Girls on Fire.

Robin Wasserman.

Dedication.

For my father, who believed that I could.

Epigraph.

In the Age of Gold, Free from winters cold:.

Youth and maiden bright, To the holy light, Naked in the sunny beams delight.

-WILLIAM BLAKE.

Queen of lies, every day, in my heart.

-KURT COBAIN.

TODAY.

SEE THEM IN THEIR GOLDEN hour, a flood of girls high on the ecstasy of the final bell, tumbling onto the city bus, all gawky limbs and Wonderbra cleavage, chewed nails picking at eruptive zits, lips nibbling and eyes scrunching in a doomed attempt not to cry. Girls with plaid skirts tugged unfathomably high above the knee, girls seizing the motion of the bus to throw themselves bodily into their objects of affection, Oops, sorry, guy, didn't mean to shove my boob in your face, was that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me.

Try not to see them, I dare you. Girls, everywhere. Leaning against storefronts, trying so hard to look effortless as they dangle cigarettes and exhale clouds of smoke; tapping phones while shrieking about how Mom is a such a bitch. Girls hitching up skirts by the liquor store, hoping for a handle of vodka if they show enough leg; girls in the makeup aisle, gazing helplessly at the nail polish display like they can hear you silently cheering them on, willing them to scoop those cherry reds into a bag, to succumb to temptation and expectation, to give in.

Give in: Pick a pair of them, lost in each other, a matched set like a vision out of the past. Nobody special, two nobodies. Except that together, they're radioactive; together, they glow. Nestled into a seat in the back of the bus, arms tangled, foreheads kissing.

Long for the way they drown in each other.

Follow them off the bus and onto the beach, as the one in charge-there's always one in charge-shakes her curls free. Her makeup is expertly applied, her beet lips excessively large, kissable. The other girl wears no makeup at all, and her hair, bone straight and dyed platinum, flaps in the ocean breeze. Watch them lick soft-serve, pink tongues flicking spiraled cream. Watch them turn cartwheels in the surf, watch them slurp Dorito dust from sticky fingers, watch them split a pair of earbuds and stare up at the clouds, their secret soundtrack carving shapes in the sky.

Try to hold yourself back from rising over them, casting them in aging shadow, warning of millennial futures, the end of days, days like this, warning them to taste each sugary minute, to hold on tight.

Hold back, because you know girls; girls don't listen. Better, maybe, to knock them out, drag them into the sea. Let this perfect moment be the last, say, Go out on a high note, girls, and push them into the tide. Let them drift off the edge of the earth.

Impossible not to see them, not to remember what it was like, when it was like that. To sit there, shivering, as the sun dips toward the horizon and the wind blows cold over the waves, as the sky blazes red and darkness gathers around the girls, neither of them knowing how little time they have left before the fire goes out.

Remember how good it felt to burn.

US.

November 1991March 1992.

DEX.

Before Lacey.

THEY FINALLY FOUND THE BODY on a Sunday night, sometime between 60 Minutes and Married with Children. Probably closer to Andy Rooney than Al Bundy, because it would have taken some time for the news, even news like this, to travel. There would have been business to attend to in the woods, staking out the scene with yellow caution tape, photographing the pools of blood, sliding the body into a useless ambulance and bagging the gun-there was a universal logic to such things, if TV had it right, a script to follow that would get even our sorry Keystone Kops past the hurdle of touching a corpse, seeing and smelling whatever happened to a body after three days and nights in the woods. From there, who knew how it worked, officially: where they took the body, who was tasked with calling the parents, how they extracted the bullet, what they did with the gun, the note. Unofficially, it did what bad news did best: spread. My father always liked to say you couldn't shit your own bed in Battle Creek without your neighbor showing up to wipe your ass, and though he said it largely to get a rise out of my mother, it had the whiff of truth.

It was always my mother who answered the phone. "They found him, that boy from your school," she said, once the show had gone to commercial. We were all facing carefully away from one another, toward the giant Coke bottles dancing across the screen.

