Girls on Fire

THEM

NIKKI’S MOTHER HAD ALWAYS PITIED other mothers. So many of them were less comfortable, less attractive, less skilled at the intricacies of PTA electioneering and bake sale presentation. They were, in a word, less, and it was perhaps no surprise they’d raised lesser daughters. She pitied them all, because they didn’t have Nikki and she did. What good fortune, the other mothers were always saying, that you should get one like her. What a blessing, they would say, which was simply a way of reassuring themselves that they’d done nothing to deserve their inferior offspring as she’d done nothing to deserve her golden child; as if they still believed in an indiscriminate stork dropping bundles on doorsteps at random. Nikki’s mother smiled gracefully at these women, letting them have their delusions. It would be unseemly to correct them, to point out that her daughter was a culmination of good genes and good breeding, and neither of these came down to luck. That she’d worked hard to ensure she had a daughter worthy of her, and raised Nikki to appreciate that hard work and continue it on her behalf. Seventeen years of approximated perfection: hair, skin, teeth, clothes, friends, boys, everything as it should be.

The best of everything, as it should be.

Her daughter couldn’t be blamed for what that boy did in the woods — that was his parents’ cross to bear, and Nikki’s mother hoped they felt suitably guilty for what their second-rate parenting had inflicted on her daughter — but Nikki had endured the episode with dignity, and the small markers of grief, the glossy eyes and the blanching skin, had, if anything, made her even more beautiful. Nikki’s mother had encouraged her, after a suitable time passed, to choose someone else. Life was easier with a solid shoulder to lean on, or seem to, she’d taught her daughter. The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness. I don’t need another boyfriend, Nikki snapped after her mother had urged her once too often. Of course not, Nikki’s mother replied. Need was unseemly; need was itself weakness. The love that you needed was the kind best avoided. No one knew that better than Nikki’s mother. Though, of course, she couldn’t tell her daughter that.

Nikki was doing fine. Nikki was doing great. Nikki, she told herself, standing in the entryway of her daughter’s closet, trying to understand what she’d found there, wasn’t the problem.

It was, she suspected, this Hannah girl, the one who had followed her daughter around all summer like a mangy dog. Hannah Dexter, with her bad genes and worse breeding, her ill-fitting clothing and her abominable hair. It had to be Hannah’s influence that had Nikki acting so erratically. Talking back to her parents. Canceling her dates. Dyeing her hair, of all things, some cheap drugstore purple that had cost Nikki’s mother more than a hundred dollars to dye back to its original color before anyone could see. “She’s not up to your standards,” Nikki’s mother had told her daughter the other night at dinner, and Nikki had actually laughed.

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

Something was off. A mother always knows.

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

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

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

It was not acceptable, she thought.

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

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

“I put it all back,” she told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She would be fine.

A mother knows.