"They're the same thing."

"No, Lacey. One is about her. One is about you. Normal people know the difference."

"Don't hurt her just to fuck with me."

"Let's be clear. I don't care about fucking with you any more than I care about fucking you."

"Then why are we here?"

She left without an answer. We both knew the answer.

I made it worse. I tried to warn you, and you didn't listen, and that part's your fault, but the rest of it, that's on me. What she did next. What that made you do. It was all my fault and not my fault at all, same as everything else.

WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I threw out my retainer with my lunch. Didn't even notice until it was time to slip it back in my mouth and go to class, and that's when I freaked the fuck out-because I could see it, wrapped in a napkin on the corner of my tray so it wouldn't get gummy with French bread pizza. Sliding into the garbage on top of Terrence Clay's leftover spaghetti and the tuna fish salad that Lindsay North, getting the same head start on anorexia she'd gotten on boobs, had tossed out uneaten. You want to know what my life was like before you? It was like, given a choice between going home without the retainer and taking a swim in a Dumpster, I didn't even have to think. The janitor gave me a boost, and then watched me pick through the banana peels and clumps of spaghetti-I've blocked that part out, for the sake of my sanity. What I remember is that I found my retainer. I took it to the bathroom, ran it under some hot water, and-I try not to think about this, because it makes me feel like I've got bugs laying eggs inside my skin-I put it back in my mouth.

"Careless," the janitor said after he pulled me out, after I'd finally stopped crying. "Means that much to you, why'd you throw it out in the first place?"

You tell me, Dex. Why would a person do that?

You came for me, like nothing had happened, like we were still Lacey and Dex, you and me forever. I felt more like a witch than usual, because I'd commanded it, you need me, and there you were. Needing me. You pretended it was a gift, like you were giving for once instead of taking, but you needed me to tell you what to do next.

You told me what my mother said when you went looking for me at the house: Lacey doesn't live here anymore. But you didn't say how she said it, regretful or worried or relieved. Lacey doesn't live here anymore. Turns out that, even in Battle Creek, some secrets keep-especially when they're about something people would rather not know.

You took her suggestion and came for me in the Giant parking lot, and when you found me, you didn't look at me like I was some charity case, and you didn't ask me stupid questions, you just said, Lacey, I have a surprise for you, something you're going to like.

Lacey, trust me.

What would you have done if you'd known the truth, Dex? That when you tapped on my window, you were-for the first time in months-not even a speck on my mind. It was Halloween, and that night, of all nights, I was thinking about Craig, and about Nikki. I was thinking kind thoughts about Nikki and how I'd held her while she cried. I wondered if she felt it, on this night, dressed up somewhere in some stupid slutty kitten costume, laughing and drinking and finding someone else to make hurt as much as she did. If she'd been the one to tap at my window that night, I would have let her in, and I would have taken her into my arms and sung her to sleep. I would have given her what I owed her, because I couldn't give her what I'd taken, and maybe she would have done the same for me.

It wasn't her. It was you.

Your face, a ghost materializing on the other side of the glass, that hopeful smile, same as the first time I ever talked to you, like maybe, if you pressed your hand to the window, I would meet it with mine.

You had a surprise for me, you said. That night, of all nights, a surprise in the woods.

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was a girl who loved the woods, the cool sweep of browning greens, the canopy of leafy sky. Hidden in the trees, she picked flowers and dug for worms, she recited poems, timing the words to the bounce of her feet in the dirt. In the woods she met a monster, and mistook her for a friend. Into the woods they went, deeper and darker, and carved a sacred ring around a secret place, where the monster dug out pieces of the girl and buried them in the ground so that the girl could never truly leave, and never bear to return.

Once upon a time, another time, there was a girl who screamed in the forest of her dreams and woke up to grasping fingers and dead eyes, more monsters to carry her back home, and this is when the girl realized it was her fate, to live under the rotting bark and the molding stones, that she could escape, but always, somehow, the woods would claim her.

That's your kind of story, isn't it, everything tidied up and turned pretty. You wouldn't like to hear that once upon a time there was a girl who got totally fucked up by what happened to her in the woods, that there was blood and piss and shit and death, that the woods were where the girl turned into a killer and a devil and a witch, and that even the thought of going back, especially to that place, on that night, made bile rise up in her throat and she had to rake her nails down her palm so hard she drew blood just to keep from screaming.

Because you asked, I followed you into the woods.

