Girls on Fire

DEX, The Devil’s Playground

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

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

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

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

“When do you think it’ll start?” I asked her. The last time, we’d chopped up the mushrooms and mixed them in chocolate pudding, to make them go down. This time we were purists. It was like eating a Styrofoam cup.

“Maybe it already did.” She laughed. “Maybe I’m not even here, and you’re just imagining me.”

I gave her the finger, and we went inside.

It had been Lacey’s idea to settle into the wooden pews and wait for something to happen. She’d read about some experiment where a bunch of people got high for Easter Mass and had a transcendent religious experience, so we swallowed and closed our eyes and — for purely scientific purposes, she said — waited for transcendence.

Lacey always said that other people’s drug trips were almost as boring as other people’s dreams, but when it finally kicked in, inside that church, I’d never felt more wildly and indelibly myself. As if the world were re-creating itself especially for me, the walls whispering a sacred message, the minister’s voice blue light and warm coffee and slipping down my throat to my secret self, and I was an I like no other I had ever been, life was a question and only I knew the answer, and if I closed my eyes, the world outside, the colors and sounds and faces that existed only to please me, would vanish.

Inside that church, I didn’t discover a god; I became one.

The minister said the devil walks among you.

The minister said evil is in this town and the wages of sin is death.

The minister said cows were dying and chickens were slaughtered and dead cats were hung from flaming trees, and this is the evidence you need that these are the end times, that hell is upon you, that Satan’s cold fingers hold you in their grasp, that here and there and everywhere children are dying and children are killing and children are danger.

The minister reached out across the congregation, reached for us, and I could feel his cold fingers on Lacey’s lips, because her lips were my lips, because what was hers was mine. The minister said the devil will sing you to hell, but when he raised his hands, the choir sang in Kurt’s voice, hoarse and longing, their robes white, their eyes black, and Kurt’s voice sang my name, said you have always belonged to me. The minister’s eyes glowed, and the walls bled, and the people, the good, churchgoing, God-fearing people, they all turned to us, eyes hungry, and then Lacey’s hand was hot against my mouth, as if she knew before I did that I was going to scream.

She rested her other hand in my lap, fingers tight in a fist, then blooming open, and there was a flower she’d inked on her palm. I stopped screaming, then. I watched the flower. Its petals leached color from her skin. They glowed green like Lacey eyes and red like Lacey lips and pink like Lacey tongue. The flower whispered to me with Lacey’s voice and told me there was nothing to fear. Believing her was like breathing.

When the service ended, she held my hand tight and led me out of the church. Her lips brushed my ear and she smelled purple, and when she whispered “Having fun yet?” our laughter tasted like candy.

Fun was meant to be beneath us. Fun was for Battle Creek, for the losers who dragged their six-packs into the woods and groped each other in the dark. Not for us; we would get high only for a higher purpose, Lacey had decreed. We would be philosophers; we would devote ourselves to all forms of escape. After the service we would retreat to an empty field and spend the hours until we came down groping for Beauty and Truth. We would lie in the grass, search the sky for answers, make art, make something to make ourselves real.

That was the plan before, when everything had seemed clear — but now was after, silvery and strange. And when we went to the field, bumping and sloshing in the back of a pickup, we didn’t go alone.

Boys: some of them in church shirts with shiny shoes, some in flannel with jeans and dirty boots. All of them with sticky beer fingers and grubby breath, all of them boys we did not know and would never like, with faces that blurred and shifted, strangers determined to stay strange. I couldn’t keep track: Were there many or few? Had we begged them to bring us or did we beg them to let us go? I waited for Lacey to tell me it wasn’t happening, but Lacey only complained about tramping through the mud and breathing in the shit, then asked if, until it was time, she could carry the axe.

One of the boys, I saw then, had an axe.

The sky was pinking and the lowing cows breathed fire like fairy-tale beasts, and I heard my voice saying you can’t.

“You eat burgers, don’t you?” a boy said.

I heard Lacey laughing and knew I must be imagining it.

“They’re my property,” another boy said. “I decide if they live or die. I’m their god.”

I knew that wasn’t quite right, but the words to prove it were slippery. Before I could snatch them from the fog, an axe whistled through leathery hide, and blood spurted, and with one voice, the beast and I screamed.

Sticky beer, sticky blood. Laughing boys, giving the finger to an imaginary face in the sky. Laughing Lacey, asking to hold the axe. Lacey’s hands on the axe and my hands on the axe. What’s hers is mine. Someone’s voice saying don’t be a pussy, someone’s voice saying please don’t make me, someone’s knees in the dirt, someone’s fist in a steaming wound, someone’s bloody fingers inking a five-pointed star across the grass, someone’s breath, someone’s whisper, someone’s tears. Someone’s voice pretending to be Lacey, impossible words carving fire across the sky.

“We trade this blood for the blood of our enemies. Let us bring them to ruin.”

THEN IT WAS DARK, AND I was in a barn, lying in the hay, and I came back to myself just as a cold hand slid into my pants.

Just say no, they’d said in school, back when we were too small to imagine the need, so now I said it, “No,” and pulled the hand out and pushed the body away.

“C’mon,” the body said, and nuzzled its snout against my chest. Red hair, I noted, and disliked. Lacey was sandwiched between a checkered-shirt farm boy and a hay bale, stripped down to her bra and combat boots.

Boys from the field, I thought, then shoved the thought away.

I smacked the copperhead and said no again.

“She said you thought I was cute,” he whined.

I took him in, freckles and crooked smile, beady eyes and puffy cheeks, and thought: Maybe. But cute didn’t mean I wanted this animal thing, wet and clumsy, bones and meat. My first kiss had come at the wrong end of a dare, someone else’s punishment; the second came in the dark, someone else’s mistake. This was lucky number three, and when I stood up, he said, “I never get the hot one,” then jerked off in the hay.

“Lacey,” I said, and I was crying, probably. “Lacey.”

She made a noise. It’s hard to talk when your tongue is tracing messages in someone else’s mouth.

“Let ’em be.” Red had crusty nails and oozing zits, and I knew without checking that I didn’t get the hot one, either.

“Lacey, I want to go.” And maybe I was making myself cry, because crying was a thing Lacey wouldn’t resist.

“Can it wait?” Lacey wasn’t looking at me. The flannel boy bent her over the bale and kissed her knobby spine. “Just a little longer?”

He laughed. “You got the long part right.” His dirty hands were on her, fingers smudged with motor oil.

Lacey giggled. I couldn’t stop smelling blood.

Hot breath on the back of my neck and “Don’t worry, babe, I won’t let you get bored.”

“Lacey,” I said. “Lacey. Lacey. Lacey.” That did it. A prayer; a summoning. My witching powers, or the hitch in my voice, or just her name, like the lyrics to a favorite song, calling her home.

“Can’t you shut her up?” Flannel said, but Lacey slipped through his straddled legs and scooped up her clothes. She touched my cheek. “You really want to go, Dex?”

I nodded.

“Then we go.”

Flannel’s nose went piggy when he sneered. “And what the hell are we supposed to do?”

“Suck each other off, for all I care,” Lacey told them, then took my hand, and together we ran.

“Sorry,” I said, when we were safe in the car, windows down, Kurt’s raw voice streaming in our wake, the boys and the field and the church and the night shrinking to a story we would tell ourselves and laugh.

“Sorry for what?” Lacey sped up, as she did when she was bored, and I pictured her toes curling on the grimy pedal. She liked driving in bare feet.

We didn’t apologize — that was a rule. Not to each other, not for each other. We made our own choices. We did what we did with the boys in the field, what we did in the grass and the blood and the hay. We kept moving, without looking back. The day behind us was fogging up, and I tried to let it. I tried to feel no shame.

WE SLEPT OUTSIDE THAT NIGHT, and woke up damp with dew. I told myself that none of it had happened, not the glint of the axe or the intestines steaming in the moonlight, not the boys in the field or the barn. The way I felt, floating between the cushions of grass and sky, no longer high but not yet grounded, it was easy to believe.

Lacey had promised there’d be no hangover. She didn’t tell me it would be more like the opposite — that I would wake up still feeling like I could fly.

I listened to her breathe, and tried to time the rise and fall of my chest to hers. I counted the clouds, and waited for her to wake up — not bored, not afraid, simply alive to the tickle of grass and sigh of wind. It was only when she blinked herself awake, when she saw my face and said, brightly, “Good morning, Lizzie Borden,” that I thudded back to earth.

I sat up. “Lacey.” I swallowed. “Last night. .”

She took in my expression. Recalibrated. “Breathe, Dex. No freak-outs before coffee.”

“But what we did—”

“Technically, you made us leave before we did anything,” she said, and laughed. “The look on their idiot faces.”

“Not in the barn.” I didn’t know why I was still talking. If I didn’t name it, maybe I could erase it. “Before.”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to change before anyone sees us,” Lacey said, looking down at herself, and I realized the stains on her shirt were blood. The stains on mine, too.

I shook my head. Everything was shaking.

“No.” Lacey stilled my hands with hers. “No, Dex. They’d have done it whether we were there or not.”

It was some note of certainty in her voice, maybe, that cued a memory from an assembly past, then half-remembered words from the morning’s service, and the pieces jigsawed themselves. “You knew,” I said, and of course she knew. She always knew. “You picked that town on purpose.”

“Of course I did. I was curious. Weren’t you?”

I knew the right answer: Curiosity was supposed to be our lifeblood.

“What do you think they do with cows on that farm, Dex?” she said when I didn’t give it to her. “This isn’t Charlotte’s Web.”

“That was a pig.”

“And they were going to butcher it, right?” Lacey said. “That’s how farms work. It’s not like killing someone’s cat or something.”

“Have they killed someone’s cat?”

“Do you want the answer to that?”

Silence between us, then, except for the bugs and the birds and the wind.

“You were having fun,” she said, and it felt like an accusation. “You were laughing. You just don’t remember.”

“No. No.”

“You do know it was all a bad joke, right?” she said. “Just a bunch of asshole hicks trying to freak out their parents. No one was actually trying to summon the devil.”

“Of course I know that.” What I didn’t know, at least not with the same degree of certainty, was whether it mattered. The sacrifice was a joke, maybe, but wasn’t blood still blood, dead still dead?

“Anyway, it’s not some crime against nature to watch stupid people do stupid shit,” Lacey said.

“But it was more than watching. . wasn’t it?”

“What do you think?” Lacey laughed. “You think you helped put poor little Bessie out of her misery? You?”

I was sitting cross-legged, and Lacey shifted until she faced me in exactly the same pose. The Mirror Game, I’d called it when I was a kid, springing it on my parents without warning. You scratch your nose; I scratch mine. My mother loathed it. My father, who’d learned in some long-ago acting class how to cry on command, always won. If Lacey and I played, I thought, the game could go on forever.

She cupped my hands again. “How much do you remember, Dex? Seriously.”

I shrugged. “Enough?”

“I remember how it was my first time. Everything feels kind of like a dream, right? You’re not sure what’s real, what’s not?”

I nodded, slowly. “Not for you?” I said. “Everything’s clear for you?”

“Crystal. So I can tell you everything that happened, in graphic detail, or. .”

“Or.”

“Or you trust me that everything is fine. That all the good stuff happened and all the bad stuff was a dream. You let me remember, and you let yourself forget. You trust me, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

“Then?”

“Then okay. Yes. Everything is fine.”

She smiled — I smiled. That was how the game worked.

“You’re not sorry, are you?” Lacey asked, and I knew, because I always knew, what she really meant. Was I sorry not just about the things that happened in the field and the things that didn’t happen in the barn, and not just about the church and the mushrooms, but sorry for everything that led up to it, sorry about Lacey and Dex, sorry to be here with her in this field, damp and shaky and stained with blood, sorry to be with her anywhere?

I knew what she needed to hear. “Never be sorry, remember?”

Never be sorry, never be frightened, never be careful — those were the rules of Lacey. Play by the rules, win the game: Never be alone.

WE MUST HAVE GONE TO class; we must have scribbled down an English paper or two, made small talk with parents and teachers, emptied dishwashers and mowed lawns, nuked frozen pizza for lonely TV dinners, snooze-buttoned our way through six A.M. alarms, waded through all the mundane detritus of high school life, but that’s not what I remember. Somewhere out there, line dancing swept the nation, LA exploded over Rodney King, Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, George Bush threw up on Japan, a Long Island nutcase shot her boyfriend’s wife in the face, a new Europe chewed its way out of the corpse of the USSR, and history officially met its end. None of it penetrated. We were our own world. I remember: riding down the highway in Lacey’s Buick, trying to shove her lone Pearl Jam tape into the player, rain pelting my face on stormy nights because the passenger window was stuck halfway down, the two of us one with the car and with the road, Lacey always at the wheel despite daily promises that she would teach me how to drive. We were at our best when we were in motion.

Once, we drove all night, Lacey slugging back Diet Cokes while I searched for exit signs and inscribed our names on the dewy window. When we hit the George Washington Bridge, Lacey stopped the car on the Jersey side, and we watched the city groan into morning. Then we turned around and drove home. Because it wasn’t about going to New York City, Lacey said. It was about proving we could. Actually going to New York, that was another thing for plebes. Too obvious, Lacey said. When we escaped, it would be to Seattle. We would get an apartment near the Crocodile café, where we’d waitress so we could score free booze and sleep with the bands. We would have a beanbag chair and a cat named Ginsberg. We would sell the car to pay the first month’s rent, then buy a bottle of wine with whatever was left over and toast to the fact that there was no turning back.

