Girls on Fire: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year
On Halloween, 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, and disappears. Three days later, he’s found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand—a discovery that sends tremors through this conservative community, already unnerved by growing rumors of Satanic worship in the region.
In the wake of this incident, bright but lonely Hannah Dexter is befriended by Lacey Champlain, a dark-eyed, Cobain-worshiping bad influence in lip gloss and Doc Martens. The charismatic, seductive Lacey forges a fast, intimate bond with the impressionable Dex, making her over in her own image and unleashing a fierce defiance that neither girl expected. But as Lacey gradually lures Dex away from her safe life into a feverish spiral of obsession, rebellion, and ever greater risk, an unwelcome figure appears on the horizon—and Lacey’s secret history collides with Dex’s worst nightmare.
By turns a shocking story of love and violence and an addictive portrait of the intoxication of female friendship, set against the unsettled backdrop of a town gripped by moral panic, Girls on Fire is an unflinching and unforgettable snapshot of girlhood: girls lost and found, girls strong and weak, girls who burn bright and brighter—and some who flicker away.
Robin Wasserman
Robin Wasserman is a graduate of Harvard University and the author of several successful novels for young adults. A recent recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Girls on Fire is her first novel for adults.
Read more from Robin Wasserman
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Reviews for Girls on Fire
125 ratings20 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow. I was a teenager in the 1990's, and this book -- especially the first half -- made me so nostalgic for those years. I identified with the girls in this novel, and I really believe Wasserman captured what it meant to be confused and awkward and unsure and on fire.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is no wonder this book is so highly acclaimed by a variety of media sources. I can honestly imagine it becoming the next Girl on the Train, in its popularity among adult and later aged young adult readers. It is gritty, raw, honest and completely and utterly addicting. I honestly haven't read a book this hit so many 5* points in quite some time. It was truly one I could not bring myself to put down. From start to finish, the girls were in my head and I needed to know where everything in their young, grunge styled lives would lead, especially with the disconnect they had with most people, especially those there age. Having been a youngster who had a similar disconnect, was bullied and had a regrettable home life, I found this book resonated with me on a whole new level. It reached right in and squeezed my heart, had me shaking my head and even brought laughter or a wee tear to my eye at points. The characters are perfection. Wasserman got the girls lives, personalities and even clothing down to a T. It almost made me feel as if she knew them, was like them or at the very least did her in depth research to create whole, believeable people. This meant I was connected to them and invested in their outcome, from the very first page. The pace was excellent. When something happened that needed a swiftness to it, to show the urgency of the outcome or the buildup, we were given it. Most of the time the pace matched their young, grunge life. It was laid back, just flowing by and happening, but when they took action it flew and it really sped right to the result. They we quick, excitable and wanted things to come to a head, and they did. Overall, this book is dark. Be prepared. However, it is one that teenagers and above will love and need to read. It shows life from so many angles, for so many people, all at different places and stages in life. It has good lessons and is one that will truly touch you. **I received this book for free and voluntarily provided my honest and unbiased review.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hannah is essentially a "good girl", if a bit of an outsider. Lacey is the "bad girl" in school, who seems to throw her indifference in the faces of all who would question her place in society. These two girls somehow find themselves thrown together into a severely co-dependent relationship (think Thelma and Louise hyped up on some of Cobain's "teen spirit"). Hannah lacks any self-identity and simply transforms into what people expect of her. Lacey christens her under the new name of "Dex" and recreates her into her own goth image.Then you have Nikki, the privileged mean girl in school who everyone follows as if she were the pied piper of vicious teenagers. The school is sent into a bit of a spiral by the suicide of the school jock, who was Nikki's longtime boyfriend. The pair were high school royalty.Then there are the parents. The ever-embarrassing parents who never seem to "get" their troubled teens. Dex comes from a normal home with parents who care, while Lacey comes from a screwed up home life with an overbearing step-father and an alcoholic and dispassionate mother.The story switches between the perspectives of Dex and Lacey (Us), and occasionally that of the parents (Them). Sometimes switching perspectives like this can be difficult to follow, but the author really handled it well and it was a useful tool and quite enlightening. It is interesting to see an act through the eyes of one person, and then to see the same act through those of another person. What may have first seemed cruel or selfish or self-motivated could actually have been motivated by compassion or fear or even love. And even an act motivated by love can be evil or cruel.My final word: This book is marketed as the author's first "adult novel", yet check Goodreads and you'll see the number one genre classification by readers is "young adult", and I have to agree with that. This book really took me back to my teen years. I could see a bit of myself in Dex and my friend in Lacey. There's a hard edge to the story and quite a bit of graphic sexuality and some violence, so it is not for the younger crowd. But it definitely fits into the young adult niche. I enjoyed the author's writing, which is very easy to read and engaging. The characters are well drawn and defined, and her technique with the ever-changing perspectives was expertly handled. There is a twist at one point that left me thinking, "Well, I did not see that coming!" Moments made me cringe, some made me angry, others made me ache for the individual. Overall this is one damn fine read!
