Girls on Fire

DEX, Paper Cuts

LACEY WAS GONE.

Lacey was gone and I was alone.

Lacey would never have left without me, but Lacey had left without me. Left me alone with the things I’d done. The things done to me, or not done to me. Swallowed by the black hole of memory.

I had fragments to piece together: The ink on my skin. The whispers. Slivers of the night — bodies pressed together, music, voices — all in a broken filmstrip. That must have been the worst of it, I told myself. If there’d been worse, my body would remember, would ache or bleed. The worst left a stain, so the worst must not have been.

The worst thing that could happen, I thought, and never gave it a name.

The girl on the other side of the night, the girl I was now: The girl who’d torn off her shirt and danced on a table. The girl who’d grabbed bulges through jeans and moaned filthy things, who said dick and pussy and lick my cunt.

It was a wonder, that I could do those things. There was a box in the basement where we kept stray jigsaw pieces, all of them parts of different pictures, none of their edges lining up. That was me. A Picasso person. The wrong parts in the wrong places. Lacey would have known how to make them fit. Lacey had named me: This is who you are, this is who you will be.

She would have known, but she was gone.

I WENT TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, because going to school on Monday was a thing I’d always done.

I didn’t go back.

As long as the homework got done, no one objected to me spending the final three weeks of the semester in my room. No one wanted to look at me.

Everyone wanted to look at me.

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

Lacey said it mattered, how you chose to do it, and now I understood that, too: why you might choose the bullet and the gun, choose ugliness and hurt instead of slipping away sweetly into the black. Some pain dictated violence, bloodshed. Oblivion required obliterating not just the pain but its source. Justice necessitated leaving behind a mess. A scream of blood and bone and rage.

It scared me, how much I understood.

IF I HAD LET LACEY set the house on fire. If I had watched it burn. Sometimes I dreamed of the flames and woke up with the smell of charred flesh, and sometimes I woke up smiling.

I tried to dream of Lacey, dream myself into our life in Seattle, but I couldn’t get there. Seattle was a ghost, and Lacey was like something conjured from one of my books. If it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been at the party; if it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been so angry and so drunk; if it weren’t for Lacey, I would have been safe.

I hated her. I loved her. I wished she’d never come back, and I wished she would. That was how I lived, after: not one thing and not the other. Canceling myself out.

I STAYED IN MY ROOM. SAFE territory. My room: fifteen feet wide, thirteen feet short, beige from floor to ceiling, with matted knots in the carpet from where our cat had puked her life away. A twin bed with Strawberry Shortcake sheets, because, according to my mother, sheets were expensive and grown-up was a matter of opinion. Shuttered windows that let through slats of light in the early afternoon and a rusty full-length mirror papered with remnants of Lacey: wrinkled postcards from Paris and California and Istanbul written by people long dead and rescued from yard sale bins; deep thoughts courtesy of deep thinkers, inscribed by Lacey in stern black marker; for Lacey’s sake, a cutout of Kurt, his granny cardigan matching his eyes; at the center of it all, a Dex-and-Lacey photo collage that captured none of the important moments, because for those we were always alone, no one to hold the camera. A particleboard bureau stickered with glow-in-the-dark stars that three years of scraping couldn’t clear away. Stacks of books pressed up against beige wallpaper, spines stretching to the ceiling, every book an adventure that meant climbing or toppling or ever so gently working one out of the middle of a stack, Jenga for giants. There was a card table desk in the corner, stacked neatly with the year’s final papers (failures) and report card (“disappointing”), and buried beneath them, for some future scrapbook of shame, two copies of the local paper — the edition with the letter to the editor telling the story of the wild girl passed out in the ruins of an abandoned party, and the weekend edition with the editorial, with its anonymous but all-knowing first person plural: We believe the girls in this town are up to no good, we believe modern music and television and drugs and sex and atheism are rotting our youth, we believe this girl is as much to blame as her toxic culture and her lax parents, we can’t blame her but we can’t afford to excuse her, so it follows that we must use her as a warning, lest we lose another of our brightest youth, and we the people of Battle Creek, the parents and teachers and churchgoers and goodhearted folk, we must do better.

I CALLED HER LINE IN THE middle of the night, after my parents were asleep. Every night. All night, sometimes, just to hear it ring. No one ever answered.

No, her mother finally said, she didn’t know where Lacey went. No, I shouldn’t call back.

MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY ALL the time. Not at me, she said. Or not just at me.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” my father said, standing in the doorway of my room a few days after — and maybe not, but he’d never stood like that before, like a trainer at the mouth of a cage, waiting for something wild to make its move. “You’ll always be a good girl. Maybe without Lacey around. . things will settle.”

Without Lacey, I was incapable of wildness, that’s what he was telling me. When I had Lacey, he had a little piece of her, too, could love me more for the things she saw in me. Now that she was gone, he expected I would revert to form. I would be the good girl, his good girl, boring but safe. He was supposed to want that.

I READ.

Lacey had always discouraged reading that was, as she put it, beneath us. We should spend our time on mind-expanding pursuits, she said. Our mission, and we were obligated to accept it, was an investigation into the nature of things. The fundamentals. Together we paged through Nietzsche and Kant, pretending to understand. We read Beckett aloud and waited for Godot. Lacey memorized the first six stanzas of “Howl” and shouted it over our lake, casting her voice into the wind. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, she would scream, and then tell me that Allen Ginsberg was the oldest man she would be willing to fuck. I memorized the opening and closing lines of “The Hollow Men” for her, and I whispered it to myself when the dark closed in.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

It sounded like a promise.

Without Lacey, I slid backward. I tessered with Meg Murry; I crept through the wardrobe and nuzzled my face into Aslan’s fur. I swept the dust and warmed the fires in Howl’s moving castle; I turned half invisible with half magic, drank tea with the Mad Hatter, battled Captain Hook, even, occasionally, hugged the Velveteen Rabbit back to life. I was a stranger in a strange land. I was an orphan, abandoned and found and saved, until I closed the book, and was lost all over again.

I read, and I wrote.

Dear Lacey, I wrote, sometimes, in letters I hid in an old Sears sweater box, just in case. In my terrible handwriting, with smearing ink, unstained by unfallen tears, I’m sorry, I wrote. I should have known better.

Please come home.

THE LAST SUNDAY IN JULY, I went outside. Just a ride around the block, on the bike my father had quietly collected from the postparty wreckage. The sun felt good. The air smelled good, like grass and summer. The wind sounded good, that thunder you could hear only when you were in motion. When I was a kid, bike riding was an adventure, bad guys on my tail and the wind rushing through a mountain pass, passageway to enchantment. The bike itself was magic back then, the only thing other than a book that could carry me away. But that was kid logic, the kind that ignored the simple physics of vectors. It didn’t matter how fast I pedaled if I was turning in circles. The bike always carried me home.

My father was smoking on the porch steps; he’d started in June, after. The cigarettes made the house smell like a stranger.

I dumped the bike on the lawn, and he stubbed the butt into the cement stair.

“Hannah,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just. . It’s good to see you out.”

“Don’t get used to it.” I said it with my best take-no-shit Lacey front.

He lit up another cigarette. Chain-smoking now. Home in the middle of the day. Probably only a matter of time before he got fired again, or maybe he already had and was afraid to admit it. That used to be the kind of secret we kept. It had seemed romantic, the Don Quixote of it all, his conviction that the present was just prologue to some star-spangled future, but these days he only seemed pathetic. Lacey would have said I was starting to sound like my mother.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I don’t think she’s coming back. Lacey. And I don’t want you thinking it’s about you, that she left.”

Lacey was gone, and he was still trying to claim a piece of her.

“Something happened at her house,” he said. When I asked what made him think that, he admitted — and it had the timbre of admission—“She came here, that night. Before she left.”

Everything went still.

“What did you say to her?

“She needed someone to talk to,” he said. “We talked sometimes.”

What the fuck, the old Dex, the Dex who had Lacey, would have said. What the fuck are you talking about, what the fuck is wrong with you, what the fuck have you done?

She is mine, that Dex would have said, and believed it.

“Your friend had some problems,” he said.

“Everyone has problems.”

“You didn’t know everything about her, kid.”

“What did you say to her?” I asked again. “What did you say that made her leave?”

“All I know is, something happened at home and it upset her. She didn’t want to go back there.”

“But you made her.” My voice was steady, my face blank; he couldn’t have known what he was doing. What was burning away between us.

“No—”

“You told her not to?”

“No. .”

“So what did you say?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop her. A person has to want to be helped.”

“She didn’t belong to you.” There are things that shouldn’t have to be said.

“She didn’t belong to you, either, kid. But I know what she meant to you. I would never have made her go.”

“But you’re glad she’s gone.”

He shook his head. “She was good for you,” he said, then, sounding less certain, “wasn’t she?”

I wondered what he thought he knew. Who he thought I’d been before Lacey, and who he thought I’d become in her wake. Who he needed me to be: Daddy’s girl, sassy but not skanky, flirting with boys but never fucking them, breaking curfew, breaking laws, breaking everything but my precious hymen, trying to be more like Lacey and less like Lacey at the same time, rebelling, not against him but with him, giving the finger to the Man and to my mother but coming home in time to curl up on the couch and watch Jeopardy! I saw, then, what I hadn’t seen before, that I wasn’t Hannah or Dex for him; I was wholly Jimmy Dexter’s daughter, reflection of whatever he needed himself to be.

“We could go to the movies sometime, if you want. Just you and me, kid, like we used to?”

He wasn’t going to tell me what he’d said to her. Believe what you want, people always say. As if it’s that easy, as if belief and want could dovetail so effortlessly. As if I didn’t want to believe that my father loved me and my parents loved each other, that Lacey was coming home, that I would stop burning with humiliation every time I left the house, that life was fair, tomorrow was another day, Nikki Drummond would burn in hell. Why stop there? I wanted to believe in time travel and ESP and aliens and God, in a world that was more magical than it seemed and a future that beelined out of Battle Creek and into the event horizon. Lacey said believing was the hard part. If you could do that, everything else would follow,

“You’ll give yourself lung cancer,” I told my father, and stepped over him to get to the door.

LACEY HAD A THEORY THAT people have a finite capacity for the enjoyment of their favorite things. Songs, movies, books, food: We’re hardwired for specific quantities of pleasure, and once the amount is exceeded, good goes bad. The kicker is, there’s no warning when you’re approaching the limit; the dopamine just flips off like a switch, and there’s one more book for the fire.

Very rarely, Lacey said, you find something for which your brain has infinite capacity, and that, Lacey said, is the thing we call love.

I no longer believed in that. But I did believe in overdoses and disappointment, and I wasn’t about to risk either on my favorite books. The house wasn’t a safe space anymore — there were no safe spaces anymore — and that made it easier to leave. When I did, I only ever went to the library. I felt twelve again, fresh out of the kids’ section, stroking the spines in the grown-up stacks as if I could osmose their words through the bindings. I felt almost normal again.

“God loves you all,” promised the woman with the stack of pamphlets who’d planted herself just outside the front door. “But He cannot protect you if you willingly put yourselves in the path of temptation.” It was beak-faced Barbara Fuller, who wore her clothes like a hanger, who’d snubbed my mother more than once at a PTA bake sale, suggesting not so subtly that someone who settled for store-bought was no more deserving of the title mother than Entenmann’s donuts were of the title food. Barbara Fuller was the type who wrote letters to the editor about loose morals and garish Christmas lights, and she had a voracious hunger for the failures of others. That day, she didn’t seem to care that her audience consisted of a handful of bored retirees and one abashed bald guy who looked like he would gnaw his own arm off if his wife — Barbara Fuller’s only avid listener — didn’t let go.

“Satanists slaughter fifty thousand children each year.”

The bald guy picked something out of his nose.

“This is a national emergency. And don’t fool yourselves — there is an active satanic cult operating in this town.” She raised her voice. “Your teenagers are at risk.”

It was a joke, this woman preaching to us about risk — pretending she knew who was in danger, and of what.

I walked quickly, head down, focusing on the slap of my flip-flops against pavement, the gravel beneath some old lady’s Chevrolet, the crying cicadas, the pulse of blood flushing my cheeks, the jangle of the bike lock as I fumbled with the key.

“They prey on the vulnerable and confused,” she screeched, and I suspected she wasn’t just trying to penetrate the old folks’ hearing aids. I would not look up to catch her looking at me. “They prey on the fallen.”

SUMMER STRETCHED ON. OUR HOUSE whirred day and night with the apologetic wheezing of fans. They stirred hot air; we endured. More than once I read through Barbara Fuller’s pamphlet about satanism, a copy of which I’d liberated from the trash. Written by one Isabelle F. Ford, PhD, and jointly published by Parents Against Satanic Teachings and the Cult Crime Research Institution, it suggested that an underground network of tens of thousands of satanists was diligently pursuing a program of grave robbing and child sacrifice.

If only, I thought, because imagine: If there were such a cabal, veins of dark power threading through Battle Creek. If there were others like me, a coven of girls whose secret selves throbbed with pain, who needed blood to feed their hearts of darkness. I’d always longed for a shadow world, ever since I was a kid, searching out garden sprites and bridge trolls, wishing myself into a faerie changeling waiting for the summons home. Now, a new fantasy: spindly arms carving strange symbols in the night, robed silhouettes against the full moon, a bloody altar and a cloud of incense, ritual and invocation, the promise of power. We laughed, Lacey had told me; we hefted an axe in a moonlit field, loomed over something large and vulnerable, and there was joy in power, joy in drawing blood, slashing and slicing and destroying. When I let myself remember, I could almost believe it, that there was, that we did. If only the Barbara Fullers of the world were right and all I had to do was summon the forces of darkness and let them consume me.

I threw the pamphlet back in the trash. One more empty promise.

Lacey never called.

No one called.

Until one night — as if the forces of darkness had materialized after all, in response to my silent request — my mother shouted upstairs to tell me I had a call. . from Nikki Drummond. When I wouldn’t come to the phone, Nikki called again the next night, and the night after.

On the fourth day, she came to the house.

HERE WAS NIKKI DRUMMOND, PERCHED prettily on the blue velour couch in my living room, sitting in a spot where I’d peed as a baby, more than once. She was dressed for summer in Battle Creek, which meant straddling the narrow line between socially acceptable and buck naked, somehow making a strapped cotton shell and sweaty cutoffs look both girl-next-door sexy and living-room-small-talk appropriate. Kid-tested, mother-approved. I was dressed nearly the same, but looked like a homeless person.

“So,” Nikki said.

Lacey had taught me that the best way to unnerve people was to let them marinate in silence. I watched her, waiting, and she watched me, waiting. I broke first.

“What do you want?”

“Are you mad at me or something?”

“Seriously?” It was strange to talk to someone like everything was the same as it had been, like only I was different.

“Come on, what did I ever do to you, Hannah?”

“For one, you ratted me out to my fucking mother.” It felt like forever ago; it felt laughably small, considering. But it was easiest to say out loud.

“That was for your own good.” Her voice, sweet as syrup. Sticky. “She got you to break the law, Hannah. Come on, what kind of friend is that?”

“Dex.”

“What?”

“My name is Dex.”

She laughed. I’d never actually punched anyone — growing up an only child had deprived me of the wrestling and black eyes that came with siblings — but I could imagine it, the bite of nails against my palm, the crunch of knuckles against cartilage, the spatter of blood, her wide-eyed surprise, her pain, her awe. That I had it in me to break something. That she could be broken.

She must have seen it, because she swallowed the giggle.

“Sorry. Dex.”

“Please go.”

“Not yet. I came by to see if you were doing okay, and you’re not even giving me a chance to ask.”

“Lacey’s gone,” I said. It was the first time I’d said it out loud. “So you don’t have to worry about me anymore. No more bad influence.”

“God, Hannah, I don’t give a shit about Lacey, I’m talking about you. How are you? After. . you know?”

I did know, and I didn’t. Maybe that was why I’d let Nikki Drummond sit on my couch and scuff her flip-flops into my rug. So she could tell me.

“Fine,” I said.

“Yeah, so fine you’ve been playing hermit all summer. You look like an albino.”

I stood up. “You came to the circus, you’ve seen the freak. Now you can go.”

Nikki sighed. “Look, Hannah—”

“Dex.”

“Yeah. Whatever. It was my party, sort of. Okay? So I feel responsible for how it ended up. For you.” She said it like she was expecting credit.

“How it ended up,” I said, slowly. Lacey would say: Show no fear. Lacey would say: She should be afraid. “With me dumped out back like garbage?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Nikki said. “I left way before then, don’t you remember?”

I shrugged.

She leaned forward. “Wait, you don’t remember? Oh my God, you totally blacked out!”

What I did remember: How it felt, to want to touch, to be touched. The heat and prickle of it, the fire.

“It must be killing you,” Nikki said. “Not knowing.”

I said nothing.

“You want my advice?” She said it like she wanted to help, and it was all upside down, Lacey leaving me, Nikki refusing to go away. “Decide nothing happened. Decide you’re fine, and you will be.”

Believing was the hard part, Lacey always said.

“I told you. I am fine.”

“Any of us could have gotten snagged by that rent-a-cop,” Nikki said. “Don’t think we don’t know that. You have more friends than you realize.”

“I have enough friends.”

She snorted. “Come to my place this weekend. My mom’s throwing some god-awful mother-daughter pool party, it’ll be a nightmare. You’ll love it.”

“I would rather jab a hot knife in my eye.”

“Too bad for you, then, because your mom already said yes.”

LACEY, Endless, Nameless

I BLAME JESUS. AND BEFORE YOU get all uptight about sacrilege, remember that it would be just as easy to blame you.

I should have left without you. I could have: I had the car. Shame on me for giving you more time, for assuming the Bastard would calm himself down. For going home.

Call it a failure of the imagination.

HORIZONS. THAT’S WHAT THE SHITHOLE was called. As in Expand your. As in Learn to see Christ on the. As in Unless you want to be a brainwashed Jesus-freak head case, better run for the.

They dumped me off just inside the barbed wire gate, and I knew exactly what kind of place it was once I saw the pony-tailed blonde with the lobotomized smile flanked by two thugs just waiting for a chance to test out their Tasers. I let Thing One and Thing Two frog-march me in to see the man in charge — also blond; they were all fucking blond. He told me to call him Shawn. The people at Horizons said Shawn the way Shawn said Jesus. This puny, pasty gym-teacher wannabe with the cross-shaped whistle around his neck and the gigantic mahogany desk that said more than he intended about the size of his dick, this was the only guy with the power to send me back to you.

“Welcome to your safe haven,” he said, and I wondered how many of the girls he’d fucked, hoping it was a lot, because it’s the kind of guy who’s in it for other reasons that you really have to worry about.

He issued me a Horizons handbook and my very own teen Bible, complete with a couple neutered blonds frolicking on the cover, bone-white horse teeth testifying to their oneness with the Lord. “We’ve made a space for you in bunk six, Ecclesiastes. Chastity will take you over there. I’m sure you have many questions—”

“Starting with, are you fucking kidding me that her name is Chastity?” I had more questions — did he really believe that a few coils of barbed wire could keep out the devil, how much had the Bastard paid for the privilege of dumping me in this shithole, how long would it be before I could go home — but Shawn’s game-show-host grin had gone full jack-o’-lantern.

“—but as you’ll learn from your handbook, you haven’t yet earned the privilege of asking questions.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“This is a hard transition process, I know. So I’ll give you a pass on the language. But my leniency ends now.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” I said.

He jerked his head at She-Who-Would-Not-Be-Penetrated. “One demerit,” he said, shaking his head in what I eventually came to recognize as Shawn’s Special Recipe Sorrow, because it hurt him ever so much to hurt us.