I fell asleep nights thinking about it, imagining highways ribboning across flat brown land, afraid we wouldn’t go, afraid she’d go without me. Some mornings I woke with the sun, convinced I’d dreamed her into my life, and called her house just to make sure she was still there.

WE DIDN’T TRY MUSHROOMS AGAIN; we never talked about the night in the field. Not directly, at least, and that made it easier for memory to recede into shared dream. But after that night, Lacey had two new fixations: finding out more about what she called the devil-worship thing and getting me laid. Both made my skin creep, but when she grabbed me outside the cafeteria to tell me she had two birds and one stone waiting for us in the parking lot, I did as I was told.

“Three birds, if you want to get technical,” she said. “Though one of them doesn’t believe in showers, so he’s out.”

Three birds, scuzzy and greased, one with a pube-stache, one with a shaved head, one with “prison tats” he’d meticulously inked up and down his arm: Jesse, Mark, and Dylan. Boys I’d known since they were still boys enough to play with dolls; boys who’d grown into almost-men who wanted to be dangerous and persuaded the wrong people they were.

I didn’t think they deserved it, what had been done to them in the fall and the way people acted after — as if the three of them had dragged Craig into the woods and whispered satanic prayers to him till he cracked, then beat themselves up and lofted themselves into that tree as penance. As if whatever happened to them was just, even merciful. But I also didn’t want to be out there in the alley with them alone.

Not alone, I reminded myself. With Lacey.

Never alone.

“You want?” Jesse offered Lacey a hit off his dwindling blunt. She waved him away. He didn’t ask me.

“You guys know Dex, right?”

Mark snorted. “Yeah. You still crying over that dead Barbie, Dex?”

Jesse whacked the back of his head. “You still playing with dolls, Mark?”

I’d known the three of them since nursery school, since the days when Mark lit dolls on fire, Dylan collected Garbage Pail Kids, and Jesse took a shit beneath the elementary school seesaw, just to prove he could. Jesse and I had ridden bikes and woven grass jewelry for our mothers on May Day. Then he’d hooked up with Mark and Dylan, and while individually they’d seemed comprehensible and unintimidating and like the type of boy you might one day grow up to kiss, together they went feral, roaming the streets, baring teeth and brandishing sticks. They bashed bats into mailboxes and left dog shit on neighbors’ doorsteps and eventually graduated from skateboards to death metal. Before Craig died, they were so proud of their rotting-skull T-shirts and black trench coats, their car stereos blasting lyrics about bleeding eyes and demon hearts. I thought now about all those dolls and trading cards and that sorry lemonade stand, Jesse and me selling twenty-five-cent cups of water stained with yellow dye, and it felt stupid to be wary of them — but then I thought of bloody symbols on church doors and bloody axes in dark fields, and it felt equally stupid not to.

“I like the new look,” Jesse said, and scuffed a toe against my boots. “It’s dark.”

“He means it makes your boobs pop,” Mark said.

“Fuck off, asshole.”

“You fuck off.”

Lacey rolled her eyes, and I tried to check out my cleavage as surreptitiously as possible. No part of me wanted to be in this alley.

“Can you help us or not?” Lacey said.

“Your friend’s mental, you know that?” Jesse told me.

“She thinks we’re going to teach her how to worship the fucking devil,” Dylan said.

Mark traced a cross against his chest and adopted a Transylvanian accent. “I vant to suck your bloooooood.”

“She doesn’t think we’re fucking vampires,” Jesse said. “She’s not a fucking moron.”

“Thank you,” Lacey said.

“Except you are a fucking moron if you’re planning to start messing around with that shit. Not in this town. And if anyone asks, you tell them we’ve got nothing to do with that anymore.”

It had been half a year since golden boy Craig turned up in the woods, brains leaking into the dirt, and five months since Jesse and the others had discovered exactly how much Battle Creek wanted to believe in the devil. Battle Creek still watched us closely, like we were walking grenades, hands hovering recklessly close to the pin. Us as in all of us, anyone under the age of eighteen automatically under suspicion; us as in them, most of all, the Dumpster Row boys, because Craig Ellison was dead when he shouldn’t have been and that demanded a rational explanation, even if rational, according to the pamphleteers in the Woolworth’s parking lot and the Concerned Parents League, who’d cornered the market on op-eds, meant teen football star falls prey to satanic cult blood orgy.

Lacey knew all this — she had to. But I understood her now. I understood that it only made it more tempting, that anything that frightened the plebes this much merited further investigation. That anyone stupid enough to be scared deserved it. I understood that I was supposed to know better.

“I know what you say.” Lacey reached forward and tapped Jesse’s chest, at the spot where blood gushed from Ozzy Osbourne’s silkscreened face. It amazed me, how she didn’t hesitate to touch him. “And I know what I see.”

“It’s just music, get it?” Jesse sounded weary. “Slayer, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, they’re all putting on a show.”

“First off, there’s no such thing as just music,” Lacey said. “Second, that’s not music. Biting the head off a live bat isn’t music, it’s a pathetic plea for attention.”

“What is this shit?” Dylan said. “You come to our house to talk this kind of shit?”

“Your house?” Lacey echoed, glancing at the nearest Dumpster. “Nice furniture.”

I grabbed her, tugged. “Let’s just go.”

“I got some Headbangers Ball on tape,” Jesse said. “Back at my place. You guys want to watch, I’ll show what you’re missing. But no animal sacrifice. No matter how hard you beg.”

I thought: Enough. “That’s okay, we’re not—”

“We’d love to,” Lacey said.

IN THE CAR, BUMPING ALONG toward the house I hadn’t been in since third grade, Lacey said she was pretty sure Jesse wanted to get in my pants and that I should let it happen—let it happen, that’s how she put it, like sex was a force of nature and I simply needed to get out of its way.

I thought about it, on the couch in the wood-paneled basement, everything the same as it had been years before. Mark and Dylan rolled joints, riveted to their Megadeth videos. Lacey stretched herself out in the leather armchair, closest to the speakers, and fixed on the screen, her Kurt face on, waiting for enlightenment. Jesse was next to me, his arm millimeters from mine, and much hairier than the last time I’d seen it.

“Remember Kids Incorporated?” I said, because that’s what we’d watched when I came over after school. It had been my idea, because I didn’t have the Disney Channel at my place, but he was the one who’d taught me the choreography so we could dance along.

Jesse grunted. This, I thought, was not letting it happen.

He had a square head. Greasy lips, and those stupid fake tattoos. I could maybe, almost, imagine kissing him. If it were dark and I could, immediately after, dematerialize. I was turning seventeen that summer; such things were supposed to appeal.

There was a look my mother had given me when some neighbor was over, complaining about lesbian jokes on TV, and since then I’d been wondering what she thought but, more than that, wondering if she’d recognized something in me I couldn’t see for myself. I said as much once, to Lacey, who crossed her eyes. “Do girls turn you on?” she said, and when I said I didn’t think so, she shrugged. “Then you’re probably not gay. I hear that’s a prerequisite.”

Nothing turned me on, as far as I could tell. Lacey thought there was probably something wrong with me, and I thought she was probably right.

Now I think it wasn’t my fault, that my younger self can be excused for reading phrases like fire in my loins and stumbling over the idea of pleasurable burning. But then it shamed me, the ease with which Lacey could spider her fingers down her stomach, across her thighs, into the dark space that remained a sticky mystery to me, and instinctively know how to feel. When, under duress, I’d locked myself in the bathroom and played around with the showerhead while Lacey cheered me on from the other side of the door, I had felt only ridiculous.

“You still got my He-Man?” Jesse asked, and I smiled because it meant he remembered how he used to bring his action figures over to play with my Barbies, and also because, somewhere at the back of my closet, I did.

“You still pretending you didn’t steal my She-Ra?”

In my peripheral vision, I could see him blushing.

“Hey, she was sexy. Metal bikini, Hannah. Metal bikini.”

On-screen, a brunette in a spiked leather corset fellated a drumstick. Now I was blushing.

“Her name is Dex,” Lacey said, without looking away from the screen.

“Sorry.” He elbowed me, gently. “Dex.”

“It’s okay. Whatever.”

“I kind of liked it,” he said. “Your name. But Dex is cool, too.”

Here is how I imagined things might go, if I let it happen: Jesse Gorin would inch his hand across the couch toward mine, ever so casually link our pinkies together, then turn my hand over and tap a message into my palm, in the Morse code we’d taught ourselves one rainy summer week before third grade. It would say: I remember you. It would say: We are still the people we used to be. And when he said he wanted to make some popcorn and did I want to help, I would follow him up to the kitchen, and while I was grabbing the air popper from the cabinet where it used to be, he would slip up behind me, whisper something suitably romantic in my ear, or maybe just my name, maybe just Hannah, then kiss the back of my neck, and when I turned around, I would be in his arms, hair dangling over the sink, lips perfectly parted and tongue knowing what to do. And even though we would return to the basement like nothing had happened, the taste of each other rubbed away by popcorn butter, we would bite down on the inside of our cheeks to prevent secret smiles, and silently understand that something had begun.

That was before Lacey asked Jesse to show her where the bathroom was and they disappeared upstairs together for the rest of the show. When they came back, Jesse’s ballpoint tattoos were bleary with sweat and Lacey’s shirt was on inside out, which she could only have done to prove a point.

“So, you’re welcome,” Lacey told me in the car on the way home.

“For what?”

She seemed surprised I had to ask. “Didn’t you notice the way that skeezer was eyeing you? If I hadn’t gotten it out of his system, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said. “I thought I was supposed to let it happen.”

“With him? God, Dex, learn to recognize a joke.” She pulled up in front of my house. “You deserve so much better.”

I opened the car door, but she grabbed my wrist before I could get out.

“So?” she prompted.

“So?”

“Magic words, please. A little polite recognition for my sacrifice.”

“Right. Thank you.”

LACEY DECIDED TO FIND ME a more satisfactory dick. That’s how she put it when she presented me with a flimsy fake ID and a black lace corset. “Amanda Potter”—born Long Island, 1969, Sagittarius, details I repeated to myself over and over again as we stood in line waiting for the bouncer—“is getting some tonight,” Lacey told me, but didn’t tell me how she’d found this club, a grim concrete block beside the highway, or why it promised to be my sexual salvation. “No argument allowed.”

Her corset was purple, and seemed, at least from where I stood, to offer slightly more room to breathe. She wore a silver pentagram around her neck, another thrift store acquisition to go with the Satanic Bible she’d finally dug up in the basement of some used bookstore along the highway. She loved the way people looked at her when she wore it, the same way I looked at her when she showed me the book for the first time. It didn’t look like any Bible I’d ever seen. It was black, with a red five-pointed star etched onto the cover, and even the author’s name gave me the creeps: Anton Szandor LaVey. It sounded deliberately fake, like a name the devil himself would choose. Lacey had already highlighted several passages.

Man’s carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.

There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes.

Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs.

“You really don’t want to let anyone see that you have this,” I’d told her, when she showed off her purchases, then pressed the pentagram necklace back into her hand. “And you really don’t want to be wearing this.” She still didn’t get it, the rules of a place like Battle Creek. It was one thing being a metalhead with a corpse on his T-shirt and a fetish for black nail polish; it was another thing altogether to be a girl wearing a pentagram. It was always another thing, being a girl.

“The hilarious thing is, they’ve got it all wrong,” Lacey had told me. “Turns out actual satanism’s just about freethinking and being yourself. Stuart Smalley could’ve written this.”

“Can we not talk about this now?”

“You say now, but you mean ever.”

I did.

“You should read it,” Lacey said. “You’ll see. There’s good stuff in here.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m joking,” she said, and it was easiest to assume it was true.

The club was called Beast, and the bouncer, more interested in my cleavage than my birthdate, waved us both in.

“I see you smiling,” Lacey said, sidling us up to the bar. She tugged at the laces of my corset. “You’re going mad with power.” I could barely hear her over the music, was already losing myself to noise and strobe light and the foul taste of the beer she poured down my throat, and somehow these all seemed like good things. Maybe because she was right; I did love the power of it, my chest, squeezed sausage tight, suddenly capable of miracles. I was used to people looking at Lacey. That night, they looked at me.

Maybe it was the corset, maybe it was the shot, maybe it was Lacey pushing me into the single-stall bathroom with some guy she thought worked behind the counter in our record store. Whether it really was Greg the Sex God, who we’d spent two Saturdays in a row peeking at from behind the Christian gospel shelf, or just some unknown grunger with a down vest and a hemp bracelet, he followed me in, and when I opened my mouth to say my name or maybe sorry my lunatic friend just shoved you into a bathroom, he stuck his tongue in. I let it worm around for a bit, tasting his beer and trying to decide whether the hand squeezing my ass was doing it right. Between that and my mental tally of the bacteria and fecal matter on the bathroom door, I forgot all about our lingual calisthenics, and the distraction must have been obvious, because eventually he stopped.

“Hey,” the guy said, lips still practically touching mine.

“Hey.”

The floor was spattered with urine, the walls with posters: The Screaming Trees. Skin Yard. The Melvins. Soundgarden. Even Babes in Toyland, who Lacey said sucked.

“You like this?”

I shrugged, thinking it was nice, if a little late, of him to ask. “I don’t usually do it in bathrooms, I guess.”

“What?”

The music, even in there, was incredibly loud.

“I don’t do this in bathrooms!” I said, louder.

“No, I mean the song! You like the song?”

“Oh. Sure.”

“It’s the new Love Battery!” He stepped back, did a little air guitar. I winced, thinking of what Lacey would think. “It’s fly, yeah? You should hear the album, it’s like the fucking A-bomb, just a bunch of stuff, and then, boom. Takes you to another dimension. You know?”

“Sure.”

