Girls on Fire

DEX, 1992

THERE HAD TO BE CONSEQUENCES. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.

And it had been so easy.

Nikki had called to apologize. Again, when I refused to answer, and again, when I didn’t show up at school. Fuck my parents, fuck obligation and requirement and life; I stayed in bed, I kept the door closed, I waited to feel better or feel something or die.

She left me a note in an envelope on the front porch, and it said, I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Never again. This time I mean it.

Never again. At that, I did feel something, and it filled the void. It brought me back to life.

I couldn’t figure her agenda, why it was so important to make me forgive, but this time I didn’t need to understand it. I only had to use it.

I laughed; I called her. I let her apologize to me, blame it on grief, blame it on Craig, on Lacey; she’d wanted to teach me a lesson about who I was allowed to talk to and what I was allowed to ask for, that was the explanation for this party; and as for the last one, that was a mistake, ancient history, terrible but past and she was sorry, so that should be enough. She was trying to be a different person, she said, a better person, that’s what all this had been about. She’d been stupid, then. Later, she’d been angry. Now she was just sorry, and couldn’t I just believe it.

I told her she could apologize to me if she wanted, but only in person, in the place she could be trusted to tell the truth, and on the night her ghosts would howl the loudest. Even ground: We would both be haunted. I swallowed bile and told her to meet me in the woods, and when she showed up, I was waiting.

She laughed, at first, even when she saw the devil marks I’d painted on the walls of the boxcar, the pentagram I’d smeared on the floor in pig’s blood. She laughed even when I showed her the knife.

THE KNIFE.

I brought it, but I never intended to use it. It was generic Kmart crap, its blade the length of my forearm, its edge sharpened once a season, its hilt a cheap black plastic with a leathery feel. I’d used it to chop potatoes and raw chicken, enjoyed the satisfying thwack it made when swung recklessly through the air and into a soft breast or leg or straight into the meat of the cutting board. Before Lacey, the knife was the only recklessness I allowed myself. My mother hated it, but it always made my father laugh when I held the duller edge to my neck and pretended to slit my throat. The knife had always felt like a toy, and that night was no different.

I wasn’t the kind of person who would use a knife, only the kind who would need one. Without it, Nikki wouldn’t have listened. She wouldn’t have been afraid, and I needed her to be afraid. I needed her to do what I said, to be my puppet. Letting someone else have power over you, Nikki had said, that was the only truly intolerable thing. And so she’d told me exactly how to hurt her without drawing blood.

I had dinner with my parents that night, frozen chicken fingers with frozen broccoli, which I ate without comment, knowing they could tell something was wrong, sure neither would have the nerve to ask. My father assumed everything was about him, that if he pushed too hard I’d tattle to my mother. As if I cared, anymore, what he’d been doing with Lacey; as if he could be anything to Lacey but a distraction, a horsefly buzzing at a stallion. What we had together was too big for distractions — I finally understood that. He would never understand, and maybe it was a mercy that he would never realize how much he didn’t. My mother, maybe, had a better guess, but she wouldn’t push it, either. I missed her, sometimes, the long-ago mother who was still bold enough to say, Tell me where it hurts, but maybe I’d only imagined her along with the faeries who’d once lived in the hedges and the monsters snoring under my bed.

I should have hated them both, I thought, for failing. Then I should have forgiven them, for trying. But I couldn’t be bothered. They were cardboard cutouts, Peanuts parents wah-wah-wahhing in the background, and I couldn’t feel anything for them anymore. I couldn’t feel anything but hands on my body. Strangers’ fingers. Strangers’ tongues. I couldn’t stop feeling that.

I brought the knife into the woods because I knew it was safe. Because I knew I would never use it the way it was meant to be used — I wasn’t the kind of girl who would do a thing like that. However much I might have wished otherwise.

I SHOWED NIKKI THE KNIFE. I said, “Take off your clothes.”

“Why?”

“You don’t get to ask that anymore.”

“You want to see me naked? Fine. Whatever. I always figured you were a little gay. You and Lacey both, with your perverted little—”

“Shut up. Take off your shirt, take off your pants, and toss them out the door.”

Miraculously, she did. I felt a rush of something — power, euphoria, satisfaction, maybe the simple wonder of speaking a command and seeing the world comply. There was something godlike about it: Let there be obedience, let there be fear.

I watched her strip down to her pink-laced panties. I closed her into the dark, slipped the dead bolt, and listened to her scream. I stood in the night, quiet and still, breathing and listening, palm pressed to the boxcar, picturing her on the other side, alone and naked in the dark with the pig’s blood and the death metal, her screams bouncing off the metal walls until her throat burned. Nikki, helpless and afraid, cringing from things creeping through the dark, holding on until she had no choice but to let go, and break.

Then I pulled myself away and went in search of Lacey, to make my offering.

LACEY SAID WE SHOULD TIE her up, so we tied her up. Or, rather, Lacey did, and I held onto the knife.

Lacey, Lacey, Lacey — she was back. It was hard to concentrate with her name singing through my head. All I wanted to do was cling to her, whisper apologies, make her promise all over again never to let me go.

But first I had to prove myself. So I held the blade steady while Lacey brought Nikki’s pale wrists together behind her back, wrapping them tight with the extra laces she had in her trunk. She had everything in her trunk. The laces were strong, made for combat, and Lacey bound Nikki’s waist and ankles to a rotting old chair she’d found in the station, using more laces and a bunch of leggings. This is a handcuff knot, Lacey said, twisting in elaborate loops, this is a clove hitch and this is a butterfly, and these knots will hold, Lacey said, inexplicably certain, and even if they didn’t, we still had the knife.

Once Nikki was bound up tight, Lacey held out her hand to me, palm up. She didn’t have to ask: I gave her the knife, and only after it was gone did I feel like I’d given up something that mattered.

“I have to pee,” Nikki said, like pulling out a trump card.

Lacey patted her head. “Go for it.”

Nikki spit at her face, and Lacey laughed when she missed. I laughed, too, until the smell hit me, and the flashlight exposed the dark patch spreading across Nikki’s lace panties. I expected her to look pleased that she’d called Lacey’s bluff, but she just looked like a girl who’d peed her pants and was trying not to cry.

I thought about stopping it, then.

A helpless girl, naked, tied to a chair in a dirty train car with satanic scribbles on the wall. Two wild-eyed girls looming over her, one of them holding a butcher knife. I saw it like I was seeing it onscreen, prom queen brought low, soon to have her throat slashed by monsters of her own creation, audience rooting neither for hero nor villain but only for gore. I saw the Hollywood vision but smelled the urine, half a scent away from comforting, and when I did, the girl wasn’t Nikki Drummond but any girl, sorry and afraid, and if I’d been in the audience, I would have wanted her saved.

THIS IS REAL, I THOUGHT. But many things were real. Foggy memories of hands on skin were real. Evidence captured on videotape was real. The swooping lines of black permanent marker I’d scrubbed off my skin, the taste of puke and stranger I’d brushed out of my mouth, the creeping fingers doing exactly as Nikki commanded. Real, real, real.

Surfaces were deceptive. Nikki had taught me that better than anyone. The trappings of evil were for scary movies and school assemblies; the real devil wore pink and smiled with pastel lips. And here, in the dark, we all knew who she was.

