Lacey stole the dirty apple for her lunch that day, and later that month, when Jenny Hallstrom lost it to Brett Koner in a church utility closet, we said she'd dropped her apple. "Guess we know what Brett likes to eat," Lacey said. Jenny was the one who told us what happened inside the Teen Pregnancy Center. That was before she got sent away; we heard her kid was due by Christmas.

Word always got around. That was the rule of Battle Creek, and maybe that was why our parents spent so much time worrying who was shoving what into where in the backseat of whose car. Because we'd be the ones to burn in hell, but they were the ones who'd have to hear about it in church.

Now we tiptoed toward the Jesus freaks' evil lair and hoped they were too cheap for security guards. I wore a fleece hoodie; Lacey was in cat burglar drag, all black with a bloody smear of lipstick that was the same color as our spray paint. She shook the can like she'd done this before, and showed me how to hold it and what to press. I waited for her to go first, to see how she did it, her hand steady and her letters smooth. I waited for an alarm, or a siren, or the men in uniforms who would drag us off into the night, but there was only the hiss of paint and Lacey's cool laughter as the first of our messages glittered under sodium lights.

Fake Abortion Clinic. Beware.

We had written the messages together, ahead of time, while Lacey's mother was downstairs getting drunk and her stepfather was out bowling for Jesus.

Get your politics out of our pussy.

God is dead. Lacey had insisted on that one.

God is dead, I wrote, because it was the shortest. The letters wiggled and the G looked more like an o, but I wrote it. I pressed my finger against the nozzle and turned brown stone red and Hannah Dexter into a criminal. Magic.

We couldn't go home yet, not feeling like that. We drove nowhere; we drove nowhere fast, because speed was what mattered. Speed and music, Nevermind in the player, Kurt's screams tearing up his voice and our screams even louder. I shouted along with Kurt and didn't care that according to my father my voice was like a raccoon screech or that according to Lacey I had the lyrics all wrong. I sang like it sounded to me, because those words sounded right: I loved you I'm not going back I killed you I'm not going back.

We drove with the windows up so we could scream as loud as we wanted, and it was easy to imagine we might never go home; we might drive off a cliff or over the rainbow. We might tear across the country, fire and ruin blazing in our wake. Lacey and Dex, like Bonnie and Clyde, like Kurt and Courtney, high on our own madness, burning holes in the night. "We should do this again!" I screamed. "We should do this always!"

"What? Be outlaws?"

"Yes."

I'm not going back, I shouted, and that night, only that night, I loved Kurt like Lacey loved Kurt, loved Kurt like I loved Lacey.

I'm not going back.

I'm not going back.

LACEY.

Good Intentions THIS IS NOT A CAUTIONARY tale about too much-or the wrong kind-of fucking. This is not a story of bad things happening to bad girls. I say this because I know you, Dex, and I know how you think.

I'm going to tell you a story, and this time it will be the truth.

Girl meets girl. Girl loves girl, maybe. Girl wants girl, definitely. Girls drink, girls dance, girls fuck, girls link fingers on a dark night and whisper their secret selves, girls swear a blood oath of loyalty and silence. Girl betrays girl, girl loses girl, girl leaves girl alone. It's a story you won't like, Dex, because this is not the story of us.

"Just to watch," Craig said, that first time he came to our place in the woods.

I'd already started thinking of it like that. Our place.

He brought along his mother's picnic blanket, a puffy synthetic with lace stitching at the edges-he was, it turned out later, almost pathologically fastidious. It was a pointless effort, trying to make what happened between us clean. But the ground was hard and sparkled with broken glass, and the blanket was silky against bare skin, so we only mocked him a little.

When he said he'd watch, he didn't say he'd jerk off while we were tangled up in each other, but he was a sixteen-year-old guy, so maybe that was implied. It was equal parts disgusting and hot. Disgusting because obviously. Hot because it's one thing to get a guy off with your hand or your mouth, the slippery-when-wet mechanics of skin on skin; it's another to do so without even touching him. That's power.

Maybe it freaked him out, because it was a while before he came back. Or maybe Nikki didn't want him back. Maybe she wanted me to herself.