“It’s some Star Trek—level shit there, you know? That’s what my album’s gonna be like.”

“You’re making an album?”

“Well, not yet, obviously. But, I mean, when the band gets there. It’ll happen. Patience, man. That’s the secret.”

“So you’re in a band?”

“I’m telling you, not yet. But I’m working on it. Stuff’s in the works. Big stuff.”

“That’s. . great.”

“You’ve got great boobs. Can I get in there?”

“Not sure that’s physically possible,” I said, more pleased than I wanted to be, but he’d already found a way to fit his fingers into the dark crevice of the corset.

“Huh. That’s kind of. . floppier than it looks.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I mean, that’s just how it goes with the big ones. Most of them are floppier. This is pretty good, actually.”

“Thanks?”

“Do you, like, feel yourself up all the time?”

“Uh, no.”

“That’s what I’d do if I was a girl. Especially if I had your. . you know. All. The. Time.”

“That might get in the way of your recording career.”

He spent some time trying to work out whether that was a joke, then, “You want to blow me?”

“Not especially.”

“Well, you know. A guy’s gotta ask.”

That was when I pushed my way back into the club and found Lacey. The band was starting, the one she’d heard had once opened for Nirvana, but from the opening chords it was clear these guys had only recently learned how their instruments worked. It didn’t matter. Lacey asked me what had happened, whether Mission Fuck had been a success, and instead of answering I threw my arms around her, because the beer buzz was finally heating me up and because I wanted to, simple as that, wanted to be there, with her, sweat-slick bodies swirling around us. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to dance.

“You’re drunk!” she shouted when I wove my fingers through hers and dragged her into the mess of bodies.

“Not drunk enough!” I twirled around, arms in the air, finally understanding what it was to feel a need and seize it. I needed to move. I needed to fly. I needed not to think about dicks and tongues and the gritty wrongness of real life. I needed this to be my real life, me and Lacey, in the smoky dark, strobes bouncing over our head, band screaming and shaking sweat into the crowd. The crowd a single organism, all of us, a hundred arms and legs and heads, a single heart beating, beating. All of us thrashing together, wild and fury in our blood. Lacey’s laughter in my ear, the smell of her shampoo like a cloud, her hair whipping across my cheek, and then nothing but the ecstasy of motion. Anything, everything possible. No one watching.

SHE LIKED TO TEST ME, and it was hard to tell the difference sometimes, between game and truth. Kurt was real, that was nonnegotiable. So were we, Dex-and-Lacey. Sacred ground. Boys, though, were for playing and trading, were equivalent to the sum of their parts, tongues and fingers and dicks. God was a bad joke, Satan a usefully pointy stick. She liked people to think she was dangerous. This didn’t explain why, one night when we’d been saddled with babysitting the junior Bastard, she had me hold the wriggling baby over the bathroom sink while she used the blood of a raw steak to paint an upside-down cross on his tiny forehead.

“This is disgusting, Lacey.” It wasn’t the right word, but it was the easiest one.

The baby whimpered and pulled away from her bloody finger, but she shushed him and stroked his tiny ears, and he didn’t cry. “Just hold him still.”

The blood smeared watery pink across his forehead, running into his eyes. I held him still.

Lacey gently tapped his right shoulder, his left shoulder, his sternum, his forehead, solemn as any priest. “In the name of the Dark Father and the unholy demons, I baptize you into the church of Lucifer.”

They were just words, I reminded myself. They had only as much power as we gave them.

Lacey said she couldn’t wait to see the look on the Bastard’s face when he found out, though she was careful to wipe off every trace of blood before we laid James Jr. to bed for the night. Lacey said the Bastard thought the Battle Creek hysterics were an embarrassing sideshow, blind to the true war for their children’s souls, against the modern Cerberus of liberalism, atheism, and sexual revolution. The Bastard didn’t believe in satanism, Lacey said, only in Satan, and claimed anyone who thought differently was doing the devil’s work.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s sister but yours,” she said, too, which made it okay that, when I left that night, the baby’s forehead still smelled like raw meat.

She wanted to spend her birthday in the graveyard, and so we did.

“Scared?” she said as we picked our way through the dark. Narrow lanes wove through rows of tombstones. I saw a stone angel, a spire circled by stone roses, crosses tilting and crumbling, tombs that gleamed in the flashlight beam where names were etched with lacquer and gold.

“Am I supposed to be scared of ghosts, or of you?”

“We both know you’re scared shitless of getting caught, Dex.”

She held the flashlight beneath her chin, casting her face in ghoul glow. “The only scary thing here is me.”

Maybe it was stupid of me not to be scared — if not by her big plan for the night, then by the intensity with which she’d insisted on it, that we sneak out with our candles and shovels, build a shrine to the Dark Lord, just enough of a show to give the plebes a good scare. “All I want for my birthday is to freak the shit out of Battle Creek,” she’d said, and I was prepared to help.

She stopped at a small square tombstone and sat, hard, beside the dead flowers at its base.

“Lacey.” It seemed like bad luck, saying her name out loud, like I might alert some predatory spirit to her identity. The stories had always made it very clear: Names were power. You gave yours away at your own risk. “I thought we were looking for a fresh one.”

“Look.” She aimed her flashlight at the stone.

Craig Ellison, it said, b. March 15, 1975, d. October 31, 1991

Beloved son and brother

Go Badgers!

“Go Badgers?” I laughed. Then aimed a cheerleader fist pump at the clouds. “God, that’s tacky. Can you imagine taking Battle Creek Badger pride to your grave?”

She didn’t say anything. I felt judged by her silhouette.

“What if it’s not some big joke?” Lacey said then. “Imagine the plebes are right, and there is some devil cult dancing around the woods, faces painted with blood. Acid orgies. If that’s what really happened to him.”

I tried to picture it, Craig Ellison forming an unholy alliance with the Dumpster Row boys, stripping off his basketball jersey to frolic naked in the woods, Craig Ellison magicked into drawing his own blood. Standing there in the shadow of his gravestone, stone angels judging our trespass, it wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been.

“And what if aliens are secretly running the country?” I said, desperate now to make my voice a flashlight, guide us both back on track. “What if the mayor is a vampire? What if I’m possessed by Satan and I’m about to suck your brains? It’s like you always say, anything’s possible—”

“—in the woods. Yeah. It is.”

That was when I noticed she was crying.

I almost fell beside her. Lacey wasn’t the kind of girl who cried. “What is it?” I put my hand on her shoulder. Took it off again. “What?”

“You love me, right?” Her voice was flattened, dead.

“Of course.”

“And you’re a good person.”

“Well, not since I met you.” The joke didn’t land. Her nails dug into my arm.

“Never say that again.”

“Okay. Okay, Lacey, it’s fine.” Panic. We were in a graveyard and she was freaking out, needing something I didn’t know how to give her because Lacey wasn’t supposed to need anything. “Of course I love you. And of course I’m a good person. And can you just tell me what’s going on so we can get the hell out of here?” I was crying, too. It was a reflex, like contagious yawning or throwing up at the smell of vomit.

“If I tell you to do something, and you do it, whose fault is that?” she asked.

“Depends on what you want me to do, doesn’t it?”

“It shouldn’t depend. Circumstances shouldn’t matter. If it’s my idea, it’s my fault. Your idea, yours.”

“Except it would be my idea to do what you told me to do. I get to decide that. I’m not your puppet.”

“No? No. I guess not.”

I rapped softly at her head, the safest way I could think to touch her. “What’s going on in there, Lacey? I know it sucks that he’s dead, even if he is Craig, but it’s not like he meant something to you.” As I said it, I was wondering whether it was true. Maybe it all made sense in some seedy, beneath-her kind of way, the fervent and unfounded hatred of Nikki, the unprompted tears for a Neanderthal, the words that seemed snagged in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. “Was he cheating on her with you? You can tell me. I get it, I swear.” I didn’t get it, not a guy like him, his meaty hands fumbling at her bootlaces, but love was meant to be strange. “You can’t think it’s your fault, what happened. Even if he felt guilty, or you dumped him and he freaked out, or whatever it was, it wouldn’t be—” I thought about what it would be like to do something and not be able to take it back. “Even if you told him you wanted him to die or something, that wouldn’t make it your fault that he went and did it. You didn’t put the gun in his hand. You didn’t pull the trigger. Nothing is your fault.”

She looked up at me, face tipping into shadow, and smiled. “You think Craig was cheating on Nikki? With me?” She laughed, then, so beautifully, and I don’t know whether I was more relieved that we’d escaped the moment together or that I’d so plainly been wrong. Then she kissed my cheek. “You always know what to say to cheer me up.”

If not that, then what? I wanted to say, but couldn’t, not when she was happy again, not when she’d taken my hand in hers and pulled us both off the ground, sent us spinning, like the grave was a meadow and the moon was bright summer sun. “I can’t believe you thought I could love him.” Her laugh was a witch’s cackle, our dance a ritual that didn’t need spells, only hot blood rising in our cheeks and burning through our veins, an invocation of the gods of love, of whatever force pressed our palms together and whispered on the night wind, You are one.

AND THEN WE WENT TOO far.

“It’s what Kurt would do,” Lacey whispered, and there was no argument to that.

We eased open her window and dropped down to the bushes below. The car was too noisy, so for the first block we pushed it, gear in neutral and shoulders bruising against the trunk. When it was safe, Lacey gunned it, and I jittered in the passenger seat, cans of spray paint slippery in sweaty palms.

Kurt once got arrested for spray painting homosexual sex rules on the side of a bank, Lacey said, up there big and bright for all the rednecks to see, at least the ones who could read well enough to sound out the words. He grew up in an old logging town, Lacey said, full of assholes, their puny brains filled with all the things Kurt smashed with his guitar. Before the guitar, there was spray paint, and there were words. “We have those,” Lacey said. “That’s enough.”

“If we get arrested,” I said, “I swear I will kill you.”

All brick and stone, squat and sad, the Teen Pregnancy Center was deep in last-resort territory. Past the walk-in clinic and the Sunrise rehab center, past the veterans’ hall where it was nothing to cadge free donuts from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a mile past even the boarded-up strip club that had survived three months, flush on the town fathers’ pay, before the town mothers had driven it to ruin. If it was you that let some greasy animal inside you, and you that hit the devil’s jackpot, sperm and egg making their miracle, then it might be you swallowing your panic, flipping through the yellow pages, finding salvation on the highway, in the gray windowless husk just past the Friendly’s. You might come from Battle Creek or Marshall Valley or even as far as Salina. You might wonder if it would hurt, or if you’d be sorry; you might be afraid.

You would definitely be surprised when the good people at the Teen Pregnancy Center gave you a pamphlet with Jesus on the cover and set you straight. The Teen Pregnancy Center would speak of miracles and wonders, and show you pictures of a seed they said was a baby and a sin they said was murder. And then, if you weren’t careful, they would ferret your name and phone number out of you so that when you got home, your parents would be waiting.

It was evil, Lacey said, and her first idea had been burning it to the ground.

Battle Creek wasn’t a sex-ed kind of town. But word got around, in playground diagrams and Sunday school sermons, and by junior high we all knew what to do and that we’d burn in hell for doing it. Just after Easter that year, our health teacher had held two apples before the class, then dropped one on the ground. Picked it up, dropped it again. “Which one would you want to eat?” she asked, finally. “This nice, shiny, clean apple? Or the bruised, dirty, dented one?”

Lacey stole the dirty apple for her lunch that day, and later that month, when Jenny Hallstrom lost it to Brett Koner in a church utility closet, we said she’d dropped her apple. “Guess we know what Brett likes to eat,” Lacey said. Jenny was the one who told us what happened inside the Teen Pregnancy Center. That was before she got sent away; we heard her kid was due by Christmas.

Word always got around. That was the rule of Battle Creek, and maybe that was why our parents spent so much time worrying who was shoving what into where in the backseat of whose car. Because we’d be the ones to burn in hell, but they were the ones who’d have to hear about it in church.

Now we tiptoed toward the Jesus freaks’ evil lair and hoped they were too cheap for security guards. I wore a fleece hoodie; Lacey was in cat burglar drag, all black with a bloody smear of lipstick that was the same color as our spray paint. She shook the can like she’d done this before, and showed me how to hold it and what to press. I waited for her to go first, to see how she did it, her hand steady and her letters smooth. I waited for an alarm, or a siren, or the men in uniforms who would drag us off into the night, but there was only the hiss of paint and Lacey’s cool laughter as the first of our messages glittered under sodium lights.

Fake Abortion Clinic. Beware.

We had written the messages together, ahead of time, while Lacey’s mother was downstairs getting drunk and her stepfather was out bowling for Jesus.

Get your politics out of our pussy.

God is dead. Lacey had insisted on that one.

God is dead, I wrote, because it was the shortest. The letters wiggled and the G looked more like an o, but I wrote it. I pressed my finger against the nozzle and turned brown stone red and Hannah Dexter into a criminal. Magic.

We couldn’t go home yet, not feeling like that. We drove nowhere; we drove nowhere fast, because speed was what mattered. Speed and music, Nevermind in the player, Kurt’s screams tearing up his voice and our screams even louder. I shouted along with Kurt and didn’t care that according to my father my voice was like a raccoon screech or that according to Lacey I had the lyrics all wrong. I sang like it sounded to me, because those words sounded right: I loved you I’m not going back I killed you I’m not going back.

We drove with the windows up so we could scream as loud as we wanted, and it was easy to imagine we might never go home; we might drive off a cliff or over the rainbow. We might tear across the country, fire and ruin blazing in our wake. Lacey and Dex, like Bonnie and Clyde, like Kurt and Courtney, high on our own madness, burning holes in the night. “We should do this again!” I screamed. “We should do this always!”

