Never again. At that, I did feel something, and it filled the void. It brought me back to life.
I couldn’t figure her agenda, why it was so important to make me forgive, but this time I didn’t need to understand it. I only had to use it.
I laughed; I called her. I let her apologize to me, blame it on grief, blame it on Craig, on Lacey; she’d wanted to teach me a lesson about who I was allowed to talk to and what I was allowed to ask for, that was the explanation for this party; and as for the last one, that was a mistake, ancient history, terrible but past and she was sorry, so that should be enough. She was trying to be a different person, she said, a better person, that’s what all this had been about. She’d been stupid, then. Later, she’d been angry. Now she was just sorry, and couldn’t I just believe it.
I told her she could apologize to me if she wanted, but only in person, in the place she could be trusted to tell the truth, and on the night her ghosts would howl the loudest. Even ground: We would both be haunted. I swallowed bile and told her to meet me in the woods, and when she showed up, I was waiting.
She laughed, at first, even when she saw the devil marks I’d painted on the walls of the boxcar, the pentagram I’d smeared on the floor in pig’s blood. She laughed even when I showed her the knife.
THE KNIFE.
I brought it, but I never intended to use it. It was generic Kmart crap, its blade the length of my forearm, its edge sharpened once a season, its hilt a cheap black plastic with a leathery feel. I’d used it to chop potatoes and raw chicken, enjoyed the satisfying thwack it made when swung recklessly through the air and into a soft breast or leg or straight into the meat of the cutting board. Before Lacey, the knife was the only recklessness I allowed myself. My mother hated it, but it always made my father laugh when I held the duller edge to my neck and pretended to slit my throat. The knife had always felt like a toy, and that night was no different.
I wasn’t the kind of person who would use a knife, only the kind who would need one. Without it, Nikki wouldn’t have listened. She wouldn’t have been afraid, and I needed her to be afraid. I needed her to do what I said, to be my puppet. Letting someone else have power over you, Nikki had said, that was the only truly intolerable thing. And so she’d told me exactly how to hurt her without drawing blood.
I had dinner with my parents that night, frozen chicken fingers with frozen broccoli, which I ate without comment, knowing they could tell something was wrong, sure neither would have the nerve to ask. My father assumed everything was about him, that if he pushed too hard I’d tattle to my mother. As if I cared, anymore, what he’d been doing with Lacey; as if he could be anything to Lacey but a distraction, a horsefly buzzing at a stallion. What we had together was too big for distractions — I finally understood that. He would never understand, and maybe it was a mercy that he would never realize how much he didn’t. My mother, maybe, had a better guess, but she wouldn’t push it, either. I missed her, sometimes, the long-ago mother who was still bold enough to say, Tell me where it hurts, but maybe I’d only imagined her along with the faeries who’d once lived in the hedges and the monsters snoring under my bed.
I should have hated them both, I thought, for failing. Then I should have forgiven them, for trying. But I couldn’t be bothered. They were cardboard cutouts, Peanuts parents wah-wah-wahhing in the background, and I couldn’t feel anything for them anymore. I couldn’t feel anything but hands on my body. Strangers’ fingers. Strangers’ tongues. I couldn’t stop feeling that.
I brought the knife into the woods because I knew it was safe. Because I knew I would never use it the way it was meant to be used — I wasn’t the kind of girl who would do a thing like that. However much I might have wished otherwise.
I SHOWED NIKKI THE KNIFE. I said, “Take off your clothes.”
“Why?”
“You don’t get to ask that anymore.”
“You want to see me naked? Fine. Whatever. I always figured you were a little gay. You and Lacey both, with your perverted little—”
“Shut up. Take off your shirt, take off your pants, and toss them out the door.”
Miraculously, she did. I felt a rush of something — power, euphoria, satisfaction, maybe the simple wonder of speaking a command and seeing the world comply. There was something godlike about it: Let there be obedience, let there be fear.
I watched her strip down to her pink-laced panties. I closed her into the dark, slipped the dead bolt, and listened to her scream. I stood in the night, quiet and still, breathing and listening, palm pressed to the boxcar, picturing her on the other side, alone and naked in the dark with the pig’s blood and the death metal, her screams bouncing off the metal walls until her throat burned. Nikki, helpless and afraid, cringing from things creeping through the dark, holding on until she had no choice but to let go, and break.
Then I pulled myself away and went in search of Lacey, to make my offering.
LACEY SAID WE SHOULD TIE her up, so we tied her up. Or, rather, Lacey did, and I held onto the knife.
Lacey, Lacey, Lacey — she was back. It was hard to concentrate with her name singing through my head. All I wanted to do was cling to her, whisper apologies, make her promise all over again never to let me go.
But first I had to prove myself. So I held the blade steady while Lacey brought Nikki’s pale wrists together behind her back, wrapping them tight with the extra laces she had in her trunk. She had everything in her trunk. The laces were strong, made for combat, and Lacey bound Nikki’s waist and ankles to a rotting old chair she’d found in the station, using more laces and a bunch of leggings. This is a handcuff knot, Lacey said, twisting in elaborate loops, this is a clove hitch and this is a butterfly, and these knots will hold, Lacey said, inexplicably certain, and even if they didn’t, we still had the knife.
Once Nikki was bound up tight, Lacey held out her hand to me, palm up. She didn’t have to ask: I gave her the knife, and only after it was gone did I feel like I’d given up something that mattered.
“I have to pee,” Nikki said, like pulling out a trump card.
Lacey patted her head. “Go for it.”
Nikki spit at her face, and Lacey laughed when she missed. I laughed, too, until the smell hit me, and the flashlight exposed the dark patch spreading across Nikki’s lace panties. I expected her to look pleased that she’d called Lacey’s bluff, but she just looked like a girl who’d peed her pants and was trying not to cry.
I thought about stopping it, then.
A helpless girl, naked, tied to a chair in a dirty train car with satanic scribbles on the wall. Two wild-eyed girls looming over her, one of them holding a butcher knife. I saw it like I was seeing it onscreen, prom queen brought low, soon to have her throat slashed by monsters of her own creation, audience rooting neither for hero nor villain but only for gore. I saw the Hollywood vision but smelled the urine, half a scent away from comforting, and when I did, the girl wasn’t Nikki Drummond but any girl, sorry and afraid, and if I’d been in the audience, I would have wanted her saved.
THIS IS REAL, I THOUGHT. But many things were real. Foggy memories of hands on skin were real. Evidence captured on videotape was real. The swooping lines of black permanent marker I’d scrubbed off my skin, the taste of puke and stranger I’d brushed out of my mouth, the creeping fingers doing exactly as Nikki commanded. Real, real, real.
Surfaces were deceptive. Nikki had taught me that better than anyone. The trappings of evil were for scary movies and school assemblies; the real devil wore pink and smiled with pastel lips. And here, in the dark, we all knew who she was.