It was a wonder, that I could do those things. There was a box in the basement where we kept stray jigsaw pieces, all of them parts of different pictures, none of their edges lining up. That was me. A Picasso person. The wrong parts in the wrong places. Lacey would have known how to make them fit. Lacey had named me: This is who you are, this is who you will be.
She would have known, but she was gone.
I WENT TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY, because going to school on Monday was a thing I’d always done.
I didn’t go back.
As long as the homework got done, no one objected to me spending the final three weeks of the semester in my room. No one wanted to look at me.
Everyone wanted to look at me.
In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.
Lacey said it mattered, how you chose to do it, and now I understood that, too: why you might choose the bullet and the gun, choose ugliness and hurt instead of slipping away sweetly into the black. Some pain dictated violence, bloodshed. Oblivion required obliterating not just the pain but its source. Justice necessitated leaving behind a mess. A scream of blood and bone and rage.
It scared me, how much I understood.
IF I HAD LET LACEY set the house on fire. If I had watched it burn. Sometimes I dreamed of the flames and woke up with the smell of charred flesh, and sometimes I woke up smiling.
I tried to dream of Lacey, dream myself into our life in Seattle, but I couldn’t get there. Seattle was a ghost, and Lacey was like something conjured from one of my books. If it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been at the party; if it weren’t for Lacey, I wouldn’t have been so angry and so drunk; if it weren’t for Lacey, I would have been safe.
I hated her. I loved her. I wished she’d never come back, and I wished she would. That was how I lived, after: not one thing and not the other. Canceling myself out.
I STAYED IN MY ROOM. SAFE territory. My room: fifteen feet wide, thirteen feet short, beige from floor to ceiling, with matted knots in the carpet from where our cat had puked her life away. A twin bed with Strawberry Shortcake sheets, because, according to my mother, sheets were expensive and grown-up was a matter of opinion. Shuttered windows that let through slats of light in the early afternoon and a rusty full-length mirror papered with remnants of Lacey: wrinkled postcards from Paris and California and Istanbul written by people long dead and rescued from yard sale bins; deep thoughts courtesy of deep thinkers, inscribed by Lacey in stern black marker; for Lacey’s sake, a cutout of Kurt, his granny cardigan matching his eyes; at the center of it all, a Dex-and-Lacey photo collage that captured none of the important moments, because for those we were always alone, no one to hold the camera. A particleboard bureau stickered with glow-in-the-dark stars that three years of scraping couldn’t clear away. Stacks of books pressed up against beige wallpaper, spines stretching to the ceiling, every book an adventure that meant climbing or toppling or ever so gently working one out of the middle of a stack, Jenga for giants. There was a card table desk in the corner, stacked neatly with the year’s final papers (failures) and report card (“disappointing”), and buried beneath them, for some future scrapbook of shame, two copies of the local paper — the edition with the letter to the editor telling the story of the wild girl passed out in the ruins of an abandoned party, and the weekend edition with the editorial, with its anonymous but all-knowing first person pluraclass="underline" We believe the girls in this town are up to no good, we believe modern music and television and drugs and sex and atheism are rotting our youth, we believe this girl is as much to blame as her toxic culture and her lax parents, we can’t blame her but we can’t afford to excuse her, so it follows that we must use her as a warning, lest we lose another of our brightest youth, and we the people of Battle Creek, the parents and teachers and churchgoers and goodhearted folk, we must do better.
I CALLED HER LINE IN THE middle of the night, after my parents were asleep. Every night. All night, sometimes, just to hear it ring. No one ever answered.
No, her mother finally said, she didn’t know where Lacey went. No, I shouldn’t call back.
MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY ALL the time. Not at me, she said. Or not just at me.
“I don’t care what anyone says,” my father said, standing in the doorway of my room a few days after — and maybe not, but he’d never stood like that before, like a trainer at the mouth of a cage, waiting for something wild to make its move. “You’ll always be a good girl. Maybe without Lacey around. . things will settle.”
Without Lacey, I was incapable of wildness, that’s what he was telling me. When I had Lacey, he had a little piece of her, too, could love me more for the things she saw in me. Now that she was gone, he expected I would revert to form. I would be the good girl, his good girl, boring but safe. He was supposed to want that.
I READ.
Lacey had always discouraged reading that was, as she put it, beneath us. We should spend our time on mind-expanding pursuits, she said. Our mission, and we were obligated to accept it, was an investigation into the nature of things. The fundamentals. Together we paged through Nietzsche and Kant, pretending to understand. We read Beckett aloud and waited for Godot. Lacey memorized the first six stanzas of “Howl” and shouted it over our lake, casting her voice into the wind. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, she would scream, and then tell me that Allen Ginsberg was the oldest man she would be willing to fuck. I memorized the opening and closing lines of “The Hollow Men” for her, and I whispered it to myself when the dark closed in.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
It sounded like a promise.
Without Lacey, I slid backward. I tessered with Meg Murry; I crept through the wardrobe and nuzzled my face into Aslan’s fur. I swept the dust and warmed the fires in Howl’s moving castle; I turned half invisible with half magic, drank tea with the Mad Hatter, battled Captain Hook, even, occasionally, hugged the Velveteen Rabbit back to life. I was a stranger in a strange land. I was an orphan, abandoned and found and saved, until I closed the book, and was lost all over again.
I read, and I wrote.
Dear Lacey, I wrote, sometimes, in letters I hid in an old Sears sweater box, just in case. In my terrible handwriting, with smearing ink, unstained by unfallen tears, I’m sorry, I wrote. I should have known better.
Please come home.
THE LAST SUNDAY IN JULY, I went outside. Just a ride around the block, on the bike my father had quietly collected from the postparty wreckage. The sun felt good. The air smelled good, like grass and summer. The wind sounded good, that thunder you could hear only when you were in motion. When I was a kid, bike riding was an adventure, bad guys on my tail and the wind rushing through a mountain pass, passageway to enchantment. The bike itself was magic back then, the only thing other than a book that could carry me away. But that was kid logic, the kind that ignored the simple physics of vectors. It didn’t matter how fast I pedaled if I was turning in circles. The bike always carried me home.