“What? Be outlaws?”

“Yes.”

I’m not going back, I shouted, and that night, only that night, I loved Kurt like Lacey loved Kurt, loved Kurt like I loved Lacey.

I’m not going back.

I’m not going back.

LACEY, Good Intentions

THIS IS NOT A CAUTIONARY tale about too much — or the wrong kind — of fucking. This is not a story of bad things happening to bad girls. I say this because I know you, Dex, and I know how you think.

I’m going to tell you a story, and this time it will be the truth.

Girl meets girl. Girl loves girl, maybe. Girl wants girl, definitely. Girls drink, girls dance, girls fuck, girls link fingers on a dark night and whisper their secret selves, girls swear a blood oath of loyalty and silence. Girl betrays girl, girl loses girl, girl leaves girl alone. It’s a story you won’t like, Dex, because this is not the story of us.

“Just to watch,” Craig said, that first time he came to our place in the woods.

I’d already started thinking of it like that. Our place.

He brought along his mother’s picnic blanket, a puffy synthetic with lace stitching at the edges — he was, it turned out later, almost pathologically fastidious. It was a pointless effort, trying to make what happened between us clean. But the ground was hard and sparkled with broken glass, and the blanket was silky against bare skin, so we only mocked him a little.

When he said he’d watch, he didn’t say he’d jerk off while we were tangled up in each other, but he was a sixteen-year-old guy, so maybe that was implied. It was equal parts disgusting and hot. Disgusting because obviously. Hot because it’s one thing to get a guy off with your hand or your mouth, the slippery-when-wet mechanics of skin on skin; it’s another to do so without even touching him. That’s power.

Maybe it freaked him out, because it was a while before he came back. Or maybe Nikki didn’t want him back. Maybe she wanted me to herself.

It was different, with a girl. Not as different as you’d expect, not softer, because there was nothing soft about Nikki Drummond. It was still skin and sweat, and I was still her secret, just like I’d been Shay’s secret. I was still the shameful thing, and I was good at that.

Two weeks before Craig came back again. Two weeks, just the two of us, every day, in the woods, rolling in the weeds. Not inside the hollowed-out station, where we might have sunk into the old couch, generations of fluids staining its molding cushions. Not inside the rusting boxcar, where Nikki said she could hear the walls plotting to close in. We stayed in the open, beneath the sky’s prying eyes, putting on a show for the sun and the stars. I didn’t talk to her about Kurt; she didn’t talk to me about prom. We didn’t talk much at all, wink wink nudge bleh, but when she asked me questions, I told the truth, and that made things different, too.

I liked the taste of her, Dex. I liked spelling my name inside her with my tongue. Like I was branding her where no one could see. Mine.

I got good at getting her off, and then I must have gotten too good, because the day before the first day of school, I made her scream, and then she rolled away from me, curled fetal, and started to cry.

“What?” I ran my knuckles down her spine. It always made her shiver. “What is it?”

Nikki didn’t cry. We were the same that way.

She didn’t cry, but she was crying, and when I touched her again, brushed her hair out of her face, because that seemed like the kind of thing to do when you were naked and crying together, she sat up, shook me off along with the mood, found her clothes and her vodka, and we got drunk. The next day she brought Craig with her again, and said it was only fair we let him play.

Both of us or neither of us, that was the implied deal, and I thought: Kurt would do it, Kurt would be proud of me for doing it; the Bastard would keel over and die. I thought she needed me, they needed me, and it was good to be needed.

I thought: Why the fuck not?

Craig was never sweet, but he could look it, with a kid’s cowlick and a practiced sidelong glance through those long lashes that were criminally wasted on a guy. Bulky for a basketball player, with a neck like a gangster. But he could smile like everything was exactly as easy as you let it be. He knew how to make people love him, when he cared to. He and Nikki had that in common, I guess, but Nikki had to make an effort, transform herself into whatever kind of girl was needed. Craig only had to act intensely himself, more the guy everyone imagined him to be.

He couldn’t get hard at first, not with me there watching, and not with the condom, which he’d given up on back when Nikki got herself on the pill. We were shy, then, or at least he was, and though I heard him talking to it while he rubbed, whispering sweet nothings into its flaccid flap of skin, he never would tell me what he was saying. Nikki gave it a few soft kisses, which didn’t help; then she gave me a few soft kisses, which did. It didn’t take long, watching us go at it, before he wanted into the mix, and then, with Nikki gasping in my ear as his fingers did their work, he was inside me, and maybe I was shy, too, because that first time, it hurt. It was messy, then, and confusing. Bodies are supposed to come in twos, ark-like.

Six legs, six arms, thirty fingers, nine holes, the math was tough to contend with, but we did our best, and when Nikki chomped down on my nipple and Craig crushed my fingers under his ass, I didn’t complain — it was all too interesting, too new, to stop.

You never like the bare facts, Dex, not when it comes to this. You like to forget that you’re an animal, too, that you burp and fart and shit and every month you bleed. You think it’s not nice to talk about those things, and not much nicer to do them, except in the dark where no one can see. So you probably don’t want to know that Craig was hairy like a gorilla, at least until he let us shave it all off, just to see how it would feel. You might want to know how he looked in Nikki’s lace panties, but you don’t want to hear that his dick curved ever so slightly to the left and his sac had an old man’s complexion. Or that he apologized as soon as he shoved it in, and again when he took it out, like he thought I was going to cry or cry rape, like he literally couldn’t believe this was playing out as it seemed.

We were acting out our parts, that first time, waiting for the soundtrack to kick in and for things to go slow and romantically blurry instead of herky-jerky ugly real. We were waiting for sepia tones and candlelight, but eventually we got used to sticky clothes and awkward pokes and the pock sound Nikki’s thighs made when they slapped together too hard, that and the sound of grunting, and mingled laughter.

Don’t feel stupid. You couldn’t have known. No one knew, and when school finally started, Nikki and Craig wouldn’t speak to me in public. I liked that they were ashamed of it. The secret was part of the fun. I liked it when Nikki prowled past me in the hall, like she didn’t know that I could ruin her life with one well-placed rumor. I liked her snot-faced, nose-up public self, because I was the only one who knew how that face looked when Craig’s fingers were inside her, plying their clumsy magic.

By then, they were doing that in front of me; turned out we all liked to watch. Sometimes it was watching I liked best. There’s something about two people fucking, the way they forget to hide their secret selves. Even after all this time, Nikki and Craig were putting on a show for each other, Nikki playing “excited!” and “turned on!” or “boooooored,” depending on her mood, but never straying too far from “granting you the greatest favor of your life,” Craig doing “gettin’ me some” every time. But there was always a moment. She’d forget to suck in her stomach; he’d forget to gaze lovingly in her eyes; they would each forget the other was there, and the sex became masturbatory, the alien body incidental, just another tool to abuse. I liked turning transparent and immaterial, watching them lose control.

Nikki liked to watch, too, but not for watching’s sake. It brought out her inner Mussolini. She didn’t watch; she commanded, directing us in her own private puppet show, bossing us into positions meant more for her pleasure than ours.

I don’t know what Craig liked the best, especially once the novelty of two girls going at it wore off, which it did surprisingly quickly. Sometimes I don’t think he liked much of anything.

We all took a turn; sometimes, instead, we just drank and talked. The abandoned station was a magic place, a sacred one, where secrets were swallowed by the trees. We were different people in the woods; we were our own shadow selves. Nikki told us about the time her inbred cousin raped her at a Thanksgiving dinner, squashing her against her grandma’s lace-doily quilt and tasting of sweet potatoes and gravy when he forced his mouth against hers to shut her up, as if she would have screamed. I told them how the Bastard wanted to send me away once the baby was born, that I’d read it in the letter he wrote to his pastor back in Jersey, some Billy Graham wannabe with a local radio show. I told them how I’d also intercepted the pastor’s response, godly advice on how to erase me from the family picture for the good of the Bastard’s reputation and spawn — then, because we’d sworn an oath of secrecy, not truth, I told them I didn’t care. Craig told us about the time in junior high he got a blow job from some poor guy on his JV basketball team, then got so freaked out that he spread word that the kid had been sneaking peeks of the other guys in the locker room and had tried to cop a feel during a wrestling bout. After they gave the guy his third beat-down, he transferred to a school in another county.

“Didn’t even feel guilty about it,” Craig said. “Does that make me, like, a psychopath?”

“Probably,” I said. Nikki laughed and laughed.

He’s dead now. It’s strange, isn’t it? He was here, he was inside me, he was sweaty and obnoxious and maybe, like, a psychopath, and now he’s just a corpse. Less than that, soon enough: bones and dust and worms. Not a ghost, certainly. If he were a ghost, I’d know, because he’d never leave me the fuck alone.

I know how he died; I know why, unless you want to get all existential why, God, why about it, in which case who knows anything, but I can’t say I ever knew Craig. He had a little sister, it turned out, some gap-toothed goofball in pigtails who worshipped him for teaching her to shoot free throws and punch out the playground bully. But I didn’t know that until her gap-toothed eulogy, and by then I couldn’t afford to let myself listen. He was like our doll sometimes, an animatronic jock for us to pose. He was a slobbery kisser and an angry drunk, and he loved Nikki enough to get jealous but not enough, or at least not well enough, to make her love him back.

Sometimes we still met up without him, and that’s when she told me all the things even he didn’t know, like her secret early-morning runs, which she’d started back when she was fourteen and anorexic, but kept up because she liked the vacant dark of five A.M. Everyone knew that Nikki’s mother had spent a year screwing her father’s racquetball partner, but no one knew how pathetic Nikki thought her for coming back and begging forgiveness, much less for staying with a husband who now stuck it to her every chance he got. Everyone knew Nikki was good at being popular, but only I knew how little she cared. She fucked with people and built her little kingdom because it came easy, and because it was more fun than the alternative, but it didn’t make life any less mind-numbing, or the future any more bearable. She liked to watch people bow and scrape before her for the same reason little kids light anthills on fire. Not because it gave her life meaning, but because sometimes you need to spice up an afternoon.

Everyone knew she and Craig Ellison were destiny, their love mandated by the laws of royal courtship, and everyone was probably right. Craig was seventh-grade Nikki’s first kiss, Nikki was Craig’s first trip to second base, but there’s nothing sexy about inevitability, or at least nothing as sexy as a nameless eighth grader who’ll jerk you off in a roller rink bathroom, and so it wasn’t until sophomore year that they got together for real — fucking each other and fucking each other over, fucking and fighting and then fucking again. No wonder they were bored.

Craig, somehow, still had his secrets: He could get us anything. We tried heroin — horse, that’s what Craig called it, because he didn’t know how not to be an ass — but only once. People aren’t meant to feel that good, or be that happy. Coke was better. It made the sex better. It made everything better. It was easier to get and substantially harder to screw up, as opposed to the heroin, with which I almost set Nikki’s hair on fire. It was easy to laugh about things back then.

That’s it, all we did. Watch and fuck and snort and talk, rinse and repeat. Until Craig was dead, and it was all over. I didn’t go back. I couldn’t. Not to the station, not to the woods. It was desecrated. Not haunted — I told you, I don’t believe in that — just ruined.

No one would know unless Nikki or I told them, and we swore ourselves silent. One last sacred promise, and — stupid me — I assumed it would bind us together for life, but that was the last I saw of her, too. Maybe I was her woods, desecrated and ruined. But you know what I think? I think I was wrong from the start, suckering myself into believing that I’d peeled off Nikki’s mask and glimpsed her true face, when, in fact, there was nothing underneath but more masks. Masks on top of masks, with a hollow space at the center where some higher power forgot to shove in a soul. All animal instinct, no higher function. No capacity for pain.

SHE BLAMED ME.

She blamed me.

I don’t blame myself.

I refuse.

I did nothing wrong.

Pinky swear, Dex. Cross my heart and hope to join Craig on the big basketball court in the sky, nothing is my fucking fault.

No one is my puppet.

You promised me that.

ALONE AGAIN, AFTER. ALONE, IN the dark, with a secret, alone with the nightmares and the ghost of their skin, waking up with him inside me, her crawling down my body, invisible fingers and tongues dissolving into nothing with the dawn light. Alone with my mother and the Bastard and of course the precious fucking baby, who wouldn’t stop crying, the two of them keeping me away from him as if I had some contagious disease, as if I would want to touch or hold or big-sister their screaming, shit-stained midlife crisis, and who could blame me for taking the knife into the bathtub?

Rhetorical question. The Bastard blamed me for being a drama queen, and my mother blamed me for getting the Bastard riled up, and the cheap-ass therapist blamed me for not wanting to honestly face up to my problems, not wanting to rip the bandage off the seeping wound, but at least he gave me a prescription, and then I didn’t give a shit who blamed me for what, even Nikki Drummond. Especially Nikki Drummond.

Those were the cloud days. I floated. I played Kurt loud where I could, and quiet, in my head, where I had to. I could have floated forever, Dex; you should know that.

It’s important you know that I didn’t go looking for you.

I thought about it sometimes: how she would hate it, seeing me with someone else, watching me lace my arm around a waist or lean close to whisper a secret. It would hurt, and I wanted, more than anything, to make her hurt. I admit that. I could have picked anyone, any of those sad little girls dancing down the hall in their identical denim jackets and neon stirrup pants, bopping to New Kids or maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot because that’s what their boyfriends told them to listen to, saying please and thank you to their teachers and not so hard and fuck me to the boys they’d only be seen with in the woods, sad girls with big bangs and little dreams. I watched them, and I thought about it.

Then you came to me.