You put a scratchy tape into the Barbie player and turned Kurt all the way up, and smiled at me like this, too, was a gift. I rolled down the window so I could breathe, and pretended I was doing you a favor by letting you drive.

"Are you going to tell me where we're going?" I said when you parked the car and we took off into the trees.

"You'll see," you said, but even then, I knew.

I thought Nikki must have told you the truth after all, because how else would you know about the station, why else would you make me go back?

The station was the same as we'd left it, only more weeds, more rust. You needed me to be strong, and so I was. Your Lacey wouldn't run away; your Lacey would remember to breathe.

There's no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as fate.

But there is justice.

You stopped in front of the boxcar, almost tripping over a rusted bucket brimming with brown rainwater. You rested your hand on a shiny padlock, and in the silence between our breathing, I could hear faint music, and her screams.

"Dex . . . what did you do?"

"Just to be clear, this isn't about what she did to me," you said. Then you told me what she did to you, and I folded you into me and felt you shaking and wanted her to die. "It's about what she did to us. That's what she's paying for."

You spun the combination and opened the lock.

Here was Nikki: crouched in a corner, shaky hands splashing light at the shadows, screaming into the noise. Nikki Drummond, a scared animal in the dark.

Here was you: grinning, proud mama showing off your beautiful baby. This scene, this night that you'd made for me, birthed from idea into fact. Hannah Dexter, in the boxcar, with a knife.

"Dex, why is she naked?"

I wasn't ready to ask you about the knife.

Nikki was on her feet, pressed into a corner, ready to pounce, her body registering something new. Incoherent screaming gave way to words. To: "Lacey."

She was crying.

"Lacey, get me the fuck out of here, she's gone fucking crazy, tell her to let me the fuck out."

You were watching her, not me. You weren't waiting for me to choose between you; it never occurred to you there was a choice. You believed in us again.

You believed in me again.

"You owe me," Nikki said. "Look where we are. Look what night it is. You fucking owe me, and you better fucking deal with this."

It never occurred to Nikki, either-that I might disobey, that I might not choose her, that she might want to say please. If she had, I might have done what she wanted. I'd tasted enough blood in these woods, and maybe Nikki had, too.

I wouldn't have given her back her clothes. But I might have helped her, because I don't hurt animals. I might have helped her-if only she hadn't been so fucking certain that I would.

"Lacey, you have to."

I closed her back into the dark.

THEM.

NIKKI'S MOTHER HAD ALWAYS PITIED other mothers. So many of them were less comfortable, less attractive, less skilled at the intricacies of PTA electioneering and bake sale presentation. They were, in a word, less, and it was perhaps no surprise they'd raised lesser daughters. She pitied them all, because they didn't have Nikki and she did. What good fortune, the other mothers were always saying, that you should get one like her. What a blessing, they would say, which was simply a way of reassuring themselves that they'd done nothing to deserve their inferior offspring as she'd done nothing to deserve her golden child; as if they still believed in an indiscriminate stork dropping bundles on doorsteps at random. Nikki's mother smiled gracefully at these women, letting them have their delusions. It would be unseemly to correct them, to point out that her daughter was a culmination of good genes and good breeding, and neither of these came down to luck. That she'd worked hard to ensure she had a daughter worthy of her, and raised Nikki to appreciate that hard work and continue it on her behalf. Seventeen years of approximated perfection: hair, skin, teeth, clothes, friends, boys, everything as it should be.

The best of everything, as it should be.

Her daughter couldn't be blamed for what that boy did in the woods-that was his parents' cross to bear, and Nikki's mother hoped they felt suitably guilty for what their second-rate parenting had inflicted on her daughter-but Nikki had endured the episode with dignity, and the small markers of grief, the glossy eyes and the blanching skin, had, if anything, made her even more beautiful. Nikki's mother had encouraged her, after a suitable time passed, to choose someone else. Life was easier with a solid shoulder to lean on, or seem to, she'd taught her daughter. The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness. I don't need another boyfriend, Nikki snapped after her mother had urged her once too often. Of course not, Nikki's mother replied. Need was unseemly; need was itself weakness. The love that you needed was the kind best avoided. No one knew that better than Nikki's mother. Though, of course, she couldn't tell her daughter that.

Nikki was doing fine. Nikki was doing great. Nikki, she told herself, standing in the entryway of her daughter's closet, trying to understand what she'd found there, wasn't the problem.

