, you don’t need to know about that. But she thought—”

“You were talking about me.”

“And that’s how you became you, little watermelon. That’s how you became Lacey.”

When I was ten, my mother told me she pulled my name from some shitty romance novel. “Lucky you weren’t a boy,” she said, “or it could have been Fabio.”

It was her hobby, telling lies about the past. Making up stories to help her feel better and me feel worse.

Your father left because he didn’t love us.

Your father was a useless fuckup and we’re better off without him.

Unless she was in one of her other moods: It ruined everything, a fucking baby, how could it not. No more fucking on the kitchen floor, suddenly it’s all diapers and bills and how can I blame him for fucking off. I would’ve done it myself if I’d thought of it first.

Before you, he drank, but he was no drunk.

Before you, everything was good.

Back in Jersey, when she was in an especially good mood, she would tell me how they met, both drunk off their asses at a Van Halen show. He worked security, she was a groupie, and she’d fuck anyone if it meant getting backstage.

She didn’t talk about it as much with the Bastard around, because he didn’t like the reminder that he wasn’t her first. But sometimes, when he was out bowling for the Lord or whatever, she’d get drunk and misty and want to play another round of This Is Your Life. Your daddy gave me a coat hanger for Valentine’s Day. I should have used it.

I know what I know.

Lacey, he said, when he put his hand on my unformed head, only that thin layer of lace and womb between us, and he said it because even then he thought I was beautiful.

I’d stay if I could, he whispered, that last night. I’ll come back for you.

He did come back for me, four times that year, twice the next one, always when she was at work or asleep, and I never told her, not once. Sometimes he showed up at night and threw pebbles at my window, like we were fucking Romeo and Juliet, and he would climb up the trellis and crawl into my bedroom with a stuffed animal in his mouth, some limp bunny or three-legged cat that he’d found and saved just for me, because he knew I liked them wounded. He’d put his finger to his lips, and I’d zip mine shut, and we would play in the moonlight, quiet as mice, pretending that maybe this one time, the sun would never rise.

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 together, 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.