"What the fuck, Dex?"

She wasn't dressed for a party. White wifebeater and gym shorts, she wasn't dressed for anything. No makeup. No boots. That was the weirdest part. Lacey in sneakers.

"I didn't even know you owned sneakers," I said.

"Are you drunk?"

"Started without you." Then I was hugging her, hugging her and saying how much she sucked for flaking out on me, but now she was here, and sneakers or not, everybody dance now-I sang it, took her wrists in my hands and waved her arms in the air.

She shook me. "Sober up, Dex. What the hell were you thinking?"

"You love me drunk."

"When you drink with me. When I can watch you."

"You're late," I said, and we shook each other off. "And in the wrong place."

"And you're sticking your tongue in Marco Speck. We're both having off nights."

"Lacey. Laaaaaaaaaaacey. Lighten up. It's a party."

"I have to fucking talk to you."

"Right. Revenge," I said, open for business. "Vengeance. Monte Cristostyle. Bring it on. What've you got?"

"What?"

"Nikki Drummond. You said you had the perfect plan. So, go on. Make this worth it."

"Because you've got better places to be? Like in Marco Speck's pants? Like I'd let that happen."

I would have gone back down to the party then, maybe not to fuck Marco Speck but at least to make a good effort, if she hadn't stepped in front of the door.

"Fine," she said. "You want revenge? Here's the plan. We burn the fucking house down. Right now." She pulled out a lighter. I didn't know why she would have a lighter, or why she was lighting it, taking one of the kids' pillows and setting it on fire, both of us staring, mesmerized, at the flames.

"Jesus Christ!" I knocked it out of her hands, stomped on the fire, hard, desperate, stop, drop, and roll spinning through my head, and all those panicked nights I'd spent in fourth grade after Jamie Fulton's house burned down and the school sent home a checklist of clothes the family needed in the aftermath, including girls' underpants, size small. If my house burned down and my clothes turned to ash and the other kids in school had it confirmed in black-and-white that I required their spare girls' underpants, size small . . . better to die in a fire, I'd thought.

The flames went out. Docs were good for stomping.

"Are you trying to kill us?"

"The house burns down and what do you think will happen? Nikki's party, Nikki's fault, and everyone will know it," Lacey said, something wild on her face, like she would have actually done it, like she would still do it, if only I said yes. "It'd be all over for her. And think of the fire, Dex. Flames in the night. Magic."

"Since when did you turn into a fucking pyro?"

"That's the plan, Dex. In or out?"

"Either you've gone truly insane, or you think this is all a big joke, and either way, fuck you." I snatched the lighter out of her hands. "This stays with me."

There was a feeble laugh. "I wasn't actually going to do it. Jesus, Dex, learn to take a joke."

I believed her; I didn't believe her. I was tired of trying to figure it out.

"Just making sure there's still a little Hannah in my Dex," she said. "Where would I be without that little voice telling me, No, don't do that, Lacey, that's dangerous?" It was the sorry, pinched way she said it, like a bank teller rejecting a loan.

"I'm not your fucking conscience."

She must have seen it then, how angry I was, how drunk and how done. "Come on, Dex. Come on, it was a joke, I'm sorry. Look, this was a mistake. This party. This week. Everything. Let's erase it. Start again. For real this time. Burn our lives to the ground-" She held up a hand to silence me before I could object. "Metaphorically. Let's really do it this time, Dex. Get away. Go west, like we planned."

"Now?"

"Why not now?"

"I'm grounded," I reminded her.

"Exactly. You'll be grounded for life when your mother figures out you were here. Fuck her. Fuck all of them. Let's go, Dex. I mean it."

"Tonight."

"This minute. Please."

For a heartbeat, I believed her, and I thought about it. To jump into the Buick, aim ourselves at the horizon. To begin again. Could I be the girl who dropped everything and walked away? Could I be Dex, finally, forever?

Could I be free?

One heartbeat, and then in the thump of the next, I hated her for making me believe it could happen, because what could this be but another test, some wild dare I was supposed to shoot down, because-hadn't she just said it?-that was my job, the wet blanket on her fire.

"Enough bullshit," I said. "I'm going back to the party."

She shook her head, hard. "No. Dex. We have to go."

"If you want speed off into the sunset, you do it, Lacey. I'm not going to stop you. I'm going to have another drink. I'm going to have fun."

