Would it surprise you to know that I walked in the woods all the time back then? There’s another pretty lie for you, that I was some mythical creature of the water, constitutionally afraid of trees. The woods weren’t just my kind of place, with their shadows and the music of whispers on the breeze; they were my place, this green labyrinth I could escape into and spin a little fantasy of my own. The closest path through the trees picked up less than a mile from the house, but inside the green it was dense and silent and felt about a million miles away from the Bastard and his Battle Creek. I could be the last person on earth, everyone and everything scorched away except for me and the trees, the worms and the deer. I liked when the leaves got so thick you couldn’t see the sky.
The first day I came across the old train station, I took a breath and wondered whether I’d willed it into existence. Because here was the end of civilization, forgotten station and rusty tracks and a behemoth of a boxcar sleeping in the weeds. You probably would have wasted your time trying to imagine yourself into the past, some booming, bustling era of ladies with parasols and men with briefcases and fedoras and important places to go, but I liked it the way it was, sprayed with fading graffiti, full of broken glass and jagged edges, lost in time. It was the first place I found that felt dangerous — the rotting heart of Battle Creek. This was apocalypse country, and it felt like home.
You can imagine how it felt when I found Nikki trespassing in my story.
“I don’t know you,” Nikki said, like existing without her awareness was the worst kind of sin. Like I was the intruder.
“Don’t know you, either.” I took one more slug before she stole the bottle back.
“I know everyone.”
“Apparently not.”
“Everyone. Everything. What are you supposed to do when you’ve done everything? Huh? What then?” Nikki Drummond slurring her words, baring her existential crisis to the newest trash in town.
“I highly doubt you’ve done everything. You live here.”
“I rule here,” Nikki corrected me.
At that, I laughed. I didn’t know her well enough then to realize how drunk she must have been not to claw my eyes out.
“I’ve done Craig,” she said. “I’ve done him and done him and done him and dull dull dull.”
“Whereas I bet he finds you fascinating.”
She blinked big blue eyes up at me; she smiled. Nikki stalked the world like a cat, but that afternoon she looked more like the tiger cub dangling from a branch in some lame inspirational poster: Hang in there! Clawed, but cuddly.
Lacey Champlain, in the woods, with a knife to your heart, because here’s the truth: Before you, there was Nikki Drummond.
We drank; she talked. I got an A-to-Z of the world according to Nikki, what it was like to be perfect and popular, to be Nikki-and-Craig, like Barbie-and-Ken, to be written in the stars, if the stars were a staple-bound yearbook and the ink was semen and beer. She told me they belonged together, and that if she couldn’t love him she couldn’t love anyone.
“Break up with him,” I said.
“Done that, too. It didn’t take.”
Too lazy and too bored to do anything but get blackout drunk and whine on a Tuesday afternoon. Such a tragedy, right? Where were the inspirational Sally Struthers commercials, the promise that even you could pimp out poor Nikki for just pennies a day?
“Sometimes I’m so bored I could fucking die,” she said. We were sitting side by side, dangling our legs over the tracks. “You ever feel that way?”
I wanted to be a different person. I wasn’t the girl I’d been in Jersey. I wasn’t Shay’s girl anymore, the kind who followed a foot behind if the wrong people were watching and said Yes, whatever you want when the answer was No fucking way; I hadn’t been Daddy’s girl, not in a long time, and my mother had a new kid to screw up. I was Kurt’s girl, and I needed that to mean something. So maybe I was the one who crossed the space between us and smeared her pastel gloss, but the way I remember it, she was already there, and our lips and then our tongues and then the rest of us came together like it had been the plan from the beginning.
You’re probably picturing something porny, exploding feather-pillow fights and pizza delivery girls who want a taste of your pepperoni. It felt like porn, which made it interesting. It felt filthy, literally, rolling around in the dirt, our hair tangled with twigs, our flesh matted with gravel and moss, both of us panting and sweating and moaning, two wild girls raised by wolves.
So that’s how it started: by accident, but also not. We made a plan to meet the next day, same time, same place, same bottle of vodka — only this time she showed up with Craig Ellison in tow, Mr. Hot and Boring, as she introduced him. He’d heard about the action and wanted in on it.
“Just to watch,” he said, and that first time, it was all he did.
THEM
DEX’S MOTHER KNEW SHE SHOULD be afraid for her daughter. This, she’d been told, was the tragedy of birthing a girl. To live in fear — it was the fate of any parent, maybe, but the special provenance of a mother to a daughter, one woman raising another, knowing too well what could happen. This was what lurked inside the luckiest delivery rooms, the ones whose balloons screamed It’s a girl!: pink cigars and flowered onesies and fear.
So she’d been told.
Now she was supposed to be more afraid than ever. Now they were all more afraid than ever, the mothers of Battle Creek, because whatever illusions they’d had about their children and their home and the inevitability that the future would unfold as uneventfully as the past had been punctured by the bullet that Ellison boy blew through his brainstem. And Dex’s mother had been afraid, that first night. She and Jimmy had stood in their daughter’s doorway, watching her sleep, dipping a toe in the unimaginable. They’d counted her breaths, the easy rise and fall of her chest, and Dex’s mother felt her own lungs sighing in time with her daughter’s, breathing for her the way she had when her daughter was a newborn, when she’d sat by the bassinet, fingertips resting lightly on infant chest, because only by feeling the rhythm of breath and the flutter of heartbeat, one moment after the next, could she reassure herself that the baby was still alive.
They’d resolved everything would be different, after the tragedy. Nothing was different, of course, because it wasn’t their tragedy, and Dex’s mother had little patience for the mothers of Battle Creek who seemed unable to comprehend this basic fact. Boys weren’t supposed to be vulnerable; it overturned the natural order of things, a boy falling prey to pain. That was a girl’s purview. So maybe it was understandable that they groped for other answers, these mothers, still twittering all these months later about what had “really” happened, about demonic influences and satanic cults, about heavy metal and blood sacrifice, but it infuriated her, all these ginned-up monsters under the bed, as if that would recuse them from worrying about anything that mattered, overdoses and car crashes and AIDS and, especially in the case of those mothers of sons who thought only daughters should be worried for, accidentally raising little proto-rapists who thought wining and dining a girl meant getting her drunk enough that she’d swallow a mouthful of ejaculate without complaint. Dex’s mother hadn’t known the Ellison boy, but she’d known plenty of boys like him. There had always been boys like him. And she knew whatever trouble he’d gotten into, if there had been trouble, he’d probably brought it on himself. All these mothers, so concerned about the terrible things that could happen to their children — so unwilling to think about the things their children might make happen. Maybe this was why Dex’s mother never had managed to muster up much fear for her daughter. Her daughter wasn’t the type to make things happen.