It was, she suspected, this Hannah girl, the one who had followed her daughter around all summer like a mangy dog. Hannah Dexter, with her bad genes and worse breeding, her ill-fitting clothing and her abominable hair. It had to be Hannah's influence that had Nikki acting so erratically. Talking back to her parents. Canceling her dates. Dyeing her hair, of all things, some cheap drugstore purple that had cost Nikki's mother more than a hundred dollars to dye back to its original color before anyone could see. "She's not up to your standards," Nikki's mother had told her daughter the other night at dinner, and Nikki had actually laughed.

"My standards are fucked," Nikki had said. Trashy language, trashy sentiments: This was not the daughter Nikki's mother had raised.

Something was off. A mother always knows.

So Nikki's mother waited until her daughter was at school and prowled through her room. She'd never done it before, never had the need, silently judged those parents who were forced to police their daughters, paw through their diaries for secret rendezvous, search underwear drawers for condom packets. Nikki's mother didn't need forensic evidence. A mother knows.

But: All those empty bottles in the closet. Cheap vodka, some gin, and a few tacky wine coolers. Left behind when they so easily could have been disposed of, almost as if Nikki wanted her to see. And the pictures, beneath her mattress, pages torn from magazines, of women doing ungodly things.

Nikki's mother thought about all those hours Nikki had spent alone with that Dexter girl, imagining the girl pouring vile liquids down her daughter's throat, imagining the girl stripping off her daughter's clothing, climbing up her daughter's body, trying to pervert her daughter into something she was never meant to be.

It was not acceptable, she thought.

"So what did you do?" Kevin asked, stroking his finger along Nikki's mother's bare leg, up and up and, almost unbearably, up.

She had called him in a moment of weakness. She only, always called him in a moment of weakness, and every time was supposed to be the last time, but then there she was again, bedded down in her husband's gym buddy's navy sheets, staring at the photo of him with his wife and children at Disney World, Mickey ears perched on all four heads, while he burrowed his face beneath the blanket and did things to her down there in the dark that she could never understand. He'd asked her, once, if she wanted him to put the photo away, and she lied, saying that wouldn't be appropriate, and that she barely noticed it, when the truth was that the photo was another thing she didn't understand, a necessary part of the process, that she needed his fingers and his lips, but also their faces, Cheri's bovine eyes and the twins' sorry cowlicks, that it was this photo she saw when she closed her eyes and let his tongue guide her over the edge.

"I put it all back," she told him.

"Every girl needs her secrets," he said, and smiled like they shared something together.

In therapy, which had been Steven's condition for taking her back, she had told her husband that the affair meant nothing, the other man couldn't compare to him, which was true. Kevin was smaller in every way. Poorer, uglier, meaner. She couldn't tell him that Kevin was the tool that made Steven bearable, which was how she justified continuing it, even now, even after she'd sworn never again, this time I mean it.

"Maybe I should talk to her about it," Nikki's mother said.

"Maybe," Kevin agreed. He was nothing if not agreeable. Sometimes Nikki's mother felt like she was having sex with herself.

"But a mother shouldn't know everything about her daughter," she continued. "I certainly wouldn't want her to know everything about me."

"Certainly not," Kevin agreed, and they stopped talking.

She was sore, driving home, but it was the good kind of sore, the kind that would sustain her through her dinner preparations and the inane small talk of family life, a secret and deeply pleasurable ache that would keep the smile fixed on her face. This was what convinced her: Nikki deserved her secrets, as did they all. Hadn't she taught her daughter that who we are, what we do, is all less important than who we seem to be?

Dinner was meat loaf, and it was polite. Nikki's father didn't ask his wife what she'd done that day. Nikki's mother didn't ask her daughter why she smelled, as usual, of breath mints. Nikki didn't ask her parents why her brother wasn't coming home for Thanksgiving. They discussed Halloween, whether to hand out toothbrushes again and risk getting egged, or capitulate to the inevitable and return to the mini Hershey bars of years past. Nikki's father told a politely funny story about his colleague's toupee. Nikki said she'd be home late the next day because she was giving a friend a ride to the doctor, which was just the kind of thing Nikki was prone to do. Nikki's mother offered her daughter dessert and smiled when Nikki turned down the empty calories. She felt better already. Girls went through phases-everyone knew that. Nikki knew what was needed to survive and excel. She would be fine. That's what Nikki's mother told herself that night as she endured her husband's ministrations and went to sleep, and that's what she told herself the next day when evening darkened into night and the little ghosts and monsters stopped ringing the doorbell and still Nikki didn't come home.

She would be fine.

A mother knows.

US.

Halloween

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.