One demerit meant one chore, of my counselor’s choosing, and my counselor, a mini-Mussolini named Heather, never met a toilet she didn’t think needed a good toothbrush-scrub. So that’s how I spent my first morning at Horizons: on my knees, bent over the bowl, swallowing bile because I was pretty sure that if I threw up I’d have to clean that, too. As I scrubbed, she walked me through my dos and don’ts: Do love Jesus, do follow the rules, don’t think for yourself, don’t imagine your life is your own, don’t fuck up or you’ll be sorry.

For each day of not fucking up, you earned a privilege, and privileges were everything. You needed them to speak to other campers, to leave your cabin without supervision, to send letters, to spend your free time outside rather than sitting at your desk reading the Bible, to go to the bathroom without supervision—“and I don’t want to waste any more time than I have to watching you pee,” Heather said, “so get it together.” No amount of privileges would get you five minutes of any music but Christian rock. You earned privileges by memorizing Bible passages, making your bed with hospital corners, sucking up to your counselor, publicly confessing your sins and taking Jesus into your heart, writing antiabortion letters to your local congressman, and tattling on your fellow campers when they momentarily forgot themselves and started acting like human beings rather than zombies. We lived in bunkhouses named for the books of the Bible, a dozen of us in Ecclesiastes: twelve little girls in two straight lines, call it Madeline and the Jesus Freaks.

Mornings were for Bible study, afternoons were for exercise, then the sing-alongs and sharing sessions that comprised mandatory fun. Meals were for watching your back and learning your place. Twelve girls, and I didn’t need to learn their names or their stories because I didn’t intend to be one of them for long. It was enough to know that the Screamer jerked us all awake at three every morning; that the Sodomite had been caught in flagrante with her soccer team captain; that the Skank was a sex addict, or at least had a diary-reading mother who thought so; that the Virgin had remained so — if only by her own technical definition — by restricting herself to copious amounts of anal sex; that Saint Ann had shipped herself off to Horizons voluntarily, in search of some sinners to save.

The Bastard would have liked the regimented schedule, the drill-sergeant counselors whipping us into shape, a boot camp for the army of God; he would have loved the fact that any trespass was met with flamboyant, Old Testament — style consequences. This wasn’t hippie worship, the guitar-playing, turn-the-other-cheek kind of lovefest he detested, and it wasn’t the bingo-playing, potlucking, pamphleteering morality play that enraged him in Battle Creek. This was a camp created as if in his own image, complete with brimstone and fire and daily viewings of The 70 °Club. All I had to do, they told me, was learn respect for authority and for the Lord, and they would send me home.

I tried.

I dedicated my life to Christ. I memorized Bible passages. I sang that my God was an awesome god and learned the hand motions to prove it. When we stood in a circle for Squeeze Prayer, I said my line, “I pray that the Lord helps me fight off the devil and his temptations,” then squeezed Skank’s hand and pretended to listen while she told her own lie. I dedicated myself to craft projects, because Jesus was a carpenter and handiwork was noble work; I sawed wood and carved soap, and when we practiced tying knots I did my best not to dream of a noose. I confessed to lascivious thoughts and agreed with Heather that I’d squandered my life. I racked up two weeks’ worth of privileges, and I didn’t let myself think of Battle Creek or of you until I was safe in bed, because that was my reward for making it through each day — that and Kurt, who sang me to sleep. Two weeks, and I scored enough privileges to write two letters. One to the Bastard, promising to be good if he’d let me come home. The other to you.

Dear Dex, I wrote, then stopped.

Dear Dex, I’ve given up. Dear Dex, Everything I told you about myself was a lie. Dear Dex, Everything I do is so I can come home to you, but I don’t deserve you if I come home like this.

No. I needed to be your Lacey. Strong. So the next morning, during the dawn service, I stood up in my pew and cursed Jesus Christ my Lord for this season in hell, and our whole bunk got rewarded with an afternoon scrubbing shit out of the toilet bowls. The next day I gave Shawn the finger, and Heather tasked us with mucking out the cow stalls, to remind us what it meant to be befouled by sin. I thought of you, Dex, and I thought of Kurt, and knew I would roll in my own shit before living their vision of salvation.

The next time I fucked up, they tried something new.

THERE’S A HIDDEN TRACK ON Nevermind. You’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. First “Something in the Way” fades out, with a final soft crash of cymbals and Kurt’s dying hum and then nothing.

Nothing for thirteen minutes and fifty-one seconds. What comes next is only for us, the ones who care enough to endure the silence. First the drumbeat, thrumming into the too-quiet like jungle cannibals. Then the lion roars: Kurt’s voice, pure and gleaming; Kurt’s voice like a knife scything the sky. It’s the raging of a man not going gentle into that good night. The silence is part of it, those thirteen minutes of agony, and Kurt’s in it with you, muzzled and frenzied as the seconds tick by and the pressure mounts and finally, when he can’t bear it any more than you can, he tears off the muzzle and goes fucking nuts. Thirteen minutes, fifty-one seconds. It doesn’t seem like it would be that long. But time stretches.

Remember what we read about black holes, Dex? How from the outside, from a safe distance away, when you watch someone fall into a black hole, they fall slower and slower, until they seem to freeze at the event horizon? How they’ll stay there forever, suspended over the dark, the future always just out of reach?

It’s a trick. If you’re the one falling, time keeps right on going. You sail past the event horizon; you get sucked into the black. And no one on the outside will ever know.

That’s how it was, in the dark place. No boundary between yourself and the dark, past and future, something and nothing. You could scream all you wanted, and the dark would swallow it whole. In the dark place, silence was the same as noise.

IN PRISON THEY CALL IT the hole, at least if you want to believe prison movies, and if you can’t believe the movies, then half of what I know about the world is bullshit. But in prison movies, the hole is just some cell like all the others. At Horizons, it’s a fucking hole in the ground.

In the dark place, you tell yourself, This time I will hold on. This time you’ll keep it together, remember that time passes and there are no monsters hiding in the dark. When the slab creaks open each day and the food drops down, you’ll fling it back in their faces, along with fistfuls of your own shit. When they lower the rope and offer to lift you back into the sun, if only you’ll apologize and say thank you, you’ll laugh and tell them to come back later, you were in the middle of a nap. This time the dark place will be your gift, your vacation from the torments of daily life. This time will be your time.

Bullshit.

The dark place is always the same.

First it’s boring. Then it’s lonely. Then the fear washes in, and when that tide ebbs, there’s nothing left. Silence fills with all the thoughts you spend your daylight life trying not to think. The bad things you’ve done. The blue of the sky. The bodies rotting away in coffins, the maggots feasting on skeletal remains. What happened to the body when you left it behind, and whether now is your time to return. Your food is damp with tears. It tastes like shit and piss, because that’s all you can smell, that and your rotting sweat and shame. The air is hot and stale, thick with your own breath. When the darkness breaks and a voice cracks the silence, you tell them whatever they want to hear.

No, not you. That’s cheating. I don’t know what you would do, Dex. This is what I did.

“I accept Jesus into my heart.”

“I renounce Satan.”

“I have sinned and I will sin no more.”

I always gave in — and that’s something I’ll never not know about myself — but at least I held out longer than most. It was because of Kurt. He was down there with me. Down there is where he lives. Singing was better than screaming. I sang with him; I remembered you. I lived for you, down in that dark place, and I survived knowing you were somewhere up in the light, living for me.

DEX, About a Girl

YOU’RE GOING,” MY MOTHER SAID. “We both are.”

I felt ancient, but when it came to my mother, apparently I’d never be too old for because I said so. We went. A mother-daughter pool party, awkward purgatory of small talk and cellulite that only a Drummond could dream up.

“It was lovely of them to think of us.” My mother navigated our beat-up Olds into a narrow slot between a Mazda and an Audi, tapping the bumpers of each of them once, as if for luck. Nikki’s house couldn’t have been more than a five-minute drive from mine, but it felt like we’d passed through a portal — or maybe through a TV screen, because the sidewalk maples, the colonnade-lined porches, the impeccably pruned rectangles of green all seemed too perfect to be anything but a set. Tragedy or farce, that was the only question. “And it’ll be lovely for you to spend some time with your friends.”

Okay, farce.

“How many times do I have to tell you—”

“All right. Girls who could be your friends. If you would only give them the opportunity.”

How was it, I wondered, that the mere act of growing older precipitated radical memory loss? Here was my mother, naively expecting not only that a coven of PTA moms who’d snubbed her for a decade would spontaneously open their arms to her unmanicured charm, but also that their daughters would follow suit.

“You really want me to go to a party? After what happened the last time.” It was a mark of my desperation that I was willing to come so close to explicitly referencing it. “Aren’t you afraid of what I’ll do?”

For someone with no sense of humor, my mother had an expert wry smile. “Why do you think I came as your chaperone?”

It should have been worth something she was willing to be seen in public with me — but then she was my mother, so that was worth about as much as her telling me I was pretty.

“You can’t control what people think of you,” she said. “You can only do your best to prove them wrong.”

“Guilty until proven innocent? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

“Life isn’t LA Law, dear.” She turned off the car. We were actually doing this.

“Lacey’s gone,” I said, the last-ditch effort worth the pain of saying the words out loud. “No more bad influence. No need to sucker me into making new friends.”

She put her hand over mine — then pulled away before I could. “You know, Hannah, my issue with Lacey was never Lacey. Not entirely.”

“Is that one of those Zen things that make no sense?”

“I know how it feels,” she said. “To invest everything you have in another person. But no one’s dreams are big enough to be worth giving up yours, Hannah. If you don’t figure that out before it’s too late, you can wake up inside a life you’d never have chosen for yourself.”

“I don’t know what any of that has to do with me.”

My mother did not talk like this, and she certainly didn’t talk like this with me. We weren’t equipped for it, either of us.

“You can’t dream someone else’s dreams forever, Hannah. And when you finally stop, it’s no good for anyone.” She clapped her hands together, plastic again with a Teflon smile, as if I’d simply imagined that, for a moment, she’d somehow melted into a real person. “Let’s get going. We wouldn’t want them thinking we’re rude.”

“Who cares what they think? They treat you like crap.” I didn’t say it to hurt her; it didn’t occur to me, then, that I could hurt her.

Framed in fake gilt on my mother’s bureau was a photo of the girl she’d once been, posing at a ballet recital with her younger sister, who, unlike my mother, was actually built to be a ballerina. The two of them were frozen midpirouette, my aunt’s form perfect and her smile beaming, my mother sullen and dumpy with a familiar thicket of frizz — her hair had gone limp after pregnancy, something else to blame me for. If this had been a movie, we would have bonded over our mutual ugly-duckness; of course, in the Hollywood version, my mother would have blossomed into an intimidating swan rather than simply expanding into a slightly taller, substantially thicker duck, one who sometimes didn’t seem to like me very much. For which I couldn’t blame her: She probably didn’t enjoy the daily reminder of her yesterday any more than I wanted the glimpse into my tomorrow.

She climbed out of the car and smoothed down her bathing suit cover-up, a blue terry cloth drape I was sure looked nothing like anything the other mothers were wearing. “Just because you leave high school doesn’t mean high school leaves you.”

I had to laugh. “That may be the most depressing thing you’ve ever said to me.”

She laughed, too. “Then I suppose I’m doing my job.”

“Mother of the year.”

I could see it on her face, the moment she decided to press her luck and go for it, a mother-daughter moment. “It’s nice to see you smile, Hannah.”

“Tell me we can get back in the car and go home. I’ll smile like I’m in a toothpaste commercial.”

“Tempting,” she said, pausing just long enough for me to get my hopes up.

Then we went to the party.

BEDECKED IN FULL-ON RICH GUY leisurewear — Ralph Lauren khakis and a polo shirt — Nikki Drummond’s father opened the door and grunted us toward the pool deck. I crossed through the house head down, not wanting to spot some domestic artifact — an ancient finger painting on the fridge or a therapist’s appointment on the calendar — that might render Nikki human. We padded across fancy tiles, the kind with barely perceptible swirls that make you feel like you’re walking on water, and stopped short in the back doorway, a mother-daughter pair in matched contemplation of their dark fate.

Mothers wore artfully draped sarongs or Esprit tracksuits, nails manicured and hair dutifully bobbed into Hamill-esque mom cuts, like they’d sworn a sacred pact to go frumpy at forty; daughters frolicked in designer cutoffs, tan, coltish legs poking through artfully frayed denim. Pink or purple jellies squished on manicured feet; oversized T-shirts belted low or tied in a knot just above the belly button, except on those girls who — despite the absence of any Y chromosomes to impress — had bothered stripping down to bikinis. Nikki’s usual crowd was absent, replaced by scattered clutches of second-tiers dangling their feet in the pool or poking suspiciously at plastic Jell-O cups of shrimp cocktail.

If there’s a hell, it smells like suntan lotion and sweaty Benetton cotton, and tastes like warm Coke; it sounds like easy listening and urgent whispers; it feels like being X-rayed, radioactive stares penetrating baggy clothes to the naked flesh beneath. I could feel myself mutating; I was the hideous swamp monster come to crash the soiree, and the Lacey in me wanted to play the part, tear a swath of destruction, give them a reason to stare.

Instead, I drifted toward the closest thing to a safe harbor: Jenna Sterling, Conny Morazan, and Kelly Cho, who styled themselves so aggressively as the Three Musketeers that they’d dressed the part every Halloween since they’d met. They were a self-contained unit, occasionally glomming in lockstep onto creatures a little higher up the food chain but never breaking formation. Jenna, with her Barbie hair and chunky field hockey legs, had once cried when forced to partner with me on some fourth-grade math project — memorably demonstrating the concept of remainders. Able lieutenant Conny was an expert at completing Jenna’s sentences when Jenna found herself unable, which was often. And then there was Kelly, who’d appeared in second grade, still learning the English for recess and blackboard and weirdo, suffering the boys who pulled their eyes into slits and spoke in nonsense syllables they called Karate Kid Chinese even after she reminded them, yet again, that she was Korean. Somewhere along the way she’d lost the accent and the baby fat, and now was the only one of the three to consistently have a boyfriend, even if it was usually some youth group kid she’d picked up at church.

They hadn’t been at the foreclosure party; girls like these didn’t go to parties like those. Whatever they’d heard afterward, they hadn’t seen it happen.

I’d never quite mastered the art of joining a conversation in progress, so I stood there creeping on their huddle, waiting for one of them to acknowledge my existence.

“So where did she go, anyway?”

It took me a beat too long to realize the question was directed at me. “Who?”

“She probably has no clue,” Jenna said. “She’s like. .”

“Clueless,” Conny offered, and Jenna nodded her assent.

“So do you or don’t you?” Kelly said.

“What do you think?” I said, with a tone that suggested duh, of course I did.

Result: eagerness. “So? Where?”

“Juvie, right?” Jenna had a wholesome midwestern look I’d never trusted. She was the kind of girl who brought her field hockey stick to class and experimented with Body Shop perfume combinations until she found the one that made her smell most like apple pie.

Conny snorted. “Mental institution, more like.”

“New York City, that’s where they all go,” Kelly said.

“They who?” I asked.

“You know. .” Less confident now. “Girls like Lacey. Who. .”

“. . run away,” Conny supplied. “Like in Pretty Woman.”

“Pretty Woman is about LA.” Nikki had suddenly materialized by my shoulder in her witchy way. “And I highly doubt Lacey ran away to be a prostitute.” She hooked a finger around one of my belt loops and tugged me away from the Musketeers. “Hannah Dexter. You want to get out of here?”

It took me a moment to realize this was an invitation, not a command — or maybe that’s just a convenient excuse for why, instead of coming up with a clever retort or giving her the finger, I said yes.

I DON’T KNOW WHY MY MOTHER insists on this crap,” Nikki said, monologuing us through the woods. Complaints about finger food and her mother’s friends led to the laundry list of adventures for which all Nikki’s actual friends had abandoned her: tennis camp, arts camp, Jewish camp, Allie Cantor on a teen tour of the Grand Canyon, Kaitlyn Dyer shopping (and doubtless fucking) her way across the Continent, less Virginia Woolf, more Fergie. (It destabilized my world to hear Nikki Drummond reference Virginia Woolf.) She complained about the humidity and the gnat swarms, the creepy pool cleaner whose gaze always lingered one second too long, the hassle of shaving her bikini line, the tedium of reruns, the gall of her parents to refuse to pay for call-waiting on her personal line. She whined and sipped from an airplane bottle of something brown and illicit, and seemed not nearly as concerned as she should have been about what I might do to her in the woods.

The trees closed around us, dark and lush and whispering. The afternoon had taken on a fairy-tale inexorability: The witch told me where to go, and like a child lost in the woods, I followed. Until, finally, she stopped — walking and talking both, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the endless stream of complaint might indicate some jangling of nerves until she abruptly fell silent.

We’d paused at the edge of a clearing, its center occupied by a sagging structure, its walls crayoned with black hearts and bubbled tags, its windows jagged black holes. A few yards away, a rusting freight car tilted on bare axles twisted with weeds, like some ancient mechanical beast had crawled into the forest to die. It was no gingerbread house, but it still felt enchanted.

I knew about the old train station, of course. Everyone did. It had been abandoned since the seventies, and whatever cozy charm the architect had been aiming for with its sculpted iron railings and gabled roof was long lost to history and the encroaching woods. Somewhere in the darkness below the platform were broken and weedy tracks, and rumor had it that there were people living down there, storybook hobos who warmed themselves over trash fires and stabbed one another with iron nails. The station loomed large in Battle Creek childhoods, a landmark for bored and daring kids, easy initiation ritual for secret clubs: Brave the haunted station, return with a talisman, a sliver of glass or torn condom wrapper. Try not to get hepatitis. It was a place of possibility, the threat of shadows or even sentience, like the slouching station might be keeping counsel of its own. It was the kind of sacred place Lacey might have tried to make ours, if not for her thing about the woods.

A trench cut through the clearing, bent and broken track unspooling along its base like a canyon river, and Nikki settled onto its bank, dangling her feet over the edge. “This is where he died, you know.”

It didn’t exactly make the place feel less haunted.

“That’s what they say,” she added. “They didn’t want to make it public, that this was the place. In case freaks wanted to turn it into some kind of shrine. Or do some copycat thing. But they told me. Obviously.”

I didn’t know Craig at all, not really, except that I’d known him for sixteen years and knew plenty: that he could burp the alphabet, that he could fit four Legos up his nose, that he’d once cried when he fell off the seesaw and broke his arm. He was a fixture, like the condemned church on Walnut Street I walked past every day for years, never wondering what was inside, until the day it burned down. That was Craig’s absence, for me: a vacant lot where one shouldn’t have been.

Impossible not to imagine him sitting in the shadow of this abandoned husk, pondering the desiccation of the past, reading existential doom into the graffitied dictates: fuck ronda, suck my cock. Impossible not to imagine him bloody and still, rotting into the dirt.

It belonged to Nikki now, this place. He’d claimed it for her.

“Your boyfriend killing himself doesn’t automatically make you a good person,” I said, because it hurt to feel sorry for her.

She looked like she’d had that thought before. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Because you’d kind of think it would.” She offered me the bottle, but I waved it away. I knew what to do when the witch offered you a bite of her apple.

Nikki downed the rest in a single swallow, then fired the bottle into the trench. There was something immensely satisfying in its shatter. She swung her legs back and forth. Somewhere, birds sang. A mosquito lit on my knee, and Nikki slapped it away. She left behind a slick of sweat, which surprised me. The Nikki Drummonds of the world weren’t supposed to perspire.

“I don’t lie to people here,” she said. “So maybe you’ll believe me this time. I’m not the enemy. There is no enemy.”

“Why do you care so much if I believe you?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was weird, too.”