It wouldn’t surprise you that Nikki told me about you. It would surprise you what she said, something like, “Who, her? That loser’s always glaring at me like I drowned her puppy,” and forgive me, Dex, but I said, “Probably in love with you,” and Nikki said, “Who isn’t?” and then, I’m sure, drunk and high, we both laughed.

Truth, Dex: She never gave a shit about you. All that energy you put into hating her, and still you were nothing to her. Not until I made you something. You’ve never thanked me for that, either.

I WATCHED YOU. BILLOW OF HAIR like your very own storm cloud. Interchangeable Kmart T-shirts, always a size too big, like you’d never clued into your best asset, or wanted to make sure no one else did. Always with a book, thick glasses and middling sulk, that smirk you gave people when they said something stupid. I don’t even think you know you’re doing it, slitting your eyes and raising your lip, like the morons cause you physical pain. You told me once that, before me, you wasted half your time wondering why people didn’t like you more, obsessing about your glasses or your hair or the way you rolled the cuffs of your jeans, precisely how tight and how high. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that none of it would have helped. People like to believe they’re beautiful and smart and funny—special. They’ll never like the person whose face reveals the truth.

What I saw in your face was the truth of Nikki. She was as ugly to you as she was to me. You wanted to make her hurt. And I helped you do it, even if you didn’t realize it. You’re welcome for that, too.

I knew you before you knew yourself. Imagine if you’d marched through high school and college and a lifetime of diaper changes and mind-numbing jobs and garden clubs and PTA bake sales, and never known yourself, so tough and so, so angry. You were afraid to let yourself feel it, but I could feel it for you, simmering. I could hear the pot lid, that clatter of metal like a rattlesnake warning: Stand back, shit’s about to explode.

So fucking what if that’s why we started, if you hating her was the thing I loved most, if I held on so tight because I could feel her fury that she’d been replaced — by a nonentity. So Nikki brought us together. So what?

What matters isn’t how we found each other, Dex, or why. It’s that we did, and what happened next. Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That’s us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.

DEX, Urge Overkill

THERE WAS A SECURITY CAMERA. Two shadows caught on-screen, faces indistinct, ages readable enough that — the very morning after our graffiti triumph — two cops muscled their way into the principal’s office. By noon, word had gotten around that they were looking for two girls in possession of spray paint, with possible connections to a dark underground, two girls with dangerous intent. God is dead, we had written — I had written — and not realized this would magic us into something to fear. Midway through English class, the PA buzzed, and the principal came on to issue dire warnings: that new evidence suggested agitators in our midst, that we should all be vigilant, that all of us — the misguided perpetrators most of all — were at risk. The rumor mill was delighted, giddy speculation quickly drowning out any buzz about the next big party and Hayley Green’s bulimia-induced laxative incident.

Two nameless girls heeding the call of the dark; I could feel people watching us.

We met by the Dumpsters, one of us ice-cold and the other freaking out, three guesses which was which. This wasn’t the year to be a juvenile delinquent. “Worst case, it’s vandalism, that’s got to be a misdemeanor,” Lacey said, every word a shrug, and I wanted to shake reality into her.

“A misdemeanor? They still arrest you for those, Lacey. We’re so fucked.”

The refrain had been beating in my head since I saw the cop car pull up to the curb through my homeroom window. So fucked. So fucked. So totally, absurdly, screwed grounded arrested fucked. Lacey pretending otherwise didn’t fix anything.

“No one’s getting arrested. No one even knows it was us. Stop acting like a crazy person, and they never will.”

But the way I acted wasn’t the problem. It was Lacey. People knew enough about her to suspect the truth — at least, Nikki Drummond would.

And it turned out she did.

“Let me guess: her idea,” Nikki said, snaring me in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, where I’d taken to going ever since she’d cornered me in the one on the ground floor. “She promised no way would you get caught. No consequences.”

“Do you have some obsession with hearing me pee?”

“It’s always her idea, but you’re the one who’s going to get screwed. She’ll find some way to make sure of that.”

“Seriously, are you bathroom stalking me? Because that’s significantly weird.”

“She’s bad news, Hannah.”

“What are you, an after-school movie?” I washed my hands, then smeared on some ChapStick, just to show her my hands weren’t shaking. “One more time: I don’t know what you’re talking about. No idea.”

“Trust me, I believe that.”

“Fuck off,” I said, and banged out the door. Not my cleverest comeback, but I hated to give her the last word.

She seized it anyway. When I got to my locker that afternoon, the vice principal was waiting for me, with a cop and a pair of pliers and an “anonymous” tip.

I was crying before they got the door open, even knowing there’d be nothing to find, because even amateur, self-righteous vandals weren’t dumb enough to stash their spray paint at school, but it was still humiliating and there was a cop forcing open my locker and how the fuck had my life turned into this movie — and in the seconds before they deemed the locker inoffensive and sent me on my way, incriminating tears or not, I cursed Lacey, and thought, if only for a second, Nikki was right.

Lacey was ebullient when she scooped me up in the parking lot. We’d officially gotten away with it. “Bonnie and Clyde, right?”

“Bonnie and Clyde ended up dead.”

“What crawled up your ass?”

I couldn’t explain that I’d turned on her, however briefly, that I didn’t deserve her or the celebration she proposed, and instead I made her drop me off at home. If I could make it to my room before I started to cry, I thought, I would be safe. The day could end and tomorrow everything would be erased.

My father was waiting behind the door. “Your mother’s in your room,” he said. His face was doom.

“What? Why’s she not at work?”

“Just go up there.”

“What’s wrong?” It seemed likely someone was dead, or at least on the way there. I could see no other reason for my mother to leave work in the middle of the afternoon, no other end for this shitty, decompensating day.

He shook his head. “I promised her I’d give her first shot. But. . let’s just say, officially, I’m very disappointed. Unofficially?” He winked.

So fucked.

“Any chance we can pretend I never came home?”

He pointed at the stairs. “Go. And, kid?”

“Yeah?”

“Gird your loins.”

WHAT SHE’D FOUND: TWO CANS of spray paint, which Lacey had insisted we not throw out (but that she not keep). Rolling papers and a glass pipe I’d never used. Condoms, equally unused, extra-large and strawberry-flavored at Lacey’s insistence. Lipstick, too ugly to wear but shoplifted from Woolworth’s just because. Dusty bottles filched from the liquor cabinet. A Polaroid of Lacey’s boobs that had served us some ridiculous purpose I couldn’t remember.

How she knew to find it: A call to her office from a nameless “concerned friend” who was obviously Nikki Drummond, concerned only about ruining my life.

What she said: You are a disappointment. You are a disgrace. You are, it goes without saying, grounded.

You are not the daughter I raised.

You are lucky I’m not calling the cops.

You will never see that Lacey again.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t betray Lacey, not this time, not out loud. I admitted what I’d done, said I’d done it on my own, and if my own mother wanted to turn me in to the police, I’d be happy to tell them exactly the same thing. I told her that she couldn’t keep me away from Lacey, that the only bad influence here was sitting on my bed, holding two cans of spray paint like they were live grenades. I told her I didn’t need anyone, especially Lacey, to give me ideas or bully me into standing up for what was right. I was an adult, and if I wanted to fuck the Man, that was my business.

She sighed. “This isn’t you, Hannah. I know you better than that.”

“The name is Dex,” I said, and it was the last thing I would say to her that night or the two that followed. The silent treatment was still the only real weapon I could muster.

I must have seemed ridiculous. At least as ridiculous to her as my father seemed to me, cheering me on behind my mother’s back and making the occasional frontal assault with vague references to their shared posthippie past, invoking long-lost good causes and heroic stands, though my mother shut him down every time, in a way guaranteed to make both of us feel like shit. “She doesn’t care about feminist politics any more than you do, Jimmy,” I heard her say, after I’d tossed my burnt meat loaf and returned to my room. “She’s simply infatuated. You should know the feeling.”

She’d unplugged my phone and was monitoring the ones downstairs.

“No, Hannah can’t come to the phone,” I heard her say that Saturday morning. “Please stop calling.”

Lacey, I knew, would never stop calling.

Maybe this was it, the catalyst we needed to escape. Maybe I could finally shake off my suburban shackles, fuck high school and college and my permanent record, climb into Lacey’s Buick, slam my fist on the dashboard, and grant the permission I’d withheld for so long, say Go west, young man, and chart a course to freedom.

When I packed for school that Monday, I slipped my escape fund, all $237 of it, into my backpack, along with my copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and the first mix Lacey had made me, the one with HOW TO BE DEX scribbled across it in permanent marker — all the essentials, just in case. I waited for her in the parking lot, desperate for proof that she existed, and as I waited, I composed revenge plans in my head, a gift for Lacey, because before we escaped we’d need to avenge ourselves against the enemy. We would sneak through Nikki’s window and shave her head; we would slit the seams of her prom dress, just enough that the gown would dissolve as they placed the crown on her perfectly coiffed head; we would frame her for cheating; we would find someone to break her heart.

They were lame schemes, cribbed from Sweet Valley High books and half-remembered teen movies, but evidence of my will. Lacey would supply the way.

Except that when Lacey finally showed up — not a half hour early, as I had, bouncing with eagerness and certain she was feeling the same way, but twenty minutes after the start of homeroom — and I cornered her in the parking lot, she didn’t want to hear about my revenge schemes, and she wasn’t full of sympathy for my weekend of torment. She didn’t, in fact, seem particularly concerned about my problems at all.

“How worried do I have to be?” she said. “Is your mother the kind who’s going to call mine?”

“Depends whether she thinks it’ll torture me or not.”

“Fuck, this is serious, Dex. You have to ask her if she’s planning to tell. Get her not to.”

“That’s going to be hard when I’m not speaking to her.”

“So fucking speak to her. What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know, Lacey, maybe being a prisoner in my own home has driven me crazy? Maybe it’s been a little difficult, having my own mother look at me like I’m some criminal who’s going to shiv her in the night? Maybe I’m a little worried that she’s forbidden me from seeing my best friend, and I thought my best friend might be a little worried about that, too.”

“You’re seeing me right now.” She sounded distracted, as if there could be anything more important to think about.

“How are you not getting this?”

“How are you not getting it, Dex? I can’t have the Bastard finding out about this. I can’t.”

“Oh, but it’s totally fine when I get caught?”

“That’s not what I meant. But, okay, yeah. You seem pretty fine to me.”

“Oh, I’m awesome, Lacey. Everything is fantastic.”

“You don’t get it—”

“I get that it’s okay for me to get in trouble as long as you don’t get in trouble. Even though this whole fucking thing was your idea.”

“Can you for one millisecond entertain the hypothesis that not everything is about you, Dex?”

I heard myself spit out the world’s ugliest laugh. “Tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”

She didn’t say anything. I willed her to. Say something; say anything. Fix this.

“Well?” I said. “Really? Nothing?”

“Please ask your mother not to tell mine.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

SCHOOL HURT WITHOUT LACEY THERE, even more because she was there, just no longer mine.

I was the angry one. I was the righteous one. I was the one avoiding her in the halls and getting on the bus after school instead of waiting for her car. So why did it feel like she’d abandoned me?

Temporary, I told myself. She would apologize, I would forgive, all would be the same. But when I saw Nikki, I couldn’t say anything. It felt different, not having Lacey at my back. All the things I wanted to say, all the fuck you, how dare you, what gives you the right curdled in my throat, and I knew how they would come out if I tried.

You won.

I DID SPEAK TO MY MOTHER that week, just once, just to ask her not to tell Lacey’s parents what she suspected. Because there was no evidence Lacey had done anything, I reminded her, and being my mother only gave her the right to ruin my life.

I didn’t speak to Lacey.

I didn’t call anyone, for that matter; I didn’t go anywhere. I came straight home after school and watched TV until it was time for bed. Life grounded was a lot like life before Lacey, and it terrified me.

“Like old times, right?” my father said, during a commercial, while we waited to see which inbred family would win their feud. And my face must have revealed what I thought of that, because he added, “I know. I miss her, too.”

This did not help.

What did: Friday afternoon the phone rang, and after he answered it, he handed it to me. My mother was down at the Y, tapping into her inner artist at a pottery class — and the customary liquor-fueled wallow that followed — that would reliably keep her occupied through midnight. We were alone in the house. No one to stop him from breaking her rules; no one to stop me from saying, cautiously, hello, and finally breathing again when I heard her voice.

“I’m sorry.”

I wanted to wait for her to say it first, but I was too puppy dog eager, and so we chimed together, overlapping, desperate, both of us so, so sorry, both of us so quick to dismiss and fast-forward, whatever, it was nothing, ancient history, stupid, inessential, inconsequential to the epic and never-ending story of us.

“I have it, Dex,” she finally said. “The perfect revenge.”

“Nikki?”

“Of course, Nikki. You think we let her do this to you and get away with it?”

“So, what’s this perfect plan?”

“Not now. Tonight. You heard about the foreclosure party, right?”

Everyone had heard about the foreclosure party. An abandoned house at the edge of a half-built development, guaranteed empty, out of the way, and equipped with ample bedrooms. Nikki’s father worked at the villainous bank, and every month or two she managed to snag an address and a key. Lacey and I were supposed to be above such things.

“I’m grounded,” I told her, even as my father mouthed, It’s okay, and nodded.

“Sneak out. I promise, it’ll be worth it.”

It’s not that I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t know what it was. “Lacey—”

“Pick you up at nine.” She hung up before I could answer.

“I don’t want to know where you’re going,” my father said. The dial tone was still droning in my ear. “Plausible deniability. Just be back before your mother.”

So I was going to a party.