“Don’t think we’re going to feel sorry for you,” Lacey said, and she was right.

Real was the hollow space Lacey had left behind, and the lies Nikki had told me in her wake. I’d believed the witch, let her put a curse on Lacey. All those days and weeks she’d spent sleeping in her car. While I was slurping frozen yogurt at the mall and debating whether Aladdin could be fuckable even if he was a cartoon, Lacey had been alone. Because I left her that way; because Nikki had made me.

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

Lacey snorted. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’ve been here for fucking ever!” Nikki shouted. “And I’m thirsty.”

“Idea,” Lacey said brightly. Lacey loved an idea. “Dex, go get that bucket we saw outside.”

I set the bucket before her. It was corroded by what seemed like centuries of rust, filled almost to the brim with brackish rainwater.

Nikki shook her head. “No.”

“You’re thirsty, right?” Knife in hand, Lacey grabbed her hair and yanked her forward, hard enough that she toppled, chair and all, onto her knees, until her lips were nearly on the bucket rim. “Don’t you want a drink?”

“Let go.” It was a whisper. “Please don’t make me.”

“So picky,” Lacey said.

Together, we righted her; she was heavy, but she wasn’t fighting us anymore. That made it easier.

“You realize this is kidnapping, right?” All the trembly vulnerability was gone from her voice, nothing left beneath the flab but hard, pearly bone. “You’re going to be in huge trouble when you let me out of here.”

“You’re not giving us much incentive,” Lacey said.

“What are you going to do, kill me?”

“It’s so cute when you pretend to be fearless.” Lacey turned to me. “Dex thinks you’ll never tell. She thinks you’ll be too piss-scared of what people would think. Look how well she knows you.”

“Better than she knows you. Not as well as I do.”

Lacey closed in. I held the flashlight steady. The beam glinted off the blade.

“I want you to tell her what you did,” Lacey said.

Nikki tried to laugh. “I really don’t think you do.”

“At that stupid party. You tell her what you did, and you apologize.”

“How much is that going to mean, Hannah? You going to believe I’m sorry with a knife to my throat?”

The knife wasn’t at her throat.

And then it was.

“Lacey,” I said.

“It’s fine.”

It was fine.

“Tell her,” Lacey said. “Tell me. Let’s hear your confession.”

When Nikki swallowed, her throat bulged against the knife. “You want me to talk, step back,” she said, barely moving her lips. Keeping her head very, very still.

“I want you to talk carefully,” Lacey said.

Nikki swallowed again. “We were just having fun. You remember fun, don’t you, Lacey?”

Lacey kept her gaze on Nikki. “Did you have fun at that party, Dex?”

“No, I did not.” I’d brought along a bottle of my parents’ scotch, for courage, like they said in the movies, and now I took a burning swig. It was cold outside but hot in our boxcar, or I was hot, at least. Fizzing and tingling. Fire licking my throat.

“You let her drink too much,” Lacey said.

“She’s a grown-up.”

“You let her drink too much, and she passed out, and when she did. .”

Nikki didn’t say anything.

I didn’t see Lacey’s hand move, but Nikki moaned. Then, “When she did, we had a little fun, like I said.”

“You took off her clothes.”

“I guess.”

“You let your idiot friends touch her.”

“Yeah.”

“Feel her up.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck her.”

“Lacey—” I said. “Don’t.”

I wanted to know; I didn’t want to know; I couldn’t know.

I drank more.

“No,” Nikki said. “I’m not a fucking sociopath. Unlike some people.”

“Just a perv,” Lacey said, “who filmed the whole thing on her daddy’s camera. Tell us how you made them pose her. That’s still assault, you realize that, right? That’s still called rape.”

“Stop,” I said.

“I never touched her,” Nikki said.

“Of course not,” Lacey said. “Not yourself. You don’t get your hands dirty. You just make things happen.”

“Enough,” I said. Too much.

“It was harmless,” Nikki said. “Look, it was stupid, I know. I’m a bitch, I know. But it was harmless.”

That word. That she could say it. Harmless. It erased me from the picture. Without me, there was no one to be harmed.

“She wants to hear you say you’re sorry,” Lacey said. “And I suggest you try to sound like you mean it.”

I never loved anyone the way I loved Lacey that night. She was like a wild thing, a storm in a bottle, so much rage compressed into a tiny black-eyed body and channeled in my defense. It was glorious. Like watching a sunrise, blazing Crayola pinks birthing a new world, meant only for me.

“I’m sorry,” Nikki said, quietly. “And for what it’s worth, that’s actually true. I am sorry, Hannah.”

“Her name is Dex.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Say it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Dex.”

“You buy that, Dex?” She didn’t ask whether it made anything better. What made it better was forcing Nikki to admit what she’d done. And knowing I had the power to make her suffer for it.

I wasn’t supposed to be that kind of person. I was a good girl, and good girls weren’t supposed to take pleasure in pain. But I did, and I found there was no shame in it.

“I wish everyone could hear what kind of person she really was,” I said. “Imagine if they knew.”

“They know,” Lacey said. “They just don’t give a shit.”

But they didn’t know. It wasn’t just Nikki’s parents who were fooled, the gullible teachers and women at her church, the kids on the outer fringes who looked unto her as a god. It was her own: They knew she was a carnivore, but didn’t understand she was a cannibal. They didn’t know how many of their boyfriends she’d screwed, how many of their hearts she’d contrived to break, how many of their secrets she’d handed to me, how many of them she’d hurt just because she was bored, just because she could. There was no leverage in me knowing that — no use in threatening to expose her. She didn’t care about them, wouldn’t care about alienating them and being left alone; that wasn’t what appealed to me about forcing her to confess. It was the prospect of forcing her to do what I wanted. Anything I wanted: Nikki stripped bare, limp and helpless, a marionette under our control.

I knew, when we let her out, that we would be safe. She would keep quiet — not to save herself the embarrassment but to save herself the pity. If I could bend her to my will, force her to speak the words I put in her mouth — if she was powerless, and admitted it — then a part of her would always be powerless. Nikki would never tell anyone what happened here, because if she did, it would mean a part of her never left.

It was my idea first, but Lacey was the one who remembered the Barbie tape recorder, and the stack of cassette tapes, and understood what they could mean. What we did next, we did together.

“You’re going to tell us everything,” Lacey said when we’d trekked back to the car and retrieved the equipment, once Nikki had come down from being left once again to scream and weep alone in the dark. “Everything terrible you’ve done, from start to finish. And maybe we’ll play it for the world to hear, or maybe we’ll just keep it for ourselves, for insurance. You’ll never know.”

“Think of it as a confessional,” I said. “Good practice for your audition tape.”

“Why would I ever do that?” It was almost impressive, this skinny, stripped-down girl pretending at defiance. “Because of your stupid knife? What are you going to do, murder me and bury me in the woods?”

“I’m surprised you think that’s beyond me,” Lacey said, but when Nikki held her gaze, Lacey was the one to look away first.

“I’m not doing it,” Nikki said. “You can keep me here as long as you want, but you can’t make me do anything. You can’t.”

“I don’t know about that.” Lacey toed the bucket of water, then bumped shoulders with me. I’d thought we would never do that again, never be so perfectly in sync that we could speak with our bodies instead of our words. “What is it they say about me at school, Dex? Don’t they think I’m some kind of witch?”