The witch builds her house out of candy to charm stupid children, I reminded myself.

“I can help you fix it, you know,” she said.

“Fix what?”

“Well, for one, your sullied reputation. For another. .” She flung her hands in my general direction, as if to suggest your essential Hannah Dexter — ness.

“What makes you think I need to be fixed?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“And why would you want to make me your project?”

“Maybe I’m bored.” She was looking at her feet, pointing and flexing them together, like we used to do in gymnastics at the Y. “Maybe I’m tired.”

“Of summer?”

“Of pretending not to be a bitch,” she said. “You’ve obviously already decided I am. It’s relaxing.”

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said, and maybe I was, because at her admission I felt a strange tingle of something adjacent to pride.

She shrugged again, which I took as a yes. “I don’t beg. Come to the mall with me tomorrow. Let the idiots see you not caring what they think. Let them see you with me. It’ll help.”

“Come to the mall with you? Are you high?”

“Marissa is cheating on Austin with Gary Peck. She lets him finger her in the chem lab after school.”

Marissa Mackie and Austin Schnitzler had been a couple since junior high and had been Craig and Nikki’s prime competition for every sweetheart-related yearbook superlative, not to mention my own personal Most Likely to Make You Vomit. Even money had them engaged within a few months of graduation, earlier if the condom broke. “How do you know?”

“Because people tell me things.”

“And why are you telling me?”

“So you’ll trust me.”

“I’ll trust you because you’re spreading gossip—”

“It’s not gossip if it’s true.”

“Okay, so your logic is, I’ll think you’re trustworthy because you’re sharing your best friend’s darkest secret with your worst enemy?”

“Number one, she’s not my best friend. Number two, she has much darker secrets. Number three, you’re seriously underestimating my pool of enemies.”

“God, you really are a bitch, aren’t you?”

Nikki stood. “I told you, I don’t beg. Take it or leave it, your call.”

“You’re absolute crap at being nice, you know that?”

There was something different about her laugh, here, something light and sunny, and it felt good.

“You’ll have to pick me up. I don’t have a license.”

“We’ll take care of that, too.” This time her laugh was more a cackle. “I do love a project.”

I felt that tug of inevitability again, some profound sense that life had come unstuck.

“I have to get back, or my mother will freak,” she said. “But you can stay, if you want. Cut straight through on the other side of the station and your place is only about a mile. I’ll tell your mom you got sick and I gave you a ride home.”

It was less a suggestion than an order. “Nikki—” I didn’t turn to face her. I couldn’t. “Before you go. .”

“Yeah?”

It would be so easy for all those storybook heroes to avoid adventure, to save themselves from the sorry fate of leading an interesting life. Don’t lean over the well; don’t rub the magic lamp. When the voice calls to you from the dark, don’t listen.

Don’t go into the woods.

“What’s the deal with you and Lacey?”

She paused just long enough to make me nervous. “Maybe we were lovers, Hannah.” She lingered on the operative word, opening her jaw so wide I could see her tongue pry the l from the roof of her mouth. “Hot ’n’ heavy lesbo action, and you’re just some pawn in our lovers’ quarrel. Ever think of that?”

It was like she was too lazy to make an actual joke. She might as well have said insert crass bullshit here, and fuck you very much for asking.

“Whatever, Nikki.”

“I’m turning over a new leaf. It’s called, who gives a fuck about the past? The real issue is you and Lacey.”

“And what issue is that?”

“I already told you. She was shitty to you. And for you. It was painful to watch.”

“Who asked you to watch?”

It was the wrong answer. I should have defended Lacey, and then it was too late.

“Why would she let you get so drunk that night, then leave you there on your own? What kind of ‘best friend’ does that?” She squeezed her fingers around the phrase.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“She was shit to you that night, and she’s been shit all along. It’s a power trip for her, you get that, right? Making you think you need her? Poor little Dex, alone and helpless, with big strong Lacey to teach her how life works. You were the only one who couldn’t see it.”

“Fuck you, Nikki.”

“Say I’m wrong. She’s the best friend a girl could have. So where is she? You’re having the worst fucking time of your life, and she abandons you to go throw her panties at Nirvana? You’re lucky, Hannah. She would have ruined you. That’s what she does. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

“Go back to your party, Nikki.”

She left me alone in the woods to think through her bullshit, or ignore it and imagine all the people who must have passed through the station back when the trains still chugged through Battle Creek: businessmen in fedoras or smutty-cheeked coal miners or grinning teenagers riding off to war, everyone on the way to somewhere else, waving at the sorry town rooted in its place, and I did my best to imagine all of it, until it got dark and I got tired of being alone.

THE MALL. LACEY AND I never went to the mall, which was thirty minutes down the highway, bedecked with bright red and blue banners over the entrances, like a Renaissance faire sponsored by Macy’s and Toys “R” Us. The mall, Lacey said, was brain death. A lobotomy built of fake brass and linoleum. Drones and plebes embalming themselves with fro-yo, middle-aged creepers buying “neck massagers” at the Sharper Image. Lacey believed in small stores tucked into forgotten spaces: attics, garages, a basement where we probably would have been murdered if the guy’s bong hadn’t set off his smoke detector. The chain stores lining the mall were a colonizing force, Lacey said, infecting the populace with bacteria that would breed and spread. The more people were alike, the more alike they’d want to be. Conformity was a drug, the mall its sidewalk pusher, red-eyed and greasy and promising you there was no harm in just a taste.

At the mall, the fro-yo tasted like vanilla-scented shampoo. At the mall they played instrumental versions of Madonna and girls danced along, using moves they’d gleaned from MTV. There were cookies the size of my head and pretzels with chocolate dipping sauce and cream cheese frosting. There was a carousel in the center, where children screamed in circles and bored fathers pretended to watch. Armored knights guarded the exits, fending off toddlers who clung to their shiny limbs. There was a booth selling “mead” at the food court, and beside it a table of scruffy lacrosse guys smashing pizza into gaping maws—“gross but cute,” said Nikki.

There was a fountain sparkling with coins. I threw in a penny and didn’t wish for Lacey.

I watched Nikki try on long flowered skirts and denim vests, but I refused the pastels she shoved at me. “I don’t care what other people think,” I said. “I dress for myself.”

“I guess it’s just a coincidence, then, that you dress exactly like Lacey. The goth Sweet Valley twins.”

“We wear what we want,” I said. Present tense. Like grammar could shape reality. “Not some kind of”—I dangled a tank top off my finger, its lace threaded with shimmering silver, the delicate sheath suggesting a fragility Nikki might sometimes want to project but never embody—“costume.”

Nikki rolled her eyes, slipped on the tank top, and somehow, with a shift of her shoulders and a calculated tilt of the head, became someone brand-new, sweet as the orange-blossom perfume she’d spritzed on us both.

“Sorry, I forgot — those hideous boots are an expression of your soul. And just happen to also be an expression of Lacey’s soul, and the souls of every other grunge-girl wannabe Mrs. Cobain. One big flannel-covered coincidence.” She’d produced a vintage silver flask at lunch, the kind of beautifully beat-up artifact Lacey would have loved, and added some vodka to her Diet Dr Pepper, which had buzzed her straight into lecture mode. “By this time next year, half of Battle Creek’s going to be walking around in your stupid flannel shirts, I guarantee it.” She thrust one of her discards at me, a sky blue cashmere sweater I could never afford, even if I might someday decide I wanted to wear something that feminine — something that brought out my eyes, as she pointed out. “Everything’s a costume, Hannah. At least be smart enough to know it.”

The sweater was whisper soft, and it fit perfectly. I didn’t have to tilt my head or shift my posture; between the fairy-tale blue and the cherry-pink gloss Nikki had smeared across my lips with her thumb, I looked like a brand-new person, too.

I didn’t remind her to call me Dex, and she didn’t bring up Lacey for the rest of the day. We stuck to safe spaces: the many ways our mothers embarrassed us, which of the Dead Poets Society boys we’d prefer and in what order, whether the incentive of a real-life Patrick Swayze could teach anyone to dance like Jennifer Grey, whether our ninth-grade biology teacher was sleeping with the principal, whether returning to Battle Creek after college and for the rest of agonizing life should count as tragedy or farce.

It was fun. That was the surprise of it, and the shame. We didn’t excavate the truths of the universe or make a political statement; we did nothing daring or difficult. We simply had fun. She was fun.

All day, I waited for the punch line, but there were only L’Oréal counter makeovers and Express denim sales and an hour of hysteria squeezing ourselves into wedding-cake formal dresses, the more rhinestoned, the better. There was a turn in the Sharper Image massage chairs, and a shared pack of chocolate SnackWell’s in the car on the way home. It was inexplicable and impossible, and then, with that weird summer temporal distortion where one day seems like ten and a week is enough to turn any alien addition into the familiar furniture of life, it was routine.

I got to know her house and its ways. I stopped waiting for her agenda to emerge.

We spent most of our days outside, floating the pool on inflatable rafts, letting the sun crisp our backs and splashing water at Benetton, Nikki’s Labrador retriever. That was what I learned best from Nikki that summer: how to float. To stop drowning, she taught me, I only had to stop fighting. I only had to lie back and decide that no dark shapes swam beneath the surface, that nothing with sharp teeth and insatiable hunger was lurking in the fathomless depths. In the world according to Nikki, there were no depths.

I was already empty; Nikki taught me it was safest to stay that way. That if I pretended hard enough nothing was waiting to claim me, nothing ever would.

SHE PLAYED WITH MY HAIR and vetoed chunks of wardrobe; one sticky afternoon she brought me to the elementary school parking lot and taught me how to drive. She still refused to call me Dex. “Your name is Hannah,” she said. “Who lets some stranger give them a new name? It would be one thing if you didn’t like it. But seriously, to decide to be someone new just because some weirdo tells you to?”

I did like my name — that was the thing of it. I’d forgotten that: I hadn’t known there was anything wrong with Hannah until Lacey told me so.

Nikki was too careful to talk about Lacey. Instead she talked around her, let me creep to my own conclusions. “I don’t know why you listen to this shit when you obviously don’t even like it,” she said when I fast-forwarded through one too many Nirvana songs.

“Of course it matters what people think of you,” she said when I told her I didn’t need her help repairing my reputation, that my reputation was irrelevant. “Anyone who tells you different is trying to screw you.”

“Some people can’t help being freaks, so they’ll try to drag you into freakhood with them,” she said, thrusting an armful of hand-me-downs at me. “But you’re different. You’ve got options.”

She talked about herself, and maybe that was the thing that slowly suckered me into trusting her. She was bored, she told me, not just with Battle Creek and her friends and her dysfunctional parents and her perfect brother with his dull college girlfriend and obedient premed life, but with herself, too, with waking up every morning to perform “Nikki Drummond.”

“You have no fucking idea, Hannah,” she said, in the middle of a rant about the girls who assumed themselves adored members of her royal court. “When I say shallow, I don’t mean like a sandbar. I mean like a puddle.”

“They’re shallow?” I said, with a pointed look at the issue of Seventeen in her lap. She’d just spent the last thirty-seven minutes gaming the “Who’s Your Perfect Beach Boyfriend?” quiz to ensure she scored high enough to match with “Golden God.”

She threw it at me. “Of course I’m fucking shallow. But I know it, that’s the difference. Like I know that reading Nietzsche doesn’t make you deep.”

She pronounced his name correctly, almost pretentiously, with the same faux German accent Lacey had used.

“Everything is crap,” Nikki said. “It’s the people who don’t get it that tire me — the ones who think anything fucking matters, whether it’s their nail polish color or the meaning of the fucking universe.”

She was buzzed. Nikki, I understood by then, was always just a little buzzed. I’d seen enough Lifetime movies to know this was not a good thing. She talked about having power over people, how it was dull but necessary, because the only other option was letting people have power over you. Sometimes she even talked about Craig.

We did this only when we went to the train station, which we did only when she was in a very particular mood. I didn’t like it there. They hadn’t told her exactly where they’d found the body, she said, whether it was on the tracks or in the old station office or hanging half in and half out of the boxcar, as if he’d tried at the last minute to flee from himself. We might have been sitting on grass that had been flattened by his body and fed with his blood. I didn’t believe in ghosts — even as a child eager to believe in anything, I never had — but I believed in the power of place, and who was to say there wasn’t something about the old station, something so sad about the sound of the wind rattling through its broken windows that it had infected Craig, attuned him to his own pain? It was the kind of place that whispered.

Nikki said it hurt to be there, but that sometimes pain was good.

“I miss him,” she said once, dangling her legs over the tracks, picking at the dirt under her nails. “I didn’t even like him that much, and I fucking miss him. All the time.”

I’d learned not to say I’m sorry, because it only made her mad. “He should be sorry,” she always said. “Plenty of people should be sorry. Not you.”

Once she lay down along the edge with her head in my lap, and said that maybe she was to blame. Her hair was softer than I’d imagined. I brushed her bangs off her forehead, smoothed them back. The roots were coming in, dirt brown. I wondered when her hair had gone so dark, whether it had ever really been the color of the sun, or if that was just how I’d needed to remember it.

“Don’t be a narcissist,” I said. She liked that.

“Do you worry you’ll never love anyone again?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. But then, “I didn’t, though. Love him. I thought I did, and then I knew better.”

“What happened?” I meant, what happened to make her see, but I meant more than that, too. Like everyone, I wanted to know what happened to make him walk into the woods, what made him bring the gun — and, if she didn’t have the answers, I wanted to know how could she stand it, the certainty she never would.

“Did you know that until Allie was seven years old, her mother lied and told her that carob was actually chocolate?” she said. “This poor kid, for years her mother’s shoveling this health food crap in her mouth and calling it chocolate, and she’s wondering why the whole world makes such a big deal out of something so disgusting. And then you know what happened?”

I shook my head.

“Some babysitter didn’t get the memo and brings over some ice cream and a bottle of chocolate syrup. Allie gets one taste and goes fucking nuts. She got up in the middle of the night and drank the whole thing. I think they had to pump her stomach.”

“Moral of the story, don’t lie to your kids?”

“Who the fuck cares what the moral of the story is? The point is, it’s not like she could go back to carob after that, could she? But her mother wasn’t about to let her have chocolate again. She was fucked.”

Nikki wouldn’t say any more, and I was left to use my imagination: What was her chocolate? Some college guy, a friend of her brother’s visiting for the weekend? Something more illicit, perhaps — a teacher? A friend of her father’s? Someone who’d given her a taste of something she couldn’t have again and couldn’t forget. Whoever he was, he was gone: She hadn’t dated anyone seriously since Craig had died, never seemed to evince a moment of interest, though it occurred to me that was her way of punishing herself.

Maybe she knew exactly why he did it; maybe the worst of the rumors were true, that he’d done it for her, because of her. It would be better never to know, I thought, than to know something like that.

Instead, she occupied herself with imaginary boyfriends: Luke Perry, Johnny Depp, and Keanu Reeves, whose future wedding she had already imagined in great detail, right down to what she’d be wearing as his bride — not that he would give a shit, because he clearly didn’t give a shit about anything. Which, Nikki said, was the key to his appeal.

“Not my type,” I admitted, and she shrugged. But imaginary worked for me, too. I’d scrubbed away those words on my skin, but it felt like the ink was in my blood. Never again: I would be a fortress now, impermeable. I contented myself with the Dead Poets boys, sweet and lyrical and easily cowed, and River Phoenix, the kind of boy who would light candles and read you poetry, who would kiss you softly on the lips and then let the night fade to black, who was never angry, only sad, who cared about the earth and refused to eat animals and eschewed drugs and had such lonely eyes.

Then Nikki made me watch My Own Private Idaho, and there was my River alongside her Keanu, the two of them sky-high on heroin and fucking for cash, and so much for that.

“I thought you’d like it,” she said, halfheartedly, not even trying to disguise the fact that she’d done it on purpose, that she knew it would screw with my head and River-besotted heart, and because I knew, and she knew I knew, somehow that made it all right. I could even laugh.

It wasn’t the same, the two of us. There were no midnight dances in the rain, none of those heart-thumping moments when the tide of wildness washed in and I loosed my grip enough to be swept away. But it gave me an excuse to leave the house, and a heated pool.

“Probably I shouldn’t,” Nikki said one afternoon as we paddled our rafts back and forth across the water. I was wearing a new bikini, courtesy of my mother, who was so happy with the new state of Drummond-related affairs — and her own burgeoning acquaintanceship with Nikki’s mother — that she’d been ready to buy out the store. Blood money, I thought, as she passed the credit card to the cashier. My very own thirty pieces of silver, complete with pink stitching and push-up cups. Too bad: I liked how the suit glowed against my tan, and the cloud of chlorine that clung to me through the day, my hair as crispy as my skin.

“Shouldn’t what?”

Nikki liked to start conversations in the middle, after she’d already hashed them out in her mind, which made it difficult to know whether I’d zoned out or she’d only just started speaking.

“Cut my bangs like that girl on The Real World. You know?”

“Not really.”

“You know. Becky.”

“I don’t have cable.”

She bolted upright. “Wait, seriously?”

“Seriously.”

We spent the rest of that day in her air-conditioned basement watching Real World tapes on her big-screen TV. Nikki had every episode, carefully labeled, and we watched them all, straight through for six hours, until I felt like I, too, was living in a house, having my life taped, no longer being polite but starting to get real. The next day we started again, and the rest of August unspooled to the sounds of Julie’s cackle, Kevin’s rants, Eric’s Jersey-boy bravado, Heather B.’s hip-hop rhyme.

“Imagine if we all stopped pretending there was such a thing as getting real,” Nikki said. “Imagine the fucking relief.”

Real World housemates were required to lock themselves in a closet and spill their secrets into a camera and — miraculously, as if they assumed no one would ever watch — they did.

“Let’s do it,” Nikki said, and I could see it sparking in her, the flare of an idea that demanded action. It was the one thing she and Lacey had in common, and the thing I most envied about them both.

“I’m not telling you my deepest secrets,” I said. “I’m certainly not recording them.”

“No, we won’t be us, we’ll be them,” she said. We would put on a show, play their parts. It would be practice for her future audition tape; it would be fun.

Her father had a video camera and a tripod. Nikki played Becky with her pointy cardboard boobs and then Eric, with his Guido swagger. I took on Andre and his flannel angst, lounging on the leather couch, gazing at the ceiling, all woe is me and why, God, why. “The world is pain,” I said, in my druggy Andre voice, while Nikki manned the camera and cheered me on, “but, like, the music, yeah, when it, like, pours out of me, man, that’s just, you know, that’s like my soul on the wind.”

Nikki laughed. “I thought you were doing Andre, not Lacey.”

Even then, even when it hurt, she was right: It was fun.

I LEARNED TO PRETEND AWAY almost everything, but I couldn’t will September out of existence. Summer ended without my permission. I went back to school — I put on a show.

Nikki and I didn’t associate with each other publicly; this was an unspoken mutual agreement. But she’d taught me how to perform, and I performed for her. Summer was long, but not long enough for people to forget what had happened. They all looked at me too hard, and I knew what they saw: spotty nipples, tiny sprouts of hair, secret stretches of skin. Boys, especially, watched me like they knew my function and were waiting for me to figure it out. I knew how to act like I didn’t care, and if I could be all surface, no depth, then the act would be all that mattered. I would not drown.

It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide. To give up on Dex; to be dull, to live a small, safe life.

I went to school. I went home. I slurped spaghetti with my family and tuned out my mother. Funny how she’d been so concerned with my first transformation but was so content with the second; there were no more speeches advising me against losing myself. Maybe some long-dormant maternal instinct kicked in, and she understood that I’d already lost too much to risk giving more away. I learned how not to look at my father. He kept offering to treat me to a movie; I took him up on it only once, for a midnight showing of Honeymoon in Vegas that had been sold out for weeks and which my mother had given me special dispensation to see, under my father’s guidance of course. Not since Lacey had I been out so late, and I’d missed the quiet of the sleeping town and its stars. My father bought popcorn and settled in beside me, and we sat in silence until the Elvises flew and the credits rolled.

