"Not in the barn." I didn't know why I was still talking. If I didn't name it, maybe I could erase it. "Before."

"Yeah, we're going to have to change before anyone sees us," Lacey said, looking down at herself, and I realized the stains on her shirt were blood. The stains on mine, too.

I shook my head. Everything was shaking.

"No." Lacey stilled my hands with hers. "No, Dex. They'd have done it whether we were there or not."

It was some note of certainty in her voice, maybe, that cued a memory from an assembly past, then half-remembered words from the morning's service, and the pieces jigsawed themselves. "You knew," I said, and of course she knew. She always knew. "You picked that town on purpose."

"Of course I did. I was curious. Weren't you?"

I knew the right answer: Curiosity was supposed to be our lifeblood.

"What do you think they do with cows on that farm, Dex?" she said when I didn't give it to her. "This isn't Charlotte's Web."

"That was a pig."

"And they were going to butcher it, right?" Lacey said. "That's how farms work. It's not like killing someone's cat or something."

"Have they killed someone's cat?"

"Do you want the answer to that?"

Silence between us, then, except for the bugs and the birds and the wind.

"You were having fun," she said, and it felt like an accusation. "You were laughing. You just don't remember."

"No. No."

"You do know it was all a bad joke, right?" she said. "Just a bunch of asshole hicks trying to freak out their parents. No one was actually trying to summon the devil."

"Of course I know that." What I didn't know, at least not with the same degree of certainty, was whether it mattered. The sacrifice was a joke, maybe, but wasn't blood still blood, dead still dead?

"Anyway, it's not some crime against nature to watch stupid people do stupid shit," Lacey said.

"But it was more than watching . . . wasn't it?"

"What do you think?" Lacey laughed. "You think you helped put poor little Bessie out of her misery? You?"

I was sitting cross-legged, and Lacey shifted until she faced me in exactly the same pose. The Mirror Game, I'd called it when I was a kid, springing it on my parents without warning. You scratch your nose; I scratch mine. My mother loathed it. My father, who'd learned in some long-ago acting class how to cry on command, always won. If Lacey and I played, I thought, the game could go on forever.

She cupped my hands again. "How much do you remember, Dex? Seriously."

I shrugged. "Enough?"

"I remember how it was my first time. Everything feels kind of like a dream, right? You're not sure what's real, what's not?"

I nodded, slowly. "Not for you?" I said. "Everything's clear for you?"

"Crystal. So I can tell you everything that happened, in graphic detail, or . . ."

"Or."

"Or you trust me that everything is fine. That all the good stuff happened and all the bad stuff was a dream. You let me remember, and you let yourself forget. You trust me, don't you?"

"You know I do."

"Then?"

"Then okay. Yes. Everything is fine."

She smiled-I smiled. That was how the game worked.

"You're not sorry, are you?" Lacey asked, and I knew, because I always knew, what she really meant. Was I sorry not just about the things that happened in the field and the things that didn't happen in the barn, and not just about the church and the mushrooms, but sorry for everything that led up to it, sorry about Lacey and Dex, sorry to be here with her in this field, damp and shaky and stained with blood, sorry to be with her anywhere?

I knew what she needed to hear. "Never be sorry, remember?"

Never be sorry, never be frightened, never be careful-those were the rules of Lacey. Play by the rules, win the game: Never be alone.

WE MUST HAVE GONE TO class; we must have scribbled down an English paper or two, made small talk with parents and teachers, emptied dishwashers and mowed lawns, nuked frozen pizza for lonely TV dinners, snooze-buttoned our way through six A.M. alarms, waded through all the mundane detritus of high school life, but that's not what I remember. Somewhere out there, line dancing swept the nation, LA exploded over Rodney King, Bill Clinton didn't inhale, George Bush threw up on Japan, a Long Island nutcase shot her boyfriend's wife in the face, a new Europe chewed its way out of the corpse of the USSR, and history officially met its end. None of it penetrated. We were our own world. I remember: riding down the highway in Lacey's Buick, trying to shove her lone Pearl Jam tape into the player, rain pelting my face on stormy nights because the passenger window was stuck halfway down, the two of us one with the car and with the road, Lacey always at the wheel despite daily promises that she would teach me how to drive. We were at our best when we were in motion.

Once, we drove all night, Lacey slugging back Diet Cokes while I searched for exit signs and inscribed our names on the dewy window. When we hit the George Washington Bridge, Lacey stopped the car on the Jersey side, and we watched the city groan into morning. Then we turned around and drove home. Because it wasn't about going to New York City, Lacey said. It was about proving we could. Actually going to New York, that was another thing for plebes. Too obvious, Lacey said. When we escaped, it would be to Seattle. We would get an apartment near the Crocodile cafe, where we'd waitress so we could score free booze and sleep with the bands. We would have a beanbag chair and a cat named Ginsberg. We would sell the car to pay the first month's rent, then buy a bottle of wine with whatever was left over and toast to the fact that there was no turning back.

