Then, a week before Halloween, the thunderstorm. One last gasp of summer before the snows set in. The thunder sounded its summons, and even though I did not want to miss her, did not want to see her, did not want to want her, I gave in. The night felt unreal, the landscape lashed with wind and water. Like temporarily we’d slipped into another world, where nothing had to count.
I waited until my parents were asleep, stole the car keys, drove to our lake. How surprised she would be, I thought, when she saw that I’d learned to drive without her.
There was no question she would be there. For the storm, for me. There are irresistible forces, but there are no immoveable objects. The storm called; we always answered.
She looked inhuman, spattered with mud, slick and shiny in the headlights, some wild, watery creature of the night.
“You weren’t invited,” she said when I reached her. “You’re not welcome.”
It’s a free country, I could have said, like a little kid, but I knew I was trespassing, that everything ours was actually hers. She’d gotten custody of the wild.
I wasn’t welcome, but when I sat on the dock, she lowered herself beside me. We sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough that low voices could cross the void. Her cheek shimmered. Rain hung on her lashes. She dropped her head, hiding her eyes, exposing the soft, pale slope of her neck and shoulders. The tattoo was a black smear, ballpoint rivulets tracing dark veins down her spine.
I touched the smudge that had once been a star. “Everything about you is a lie.”
She raised her head just enough to show her smile. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Then she rag-dolled down again. “I know what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that with him.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking. Not anymore.”
She only laughed.
“You’ve got to quit with this devil stuff, Lacey.”
“What are you worried about? What are they going to do to me? Drown me in a well? Exorcise me?”
“Expel you, for one.”
“Ooh, scary.”
“And, I don’t know. What are you going to do if someone really gets hurt?”
“How could anyone getting hurt be my problem? You don’t actually think I’m doing something to them?” Lacey shook herself like a dog. The spray was colder than the rain.
“You know this town, Lacey.”
“And this is your problem how?”
She had me there.
“I’d save your worry for yourself,” Lacey said.
“I’m fine.”
“Something bad is coming.”
“Is that supposed to be a prophecy?” I said. “Or, what? A threat?”
“Dex—” She breathed. Our shoulders rose and fell together. In, out. Slow, steady. Breathe, Dex. Breathe, Lacey. “I want you safe, Dex. That’s all I want.”
Nikki would have said she was jealous. That she needed me to need her, no matter how much it hurt.
“It wasn’t about you, this thing with your dad,” Lacey said. “And the Nikki thing, that’s not about you, either.”
“Yeah, of course, it’s about whatever mysterious secret conspiracy you can’t let me in on. I got that.”
“What’s between me and Nikki. . it’s about Craig.”
“You say that like it means anything. Like I’m supposed to pretend it’s an answer when we both know it’s not.”
I didn’t actually expect it would make her explain herself; nothing could make Lacey do what she didn’t want to.
She said it quietly. “She thinks it’s my fault.”
All the little ways Nikki had tried to turn me against Lacey, the way she’d taken a razor blade, ever so carefully, to my faith in her, shaving it away in impossibly thin slices until there was almost nothing left — all that time, she’d said nothing of this.
Maybe, I thought, it was just another lie. But that wasn’t Lacey’s way. Lacey lied with silence.
“Go ahead.” She sounded ancient with exhaustion, like there was nothing left to do but wait for bones to crumble to dust. “Ask me if it was. My fault.”
I shivered, and wiped the rain from my forehead. The lake water danced, leaping for the clouds.
“It wasn’t all bad, was it, Dex?”
I couldn’t lie in a storm. “None of it was bad.” I took her hand. There was no thought behind it, just bodily need, to press our slippery skin together. To hang on. “Say it, Lacey. Whatever it is. Make it better.” She was the witch, wasn’t she? I willed her: Summon the words.
She squeezed. “Let’s start fresh, Dex. Fuck the past.”
I didn’t see how she could say it when the past was everything. The past was where Dex and Lacey lived. If she erased that, there would be nothing left of us.
“I never tried to hide you away,” Lacey said. “I never kept you a secret.” Somehow we were talking about Nikki again. I didn’t want her there, between us. “People only keep secrets when they’re ashamed.”
“You keep plenty of secrets.”
“But you were never one of them, Dex.”
I couldn’t say it made no difference.
“Miss me?” she asked.
“You’re right here.”
Lacey took my face in her hands. Her fingers were spindlier than I remembered. Everything about Lacey, I realized, had become more angular. Her collarbone jutted out; her shoulders and elbows looked sharp enough to cut.
“You really don’t,” she said, wonder in her voice.
My chest hurt. I couldn’t speak with her fingertips burning against my chin and cheek and lip. When I didn’t correct her, she launched herself off the dock and into the lake.
I screamed her name.
Splashes in the dark. The familiar laugh. Thunder. “Come on in!” she shouted. “The water’s fine.”
“It’s a fucking lightning storm!”
“Still a coward,” she shouted, and disappeared into the black.
Those long seconds of still water and empty night, nothing but rain and lightning and me, and Lacey somewhere beneath; seconds and seconds waiting for her to surface, gasping and laughing and alive.
There was time to wonder: Whether she could be trusted to save herself. Whether I could. Dive into dark water, impenetrable as sky. Weightless, kicking down and down, reaching for something limbed and heavy sinking to muddy bottom. Lacey would fight me, that was Lacey’s way, pull at my hair, climb up my body, so desperate for surface, for air, for life, that she would drag us both down.
I stood at the edge of the dock, heels on the wood, toes hanging over air, willing myself to jump.
The lake was endless dark. And there she was, floating moon of a face. Another game. Now we both knew who had won, because there she was in the water, and here I was on the shore.
Inside the car it was warm and dry, enough so that I was tempted to curl up in the front seat and sleep. Instead I started the engine and left her there, with her water and her storm, knowing the lightning would never dare strike.
SHE GOT IN MY HEAD. That Friday, when Nikki called me to bitch about the sleepover she’d been suckered into throwing, the tedious effort of putting on a happy face for her supposed friends and said, “I’m tired of all this crap, wish you could just come over and watch bad movies,” I broke our unspoken agreement and said, “Well, I could.”
“Could what?”
“Come over. Watch bad movies, or whatever.”
“I told you, I can’t get out of this party.”
She wasn’t so stupid; she was making me spell it out. “No, I mean, I could come to the party.”
“Oh, Hannah, you know you would hate that. Like, actively, puke your guts out. You hate those bitches.”
“So do you.”