He leaned toward me, awkwardly, like a bad date priming to make his move. “No word from Lacey, kid?” Unlike my mother, my father couldn’t stand Nikki.

I shook my head.

“Huh.” He cleared his throat. “So that’s it.”

It had been twenty-two days since I’d last biked past her house, searching her window for signs of life. “Yep. That’s it.”

He sighed and stretched back, kicking his legs up on the empty seat in front of him. “I love it here, don’t you?”

“My shoes are sticking to the floor.”

“It’s not because of the movie, you know? I dunno — maybe it’s just the dark. Two hours, nothing to do but sit here, let the world settle over you.”

You spend your whole life sitting in the dark doing nothing, I could have said. I’d always assumed he loved his sunglasses for how they made him look, but maybe they just gave him a place to hide.

A week later, having survived another school day and a long stretch of homework in the library — anywhere was better than home — I biked home through twilight drizzle, feeling, in the surge of wind and adrenaline, that this was manageable, these two-hundred-some days to be endured before the rest of my life.

I dropped the bike in the driveway and was about to head inside when the horn blasted. I turned to see a car idling at the curb, its high beams flashing an SOS. The horn sounded again, impatient, and the passenger door swung open. Kurt’s voice scratched at the night.

Lacey was home.

LACEY, Smells Like Teen Spirit

IT TOOK ME MONTHS TO stop thinking about her lips. I liked them smiling, pussy pink and quirked at the corners, but I liked them every way. Pouting. Sucking. Trembling. I told her that the flask made me think of her, spun her some bullshit about flappers and daring girls sucking the marrow out of life, but — truth? I just wanted to see those lips pursed around the silver spout.

That’s the kind of thing that came back to me in all those dead hours staring at Jesus, pretending to pray: things I was meant to have forgotten, Nikki’s lips and Craig’s dead eyes and a canopy of leaves the color of blood and fire. Horizons had no horizon. Some girls got sent home after a couple weeks; others were stuck there for years. Your golden ticket: a letter home saying that Jesus had finally turned the bad seed good. No one knew how you got it. There were demerits and credits and an impenetrable algorithm ranking us on a hierarchy of salvation, but nothing to suggest that surviving one day got you closer to anything but more of the same.

I didn’t think about the future. I refused the past, pink lips and the smell of gunpowder. I thought about you.

My own version of prayer, my own religion. The church of Dex and Lacey. Where the only true sin is faithlessness. I would have faith you could forgive me. I knew I could forgive you anything.

They were big on forgiveness at Horizons. Disclosure of past sins was mandatory, the bigger, the better, so we amped them up. The Screamer’s occasional toke became a drug addiction; the Skank’s ill-advised habit of masturbating to her father’s Soldier of Fortune collection became oedipal lust; even the time Saint Ann kissed some nerd in her church group so he’d help her with her chemistry homework was a gateway to prostitution. The Sodomite’s sins were self-explanatory, and every time she confessed to fantasizing about one of us stripping naked in the outdoor shower, they assigned her to wood-chipper duty and an extra hour of praying away the gay. Imagine if they knew what I’d done in the woods. How good it had felt.

It was fun watching them pretzel-twist themselves trying to forgive our imagined pasts. That was Shawn’s mandate: We were all equal here. We were all, once we’d dipped ourselves in the lake and sworn our fealty to God and country and Shawn, cleansed.

You tell me, Dex, what kind of a bullshit god doesn’t care what you did or who you hurt as long as you say you’re sorry?

Forgiveness for the mistakes of the past, revenge for the trespasses of the present: That was the Horizons way. When you got toilet-toothbrush duty for giving your counselor the finger, or solitary for trying to lubricate your unit with laxatives in the pudding, that wasn’t punishment; it was correction. Curtsy and say thank you, lest you be corrected some more.

It got easier once I found ways to correct myself. Digging into my wrist scar with a paper clip, just a little — that was enough to clear my head. They wanted us fuzzy. Pliable. That’s what the skimpy rations and the middle-of-the-night prayer calls were all about. The hours of verse memorization, the time in the dark place — it was CIA-brand torture. Survival was a matter of maintaining control, staying steady.

That’s why, about three weeks in, I threw out my pills.

I ALMOST WENT CRAZY, IN THERE, without them, until I came up with the game. Or maybe the game was me going crazy. Either way, it worked. At Horizons, the devil was everywhere. Any time you cursed, lusted, cried yourself to sleep, forgot to ask permission before taking seconds at dinner, that was the devil getting his claws in you. So I figured, they want it so badly, let ’em have it. Something real to hate. Something to fear: me.

The next time they asked us for confessions, I gave them one to remember. “I killed a boy, once,” I said. The Skank and the Sodomite leaned close, like they knew this one was going to be good, even before the punch line: “I fucked him to death.”

I’d get it from Heather for that one, later; we all would, the punishment of the one visited on the many, the righteous burning alongside the sinners. But confessions were sacrosanct. Call it my Scheherazade moment, Dex, because I did it to save my own life. “Not literally, of course,” I continued, “but it was the fucking that got him into the woods, and kept him there once he realized what we were all about. A boy like him should have run screaming in the other direction once he saw the altar, the poor little cat, the knife. Nice boys like that don’t mess with the devil.”

The Skank snickered. She would know.

I told them of a sacred clearing where moonlight glinted off shining bark and the scent of mossy earth mingled with sweat and breath and blood. I told them that we whispered terrible oaths, promises to each other and to a dark lord, that we invoked the forces of earth and sky and claimed dominion over the natural world, that we raised storms and whirled madly in the lightning. I told them that we’d needed more power and more blood and an ultimate sacrifice, and so I had played the serpent, slithered into a boy’s life and let him slip inside me until he lost all reason and became my plaything, until I could loop a delicate finger around his belt buckle and draw him into the woods, where the girls and I were so hungry, had waited so long, would finally wait no longer to feed.

In the hush after I’d finished speaking, they all tried very hard to laugh, and I tried not to. They pretended not to believe me. Heather aborted the confessional and we spent the rest of the day in the sun, holding buckets of water — which, I know, doesn’t exactly sound like the Spanish Inquisition, but don’t try this at home. After about an hour it feels like your arms are going to fall off. Then, in the late-summer heat, the thirst kicks in, and your head goes all foggy, black dots creeping across your vision, and still, your hands sweaty and raw, you hold tight, because you know if you let go they’ll toss you in the dark place until God knows when. We lasted long enough for Heather — who got off on torture in the name of the Lord — to giggle through la petite mort, and for three of us to pass out.

They treated me differently after that. I felt different, too. Like I really had fucked a boy to death, and was not sorry.

The rest was easy. I’d read Satan’s bible; I knew what to do. A few stupid made-up prayers to the Dark One, some bloody pentagrams on the floor, a lot of crap about how my Lord would rain fire and darkness down upon the whole operation. One afternoon I spotted a dying squirrel writhing in the gutter outside our cabin. It was dead by the time I snuck out in the night to retrieve it, and I’ll spare your delicate ears the details. Blood is blood, even if you have to dig your hands into some matted fur and rotting innards to get at it. Once I speared the squirrel with the stick, it was almost like using a paintbrush. No one woke up, not even Heather, when I painted the sign of the Antichrist over her bed, then left the squirrel on her pillow.

The way they all looked at me then, Dex — the girls, the counselors, even Shawn. Like I was dangerous. Not troubled, just trouble. Eve and Lilith, the serpent in the grass. Down in the dark place I chanted imaginary prayers; in the depths of night I whispered in the girls’ ears: the things I would do to them, the things I knew their dark hearts had done.

I promised them we would be prisoners here forever, that Horizons was our birth and death, that as long as I lived among them, the devil would have a home. Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs. This is what the Satanic Bible teaches, and this much is true.

MAYBE IT WAS THE GAME. Maybe it was something in me that woke up when I stopped taking the pills, opening my mouth pink and wide for inspection every morning, mother’s little helper nestled safely in fleshy cheek. Who the fuck knows, maybe it was the devil himself. It’s not the why of it that matters; it’s the what: It’s the dreams.

I dreamed of animals eating my face.

I dreamed of the woods, never lovely, only deep. Dead things rotting. I dreamed of a bird, with inky feathers and a smirking beak, talons perched on my breasts, pecking at my stomach, ripping into my intestines, digging out the thing they call a womb.

I dreamed of a man. He climbed through the bunk’s window, slid into my bed, and he held me, and I was a child, but I was not afraid.

Or I was afraid, and I screamed, and he laid his heavy hand across my mouth and his body across my body and had his way in the dark.

He wore your father’s face, or mine; he wore the Bastard’s face; he wore Kurt’s face, and this was how I liked him best. He was always the same man.

He was no man at all.

I told him what I’d done and what I wanted to do. He told me sleep is where you find the people you’ve lost, and where the dead come home to you.

In your dreams, it’s easy to be a god.

When he wore the face I liked, the Kurt face, I liked to touch the hair, blond as a child’s. His eyes were blue like the plastic stone on a gumball-machine ring. I liked to lean my cheek against his stubble. He said I would hurt less if someone else hurt, too, and that I already knew. It was safe to want that; it was safe to want anything, in a dream.

I dreamed of death.

I dreamed of maggots crawling out of Craig’s hollow eye sockets, feeding on the raw meat of his brain. I tasted metal in my mouth and felt my finger twitch. I saw three bodies in the dirt, three holes, blood pooling together as it sank into the earth.

I dreamed of things that could have been. Some nights, I dreamed what was. The weight of his body when it went limp on mine, the seconds that passed as the skin cooled, as time did not reverse itself and the rupture in his skull did not heal.

In my dreams, the man with the blue eyes and the angel skin told me I had power, and his voice was the kind that only told the truth. He asked what I wanted, and I said I wanted control, and I wanted pain for my enemies, and I wanted you.

Sometimes, as I was trying to fall asleep or trying not to, listening to the other girls dream, I remembered home and the people who’d driven me away from it. I counted the trespasses of mine enemies.

I made lists.

It’s important to remember who your enemies are. What you would do to them if you could.

What would you do if you could do anything? What would you do in the dark if you knew you would never be seen?

What would I do if I got to go home?

Awake, I made lists; in my dreams, I crossed off names. I laid waste to my enemies.

His eyes were always watching.

They approved.

THE GIRLS WORE PILLOWCASES OVER their heads when they came for me. Moonlit ghosts closing me into a silent ring, pale arms reaching for me, cold fingers tugging back sheets, grasping for purchase on slick skin, pressing me down, holding me still, nails digging into flesh, hands clamping my jaw shut, teeth slicing tongue, the tang of blood dripping down my throat, and I blinked and writhed and thought foggily that I’d dreamed them into reality, that this was my coven, come to claim me for the dark. I was lofted in their arms and floating into the night before I grasped that the ghosts were watching me through eyeholes cut from cotton. Heather will seriously fuck them up for shredding those sheets, I thought, and that was how I understood: They no longer cared. Fear could no longer stop them.

Then my hands were tied together and my ankles lashed tight, and I was lying on my back in the mud, homemade Klan masks blotting out the stars. No one could exorcise what was inside me; that I was there, down on the ground beneath them, that they so desperately needed me frightened and weak was proof enough of that.

I made this happen, I thought.

I willed it to life with my words and my deeds, I transformed myself into a dangerous creature, and there was almost power in that, and almost comfort.

“O Lord, we beseech you, help us banish this evil,” one of them intoned. I knew her by voice: Peppy, a beefy cheerleader from Harrisburg who’d been caught blowing her gym teacher and had about as much respect for the Lord as I did. “Devil, be gone!”

“We anoint thee with holy water,” said someone who sounded suspiciously like the Skank.

With a ritualistic solemnity, she raised a plastic cup over my head and dumped warm piss all over my face.

“Amen,” the others chorused. That part had clearly been rehearsed.

The rest they made up as they went along.

ALONE AND NAKED IN THE woods. Curled up against mud and bark, twitching at every whisper and crack of branches. Vision tunneled to the next second, and the one after that. Imagining red eyes in the dark. Waiting for someone to come back. Waiting for dawn.

Flies are drawn to the smell of pee and shit and blood. Mosquitos, too, and squirrels, and rats, and when your hands are tied together, you can’t exactly wave them off. All you can do is scream.

A search party of counselors found me, eventually — it took all night and most of the next day, but then, who knows how hard they bothered to look.

They found me with shit smeared across my forehead and lips, with EVIL written across my breasts in my own dried blood, with stigmata cut into my palms and feet, sliced by the same scissors used to hack off my hair. The next morning, I signed something saying it never happened, and in return Horizons called and told the Bastard I’d turned over a new leaf, that I was shining with the light of the Lord. They sent me home.

I decided: It never happened. I would not allow it to have happened.

It was erased.

Still, everything leaves a stain.

And if there is such a thing as possession, if I really do have the devil in me, now you know who put it there.

DEX, Negative Creep

YOU GETTING IN, OR WHAT?”

The car was the same; Lacey was different. Her hair had been cropped close to her scalp; from the uneven look of it, she’d done it herself. Her eyes were unlined, her nails flesh-colored. Lacey without makeup looked naked. She’d always been thin, but now she was skinny, almost gaunt, deep hollows carving her face into a skull. Her favorite dress, a blue-and-green-plaid baby doll, hung sack-like, and the leather jacket that had hugged her curves now gave her the look of a kid swimming in her father’s coat. Even her voice sounded alien, maybe because it was nothing like the one I’d been ignoring in my head. That Lacey was reptilian cool. Lacey in the flesh was warm-blooded, sweat beading at her collarbone, fingers twitching against the dash. “Now or never, Dex.”

I got in the car.

“You’re back,” I said.

“I’m back.”

I hugged her, because it seemed the thing to do. She leaned in at the wrong time; our skulls clunked together. “Sorry,” I said.

“Never apologize, remember?”

It had never been awkward between us.

“It’s late,” I said. “I should probably get inside. Maybe we can hang out tomorrow after school or something?”

Her voice flew to a simpering register. “Maybe we can hang out after school? Or something?” A weary sigh. “I thought I’d trained you better than that.”

“I’m not your dog.” It came out harsher than I meant it — I was the only one who flinched. I saw her see it in my face, the wish that I could take it back. Only then did she smile.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

I didn’t argue. How come you never get to decide anything? Nikki would have asked. But deciding was what Lacey was for.

“I don’t know where,” she said, as if I’d asked. “Anywhere. Everywhere. Like we used to.”

She rolled down the windows, turned up the volume, launched us into the night. Just like old times.

WE WENT TO THE LAKE. Not our lake, but the swampy pond on the east side covered in a layer of algae and golf balls. Lacey had always treated its water as a personal affront.

“Here,” she said, picking her way through the weeds to a rotting dock. There were no streetlights there, no moon behind the thinning summer clouds. Without the radio, there was nothing left to fill the space between us.

“You missed me,” Lacey said.

“Of course I did.”

“You’ve been counting the days until I came home, marking them on the wall in lipstick like a lovesick convict.”

“Not lipstick. Blood.”

“Naturally.”

It was a game we played, narrating the story of me better than I could do it myself.

“I know you too well to ask,” she’d said once. “It would be like asking my elbow, How do you feel?”

When something’s a part of you, she told me, you just know. But I didn’t; I had to squint through the dark, searching the shadows of her face, and ask. “Where were you?” Whatever the game, I’d lost. “Why come back?”

There was a plunking splash, then another. She’d kicked off her shoes, blue polka-dotted flip-flops we’d lifted from Woolworth’s in the spring. Bare feet settled in my lap. “Don’t you know, Dex?” It was strange to hear her say my name. “I’ll always come back.”

“But where did you go? Why?”

I stopped myself before I could say it: Why did you leave without me? Small victories.

The sound of a car streaking past, then another. That was how long it took her to answer.

“God, Dex, why do you think? The Bastard and his joke of a wife sent me away.”

This was the one possibility that hadn’t occurred to me. That she hadn’t betrayed me. That I had betrayed her all the more by not, somehow, knowing it.

“They told me they didn’t know where you went.”

“Gosh, they lied to you? Shocking.”

“Sent you away where?”

She snorted. “To the kind of place you send wayward daughters. Think of it as a Club Med. With extra Jesus.”

Not Seattle, not New York, not starring in music videos or living on the streets but this. I waited to feel something.

“You’re thinking, Oh, no, Lacey, that’s horrible! If only I had known, I would have come to rescue you.”

“Was it. . was it bad?”

“Oh, Dex, your face.” She circled my cheeks with her finger and squeezed. “It’s adorable when you do that worried thing with your mouth.”

I’d forgotten the sound of her laugh.

“You think the Bastard has the power to make me suffer? Please. It was a shitty summer camp with brainwashed sheep. Ten minutes and I was running the place.”

“Good. I guess?”

“And you, Dex? What did you do on your summer vacation? Other than miss me desperately?”

I shrugged.

I wanted to tell her everything: the foreclosure party and its fallout, the strangeness of Nikki, the chill at home, my father and me and the space between. At least, I wanted to want to tell her.

“Normal summer,” I said. “You know.”

Lacey scooped up a clump of dirt and tossed it at the lake.

“Forget the past. Let’s talk future. You ready to hear the plan?”

“What plan?”

“You’ve gotten so slow, Dex. We’ll have to work on that. What were we doing back in June when we got so rudely interrupted? What was number one on our agenda?”

I shook my head.

“Revenge, Dex. Knock the bitch off her throne, pay her back for fucking with us. Who do you think tipped the Bastard off to my stash? Why do you think they sent me away in the first place?”

“I don’t think Nikki did that. Would do that.”

“You’re fucking kidding me, right? It’s exactly what she did to you. Now she pays.”

“Can we just let it go, Lacey? Start fresh. Forget the past, like you said.”

“You, queen of the grudge, want to forget the past?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Yes. I do.”

“No, you don’t. Yes, I do. No you don’t yes I do no you don’t yes I do—” She stuck out her tongue. “We’re not six, we don’t need to play that game. And besides, you know I always win.”

I remembered a particularly vicious episode of late-night Twister with vodka for stakes and lubrication. The more I drank, the more I lost, the more I lost, the more I drank. I remembered Lacey shoving the drinks into my hand, cheering me on.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said.

“You can’t let her scare you.”

“She doesn’t scare me. She. .” To explain Nikki would be to explain what had come before. The long days after the party. The party itself, after Lacey left me alone. She would want details. She would want to peel back the surface, because Lacey only believed in what lay beneath. “She apologized. I accepted. It’s over.”

Lacey burst into laughter. “Fuck that. She apologized? I bet she promised never to screw with you again, cross her heart and hope to die?”

“Pretty much.”

“You know who else made a lot of promises like that? Hitler.”

“Come on, Lacey. Really?”

“I’m serious, Dex. It’s historical fact, look it up. Appeasement. They were too chicken to do anything but kiss his ass. You know what happened then?”

“I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“He invaded fucking Poland.”

“Invoking Hitler isn’t exactly the sign of a strong argument, Lacey. And I don’t think Nikki Drummond is angling for Poland.”

“You can’t negotiate with evil.”

It had been nice, that summer, not having so many enemies.

Lacey threaded her fingers through mine.

“You know why guys like to hold hands like that,” she’d told me once. “Because it’s sexual.” She drew out the word, like she always did, because she liked to watch me squirm. “Your fingers are basically having intercourse.”

“Say it, Dex,” she said now, squeezing. “You and me against the world. Everything like before.”

“Sure.”

