Everything as fucked-up as possible, just the way Nikki liked it, so of course that’s when she slipped the note into my locker, asking me to meet her at the lake. If it had been the station, any part of the woods, I wouldn’t have gone. But of course she wouldn’t ask that of herself. The lake seemed okay to me, because even the shitty algae slop that passed for a town lake would remind me of the lake that mattered, yours and mine, clear and blue and ours. Nikki was part of the woods, twisting trails and sinkholes and the smell of rotting bark. You were water.
I showed up early, but she was there already, sitting on the dock. When she saw me, she pulled a bottle of Malibu from her bag. “Split it?”
It was too sweet, and the smell made me sick, but I took a couple shots. Judging from the blurriness around her edges, she’d gotten a head start.
We didn’t talk much until we were both safely drunk.
“Satan, huh?” she said.
“Our Dark Lord and Savior. Wanna join up?”
“What the fuck happened to you?”
I took another swig. “Figured out I’m all alone in the world, no one loves me, and oh, yeah, a bunch of Jesus-loving psycho bitches force-fed me shit and left me in the woods to die.”
She toasted me with the Malibu. “Once a drama queen, always a drama queen.”
“Queen of the underworld now, haven’t you heard?”
That’s when she started laughing. “You’re not actually fucking Hannah’s dad, are you? I’d kill myself before letting someone that old stick it in me.”
I went cold. “Don’t say her name.”
“You really hate me, don’t you?” she said.
“Even more than you hate me.”
“Not possible.”
“Try me.”
Then her hand was on my thigh, and she was crawling up me like I was a tree, Nikki Drummond, drunk and hungry, straddling me, grinding me, tonguing my lips and tugging at my hair, saying something about how she hated it so short, then cutting off the thought by taking my fingers in her mouth and sucking, hard. Her breasts felt bigger than I remembered them, looser somehow, and there was a trickle of drool at her mouth.
“Get the fuck off.” I pushed her hard enough to hurt and hoped that it did.
“Come on, you know you want to.”
You know how they say desperation isn’t sexy? Bullshit. An ugly drunk without a shirt, wheezing rum and aiming herself at me like a torpedo of need? Pushing her away felt like kicking a puppy, and I got off on that, too.
“Maybe I’m fucking in love with you,” she said, doing that half-laugh, half-cry thing that middle-aged women do in bad movies. “Did you think of that?”
“Frankly? No.”
She sat back. “Why the fuck did you even show up, then?”
“I want to know what you want.”
“Was I not clear?”
“What you want to stay away from her.” I would have given it to her, Dex. Anything.
“You’re fucking kidding me. You want me to believe you came here to talk about Hannah?”
“Her name is Dex.”
“Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.” She laughed again. She’d amped up her acting skills since the last time we talked. She was nearly approximating human. “I get it, what you were doing. But we don’t need her anymore.”
“Since when is there a fucking we, Nikki?”
“You’re not serious.” She was touching me again, sweaty hands on hands. “What do you think your precious Dex would say if she actually knew you, Lacey? Is that what you really want, someone who can’t see you? Someone who thinks all your bullshit is for real?”
“Stop talking.”
“It’s almost a year,” she said.
“We don’t talk about that.”
“You don’t think about him? You don’t think about me?”
For a second, she almost had me. The stink of desperation, the sheen of moisture in her eyes, the pressure of her hands: She was so good at playing her part that, even knowing everything I knew, I almost bought it, that she missed me, that all this time she’d been secretly in love or lust, that she’d clawed her way into your life for the same reason I’d hung onto your father, that she didn’t hate me anymore for what we knew about each other, that the things we’d done in the woods had meant something, hadn’t been a hateful joke. Maybe I did buy it, just long enough to tell her the truth, and tell it almost gently. “Not anymore.”
She let go.
“You came here for her,” she said, and there, in the flat affect, the vacuum of her expression, was the real Nikki. “To tell me to stay away from her.”
I nodded.
“But why would I stay away from my good friend Hannah?” She was slurring; it was hard to tell how much was rum and how much was effect. “I’m protecting her. Saving her from the big bad wolf.” She smeared a hand across her nose and wiped the snot on her jeans. “Like I should have saved Craig. I’m good now. I do good works. Like Jesus.”
“I need to know what you’re going to do, Nikki. Are you going to tell her?”
Laughing again, she wouldn’t stop laughing. “Tell who? Tell what?” Then she clapped her hands together. “Oh, I get it! All this crap about staying away from Hannah — that’s not about her, that’s about you.”
“No.”
“You’re not afraid of what I’ll do to her. You’re afraid of what I’ll tell her.”
“They’re the same thing.”
“No, Lacey. One is about her. One is about you. Normal people know the difference.”
“Don’t hurt her just to fuck with me.”
“Let’s be clear. I don’t care about fucking with you any more than I care about fucking you.”
“Then why are we here?”
She left without an answer. We both knew the answer.
I made it worse. I tried to warn you, and you didn’t listen, and that part’s your fault, but the rest of it, that’s on me. What she did next. What that made you do. It was all my fault and not my fault at all, same as everything else.
WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I threw out my retainer with my lunch. Didn’t even notice until it was time to slip it back in my mouth and go to class, and that’s when I freaked the fuck out — because I could see it, wrapped in a napkin on the corner of my tray so it wouldn’t get gummy with French bread pizza. Sliding into the garbage on top of Terrence Clay’s leftover spaghetti and the tuna fish salad that Lindsay North, getting the same head start on anorexia she’d gotten on boobs, had tossed out uneaten. You want to know what my life was like before you? It was like, given a choice between going home without the retainer and taking a swim in a Dumpster, I didn’t even have to think. The janitor gave me a boost, and then watched me pick through the banana peels and clumps of spaghetti — I’ve blocked that part out, for the sake of my sanity. What I remember is that I found my retainer. I took it to the bathroom, ran it under some hot water, and — I try not to think about this, because it makes me feel like I’ve got bugs laying eggs inside my skin—I put it back in my mouth.