“I’ve heard that,” I said.

“Me, I think Nikki’s the witch.”

“Understandable.”

“I know a lot about witches these days,” Lacey said. “You know how they used to tell if someone was a witch? Back in the bad old days?”

“I do,” I said, and I remember feeling clever, and giddy, and not at all afraid. These were moments without consequence; this was a night that would never end.

“How about it, witch?” Lacey lifted the bucket, nasty water sloshing over her hands. “Let’s see if you float.”

LACEY, 1991

IT WAS THE DAY I woke up and smelled winter. No frost, no snow, nothing so dramatic as all that, but you could feel the cold crouching in the wings. It had been summer all week, and according to the overtanned idiot on TV, winter was blowing across the Midwest, the sparkly cardboard snowflake inching toward us one corn state at a time.

Winter was our ticking clock. What were we supposed to do, fumble at zippers with wool mittens and Velcro gloves, kiss with frozen tongues and watch our excretions turn to ice? As a novelty act, maybe, but unless you’re Dr. Zhivago, frostbite is a turnoff and fucking outside, much less lying on the ground in two feet of snow, high on pot and pheromones and trying to connect with the sublime, is a testicle-shrinking failure waiting to happen. We didn’t have to discuss it to understand the obvious: When the cold came, the thing between us would sheathe its fangs, crawl under a rock, and hibernate the winter away.

We used the heat while we had it, and that day, Halloween, Nikki and I skipped school and met in the woods, dressed in costume as each other, to fuck with Craig’s mind. She always loved role-play the best, and she made me promise that when Craig showed up after practice — always after practice, because however much he loved her and us and the fleshly pleasures that came with it, he loved the team more — we would keep to our roles religiously, though of course by the time he did, we were too drunk to bother. Maybe if we had, we would have played an entirely different game, and Craig would still be alive, or one of us would be dead.

That day, we’d finished with each other. We were waiting for Craig and making snow angels in the mud, and Nikki was amusing me by itemizing the defects of our peers, one by one, in alphabetical order, just to show she could. Theresa Abbot had a harelip and talked like a cartoon character, and she’d once tattled on Nikki, unforgivably, for smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Scotty Bly would have been cute except for the way he chewed with his mouth open and insisted on letting a worm of a mustache crawl across his upper lip, both of which rendered him unfuckable. I was bored by the time we got to C, but also pleased, because nothing got her hot like talking about people she hated. Maybe you already know that.

We went through Shayna Christopher and Alexandra Caldwell, and then, Dex, we got to you.

“You want to know what’s wrong with Hannah Dexter?” Nikki asked.

“Not particularly.”

Not because I cared about you, Dex, but because I didn’t care at all.

“She’s such a fucking victim,” Nikki said. “It’s like she’s asking you to screw with her.”

“Funny, she’s never asked me.”

“You know what I mean. Where’s the fun in it? It’s like playing kickball with a dead skunk.”

“It makes you smell?”

“Too easy and it makes you smell. Like, yeah, you feel bad for the skunk, but why’d it run into the road in the first place? Like it wanted to get run over, you know? Like that would be easier than just finding a way across and figuring out what the hell to do next.”

“That’s the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard,” I said.

She wasn’t listening. She was on a roll. What does it mean, Dex, that in all the time I’d known her, she’d never mentioned you once? But that day, it’s almost like you were there with us, the future ghosting itself onto the past. “And also! She’s like. . oatmeal.”

“Beige and lumpy?” I said, and then there was some talk of lumpiness that’s better left forgotten.

“No. No! Pudding. Hospital pudding, the kind that comes dry out of a packet and you add water.”

“So she’s pudding. What do you care?”

“I don’t care. I. .”

“What?”

“Give me a second, I’m thinking.”

“Slowly.”

“Fuck you.” She stripped off her shirt, then. It was still warm enough for that. I raised my ass off the ground just enough to shimmy out of my skirt. “Because she doesn’t try, that’s what I hate about her. Because she’s nothing, she’s blah, and fine if that’s what she wants, but she walks around all bitter and sulky that people treat her like she’s nothing—”

“People meaning you.”

“Sure, whatever. Me. Acting like it’s somehow my fault that she’s a loser. Like I’m some kind of fucking witch, and I put a curse on her.”

“Poof!” I zapped her with my magic finger. “You’re pathetic.”

“Abracadabra!” She waved her arms, accidentally or not whacking me in the boob. “You’re a horny toad.”

“All that and she’s a horny toad?”

“No, you’re a toad,” she said. “And I’m horny.”

Every time was like the first time.

Even that last day, when we’d already done everything we could think to do, when we knew how to fit our bodies together and how to slide in a third, when she knew how I tasted and I knew where to rub and when to pause and what would make her wet. It never got old, not married-couple old, because it was always dangerous. Anyone could stumble upon us; animals could attack. There were always new positions, new dares — down on the tracks or rolling on the station floor, dodging the broken glass, finding ants and beetles later in places nothing alive should enter. The illicit charge sparked extra bright when it was just the two of us, because Craig got petulant at the thought of us enjoying things without him. It dented his ego to realize that his dick was superfluous, and while he got off on hearing us describe what it was like — the tidal wave of sensation, the seizing muscles and the curled toes, the Penthouse reality of the full-body shudder — he never really bought it, that it was the same as what he felt, or what we could be made to feel by him. Girls don’t get sex, he always said, not really. It was lucky for us, he said, that we didn’t know what we were missing. Lucky for him, we giggled, when he wasn’t around, and when the wave rippled through, both of us liked to scream.

I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they were bored; maybe I was an escape route; maybe Craig was in love with Nikki and Nikki was in love with me; maybe together the three of us made something, like a poem, like a song, like a band, that was greater than the sum of its parts, and we all wanted to be greater than. I don’t know why I did it, except that life was small and this seemed huge. They needed me, and no one had ever needed me before. You’ve got to remember, Dex, I’d just found Kurt; I’d sworn to myself that I would be different, that I would live like he sang, that I wouldn’t let anything be easy and experience would be my art. I was brand-new, and there’s a reason babies don’t do anything but poop and suck teat and pee in their parents’ faces. They don’t know any better; they can’t help themselves.

DEX, 1992

THE FIRST TIME, IT WAS almost funny. I couldn’t do it myself. I didn’t trust myself to grip her hair, hold her head under the water without letting go, long enough to break her but not long enough to drown her, so Lacey did it while I held the knife. She thrashed around a bit, or as much as she could all tied up, and when Lacey finally let her up for air she was soaked and shuddering, filthy water streaking down her face. Once she’d gotten in one or two good breaths, before she could even agree to offer her confession or put up any more fight, Lacey shoved her under again, holding tight as her body spasmed.

I held my breath, too, and when my lungs started to hurt, I said, “It’s too long?”

“Trust me,” she said.

This time, when Nikki came up, wet and panting, she was ready to talk. “Whatever the fuck you want, just don’t do that again. Please.”

Sometimes I tried to drown myself in the bathtub — not seriously, just as an experiment, slipping beneath the waterline and staring through it to the cracked ceiling, lips shut tight against the warm water, daring myself to stay down. If I open my mouth, I would think, if I breathe it in. It would be that simple, and it was nothing I hadn’t done by accident a thousand times in a thousand summer pools. But I could never will myself to do it. You can’t ask your body to kill itself. You want it dead, you have to murder it.