She said they'd found him in the woods, found him dead. That he'd done it to himself. She asked if he'd been my friend, and my father said that I'd answered that already when the boy went missing, and that I barely knew him, and that I was fine, and my mother said, Let her speak for herself, and my father said, Who's stopping her, and my mother said, Do you want to talk about it, and my father said, Does she look like she wants to talk about it.

I did not want to talk about it. I told them I might later, which was a lie, and that I wanted to be alone, which was the truth, and that they shouldn't worry about me, because I was fine. Which was less true or false than it was necessary.

"We're sorry about this, kid," my father said as I made my escape, and these were the last words spoken in my house on the subject of Craig Ellison and the thing he did to himself in the woods.

HE WASN'T MY FRIEND. HE was nothing to me, or less than. Alive, Craig was Big Johnson shirts and stupidly baggy jeans that showed off boxers and a hint of crack. He was basketball in the winter and lacrosse in the spring and a dumb blond with a cruel streak all year round, technically a classmate of mine since kindergarten but, in every way that counted, the occupant of some alternate dimension where people cheered at high school sporting events and spent their Saturday nights drinking and jerking off to Color Me Badd instead of sitting at home, watching The Golden Girls. Alive, Craig was arguably just a little less than the sum of his meathead parts, and on the few times our paths crossed and he deigned to notice my existence, he could usually be counted on to drop a polite witticism along the lines of Move it, bee-yotch as he muscled past.

Dead, though, he was transformed: martyr, wonder, victim, cautionary tale. By Monday morning, his locker was a clutter of paper hearts, teddy bears, and basketball pennants, at least until the janitorial staff were instructed to clear it all away amid fears that making too much of a fuss might inspire the trend chasers among us to follow. A school-wide memorial was scheduled; then, under the same paranoid logic, canceled; then scheduled again, until compromise finally took the form of an hour of weepy testaments and a slideshow scored to Bette Midler instrumentals and the flutter of informational pamphlets from a national suicide hotline.

I didn't cry; it didn't seem like my place.

All of us in the junior class were required to meet at least once with the school counselor. My appointment came a few weeks after his death, in one of the slots reserved for nonentities, and was perfunctory: Was I having nightmares. Was I unable to stop crying. Was I in need of intervention. Was I happy.

No, no, no, I said, and because there was no upshot to being honest, yes.

The counselor sponged off his pits and asked what disturbed me most about Craig Ellison's death. No one used the word suicide that year unless absolutely necessary.

"He was out there in the woods for three days," I said, "just waiting for someone to find him." I imagined it like a time-lapse video of blooming flowers, the body wheezing out its final gaseous waste, flesh rotting, deer pawing, ants marching. The tree line was only a couple blocks from my house, and I wondered, if the wind had been right, what it might have carried.

The thought of the corpse wasn't what disturbed me most, not even close. What disturbed me most was the revelation that someone like Craig Ellison had secrets-that he had actual, human emotions not altogether dissimilar from mine. Deeper, apparently, because when I had a bad day, I watched cartoons and hoovered up a bag of Doritos, whereas Craig took his father's gun into the woods and blew a hole through the back of his head. I'd had a guinea pig once that did nothing but eat and sleep and poop, and if I'd found out the guinea pig's inner turmoil was stormier than mine, that would have disturbed me, too.

Weirdly, then, the counselor shifted gears and asked whether I knew anything about the three churches that had been vandalized on Halloween, blood-red upside-down crosses painted across their wooden doors. "Of course not," I said, though what I knew was what everybody knew, which was that a trio of stoners had taken to wearing black nail polish and five-pointed stars, and had spent the week before Halloween bragging how they would put the devil back into the devil's night.

"Do you think Craig knew anything about it?" he asked.

"Wasn't that the same night he . . . you know?"

The counselor nodded.

"Then I'm guessing, not so much."

He looked less disappointed than personally affronted, like I'd just ruined his Murder, She Wrote moment: Insightful bystander unveils dark truth behind hideous crime.