We drove home without music. Lacey propped her bare foot on the seat and hung an arm out the window, steering with the fingertips of one hand.

“Pick you up tomorrow morning?” she said when the car stopped in front of my house. “We could drive to the ocean again, see some real water.”

“I’ve got school tomorrow.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And I can’t cut.”

“Because?”

“Because I can’t. I’ve got a math test. And this. . other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“I’m going to the mall after school, okay?”

“Whatever, let the mother-daughter fro-yo wait a day.”

“It’s not my mother—” I was almost tempted to say the name, see what she would do. “I said I’d go with some people, and I want to, okay? So I’m going.”

There was a noise in the darkness, the sound of someone choking on her own spit. “Funny ha-ha.”

“No. Seriously.”

“Oh.”

I wanted to touch her face, then lay my fingers against her lips and feel what shape they took in surprise.

“Are you coming back to school?” I asked, opening the door.

“Nothing better to do. They gave me a week or two to catch up.” The words came slow. “Whatever. I can go to the beach myself. Maybe I’ll send you a postcard.”

“Fingers crossed.”

She pulled the car away from the curb, then stopped and stuck her head out the window. It was still strange, that pale moon of a face without its curtain of black hair. “Hey, Dex, I almost forgot—”

“Yeah?” I was prepared. She would ask me for something, something I couldn’t deliver and couldn’t refuse. Or she would find the magic words that would bind us together again, some spell to fix what was broken. I would have waited there in the dark forever, except for the part of me that wanted to run.

“Tell your dad I say hello.” Then she drove away.

THAT NIGHT, I EXPECTED TO dream of Lacey. When it didn’t happen, I woke up convinced she was gone. Run away for real this time, or banished back into my imagination, like some fairy-tale creature who, once refused, spirits herself away.

I went to school, did my homework, answered my parents politely, didn’t think about Lacey, didn’t think about Lacey, didn’t think about Lacey.

Sunday, Nikki invited me to church. I sat stiffly at her side, examining the fine grain of the pew while the minister explained about hell, counting the bulbs in the track lighting and trying to remember when it was time to stand up for Jesus. The Lord was a lot less interesting without magic mushrooms. Ladies fanning their Sunday finery, husbands jockeying for usher spots so they could sneak a smoke, ribboned and bow-tied kids who took a sickening pleasure in good behavior dodging spitballs from brats who didn’t. The minister spoke on forgiveness, opening your heart to those who had wronged you, but he didn’t say how.

There was a time, I thought, when I descended on a place like this as a god.

“There’ll be wine at lunch after,” Nikki whispered. “We can snag some if we’re careful.”

I was always careful.

Days passed without sign of Lacey, until I started to think I really had imagined her return. Then, one Monday after school, the Buick pulled into the bus lane and honked, one unrelenting blare of the horn that didn’t let up until everyone on the lot had turned to stare.

Lacey poked her head out the window. “In.”

HER ROOM WAS DIFFERENT. THE giant poster of Kurt was gone. Everything was gone.

“Spring cleaning.” She shrugged. “I’m going for the monk thing.”

She’d painted the walls black.

“The Bastard had a fit,” she said.

Lacey sat on her bed. I sat on the floor, cross-legged, next to where she’d kept her tapes. They were gone, too. Everything she had left, she kept in her car. A handful of tapes in the glove compartment, everything else in the trunk. “You never know when you’ll need a quick getaway.”

I’d thought we would go on a drive; we always went on a drive. But Lacey wanted to show me something, she’d said. To tell me many things.

She smiled a fake Lacey smile. “So, how was the mall?”

“Fine. You know. The mall.”

“I know you went with Nikki Drummond,” she said.

“Are you following me?”

“I notice you’re not denying it.”

“No, I’m not.”

“So, what? You two are friends or something now?”

I shrugged.

“Well, not officially friends, I’m guessing. Not in public, not at school, where people could see.”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. She put on a real smile once we both concluded she’d won. And then, very quickly, it went away again. “Sorry,” she said, and she never said that. “I heard some other crap, too. About that party last spring. .”

“It’s bullshit,” I said quickly.

“You know I don’t care what you did, Dex.”

“I didn’t do anything. People are fucking liars.”

“Okay. . but if someone did something to you, we can handle it. We’ll—”

I needed it to stop. “If someone did something to me, I don’t see how that’s your problem.”

“What is it? What did she say to you?” Lacey asked.

“Who?”

“You know who. The bitch. Nikki. She told you something about me. That’s what this is.”

“No, Lacey. There’s no conspiracy.”

“Whatever she told you, I can explain.”

It was the wrong thing to say; it was an admission.

“Go ahead. Explain.”

“First tell me what she said.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you think she said? Or, even better, the fucking truth.”

“Language, Dex.” She tried another smile. I didn’t. “It’s complicated.”

Fix this, I willed her. Before you can’t.

“She’s using you to get at me,” Lacey said. “Tell me you see that, at least.”

“Because someone like her would never actually want to be friends with someone like me.”

“It’s not you, it’s her! She uses everybody. It’s how people like Nikki operate.”

“Right. People like Nikki.”

“Believe whatever you want about me, Dex, but promise me you won’t believe her. She’ll do whatever she can to hurt me.”

“And why is that, Lacey? Why would she go to all that trouble?”

It took me a long time to understand that this expression on her face, the one that made her look like a stranger, was fear. “I can’t tell you.”

“Have you always thought I was this stupid?”

“Can’t you just trust me, Dex? Please?”

That would have been so much easier — and so I did it; I tried.

“I see,” she said, as if she did, and it hurt. “But you can trust her. If it’s between me and her, you pick her.”

I reminded myself it wasn’t her fault that she’d left. That she’d molded me from wet clay, and it was law to honor thy creator. We were Dex and Lacey; we should have been beyond ultimatums. I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t have to trust Nikki. That was the most appealing thing about her: She didn’t ask that of me. She didn’t ask anything.

“It’s stupid to be jealous,” I said.

“Jealous?” She was a wild thing, suddenly. “Jealous of what? Of her? Of you? Do you know what a fucking favor I did for you, Dex, turning you into something? If I wanted a charity project, I could have gone and read to old ladies or joined the fucking Peace Corps, but I didn’t. I chose you. And you? You choose the fucking mall?”

She was the one who’d taught me that words mattered, that words could make worlds, or break them.

“I’m going, Lacey.”

“Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, talking too fast. “The bitch doesn’t matter. You matter, Dex. Me and you, like before. That’s all I want. Just tell me what I should do.”

Tell me what I should do. This was power.

I couldn’t say, Go fuck yourself.

I couldn’t say, Tell me what I should do. Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.

Somewhere below us, the front door opened and closed, hard. A baby screamed, and Lacey’s mother shouted her name in a witch’s howl; it broke the spell.

“I’m going, Lacey,” I said. “I’m done here.”

“Yeah.”

But I didn’t need her permission anymore.

I DIDN’T MEAN FOR IT TO be the end.

Or maybe I did.

She came back to school in head-to-toe black, with a silver pentagram around her neck and a bloody tear painted beneath her eye. We didn’t speak. By lunch, rumor had congealed into fact: Lacey had Satan on speed dial. Lacey had snuck into Mrs. Greer’s room and turned her contraband cross upside down. Lacey had fallen into a trance on the softball field and started speaking in tongues. Lacey drank pig’s blood for breakfast; Lacey kept a bloody rabbit’s foot in her pocket for luck; Lacey had joined a death cult.

“She’s desperate for attention,” Nikki said that night on the phone. “Your attention, probably. Don’t fall for it.”

Nikki didn’t ask me what I thought Lacey was up to, but she was the only one. People who hadn’t spoken to me since junior high accosted me in the halls, wanting to know whether Lacey really thought she could call Satan’s wrath down upon her enemies, whether I thought she could. I liked it.

My mother asked me, occasionally, why Lacey never came around — it didn’t seem like she was disappointed, more like she thought I was hiding something she needed to know — but I usually mumbled something about being busy and hoped she wouldn’t bring it up again. My father pushed harder, told me that whatever Lacey’d done I could forgive, and I wondered what made him think that she was the one at fault. Or why he couldn’t decide whether we were better off with or without her. I didn’t ask. This was how we conversed, now, my father talking at me while I played a wall. I couldn’t remember why I was so angry with him. Because he’d kept things from me; because he hadn’t fixed things for me; because in some indefinable way he’d taken Lacey from me, which seemed an even greater sin now that she was back. Because he didn’t like the Hannah I’d become, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.

Don’t you miss her, he said, and of course I did, and he was also saying without saying, don’t you miss me, and of course I did that, too. But it was safer like this, to be a wall. To be Hannah. My father, Lacey — neither of them understood why that mattered, staying safe. They didn’t know what it was to wake up on damp ground with a stranger’s boot toeing your flesh, to find words on your skin that named your secret self. They didn’t still, sometimes in the shower, rub themselves raw, imagining ink seeping into their skin, invisible brands leaving permanent marks. They didn’t know what it was not to remember.

It was all mine, the power to tell my story, build myself up again from whatever fairy tale I liked. I liked ordinary. Unexceptional. Safe. A story without dragons, without riddles, without a dark witch in the heart of the woods. A boring story about a girl who turned down the quest, stayed home to watch TV.

Now that I was Hannah again, I stayed in the kitchen after dinners, to help my mother with the dishes. You’re such a comfort to me, she would say, and I would smile my fake smile. We rinsed and rubbed, and I feigned interest in her latest self-improvement strategies, the Post-it note plan for the fridge, the poem-a-day calendar, the challenge of how to persuade herself to spend yet another evening sweating and stretching in time with Jane Fonda. She filled me in on her dull office politics and asked my advice on how to handle the asshole at reception who was always stealing her lunch. Sometimes she complained about my father, though she tried to pretend it wasn’t complaining, just idle speculation: “I wonder if your father likes this job enough to stick with it for a while” or “I wonder if your father will ever get around to cleaning out the gutters like he promised.” She was right about him, and I couldn’t understand why I still had to bite back the only answers that wanted to come: Maybe if you didn’t nag him all the time he wouldn’t hate you so much. Maybe he drinks to drown out the sound of your voice. Maybe you’ve told him he’s a failure so many times that he believes it.

He was drinking less but smoking more. He was happier. He’d stopped complaining about the movie theater, even taken on some extra shifts, mostly at night. I overheard my mother on the phone joking that he was probably having an affair.

That week, over a chicken potpie he’d uncharacteristically cooked from scratch, he said he was thinking about starting up his band again.

My mother laughed. “Oh, come on, Jimmy,” she said when he pulled a sulk. “I’m sorry, but if you’re going to have a midlife crisis, does it have to be such a cliché?”

“How about you, kid?” he asked me, as if he’d forgotten we weren’t like that anymore; I couldn’t be counted on for backup. “I could always use a drummer.”

It was pathetic, the idea of him jamming in a garage in some torn-up T-shirt with a tie for a bandana, a sad after-hours Springsteen. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, though, and he must have known what it meant.

The charm offensive swung back toward my mother. “You know you’ve always wanted to be my backup singer, Jules.”

“Not exactly my heart’s fondest desire,” she said, but without enough bite for my taste.

“That’s not what you said on our third date.”

Now she was fighting back a smile. “Jimmy, we agreed we would never—”

“Hot Lips here insisted we let her up on stage.” He reached for her hand, and she reminded him not to call her that, and said that he’d pushed her on stage, but when he pulled her out of her chair now, she pantomimed some unconvincing resistance, then let him swing her around and laughed when he started singing in falsetto. “I’m a good singer, I swear, really, let me at the mic,” he said, in his version of my mother’s voice, and she leaned her head against his shoulder and they swayed to music I couldn’t hear.

“To be fair, I’d had quite a bit to drink.” She was, ridiculously, giggling.

“They threw rotten fruit at the stage,” my father said.

She smacked him. “They certainly did not.”

“Cantaloupe. Pineapple. Who brings pineapple to a concert?”

“Most humiliating experience of my life,” she said, fondly.

“You loved it.” My father grinned at me over her head. “How about it, kid? We’ll do like the Partridge Family. Get a bus and everything.”

It should have made me happy, seeing them like that, like they must have been before they forgot how. I made it to the upstairs bathroom before my dinner rose up in my throat, but only barely. I let my cheek fall against the cool porcelain of the toilet rim and tried not to taste what was heaving out of me, waited in dread for one of them to come looking for me, but neither one did.

STRANGE THINGS STARTED TO HAPPEN. Stranger, I mean, than Lacey prostrating herself at cloven feet. Stranger than me going to school in a borrowed denim vest and baby blue peasant skirt with a lace hem. I missed my flannel; I missed my Docs. I missed caring about the things that mattered and not caring about anything else; I missed being afraid of what I might do instead of what might be done to me.

I missed Dex.

Dex couldn’t exist without Lacey — but somehow, impossibly, Lacey soldiered on without Dex. As if, in losing me, she’d lost nothing.

If I could, I would have willed her out of existence. Instead I haunted the hallway by her locker and drifted past her classrooms in case she’d decided not to cut. The less I saw her, the less it would hurt to see her, until it stopped hurting at all. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stay away.

It felt like we were the only two real people in the building. That the other bodies were automata, simulacra of life that existed only for our entertainment. I watched them watch Lacey. I watched Lacey. I watched her turn our joke into her religion, watched her slip out the emergency exit and into the parking lot with Jesse, Mark, and Dylan, watched her slip an occasional tongue past Jesse’s greasy lips, but I couldn’t watch her all the time, and so I wasn’t there to see the thing she did to Allie Cantor. The thing that, at least, they said she did to Allie Cantor. Plural trumped singular: Whatever they said became truth.

Allie Cantor was, famously, the first girl in our class to have sex — or at least to admit it. At thirteen, she’d briefly intersected with Jim Beech as they moved in opposite directions on the popularity ladder (she now ruled as Nikki Drummond’s right hand whenever Melanie Herman fell from favor; he wore a cape to school and smelled like bacon). Allie had math with Lacey, a class for seniors still muddling through long division — Lacey because she couldn’t be bothered, Allie because she couldn’t remember her own phone number. Her mental energy, as far as I could tell, was expended on teasing her bangs, counting her calories (on her fingers, no doubt), tonguing Jeremy Denner’s balls, and boring people on the subject of her two King Charles spaniels, which would have been prize show dogs had their tails not been crooked as her presurgical nose.

Stranger than strange: Lacey stared at Allie from across the classroom for a week, her gaze never wavering, her lips betraying some silent, unceasing chant. “Cursing her,” she answered, whenever anyone asked what she was doing. Like it should be obvious.

Even Allie Cantor claimed to find it hilarious, until the day she broke down under the weight of Lacey’s gaze, fled the room, and didn’t show up again for a week. Some mystery illness, we heard. Many fluids expelled in many unfortunate ways. When Allie did come back to school, she was ten pounds and several shades lighter. She transferred to a different math class.

“Food poisoning,” Nikki said on the phone that night. “Coincidence.”

We watched Lacey; Lacey watched her targets. Next up was Melanie Herman. Melanie spent half her time trying to knock Allie Cantor out of contention for Nikki’s affections, the other half groping Cash Warner while desperately pretending she didn’t want to date him and marry him and have his little Cash babies. Lacey stared, day in, day out. There was no reason to associate it with the way Melanie’s hair began to fall out, a few strands here and there, as if someone was plucking her in the night. Patches of skull began to show through, sickeningly pale, and she took to wearing hats. The doctors diagnosed alopecia; Melanie diagnosed Lacey.

Sarah Kaye was tolerated only because her deadbeat cousin was always willing to buy her underage friends beer. She went down in gym class, passed out cold on the soccer field, breaking her wrist in the fall. She said that just before everything went black, Lacey had given her a weird look and murmured something under her breath. Sarah, whose diet consisted of celery and Tic Tacs, got a get-out-of-gym-free pass for the rest of the semester. Lacey got a tattoo, a black, five-pointed star at the nape of her neck.

Kaitlyn Dyer, who’d absorbed the concept of “girl next door” from her mother’s amniotic fluid and devoted her life to fulfilling Seventeen’s bouncy, adorable, baseball-capped ideal, found a rash spreading up and down her left arm. This, she claimed, after Lacey spit on her in the hall, a spray of saliva patterning her arm precisely where the rash bloomed. Marissa Mackie borrowed a pen from Lacey in history class, only to wake up the next morning with a knife-shaped burn on the curve of her palm. Or so everyone believed, until her little sister revealed that Marissa had paid her twenty bucks to burn her with a curling iron and keep her mouth shut. Everyone agreed this was pathetic.

I thought it was all pathetic. Waking up to a mysterious stomachache or a tingling sensation in your foot had become a badge of honor, an anointment. No one could prove that Paulette Green was faking it when she fainted by her locker, even if she conveniently managed to land in Rob Albert’s muscled grasp. No one would suggest out loud that Missy Jordan might have deliberately made herself puke her guts all over her chem lab partner. But by the next week, Paulette and Rob were an official item and Missy was ensconced at Nikki’s cafeteria table, because the enemy of mine enemy, et cetera.

Even back when Jesse Gorin was inking pentagrams on his forehead and sacrificing Dumpster rats, it would never have occurred to anyone to believe, even half jokingly, that he’d developed psychic powers. The jocks who’d slung him in a tree were more than willing to believe he worshipped the devil, but no one suggested the devil was returning his calls. Jesse, Mark, Dylan, they were known quantities — as were we all. We’d known one another since preschool, through cooties, boogers, cracking voices, diagnoses. We knew one another like family, by scent and by rote, so wholly that it seemed less knowledge than embodiment. We were a single, self-hating organism. Lacey would always be a foreign body. Capable of anything.

Nikki wouldn’t dignify it with speculation. “Do I think she’s a fucking witch?” I heard her say to Jess Haines, as they were passing by my locker. “Sure. And I think you’re a fucking moron.”

Her mask was slipping, I’d noticed. She wasn’t as good at playing nice as she used to be; the silky smooth exterior had taken on a certain gritty texture. Sometimes I caught spearmint on her breath, her preferred flavor for covering up the smell of her parents’ gin. Lacey — or neuroses and desperate striving — picked off the minions one by one, but Nikki Drummond herself escaped unscathed. People, as they say, began to talk.

This is what they say happened when Nikki caught Lacey outside the orchestra room, just after lunch. That Nikki dared her to do something, then and there, to bring down the wrath of Satan. Prove it. Lacey stood by, silent and impassive, watching her melt down.

“Well?” Nikki said, and they say she seemed on the verge of violence, that there was something off-kilter about her. “Go ahead. Do it. None of this rash shit. No fainting. Just ask your friend the devil to strike me down dead, right here.”

Lacey said nothing.

“Show them all what you are,” Nikki said.

“I know how to hurt you,” Nikki said. “Don’t forget that.”

Then Lacey spoke. And she said this: “Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.” It had the sound of memorized scripture. Then, they say, she smiled. “Don’t be so impatient.”

PARENTS WROTE LETTERS AND LEFT messages and raised an alarm, and the school sent Lacey home for inappropriate dress or behavior, and sometimes suspended her, but she always came back, and it would begin again. They tried sending her to the school’s counselor, but rumor had it that she spent the whole session in spooky silence, mouthing hexes and sending him home early for the day with a suspicious migraine. After that, they sent me.

He had no office, so we met in the empty gym, dragging two metal folding chairs beneath one of the baskets. It smelled like shoe polish and boy sweat, while Dr. Gill, pit stains seeping through his pink shirt, smelled vaguely of VapoRub.

“I’m told you’re very close with Lacey Champlain,” he said. He wasn’t extraordinarily ugly, not in a Dickensian way — that would have suited me — but ugly enough, his throat wattled, his gut bulging slightly over a pleather belt, a swell of man boob filling out his plaid shirt. “How do you think she’s doing?”