I fell asleep nights thinking about it, imagining highways ribboning across flat brown land, afraid we wouldn't go, afraid she'd go without me. Some mornings I woke with the sun, convinced I'd dreamed her into my life, and called her house just to make sure she was still there.

WE DIDN'T TRY MUSHROOMS AGAIN; we never talked about the night in the field. Not directly, at least, and that made it easier for memory to recede into shared dream. But after that night, Lacey had two new fixations: finding out more about what she called the devil-worship thing and getting me laid. Both made my skin creep, but when she grabbed me outside the cafeteria to tell me she had two birds and one stone waiting for us in the parking lot, I did as I was told.

"Three birds, if you want to get technical," she said. "Though one of them doesn't believe in showers, so he's out."

Three birds, scuzzy and greased, one with a pube-stache, one with a shaved head, one with "prison tats" he'd meticulously inked up and down his arm: Jesse, Mark, and Dylan. Boys I'd known since they were still boys enough to play with dolls; boys who'd grown into almost-men who wanted to be dangerous and persuaded the wrong people they were.

I didn't think they deserved it, what had been done to them in the fall and the way people acted after-as if the three of them had dragged Craig into the woods and whispered satanic prayers to him till he cracked, then beat themselves up and lofted themselves into that tree as penance. As if whatever happened to them was just, even merciful. But I also didn't want to be out there in the alley with them alone.

Not alone, I reminded myself. With Lacey.

Never alone.

"You want?" Jesse offered Lacey a hit off his dwindling blunt. She waved him away. He didn't ask me.

"You guys know Dex, right?"

Mark snorted. "Yeah. You still crying over that dead Barbie, Dex?"

Jesse whacked the back of his head. "You still playing with dolls, Mark?"

I'd known the three of them since nursery school, since the days when Mark lit dolls on fire, Dylan collected Garbage Pail Kids, and Jesse took a shit beneath the elementary school seesaw, just to prove he could. Jesse and I had ridden bikes and woven grass jewelry for our mothers on May Day. Then he'd hooked up with Mark and Dylan, and while individually they'd seemed comprehensible and unintimidating and like the type of boy you might one day grow up to kiss, together they went feral, roaming the streets, baring teeth and brandishing sticks. They bashed bats into mailboxes and left dog shit on neighbors' doorsteps and eventually graduated from skateboards to death metal. Before Craig died, they were so proud of their rotting-skull T-shirts and black trench coats, their car stereos blasting lyrics about bleeding eyes and demon hearts. I thought now about all those dolls and trading cards and that sorry lemonade stand, Jesse and me selling twenty-five-cent cups of water stained with yellow dye, and it felt stupid to be wary of them-but then I thought of bloody symbols on church doors and bloody axes in dark fields, and it felt equally stupid not to.

"I like the new look," Jesse said, and scuffed a toe against my boots. "It's dark."

"He means it makes your boobs pop," Mark said.

"Fuck off, asshole."

"You fuck off."

Lacey rolled her eyes, and I tried to check out my cleavage as surreptitiously as possible. No part of me wanted to be in this alley.

"Can you help us or not?" Lacey said.

"Your friend's mental, you know that?" Jesse told me.

"She thinks we're going to teach her how to worship the fucking devil," Dylan said.

Mark traced a cross against his chest and adopted a Transylvanian accent. "I vant to suck your bloooooood."

"She doesn't think we're fucking vampires," Jesse said. "She's not a fucking moron."

"Thank you," Lacey said.

"Except you are a fucking moron if you're planning to start messing around with that shit. Not in this town. And if anyone asks, you tell them we've got nothing to do with that anymore."

It had been half a year since golden boy Craig turned up in the woods, brains leaking into the dirt, and five months since Jesse and the others had discovered exactly how much Battle Creek wanted to believe in the devil. Battle Creek still watched us closely, like we were walking grenades, hands hovering recklessly close to the pin. Us as in all of us, anyone under the age of eighteen automatically under suspicion; us as in them, most of all, the Dumpster Row boys, because Craig Ellison was dead when he shouldn't have been and that demanded a rational explanation, even if rational, according to the pamphleteers in the Woolworth's parking lot and the Concerned Parents League, who'd cornered the market on op-eds, meant teen football star falls prey to satanic cult blood orgy.

Lacey knew all this-she had to. But I understood her now. I understood that it only made it more tempting, that anything that frightened the plebes this much merited further investigation. That anyone stupid enough to be scared deserved it. I understood that I was supposed to know better.

"I know what you say." Lacey reached forward and tapped Jesse's chest, at the spot where blood gushed from Ozzy Osbourne's silkscreened face. It amazed me, how she didn't hesitate to touch him. "And I know what I see."

"It's just music, get it?" Jesse sounded weary. "Slayer, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, they're all putting on a show."

"First off, there's no such thing as just music," Lacey said. "Second, that's not music. Biting the head off a live bat isn't music, it's a pathetic plea for attention."