Even to people who gave Craig more credit than I did-maybe especially to them-the suicide was a puzzle to be solved. He'd been a good boy, and everyone knew good boys didn't do bad things like that. He'd been a high school point guard with a winning record and a blow-job-amenable girlfriend: Logic dictated joy. There must have been extenuating circumstances, people said. Drugs, maybe, the kind that made you run for a plate glass window, imagining you could fly. A game of Russian roulette gone wrong; a romantic suicide pact reneged; the summons of darkness, some blood magic that seduced its victims on the devil's night. Even the ones who accepted it as a straightforward suicide acted like it was less personal decision than communicative disease, something Craig had accidentally caught and might now pass on to the rest of us, like chlamydia.

All my life, Battle Creek had reliably been a place where nothing happened. The strange thing that year wasn't that something finally did. It was that, as if the town shared some primordial lizard brain capable of divining the future, we all held our breath waiting for something to happen next.

THANKS TO SOME AMBIGUOUS CAUSAL link the school administration drew between depression and godlessness, a new postmortem policy dictated that we spend three minutes of every homeroom in silent prayer. Craig had been in my homeroom, seated diagonally to my right, at a desk we all now knew better than to look at directly. Years before, during a solar eclipse, we'd all made little cardboard viewing boxes to stare up into the dark, having been warned that an unobscured view would burn our retinas. The physics of it never made sense to me, but the poetry did, the need to trick yourself into looking at something without really seeing it. That's what I did now, letting myself look at the desk only during those three minutes of silent prayer, when the rest of the class had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, as if secret looking somehow didn't count.

This had been going on for a couple months when something-nothing so bold as a noise, more like an invisible tap on the shoulder, an unspoken whisper promising this way lies fate-pulled my eyes away from the lacquered surface scuffed by Craig's many etchings of cocks and balls, and toward the girl in the very opposite corner of the room, the girl I still thought of as new even though she'd been with us since September. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on Craig's desk, until they weren't anymore. They were on me. She watched me like she was waiting for a performance to begin, and it wasn't until she rolled her eyes skyward and opportunity slipped away that I realized it was opportunity I'd been waiting for. Then her middle finger ratcheted up, pointing to the ceiling, to the clouds-unmistakably, to the Lord Our God in Heaven-and when her eyes dropped to meet mine again, my finger rose of its own accord in identical salute. She smiled. By the time our teacher called, Time's up, her hands were folded politely together on the desk again . . . until she raised one to propose that school prayer, even the silent kind, was illegal.

Lacey Champlain had a stripper's name and a trucker's wardrobe, all flannel shirts and clomping boots that-stranded as we were in what Lacey later called the butt crack of western Pennsylvania-we didn't yet recognize as a pledge of allegiance to grunge. The new kid in a school that hadn't had a new kid in four years, she defied categorization. There was a fierceness about her that also defied attack, and so she'd become the two-legged version of Craig's desk, best glimpsed only from the corner of your eye. I looked at her head-on now, curious how she managed to weather Mr. Callahan's infamously fearsome glare.

"You have some problem with God?" he said. Callahan was also our history teacher, and had been known to skip over entire decades and wars in favor of explaining how carbon dating was nonsense and all the coincidental mutations in history couldn't account for the evolution of the human eye.

"I have a problem with you asking me that question in a building funded by public taxes." Lacey Champlain had dark hair, almost true black, that curled over her face and bobbed at her chin flapper-style. Pale skin and blood-red lips, like she didn't have to bother dressing goth because she came by it naturally, vampire by birthright. Her nails were the same color as her lips, as were her boots, which laced up her calves and looked made for stomping. Where I had a misshapen assemblage of lumps and craters, she had what could reasonably be called a figure, peaks and valleys all of appropriate size and direction.

"Any other objections from the peanut gallery?" Callahan said, fixing us all with his look one by one, defying us to raise a hand. Callahan's glare wasn't as intimidating as it had been before the morning he officially informed us Craig wasn't coming back, when his face crumbled in on itself and never quite came back together, but it was still grim enough to shut everyone up. Smiling like he'd won a round, he told Lacey that if praying made her uncomfortable, she was welcome to leave.

She did. And, rumor had it, stopped in the library, then headed straight for the principal's office, constitutional law book in one hand, the ACLU's phone number in the other. So ended Battle Creek High's brief flirtation with silent prayer.