“Ready?” Lacey said, and when Nikki nodded, her wet hair stuck to her face and sending rivulets down her bare chest, I pressed record. Lacey crossed her arms and paced, like a TV lawyer, which felt wrong, somehow. We should be sitting quietly in shadow, I thought, our eyes averted, like priests.

Lacey told her to start at the beginning, and so Nikki told us how in sixth grade she’d gotten bored with her then best friend, Lauren, and convinced all the other girls in their group to ice her out for the rest of the year. I remembered this: I had joined the I Hate Lauren club — which never existed as anything more than a membership list circulated to half the class, then left anonymously on Lauren’s desk the next morning, just as the I Hate Hannah list had the year before — not because I did hate Lauren, but because it seemed to have slipped into the zeitgeist that Lauren was hateable, and it was safer to be against than for. She told us about how she’d dared Allie to accuse Mr. Lourd of feeling her up in the computer lab, but when Allie came crawling back to complain about the subsequent mess — Mr. Lourd getting fired, then getting drunk and trying to throw himself in front of a bus, Allie landing in therapy with a guy who actually tried to feel her up — Nikki laughed and claimed she’d never dared her, that Allie was just imagining things, and maybe she should do whatever that therapist wanted because she was clearly losing her mind. It went on and on — the time Sarah Clayborn was arrested for shoplifting because someone had slipped a Calvin Klein scarf into her bag; the day Darren Sykes was roughed up by a couple of thugs from Belmont because someone told them he’d screwed their mascot, and the months Darren spent trying to live down the rumor that he’d fucked a goat; the way Jessica Ames dumped Cash Warner without explanation or opportunity for apology because someone had told her he’d cheated with the sexy-for-a-sub replacement math teacher — so many catastrophes, all of them bearing her devil’s mark but not her fingerprints.

Midnight came and midnight went.

When the stories trailed off, somewhere toward the end of tenth grade, and she said that was enough, she was hungry, she was bored, she was done, Lacey dunked her again, holding her down longer this time, until the thrashing stopped.

When she came up, she was still breathing, and I had a momentary lapse, wondering if I should stop Lacey before things went too far, whatever that meant. That Nikki could make me feel for her, fear for her, even for that one moment — maybe she really was a witch.

I reminded myself it had to look real. Nikki had to believe we meant to hurt her.

She was dripping wet, and crying too hard to speak.

“I’m going out to pee,” Lacey murmured. “Watch her.”

And then there were two.

“It’ll be a while,” Nikki said, tears drying. “She probably needs a smoke.”

“Lacey doesn’t smoke.”

Nikki only smiled, or tried to.

She coughed hard, and spit. I aimed the flashlight at the ground. It was harder to look at her without Lacey there. Harder to remember that we weren’t the bad guys.

“You can just untie me before she comes back,” Nikki said.

“Why would I do that?”

“If you’re scared to piss her off, tell her I got away somehow. She’ll believe it.”

“I don’t need to lie to Lacey,” I said. “I’m not the one who should be scared.”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Hannah? Look around you! You should be fucking scared out of your mind. She’s nuts. You think she’s ever letting either of us out of here? She’s totally lost it. Sane Lacey is gone. Sane Lacey has left the building. Look what she’s making you do, for God’s sake.”

“She’s not making me do anything.”

“I’ll be sure to explain that to the cops.”

“What cops? I thought neither of us was ever getting out of here.”

“Listen, we were friends, right? We were friends, I know that was fucked-up of me, I know it, but it was also real. You know me now enough to know I’m just fucked-up enough for that. I felt bad about. . you know, everything, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t remember and, yeah, I wanted to fuck with Lacey, but then, Jesus, turns out I actually liked you.” She was talking so fast, the words running together, lying at the speed of light. “You liked me, too, Hannah, you know you did. You can lie to her all you want, but I know that.”

“There’s something very wrong with you,” I told her.

“Fuck.” She started crying again. “Fuck.”

Come back, Lacey, I thought. I could go to her now, but I couldn’t be that girl, not for either of them. I had to be the girl who could hold onto the flashlight and the knife, who could stand guard in the dark, who could fend off all enemies.

This time, I would keep the faith. Lacey was in control; we both were. This night would go only where we wanted it, and no further.

Then Nikki spoke again. “She was mine first, you know. Lacey was mine.”

“Shut up.” A knife is only as powerful as the person holding it. Even then, she knew the truth of me.

“She used to drive me around in that shit Buick, just like you. She still have those candy cigarettes in the glove compartment? She still like to listen to ‘Something in the Way’ when she’s sad?”

She did.

“Oh, I’ve been in her car,” Nikki said. “And in her room. Watched her make out with that stupid Kurt Cobain poster, kneel in front of it like he’s some kind of god. Did you think you were the first to catch her act? Did you think you were special?”

“I said shut up.”

“You’re not special. You’re not even relevant. You’re just some sad, clueless deer wandering onto the highway. Roadkill waiting to happen.”

“I’m serious, Nikki, stop talking. Or else.”

“Or else what, Dex? I’m fucked either way, thanks to your batshit friend out there. And so are you. Don’t you want to know who’s fucking you?”

Nikki was naked and tied to a chair and somehow she was still beating me. And what if Lacey never came back, I thought. How long, I wondered, would I wait?

I’d learned my lesson. This time, I would wait forever.

“I know her,” Nikki said, and she was crying again, as if that would make me believe her. She was crying, but her voice was hard, as if her lips didn’t know what her eyes were doing, had divorced themselves from the shine of panic and would stand their cruel ground until the end. “I know she runs hot. I know, when she puts her arms around you, it’s like curling up against a hot water bottle. It’s like she’s on fire.”

“This is pathetic, Nikki.”

“I know what it feels like to have her hands on my body and how she looks when she’s getting fucked. This face she makes, the way her eyes go all surprised and you think she’s going to scream but she just makes this kind of breathy sigh and then it’s over.”

Come back, Lacey.

Come back and make her stop.

It didn’t make sense, except for how it made all the sense — what else but this, what else could it have been, what else was there, and where did it leave me.

Come back.

“I know what makes her wet. What she tastes like, Hannah. You know all that, too? No, I don’t think you do. I can see it in your face. What you don’t have. What you want.”

If the door hadn’t creaked open. If Lacey hadn’t climbed in, reeking of smoke. If she hadn’t taken the knife from my hand. If Nikki had kept talking, her garbage piling up between us, steaming and rotting until I couldn’t take it anymore and the knife had found its way on its own to her gut or her face or her throat, anything to make it stop. If I’d been left on my own to decide, I would have stopped her. There would have been blood.

Instead there was only Lacey, back in time, holding me, whispering, why was I shaking, then shouting at Nikki, what did you do?

“What could I have done?” she said, sweetly. Then, “I’m glad you’re back. I’m ready to confess a little bit more. How about we start with what happened to Craig?”