It was different, with a girl. Not as different as you'd expect, not softer, because there was nothing soft about Nikki Drummond. It was still skin and sweat, and I was still her secret, just like I'd been Shay's secret. I was still the shameful thing, and I was good at that.

Two weeks before Craig came back again. Two weeks, just the two of us, every day, in the woods, rolling in the weeds. Not inside the hollowed-out station, where we might have sunk into the old couch, generations of fluids staining its molding cushions. Not inside the rusting boxcar, where Nikki said she could hear the walls plotting to close in. We stayed in the open, beneath the sky's prying eyes, putting on a show for the sun and the stars. I didn't talk to her about Kurt; she didn't talk to me about prom. We didn't talk much at all, wink wink nudge bleh, but when she asked me questions, I told the truth, and that made things different, too.

I liked the taste of her, Dex. I liked spelling my name inside her with my tongue. Like I was branding her where no one could see. Mine.

I got good at getting her off, and then I must have gotten too good, because the day before the first day of school, I made her scream, and then she rolled away from me, curled fetal, and started to cry.

"What?" I ran my knuckles down her spine. It always made her shiver. "What is it?"

Nikki didn't cry. We were the same that way.

She didn't cry, but she was crying, and when I touched her again, brushed her hair out of her face, because that seemed like the kind of thing to do when you were naked and crying together, she sat up, shook me off along with the mood, found her clothes and her vodka, and we got drunk. The next day she brought Craig with her again, and said it was only fair we let him play.

Both of us or neither of us, that was the implied deal, and I thought: Kurt would do it, Kurt would be proud of me for doing it; the Bastard would keel over and die. I thought she needed me, they needed me, and it was good to be needed.

I thought: Why the fuck not?

Craig was never sweet, but he could look it, with a kid's cowlick and a practiced sidelong glance through those long lashes that were criminally wasted on a guy. Bulky for a basketball player, with a neck like a gangster. But he could smile like everything was exactly as easy as you let it be. He knew how to make people love him, when he cared to. He and Nikki had that in common, I guess, but Nikki had to make an effort, transform herself into whatever kind of girl was needed. Craig only had to act intensely himself, more the guy everyone imagined him to be.

He couldn't get hard at first, not with me there watching, and not with the condom, which he'd given up on back when Nikki got herself on the pill. We were shy, then, or at least he was, and though I heard him talking to it while he rubbed, whispering sweet nothings into its flaccid flap of skin, he never would tell me what he was saying. Nikki gave it a few soft kisses, which didn't help; then she gave me a few soft kisses, which did. It didn't take long, watching us go at it, before he wanted into the mix, and then, with Nikki gasping in my ear as his fingers did their work, he was inside me, and maybe I was shy, too, because that first time, it hurt. It was messy, then, and confusing. Bodies are supposed to come in twos, ark-like.

Six legs, six arms, thirty fingers, nine holes, the math was tough to contend with, but we did our best, and when Nikki chomped down on my nipple and Craig crushed my fingers under his ass, I didn't complain-it was all too interesting, too new, to stop.

You never like the bare facts, Dex, not when it comes to this. You like to forget that you're an animal, too, that you burp and fart and shit and every month you bleed. You think it's not nice to talk about those things, and not much nicer to do them, except in the dark where no one can see. So you probably don't want to know that Craig was hairy like a gorilla, at least until he let us shave it all off, just to see how it would feel. You might want to know how he looked in Nikki's lace panties, but you don't want to hear that his dick curved ever so slightly to the left and his sac had an old man's complexion. Or that he apologized as soon as he shoved it in, and again when he took it out, like he thought I was going to cry or cry rape, like he literally couldn't believe this was playing out as it seemed.

We were acting out our parts, that first time, waiting for the soundtrack to kick in and for things to go slow and romantically blurry instead of herky-jerky ugly real. We were waiting for sepia tones and candlelight, but eventually we got used to sticky clothes and awkward pokes and the pock sound Nikki's thighs made when they slapped together too hard, that and the sound of grunting, and mingled laughter.

