“And trust me, if I could run away to your place and let the animals take over the zoo, I would, but my mother would kill me if one of them peed on the carpet.”
I was lying on my bed, watching the ceiling, counting the cracks, trying not to care.
“You remember that pool party this summer,” she said. “A fucking train wreck.”
When I didn’t answer, she added, “And the other party.”
Now we’d both crossed a line.
There were seventy-two cracks, and also a yellowed patch in the corner where something must have been dripping from a hidden pipe. If the ceiling collapsed, I wondered, would it kill me, a blanket of plaster and dust smothering me in the night? Or would I wake up coated in asbestos, wondering why I could see the sky?
“Why aren’t you saying anything, Hannah? Tell me you understand I’m doing you a favor.”
“Sure. Thank you.”
“You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”
“I’m not being weird.”
“Good. Don’t. Now you tell me something. What tells of Hannah Dexter’s excellent adventure?” She affected a Keanu drawl. “Did you have a most awesome week? Or totally bogus?”
“I talked to Lacey.”
There was a hissing on the line. It was the bad connection, but it was too easy to imagine Nikki herself, reverting to snake. She breathed out the word. “Fuck.”
“It was fine.”
“No wonder you’re being so fucking weird. Please tell me you’re not feeling sorry for her.”
“She said something about you and her,” I said, which was almost true. “And Craig.”
The snake uncoiled, struck.
“You talked to Lacey about Craig? You talked to Lacey about Craig?” She was yelling, and Nikki never yelled. “About what I’ve told you? Things I’ve never told anyone? How could you even think that was okay?”
“I didn’t! I wouldn’t!”
I protested; I swore I would never break her confidence, that Lacey had asked nothing and told even less, that it’s not like I had anything real to tell. I couldn’t ask her, not then, why she would blame Lacey for anything; I could only say I was sorry. She hung up on me.
On TV, this was the moment to throw the phone across the room, and so I did and felt like a fool.
So did she, she said, when she called back an hour later. “That was unfair of me. I’m a little sensitive about. . you know.”
“Of course,” I said.
“I know you would never tell Lacey anything. Right?”
“Of course I wouldn’t.”
“And I’ve been thinking about this sleepover party crap. You should come — I mean, if you really want to. It’s going to be totally lame, and you’re going to hate me for inviting you, but at least it’ll be more fun for me.”
“You actually mean it?”
“I don’t do things I don’t mean, Hannah. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
I GOT THERE AT NINE, as I’d been told, but I was the last to arrive. I’d cobbled together an outfit from the Nikki-approved corner of my closet, sleeveless velour shirt in forest green, black cardigan with flared sleeves, a gray choker. I wore vanilla-scented perfume and Gorilla Grape — flavored Lip Smackers. We would all taste the same in the dark.
Mrs. Drummond fluttered a hand toward the basement. “The girls are downstairs.”
The girls: lazy cats sprawled across couches and sleeping bags, all smiles and claws, same as they were at school, same as they’d been since kindergarten, same as I remembered from the party I couldn’t remember.
The girls: Paulette Green, who no one much liked but everyone tolerated because her parents had a secret patch of pot in their vegetable garden and enthusiastically believed in pharmaceutically raising the consciousness of their daughter and her friends. Sarah Kaye, whose father had multiple sclerosis and never left the house. Kaitlyn Dyer, the sweetheart everyone loved, even me, because she was short enough to be tossed around, short and bouncy and seemingly harmless, who was such a klepto she’d tried to steal the prom fund, and who’d gotten away with super-secret double probation because when the school tried to expel her, her parents had threatened to sue. Melanie Herman, who was sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. Allie Cantor, who had herpes, and would forever.
I knew these things about them because Nikki had told me, and because she told me, I trusted her. Forgetting, eventually, that they weren’t her secrets. That the girls had trusted her, too.
The girls were laughing at something on TV, and the something was me.
Me, unconscious and drooling in the dark. Shadows, then faces, grainy on the screen, grainy in a way I recognized. That was Nikki’s father’s video camera, the one she loved so much. That was Melanie and Andy and Micah. That was a voice, in the dark, shrieking “Weekend at Bernie’s!” as brawny arms hoisted me up, danced me around, floppy and bare.
“Slut,” someone said, and a hand reached into the frame, carved a Sharpie across my stomach, S-L-U-T, then made a smiley face out of a nipple.
Girls’ laughter on the TV; girls’ laughter in the basement. Freeze-frame, rewind, fast-forward, play.
“She wants it,” a voice said off camera, and on-screen, Andy Smith lowered himself over the rag doll, ground against her, hip to hip, chest to chest, tongue slurped up her cheek, then down her sternum, then ringing the smiley face, round and round it goes.
“Take off her panties,” a voice said.
“Slip in a finger,” a voice said. “Make her wet.”
“See? She wants it,” a voice said. “She’s dripping with it.”
“Make her suck it,” a voice said. “She wants to taste it.”
Different hands, different fingers and tongues. But always the same voice. Always obeyed. And the Dex doll did whatever they made it do.
Nikki loved to direct.
“Here comes the gross part!” sweetheart Kaitlyn giggled in the basement as vomit trickled out of the girl on-screen, and that was how I knew they’d watched it before, knew it by heart.
On-screen there were groans and retching sounds, and Melanie said, “There goes the boner,” and Nikki’s voice said you can get it back and don’t be a pussy and we can’t stop now and then there was a flashing red battery light and fade to black.
Maybe I made some kind of noise.
Maybe Nikki had always known.
Of course she had known.
Nikki turned. “Oh, no. Hannah. You’re here,” she said, with no inflection. “Oh dear, I guess you saw everything.”
SOMEHOW, I GOT OUT OF there. Somehow, adjusting the mirrors, shifting the gears, signaling the turns, all as Nikki had taught me to do, I got home.
Locked in my room, on the floor.
Burning with cold fire.
What I could say now, if I could speak to her then, that girl on the floor, that girl broken: This is not your fault; this is not your story. This is not the end. This will someday end.
What I know now, what I knew then: This will never stop burning.
Hannah, burning.
Hannah, burned away, hollowed out, scoured clean, Hannah the victim, Hannah the fool, Hannah the body. Hannah, stupid. Hannah, dead.
Dex, awake.
LACEY, Come As You Are
AFTER SHE HAD HER LITTLE fun making you think I was fucking your father, Nikki came for me. It was over, obviously, whatever it was between him and me, as soon as you knew it existed. You’re lucky you ran off as fast as you did so you didn’t have to see him cry. “God, what the fuck is wrong with me, what was I doing. .” and on and on, literally ad nauseam, or maybe that’s not what made me throw up all over the parking lot, but at least once I did, he shut up. Then he told me to go home and never come back, and I said and did some things I’m not proud of, until he took my shoulders and pushed his arms out, rigid, all that empty space between us, and gave me a pretty little speech about how I should respect myself more and expect more from others, and stop thinking I’m only valuable for sex, and all the while there was that bulge in his pants that both of us had to pretend didn’t exist.