LACEY, 1991

HE BROUGHT HIS FATHER’S GUN. It was Halloween, after all. He was a Goodfella, and he wanted to look the part. That’s what he said, at least, because that way he didn’t have to say he was giving in to Nikki, who’d been whining about getting her hands on the gun ever since Craig let slip that it existed. You can see, can’t you, that it couldn’t have been entirely my fault? That Craig was the one who set Chekhov’s Law in motion? (And this is a guy who only knew Chekov the Star Trek character.) The Bastard would tell me not to speak ill of the dead. But if, hypothetically, someone drifted into the great beyond due to his own ape-headed stupidity, and left the rest of us behind to mop up the blood and wipe away the fingerprints — not to mention zip up his pants — he couldn’t exactly resent a little postmortem scorn.

Craig showed me how to shoot. Stood behind me with his arms around mine, closed his hands over my grip, and together, we raised the gun. He showed me how to sight it, line up the mouth of the gun with the beer can we’d propped on a branch, and I could feel him getting hard as we fingered the trigger. What do you think turned him on? The fact of my body against his, the heft of the gun, the anticipation of the shot, or the power of knowing something I didn’t, pulling my strings for once, pull back, breathe, relax, steady, go?

The weight of it. The cold metal realness of it. The knowing that I could turn it on him, on either of them, pull the trigger, and, simply as that, wipe them from existence. Who wouldn’t get hard?

Nikki refused to touch the gun. She just liked watching us shoot it. She always loved to watch.

Craig was the jealous type. Pawing at us when we got too close to each other, sliding in between, his every pore oozing Look at me. Want me. Craig, with his Égoïste cologne and his crooked front tooth, textbook dim, meathead sure of himself, but somewhere deep beneath the roided-up muscle meat — somewhere in the blood or marrow — he must have sensed the truth. He was an appendage. He was Nikki’s Velveteen Rabbit, all of us waiting for him to turn real. She was done with him, bored with him, didn’t love him. If I knew it, he must have known it, too.

Sometimes he ignored her and went at me like an octopus, tentacles grasping with a need neither of us actually felt. And always, when he pawed me, he watched her, hoping it would hurt. You could feel him deflate when she cheered him on. It was supposed to be every guy’s dream, two girls, one dick, everyone rooting for a home run. He wasn’t allowed to say no. To say, Too weird, too twisted, too freaky for me. To say, I want you to myself in the backseat of a car or the empty locker room or even, on a special occasion, in some honeymoon suite rented by the hour. He wasn’t allowed to say, I don’t want adventure, I want crabs-infested upholstery and a vibrating bed. So he did as he was told. And maybe he had to drink himself sick or get stoned off his head to deal; maybe he thought there was something wrong with him; maybe we made him think there was something wrong with him, teased and flicked him when he couldn’t get it up, devised demented games and awarded ourselves points when we pushed him too far, spiked his drink now and then to give ourselves some time alone, enjoying the spectacle of King Jock brought low by his concubines. Maybe there actually was something wrong with him, ever think of that?

I liked the sound of the gun when it went off. I liked how you could feel the sound in your fingers, and how it hurt.

Later.

Craig passed out beneath a tree, so it was just the two of us again, me and Nikki, evening spreading out against the sky and all that crap. We lay side by side. I cradled the gun against my chest, wondering if Kurt had a gun, if he loved it as much as I could love this one. I could take it home with me, I thought. Slip it under my pillow, hold it as I was falling asleep, let it follow me into my dreams, where we would be one, we would be all-powerful, we would be safe. I rubbed it, long and slow, like it was Craig and I could feel it harden to my touch, and laughed to think it would stay hard forever. Less trouble, in all ways, than flesh.

“We should trade in men for guns,” I told Nikki, and it was late enough, we were high enough, that it felt profound.

“We could be men, with guns,” she said, and touched it for the first time, took it in her hands like she knew exactly what to do, held it to her crotch, raised its mouth slowly toward sky. “Bang.”

Nikki started it. Remember that, even if she never did.

“You ever think about it?” she said. “Having one of these?”

“I dreamed I had a dick once. It was so real I woke up freaked out enough to check.”

“When I was a kid, I saw a movie where that happened,” Nikki said. “Girl wished she was a boy and woke up with a little something extra in her pants.”

“That’s fucked-up.”

“Scared the crap out of me. Then. But now?”

Craig was slumped against ancient bark, head tipped back, eyes closed. He would have looked deep in thought, but for the drool.

“Now I wonder,” Nikki said.

Didn’t we all? What it would be like to be one of them. To have power, be seen, be heard, be dudes rather than sluts, be jocks or geeks or bros or nice guys or boys-will-be-boys or whatever we wanted instead of quantum leaping between good girl and whore. To be the default, not the exception. To be in control, to seize control, simply because we happened to have a dick.

“Imagine if it were that easy to get off,” Nikki said. “I don’t know how they ever get anything done. I’d be jerking off nonstop.”

“Not worth it,” I said. “You really want something hanging off you that just pops up whenever it feels like?”

“Or doesn’t.” She giggled. Craig had a tough time getting it up when he was drunk. That October, he was always drunk.

“Or doesn’t. Seems very inconvenient.”

“Good for peeing, though.” She stood up, held the gun tight against her zipper, aimed it at the ground. “I bet I could spell my name. In cursive.”

“You’d be a lady-killer.”

She grinned, spread her legs wide, threw her shoulders back. Held the gun with one hand and smacked an imaginary ass with the other. It was Craig’s favorite pose, though he usually accompanied it with some improvised porn music, bow chicka wow wow. “Yo, dude. Check out my package.”

“Big and hard,” I said. “Just the way I like it.”

“Not as big as your rack,” she said. If I’d let myself laugh, maybe it would have ended there. But I was still wearing my Nikki costume, I’d slurped a deadly puddle of tequila-spiked Jell-O, and it was Halloween — I wanted to play.

“Oh, Craig,” I simpered. “I love your big, hard cock.”

He liked that, dirty talk, always wanting us to assure him, Oh baby you’re huge oh baby you feel so good oh baby I’m so wet oh baby—it said he was strong and we were weak, he was supply and we were demand, he was power and we were need.

“Oh, yeah, baby?” she said. “You want it? You want it bad?”

“I want it so bad,” I said. “Because you’re the most popular guy in all of school and we’re going to look super sexy in our Dreamiest Couple yearbook photos.”

“I do not sound like that, bitch.”

I let my voice go breathy phone sex operator. “Tell me we’re going to be homecoming king and queen, big boy. Tell me how all the peons will gaze at us and we’ll crush them under our big, royal feet. Tell me how you’ll use that rock-hard cock of yours to pee on their parade.”

I raised myself onto my knees and padded toward her, till the gun was in my face. Leaned forward, kissed its cool tip. Tongued the edge, tasted its tang.

She jutted her hips. “You want some of this?”

“I want all of it.” Then its mouth was in my mouth, and I was licking my way around its rim. Nikki moaned.

“Ohhhh, Nikki,” she said, in his voice.

I pulled my lips away, just long enough to gasp, “Mmm, Craig,” then swallowed it again, drew higher up the shaft, cupped her ass in my hands.

“I love you,” she said, hand on my head, forcing me down, then up, into a rhythm. “God, I love you.”

It was no different than sucking at the real thing, hard and slippery and dangerous.

“I love you,” she whispered, nails digging at my scalp. “I love you I love you I love you.”

And so it went, until the real Craig woke from his stupor and realized we were playing without him. There was a manly grunt, a skunk of a burp, and then he lumbered over to us and sealed his own fate in one puff of beery breath: “Step aside, ladies, and make way for a real man.”