I shrugged.

“She seems a bit. . disturbed,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Should you be talking to me about other people’s problems? Isn’t that illegal or something?”

“Are there problems of your own that you’d rather discuss? I know this last year’s been somewhat difficult for you. .”

I imagined filling in his pause. Resting my secrets at his feet one by one. Lacey. Nikki. My father. The party. My body. My beast. Without them weighing me down, I worried I might float away.

“Why would you think anything’s been difficult?” I said.

“Your teachers have reported some erratic behavior over the months, and there was that, er, incident in the spring.”

I almost wanted to make him spell it out.

“It’s natural, at your age, to test out new identities. But when a student goes through radical transformations in such a short period of time, well. .”

Well, then, that wouldn’t be natural—that was the implication. You shouldn’t be able to so thoroughly change who you are. Natural was having a shape of your own, not living like Jell-O, conforming to any mold.

“Well, what?” I said.

“Well, then we’d have to start asking whether that student is struggling to draw the boundaries of her personhood, and whether that struggle puts her at risk.”

“I’m not on drugs. I don’t even do drugs.”

“I’m not necessarily talking about drugs. Or sex.”

Dear God, I thought, please never be talking about sex. He was so solid, so fleshy, so thick with decay. It was impossible to imagine the boys I knew someday evolving into this.

“Hannah, has your friend Lacey ever tried to engage you in any. . rituals?”

“Rituals?”

“Anything that might have seemed, strange? Perhaps something involving animals? Or”—he lowered his voice to a profane, almost hopeful whisper—“children?”

I got it then, the temptation she’d succumbed to. I wanted it. To narrow my eyes, make my voice Lacey cool, and say, Well, there was the time we sacrificed the goats and made the children drink their blood. . does that count? To shove his face into his own prurient appetites and watch him feed.

Nikki had taught me better.

“Nothing like that,” I said. Polite, composed, good-girl Hannah Dexter. As interesting as a bowl of oatmeal. “Can I go back to class?”

HANNAH, HAVE YOU SPOKEN WITH her?” There was maternal concern in the question, but there was also judgment. Once again, in my mother’s eyes, I’d failed.

I shrugged.

“Have you considered it? I don’t know what went on between you—”

“That should be your first clue.”

Usually that would be enough to derail her, start an argument about my attitude, land safely in my room. Not this time.

“The girl is obviously troubled. Regardless of your differences, maybe you owe her a little compassion?”

“Aren’t you the one who forbid me ever to speak to her again?”

“That was in the heat of anger, Hannah. I was worried about you.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m worried about her.”

“Fucking unbelievable.” I said it under my breath, loud enough for her to hear.

“What was that?”

This time, I enunciated. “Fucking. Unbelievable.”

“Hannah! Language.”

“I love how when I wanted her around, Lacey was basically the devil. And now, when she’s literally worshipping the devil, you assume that whatever happened between us is my fault. Or, like, forget fault. It’s just whatever I decide to do is the wrong thing. By definition. Is that it?”

“I realize that you prefer to see me as a villain when at all possible.”

I couldn’t stand it, the simpering voice, the affected elocution, every bit of her behavior fake — and that wasn’t even the worst of it. I could have forgiven her fancier-than-thou act if she hadn’t been so bad at it.

“I’m not saying anyone’s at fault here, Hannah. I’m just worried about her. She’s obviously gotten involved in something she shouldn’t have. The things they say. . I’m worried something terrible might happen.”

I could have told her, things didn’t just happen to Lacey. If something terrible happened, it would be because Lacey had willed it to. I could have told her, I was the one things happened to.

She’d caught me downstairs on the couch, watching TV, which these days I could only do when my father wasn’t hovering. Of course she’d positioned herself squarely in front of the screen. I looked away, at the Sears photo framed on the wall, the most prominent picture of me in the house, if that chunky toddler could be considered in any way contiguous with the lumpen, scowling creature I’d grown up to be. She must have had her doubts sometimes, wondered if I was a changeling, if her perky girl who loved tutus and Parcheesi had been snatched away in the night, an angry monster child slipped into her place. I hated the girl in that photo, because I knew how much easier she was to love, all soft skin and smooth edges. How could my parents not want her back?

“Lacey’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about her.”

“That’s patently false. Maybe I should call her mother—”

“No!”

“Well, if you won’t talk to her. .”

“She’s worshipping the devil, Mother.” I couldn’t remember when I’d last said that word because I needed it, because it meant home. “Any other mother in this town would be taking me in for an exorcism or something, just in case.”

“Aren’t you fortunate, then, that I’m not every other mother?”

“Yeah, I won the lottery.”

“I hope this isn’t really you, Hannah. It’s fine, to put on this little show for me. I understand. But I hope it isn’t you.” She didn’t sound angry, and that somehow made it worse when she gave me what I asked for and left me alone.

LACEY, Something in the Way

WHAT I LEARNED FROM KURT: It can be a good thing, people thinking you’re bad. When Kurt’s neighbors worried they were living next to the devil, Kurt strung up a voodoo doll on a noose and hung it in the window for them to see.

I’m not what you think I am, Kurt says. I’m worse.

I won’t tell you what I did that first night, after I sent you inside to your happy family: how empty the car felt on the drive home, how I had to turn off the music and endure the quiet you left behind in case, if I listened hard enough, the night could tell me what to do.

I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH, NOT ANYMORE. The dreams came for me, came even when I hid under the covers and tried to stay awake. A ring of clasped hands around the bed, singing their love for Jesus; the nightmare girls closing in, fingers like spiders, creepy-crawling across bare skin. I was always naked. I never struggled, in the dream. I went stiff, corpse-like, made myself into dead weight. They chanted about Christ and I chanted to myself, light as a feather stiff as a board light as a feather stiff as a board, magic words from a time when we were all little pagans summoning ghosts.

They carried me away into the night, into the woods. Down the dark path, where the bad things live. They tore out my beating heart, their jaws sticky with my blood, and buried it in wet ground. They knew my secret self, the scarecrow-Lacey built of twigs and mud and bark, the Lacey who was made of forest and would someday be summoned home.

SO, FUCK YOU. THAT’S WHAT I thought. Fuck you and your new bitch friend, and don’t think I’ll be waiting around to mop up the blood when a certain treasonous sociopath stabs you in the back. I could have forgiven you for lying to me — maybe, even, for assuming I was so stupid that I wouldn’t clue in to what happened at that party, or at least what people said happened, that the rumors wouldn’t trickle down to me and that I couldn’t understand all the things you must have been, sad and scared and humiliated and angry at yourself for whatever you’d done and whatever’d been done to you and angry at me for letting it. I could have told you about the things hiding inside you, about the secrets I kept for you, the wild you didn’t want to know; I could have held you and remembered with you, and together we would have sworn our revenge and pledged that no one else mattered, that words were only words even when they said whore and slut and trash, that we could endure anything if we did so as us. That’s what was hard to forgive, Dex. That you forgot how much you needed me. And apparently the other side of the equation never even occurred to you.

So I was angry, and maybe, when I ambushed your father at the movie theater, I was looking for a little vengeance, thinking I could go through with it, could shimmy over in my leather cutoffs and fishnets, let him think it was his idea, make him beg for it, crook a finger into his collar, tug him into the projection room, slide his hand down my shorts, let his fingers root around, get good and wet, lick myself off him, lick him up and down in all his flabby glory, rub his hairy back and tug those sagging balls, let him bend me over a desk or shove me up against a wall, fumble with his belt buckle, whip it out, then slip it in, both of us panting and crying and trying not to scream your name.

In his defense, he wasn’t happy to see me.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” He looked over his shoulder as he said it, like someone would wander into the manager’s office to catch us, even though the building was empty, no one but us and a couple blue-hairs who had nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon than lose themselves in a movie before slinking home to count the minutes till death.

“Hi, Lacey,” I said. “So great to see you again after all this time, Lacey. How did the whole getting-tossed-out-of-the-house-and-sent-away-by-a-crazy-bastard thing work out for you, Lacey?”

“Hi, Lacey.” We were past nicknames; this time, only real words, only truth.

“Hi, Jimmy.”

“How about you call me Mr. Dexter.”

“We wouldn’t want to be inappropriate.”

I could tell from his twitchy face that he felt guilty, not just about the night he let me kiss him and then threw me out on the street, but also about the fact that he’d kept all of it a secret. I guessed, even before he confessed it, that he felt like shit for shutting his mouth and letting you mope around the house like your dog had gotten chomped up by the lawn mower. He was a liar and a coward, and he’d convinced himself you were better off without me, and once he figured out his mistake it was too late to say anything without revealing himself as a pussy. And here’s something to feel good about, Dex: The last thing your father ever wanted to do was that. Every little girl’s daddy is a superhero, isn’t that right?

“You got your small talk, Lacey. You can go now.”

“Please, can we talk for a second? For real?” I let him hear some keening underneath, the dog whistle of desperation. Men are men, Dex, all of them. “Please, Mr. Dexter.”

That got him.

I put on a good show. Begged him to make you give me another chance, remember how good I was for you. To do whatever it is that good fathers do to guide their daughters down the righteous path, to guide you back to me.

“I’m sorry, Lacey,” he said, and sounded it. “Dex is a big girl now. She picks her own friends.”

It was him calling you Dex that did it, like even if he couldn’t come right out and admit it, he was rooting for us, and the part of you that belonged to me.

Men are predictable. He hugged me. It was a dad hug, and don’t think I don’t know what that feels like. To feel so small, so safe, to feel a warm body and steady breathing and accept it as an end in itself, not an offer or a promise or a debt. I got snot on his shirt, and neither of us cared, and nothing twitched below his waist. It was a caesura, like the silence before a hidden track, a dark to hide in. The good kind of dark.

“Let’s watch a movie,” he said when we let go.

“Don’t you have to work?”

He shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

We slipped into the theater midway through Sneakers and watched Robert Redford save the day, then ventured out to the alley and shared a cigarette, and it would have been that easy, just the way I’d wanted it, except I didn’t want it anymore, didn’t want him for the purpose of hurting you, didn’t want him at all.

Wanted you.

Missed you.

Took what I could get.

THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR me in the house anymore. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and while I was gone James Jr. filled up the empty space. Little baby, big lungs. Lots of blue plastic crap, bright with stars and monkeys and terrifying clowns. Unwashed bottles, filthy diapers, the smell of lotion and shit, dried trickles of drool and puke, and, of course, the baby himself, the fucking baby, bright-eyed and apple-cheeked and looking at me like he remembered the time I baptized him into the church of Satan and was just waiting till he was old enough to tattle.

Home sweet home: The house was the Bastard incarnated in brick and vinyl. Fake siding outside and fake wood floors inside, grimy kitchen that never got clean. Wallpaper that looked like little James had puked it up, paisley blotches of half-digested peas and corn. I hated that most of all, because I knew my mother hated it even more but was too lazy and cheap to do anything about it. That wallpaper, Dex, that’s everything my life is not going to be.

The Bastard wasn’t around as much as he used to be, but when he was home, his mood was foul enough to make up for it. While I was gone he’d apparently discovered the limits of paper pushing. It turned out getting to play Mussolini to an office of stoned telemarketers wasn’t as much fun as he’d expected, and his election campaign for an open slot on the school board had — praise be to whatever saint watches over public education — stalled out at the signature-collection stage. Maybe even the dim bulbs of Battle Creek could sense he was a repellent toad; more likely, my reputation preceded him. Let him rant all he wanted about satanism being a phantom of an overheated imagination, about the devil wearing subtler costumes; he wore his costume and I wore mine, and too bad for him if mine was more effective, because when he called Horizons they told him I was saved and refused to take me back.

Meanwhile, Mother of the Year had started drinking again for real. I kept her secret. I had plenty of practice picking up her slack, though this was the first time the slack was the kind that habitually shit itself. I’m not going to say we bonded, me and baby brother, but helpless things are genetically designed to be cute. Big head, big eyes, some kind of protect me pheromone; there was even the occasional moment when I would bounce him on my shoulder and whisper in his ear and not be tempted to drown him in the tub while Mommy Dearest slept it off.

“You’d be better off,” I told him, and then, because no one was watching, kissed that soft little baby head and let him wrap his warm little baby fingers around my thumb. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”

It was James Jr. that did it, in the end. Or maybe it was just me, fucked by habit, the lie slipping out before I had a chance to think. My mother had gotten drunk, left the baby alone, and that’s how the Bastard found him, squealing in a soggy diaper in an empty house, and “What kind of mother?” and “I should call the police” and “If you think I’m letting you anywhere near my son again” and “How many times do I need to teach you the same fucking lesson” and the Bastard thought cursing was spitting in the face of Jesus — that’s how mad he was — what was I supposed to do but say it was my fault?

“I promised I would babysit,” I told him. “I thought I could just sneak out for a few minutes and no one would know.”

She let me lie for her, and I let his hand crack hard across my cheek, and I guess we both thought it would end there, but when it didn’t, when he made her choose, her daughter or his son, she let the lie sit, and so I did as I was told, packed up my shit and left.

“You’re an adult now,” she said. That’s all she said. “You can handle it.”

WHEN KURT’S MOTHER KICKED HIM out, he had to live under a fucking bridge. At least I had the Buick. I could shower in the locker rooms before school or, if I felt like it, at Jesse Gorin’s house. He didn’t even make me suck him for the privilege. Once I caught him jerking off, and he liked that so much that occasionally I watched, but it was never a quid pro quo kind of thing. More of a favor, like how I kept him company while he listened to his death metal shit and pretended it didn’t make my ears bleed. Sometimes we’d drag the action figures out from the back of the closet and make He-Man blow Skeletor or G.I. Joe take it in the ass, then watch old metal videos until the sun came up.

It wasn’t the safest thing for him, for any of them, being seen with me. Considering what people thought they were. Considering what I was trying pretty fucking hard to be. I even apologized once, if you can believe it. “Sorry,” I said — and you’ll have an even tougher time believing this, but I actually was—“if I’m bringing down extra shit on you guys.”

He shook his head. “Do what you do. They deserve it.” Then he showed me the box in the basement where he’d stowed all his old devil crap, the incense and the blades and some cheap polyester hoods, and told me to knock myself out.

Jesse got me a job at the Giant, where they didn’t give a shit about devil worship as long as I remembered to double bag. If life were a movie, I would have gotten a job at some down-and-out record store, enlightening losers who were still jonesing for New Kids on the Block and learning valuable life lessons from my grizzled yet sexy boss, who would hold out for a few months, like a gentleman, before hoisting me onto the counter and ringing me up. Instead I got Bart the produce guy, who looked a little like Paul McCartney if you squinted; Linda the meat lady, who was pretty sure she could convert me back to the Lord with a couple pot roast dinners; and Jeremy, our sleaze of a manager, who hit on every double-X chromosome in sight except for me.

Sleep was hard; everything hurt too much. There were noises. Engines and sirens and crickets and planes, nothing to keep out the night. I waited for footsteps, a tap on the glass, a face at the window. When it happened, and sometimes it did, I could rev the engine and go.

I could have gone for good. I stayed for you. The two of us heading west, together, that was always the plan.

If I’d asked, you would have said: Go. You would have drawn me a map. Like a little kid crushing her tiny fists together and telling her mommy I hope you die. You don’t believe a little girl like that. You pat her on the head and wait for the tantrum to pass. That’s called faith.

You know I think it’s bullshit: faith, superstition, some sixth sense knowing that actually means wishing or pretending or ignoring. But you’ve got to believe in something. I believe gravity will keep me from floating into space and that people came from monkeys. I believe that sixty percent of anything the government says is a lie, and that conspiracy theorists belong in the same nuthouse as alien abductionists and the Elvis lives crowd. I believe that Democrats are criminals but Republicans are sociopaths; I believe that space is infinite and consciousness is finite; I believe that my body is my body and rapists should have their balls cut off; I believe that sex is good and the deterministic universe is a quantum illusion; I believe that global warming is increasing and the hole in the ozone is widening and nuclear proliferation is worsening and germ warfare is coming and we are all ultimately fucked. Those are my foundations, Dex, my unquestionables. The gospel of Lacey: I believe in choice and words and genius and Kurt. I believe in you.

I DON’T BELIEVE IN OUR DARK Lord of the Underworld or the rising of the Antichrist, I don’t believe in child sacrifice or wild midnight blood rituals, and I don’t believe that I can call on the power of Satan to knock some cheerleader off her pyramid. Wearing black felt safe. Wearing it on my skin, the mark of something vicious, that felt right. All the rest of it, that was crap. But: Sarah, Allie, Paulette, Melanie. . I wanted them to hurt, and they hurt. That’s power, Dex. You don’t need magic to make people believe what you want them to believe. Believing can hurt most of all.

“What’s with all this Satan shit?” your dad asked me once.

I’d started sneaking off to see him a few times a week. We talked over boring movies in empty theaters, and talked more in the alley, always sharing a cigarette, like smoking half didn’t count. He told me about the first time he went to the movies and how back in the dark ages it felt like an occasion, and I told him that his beloved Woody Allen was a hack and if he really wanted art he should try Kurosawa or Antonioni. He looked at me the way you used to look at me, like I knew a secret and if I was nice I might spill. We didn’t talk about his wife; we tried not to talk about you. Mostly, we talked about music. I would stick the headphones over his ears and play him snatches of the Melvins or Mudhoney. Never Kurt, though. I saved Kurt for us.

I took a long drag on the Winston. “It’s not what people think, pentagrams and blood sacrifice and all that. As religions go, satanism makes a lot of sense.”

“Translation: You’re desperate for attention.” He tossed the butt and ground it out with his heel. “Teenagers.”

I liked that he was so sure there could be nothing to it, that I was harmless.

We stayed on the fringes of the day, early matinees or midweek midnight showings that no one bothered to see, and I made sure never to approach him in the presence of witnesses. It didn’t even faze me, the morning I spotted Nikki slumped in the back row. She didn’t see anything; your father was shuffling paperwork and I was half napping through The Last of the Mohicans. Even if she had noticed me, there was nothing to see. So I didn’t tell him about it, and I didn’t stop. I thought we were safe. Too bad I wasn’t the witch they all thought I was, or I would have known better.

He made me mixtapes from old eight-tracks and tried to convince me that the Doors were rebels. A mixtape’s the best kind of love letter, everyone knows that, and I think maybe he loved me a little, or at least he loved who he got to be when he was with me — the old Jimmy Dexter, the one who still had all his hair. He told me all about his band: the time they got fifty bucks to play a wedding, then got so wasted on free wine he puked on the bride’s shoes; the time they came this close to a record deal but lost out because the bass guitarist got drafted; the many times he’d retreated into his parents’ garage with his guitar and tuned out all of existence except the strings, the chords, the music, the joy. I told him he should start it up again, or at least duck into the garage once in a while and turn up the volume on his life — that was for you, Dex. Because music, that’s one place where your father’s more like me than like you; it’s blood and guts for him, and living without it is what makes him pathetic. I thought if he could get it back, maybe you could get him back — the him you never knew. That Jimmy died in childbirth, and he never even held it against you.

EVERY DAY, I WATCHED YOU pant after Nikki. Every day, I watched out for you, waiting for her to make her move. The Halloween decorations came out and forgetting the woods got harder every day and I knew Nikki would be feeling the same jitters, that she’d be feeling the bad things coming and would do anything to stave them off, especially if it meant hurting me. She knew how to hurt me.

We had made our sacred promise, Nikki and I. We had sworn our blood oath. Confessions swallowed, guilt strangled, sins buried in salted ground. We played our games and waged our proxy wars. We bloodied you in the crossfire.

But we had promised. To leave death in the woods, and to forget.