By nine P.M., I had laced myself into the black corset, which I hadn’t worn since the night of the Beast. Lacey said it made me into a warrior, ready for battle. It did; I was. She didn’t show. I sat on the porch steps, waiting, lipstick congealing, hair wilting in the humidity, time ticking, heart beating, cars passing and never stopping, none of them her. I’d poured some of my parents’ scotch into a water bottle — our own private pre-party, or that was the plan.

I drank most of it myself.

Nine, nine thirty, ten — no Lacey. No answer at her house when I called. No fucking way I was going back inside, changing into pajamas, explaining to my father why I’d chosen rules over rebellion, staring at the ceiling, wondering why Lacey had flaked. The party was only a couple miles away, and I had a bike.

BECAUSE I WAS ANGRY. BECAUSE I was tired. Because I was sick of being the tagalong, the one things were decided for. Because I had something to prove. Because I was curious. Because I looked hot, and I knew it. Because I’d seen enough movies where the mousy girl goes to a party and changes her life. Because I hated Nikki and thought if I drank enough beer maybe I’d be able to buzz up the courage to spit in her face. Because Lacey would hate it, or maybe she would love it, or maybe I should stop fucking caring one way or another what Lacey would think. Because I was embarrassed, and sad, and that made me angry all over again, and the rage felt good against the pedals, pumping through the dark, toward a strobing shadow, toward what felt that night, with the wind in my ears and my parents’ ancient scotch burning in my throat, like destiny. Because anything, because who knows, because it wasn’t a night or a week or a year for because, no why, only who what when where:

Me.

A mistake.

After I should have known better.

Here. The husk of a McMansion, bodies moving across windows lit by the flicker of candlelight. On the grandiose porch, two guys in low-slung jeans taking a final slug of beer before going inside.

“Yo, let’s get stupid.”

“You damn right, son.”

“You know it, son.”

It was the thing, that year, for the whitest of boys to talk like they weren’t, to sling awkward slang and let their pants sag like the rappers they saw on TV, and they were going where I was going, and that could have been my cue to get back on my bike and ride home, but instead I took the water bottle out of my bag and finished the scotch. I was a delinquent, I reminded myself. The cops were after me. I was grounded and sneaking out — albeit with paternal permission. I was dangerous.

The more I drank, the easier this was to believe.

It would have been the nicest house I had ever been in if it hadn’t been so clearly left behind. Left in a hurry, it looked like, couches and tables and rugs all in place, which, despite the mass of bodies gyrating to bad music on stained carpet, gave the house a whiff of Pompeii. Someone lived here, once, and fled in a hurry, set down breakfast spoon and morning paper, ran out the door and didn’t stop until far enough away to be safe from the thing that was coming. The bad thing.

Nikki Drummond was waiting in the foyer as if she were the grand dame of the estate. “Seriously? Hannah Dexter? Gracing us with her presence.”

“Seriously. Present.”

“I figured you’d be shipped off to a military academy by now. Or at least grounded.”

I wasn’t yet drunk enough to spit on her, so I shifted my attention to the jock drooling beside her, Marco Speck, who’d been Craig’s shadow and was apparently now looking to be his replacement. “I think you should watch out,” I said. “The last guy had to put a bullet in his head to get away from her.”

Marco looked at me like I’d just sucker punched her. “Jesus, Dexter. That was cold.”

I felt cold.

Nikki only smiled and handed me a shot, which I tipped back without hesitation, thinking maybe it was enough and we were even. Then she pushed Marco at me, saying we deserved each other, and if I wanted to embarrass myself she wasn’t going to stop me. When he said he barely recognized me in those boobs, and also dude, whoa, I let one hand play at my cleavage and the other wrap itself in his, because Nikki was watching. Maybe Lacey would have said, Don’t be one of them, but then again she’d also said What’s the big deal and What are you waiting for and Don’t be so fucking precious about fucking, and anyway she wasn’t there. The shot tasted like lemon and sugar and fire. Marco tasted like peanuts. His breath in my ear was like the wind on my bike, like coasting downhill in a whoosh of summer. Like letting it happen. Broken glass crunched beneath our feet, everything gritty and sticky and layered with filth, and it smelled like sex to me, sex as I imagined it, smoke and dried beer and rotting fruit. There was music pounding, hard-core rap; there was a crush of strangers doing the things strangers did in the dark. Marco sucked my neck. Marco’s hands were in my hands, and then in my pants, Marco was grinding against me, chest to chest, groin to groin, what passed for dancing, and I could feel him hard against me and almost believed I could do this on my own, without Lacey, I could be what the night demanded, push myself into its live and beating heart.

What the fuck are you doing?

I thought I heard her voice in my head, and I answered out loud, “Shut up.”

“Not a chance.” That wasn’t my head. That was Lacey, really her, standing behind me, hands on my waist, pulling me away from Marco and his hot sweat, pushing me through the bodies, up the stairs, into a child’s bedroom, a sad parade of zoo animals peeling off its wall.

“What the fuck, Dex?”

She wasn’t dressed for a party. White wifebeater and gym shorts, she wasn’t dressed for anything. No makeup. No boots. That was the weirdest part. Lacey in sneakers.

“I didn’t even know you owned sneakers,” I said.

“Are you drunk?”

“Started without you.” Then I was hugging her, hugging her and saying how much she sucked for flaking out on me, but now she was here, and sneakers or not, everybody dance now—I sang it, took her wrists in my hands and waved her arms in the air.

She shook me. “Sober up, Dex. What the hell were you thinking?”

“You love me drunk.”

“When you drink with me. When I can watch you.”

“You’re late,” I said, and we shook each other off. “And in the wrong place.”

“And you’re sticking your tongue in Marco Speck. We’re both having off nights.”

“Lacey. Laaaaaaaaaaacey. Lighten up. It’s a party.”

“I have to fucking talk to you.”

“Right. Revenge,” I said, open for business. “Vengeance. Monte Cristo—style. Bring it on. What’ve you got?”

“What?”

“Nikki Drummond. You said you had the perfect plan. So, go on. Make this worth it.”

“Because you’ve got better places to be? Like in Marco Speck’s pants? Like I’d let that happen.”

I would have gone back down to the party then, maybe not to fuck Marco Speck but at least to make a good effort, if she hadn’t stepped in front of the door.

“Fine,” she said. “You want revenge? Here’s the plan. We burn the fucking house down. Right now.” She pulled out a lighter. I didn’t know why she would have a lighter, or why she was lighting it, taking one of the kids’ pillows and setting it on fire, both of us staring, mesmerized, at the flames.

“Jesus Christ!” I knocked it out of her hands, stomped on the fire, hard, desperate, stop, drop, and roll spinning through my head, and all those panicked nights I’d spent in fourth grade after Jamie Fulton’s house burned down and the school sent home a checklist of clothes the family needed in the aftermath, including girls’ underpants, size small. If my house burned down and my clothes turned to ash and the other kids in school had it confirmed in black-and-white that I required their spare girls’ underpants, size small. . better to die in a fire, I’d thought.

The flames went out. Docs were good for stomping.

“Are you trying to kill us?”

“The house burns down and what do you think will happen? Nikki’s party, Nikki’s fault, and everyone will know it,” Lacey said, something wild on her face, like she would have actually done it, like she would still do it, if only I said yes. “It’d be all over for her. And think of the fire, Dex. Flames in the night. Magic.”

“Since when did you turn into a fucking pyro?”

“That’s the plan, Dex. In or out?”

“Either you’ve gone truly insane, or you think this is all a big joke, and either way, fuck you.” I snatched the lighter out of her hands. “This stays with me.”

There was a feeble laugh. “I wasn’t actually going to do it. Jesus, Dex, learn to take a joke.”

I believed her; I didn’t believe her. I was tired of trying to figure it out.

“Just making sure there’s still a little Hannah in my Dex,” she said. “Where would I be without that little voice telling me, No, don’t do that, Lacey, that’s dangerous?” It was the sorry, pinched way she said it, like a bank teller rejecting a loan.

“I’m not your fucking conscience.”

She must have seen it then, how angry I was, how drunk and how done. “Come on, Dex. Come on, it was a joke, I’m sorry. Look, this was a mistake. This party. This week. Everything. Let’s erase it. Start again. For real this time. Burn our lives to the ground—” She held up a hand to silence me before I could object. “Metaphorically. Let’s really do it this time, Dex. Get away. Go west, like we planned.”

“Now?”

“Why not now?”

“I’m grounded,” I reminded her.

“Exactly. You’ll be grounded for life when your mother figures out you were here. Fuck her. Fuck all of them. Let’s go, Dex. I mean it.”

“Tonight.”

“This minute. Please.”

For a heartbeat, I believed her, and I thought about it. To jump into the Buick, aim ourselves at the horizon. To begin again. Could I be the girl who dropped everything and walked away? Could I be Dex, finally, forever?

Could I be free?

One heartbeat, and then in the thump of the next, I hated her for making me believe it could happen, because what could this be but another test, some wild dare I was supposed to shoot down, because — hadn’t she just said it? — that was my job, the wet blanket on her fire.

“Enough bullshit,” I said. “I’m going back to the party.”

She shook her head, hard. “No. Dex. We have to go.”

“If you want speed off into the sunset, you do it, Lacey. I’m not going to stop you. I’m going to have another drink. I’m going to have fun.”

“You don’t have to decide about leaving for good, not in the next thirty seconds, I’m sorry, that was crazy.” She took my wrist, squeezed hard. “But at least let’s get out of here. Please.”

It was the second time she’d said it to me in one night, and possibly in all the time I’d known her. It shouldn’t have felt so good to shrug her off. “I’m staying. You go.”

“I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”

That was when I understood. She didn’t want me to be Dex, untamed and magnificent. That was her job. I was to be the sidekick. I was to keep my mouth shut and do as I was told, spin and leap and do tricks like a trained seal. I was to obey and applaud when appropriate. I was to be molded, not into her image but into something less-than.

Could I be the girl who walked away?

“Please. Go,” I said.

“It’s not my job to watch out for you,” I said, “and vice versa.”

“I don’t care what happens next,” I said. Maybe, finally, I was the one administering the test — maybe I was lying and maybe I wasn’t.

Lacey believed me.

She left.

HOW TO DANCE LIKE NO one is watching. Or dance like everyone is watching, pale flesh jiggling as you grind against denim and polyester and lacrosse muscles and twitching dicks. Writhe in your Docs and jerk to the beat beat beat of the hip-hop blast, and let a hand find its way past a thin cotton waistband and stick its finger into your warm and wet. Wrap your arms around the closest body, press lips to neck and nape and groin, laugh along with and louder than, and if it feels good, do it. Put your hands on yourself, and rub and stroke, let yourself moan. Think, look at these faces, my friends, look at their love and look at me shine. Don’t think. Straddle something, a chair or a body, lower your weight onto it, ride ’em cowboy, ride it hard while they pour beer on your head and you raise your face to the stream and your tongue to the sour splash, then, because they call for it, lick it off yourself, and off the body, and off the ground. Note the heat of skin, the fire that courses beneath, the salt of sweat and tears. Slice your palm on the splintered edge of a broken glass and smear yourself with blood. Let the floor fall away and the horizon spin. Suck at flesh and whirl in place and throw your hands up in the air. This is how to party like you just don’t care.

Look at yourself, LACEY HAD said, the first time she laced me into the corset, turned me to the mirror, made me see. It’s like you were born to wear it.

Do you see now, Dex? she had said.

I saw: A girl’s face, made up with drastic colors and lips pursed in mock defiance. Romance-novel cleavage and black lace. Hair with streaks of icy blue and leather cuff bracelets that whispered tie me up, hold me down.

Look at yourself, Lacey had said, but myself was gone.

I thought: I look like someone else, and she is beautiful.

YOU. GIRL. WAKE UP.”

I did what I did best and followed orders, waking up slow and in pain, fuzzy mouth and throbbing head and a cavernous feeling like I hadn’t eaten in days, though the thought of food made every organ want to fling itself from my body into a putrid puddle at my feet. I woke up cursing and squinting, wishing someone would turn out the sun. Weeds beneath me, jeans and shirt damp with dew. Strange shirt; a stranger’s shirt.

An alien landscape: Stretch of overgrown lawn, drained pool, fringe of trees. Dingy white siding, broken windows, stained patio, crushed cans of beer.

A man, his foot nudging my thigh, his face in shadow, gold badge glinting in the dawn.

“That’s it. Get up now.”

When he touched me, I screamed.

The effort of it nearly made me pass out again, as did the tilt of the world as he dragged me vertical. Then the noise of his words, security guard and trespassing and, he kept saying, trash, trash, trash, but it wouldn’t come clear, whether he meant the empty cans and the broken glass and the used condoms or simply me.

The party was long over; everyone was gone. They’d left me alone. They’d left me out with the garbage.

Standing set my insides to sloshing. Thinking was hard, like a toddler unsteady on chubby feet.

“Get in,” he said, and there was a door with a sedan attached to it and a leather backseat and the thought of a moving car made me want to die.

“I have my bike,” I said.

He laughed like a dog.

“Are you a cop?” I said. “Am I under arrest?”

“Just give me your address.”

Don’t get into cars with strange men, I thought, and asked if he at least had any candy, and then I was the one laughing.

Maybe I was still drunk.

Lacey would have said: Skip the name, rank, serial number. No identification, no address, no consequences. He would have to dump me by the side of the road, and then I could sleep.

I couldn’t remember the night.

I couldn’t remember enough of the night.