"What is this shit?" Dylan said. "You come to our house to talk this kind of shit?"

"Your house?" Lacey echoed, glancing at the nearest Dumpster. "Nice furniture."

I grabbed her, tugged. "Let's just go."

"I got some Headbangers Ball on tape," Jesse said. "Back at my place. You guys want to watch, I'll show what you're missing. But no animal sacrifice. No matter how hard you beg."

I thought: Enough. "That's okay, we're not-"

"We'd love to," Lacey said.

IN THE CAR, BUMPING ALONG toward the house I hadn't been in since third grade, Lacey said she was pretty sure Jesse wanted to get in my pants and that I should let it happen-let it happen, that's how she put it, like sex was a force of nature and I simply needed to get out of its way.

I thought about it, on the couch in the wood-paneled basement, everything the same as it had been years before. Mark and Dylan rolled joints, riveted to their Megadeth videos. Lacey stretched herself out in the leather armchair, closest to the speakers, and fixed on the screen, her Kurt face on, waiting for enlightenment. Jesse was next to me, his arm millimeters from mine, and much hairier than the last time I'd seen it.

"Remember Kids Incorporated?" I said, because that's what we'd watched when I came over after school. It had been my idea, because I didn't have the Disney Channel at my place, but he was the one who'd taught me the choreography so we could dance along.

Jesse grunted. This, I thought, was not letting it happen.

He had a square head. Greasy lips, and those stupid fake tattoos. I could maybe, almost, imagine kissing him. If it were dark and I could, immediately after, dematerialize. I was turning seventeen that summer; such things were supposed to appeal.

There was a look my mother had given me when some neighbor was over, complaining about lesbian jokes on TV, and since then I'd been wondering what she thought but, more than that, wondering if she'd recognized something in me I couldn't see for myself. I said as much once, to Lacey, who crossed her eyes. "Do girls turn you on?" she said, and when I said I didn't think so, she shrugged. "Then you're probably not gay. I hear that's a prerequisite."

Nothing turned me on, as far as I could tell. Lacey thought there was probably something wrong with me, and I thought she was probably right.

Now I think it wasn't my fault, that my younger self can be excused for reading phrases like fire in my loins and stumbling over the idea of pleasurable burning. But then it shamed me, the ease with which Lacey could spider her fingers down her stomach, across her thighs, into the dark space that remained a sticky mystery to me, and instinctively know how to feel. When, under duress, I'd locked myself in the bathroom and played around with the showerhead while Lacey cheered me on from the other side of the door, I had felt only ridiculous.

"You still got my He-Man?" Jesse asked, and I smiled because it meant he remembered how he used to bring his action figures over to play with my Barbies, and also because, somewhere at the back of my closet, I did.

"You still pretending you didn't steal my She-Ra?"

In my peripheral vision, I could see him blushing.

"Hey, she was sexy. Metal bikini, Hannah. Metal bikini."

On-screen, a brunette in a spiked leather corset fellated a drumstick. Now I was blushing.

"Her name is Dex," Lacey said, without looking away from the screen.

"Sorry." He elbowed me, gently. "Dex."

"It's okay. Whatever."

"I kind of liked it," he said. "Your name. But Dex is cool, too."

Here is how I imagined things might go, if I let it happen: Jesse Gorin would inch his hand across the couch toward mine, ever so casually link our pinkies together, then turn my hand over and tap a message into my palm, in the Morse code we'd taught ourselves one rainy summer week before third grade. It would say: I remember you. It would say: We are still the people we used to be. And when he said he wanted to make some popcorn and did I want to help, I would follow him up to the kitchen, and while I was grabbing the air popper from the cabinet where it used to be, he would slip up behind me, whisper something suitably romantic in my ear, or maybe just my name, maybe just Hannah, then kiss the back of my neck, and when I turned around, I would be in his arms, hair dangling over the sink, lips perfectly parted and tongue knowing what to do. And even though we would return to the basement like nothing had happened, the taste of each other rubbed away by popcorn butter, we would bite down on the inside of our cheeks to prevent secret smiles, and silently understand that something had begun.

That was before Lacey asked Jesse to show her where the bathroom was and they disappeared upstairs together for the rest of the show. When they came back, Jesse's ballpoint tattoos were bleary with sweat and Lacey's shirt was on inside out, which she could only have done to prove a point.

"So, you're welcome," Lacey told me in the car on the way home.

"For what?"

She seemed surprised I had to ask. "Didn't you notice the way that skeezer was eyeing you? If I hadn't gotten it out of his system, I don't know what would have happened."

"I thought that's what you wanted," I said. "I thought I was supposed to let it happen."

"With him? God, Dex, learn to recognize a joke." She pulled up in front of my house. "You deserve so much better."

I opened the car door, but she grabbed my wrist before I could get out.

"So?" she prompted.

"So?"

"Magic words, please. A little polite recognition for my sacrifice."