"You're being weird. Why are you being weird?"

"I'm not being weird."

"Good. Don't. Now you tell me something. What tells of Hannah Dexter's excellent adventure?" She affected a Keanu drawl. "Did you have a most awesome week? Or totally bogus?"

"I talked to Lacey."

There was a hissing on the line. It was the bad connection, but it was too easy to imagine Nikki herself, reverting to snake. She breathed out the word. "Fuck."

"It was fine."

"No wonder you're being so fucking weird. Please tell me you're not feeling sorry for her."

"She said something about you and her," I said, which was almost true. "And Craig."

The snake uncoiled, struck.

"You talked to Lacey about Craig? You talked to Lacey about Craig?" She was yelling, and Nikki never yelled. "About what I've told you? Things I've never told anyone? How could you even think that was okay?"

"I didn't! I wouldn't!"

I protested; I swore I would never break her confidence, that Lacey had asked nothing and told even less, that it's not like I had anything real to tell. I couldn't ask her, not then, why she would blame Lacey for anything; I could only say I was sorry. She hung up on me.

On TV, this was the moment to throw the phone across the room, and so I did and felt like a fool.

So did she, she said, when she called back an hour later. "That was unfair of me. I'm a little sensitive about . . . you know."

"Of course," I said.

"I know you would never tell Lacey anything. Right?"

"Of course I wouldn't."

"And I've been thinking about this sleepover party crap. You should come-I mean, if you really want to. It's going to be totally lame, and you're going to hate me for inviting you, but at least it'll be more fun for me."

"You actually mean it?"

"I don't do things I don't mean, Hannah. Haven't you figured that out by now?"

I GOT THERE AT NINE, as I'd been told, but I was the last to arrive. I'd cobbled together an outfit from the Nikki-approved corner of my closet, sleeveless velour shirt in forest green, black cardigan with flared sleeves, a gray choker. I wore vanilla-scented perfume and Gorilla Grapeflavored Lip Smackers. We would all taste the same in the dark.

Mrs. Drummond fluttered a hand toward the basement. "The girls are downstairs."

The girls: lazy cats sprawled across couches and sleeping bags, all smiles and claws, same as they were at school, same as they'd been since kindergarten, same as I remembered from the party I couldn't remember.

The girls: Paulette Green, who no one much liked but everyone tolerated because her parents had a secret patch of pot in their vegetable garden and enthusiastically believed in pharmaceutically raising the consciousness of their daughter and her friends. Sarah Kaye, whose father had multiple sclerosis and never left the house. Kaitlyn Dyer, the sweetheart everyone loved, even me, because she was short enough to be tossed around, short and bouncy and seemingly harmless, who was such a klepto she'd tried to steal the prom fund, and who'd gotten away with super-secret double probation because when the school tried to expel her, her parents had threatened to sue. Melanie Herman, who was sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend. Allie Cantor, who had herpes, and would forever.

I knew these things about them because Nikki had told me, and because she told me, I trusted her. Forgetting, eventually, that they weren't her secrets. That the girls had trusted her, too.

The girls were laughing at something on TV, and the something was me.

Me, unconscious and drooling in the dark. Shadows, then faces, grainy on the screen, grainy in a way I recognized. That was Nikki's father's video camera, the one she loved so much. That was Melanie and Andy and Micah. That was a voice, in the dark, shrieking "Weekend at Bernie's!" as brawny arms hoisted me up, danced me around, floppy and bare.

"Slut," someone said, and a hand reached into the frame, carved a Sharpie across my stomach, S-L-U-T, then made a smiley face out of a nipple.

Girls' laughter on the TV; girls' laughter in the basement. Freeze-frame, rewind, fast-forward, play.

"She wants it," a voice said off camera, and on-screen, Andy Smith lowered himself over the rag doll, ground against her, hip to hip, chest to chest, tongue slurped up her cheek, then down her sternum, then ringing the smiley face, round and round it goes.

"Take off her panties," a voice said.

"Slip in a finger," a voice said. "Make her wet."

"See? She wants it," a voice said. "She's dripping with it."

"Make her suck it," a voice said. "She wants to taste it."

Different hands, different fingers and tongues. But always the same voice. Always obeyed. And the Dex doll did whatever they made it do.

Nikki loved to direct.

"Here comes the gross part!" sweetheart Kaitlyn giggled in the basement as vomit trickled out of the girl on-screen, and that was how I knew they'd watched it before, knew it by heart.

On-screen there were groans and retching sounds, and Melanie said, "There goes the boner," and Nikki's voice said you can get it back and don't be a pussy and we can't stop now and then there was a flashing red battery light and fade to black.

Maybe I made some kind of noise.

Maybe Nikki had always known.

Of course she had known.

Nikki turned. "Oh, no. Hannah. You're here," she said, with no inflection. "Oh dear, I guess you saw everything."

SOMEHOW, I GOT OUT OF there. Somehow, adjusting the mirrors, shifting the gears, signaling the turns, all as Nikki had taught me to do, I got home.

Locked in my room, on the floor.

Burning with cold fire.

What I could say now, if I could speak to her then, that girl on the floor, that girl broken: This is not your fault; this is not your story. This is not the end. This will someday end.

What I know now, what I knew then: This will never stop burning.

Hannah, burning.