I remembered hands gathering me up, I remembered floating in strange arms, chandeliers overhead and then stars, and laughter that wasn’t mine. I remembered fingers tugging at zippers and lace, a voice saying leave her over there, another saying turn her over so she doesn’t drown in her own puke, all the voices chanting puke puke puke and my trained-seal pride when I performed on command.

I ached everywhere, but hurt nowhere specific. That seemed important.

“Learn to have a little pride in yourself,” the man said after I gave him my address, after he led me through the front yard, pausing to let me vomit up everything left inside. “You keep acting like a whore, people will keep treating you like one.”

He deposited me at the door, which flew open at the bell, like my parents had been waiting. Of course, I thought, slowly, they had been waiting. The sun was up. I’d been missing. I felt like I still was.

The cop was a security guard for the housing development. The development would not be pressing charges. “Next time, though, we won’t be so generous.”

My mother was steel. “There won’t be a next time.”

“You sure you don’t want to take me to jail?” I asked the not-cop, brain kicked into gear enough to smile. “Might be easier on me.”

Then I heaved again. There was nothing left.

Once he was gone, my parents closed the door behind us, and there was a long stint of hugging. I tried to speak — probably it seemed like I wanted to explain myself, when I only wanted to say please be gentle and can someone turn out the lights—but my mother said no, firmly enough that it was the end of it, then held on tight, and then it was my father’s turn, and for endless time I was closed in by their love, and it was almost enough to keep me on my feet.

Then, “Go get yourself cleaned up. You smell like the town dump,” my mother said.

“Sleep,” my father said. “Then we’ll talk.”

I lurched up the stairs. I’d been hungover before, but this was like some New Coke version of a hangover, different and deeply wrong. I closed myself into the bathroom, turned on the shower, waited for the water to heat, for the night to return to me.

I wanted to be clean; I wanted to sleep. Ahead of me, I knew, was the grueling interrogation by my parents, lectures and scolding, that I’d stayed out all night, made them worry, lost their trust all over again, and I’d have to sit through it while knowing my father was desperately hoping I wouldn’t give him up, that if I kept quiet about him letting me go to the party he’d find a way to compensate. No matter what, I’d be grounded all over again. Grounding, of course, wouldn’t extend to school, and I’d have to face all those faces who’d seen me lose control, who knew what I did, whatever it was. There would be whispers and rumors I would have to ignore; there would be stories of what and who, and I would, against my will, pay attention, try to piece together the night. I would be the story; I would be the joke; I would be the thing they’d left outside with the trash. All of that I knew.

I couldn’t know about the letter to the editor some Officially Concerned old woman would publish in the local paper, about girls gone wild and the corrupting modern moral climate as encapsulated by the drunk sex fiend who’d been found passed out half naked outside the old Foster place, or that even though the girl went unnamed in the letter, my kindly security guard would spread my name to his nearest and dearest until half the town was calling me a whore, parents fish-eyeing my parents, their kids, chafing under draconian new curfews and rules, blaming me for all the ways in which they’d gotten screwed, that even my teachers would look at me differently, like they’d seen me naked. I couldn’t know that I would be famous, the Mary Magdalene of Battle Creek, without my own personal savior, without anyone to rescue me from my own inequities except the judgment of the town, for my own good.

I couldn’t know that I would go through it on my own. That when I called Lacey to tell her what had happened, to apologize or let her apologize or simply sit on the phone until I unclenched enough to let the tears fall, she wouldn’t be there. That she’d packed up in the middle of the night, just like she’d told me she would. That I was on my own now, because I’d told Lacey to go and Lacey was gone.

I didn’t know.

So when I stripped naked in the bathroom and saw myself — saw the words that had been Sharpie’d all over my body, the things someone had written across my stomach and breasts and ass, the labels that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard I scrubbed, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, but could recognize as the work of more than one person, slut and whore and skank and, graffitied neatly just below my belly button with an arrow pointing straight down, we wuz here—I thought: Lacey.

Lacey will save me.

Lacey will avenge me.

Lacey will hold me and whisper the magic words that will make all of this okay.

I climbed into the shower and sagged against the wall and watched the words shine in the water, the words strange hands had inscribed on bare skin while I slept. Strange hands redressing me, pulling underpants over my thighs, snapping strapless bra in place, lacing corset. Before that, strange hands doing things. Strange lips, strange fingers, strange dicks, all of them, I tried, hot water streaming over me, to remember what I had done, what I had let them do, who I had become in the night. The water burned and my skin burned, and still, I believed I could endure it, because soon I would have Lacey, and I would not be alone.

LACEY, Blood Ties

THE BASTARD BURNED IT ALL. In a fucking fire. Like a Nazi.

“Heil fucking Hitler,” I told him, which stopped him just long enough to slap me across the face, a nice sharp blow to make my ears sing but which we both knew wouldn’t leave a mark. Then Herr Bastard went back to his bonfire, and I spat and screamed and choked on the smell of Kurt melting in the flames. Plastic cases warping with heat, fire eating through Kurt’s eyes, Nietzsche and Sartre going up in smoke. It would have been cool — very Seattle, very Kurt — if it hadn’t been my whole life disintegrating while the Bastard splashed gasoline. And my mother. Hiding out in the kitchen, probably rustling up some marshmallows and graham crackers so the Bastard could make s’mores over the ruins of the world.

That’s why I was late picking you up for the party, Dex. My oh-so-unforgiveable crime. The Bastard found my Satanic Bible and lost his fucking shit. Which looks nothing like what you’re imagining, I can assure you. In your G-rated imagination, I’m sure, parents rant and rage and ground you for a week and then everyone has spaghetti for dinner and goes to bed.

Let me paint you a picture, Dex. Life according to Lacey. There’s me, bedhead and short shorts, nipples standing at attention, and he wasn’t even looking, that’s how hypnotized he was by his precious fire. I couldn’t stop watching it, either, the fire consuming every song, every page, every piece of me, everything that carried me away from this shit life. Is that how you felt that night, Dex, when your mother found those stupid cans of paint, when she yelled at you, poor baby, and took away your phone privileges? Did you go cold inside, like the night was an ice-covered pond, and you knew if you weren’t careful, the surface would crack open and you’d sink into the deep? Were you disgusted by it, by the way your body betrayed you with its goose-bumped shuddering and the sad little croaks and moans you made instead of words? Did you think: I’m better than this? Did you think: Now I am empty? Now I have nothing left?

You didn’t. You did have something left. You had me.

The day the music died. It’s supposed to be a metaphor. Not a live show in my backyard, the Bastard’s bloated face red in reflected light, miniature flames dancing in his eyes, hands stinking of gasoline, the devil in penny loafers and a polyester suit. I thought about those wailing widows in India, the ones who throw themselves onto the funeral pyre, because what’s left to live for when the thing you’re living for is a column of smoke? Think about that, skin flayed away, bare muscle and pearly bone, flesh fused with plastic, all of us ash together.

“You’ve got the devil in you,” the Bastard said when he shoved me into the corner of my bedroom and made me watch while he tore it apart. “We’re going to burn it out of this house, and then we’re going to burn it out of you.”

WE EACH HAVE OUR JAMES. My fake dad and your real one. Except that fake dad is what you call the kind of guy who bribes you with imitation pearls and Amy Grant CDs, who won’t shut up about How was your day? and Who are your favorite teachers? and Won’t you just give me a chance to prove I can love you?

The Bastard pretended to be nice to me for precisely as long as it took to get into my mother’s pants. Your James, on the other hand. Your Jimmy Dexter. Your dear old dad.

That’s a different story, isn’t it?

SOMETIMES I KEEP THINGS FROM you to protect you, Dex. But this is truth: I never meant for it to happen. Cliché, but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can’t blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life.

You buying any of this?

Okay, try this one: My mother and the Bastard are right, I’m the harlot of Battle Creek. I’ve got the devil in me. I’ve done terrible things, but this is not one of them.

Here’s another cliché for you: Nothing happened. That should count for something.

THE FIRST TIME. EARLY SPRING, one of those perfect mornings that fool you into believing that winter never happened and summer might not suck. The door opened as soon as I took my finger off the bell. Like he’d been waiting for me. “Can Dex come out and play?”

“Dex isn’t here right now.” That was the first thing I liked about your father, the way he called you Dex. Not like your mother, who was always throwing around Hannah this and Hannah that in that pinched voice, like what she really wanted to say was She’s mine and you can’t have her. “Her mother took her outlet shopping. Blazing-hot clearance sales, I hear.”

“Sounds thrilling,” I said.

“I begged them to bring me along.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

He grinned. Like we were friends. “Story of my life, always left out in the cold.”

“It’s a cruel world.”

“Cutthroat.” He was wearing a Cosby sweater and dad jeans, and his hair was a black scruff of weeds, like he’d just woken up, even though it was noon. Stubble inching down his chin, a little crud in the corner of one eye. I was wearing cutoffs over black leggings, the ones you said gave me buns of steel, and a tank that cut my boobs about a centimeter above the nipple. He could have gotten some show, if he’d bothered to look. But he wasn’t that kind of dad.

“Guess I should go,” I said.

“Don’t get into trouble out there.” He reconsidered. “Not too much, at least.”

“The thing is. .,” I said, and maybe I took a deep breath and held it, because I kind of wanted him to look.

The thing was, I couldn’t go home.

The thing was, the Bastard had found my condoms.

That’s why I came looking for you, Dex. So we could go to the lake, and I could sink into the icy water until it hurt enough to make me forget. It’s not my fault you weren’t there when I needed you.

“The thing is?” your father said when I didn’t.

“The thing is. .” I wasn’t crying or anything. I was just doing me, leaning against the doorway, one hand slipped into the back pocket of my cutoffs, cupping my ass, eyes on his dad shoes. Ugly blue sneakers, both unlaced. That was the thing that got me, the laces. Like he had no one to save him from falling. “Your shoes are untied.”

He shrugged. “I like ’em that way.” He stepped out of the doorway, opening a space for me. “Want to come in? Have something to drink?”

We had hot chocolate. No whiskey in it, not that time.

The mugs steamed. We watched each other. He smiled. Dad smile.

“So, what’s the verdict, Blondie?”

If you’d ever heard him call me that, you would have looked cluelessly at me, at my black hair, and I would have had to explain about Debbie Harry at the microphone and “Heart of Glass” and how I was really more of a Runaways girl, but what kind of nickname is Joan, and anyway, that didn’t matter as much as the fact that he could see the kind of girl I was, the kind who should have a mic to tongue and a guitar to smash and a stage to light on fire, that he looked at me and understood. But I didn’t have to explain, because we both knew, without saying, that this wasn’t for you.

The nickname: That was our first secret, and another thing we had in common. We liked to give things their secret names. We knew there was power in that.

“How are you liking our little town?”

“It sucks,” I said.

“Ha.” It wasn’t a laugh, more like an acknowledgment that a laugh might be called for.

“I like Dex, though,” I said.

“Smart girl. Beauty and brains. I approve.”

If he’d been someone else, just a guy rather than a dad, or even if he’d been most dads, I would have taken that as my cue, offered up my serpent smile, sipped my drink, and wiped away the chocolate mustache with one slow lick.

“Thanks, Mr. Dexter,” I said.

“You should know you’ve broken my heart.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Dex finally discovers music, thanks to you, and—”

“And you’re welcome.”

“And, thanks to you, she’s developing some seriously shitty taste.”

“Better watch out, old man, you’re starting to sound your age.”

He jerked to his feet, the chair screeched, and I thought that was it. Too far. Especially when he stalked out of the room and left me there alone to wonder whether I was supposed to see myself out, thinking at least he trusted me to do so without stealing the silver.

Then he came back, record in hand. He’d also changed his shirt. “I don’t do tapes,” he said. “No tonal fidelity.” He handed me the album. “Call me old again and you’re out on your ass.” He looked so proud of himself for cursing, like a toddler showing off a turd.

“The Dead Kennedys?”

“You know them?”

I shrugged. I learned that much from Shay. Never admit you don’t know.

“Take it home. Listen to it — at least twice. That’s an order.”

“Really?” I know music guys and their record collections, Dex. They don’t hand their precious goods off to just anyone.

“Really,” he said. “Bring me one of yours next time. We’ll pretend it’s an even trade.”

Next time.

That’s how it went, Dex, and it kept going. We talked about music. We talked about him.

Did you know that when he was sixteen, he ditched the guitar for a year and taught himself to play the drums? He wanted to be Ringo Starr. Not because he thought Ringo was the best Beatle or anything, but because you couldn’t wish or will yourself into being a genius — Lennons and McCartneys are born. Ringos, according to your dad, are made, by luck and circumstance and practice in their parents’ garage. I thought that was sweet, that he’d dream of being fourth best.

I stayed until there was nothing left in my mug but cold milk and soggy chunks of Swiss Miss, then shook his hand. “Thanks for the hot chocolate, Mr. Dexter.”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing for our Dex.” Our Dex, like you were a secret we shared. He walked me to the door. “And you better listen to that album, young lady. I’m waiting on your report.”

I saluted. “Yes, sir, Mr. Dexter.”

“My friends call me Jimmy.” Not Jim but Jimmy, which he probably thought lent him boyish charm but actually made him sound like he needed to live under adult supervision.

“Are we friends now?”

“Any friend of Dex’s,” he said. “You know the rest.”

IT WAS JUST TALK. THERE’S nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes I cut school without you. Your dad was home a lot during the day. More than he should have been, you and your mom would probably say. Even the first time, he didn’t ask what I was doing there. Neither of us bothered to pretend I was looking for you.

“Hot chocolate?” he said.

“How about a smoke?” I tossed him a pack of Winston Lights.

We took them into the backyard. I liked puffing the smoke into the cold, watching it fog the air. It was like breathing, only better.