The Spanish Inquisitors, before they tortured, would lay out their instruments, one cruel blade after another, show you what was to come, and this was considered torture in itself. This was my torture: What she knew. What she might tell you.

What you would do.

DEX, Love Buzz

OCTOBER WAS A GOOD TIME for witches. Even a town as frightened of the devil as ours went all out for Halloween. As soon as the sun set on Labor Day, Battle Creek embraced its dark side. Fanged pumpkins grinned from porches, pulpy gap-toothed smiles gleamed in windows, the candles at their hollow center casting every night in brimstone glow. Pale-faced cardboard vampires dangled from lampposts, at least until the raccoons got to them. You’d find them mangled in the street, dappled with rabid blood.

Halloween had been my favorite holiday when I was a little kid. The candy, the masks, the opportunity to disappear into someone else, if only for a night. The possibility that the world held just a little bit of magic, that any door could be a passageway to wonders. That a child could slip into the dark and never be seen again. Things changed once I figured out monsters were real. Battle Creek Halloween wasn’t for the weak: The hours between sundown and sunrise were anarchic, roving gangs of teenagers set free from the bounds of civility giving in to their inner brutes. Rotten eggs flew; toilet paper soared; mailboxes burned and cats screamed. November first’s crime blotter always overflowed its page: trespassing, vandalism, guns fired into the night, houses and people entered without permission, and those were just the sins that someone had bothered to report.

It had never seemed like a coincidence that Craig Ellison killed himself on Halloween. He’d retreated to a haunted sanctum; its ghosts had claimed him. So maybe it wasn’t just Lacey who made October feel like an avalanche, the days rushing all of us toward cliff’s edge. Maybe it was the memory of Halloweens past, the glow of pulpy teeth, the haunted Ellisons shuffling through town pale and gaunt as the season crept closer to the anniversary of their nightmare. Even the sticky, hot weather that refused to turn felt like a warning: Bad things were on their way.

Small wonder that, as one golden girl after another dropped, the town went fucking nuts. The thing had a momentum all its own. Girls I was certain Lacey had never met, girls mousier and twitchier than even I’d been in the days before Lacey, fled to the nurse and eventually the newspaper, having woken to discover a suspiciously shaped rash or strange streaks sparking across their vision. Diagnosis: Satan. Three girls struck simultaneously with laryngitis attributed their silence to Lacey’s dark powers — until it turned out the student council president had given all three of them a key to the student council office, along with gonorrhea of the throat. A third-string goalie insisted Lacey had offered him a blow job in the woods and, in a devilish bait and switch, dragged him to a satanic coven instead. He made it all the way to the local news, spinning a tale of whirling dervishes, bloodletting, face painting, and an orgy in which he wasn’t allowed to take part, that last seeming to be his main complaint. Finally, Battle Creek could put name to its enemy. There was finally something to fight, and fighting was crucial, for if someone didn’t do something soon, it was said, surely it was only a matter of time before another Craig.

We didn’t actually believe it, of course. We believed it without believing it; we made a joke of it, and the joke made it easier to be afraid. We wanted to be scared, like a kid hiding under the covers, screaming, waiting for Daddy to come in and banish the monster — because it was an excuse to stay awake, because it was fun to scream, because it felt good to have a father strong and sure rest a hand on your forehead, because the closet was deep and shadowed and, in the end, who knew what might be hiding in the dark. We didn’t believe it, but we wanted to; we believed it, but we made ourselves laugh it away. It was a joke on Lacey, letting her believe we believed it, a nasty joke on her and on the grown-ups, who didn’t understand the nuances of such belief, who saw black lipstick and pentagram tattoos and fainting girls and were convinced.

I say we, but of course I mean they. After Lacey, I couldn’t go back to being one of them. I couldn’t believe, or let her suspect I did. I could only wonder. Had she lost it so thoroughly — or was it all a show, maybe even for my benefit? To what end, I couldn’t imagine, didn’t want to.

“This is what she does,” Nikki told me, and while she didn’t sound frightened, she didn’t sound entirely unfazed, either. “She plays games. She stirs shit up. Notice how she’s only careless with other people. So that, when the time comes, they’re the ones who get hurt. But you know that. Don’t you?”

We had yet another assembly, of course. This time, Principal Portnoy warned us that it was a matter of our souls. He called Barbara Fuller to the stage—“concerned parent,” though her kid was six — who in turn introduced the great Dr. Isabelle Ford herself, national devil-worship expert, renowned pamphleteer. Probably got her PhD in bullshit, Lacey would have said if she’d been next to me in the back row rather than hiding out by the Dumpsters with her new friends and a joint. Ford and Fuller acted out a skit in which the doctor invited Mrs. Fuller to a coven. Satanism was contagious, they warned, and the eyes of the audience turned to me. “Just say no,” the doctor reminded us. Nancy Reagan’s magic bullet; it was all they knew, and for all they knew, it worked.

IT WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE Halloween when Nikki cornered me in the bathroom and suggested we cut school. The Ides of October. I should have been more careful.

“I’m desperately craving a movie,” she said.

“Pretty sure the only thing playing during the day is The Mighty Ducks, Nikki.”

“I’ll endure,” she said, and because I had several free coupons tucked into my wallet and those days my father mostly worked nights, I went for it.

It wasn’t until the lights went up — on a movie that managed to kill my enervated crush on Emilio Estevez for good — that I saw them. I’d noticed their silhouettes in the front row, but hadn’t recognized them, his boxy and hers elfin, the two of them bent together in conversation, her shoulders bouncing with laughter. The credits unspooled. They stood up. They turned around.

It was like walking in on a scene from your own life and realizing the details weren’t anything like what you remembered — the seats blue instead of red, the floor sticky with nacho cheese instead of soda, the father older and balder, the girl wearing the wrong face. My father, with the wrong daughter. My father, with a beer in one hand and Lacey in the other.

“Dex,” Lacey said, then stopped.

There was a tugging on my arm. I remembered Nikki. Remembered that my legs could move, that I could carry myself away, and so I did, running, not listening to the thud of boots as she came after me or the absence where he didn’t, running flat out until I got to Nikki’s car, pressed myself against it, home base, all safe, cool metal holding me up, and then somehow I was inside the car and we were driving away.

“God, she is disgusting,” Nikki said. “What is wrong with her? And him! I mean, God.”

I made some kind of noise, something squeaky and mouse-like. Most of me was still back there with them in the dark.

“I’m getting you drunk,” Nikki said.

“I don’t drink,” I said, because I didn’t, not anymore — it wasn’t safe. Then I remembered that nothing was safe and so what the fuck was the difference.

We went to the train station.

We went to the train station and got drunk off the wine coolers that Nikki had in her trunk, tucked beside her father’s video camera, which those days she rarely left home without. We sat on the edge of the tracks and guzzled the wine coolers, letting the ground go wobbly beneath our feet and the world turn fuzzy at its corners. We didn’t talk about what my father was doing with Lacey or what Lacey was doing with my father.

I did not think about what they had done when I left, whether they’d parted ways or whether they’d sat down together, were still together, talking about me and what made me so difficult to love. Whether Lacey put her hand over his and assured him he was still a good father; whether my father rubbed her back in slow circles, like he did when I was little and needed to be sick, promising her that everything would be all right, he would always love her, his special girl.

I was sick, straight down into the tracks, which had surely seen worse.

“Gross,” Nikki said, and by then we were drunk enough that all we could do was laugh.

We were drunk enough to set up the camera and put on a show.

This time, Nikki played herself. She let me be Craig.

“I killed you.” She slung an arm around me, her breath hot on my neck. “And now you’re back to haunt me, and I can’t blame you, because I fucking killed you.”

“I did it to myself,” I said, because whatever she thought she’d done, it was physics that sealed the deal: cause and effect, finger on trigger, trigger on bullet, bullet on skull.

“You could never do anything yourself. You made me do it all for you so you could blame me, and now I get to blame myself, thanks a fucking lot, and that’s why I hate you. I always fucking hated you.”

“I loved you,” I said, and she kissed me, and we were slippery and wine-tongued together, and she tasted sweet, and before I could wrap my muddy head around it or touch my palm to her neck or feel her fingers scrape against the fuzz at the back of mine, it was over.

Nikki was beautiful. Nikki had always been beautiful. I’d always known that, but I tried to know it differently now, to take in the specifics of her long eyelashes and the silk of her hair, the pull of her shirt against her skin and the expanses where pale flesh peeked through, soft and warm. I asked myself if I wanted more, if this was, finally, the shape of me.

“You can never tell anyone,” Nikki said softly.

“We were acting. It was no big deal.” It didn’t count when you were playing let’s pretend; nothing counted when you were drunk.

“Not the fucking kiss. I mean what I said. That I killed him. This is the secret place. No one can know what happens here.”

“You didn’t kill him, Nikki. You know that, right? Unless you came here with him and pulled the trigger. Did you do that?”

“I did not pull the trigger. I did not do that. I did not.”

“Then you didn’t kill him. Say it.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

There wouldn’t be another moment, not like this. “What happened here, Nikki? What happened to him?”

I’d never asked her so directly before, and I thought she’d be angry, or at least surprised, but she only looked bored. “Everyone knows what happened, Hannah. Old news. Bang bang, you’re dead, et cetera. Next question.”

“Why, then?” Which was, of course, the same question. The only question.

She shrugged, elaborately.

“Then why blame yourself?”

“Who the fuck knows, Hannah? Why does anyone blame themselves for anything? Oh, wait — I forgot who I was talking to.” She tossed back her head and laughed out a cloud of spittle and fumes.

I punched her. It could be this way between us, today, after what we’d seen. No walls. “What?”

She choked on the words, but I was patient. I waited.

“You. You, of all people. Telling me I’m not responsible for what someone else does.”

“You’re not.”

She seized my shoulders. “Real talk, Hannah?”

“Okay.” I thought she might kiss me again. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t not want it, either.

“Kettle, meet black pot. Or, I mean, you’re like the kettle calling the pot— Wait.”

I giggled. “You’re drunk, Nikki.”

“You’re drunk.” Which was what a drunk would say, and also true.

“It’s pot calling the kettle black.”

“Yes! That! You! You.” She poked me hard, just above my left nipple. “How about you take responsibility? Lacey’s got you so fucking brainwashed, poor little Dex, can’t do anything on her own, needs big bad Lacey to protect her. You ever ask yourself why she’d bother with you if you were that pathetic? Where’s the fun in that? What’s fun is fooling someone who’s strong into forgetting that she is. And it must have been so fucking easy for her. You want to forget. You’re begging for it.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, because the ground was shifting and the air was blurry and my ears buzzed. It was easier to let the words plunk down, drop by drop, no stream of meaning, just disconnected sounds.

“How about Lacey didn’t make you do anything, and I never made you do anything, and you went to that fucking party and took off your fucking clothes and passed the fuck out all on your own, and stop being a fucking victim all the fucking time because it gets. So. Fucking. Tired.”

“Oh.”

I was weaving and spinning, and the heartbeat in my head insisted: Pain, pain, pain.

“Are you going to cry? Hannah? Hannah Banana?” She shook me. “Say something. Don’t cry.” Her lower lip jutted out, and even in a pantomime of a pout, she was still pretty. “You said real talk.”

“You said real talk.”

“I did? That’s right. I did.” And then she was laughing again, and I was laughing, and we were on our backs looking up at twirling sky, and my brain untethered from my body and spiraled up toward the blue. The day fell away, even Lacey fell away, and I was here, in this moment, with myself, and the ground was wet and the air was warm and everything was exactly enough.

“I forgive you,” I told her. “I forgive everything and everyone. My heart is as big as the world.”

“But not Lacey,” she said.

“Never Lacey,” I said.

“Your turn.”

“My turn what?”

“Your turn real talk,” she said. “Harsh truths. Or truth or dare. Or just dare. Whatever the fuck. Your turn.”

On our backs, staring at the sky, fingers Michelangelo’d toward each other. I’d missed it, that sense of floating away from myself, everything so easy.

“Okay. Dare you to say something true. Really true.”

“I always speak the truth.”

“Lie!” I giggled. “Dirty, filthy lie.”

Nikki sat up. “We can’t all be like you, Hannah, just saying whatever the hell we feel like. No act. No costume. It’s hard to be naked all the time.”

“I am never naked,” I said, mustering my dignity. “Except in the shower. Always in the shower.”

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“What? Showers? How filthy are you?”

“No. I mean being you.”

It was truth-telling day. It was the sacred, truth-telling place, that’s what she’d said. “Shitty. Scary. Hard.”

“That’s what I figured.”

I sat up. Put an arm around her, which was weird, because we never touched, but not so weird, because we’d already made out. “You should try it more often. Naked. People would like you better.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Screw them.”

“Screw them,” she said, and guzzled another wine cooler — one, two, three long gulps and it was gone. I wanted to throw up again just watching her.

“You know what you’re doing, right?” I meant with the booze; I meant with me; I meant with losing Craig and trying not to lose it entirely and holding her shit together so she could be the Nikki Drummond her whole world needed her to be.

She grinned, kissed me on the forehead, a quick graze of lip and, so quick I might have imagined it, darting cat tongue. It was such a Lacey move that for just a second I lost the thread, closed my eyes and imagined the three of us together — Lacey, Nikki, and me — fingers threaded, eyes glazed, love buzzing through us, this sacred place with its dead trains and its ghosts a chaos engine to drive us all into the impossible.

“I always know what I’m doing,” Nikki said, and her voice woke me up.

I HAD TO GO HOME SOMETIME. When I did, my father was waiting up for me. He sat on the porch, mug in his hand, hiding behind his aviators. There was no reflection, in the dark.

“I covered for you with your mother,” he said.

“My hero.”

“Hannah—” He leaned in. “Are you drunk?”

“Jealous?”

“Given the. . circumstances, I won’t tell your mother, but—”

“But? But what? I should be better behaved?”

“If you want to talk about what you saw today. .”

“No.” I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want him to talk, certainly.

“I can imagine what you thought. But it wasn’t that.”

“Oh, really? What is it you imagine I think? Do I think you’re fucking her?”

“Hannah!”

“Do you think I’ve got that picture in my head? You and her, naked in some shitty motel? Or just doing it in the empty movie theater? Like some dirty old man at a porn movie. Except it’s in 3D?”

“We can talk in the morning, when you’re feeling”—he cleared his throat—“more yourself. But please know, it was nothing like that.”

“Of course it was nothing like that. You’re a fat old man,” I said, thinking, Hurt. Hurt more. “You can’t think you had a chance there.”

“Lacey needed someone to talk to. That’s all. Swear to God.”

I did believe him. Mostly. Almost entirely. He didn’t want to sleep with Lacey; he wanted to father her. He thought that made it better.

I stepped around him. “You don’t get us both.”

“You, uh. . You won’t mention this to your mother, right, kid?”

I’d loved it, once, when he called me that. I couldn’t remember why.

“It never happened,” I said, and he must have thought I meant the day, and not everything before it and everything between us, because he looked relieved.

I DIDN’T WAIT AROUND FOR LACEY to apologize. Never apologize—I remembered that much. I avoided her at school and my father at home. Girls got rashes and dizzy spells. Battle Creek cowered from the devil. October continued apace.

Then, a week before Halloween, the thunderstorm. One last gasp of summer before the snows set in. The thunder sounded its summons, and even though I did not want to miss her, did not want to see her, did not want to want her, I gave in. The night felt unreal, the landscape lashed with wind and water. Like temporarily we’d slipped into another world, where nothing had to count.

I waited until my parents were asleep, stole the car keys, drove to our lake. How surprised she would be, I thought, when she saw that I’d learned to drive without her.

There was no question she would be there. For the storm, for me. There are irresistible forces, but there are no immoveable objects. The storm called; we always answered.

She looked inhuman, spattered with mud, slick and shiny in the headlights, some wild, watery creature of the night.

“You weren’t invited,” she said when I reached her. “You’re not welcome.”

It’s a free country, I could have said, like a little kid, but I knew I was trespassing, that everything ours was actually hers. She’d gotten custody of the wild.

I wasn’t welcome, but when I sat on the dock, she lowered herself beside me. We sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough that low voices could cross the void. Her cheek shimmered. Rain hung on her lashes. She dropped her head, hiding her eyes, exposing the soft, pale slope of her neck and shoulders. The tattoo was a black smear, ballpoint rivulets tracing dark veins down her spine.

I touched the smudge that had once been a star. “Everything about you is a lie.”

She raised her head just enough to show her smile. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Then she rag-dolled down again. “I know what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that with him.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking. Not anymore.”

She only laughed.

“You’ve got to quit with this devil stuff, Lacey.”

“What are you worried about? What are they going to do to me? Drown me in a well? Exorcise me?”

“Expel you, for one.”

“Ooh, scary.”

“And, I don’t know. What are you going to do if someone really gets hurt?”

“How could anyone getting hurt be my problem? You don’t actually think I’m doing something to them?” Lacey shook herself like a dog. The spray was colder than the rain.

“You know this town, Lacey.”

“And this is your problem how?”

She had me there.

“I’d save your worry for yourself,” Lacey said.

“I’m fine.”

“Something bad is coming.”

“Is that supposed to be a prophecy?” I said. “Or, what? A threat?”

“Dex—” She breathed. Our shoulders rose and fell together. In, out. Slow, steady. Breathe, Dex. Breathe, Lacey. “I want you safe, Dex. That’s all I want.”

Nikki would have said she was jealous. That she needed me to need her, no matter how much it hurt.

“It wasn’t about you, this thing with your dad,” Lacey said. “And the Nikki thing, that’s not about you, either.”

“Yeah, of course, it’s about whatever mysterious secret conspiracy you can’t let me in on. I got that.”

“What’s between me and Nikki. . it’s about Craig.”

“You say that like it means anything. Like I’m supposed to pretend it’s an answer when we both know it’s not.”

I didn’t actually expect it would make her explain herself; nothing could make Lacey do what she didn’t want to.

She said it quietly. “She thinks it’s my fault.”

All the little ways Nikki had tried to turn me against Lacey, the way she’d taken a razor blade, ever so carefully, to my faith in her, shaving it away in impossibly thin slices until there was almost nothing left — all that time, she’d said nothing of this.

Maybe, I thought, it was just another lie. But that wasn’t Lacey’s way. Lacey lied with silence.

“Go ahead.” She sounded ancient with exhaustion, like there was nothing left to do but wait for bones to crumble to dust. “Ask me if it was. My fault.”

I shivered, and wiped the rain from my forehead. The lake water danced, leaping for the clouds.

“It wasn’t all bad, was it, Dex?”

I couldn’t lie in a storm. “None of it was bad.” I took her hand. There was no thought behind it, just bodily need, to press our slippery skin together. To hang on. “Say it, Lacey. Whatever it is. Make it better.” She was the witch, wasn’t she? I willed her: Summon the words.

She squeezed. “Let’s start fresh, Dex. Fuck the past.”

I didn’t see how she could say it when the past was everything. The past was where Dex and Lacey lived. If she erased that, there would be nothing left of us.

“I never tried to hide you away,” Lacey said. “I never kept you a secret.” Somehow we were talking about Nikki again. I didn’t want her there, between us. “People only keep secrets when they’re ashamed.”

“You keep plenty of secrets.”

“But you were never one of them, Dex.”

I couldn’t say it made no difference.

“Miss me?” she asked.

“You’re right here.”

Lacey took my face in her hands. Her fingers were spindlier than I remembered. Everything about Lacey, I realized, had become more angular. Her collarbone jutted out; her shoulders and elbows looked sharp enough to cut.

“You really don’t,” she said, wonder in her voice.

My chest hurt. I couldn’t speak with her fingertips burning against my chin and cheek and lip. When I didn’t correct her, she launched herself off the dock and into the lake.