"You don't have to decide about leaving for good, not in the next thirty seconds, I'm sorry, that was crazy." She took my wrist, squeezed hard. "But at least let's get out of here. Please."

It was the second time she'd said it to me in one night, and possibly in all the time I'd known her. It shouldn't have felt so good to shrug her off. "I'm staying. You go."

"I'm not leaving you here by yourself."

That was when I understood. She didn't want me to be Dex, untamed and magnificent. That was her job. I was to be the sidekick. I was to keep my mouth shut and do as I was told, spin and leap and do tricks like a trained seal. I was to obey and applaud when appropriate. I was to be molded, not into her image but into something less-than.

Could I be the girl who walked away?

"Please. Go," I said.

"It's not my job to watch out for you," I said, "and vice versa."

"I don't care what happens next," I said. Maybe, finally, I was the one administering the test-maybe I was lying and maybe I wasn't.

Lacey believed me.

She left.

HOW TO DANCE LIKE NO one is watching. Or dance like everyone is watching, pale flesh jiggling as you grind against denim and polyester and lacrosse muscles and twitching dicks. Writhe in your Docs and jerk to the beat beat beat of the hip-hop blast, and let a hand find its way past a thin cotton waistband and stick its finger into your warm and wet. Wrap your arms around the closest body, press lips to neck and nape and groin, laugh along with and louder than, and if it feels good, do it. Put your hands on yourself, and rub and stroke, let yourself moan. Think, look at these faces, my friends, look at their love and look at me shine. Don't think. Straddle something, a chair or a body, lower your weight onto it, ride 'em cowboy, ride it hard while they pour beer on your head and you raise your face to the stream and your tongue to the sour splash, then, because they call for it, lick it off yourself, and off the body, and off the ground. Note the heat of skin, the fire that courses beneath, the salt of sweat and tears. Slice your palm on the splintered edge of a broken glass and smear yourself with blood. Let the floor fall away and the horizon spin. Suck at flesh and whirl in place and throw your hands up in the air. This is how to party like you just don't care.

Look at yourself, LACEY HAD said, the first time she laced me into the corset, turned me to the mirror, made me see. It's like you were born to wear it.

Do you see now, Dex? she had said.

I saw: A girl's face, made up with drastic colors and lips pursed in mock defiance. Romance-novel cleavage and black lace. Hair with streaks of icy blue and leather cuff bracelets that whispered tie me up, hold me down.

Look at yourself, Lacey had said, but myself was gone.

I thought: I look like someone else, and she is beautiful.

YOU. GIRL. WAKE UP."

I did what I did best and followed orders, waking up slow and in pain, fuzzy mouth and throbbing head and a cavernous feeling like I hadn't eaten in days, though the thought of food made every organ want to fling itself from my body into a putrid puddle at my feet. I woke up cursing and squinting, wishing someone would turn out the sun. Weeds beneath me, jeans and shirt damp with dew. Strange shirt; a stranger's shirt.

An alien landscape: Stretch of overgrown lawn, drained pool, fringe of trees. Dingy white siding, broken windows, stained patio, crushed cans of beer.

A man, his foot nudging my thigh, his face in shadow, gold badge glinting in the dawn.

"That's it. Get up now."

When he touched me, I screamed.

The effort of it nearly made me pass out again, as did the tilt of the world as he dragged me vertical. Then the noise of his words, security guard and trespassing and, he kept saying, trash, trash, trash, but it wouldn't come clear, whether he meant the empty cans and the broken glass and the used condoms or simply me.

The party was long over; everyone was gone. They'd left me alone. They'd left me out with the garbage.

Standing set my insides to sloshing. Thinking was hard, like a toddler unsteady on chubby feet.

"Get in," he said, and there was a door with a sedan attached to it and a leather backseat and the thought of a moving car made me want to die.

"I have my bike," I said.

He laughed like a dog.

"Are you a cop?" I said. "Am I under arrest?"

"Just give me your address."

Don't get into cars with strange men, I thought, and asked if he at least had any candy, and then I was the one laughing.

Maybe I was still drunk.

Lacey would have said: Skip the name, rank, serial number. No identification, no address, no consequences. He would have to dump me by the side of the road, and then I could sleep.

I couldn't remember the night.

I couldn't remember enough of the night.

I remembered hands gathering me up, I remembered floating in strange arms, chandeliers overhead and then stars, and laughter that wasn't mine. I remembered fingers tugging at zippers and lace, a voice saying leave her over there, another saying turn her over so she doesn't drown in her own puke, all the voices chanting puke puke puke and my trained-seal pride when I performed on command.