I thought something might come of it, that silent second we'd shared. For days afterward, I kept a stalker's eye on her, waiting for some acknowledgment of whatever had passed between us. If she noticed, she showed no sign of it, and when I turned to look, she was never looking back. Eventually I felt stupid about the whole thing, and rather than be the feeble friendless loser who fuses a few bread crumbs of chance encounter into an elaborate fantasy of intimacy, I officially forgot that Lacey Champlain existed.

Not that I was feeble or friendless, certainly not by the Hollywood standards that pegged us all as either busty cheerleaders or lonely geeks. I was always able to find a spot at one table or another at lunch, could rely on a handful of interchangeable girls to swap homework or partner on the occasional group project. Still, I'd filed the dream of a best friend away with my Barbies and the rest of my childish things, and given up expecting Battle Creek to supply me with anything resembling a soul mate. Which is to say, I'd been lonely for so long, I'd forgotten that I was.

That feeling of disconnection, of grief for something I'd never had, of screaming into a void and knowing no one would hear me-I'd forgotten that was anything other than the basic condition of life.

OUTSIDE OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL EARTH science illustrations, plateaus aren't unremittingly flat. Even my carefully curated existence of school, homework, TV, and nonintrospection had its peaks and troughs. Gym class was a twice-a-week valley, and that winter, shivering on a softball field in our stupid white skirts every time the temperature rose above fifty degrees, it was more like the valley of the shadow of death, where Craig's girlfriend and her obsequious posse stood manning the bases while I lingered in left field, fearing much evil.

Craig's girlfriend: Referring to Nikki Drummond that way was like referring to Madonna as Sean Penn's ex-wife. Despite his MVP trophies, before his memorable closing act, Craig was inconsequential; Nikki Drummond, at least within the limited cosmology of the Battle Creek High School student body, was God. A spit-shined princess with who, me? eyes and a cherry-red pout, Nikki floated the halls on a cloud of adoration and dessert-themed perfumes-vanilla or cinnamon or gingerbread-though she gave no indication that she did anything so vulgar as eat. Like the girls who worshipped at her altar, Nikki streaked her bangs with Sun-In and flowered her LA Gear sneakers with felt-tipped markers, red and yellow daisies dancing across immaculate white. The girls she favored, and a number that she didn't, made themselves over in her image, but the chain of command was never in doubt. Nikki commanded; her subjects obeyed.

I was not among them, and most days that still felt like a point of pride.

After Craig's death, Nikki had briefly acquired an aura of sainthood. It must change a person, I'd thought, to be touched by tragedy, and I watched her carefully-in gym class, in homeroom, in the hall by the disappearing, reappearing shrine-wondering what she would become. But Nikki only became more fully Nikki. Not purified but distilled: essence of bitch. I overheard her in the girls' locker room, two weeks after it happened, talking to two of her ladies-in-waiting in a voice designed for overhearing. "Let them think whatever they want," she said, and, impossibly, laughed.

"But they're saying you were cheating on him," Allie Cantor said, theatrically scandalized. "Or that you were . . ." Here her voice went subsonic, but I could fill in the gap because I'd heard the rumors, too. In the wake of inexplicable suicide, sainthood didn't last long. ". . . pregnant."

"So?"

"So, they're saying he maybe did it because of you." Kaitlyn Dyer's voice caught on every other word. Nikki's girls had been competing over who could put on the biggest show of pain, though I wondered why they assumed this would earn them favor from a queen who had endured so many days of memorials and so much vile gossip, without a flinch.

"It's kind of flattering, right?" Nikki paused, and something in her voice implied a bubblegum smile. "I mean, I'm not arrogant enough to think anyone would kill himself for me. But I've got to admit it's possible."

Word-especially that word, flattering-spread; the whispers stopped. Months later, I still watched Nikki sometimes, especially when she was alone, trying to catch her in a moment of humanity. Maybe I wanted proof that I should feel sorry for her, because it seemed barbaric not to; maybe it was only animal instinct. Even the dumbest prey knows better than to turn its back on a predator.

