"Right. Thank you."

LACEY DECIDED TO FIND ME a more satisfactory dick. That's how she put it when she presented me with a flimsy fake ID and a black lace corset. "Amanda Potter"-born Long Island, 1969, Sagittarius, details I repeated to myself over and over again as we stood in line waiting for the bouncer-"is getting some tonight," Lacey told me, but didn't tell me how she'd found this club, a grim concrete block beside the highway, or why it promised to be my sexual salvation. "No argument allowed."

Her corset was purple, and seemed, at least from where I stood, to offer slightly more room to breathe. She wore a silver pentagram around her neck, another thrift store acquisition to go with the Satanic Bible she'd finally dug up in the basement of some used bookstore along the highway. She loved the way people looked at her when she wore it, the same way I looked at her when she showed me the book for the first time. It didn't look like any Bible I'd ever seen. It was black, with a red five-pointed star etched onto the cover, and even the author's name gave me the creeps: Anton Szandor LaVey. It sounded deliberately fake, like a name the devil himself would choose. Lacey had already highlighted several passages.

Man's carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.

There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes.

Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs.

"You really don't want to let anyone see that you have this," I'd told her, when she showed off her purchases, then pressed the pentagram necklace back into her hand. "And you really don't want to be wearing this." She still didn't get it, the rules of a place like Battle Creek. It was one thing being a metalhead with a corpse on his T-shirt and a fetish for black nail polish; it was another thing altogether to be a girl wearing a pentagram. It was always another thing, being a girl.

"The hilarious thing is, they've got it all wrong," Lacey had told me. "Turns out actual satanism's just about freethinking and being yourself. Stuart Smalley could've written this."

"Can we not talk about this now?"

"You say now, but you mean ever."

I did.

"You should read it," Lacey said. "You'll see. There's good stuff in here."

"Please tell me you're joking."

"I'm joking," she said, and it was easiest to assume it was true.

The club was called Beast, and the bouncer, more interested in my cleavage than my birthdate, waved us both in.

"I see you smiling," Lacey said, sidling us up to the bar. She tugged at the laces of my corset. "You're going mad with power." I could barely hear her over the music, was already losing myself to noise and strobe light and the foul taste of the beer she poured down my throat, and somehow these all seemed like good things. Maybe because she was right; I did love the power of it, my chest, squeezed sausage tight, suddenly capable of miracles. I was used to people looking at Lacey. That night, they looked at me.

Maybe it was the corset, maybe it was the shot, maybe it was Lacey pushing me into the single-stall bathroom with some guy she thought worked behind the counter in our record store. Whether it really was Greg the Sex God, who we'd spent two Saturdays in a row peeking at from behind the Christian gospel shelf, or just some unknown grunger with a down vest and a hemp bracelet, he followed me in, and when I opened my mouth to say my name or maybe sorry my lunatic friend just shoved you into a bathroom, he stuck his tongue in. I let it worm around for a bit, tasting his beer and trying to decide whether the hand squeezing my ass was doing it right. Between that and my mental tally of the bacteria and fecal matter on the bathroom door, I forgot all about our lingual calisthenics, and the distraction must have been obvious, because eventually he stopped.

"Hey," the guy said, lips still practically touching mine.

"Hey."

The floor was spattered with urine, the walls with posters: The Screaming Trees. Skin Yard. The Melvins. Soundgarden. Even Babes in Toyland, who Lacey said sucked.

"You like this?"

I shrugged, thinking it was nice, if a little late, of him to ask. "I don't usually do it in bathrooms, I guess."

"What?"

The music, even in there, was incredibly loud.

"I don't do this in bathrooms!" I said, louder.

"No, I mean the song! You like the song?"

"Oh. Sure."

"It's the new Love Battery!" He stepped back, did a little air guitar. I winced, thinking of what Lacey would think. "It's fly, yeah? You should hear the album, it's like the fucking A-bomb, just a bunch of stuff, and then, boom. Takes you to another dimension. You know?"

"Sure."

"It's some Star Treklevel shit there, you know? That's what my album's gonna be like."

"You're making an album?"

"Well, not yet, obviously. But, I mean, when the band gets there. It'll happen. Patience, man. That's the secret."

"So you're in a band?"

"I'm telling you, not yet. But I'm working on it. Stuff's in the works. Big stuff."

"That's . . . great."

"You've got great boobs. Can I get in there?"

"Not sure that's physically possible," I said, more pleased than I wanted to be, but he'd already found a way to fit his fingers into the dark crevice of the corset.

"Huh. That's kind of . . . floppier than it looks."

"Oh."

"Don't get me wrong, I mean, that's just how it goes with the big ones. Most of them are floppier. This is pretty good, actually."

"Thanks?"

"Do you, like, feel yourself up all the time?"

"Uh, no."

"That's what I'd do if I was a girl. Especially if I had your . . . you know. All. The. Time."

"That might get in the way of your recording career."

He spent some time trying to work out whether that was a joke, then, "You want to blow me?"

"Not especially."

"Well, you know. A guy's gotta ask."