Hannah, burned away, hollowed out, scoured clean, Hannah the victim, Hannah the fool, Hannah the body. Hannah, stupid. Hannah, dead.

Dex, awake.

LACEY.

Come As You Are AFTER SHE HAD HER LITTLE fun making you think I was fucking your father, Nikki came for me. It was over, obviously, whatever it was between him and me, as soon as you knew it existed. You're lucky you ran off as fast as you did so you didn't have to see him cry. "God, what the fuck is wrong with me, what was I doing . . ." and on and on, literally ad nauseam, or maybe that's not what made me throw up all over the parking lot, but at least once I did, he shut up. Then he told me to go home and never come back, and I said and did some things I'm not proud of, until he took my shoulders and pushed his arms out, rigid, all that empty space between us, and gave me a pretty little speech about how I should respect myself more and expect more from others, and stop thinking I'm only valuable for sex, and all the while there was that bulge in his pants that both of us had to pretend didn't exist.

Everything as fucked-up as possible, just the way Nikki liked it, so of course that's when she slipped the note into my locker, asking me to meet her at the lake. If it had been the station, any part of the woods, I wouldn't have gone. But of course she wouldn't ask that of herself. The lake seemed okay to me, because even the shitty algae slop that passed for a town lake would remind me of the lake that mattered, yours and mine, clear and blue and ours. Nikki was part of the woods, twisting trails and sinkholes and the smell of rotting bark. You were water.

I showed up early, but she was there already, sitting on the dock. When she saw me, she pulled a bottle of Malibu from her bag. "Split it?"

It was too sweet, and the smell made me sick, but I took a couple shots. Judging from the blurriness around her edges, she'd gotten a head start.

We didn't talk much until we were both safely drunk.

"Satan, huh?" she said.

"Our Dark Lord and Savior. Wanna join up?"

"What the fuck happened to you?"

I took another swig. "Figured out I'm all alone in the world, no one loves me, and oh, yeah, a bunch of Jesus-loving psycho bitches force-fed me shit and left me in the woods to die."

She toasted me with the Malibu. "Once a drama queen, always a drama queen."

"Queen of the underworld now, haven't you heard?"

That's when she started laughing. "You're not actually fucking Hannah's dad, are you? I'd kill myself before letting someone that old stick it in me."

I went cold. "Don't say her name."

"You really hate me, don't you?" she said.

"Even more than you hate me."

"Not possible."

"Try me."

Then her hand was on my thigh, and she was crawling up me like I was a tree, Nikki Drummond, drunk and hungry, straddling me, grinding me, tonguing my lips and tugging at my hair, saying something about how she hated it so short, then cutting off the thought by taking my fingers in her mouth and sucking, hard. Her breasts felt bigger than I remembered them, looser somehow, and there was a trickle of drool at her mouth.

"Get the fuck off." I pushed her hard enough to hurt and hoped that it did.

"Come on, you know you want to."

You know how they say desperation isn't sexy? Bullshit. An ugly drunk without a shirt, wheezing rum and aiming herself at me like a torpedo of need? Pushing her away felt like kicking a puppy, and I got off on that, too.

"Maybe I'm fucking in love with you," she said, doing that half-laugh, half-cry thing that middle-aged women do in bad movies. "Did you think of that?"

"Frankly? No."

She sat back. "Why the fuck did you even show up, then?"

"I want to know what you want."

"Was I not clear?"

"What you want to stay away from her." I would have given it to her, Dex. Anything.

"You're fucking kidding me. You want me to believe you came here to talk about Hannah?"

"Her name is Dex."

"Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that." She laughed again. She'd amped up her acting skills since the last time we talked. She was nearly approximating human. "I get it, what you were doing. But we don't need her anymore."

"Since when is there a fucking we, Nikki?"

"You're not serious." She was touching me again, sweaty hands on hands. "What do you think your precious Dex would say if she actually knew you, Lacey? Is that what you really want, someone who can't see you? Someone who thinks all your bullshit is for real?"

"Stop talking."

"It's almost a year," she said.

"We don't talk about that."

"You don't think about him? You don't think about me?"

For a second, she almost had me. The stink of desperation, the sheen of moisture in her eyes, the pressure of her hands: She was so good at playing her part that, even knowing everything I knew, I almost bought it, that she missed me, that all this time she'd been secretly in love or lust, that she'd clawed her way into your life for the same reason I'd hung onto your father, that she didn't hate me anymore for what we knew about each other, that the things we'd done in the woods had meant something, hadn't been a hateful joke. Maybe I did buy it, just long enough to tell her the truth, and tell it almost gently. "Not anymore."

She let go.

"You came here for her," she said, and there, in the flat affect, the vacuum of her expression, was the real Nikki. "To tell me to stay away from her."

I nodded.

"But why would I stay away from my good friend Hannah?" She was slurring; it was hard to tell how much was rum and how much was effect. "I'm protecting her. Saving her from the big bad wolf." She smeared a hand across her nose and wiped the snot on her jeans. "Like I should have saved Craig. I'm good now. I do good works. Like Jesus."

"I need to know what you're going to do, Nikki. Are you going to tell her?"

Laughing again, she wouldn't stop laughing. "Tell who? Tell what?" Then she clapped her hands together. "Oh, I get it! All this crap about staying away from Hannah-that's not about her, that's about you."

"No."

"You're not afraid of what I'll do to her. You're afraid of what I'll tell her."