I couldn’t know that I would go through it on my own. That when I called Lacey to tell her what had happened, to apologize or let her apologize or simply sit on the phone until I unclenched enough to let the tears fall, she wouldn’t be there. That she’d packed up in the middle of the night, just like she’d told me she would. That I was on my own now, because I’d told Lacey to go and Lacey was gone.
I didn’t know.
So when I stripped naked in the bathroom and saw myself — saw the words that had been Sharpie’d all over my body, the things someone had written across my stomach and breasts and ass, the labels that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard I scrubbed, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, but could recognize as the work of more than one person, slut and whore and skank and, graffitied neatly just below my belly button with an arrow pointing straight down, we wuz here—I thought: Lacey.
Lacey will save me.
Lacey will avenge me.
Lacey will hold me and whisper the magic words that will make all of this okay.
I climbed into the shower and sagged against the wall and watched the words shine in the water, the words strange hands had inscribed on bare skin while I slept. Strange hands redressing me, pulling underpants over my thighs, snapping strapless bra in place, lacing corset. Before that, strange hands doing things. Strange lips, strange fingers, strange dicks, all of them, I tried, hot water streaming over me, to remember what I had done, what I had let them do, who I had become in the night. The water burned and my skin burned, and still, I believed I could endure it, because soon I would have Lacey, and I would not be alone.
LACEY, Blood Ties
THE BASTARD BURNED IT ALL. In a fucking fire. Like a Nazi.
“Heil fucking Hitler,” I told him, which stopped him just long enough to slap me across the face, a nice sharp blow to make my ears sing but which we both knew wouldn’t leave a mark. Then Herr Bastard went back to his bonfire, and I spat and screamed and choked on the smell of Kurt melting in the flames. Plastic cases warping with heat, fire eating through Kurt’s eyes, Nietzsche and Sartre going up in smoke. It would have been cool — very Seattle, very Kurt — if it hadn’t been my whole life disintegrating while the Bastard splashed gasoline. And my mother. Hiding out in the kitchen, probably rustling up some marshmallows and graham crackers so the Bastard could make s’mores over the ruins of the world.
That’s why I was late picking you up for the party, Dex. My oh-so-unforgiveable crime. The Bastard found my Satanic Bible and lost his fucking shit. Which looks nothing like what you’re imagining, I can assure you. In your G-rated imagination, I’m sure, parents rant and rage and ground you for a week and then everyone has spaghetti for dinner and goes to bed.
Let me paint you a picture, Dex. Life according to Lacey. There’s me, bedhead and short shorts, nipples standing at attention, and he wasn’t even looking, that’s how hypnotized he was by his precious fire. I couldn’t stop watching it, either, the fire consuming every song, every page, every piece of me, everything that carried me away from this shit life. Is that how you felt that night, Dex, when your mother found those stupid cans of paint, when she yelled at you, poor baby, and took away your phone privileges? Did you go cold inside, like the night was an ice-covered pond, and you knew if you weren’t careful, the surface would crack open and you’d sink into the deep? Were you disgusted by it, by the way your body betrayed you with its goose-bumped shuddering and the sad little croaks and moans you made instead of words? Did you think: I’m better than this? Did you think: Now I am empty? Now I have nothing left?
You didn’t. You did have something left. You had me.
The day the music died. It’s supposed to be a metaphor. Not a live show in my backyard, the Bastard’s bloated face red in reflected light, miniature flames dancing in his eyes, hands stinking of gasoline, the devil in penny loafers and a polyester suit. I thought about those wailing widows in India, the ones who throw themselves onto the funeral pyre, because what’s left to live for when the thing you’re living for is a column of smoke? Think about that, skin flayed away, bare muscle and pearly bone, flesh fused with plastic, all of us ash together.
“You’ve got the devil in you,” the Bastard said when he shoved me into the corner of my bedroom and made me watch while he tore it apart. “We’re going to burn it out of this house, and then we’re going to burn it out of you.”
WE EACH HAVE OUR JAMES. My fake dad and your real one. Except that fake dad is what you call the kind of guy who bribes you with imitation pearls and Amy Grant CDs, who won’t shut up about How was your day? and Who are your favorite teachers? and Won’t you just give me a chance to prove I can love you?
The Bastard pretended to be nice to me for precisely as long as it took to get into my mother’s pants. Your James, on the other hand. Your Jimmy Dexter. Your dear old dad.
That’s a different story, isn’t it?
SOMETIMES I KEEP THINGS FROM you to protect you, Dex. But this is truth: I never meant for it to happen. Cliché, but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can’t blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life.
You buying any of this?
Okay, try this one: My mother and the Bastard are right, I’m the harlot of Battle Creek. I’ve got the devil in me. I’ve done terrible things, but this is not one of them.
Here’s another cliché for you: Nothing happened. That should count for something.
THE FIRST TIME. EARLY SPRING, one of those perfect mornings that fool you into believing that winter never happened and summer might not suck. The door opened as soon as I took my finger off the bell. Like he’d been waiting for me. “Can Dex come out and play?”
“Dex isn’t here right now.” That was the first thing I liked about your father, the way he called you Dex. Not like your mother, who was always throwing around Hannah this and Hannah that in that pinched voice, like what she really wanted to say was She’s mine and you can’t have her. “Her mother took her outlet shopping. Blazing-hot clearance sales, I hear.”
“Sounds thrilling,” I said.
“I begged them to bring me along.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
He grinned. Like we were friends. “Story of my life, always left out in the cold.”
“It’s a cruel world.”
“Cutthroat.” He was wearing a Cosby sweater and dad jeans, and his hair was a black scruff of weeds, like he’d just woken up, even though it was noon. Stubble inching down his chin, a little crud in the corner of one eye. I was wearing cutoffs over black leggings, the ones you said gave me buns of steel, and a tank that cut my boobs about a centimeter above the nipple. He could have gotten some show, if he’d bothered to look. But he wasn’t that kind of dad.
“Guess I should go,” I said.
“Don’t get into trouble out there.” He reconsidered. “Not too much, at least.”
“The thing is. .,” I said, and maybe I took a deep breath and held it, because I kind of wanted him to look.