I screamed her name.

Splashes in the dark. The familiar laugh. Thunder. “Come on in!” she shouted. “The water’s fine.”

“It’s a fucking lightning storm!”

“Still a coward,” she shouted, and disappeared into the black.

Those long seconds of still water and empty night, nothing but rain and lightning and me, and Lacey somewhere beneath; seconds and seconds waiting for her to surface, gasping and laughing and alive.

There was time to wonder: Whether she could be trusted to save herself. Whether I could. Dive into dark water, impenetrable as sky. Weightless, kicking down and down, reaching for something limbed and heavy sinking to muddy bottom. Lacey would fight me, that was Lacey’s way, pull at my hair, climb up my body, so desperate for surface, for air, for life, that she would drag us both down.

I stood at the edge of the dock, heels on the wood, toes hanging over air, willing myself to jump.

The lake was endless dark. And there she was, floating moon of a face. Another game. Now we both knew who had won, because there she was in the water, and here I was on the shore.

Inside the car it was warm and dry, enough so that I was tempted to curl up in the front seat and sleep. Instead I started the engine and left her there, with her water and her storm, knowing the lightning would never dare strike.

SHE GOT IN MY HEAD. That Friday, when Nikki called me to bitch about the sleepover she’d been suckered into throwing, the tedious effort of putting on a happy face for her supposed friends and said, “I’m tired of all this crap, wish you could just come over and watch bad movies,” I broke our unspoken agreement and said, “Well, I could.”

“Could what?”

“Come over. Watch bad movies, or whatever.”

“I told you, I can’t get out of this party.”

She wasn’t so stupid; she was making me spell it out. “No, I mean, I could come to the party.”

“Oh, Hannah, you know you would hate that. Like, actively, puke your guts out. You hate those bitches.”

“So do you.”

“And trust me, if I could run away to your place and let the animals take over the zoo, I would, but my mother would kill me if one of them peed on the carpet.”

I was lying on my bed, watching the ceiling, counting the cracks, trying not to care.

“You remember that pool party this summer,” she said. “A fucking train wreck.”

When I didn’t answer, she added, “And the other party.”

Now we’d both crossed a line.

There were seventy-two cracks, and also a yellowed patch in the corner where something must have been dripping from a hidden pipe. If the ceiling collapsed, I wondered, would it kill me, a blanket of plaster and dust smothering me in the night? Or would I wake up coated in asbestos, wondering why I could see the sky?

“Why aren’t you saying anything, Hannah? Tell me you understand I’m doing you a favor.”

“Sure. Thank you.”

“You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird.”

“Good. Don’t. Now you tell me something. What tells of Hannah Dexter’s excellent adventure?” She affected a Keanu drawl. “Did you have a most awesome week? Or totally bogus?”

“I talked to Lacey.”

There was a hissing on the line. It was the bad connection, but it was too easy to imagine Nikki herself, reverting to snake. She breathed out the word. “Fuck.”

“It was fine.”

“No wonder you’re being so fucking weird. Please tell me you’re not feeling sorry for her.”

“She said something about you and her,” I said, which was almost true. “And Craig.”

The snake uncoiled, struck.

“You talked to Lacey about Craig? You talked to Lacey about Craig?” She was yelling, and Nikki never yelled. “About what I’ve told you? Things I’ve never told anyone? How could you even think that was okay?”

“I didn’t! I wouldn’t!”

I protested; I swore I would never break her confidence, that Lacey had asked nothing and told even less, that it’s not like I had anything real to tell. I couldn’t ask her, not then, why she would blame Lacey for anything; I could only say I was sorry. She hung up on me.

On TV, this was the moment to throw the phone across the room, and so I did and felt like a fool.

So did she, she said, when she called back an hour later. “That was unfair of me. I’m a little sensitive about. . you know.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I know you would never tell Lacey anything. Right?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“And I’ve been thinking about this sleepover party crap. You should come — I mean, if you really want to. It’s going to be totally lame, and you’re going to hate me for inviting you, but at least it’ll be more fun for me.”

“You actually mean it?”

“I don’t do things I don’t mean, Hannah. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

I GOT THERE AT NINE, as I’d been told, but I was the last to arrive. I’d cobbled together an outfit from the Nikki-approved corner of my closet, sleeveless velour shirt in forest green, black cardigan with flared sleeves, a gray choker. I wore vanilla-scented perfume and Gorilla Grape — flavored Lip Smackers. We would all taste the same in the dark.

Mrs. Drummond fluttered a hand toward the basement. “The girls are downstairs.”

The girls: lazy cats sprawled across couches and sleeping bags, all smiles and claws, same as they were at school, same as they’d been since kindergarten, same as I remembered from the party I couldn’t remember.

The girls: Paulette Green, who no one much liked but everyone tolerated because her parents had a secret patch of pot in their vegetable garden and enthusiastically believed in pharmaceutically raising the consciousness of their daughter and her friends. Sarah Kaye, whose father had multiple sclerosis and never left the house. Kaitlyn Dyer, the sweetheart everyone loved, even me, because she was short enough to be tossed around, short and bouncy and seemingly harmless, who was such a klepto she’d tried to steal the prom fund, and who’d gotten away with super-secret double probation because when the school tried to expel her, her parents had threatened to sue. Melanie Herman, who was sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. Allie Cantor, who had herpes, and would forever.

I knew these things about them because Nikki had told me, and because she told me, I trusted her. Forgetting, eventually, that they weren’t her secrets. That the girls had trusted her, too.

The girls were laughing at something on TV, and the something was me.

Me, unconscious and drooling in the dark. Shadows, then faces, grainy on the screen, grainy in a way I recognized. That was Nikki’s father’s video camera, the one she loved so much. That was Melanie and Andy and Micah. That was a voice, in the dark, shrieking “Weekend at Bernie’s!” as brawny arms hoisted me up, danced me around, floppy and bare.

“Slut,” someone said, and a hand reached into the frame, carved a Sharpie across my stomach, S-L-U-T, then made a smiley face out of a nipple.

Girls’ laughter on the TV; girls’ laughter in the basement. Freeze-frame, rewind, fast-forward, play.

“She wants it,” a voice said off camera, and on-screen, Andy Smith lowered himself over the rag doll, ground against her, hip to hip, chest to chest, tongue slurped up her cheek, then down her sternum, then ringing the smiley face, round and round it goes.

“Take off her panties,” a voice said.

“Slip in a finger,” a voice said. “Make her wet.”

“See? She wants it,” a voice said. “She’s dripping with it.”

“Make her suck it,” a voice said. “She wants to taste it.”

Different hands, different fingers and tongues. But always the same voice. Always obeyed. And the Dex doll did whatever they made it do.

Nikki loved to direct.

“Here comes the gross part!” sweetheart Kaitlyn giggled in the basement as vomit trickled out of the girl on-screen, and that was how I knew they’d watched it before, knew it by heart.

On-screen there were groans and retching sounds, and Melanie said, “There goes the boner,” and Nikki’s voice said you can get it back and don’t be a pussy and we can’t stop now and then there was a flashing red battery light and fade to black.

Maybe I made some kind of noise.

Maybe Nikki had always known.

Of course she had known.

Nikki turned. “Oh, no. Hannah. You’re here,” she said, with no inflection. “Oh dear, I guess you saw everything.”

SOMEHOW, I GOT OUT OF there. Somehow, adjusting the mirrors, shifting the gears, signaling the turns, all as Nikki had taught me to do, I got home.

Locked in my room, on the floor.

Burning with cold fire.

What I could say now, if I could speak to her then, that girl on the floor, that girl broken: This is not your fault; this is not your story. This is not the end. This will someday end.

What I know now, what I knew then: This will never stop burning.

Hannah, burning.

Hannah, burned away, hollowed out, scoured clean, Hannah the victim, Hannah the fool, Hannah the body. Hannah, stupid. Hannah, dead.

Dex, awake.

LACEY, Come As You Are

AFTER SHE HAD HER LITTLE fun making you think I was fucking your father, Nikki came for me. It was over, obviously, whatever it was between him and me, as soon as you knew it existed. You’re lucky you ran off as fast as you did so you didn’t have to see him cry. “God, what the fuck is wrong with me, what was I doing. .” and on and on, literally ad nauseam, or maybe that’s not what made me throw up all over the parking lot, but at least once I did, he shut up. Then he told me to go home and never come back, and I said and did some things I’m not proud of, until he took my shoulders and pushed his arms out, rigid, all that empty space between us, and gave me a pretty little speech about how I should respect myself more and expect more from others, and stop thinking I’m only valuable for sex, and all the while there was that bulge in his pants that both of us had to pretend didn’t exist.

Everything as fucked-up as possible, just the way Nikki liked it, so of course that’s when she slipped the note into my locker, asking me to meet her at the lake. If it had been the station, any part of the woods, I wouldn’t have gone. But of course she wouldn’t ask that of herself. The lake seemed okay to me, because even the shitty algae slop that passed for a town lake would remind me of the lake that mattered, yours and mine, clear and blue and ours. Nikki was part of the woods, twisting trails and sinkholes and the smell of rotting bark. You were water.

I showed up early, but she was there already, sitting on the dock. When she saw me, she pulled a bottle of Malibu from her bag. “Split it?”

It was too sweet, and the smell made me sick, but I took a couple shots. Judging from the blurriness around her edges, she’d gotten a head start.

We didn’t talk much until we were both safely drunk.

“Satan, huh?” she said.

“Our Dark Lord and Savior. Wanna join up?”

“What the fuck happened to you?”

I took another swig. “Figured out I’m all alone in the world, no one loves me, and oh, yeah, a bunch of Jesus-loving psycho bitches force-fed me shit and left me in the woods to die.”

She toasted me with the Malibu. “Once a drama queen, always a drama queen.”

“Queen of the underworld now, haven’t you heard?”

That’s when she started laughing. “You’re not actually fucking Hannah’s dad, are you? I’d kill myself before letting someone that old stick it in me.”

I went cold. “Don’t say her name.”

“You really hate me, don’t you?” she said.

“Even more than you hate me.”

“Not possible.”

“Try me.”

Then her hand was on my thigh, and she was crawling up me like I was a tree, Nikki Drummond, drunk and hungry, straddling me, grinding me, tonguing my lips and tugging at my hair, saying something about how she hated it so short, then cutting off the thought by taking my fingers in her mouth and sucking, hard. Her breasts felt bigger than I remembered them, looser somehow, and there was a trickle of drool at her mouth.

“Get the fuck off.” I pushed her hard enough to hurt and hoped that it did.

“Come on, you know you want to.”

You know how they say desperation isn’t sexy? Bullshit. An ugly drunk without a shirt, wheezing rum and aiming herself at me like a torpedo of need? Pushing her away felt like kicking a puppy, and I got off on that, too.

“Maybe I’m fucking in love with you,” she said, doing that half-laugh, half-cry thing that middle-aged women do in bad movies. “Did you think of that?”

“Frankly? No.”

She sat back. “Why the fuck did you even show up, then?”

“I want to know what you want.”

“Was I not clear?”

“What you want to stay away from her.” I would have given it to her, Dex. Anything.

“You’re fucking kidding me. You want me to believe you came here to talk about Hannah?”

“Her name is Dex.”

“Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.” She laughed again. She’d amped up her acting skills since the last time we talked. She was nearly approximating human. “I get it, what you were doing. But we don’t need her anymore.”

“Since when is there a fucking we, Nikki?”

“You’re not serious.” She was touching me again, sweaty hands on hands. “What do you think your precious Dex would say if she actually knew you, Lacey? Is that what you really want, someone who can’t see you? Someone who thinks all your bullshit is for real?”

“Stop talking.”

“It’s almost a year,” she said.

“We don’t talk about that.”

“You don’t think about him? You don’t think about me?”

For a second, she almost had me. The stink of desperation, the sheen of moisture in her eyes, the pressure of her hands: She was so good at playing her part that, even knowing everything I knew, I almost bought it, that she missed me, that all this time she’d been secretly in love or lust, that she’d clawed her way into your life for the same reason I’d hung onto your father, that she didn’t hate me anymore for what we knew about each other, that the things we’d done in the woods had meant something, hadn’t been a hateful joke. Maybe I did buy it, just long enough to tell her the truth, and tell it almost gently. “Not anymore.”

She let go.

“You came here for her,” she said, and there, in the flat affect, the vacuum of her expression, was the real Nikki. “To tell me to stay away from her.”

I nodded.

“But why would I stay away from my good friend Hannah?” She was slurring; it was hard to tell how much was rum and how much was effect. “I’m protecting her. Saving her from the big bad wolf.” She smeared a hand across her nose and wiped the snot on her jeans. “Like I should have saved Craig. I’m good now. I do good works. Like Jesus.”

“I need to know what you’re going to do, Nikki. Are you going to tell her?”

Laughing again, she wouldn’t stop laughing. “Tell who? Tell what?” Then she clapped her hands together. “Oh, I get it! All this crap about staying away from Hannah — that’s not about her, that’s about you.”

“No.”

“You’re not afraid of what I’ll do to her. You’re afraid of what I’ll tell her.”

“They’re the same thing.”

“No, Lacey. One is about her. One is about you. Normal people know the difference.”

“Don’t hurt her just to fuck with me.”

“Let’s be clear. I don’t care about fucking with you any more than I care about fucking you.”

“Then why are we here?”

She left without an answer. We both knew the answer.

I made it worse. I tried to warn you, and you didn’t listen, and that part’s your fault, but the rest of it, that’s on me. What she did next. What that made you do. It was all my fault and not my fault at all, same as everything else.

WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I threw out my retainer with my lunch. Didn’t even notice until it was time to slip it back in my mouth and go to class, and that’s when I freaked the fuck out — because I could see it, wrapped in a napkin on the corner of my tray so it wouldn’t get gummy with French bread pizza. Sliding into the garbage on top of Terrence Clay’s leftover spaghetti and the tuna fish salad that Lindsay North, getting the same head start on anorexia she’d gotten on boobs, had tossed out uneaten. You want to know what my life was like before you? It was like, given a choice between going home without the retainer and taking a swim in a Dumpster, I didn’t even have to think. The janitor gave me a boost, and then watched me pick through the banana peels and clumps of spaghetti — I’ve blocked that part out, for the sake of my sanity. What I remember is that I found my retainer. I took it to the bathroom, ran it under some hot water, and — I try not to think about this, because it makes me feel like I’ve got bugs laying eggs inside my skin—I put it back in my mouth.

“Careless,” the janitor said after he pulled me out, after I’d finally stopped crying. “Means that much to you, why’d you throw it out in the first place?”

You tell me, Dex. Why would a person do that?

You came for me, like nothing had happened, like we were still Lacey and Dex, you and me forever. I felt more like a witch than usual, because I’d commanded it, you need me, and there you were. Needing me. You pretended it was a gift, like you were giving for once instead of taking, but you needed me to tell you what to do next.

You told me what my mother said when you went looking for me at the house: Lacey doesn’t live here anymore. But you didn’t say how she said it, regretful or worried or relieved. Lacey doesn’t live here anymore. Turns out that, even in Battle Creek, some secrets keep — especially when they’re about something people would rather not know.

You took her suggestion and came for me in the Giant parking lot, and when you found me, you didn’t look at me like I was some charity case, and you didn’t ask me stupid questions, you just said, Lacey, I have a surprise for you, something you’re going to like.

Lacey, trust me.

What would you have done if you’d known the truth, Dex? That when you tapped on my window, you were — for the first time in months — not even a speck on my mind. It was Halloween, and that night, of all nights, I was thinking about Craig, and about Nikki. I was thinking kind thoughts about Nikki and how I’d held her while she cried. I wondered if she felt it, on this night, dressed up somewhere in some stupid slutty kitten costume, laughing and drinking and finding someone else to make hurt as much as she did. If she’d been the one to tap at my window that night, I would have let her in, and I would have taken her into my arms and sung her to sleep. I would have given her what I owed her, because I couldn’t give her what I’d taken, and maybe she would have done the same for me.

It wasn’t her. It was you.

Your face, a ghost materializing on the other side of the glass, that hopeful smile, same as the first time I ever talked to you, like maybe, if you pressed your hand to the window, I would meet it with mine.

You had a surprise for me, you said. That night, of all nights, a surprise in the woods.

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was a girl who loved the woods, the cool sweep of browning greens, the canopy of leafy sky. Hidden in the trees, she picked flowers and dug for worms, she recited poems, timing the words to the bounce of her feet in the dirt. In the woods she met a monster, and mistook her for a friend. Into the woods they went, deeper and darker, and carved a sacred ring around a secret place, where the monster dug out pieces of the girl and buried them in the ground so that the girl could never truly leave, and never bear to return.

Once upon a time, another time, there was a girl who screamed in the forest of her dreams and woke up to grasping fingers and dead eyes, more monsters to carry her back home, and this is when the girl realized it was her fate, to live under the rotting bark and the molding stones, that she could escape, but always, somehow, the woods would claim her.

That’s your kind of story, isn’t it, everything tidied up and turned pretty. You wouldn’t like to hear that once upon a time there was a girl who got totally fucked up by what happened to her in the woods, that there was blood and piss and shit and death, that the woods were where the girl turned into a killer and a devil and a witch, and that even the thought of going back, especially to that place, on that night, made bile rise up in her throat and she had to rake her nails down her palm so hard she drew blood just to keep from screaming.

Because you asked, I followed you into the woods.

You put a scratchy tape into the Barbie player and turned Kurt all the way up, and smiled at me like this, too, was a gift. I rolled down the window so I could breathe, and pretended I was doing you a favor by letting you drive.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I said when you parked the car and we took off into the trees.

“You’ll see,” you said, but even then, I knew.

I thought Nikki must have told you the truth after all, because how else would you know about the station, why else would you make me go back?

The station was the same as we’d left it, only more weeds, more rust. You needed me to be strong, and so I was. Your Lacey wouldn’t run away; your Lacey would remember to breathe.

There’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as fate.

But there is justice.

You stopped in front of the boxcar, almost tripping over a rusted bucket brimming with brown rainwater. You rested your hand on a shiny padlock, and in the silence between our breathing, I could hear faint music, and her screams.

“Dex. . what did you do?”

“Just to be clear, this isn’t about what she did to me,” you said. Then you told me what she did to you, and I folded you into me and felt you shaking and wanted her to die. “It’s about what she did to us. That’s what she’s paying for.”

You spun the combination and opened the lock.

Here was Nikki: crouched in a corner, shaky hands splashing light at the shadows, screaming into the noise. Nikki Drummond, a scared animal in the dark.

Here was you: grinning, proud mama showing off your beautiful baby. This scene, this night that you’d made for me, birthed from idea into fact. Hannah Dexter, in the boxcar, with a knife.

“Dex, why is she naked?”

I wasn’t ready to ask you about the knife.

Nikki was on her feet, pressed into a corner, ready to pounce, her body registering something new. Incoherent screaming gave way to words. To: “Lacey.”

She was crying.

“Lacey, get me the fuck out of here, she’s gone fucking crazy, tell her to let me the fuck out.”

You were watching her, not me. You weren’t waiting for me to choose between you; it never occurred to you there was a choice. You believed in us again.

You believed in me again.

“You owe me,” Nikki said. “Look where we are. Look what night it is. You fucking owe me, and you better fucking deal with this.”

It never occurred to Nikki, either — that I might disobey, that I might not choose her, that she might want to say please. If she had, I might have done what she wanted. I’d tasted enough blood in these woods, and maybe Nikki had, too.

I wouldn’t have given her back her clothes. But I might have helped her, because I don’t hurt animals. I might have helped her — if only she hadn’t been so fucking certain that I would.

“Lacey, you have to.”

I closed her back into the dark.