Don't feel stupid. You couldn't have known. No one knew, and when school finally started, Nikki and Craig wouldn't speak to me in public. I liked that they were ashamed of it. The secret was part of the fun. I liked it when Nikki prowled past me in the hall, like she didn't know that I could ruin her life with one well-placed rumor. I liked her snot-faced, nose-up public self, because I was the only one who knew how that face looked when Craig's fingers were inside her, plying their clumsy magic.

By then, they were doing that in front of me; turned out we all liked to watch. Sometimes it was watching I liked best. There's something about two people fucking, the way they forget to hide their secret selves. Even after all this time, Nikki and Craig were putting on a show for each other, Nikki playing "excited!" and "turned on!" or "boooooored," depending on her mood, but never straying too far from "granting you the greatest favor of your life," Craig doing "gettin' me some" every time. But there was always a moment. She'd forget to suck in her stomach; he'd forget to gaze lovingly in her eyes; they would each forget the other was there, and the sex became masturbatory, the alien body incidental, just another tool to abuse. I liked turning transparent and immaterial, watching them lose control.

Nikki liked to watch, too, but not for watching's sake. It brought out her inner Mussolini. She didn't watch; she commanded, directing us in her own private puppet show, bossing us into positions meant more for her pleasure than ours.

I don't know what Craig liked the best, especially once the novelty of two girls going at it wore off, which it did surprisingly quickly. Sometimes I don't think he liked much of anything.

We all took a turn; sometimes, instead, we just drank and talked. The abandoned station was a magic place, a sacred one, where secrets were swallowed by the trees. We were different people in the woods; we were our own shadow selves. Nikki told us about the time her inbred cousin raped her at a Thanksgiving dinner, squashing her against her grandma's lace-doily quilt and tasting of sweet potatoes and gravy when he forced his mouth against hers to shut her up, as if she would have screamed. I told them how the Bastard wanted to send me away once the baby was born, that I'd read it in the letter he wrote to his pastor back in Jersey, some Billy Graham wannabe with a local radio show. I told them how I'd also intercepted the pastor's response, godly advice on how to erase me from the family picture for the good of the Bastard's reputation and spawn-then, because we'd sworn an oath of secrecy, not truth, I told them I didn't care. Craig told us about the time in junior high he got a blow job from some poor guy on his JV basketball team, then got so freaked out that he spread word that the kid had been sneaking peeks of the other guys in the locker room and had tried to cop a feel during a wrestling bout. After they gave the guy his third beat-down, he transferred to a school in another county.

"Didn't even feel guilty about it," Craig said. "Does that make me, like, a psychopath?"

"Probably," I said. Nikki laughed and laughed.

He's dead now. It's strange, isn't it? He was here, he was inside me, he was sweaty and obnoxious and maybe, like, a psychopath, and now he's just a corpse. Less than that, soon enough: bones and dust and worms. Not a ghost, certainly. If he were a ghost, I'd know, because he'd never leave me the fuck alone.

I know how he died; I know why, unless you want to get all existential why, God, why about it, in which case who knows anything, but I can't say I ever knew Craig. He had a little sister, it turned out, some gap-toothed goofball in pigtails who worshipped him for teaching her to shoot free throws and punch out the playground bully. But I didn't know that until her gap-toothed eulogy, and by then I couldn't afford to let myself listen. He was like our doll sometimes, an animatronic jock for us to pose. He was a slobbery kisser and an angry drunk, and he loved Nikki enough to get jealous but not enough, or at least not well enough, to make her love him back.

Sometimes we still met up without him, and that's when she told me all the things even he didn't know, like her secret early-morning runs, which she'd started back when she was fourteen and anorexic, but kept up because she liked the vacant dark of five A.M. Everyone knew that Nikki's mother had spent a year screwing her father's racquetball partner, but no one knew how pathetic Nikki thought her for coming back and begging forgiveness, much less for staying with a husband who now stuck it to her every chance he got. Everyone knew Nikki was good at being popular, but only I knew how little she cared. She fucked with people and built her little kingdom because it came easy, and because it was more fun than the alternative, but it didn't make life any less mind-numbing, or the future any more bearable. She liked to watch people bow and scrape before her for the same reason little kids light anthills on fire. Not because it gave her life meaning, but because sometimes you need to spice up an afternoon.