I ached everywhere, but hurt nowhere specific. That seemed important.

"Learn to have a little pride in yourself," the man said after I gave him my address, after he led me through the front yard, pausing to let me vomit up everything left inside. "You keep acting like a whore, people will keep treating you like one."

He deposited me at the door, which flew open at the bell, like my parents had been waiting. Of course, I thought, slowly, they had been waiting. The sun was up. I'd been missing. I felt like I still was.

The cop was a security guard for the housing development. The development would not be pressing charges. "Next time, though, we won't be so generous."

My mother was steel. "There won't be a next time."

"You sure you don't want to take me to jail?" I asked the not-cop, brain kicked into gear enough to smile. "Might be easier on me."

Then I heaved again. There was nothing left.

Once he was gone, my parents closed the door behind us, and there was a long stint of hugging. I tried to speak-probably it seemed like I wanted to explain myself, when I only wanted to say please be gentle and can someone turn out the lights-but my mother said no, firmly enough that it was the end of it, then held on tight, and then it was my father's turn, and for endless time I was closed in by their love, and it was almost enough to keep me on my feet.

Then, "Go get yourself cleaned up. You smell like the town dump," my mother said.

"Sleep," my father said. "Then we'll talk."

I lurched up the stairs. I'd been hungover before, but this was like some New Coke version of a hangover, different and deeply wrong. I closed myself into the bathroom, turned on the shower, waited for the water to heat, for the night to return to me.

I wanted to be clean; I wanted to sleep. Ahead of me, I knew, was the grueling interrogation by my parents, lectures and scolding, that I'd stayed out all night, made them worry, lost their trust all over again, and I'd have to sit through it while knowing my father was desperately hoping I wouldn't give him up, that if I kept quiet about him letting me go to the party he'd find a way to compensate. No matter what, I'd be grounded all over again. Grounding, of course, wouldn't extend to school, and I'd have to face all those faces who'd seen me lose control, who knew what I did, whatever it was. There would be whispers and rumors I would have to ignore; there would be stories of what and who, and I would, against my will, pay attention, try to piece together the night. I would be the story; I would be the joke; I would be the thing they'd left outside with the trash. All of that I knew.

I couldn't know about the letter to the editor some Officially Concerned old woman would publish in the local paper, about girls gone wild and the corrupting modern moral climate as encapsulated by the drunk sex fiend who'd been found passed out half naked outside the old Foster place, or that even though the girl went unnamed in the letter, my kindly security guard would spread my name to his nearest and dearest until half the town was calling me a whore, parents fish-eyeing my parents, their kids, chafing under draconian new curfews and rules, blaming me for all the ways in which they'd gotten screwed, that even my teachers would look at me differently, like they'd seen me naked. I couldn't know that I would be famous, the Mary Magdalene of Battle Creek, without my own personal savior, without anyone to rescue me from my own inequities except the judgment of the town, for my own good.

I couldn't know that I would go through it on my own. That when I called Lacey to tell her what had happened, to apologize or let her apologize or simply sit on the phone until I unclenched enough to let the tears fall, she wouldn't be there. That she'd packed up in the middle of the night, just like she'd told me she would. That I was on my own now, because I'd told Lacey to go and Lacey was gone.

I didn't know.

So when I stripped naked in the bathroom and saw myself-saw the words that had been Sharpie'd all over my body, the things someone had written across my stomach and breasts and ass, the labels that wouldn't come off no matter how hard I scrubbed, in handwriting I didn't recognize, but could recognize as the work of more than one person, slut and whore and skank and, graffitied neatly just below my belly button with an arrow pointing straight down, we wuz here-I thought: Lacey.

Lacey will save me.

Lacey will avenge me.

Lacey will hold me and whisper the magic words that will make all of this okay.

I climbed into the shower and sagged against the wall and watched the words shine in the water, the words strange hands had inscribed on bare skin while I slept. Strange hands redressing me, pulling underpants over my thighs, snapping strapless bra in place, lacing corset. Before that, strange hands doing things. Strange lips, strange fingers, strange dicks, all of them, I tried, hot water streaming over me, to remember what I had done, what I had let them do, who I had become in the night. The water burned and my skin burned, and still, I believed I could endure it, because soon I would have Lacey, and I would not be alone.