I’d spotted the stains on his fingers, the way he kept tapping his spoon against his mouth. The tiny hole at his knee where the denim had burned away. Secret smokers recognize each other. There’s a whiff of unfulfilled need about us, of unspoken desire. You want my opinion, I don’t even think he likes smoking. I think he just does it because he’s not allowed to.

“God,” he sighed, blowing it out. “God, that’s good.”

The first draw is always the best.

He taught me to puff a smoke ring. I reminded him — later, when we knew each other better — how to roll a joint.

That day, though, we smoked our cigarettes standing up, leaning against the back wall. The shitty patio furniture seemed like your mother’s territory, all those vinyl flowers and pastel pillows.

“Can I ask you something, Blondie?” He liked to play with the cigarette, carving up the air with its glowing tip. I liked to watch. He has man hands, your dad. Big enough to curl his fingertips over mine when we pressed palm to palm, crooked like they’re still trying to curl around an invisible guitar. “It’s probably inappropriate.”

“I think we’re past that, Mr. Dexter.”

“Jimmy.”

“Jimmy.” I liked to make him tell me again.

“Does Dex have. . I mean, she’s never brought a boy home, but that doesn’t mean. . I was wondering—”

“Why, Jimmy, are you asking me if your daughter has a boyfriend?” I said.

“Well. .”

“Or if she’s a dyke?”

“That’s not what I—”

“Or are you just concerned with the state of her cherry, whatever drink it’s in?”

“You’re, uh, mixing your metaphors there, Blondie.” It was cute the way he tried to play it cool, pretend like his skin wasn’t crawling off his bones.

“Don’t ask me about Dex.”

This was the week after that night at Beast, when you went a little nuts with the tequila and decided you should put on your own personal bartop strip show. You didn’t even remember it in the morning. What you did or what you wanted, or how you cursed at me for dragging you out of there, so you can’t appreciate that I took you back to my place, tucked you up tight under my covers, rather than dumping you off on your parents’ porch, a drunk, drooling, half-naked and half-catatonic mess for them to clean up. Sometimes I lie to protect you, Dex, so you can keep lying to yourself. You didn’t want to know how you went wild in Beast, just like you didn’t want to know how, in that field with those idiot farm boys, you were jonesing to get your hands on the axe. You don’t want to know that you swung it high and hard and laughed at the blood.

I kept your secrets for you—from you. I wasn’t about to spill any to him.

“You don’t want to know whether I have a boyfriend?” I said. “Or whether I’ve been in love, any of that crap?”

“That crap’s none of my business, Blondie.”

“They’re all idiots. Guys my age.”

“Not just your age,” he said.

“So now you’re suggesting I should look into the lesbian thing?”

We weren’t looking at each other. We usually didn’t. He preferred leaning against the house, hiding behind his sunglasses and watching the back lawn like he was scanning for movement, that caveman stare, this land is mine and I will protect it. Wild boars, deer, errant mailmen — he was prepared. I focused on the same middle distance and snuck glances at him when I could. Sometimes we caught each other out. I liked it when he blushed.

“The thing to know about men is that they’re pigs,” he said. “Especially when a pretty girl comes along.”

“Are you calling me pretty, Jimmy?”

“Shoe fits, Blondie.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I told him. “I have a dad of my own, you know.”

“I know.” He did look at me then. “It must be hard, not having him around.”

“It’s not like he’s dead.”

“Of course not.” He looked like he wanted to put his hand on my shoulder. Don’t ask how I knew; I know what it looks like when a man wants to lay hands on me.

“He didn’t leave because of me, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“It wasn’t.”

“My mother made him think he was worthless. Tell someone that enough and they start to believe it.”

He drew on the cigarette, breathed out a puff of smoke.

“I hope you don’t believe it, Jimmy.”

“Excuse me?”

“You shouldn’t let her make you feel worthless.”

I was doing you a favor. He needed someone to remind him that he existed, that he wasn’t just a figment of your mother’s imagination. Let someone start believing they’re not real and, poof, one day they disappear. You wouldn’t want that, Dex.

We both know the last thing you want is to be like me.

“Mrs. Dexter has a lot on her plate these days,” he said. “And I’m not making things any easier.”

That was when I knew I’d said something wrong, “Mrs. Dexter.” Because usually he called her Julia, as in Julia hates it when I. . or Julia would have a cow if she knew I. .

“Maybe I should go,” I said.

“Maybe you should, Lacey.”

I didn’t mind that he said it. Only a screwup lets some strange girl insult his wife. I could be generous, because it didn’t change the truth: I was his secret, and he kept it. He lied to you, and he lied to your mother. I was his truth. I’m not saying that meant he loved me best. But it has to mean something.

MY FATHER IS NEVER COMING back. I know that. And my resulting daddy issues are not subtle. I didn’t need a therapist to tell me I was looking for paternal replacements, that the “inappropriate” encounter with my band teacher or the time I let that McDonald’s fry guy feel me up beside the Dumpster was all about filling a hole. Pun unintended, guttermind.

But I don’t need a father, Dex, so don’t think I was trying to steal yours. Just borrowing him for a bit, just chipping away a little for my own.

“I’ll probably get fired soon,” your dad told me once when I asked why he was around so much during the day. Not like the movie theater does such big business in the afternoon, and not like managing the place qualified as actual work, but still. “Though if you want to know a secret—”

“Always.”

He leaned in, and the whisper floated on a trail of smoke. “I’m thinking I might quit.”

He dreamed big: inventions he didn’t know how to build and franchises he didn’t have the cash to open, dreams of starting up his band again or winning the lottery or getting salad bar botulism and suing his way into a fortune. He’s the one who made you a dreamer, Dex, and maybe that’s why your mother never seemed to like you very much, either.

I told him he should go for it. That I would.

“Yeah, well, you don’t have a mortgage.” He sighed. “Or a wife.”

I was starting to think it wouldn’t be long before he didn’t have a wife, either.

“I shouldn’t have told you all that,” he said. “You can’t tell Dex. We good on that?”

It was insulting. Had I told you any of the other things you weren’t supposed to know? Like how he’d proposed to your mom because he thought she was pregnant, and when their bundle of despair turned out to be a stomach virus, he went through with it anyway. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he was trying his best. He’d gambled away your minuscule college fund on some stock scam before you were old enough to notice, and that was the last time your mom let him touch the checkbook. He liked the stillness of two A.M., when the house slept and he could imagine what it would be like if you were all gone. Sometimes he stayed awake till dawn, imagining himself into that emptier life, the songs he would write, the coke he would snort, the roar of his engine on the open road.

“They make me take these pills,” I told him, to prove myself: a secret for a secret.

“What?”

I didn’t tell him how it started, after my mother found me in the bathtub, the water pink. “You know how it is, you do one thing people don’t understand, and they freak out and drug you up like you’re some kind of crazy person having daily chats with Jesus and the man in the moon.”

“Were you?”

“I don’t fucking see things that aren’t fucking there,” I said.

“I meant, were you some kind of crazy person?”

Then I had to smile. “You’re not supposed to say crazy. It’s offensive.”

He held up his hands, like excuuuuuuuse me. “So sorry. Were you nuts?”

“Wouldn’t you go a little fucking nuts if everyone you knew was calling you crazy?”

It must have been lonely for him in that house, without anyone who knew how to make him laugh.

“So they put me on these pills,” I said. “One a day to keep the little dark uglies away.”

“Do they help?”

I shrugged. They didn’t stop the nightmares. They didn’t make it any easier to breathe when I thought about the woods.

“Dex doesn’t know,” I said.

He slipped a finger across his lips, then X-ed it over his heart. “Hope to die,” he said.

“You’re not going to. . You won’t try to keep me away from Dex, now that you know I’m totally fucked-up?”

“I think maybe it’s good for Dex to be around some fucked-up people,” he said.

No one had ever said I’d be good for someone. “You really think that?”

He sucked down the last drops of whiskey. “I have to, don’t I?”

I reached out.

I took his hand.

For a few seconds, he let me.

“Lacey,” he said.

“Jimmy,” I said.

He let go.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“I did it,” I said.

It’s just something dads do, right? They hold your hand. They hug you and let you lean against their chest and breathe in their dad smell and tickle your nose against the dad hairs poking out from the hole in their ratty dad shirt. There’s nothing fucked-up about wanting that.

SO THERE I WAS, THAT last night, everything I loved gone to ash in the backyard, the Bastard praying for my immortal soul, and when I got the hell out of there and came to find you, there was no you there to find. You’d left without me, and the only one home was your father, beered up and dreaming in the still of the night.

He came out to the car, wanted to know what I was doing there, where you were if you weren’t with me, and that’s how I discovered that you didn’t sneak out; you just asked permission. Good girl to the bitter end. He was the one who’d broken the rules.

I would have left then — come for you — but he said, “You okay, Blondie?” and he looked so worried, so dad-like, that I couldn’t lie.

We sat on the curb.

“Tell me,” he said, and said again, and I couldn’t, because I don’t believe in breaking the fucking dam.

I wouldn’t have told you, either, probably, but only because if I’d told you about the Bastard, how I felt like Kurt was dead, like I was dead, hollow inside and just fucking done, there would have been a scene and you would have fallen apart; I would have had to be the tough one, all It’s okay, don’t cry, squeeze my hand as much as it hurts, and you would have been the one to feel better.

I’m not blaming you, Dex — you are what you are.

You are not the strong one. So I have to be.

“I can’t go back there,” I said.

“Home? What happened? You want me to call someone?”

“God, no! Maybe — maybe I can just live here with Dex.” I laughed, like it was a joke. He looked like I’d asked him to fuck me.

“Kidding,” I said.

“Let’s call your mom,” he said. “We’ll talk it all through. Figure it out.”

“No! Please.”

“Okay. .” Maybe if we hadn’t been sitting out on the street, in front of everyone, he would have rubbed my back, like dads do. “Let’s go inside, then. I’ll call Julia. She’ll know what to do.”

“Your wife? The one who hates me?”

“She doesn’t—”

“Dex is forbidden to see me. Or did you forget?”

“She’s upset,” he said. “She’ll cool off.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure she’ll be real cool when she finds out her husband’s been palling around with the town slut.”

“Don’t call yourself that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Lacey—”

“Face it, your wife hates me. And that’s before she even knows about this.”

“This what?”

“This.” Like I was going to spell it out.

“Lacey.”

“Jimmy.” I said his name the same way he said mine, heavy and patronizing.

“Lacey, what, exactly, do you think is going on here?”

I snorted.

“This”—he wagged a finger back and forth between us: me, him, me—“is not a secret. Dex’s mother is the one who thought you might need—”

“What? A new daddy? A good fuck?”

He cleared his throat. “Someone to talk to.”

I was on my feet then. Fuck him fuck them fuck you fuck middle-aged middle-class self-satisfied judgmental oh-so-proud of their charity to the less-fortunate fuckfaces.

“So she put you up to it? What, did she bribe you? How many blow jobs is an hour with me worth?”

“Whoa. Blondie. Sit down. Chill.”

Like he could just choose when to be a responsible grown-up. Like he cared about anything but making sure the neighbors didn’t hear. When I didn’t sit down like a good little dog, he stood up, but he couldn’t look me in the eye, not now that he’d admitted it — that I was some kind of chore for him, a way to get out of cleaning the gutters.

“I guess this is good-bye, Jimmy,” I said.

“Look, I’m obviously not handling this very well, but if you’d just come inside—”

“I can say good-bye right out here, no problem,” I said, and when I opened my arms and he came in for the hug, I put my hands on his shoulders, rose on my tiptoes, tilted my head, and kissed him.

I don’t care that he pushed me away, hard, or that he didn’t say anything after that, just shook his head and went back into the house and locked the door between us, that when he finally saw the real me he ran away. I don’t give a shit about any of it, but you might, because before he did all that? Before he remembered who he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do? He kissed me back.

I CAME TO FIND YOU.

I came to find you and take you away, because I couldn’t go home again, and after I’d done what I’d done, I couldn’t very well let you go home again, either.

I couldn’t go without you.

That was always the plan, that we would go, and we would go together. We were supposed to be two parts of the same whole. Conjoined twins without the freak factor, one mind and one soul.

I would have told you everything. Once we were safe on our way, the past gnashing its teeth at our backs. Once we’d driven far enough to hit tomorrow, I would have told you my story, because I would know you’d chosen me, you’d chosen us, and you could be trusted with the truth.

Maybe I shouldn’t have left you there. Definitely I shouldn’t have left you there alone, in enemy territory, all boozed up and no place to go, thinking you could hold your liquor when all along it’s been me holding you up, holding you back, holding your hair and mopping your puke and letting you believe you could handle things on your own. Maybe I shouldn’t have left you. But you shouldn’t have asked me to.

GIRL MEETS GIRL, GIRL LOVES girl, girl saves girl. This is the story of us, Dex. The only story that matters.

The story of us: That night at Beast, before you went all to liquored-up shit, when we let ourselves float on the arms of the crowd, surfing the love of strangers. Love pulsing with the beat, a wave that lifts you up no matter who you are. The ocean doesn’t care. The ocean only wants to slap the shore and then carry you back to the deep.

The story of us: You need me to turn you wild. And I need you. I need you to be my conscience, Dex, just like you need me to be your id. We don’t work apart.

Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousnesses will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song, Come down come away with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel’s, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other.

You always tell me there was no before Lacey, that you were only you once you met me. Now I’m telling you: After Dex, there is no more Lacey. No more Lacey and no more Dex. Only Dex-and-Lacey, only and always. You should have had more faith; you should have known I’d find my way back to you.

I will always come back for you.