Most of us, by that point in our educational careers, had mastered changing into our gym uniforms without revealing an inch more of bare skin than was necessary. Nikki never bothered. Her bra always matched her panties, and when she tired of showing off the flat stomach and perfect curves she tucked into one pastel set of satins after another, she somehow managed to make even the mandated tennis skirt look good. Me, on the other hand, all saggy granny panties and flabby C-cups bulging from stretched-out lace, dingy white uniform that gave my skin a tubercular pallor-the mirror was my enemy. So that day, the first February afternoon warm enough to play outside, I didn't inspect myself on the way out of the locker room, didn't notice until I was on the field and halfway through the first softball inning that all those people laughing were laughing at me, didn't understand until Nikki Drummond sidled over in the dugout and whispered, giggling, that I might want to stick a tampon up my cunt.

This was the nightmare with no and then I woke up. This was blood. This was stain. I was sticky and leaking, and if Nikki had slipped me a knife I would happily have slit a vein, but instead she just gave me the one word that girls like Nikki weren't supposed to say, the word that guaranteed from now on, whenever anyone looked my way, they would see Hannah Dexter and think cunt. My cunt. My dripping, bloody, foul cunt.

I was supposed to shrug, maybe. The kind of girl who could laugh things off was the kind of girl who lived things down. Instead I burned, hot and teary, hands pressed against my splotchy ass as if I could make them all unsee what they'd seen, and Nikki's teeth glowed white as her skirt when she laughed, and then somehow I was in the nurse's office, still crying and still bleeding, while the gym teacher explained to the nurse that there had been an incident, that I had soiled myself, that I perhaps should be wiped and cleaned and collected by a parent or guardian and taken home.

I locked myself into the handicapped bathroom at the back of the office and stuck a tampon up my cunt, then changed into unstained jeans, tied a jacket around my waist, scrubbed the tears off my face, and dry-heaved into the toilet. When I finally came out, Lacey Champlain was there, waiting for the nurse to decide her so-called headache was bullshit and send her back to class, but-at least this was how we told ourselves the story later, when we needed the story of us to be inevitable-at some deeper, subsonic level, waiting for me.

The room smelled like rubbing alcohol. Lacey smelled like Christmas, ginger and cloves. I could hear the nurse on the phone in her inner office, complaining about overtime and how someone somewhere was a total bitch.

Then Lacey was looking at me. "Who was it?"

It was no one; it was me; it was bad timing and heavy flow and the cruel dictates of white cotton, but because it was the laughter as much as the stain, the cunt as much as its leak, it was also Nikki Drummond-and when I said her name Lacey's lip curled up on one side, her finger playing at her face like it was twirling an invisible mustache, and somehow I knew this was as close as I'd get to a smile.

"You ever think about just doing it? Like he did?" she said.

"Doing what?"

That got me a look I'd see a lot of, later on. It said you'd disappointed her; it said Lacey had expected better, but she would give you one more chance. "Offing yourself."

"Maybe," I said. "Sometimes."

I'd never said it out loud. It was like carrying around a secret disease, and not wanting to let anyone think you were contagious. I half expected Lacey to scrape her chair away.

Instead she held out her left wrist and flipped it over, exposing the veins. "See that?"

I saw milky flesh, spiderwebbed with blue. "What?"

She tapped her finger against the spot, a pale white line, cutting diagonal, the length of a thumbnail. "Hesitation cut," she said. "That's what happens when you lose your nerve."

I wanted to touch it. To feel the raised edges of the scar, and the pulse beating beneath. "Really?"

A sudden spurt of laughter. "Of course not really. It's a paper cut. Come on."

She was making fun of me, or she wasn't. She was like me, or she wasn't.

"That's not how I'd do it, anyway, if I were going to do it," she said. "Not with a knife."

"Then how?"

She shook her head and made an uh-uh noise, like I was a kid reaching for a cigarette. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

"My what?"

"Your plan, for how you'd do it."

"But I wouldn't-"

"Whether you'd actually do it is beside the point," she said, and I could tell I was running out of chances. "How you would kill yourself is the most personal decision a person can make. It says everything about you. Don't you think?"