Girls on Fire(7)
“You know why I brought you here?” she said, finally, as we sobered up.
“To psychoanalyze me to death?”
She lowered her voice to a serial killer pitch. “Because here, no one can hear you scream.”
As I was wondering whether I’d just entered act three of a Lifetime movie, the kind where the heroine accepts a ride with a stranger and ends up floating facedown in the lake, Lacey stepped to the edge of the water, threw her head back, and screamed. It was a beautiful thing, a tide of righteous fury, and I wanted it for my own.
Then it stopped, and she turned to me. “Your turn.”
I tried.
I stood where Lacey had stood, my Keds ghosting her boot prints. I looked out at the water, skimmed with patches of ice, something primordial in their shimmer. I watched my breath fog the air and fisted my fingers inside my gloves, for warmth, for power.
I stood at the edge of the water and wanted, so much, to scream for her. To prove her right, that we were the same. What she felt, I felt. What she said, I would do.
Nothing came out.
Lacey took my hand. She leaned against me, touched her head to mine. “We’ll work on it.”
The next morning, Nikki Drummond found a bloody tampon stuffed through the vent of her locker. She cornered me in the girls’ bathroom that afternoon, hissing what the f*ck is wrong with you as we washed our hands and tried not to look at each other in the mirror.
“Today, Nikki?” And then I did look at her, the Gorgon of Battle Creek, and I didn’t turn to stone. “Not a single f*cking thing.”
LACEY
Me Before You
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO know everything, Dex—and for what it’s worth, I’m pretty f*cking sure your eyes are bigger than your stomach on that one—you should know that, before it all started, I was like you. Maybe not exactly like, not so willfully oblivious that I’d forgotten what I was trying to ignore, but close enough.
We lived by the beach.
No, that’s another of those pretty lies, the kind I tell you, the kind real estate developers and sleazy travel agents shill to gullible cheapskates, the kind the local founding fathers sold themselves on when they named their shit sprawl of gas stations and strip malls Shore Village, even though it was a twenty-minute drive from Jersey’s least attractive beach. We lived by a Blockbuster and an off-brand burger joint and a vacant lot that drunks used on Sunday mornings to puke up their Saturday nights. We lived alone, just the two of us, except it was mostly just the one of us. Between waitressing and groupie-ing, boozing and f*cking, Loretta didn’t have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn’t notice.
Poor Lacey, you’re thinking. Poor, unloved Lacey, with her trash mother and deadbeat dad, and this is why I don’t tell you these things, because for you everything is a fairy tale or a Lifetime movie, Technicolor or black-and-white, and I don’t need you imagining me in some sulfurous pit of trailer-trash hell. I don’t need your Oh, Lacey, that must have been so hard for you or Oh, Lacey, what do food stamps look like and how does neglect smell or, worst of all, Oh, Lacey, don’t worry, I understand, I have my pretty little house and my father knows best and my picture-perfect f*cking sitcom life, but deep down we’re totally the same.
I made do with what I had, and what I had was the smell of the ocean when the wind was right, and the beach itself, when I could thumb a ride. I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.
Mine was a nineteen-year-old dropout with greaser hair and a James Dean jacket, squatting in the empty apartment beneath ours, because his mother was the super and had given him the key. He read Kerouac, of course. Or maybe he didn’t actually read it; maybe he just strategically spread it across his lap while he napped in one of the crappy metal chairs he’d set up in the vacant lot, his own personal tanning zone. He definitely didn’t read Rilke or Nietzsche or Goethe or any of the other moldy paperbacks we passed back and forth while I coughed down his cherry vodka and he taught me how to smoke. He was too lazy to make it past the first chapters of most of them, but I can believe he made it through the Kerouac, because Jack spoke his language, his druggy, pretentious, wastrel nympho native tongue.
His name was Henry Schafer, but he had me call him Shay, and don’t get me wrong, Dex, even then, fifteen and swoony, I didn’t think it was love. Love was the stack of books piling up in my room, maybe, and the bootlegs he brought me; it was sailing down the Schuylkill in his beat-up Chevy, Philly on the horizon; it was South Street and head shops and smoky nights in a shitty back room listening to slam poetry; it was the heat of flesh the first time I dropped acid, salty skin when I licked my own palm. Love was not what Shay had me do to him in my mother’s bedroom while she was off trying to f*ck Metallica; it wasn’t a sticky glob of him in my mouth or the pain of a finger up my ass; it certainly wasn’t finding him with his tongue in his girlfriend’s ear and then pretending, the next night, that I’d assumed a girlfriend all along, that of course I’d understood what this was and wasn’t, that there was no harm and no foul and no reason he couldn’t keep using me to kill time while she was busy, and yes, I should be grateful that he’d always used a condom, what other proof did I need that he was thinking of me.