DEX, 1992

YOU WANT TO STOP TALKING now,” Lacey said, less like a threat than like a hypnotist’s command.

Nikki smiled. It was a storybook grin, one that might have been called insouciant in some British story of magic and portals. “No. I don’t think I do. Hannah, would you like to hear about the last time Lacey and I came into these woods? Once upon a time, on a night very much like tonight—”

“You really want to find out what happens if you don’t stop talking?” Lacey brandished the knife.

“It’s getting old, Lace. You want to use it, use it. I’m tired of secrets. That’s what all this is about, right? No more secrets.”

I wonder, now, if Lacey knew that once it started, it wouldn’t stop. A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force. Maybe she wanted to tell me, needed Nikki to make her. More games, more marionettes, all of us pulling one another’s strings, turtles all the way down.

Neither of them was looking at me.

“There are worse things than death,” Lacey said. “Maybe you need another bath.” She seized Nikki’s hair, rougher than before, shoved her face into the bucket, held her hard and tight as her limbs spasmed, and it went on and on and then on too long and I shouted at her to stop.

She didn’t stop.

I screamed it. “Stop!” and “You’re going to kill her!” and “Lacey, please,” and only then did she let go. For a long, terrifying second, Nikki didn’t move. Then she coughed up a bubble of water and took a shuddery breath. Lacey did look at me then, hurt painted across her face.

“You still don’t trust me, Dex?”

“I trust you.”

“Then why do you look so scared?”

“Gosh, I wonder why.” Nikki’s head was hanging limp, her voice hoarse, mouth wide and sucking air, and still she managed to sound smug.

“This is getting boring,” Lacey said. “We got what we wanted. Let’s get out of here. Untie her and go home.”

Just like that. She said it like a punishment, like I’d been too loud and whiny in the backseat and she’d been forced to turn the car around.

“We have her on tape,” Lacey reminded me. “She won’t tell anyone. Will you, Nikki?”

Nikki shook her head, dog obedient.

“See? It’s over. Let’s go.”

It could have been that easy. We could have gone home, the three of us, safe and sound and only a little bit fucked up for life by what happened in the woods. Lacey set that before me on a platter, and all I needed to do was reach for it. On the other side of yes: the empty highway, our artist’s loft in Seattle with its lava lamps and dissipated men, the future we’d promised ourselves. That easy.

Nikki looked hopeful, but not only that. She looked satisfied. That’s not why I said no.

We couldn’t stop, not yet. Because Lacey was too eager; because there were still secrets. Because if I let it be over, I would never know what was true.

Secrets were a claim, and as long as they shared one, they owned each other. I needed Lacey to be only mine. We would stay in this boxcar until everything was said. For Lacey’s own good, whether she knew it or not.

“Not yet,” I said. The air hissed out of both of them. “One more confession.”

“You need a break,” Lacey said. “Let’s go sit in the car for a while, listen to some music.”

“That’s right, Saint Kurt will solve all your problems,” Nikki said. “And if that doesn’t work, you can always knock her out and leave her in the woods to rot.”

“Shut up!” Lacey screamed.

I didn’t like her losing control. Nikki shouldn’t have been able to make her do that. Nikki could have no power over Lacey. I couldn’t allow it.

“We should stay here,” I said. “We should listen.”

Nikki laughed.

“We promised,” Lacey hissed, and the we was them, not us. “You promised.”

“And you tied me to a fucking chair and tried to drown me,” Nikki said. “Pretty sure that means all promises are void. Let her hear what you did.”

“What we did. You always forget that part.”

“I’m done with that. This sad story of how we’re both to blame. Fuck that.”

“Enough,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Hannah, I tried to spare you from finding out that your friend here is a sociopath, but you wouldn’t let me. So now you get to hear the whole truth.”

“I’ll kill you,” Lacey said, like a growl. “I actually will.”

“Right, because you’re so scared that Hannah will find out what you’re capable of that you’d kill me right in front of her? That’ll convince her you’re a good person. Foolproof plan.”

Then they were shouting at each other, about who was a monster and who was to blame, and they didn’t hear me tell them stop; they didn’t see me at all. I thought maybe I was the ghost. Maybe I wasn’t there, never had been.

“Tell me the story,” I said finally, and these were the words that summoned silence. “Tell me everything.”

“Smartest thing you’ve ever said, Hannah. See, Lacey and I used to come out here—”

“No,” Lacey was quiet. “I’ll tell.”

There was no more yelling. I felt it again, what Nikki had once told me, that this was a sacred place, haunted by all the ruined futures of the past.

“So you can lie to her? Again?”

I didn’t see Lacey’s hand move, only the silver blur of the knife. Then there was blood, just a dab of it, on Nikki’s collarbone, and a tiny yelp of pain.

“I’ll tell,” Lacey said, quieter still. “The truth this time, Dex. All of it.”

I was not afraid of Lacey.

I would not allow myself to be afraid of Lacey.

She would tell her story, prove her faith in me. I would repay her by finding a way to believe. “Tell me, Lacey. Everything.”

“Go ahead then, tell her,” Nikki allowed, magnanimous in victory. “Tell her the story of us.”

LACEY, 1991

NIKKI DIDN’T JUST WANT TO watch; she wanted to conduct. I tried to teach her chaos, but she understood only control. So it had been from the beginning: Nikki leaning against a tree, head cocked, eyes narrowed, ordering us from one position into another, telling Craig to lick my neck or turn me over and drive my face into the ground. It made three more manageable: two bodies and one will.

Craig didn’t want to do it, not at first. That’s something else to remember. He could never say no to Nikki.

“On your knees, bitch,” she said to him, and he dropped.

He should see what it was like, she said. She should get to watch him seeing it.

She hated him, if you want to know what I think.

What I think is, she wanted to take that gun and shove it up his ass and pull the trigger. His punishment for the person she was when they were together, the act she put on that required a Craig by her side. But Nikki Drummond doesn’t get her hands dirty.

I held the gun. I held it where a dick would be.

“Not gonna happen,” he said, even though he was already on his knees. “That’s totally gay.”

“It’s a gun, not a dick,” Nikki said. “How is that gay?”

He grunted.

“You know what’s gay, Craig? Two naked girls writhing around together. Panting. Sucking. Sweating. You don’t mind that, do you? You ever want to see that again?”

She knew so much, Dex, and yet somehow she hadn’t clued in that he really, really didn’t.

“You ever want me to touch your gun again? Or you want me to tell the whole school it’s got warts?”

“Like anyone would believe that.”

“Have you met me, sweetie? They believe anything I tell them.”

This, for them, was foreplay.

“Do I have to?” Even the question was a sign: He’d given in.

“Take it slow,” she advised. “Flick the tip. Tease it a little, it likes that. Remember what you told me, the first time? Just like eating an ice cream cone. You love ice cream, Craig. You love it.”

She didn’t need to talk me into anything. I stood steady, kept the gun erect as Craig closed his mouth over it. Maybe I was curious, too.

Darkness swirled around us, the station hissed with ghosts, and my blood was half vodka. Not an excuse, Dex. Just setting the scene.

He was tentative, at the start, like a girl sucking it for the first time, not sure where to put his hands or his tongue, licking and flicking in sorry, frog-like spurts, then easing his mouth around the barrel and holding it there, like the mere ambiance of his warm, damp cave would get the job done.