Everyone knew she and Craig Ellison were destiny, their love mandated by the laws of royal courtship, and everyone was probably right. Craig was seventh-grade Nikki's first kiss, Nikki was Craig's first trip to second base, but there's nothing sexy about inevitability, or at least nothing as sexy as a nameless eighth grader who'll jerk you off in a roller rink bathroom, and so it wasn't until sophomore year that they got together for real-fucking each other and fucking each other over, fucking and fighting and then fucking again. No wonder they were bored.

Craig, somehow, still had his secrets: He could get us anything. We tried heroin-horse, that's what Craig called it, because he didn't know how not to be an ass-but only once. People aren't meant to feel that good, or be that happy. Coke was better. It made the sex better. It made everything better. It was easier to get and substantially harder to screw up, as opposed to the heroin, with which I almost set Nikki's hair on fire. It was easy to laugh about things back then.

That's it, all we did. Watch and fuck and snort and talk, rinse and repeat. Until Craig was dead, and it was all over. I didn't go back. I couldn't. Not to the station, not to the woods. It was desecrated. Not haunted-I told you, I don't believe in that-just ruined.

No one would know unless Nikki or I told them, and we swore ourselves silent. One last sacred promise, and-stupid me-I assumed it would bind us together for life, but that was the last I saw of her, too. Maybe I was her woods, desecrated and ruined. But you know what I think? I think I was wrong from the start, suckering myself into believing that I'd peeled off Nikki's mask and glimpsed her true face, when, in fact, there was nothing underneath but more masks. Masks on top of masks, with a hollow space at the center where some higher power forgot to shove in a soul. All animal instinct, no higher function. No capacity for pain.

SHE BLAMED ME.

She blamed me.

I don't blame myself.

I refuse.

I did nothing wrong.

Pinky swear, Dex. Cross my heart and hope to join Craig on the big basketball court in the sky, nothing is my fucking fault.

No one is my puppet.

You promised me that.

ALONE AGAIN, AFTER. ALONE, IN the dark, with a secret, alone with the nightmares and the ghost of their skin, waking up with him inside me, her crawling down my body, invisible fingers and tongues dissolving into nothing with the dawn light. Alone with my mother and the Bastard and of course the precious fucking baby, who wouldn't stop crying, the two of them keeping me away from him as if I had some contagious disease, as if I would want to touch or hold or big-sister their screaming, shit-stained midlife crisis, and who could blame me for taking the knife into the bathtub?

Rhetorical question. The Bastard blamed me for being a drama queen, and my mother blamed me for getting the Bastard riled up, and the cheap-ass therapist blamed me for not wanting to honestly face up to my problems, not wanting to rip the bandage off the seeping wound, but at least he gave me a prescription, and then I didn't give a shit who blamed me for what, even Nikki Drummond. Especially Nikki Drummond.

Those were the cloud days. I floated. I played Kurt loud where I could, and quiet, in my head, where I had to. I could have floated forever, Dex; you should know that.

It's important you know that I didn't go looking for you.

I thought about it sometimes: how she would hate it, seeing me with someone else, watching me lace my arm around a waist or lean close to whisper a secret. It would hurt, and I wanted, more than anything, to make her hurt. I admit that. I could have picked anyone, any of those sad little girls dancing down the hall in their identical denim jackets and neon stirrup pants, bopping to New Kids or maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot because that's what their boyfriends told them to listen to, saying please and thank you to their teachers and not so hard and fuck me to the boys they'd only be seen with in the woods, sad girls with big bangs and little dreams. I watched them, and I thought about it.

Then you came to me.

It wouldn't surprise you that Nikki told me about you. It would surprise you what she said, something like, "Who, her? That loser's always glaring at me like I drowned her puppy," and forgive me, Dex, but I said, "Probably in love with you," and Nikki said, "Who isn't?" and then, I'm sure, drunk and high, we both laughed.

Truth, Dex: She never gave a shit about you. All that energy you put into hating her, and still you were nothing to her. Not until I made you something. You've never thanked me for that, either.