That was when I pushed my way back into the club and found Lacey. The band was starting, the one she'd heard had once opened for Nirvana, but from the opening chords it was clear these guys had only recently learned how their instruments worked. It didn't matter. Lacey asked me what had happened, whether Mission Fuck had been a success, and instead of answering I threw my arms around her, because the beer buzz was finally heating me up and because I wanted to, simple as that, wanted to be there, with her, sweat-slick bodies swirling around us. I wanted, for the first time in my life, to dance.

"You're drunk!" she shouted when I wove my fingers through hers and dragged her into the mess of bodies.

"Not drunk enough!" I twirled around, arms in the air, finally understanding what it was to feel a need and seize it. I needed to move. I needed to fly. I needed not to think about dicks and tongues and the gritty wrongness of real life. I needed this to be my real life, me and Lacey, in the smoky dark, strobes bouncing over our head, band screaming and shaking sweat into the crowd. The crowd a single organism, all of us, a hundred arms and legs and heads, a single heart beating, beating. All of us thrashing together, wild and fury in our blood. Lacey's laughter in my ear, the smell of her shampoo like a cloud, her hair whipping across my cheek, and then nothing but the ecstasy of motion. Anything, everything possible. No one watching.

SHE LIKED TO TEST ME, and it was hard to tell the difference sometimes, between game and truth. Kurt was real, that was nonnegotiable. So were we, Dex-and-Lacey. Sacred ground. Boys, though, were for playing and trading, were equivalent to the sum of their parts, tongues and fingers and dicks. God was a bad joke, Satan a usefully pointy stick. She liked people to think she was dangerous. This didn't explain why, one night when we'd been saddled with babysitting the junior Bastard, she had me hold the wriggling baby over the bathroom sink while she used the blood of a raw steak to paint an upside-down cross on his tiny forehead.

"This is disgusting, Lacey." It wasn't the right word, but it was the easiest one.

The baby whimpered and pulled away from her bloody finger, but she shushed him and stroked his tiny ears, and he didn't cry. "Just hold him still."

The blood smeared watery pink across his forehead, running into his eyes. I held him still.

Lacey gently tapped his right shoulder, his left shoulder, his sternum, his forehead, solemn as any priest. "In the name of the Dark Father and the unholy demons, I baptize you into the church of Lucifer."

They were just words, I reminded myself. They had only as much power as we gave them.

Lacey said she couldn't wait to see the look on the Bastard's face when he found out, though she was careful to wipe off every trace of blood before we laid James Jr. to bed for the night. Lacey said the Bastard thought the Battle Creek hysterics were an embarrassing sideshow, blind to the true war for their children's souls, against the modern Cerberus of liberalism, atheism, and sexual revolution. The Bastard didn't believe in satanism, Lacey said, only in Satan, and claimed anyone who thought differently was doing the devil's work.

"I don't want to be anyone's sister but yours," she said, too, which made it okay that, when I left that night, the baby's forehead still smelled like raw meat.

She wanted to spend her birthday in the graveyard, and so we did.

"Scared?" she said as we picked our way through the dark. Narrow lanes wove through rows of tombstones. I saw a stone angel, a spire circled by stone roses, crosses tilting and crumbling, tombs that gleamed in the flashlight beam where names were etched with lacquer and gold.

"Am I supposed to be scared of ghosts, or of you?"

"We both know you're scared shitless of getting caught, Dex."

She held the flashlight beneath her chin, casting her face in ghoul glow. "The only scary thing here is me."

Maybe it was stupid of me not to be scared-if not by her big plan for the night, then by the intensity with which she'd insisted on it, that we sneak out with our candles and shovels, build a shrine to the Dark Lord, just enough of a show to give the plebes a good scare. "All I want for my birthday is to freak the shit out of Battle Creek," she'd said, and I was prepared to help.

She stopped at a small square tombstone and sat, hard, beside the dead flowers at its base.

"Lacey." It seemed like bad luck, saying her name out loud, like I might alert some predatory spirit to her identity. The stories had always made it very clear: Names were power. You gave yours away at your own risk. "I thought we were looking for a fresh one."

"Look." She aimed her flashlight at the stone.

Craig Ellison, it said, b. March 15, 1975, d. October 31, 1991 Beloved son and brother Go Badgers!

"Go Badgers?" I laughed. Then aimed a cheerleader fist pump at the clouds. "God, that's tacky. Can you imagine taking Battle Creek Badger pride to your grave?"

She didn't say anything. I felt judged by her silhouette.

"What if it's not some big joke?" Lacey said then. "Imagine the plebes are right, and there is some devil cult dancing around the woods, faces painted with blood. Acid orgies. If that's what really happened to him."

I tried to picture it, Craig Ellison forming an unholy alliance with the Dumpster Row boys, stripping off his basketball jersey to frolic naked in the woods, Craig Ellison magicked into drawing his own blood. Standing there in the shadow of his gravestone, stone angels judging our trespass, it wasn't nearly as hard as it should have been.

"And what if aliens are secretly running the country?" I said, desperate now to make my voice a flashlight, guide us both back on track. "What if the mayor is a vampire? What if I'm possessed by Satan and I'm about to suck your brains? It's like you always say, anything's possible-"

"-in the woods. Yeah. It is."