“Friction!” Nikki shouted, clapping a steady beat. “Friction and rhythm. Get it together. And mind the teeth.”

I started moaning. A gasp here, a pant there, partly to help him along and partly to mock him, all for show, until, somehow, it wasn’t anymore. Because it felt good, Dex, his head under the palm of my hand, bobbing with my rhythm, his lips finding their pace, his fingers doing their work, one hand wrapped around mine on the gun, the other climbing my thigh and finding its way to where it needed to be, hot against my heat, rubbing in time and pressing hard, harder the louder I moaned, and maybe it was the booze or his fingers or just the fact of the gun, but I’m telling you, Dex, I felt it. Felt him, against me, sucking hard, swirling his tongue around just so, breathing hot and fast, felt him pulling back, pulling away for the hint of a moment, playing with me like I always played with him, then taking it all in his mouth again, swallowing us whole. And it was me, metal but also somehow flesh, and as it came over me — a full-on flash-bang explosion, zero to sixty to holy shit — I thought, this is some kind of black magic at work, this is science fiction and I am a cyborg of skin and steel, this is how it is for them to look down at us on our knees, but it wasn’t just that, one great erotic leap for women everywhere, it was this particular boy on his knees and me on my feet, it was this boy’s girl in the shadows, screaming my name, needing me to see her, to forget about him and need her back, it was the game and the show and the love and the gun, it was a split second of wild, muscle-clenching, teeth-rattling, tip-your-head-back-and-howl-at-the-sky pleasure, and then it was over.

I was crying and laughing at the same time when he seized up, went rigid — and if I was thinking of him at all, I was thinking how Nikki would never let it go, that he’d gotten off on it, loved the feel of something hard swelling in his mouth as much as any of us — but then he fell away from me, and only when Nikki stopped screaming my name and started screaming his did I realize that the crack of noise had not been some overload of neural circuitry but an actual, world-shattering sound. That the world had shattered. That the wet beneath my fingers was blood.

You don’t want to know what a dead body looks like, Dex. Or the sound a person can make when she sees one.

Craig, of course, was silent.

Craig wasn’t there anymore. The thing in his place, the raw, wormy, bloody thing that had just been cupping my ass and fingering my cunt and wrapping his hand over my hand over the gun. . that’s the thing that comes after me in my sleep, the thing that kept me out of the woods. That was the reason, later on, that I stopped at one wrist, let the knife drop by the bathtub and the water swirl pink. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I believe you see something when you die, whether the firing of synapses or some groping hand from the great beyond, and I believe that’s what I’ll see, Dex. That thing, that face, that hole. I think that’s the last thing I’ll ever see, and I can never see that again.

“You killed him.” That’s what she said when she could talk, when I’d slapped her out of her keening and back to reality so we could zip up his pants and deal with the gun. “You killed him you killed him you killed him.”

I didn’t remind her who’d made him get on his knees. I was trying to be kind.

I wanted to move the body. We both did. Away from our place, deep into the woods. I thought we both wanted to exorcise our station of his ghost so we could return. They say you sober up fast in a crisis, but that hasn’t been my experience. I must have been drunk off my ass to imagine the two of us would want to come back.

Moving the body meant touching the body, hoisting the body, dragging the body into the woods. Cleaning the trail of blood and brain bits the body left behind. We couldn’t do that. Any of it. We would leave him there in our place; we would leave him behind.

Nikki wiped down the gun; I put it in his hand. This was Battle Creek; this was a disturbed teenager alone in the woods with his father’s gun; this was a pretty enough picture, and when Nikki added the note he’d written her the day before, after he’d unforgivably forgotten her half birthday, the note that said, in Craig’s painstaking block letters, I love you and I’m sorry, the picture was perfect.

“Now what?” Nikki said. “We just leave him here?” She swallowed. “There are animals. .”

“They’ll come looking. They’ll find him. Eventually.”

“Eventually.”

She thought I was the heartless one. Because I kept going, because someone had to. If she was going to be the mess, then I had to be the one who cleaned up. If she was going to cling, then someone had to be clung to, and that was me. I am a rock, Dex, like the song says. I’m a fucking island. I do what I have to do, and that night, I had to hold Nikki Drummond while she cried. I had to collect our clothes, our empties, our cigarette butts, anything that would connect us to the body. I had to sit with her in the car while we sobered up and the body cooled, not so far away.

I wasn’t the one who suggested we frame it up like a suicide. We never talked about doing anything else. The truth wasn’t an acceptable option. What we did was too obvious, too easy, not to be the way.

That’s not how Nikki remembered it.

In her version, I’m Machiavelli. I murder him in cold blood, dupe her into covering it up so she’ll seem equally to blame. She’s the victim, I’m the devil, he’s the corpse.

In every story, he ends up dead.

No one made him get on his knees. And if anyone did make him, it was Nikki.

It was their fault as much as it was mine. I stand by that. I will always stand by that.

Murder requires intent; I know because I looked it up. Legally, killing someone by accident is no worse than hitting a deer with your car. Lots of blood and mess and guilt, but no one’s to blame except maybe the deer for being dumb enough to step into the road.

I couldn’t have killed him because I wasn’t trying to kill him. I didn’t want him to die.

Believe that.

If you believe anything, Dex, believe that.

But.

In the dark.

At night.

When I let myself remember.

I feel it beneath my finger.

The trigger.

And I know.

The gun in his mouth, the gun in my hands: It doesn’t matter what I wanted. It doesn’t matter why. Accident, purpose, motive, mistake, unconscious wish, muscle contraction: It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was in his mouth, and in my hands. It was my finger on the trigger. It was my finger that moved, just a little, just enough. Then he was gone.

DEX1992

BEFORE LACEY, I WASN’T HAPPY. I wasn’t anything. Except that’s not possible, is it? I took up space; I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents’ expectations and evidence of their disappointments; I was Hannah Dexter, middling everything, on track for an uneventful life and only just sharp enough to care.

A world without Lacey: I would have spent my days doodling and chewing gum to keep from falling asleep in class until I could come home and settle in front of the TV for the night. There would have been a few hundred days to endure, then college, somewhere compatibly middling, High School: The Sequel, Battle Creek U. That Hannah Dexter might have gathered up enough spunk to move to Pittsburgh or Philly after graduation, make a go of it in the big city, barhop with her gaggle of young single girls until one by one each scored herself a ring and fled to the suburbs. She would have made an excellent bridesmaid, a bit of a pill at the bachelorette party but always reliable for a sober ride home. She would not have complained; she would have thought it unseemly, thought that pretending to be happy was close enough. She would have returned to Battle Creek rarely, only to endure holidays with her parents and eventually to bury them. She would, perhaps, have run into Nikki Drummond at the drugstore before leaving town, and they would have offered each other the wincing approximation of a smile, as you do when you’re too old for grudges but still seething with them. Her real smile would come later, whenever she remembered those extra thirty pounds Nikki wore around her middle and the strip of pale skin on her left ring finger; she would be smugly certain it was better to avoid love than to lose it.

Lacey told me everything. What she’d done — what they’d both done — to Craig Ellison. What they’d done with each other. The ghosts of them in that place. The body they’d left behind in the woods.