I WATCHED YOU. BILLOW OF HAIR like your very own storm cloud. Interchangeable Kmart T-shirts, always a size too big, like you'd never clued into your best asset, or wanted to make sure no one else did. Always with a book, thick glasses and middling sulk, that smirk you gave people when they said something stupid. I don't even think you know you're doing it, slitting your eyes and raising your lip, like the morons cause you physical pain. You told me once that, before me, you wasted half your time wondering why people didn't like you more, obsessing about your glasses or your hair or the way you rolled the cuffs of your jeans, precisely how tight and how high. I didn't have the heart to tell you that none of it would have helped. People like to believe they're beautiful and smart and funny-special. They'll never like the person whose face reveals the truth.

What I saw in your face was the truth of Nikki. She was as ugly to you as she was to me. You wanted to make her hurt. And I helped you do it, even if you didn't realize it. You're welcome for that, too.

I knew you before you knew yourself. Imagine if you'd marched through high school and college and a lifetime of diaper changes and mind-numbing jobs and garden clubs and PTA bake sales, and never known yourself, so tough and so, so angry. You were afraid to let yourself feel it, but I could feel it for you, simmering. I could hear the pot lid, that clatter of metal like a rattlesnake warning: Stand back, shit's about to explode.

So fucking what if that's why we started, if you hating her was the thing I loved most, if I held on so tight because I could feel her fury that she'd been replaced-by a nonentity. So Nikki brought us together. So what?

What matters isn't how we found each other, Dex, or why. It's that we did, and what happened next. Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That's us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.

DEX.

Urge Overkill THERE WAS A SECURITY CAMERA. Two shadows caught on-screen, faces indistinct, ages readable enough that-the very morning after our graffiti triumph-two cops muscled their way into the principal's office. By noon, word had gotten around that they were looking for two girls in possession of spray paint, with possible connections to a dark underground, two girls with dangerous intent. God is dead, we had written-I had written-and not realized this would magic us into something to fear. Midway through English class, the PA buzzed, and the principal came on to issue dire warnings: that new evidence suggested agitators in our midst, that we should all be vigilant, that all of us-the misguided perpetrators most of all-were at risk. The rumor mill was delighted, giddy speculation quickly drowning out any buzz about the next big party and Hayley Green's bulimia-induced laxative incident.

Two nameless girls heeding the call of the dark; I could feel people watching us.

We met by the Dumpsters, one of us ice-cold and the other freaking out, three guesses which was which. This wasn't the year to be a juvenile delinquent. "Worst case, it's vandalism, that's got to be a misdemeanor," Lacey said, every word a shrug, and I wanted to shake reality into her.

"A misdemeanor? They still arrest you for those, Lacey. We're so fucked."

The refrain had been beating in my head since I saw the cop car pull up to the curb through my homeroom window. So fucked. So fucked. So totally, absurdly, screwed grounded arrested fucked. Lacey pretending otherwise didn't fix anything.

"No one's getting arrested. No one even knows it was us. Stop acting like a crazy person, and they never will."

But the way I acted wasn't the problem. It was Lacey. People knew enough about her to suspect the truth-at least, Nikki Drummond would.

And it turned out she did.

"Let me guess: her idea," Nikki said, snaring me in the second-floor girls' bathroom, where I'd taken to going ever since she'd cornered me in the one on the ground floor. "She promised no way would you get caught. No consequences."

"Do you have some obsession with hearing me pee?"

"It's always her idea, but you're the one who's going to get screwed. She'll find some way to make sure of that."

"Seriously, are you bathroom stalking me? Because that's significantly weird."

"She's bad news, Hannah."

"What are you, an after-school movie?" I washed my hands, then smeared on some ChapStick, just to show her my hands weren't shaking. "One more time: I don't know what you're talking about. No idea."

"Trust me, I believe that."

"Fuck off," I said, and banged out the door. Not my cleverest comeback, but I hated to give her the last word.

She seized it anyway. When I got to my locker that afternoon, the vice principal was waiting for me, with a cop and a pair of pliers and an "anonymous" tip.