That was when I noticed she was crying.

I almost fell beside her. Lacey wasn't the kind of girl who cried. "What is it?" I put my hand on her shoulder. Took it off again. "What?"

"You love me, right?" Her voice was flattened, dead.

"Of course."

"And you're a good person."

"Well, not since I met you." The joke didn't land. Her nails dug into my arm.

"Never say that again."

"Okay. Okay, Lacey, it's fine." Panic. We were in a graveyard and she was freaking out, needing something I didn't know how to give her because Lacey wasn't supposed to need anything. "Of course I love you. And of course I'm a good person. And can you just tell me what's going on so we can get the hell out of here?" I was crying, too. It was a reflex, like contagious yawning or throwing up at the smell of vomit.

"If I tell you to do something, and you do it, whose fault is that?" she asked.

"Depends on what you want me to do, doesn't it?"

"It shouldn't depend. Circumstances shouldn't matter. If it's my idea, it's my fault. Your idea, yours."

"Except it would be my idea to do what you told me to do. I get to decide that. I'm not your puppet."

"No? No. I guess not."

I rapped softly at her head, the safest way I could think to touch her. "What's going on in there, Lacey? I know it sucks that he's dead, even if he is Craig, but it's not like he meant something to you." As I said it, I was wondering whether it was true. Maybe it all made sense in some seedy, beneath-her kind of way, the fervent and unfounded hatred of Nikki, the unprompted tears for a Neanderthal, the words that seemed snagged in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. "Was he cheating on her with you? You can tell me. I get it, I swear." I didn't get it, not a guy like him, his meaty hands fumbling at her bootlaces, but love was meant to be strange. "You can't think it's your fault, what happened. Even if he felt guilty, or you dumped him and he freaked out, or whatever it was, it wouldn't be-" I thought about what it would be like to do something and not be able to take it back. "Even if you told him you wanted him to die or something, that wouldn't make it your fault that he went and did it. You didn't put the gun in his hand. You didn't pull the trigger. Nothing is your fault."

She looked up at me, face tipping into shadow, and smiled. "You think Craig was cheating on Nikki? With me?" She laughed, then, so beautifully, and I don't know whether I was more relieved that we'd escaped the moment together or that I'd so plainly been wrong. Then she kissed my cheek. "You always know what to say to cheer me up."

If not that, then what? I wanted to say, but couldn't, not when she was happy again, not when she'd taken my hand in hers and pulled us both off the ground, sent us spinning, like the grave was a meadow and the moon was bright summer sun. "I can't believe you thought I could love him." Her laugh was a witch's cackle, our dance a ritual that didn't need spells, only hot blood rising in our cheeks and burning through our veins, an invocation of the gods of love, of whatever force pressed our palms together and whispered on the night wind, You are one.

AND THEN WE WENT TOO far.

"It's what Kurt would do," Lacey whispered, and there was no argument to that.

We eased open her window and dropped down to the bushes below. The car was too noisy, so for the first block we pushed it, gear in neutral and shoulders bruising against the trunk. When it was safe, Lacey gunned it, and I jittered in the passenger seat, cans of spray paint slippery in sweaty palms.

Kurt once got arrested for spray painting homosexual sex rules on the side of a bank, Lacey said, up there big and bright for all the rednecks to see, at least the ones who could read well enough to sound out the words. He grew up in an old logging town, Lacey said, full of assholes, their puny brains filled with all the things Kurt smashed with his guitar. Before the guitar, there was spray paint, and there were words. "We have those," Lacey said. "That's enough."

"If we get arrested," I said, "I swear I will kill you."

All brick and stone, squat and sad, the Teen Pregnancy Center was deep in last-resort territory. Past the walk-in clinic and the Sunrise rehab center, past the veterans' hall where it was nothing to cadge free donuts from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, a mile past even the boarded-up strip club that had survived three months, flush on the town fathers' pay, before the town mothers had driven it to ruin. If it was you that let some greasy animal inside you, and you that hit the devil's jackpot, sperm and egg making their miracle, then it might be you swallowing your panic, flipping through the yellow pages, finding salvation on the highway, in the gray windowless husk just past the Friendly's. You might come from Battle Creek or Marshall Valley or even as far as Salina. You might wonder if it would hurt, or if you'd be sorry; you might be afraid.

You would definitely be surprised when the good people at the Teen Pregnancy Center gave you a pamphlet with Jesus on the cover and set you straight. The Teen Pregnancy Center would speak of miracles and wonders, and show you pictures of a seed they said was a baby and a sin they said was murder. And then, if you weren't careful, they would ferret your name and phone number out of you so that when you got home, your parents would be waiting.

It was evil, Lacey said, and her first idea had been burning it to the ground.

Battle Creek wasn't a sex-ed kind of town. But word got around, in playground diagrams and Sunday school sermons, and by junior high we all knew what to do and that we'd burn in hell for doing it. Just after Easter that year, our health teacher had held two apples before the class, then dropped one on the ground. Picked it up, dropped it again. "Which one would you want to eat?" she asked, finally. "This nice, shiny, clean apple? Or the bruised, dirty, dented one?"