It was the body that should have made the difference. Not the thought of them laughing together in the grass; not the reality that they came first, that I was the thing tossed back and forth between them, incidental.

“It doesn’t matter how it started,” Lacey said. “It was only about Nikki in the beginning. Then it was us. Just us.”

Lacey was the reason Nikki had tried so hard to hurt me, but then, that wasn’t news. News was, Lacey belonging to her first.

“I did this for you,” I said, stretching my arms wide, because it wasn’t just the night, the boxcar — it was life. It was Dex.

“Dex, you have to understand—”

“No. I have to. .” I stopped. What did I?

“I have to go outside for a minute,” I said. “I need air.”

I didn’t want air. I wanted sky, stars poking through branches, the space to run at the night, the freedom to flee, even if I wasn’t planning to, and maybe I was.

“What did I tell you?” It was Nikki, thinking she still mattered. “She can’t handle it. You think she’s going out for air? She’s going straight for the cops. You know she is.”

“No, she’s not,” Lacey said, so sure. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I repeated. They were just sounds.

“You’re fucked and you know it,” Nikki said. “Look around you. All this Satan shit — who’s taking the fall for that? She couldn’t have set you up better if she tried. Maybe she did try, Lacey. Think of that? Let me out of here now and we’ll take care of it.”

“Don’t leave, Dex.”

“She’s going to ruin everything,” Nikki said. “Untie me, and we can deal with it together. Make her see that she should keep her mouth shut.”

“Stop.” I was backing toward the door.

“Don’t leave, Dex,” Lacey said, and she took a step toward me, and she was raising the knife.

“Look at her!” Nikki crowed. “Jesus, Hannah, look at her, she’s actually thinking about it. Killing you to shut you up. She’s psychotic, Hannah. You get it now?”

“Don’t leave,” Lacey said again, and I didn’t leave.

“It’s her or us,” Nikki said, and I didn’t know which us she meant. “Only one person killed Craig, and she’s the one who’s got the most to lose here. Untie me. Untie me and I can protect you.”

“Stop talking!” Lacey slashed the air with the knife. “Stop talking. I need to think!”

The blood on Nikki’s shoulder had dried into a long brown streak, as if she’d tattooed it to remind herself of past wounds.

We were silent. Three of us, waiting.

It was like living inside one of those logic puzzles they gave us in elementary school, a menagerie of animals needing to be ferried across a river in a specific order so no one would be eaten; a sinking hot air balloon with ballast to be tossed overboard, ballast that would keep you aloft, but only if you chose the right thing to sacrifice. Those puzzles were always bloody; failure invited catastrophe, the bloody shreds of a chicken on the riverbank, broken bodies in a cornfield.

Maybe, I thought, we would stand here together until the sun rose. Light would restore sanity, brush away the wild thoughts you only have at night. But the boxcar had no windows; sunrise or not, we would stay in the dark.

Then Lacey spoke. “Nikki’s right. We’ve gone too far. If people knew. .” She tipped the knife toward Nikki. “We can’t trust her. That’s obvious. But you, Dex?” The blade swiveled toward me. “Can I trust you?”

I made some kind of noise that didn’t sound like anything of mine, more animal than human. Animal in pain.

“I trust you to love me, Dex, but you’re a good person. You might think you have some kind of obligation to tell. Unless. .” She nodded. “Yeah.”

I reminded myself to breathe. “Unless what?”

“Unless you had a secret, too.”

Nikki got it before I did. “No. No no no no. Hannah, no.”

“Mutually assured destruction,” Lacey said. “And if we’ve both done something terrible. . we’ll be the same, Dex. We’ll be in it together.”

She offered it to me like a gift — like a promise.

All I had to do was take it.

“We tied her up, Dex. We tied her up and locked her in a fucking train car and tried to drown her. You think she’s not going to tell someone? You think you’re not getting in trouble for this if we let her out of here?”

“We don’t know that.”

“She flat out told us she would.”

“I was bluffing,” Nikki said quickly. “And what I did at the party, and what happened to Craig, I’m fucked if you tell any of it. Mutually assured destruction, right? No one will ever know about this. You have my word.”

Lacey laughed. “What’s that you said before? All promises are void.”

“Hannah, don’t,” Nikki said. “Don’t let her talk you into something you can’t take back.”

Lacey, somehow, was still laughing. “You see that? She’s still trying to turn you against me. That’s what I’m afraid of, Dex. Not getting in trouble. Not what she’ll do to me — what she’ll do to us. She’ll break us again. She will.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Nikki said. “This is what she does, Hannah. She wants you to believe it, that everything is my fault. Nothing is yours. You’re the one who walked away from Lacey. You. Lacey knows you don’t want to see that. She knows you like it better the way she tells it, where you’re not responsible. You don’t like what you saw on that video? Don’t let it happen here. Don’t just lie there and let her fuck us both. Please.”

Lacey smiled. “See? She can’t help herself. She hates that we have each other.” Lacey wanted me to hear it, because she believed that I believed in us. “This can only end one way, Dex. Take the knife.”

“Take it!” Nikki shouted. “Take it and use it, because if you think she’s ever letting you out of here, you’re as nuts as she is.”

Lacey set it down on the floor between us.

“I said I was sorry. But you have to be sorry, too. Then everything can be like it used to be. Better.”

Better, because there would be nothing between them anymore. Better, because we would have a secret of our own to protect; because we would be indivisible; because we would, finally, be the same.

“You love me, Dex?”

I couldn’t not love her. Even then.

“Then prove it,” she said.

That night we did the mushrooms, after we’d looked into the face of God, after the cows in the field and the boys in the barn, Lacey had spirited me away, had parked the car for the night on the side of a deserted road, deciding, with our minds still reeling and eyes still following invisible angels, that would be safer than driving home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but Lacey said it would be better in the grass, under the stars. It was cold and damp, but we weren’t in a state to care. I curled up on my side, and she pressed her chest to my back and curved an arm around me, holding on. Do I belong to you? she’d whispered into my neck, and I’d said yes, of course, yes. You won’t leave me, she said then, and it was command, and it was request, and it was truth, and it was prayer.

“Don’t make me do this,” I said.

“I won’t make you do anything,” she said, and not enough of me was relieved.

“You pick up that knife, and you do whatever you want with it,” Lacey said then. “Your choice, not mine.”

“No, Hannah,” Nikki said. “You can’t do that.”

But I could, that was the thing of it. I could do anything. It was simple physics, biology: kneel, pick up the knife, carve. I could make my body perform each of those steps, and inanimate objects — floor, knife, skin — would give way to my will. It would be simple, and then it would be done.

And I would have been the one to do it. That was the thing of it, too.

As simply as picking up the knife, I could have walked to the door and kept going. But where would I go, without Lacey, and who would I be when I got there? Lacey thought she knew who I was, deep down, Nikki, too, and I couldn’t see how it was so easy for them to believe there was such a thing, a me without them, a deep down where no one was watching. That I wasn’t just Lacey’s friend, Nikki’s enemy, my father’s daughter; that somewhere, floating in the void, was a real Hannah Dexter, an absolute, with things she could or could not do. As if I was either the girl who would pick up the knife or the girl who would not; the girl who would turn on one or turn on the other, or turn and run. Light is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It’s the act of witnessing that turns nothing into something, collapses possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.

This was collapse.