“Think of it as a confessional,” I said. “Good practice for your audition tape.”
“Why would I ever do that?” It was almost impressive, this skinny, stripped-down girl pretending at defiance. “Because of your stupid knife? What are you going to do, murder me and bury me in the woods?”
“I’m surprised you think that’s beyond me,” Lacey said, but when Nikki held her gaze, Lacey was the one to look away first.
“I’m not doing it,” Nikki said. “You can keep me here as long as you want, but you can’t make me do anything. You can’t.”
“I don’t know about that.” Lacey toed the bucket of water, then bumped shoulders with me. I’d thought we would never do that again, never be so perfectly in sync that we could speak with our bodies instead of our words. “What is it they say about me at school, Dex? Don’t they think I’m some kind of witch?”
“I’ve heard that,” I said.
“Me, I think Nikki’s the witch.”
“Understandable.”
“I know a lot about witches these days,” Lacey said. “You know how they used to tell if someone was a witch? Back in the bad old days?”
“I do,” I said, and I remember feeling clever, and giddy, and not at all afraid. These were moments without consequence; this was a night that would never end.
“How about it, witch?” Lacey lifted the bucket, nasty water sloshing over her hands. “Let’s see if you float.”
LACEY, 1991
IT WAS THE DAY I woke up and smelled winter. No frost, no snow, nothing so dramatic as all that, but you could feel the cold crouching in the wings. It had been summer all week, and according to the overtanned idiot on TV, winter was blowing across the Midwest, the sparkly cardboard snowflake inching toward us one corn state at a time.
Winter was our ticking clock. What were we supposed to do, fumble at zippers with wool mittens and Velcro gloves, kiss with frozen tongues and watch our excretions turn to ice? As a novelty act, maybe, but unless you’re Dr. Zhivago, frostbite is a turnoff and fucking outside, much less lying on the ground in two feet of snow, high on pot and pheromones and trying to connect with the sublime, is a testicle-shrinking failure waiting to happen. We didn’t have to discuss it to understand the obvious: When the cold came, the thing between us would sheathe its fangs, crawl under a rock, and hibernate the winter away.
We used the heat while we had it, and that day, Halloween, Nikki and I skipped school and met in the woods, dressed in costume as each other, to fuck with Craig’s mind. She always loved role-play the best, and she made me promise that when Craig showed up after practice — always after practice, because however much he loved her and us and the fleshly pleasures that came with it, he loved the team more — we would keep to our roles religiously, though of course by the time he did, we were too drunk to bother. Maybe if we had, we would have played an entirely different game, and Craig would still be alive, or one of us would be dead.
That day, we’d finished with each other. We were waiting for Craig and making snow angels in the mud, and Nikki was amusing me by itemizing the defects of our peers, one by one, in alphabetical order, just to show she could. Theresa Abbot had a harelip and talked like a cartoon character, and she’d once tattled on Nikki, unforgivably, for smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Scotty Bly would have been cute except for the way he chewed with his mouth open and insisted on letting a worm of a mustache crawl across his upper lip, both of which rendered him unfuckable. I was bored by the time we got to C, but also pleased, because nothing got her hot like talking about people she hated. Maybe you already know that.
We went through Shayna Christopher and Alexandra Caldwell, and then, Dex, we got to you.
“You want to know what’s wrong with Hannah Dexter?” Nikki asked.
“Not particularly.”
Not because I cared about you, Dex, but because I didn’t care at all.
“She’s such a fucking victim,” Nikki said. “It’s like she’s asking you to screw with her.”
“Funny, she’s never asked me.”
“You know what I mean. Where’s the fun in it? It’s like playing kickball with a dead skunk.”
“It makes you smell?”
“Too easy and it makes you smell. Like, yeah, you feel bad for the skunk, but why’d it run into the road in the first place? Like it wanted to get run over, you know? Like that would be easier than just finding a way across and figuring out what the hell to do next.”
“That’s the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard,” I said.
She wasn’t listening. She was on a roll. What does it mean, Dex, that in all the time I’d known her, she’d never mentioned you once? But that day, it’s almost like you were there with us, the future ghosting itself onto the past. “And also! She’s like. . oatmeal.”
“Beige and lumpy?” I said, and then there was some talk of lumpiness that’s better left forgotten.
“No. No! Pudding. Hospital pudding, the kind that comes dry out of a packet and you add water.”
“So she’s pudding. What do you care?”
“I don’t care. I. .”
“What?”
“Give me a second, I’m thinking.”
“Slowly.”
“Fuck you.” She stripped off her shirt, then. It was still warm enough for that. I raised my ass off the ground just enough to shimmy out of my skirt. “Because she doesn’t try, that’s what I hate about her. Because she’s nothing, she’s blah, and fine if that’s what she wants, but she walks around all bitter and sulky that people treat her like she’s nothing—”
“People meaning you.”
“Sure, whatever. Me. Acting like it’s somehow my fault that she’s a loser. Like I’m some kind of fucking witch, and I put a curse on her.”
“Poof!” I zapped her with my magic finger. “You’re pathetic.”
“Abracadabra!” She waved her arms, accidentally or not whacking me in the boob. “You’re a horny toad.”
“All that and she’s a horny toad?”
“No, you’re a toad,” she said. “And I’m horny.”
Every time was like the first time.
Even that last day, when we’d already done everything we could think to do, when we knew how to fit our bodies together and how to slide in a third, when she knew how I tasted and I knew where to rub and when to pause and what would make her wet. It never got old, not married-couple old, because it was always dangerous. Anyone could stumble upon us; animals could attack. There were always new positions, new dares — down on the tracks or rolling on the station floor, dodging the broken glass, finding ants and beetles later in places nothing alive should enter. The illicit charge sparked extra bright when it was just the two of us, because Craig got petulant at the thought of us enjoying things without him. It dented his ego to realize that his dick was superfluous, and while he got off on hearing us describe what it was like — the tidal wave of sensation, the seizing muscles and the curled toes, the Penthouse reality of the full-body shudder — he never really bought it, that it was the same as what he felt, or what we could be made to feel by him. Girls don’t get sex, he always said, not really. It was lucky for us, he said, that we didn’t know what we were missing. Lucky for him, we giggled, when he wasn’t around, and when the wave rippled through, both of us liked to scream.
I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they were bored; maybe I was an escape route; maybe Craig was in love with Nikki and Nikki was in love with me; maybe together the three of us made something, like a poem, like a song, like a band, that was greater than the sum of its parts, and we all wanted to be greater than. I don’t know why I did it, except that life was small and this seemed huge. They needed me, and no one had ever needed me before. You’ve got to remember, Dex, I’d just found Kurt; I’d sworn to myself that I would be different, that I would live like he sang, that I wouldn’t let anything be easy and experience would be my art. I was brand-new, and there’s a reason babies don’t do anything but poop and suck teat and pee in their parents’ faces. They don’t know any better; they can’t help themselves.