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Who here has seen or heard of the movie “Heavenly Creatures”? It’s kind of a noteworthy gem for a number of reasons. The first is that it was one of the break out roles that Kate Winslet had before “Titanic”. It was also one of the movies Peter Jackson made before he took on the “Lord of the Rings” movies. But the third reason is the kicker: it’s also a true story, in which two girls in New Zealand, bolstered forth by their obsessive friendship, kill one of their moms because she didn’t approve of their closeness. And then one of them grew up to be Anne Perry the crime author. I think that “Heavenly Creatures” kind of sets a standard for the ‘dangerous obsessive female friendship’ trope, even if it was a real life occurrence. When I read about “Girls on Fire” I was pretty intrigued. I was hoping that I would find a new rumination on a story that’s been told many times over, from “Heavenly Creatures” to last year’s smash hit “The Girls”. But sadly I found more of the same old, same old.I think that it’s definitely important to note that “Girls on Fire” does tackle a lot of important questions about what it means to be a teenage girl in American society, and what expectations are thrust upon this group in terms of how to behave and interact with others. Both Lacey and Hannah (or “Dex” as Lacey renames her early in their friendship) are perceived in certain ways by not only their peers and their community, they are perceived in certain ways by their families, the people who are supposed to know them best. This, too, can be said for the bane of their existence, Nikki Drummond, the most popular girl in school who mistreats Hannah and anyone she sees as beneath her. Nikki has facades that she puts on for different people, and while Hannah thinks she knows one side, Lacey knows another one. The perspectives in this book are mainly those of Hannah and Lacey, alternating in sections called ‘Us’. But every once in awhile we’ll get an outside perspective from one of those close to them, under the sections called ‘Them’. I loved how this was set up, as it really reinforced the ‘us vs the world’ mentality that these two obsessed friends shared. I also liked how the structure served to explain just what happened with the popular boy who committed suicide, as it’s pretty clear from the get go that it’s not as cut and dry as it all seems.But now we get to the crux of the issue, and that is this isn’t a book that I enjoyed much beyond that. “Girls on Fire” didn’t really do anything new in terms of characterization and plotting. Both Hannah and Lacey were pretty two dimensional, even with their perspectives being laid out in the open. Lacey is the bad girl who has the terrible upbringing and just wants to be loved and turns to drugs, alcohol, and Kurt Cobain (as well as dabbling in the most milquetoast of stereotypical Satanism). Hannah is the quiet one who is so mousy that everyone is shocked when she starts to turn darker, and has darker deeper demons than anyone could have imagined. These are character tropes that we’ve seen before, and neither of them went beyond these tried and true depictions. Even the parents were stereotypes of what we imagine parents with kids like these to be. Hannah’s Mom is banal and unassuming and resents that her daughter is branching out into a more interesting realm. Her father is a former wild child who misses his days of being free, and therefore longs for Lacey both sexually and philosophically. And Lacey’s mother is an alcoholic who has married an abusive man. The only character who intrigued me and surpassed my expectations was Nikki, and even then she still ultimately lived up to our basal expectations of what a mean girl is and why a mean girl might be mean. It’s a real shame, because there was some serious potential in all of these girls to examine how our perceptions of them might be undue. But then they really didn’t have much more to say beyond what their main stereotypes were. And the central mystery isn’t really that much of a mystery, in all honesty. You can guess it pretty early on in the unspooling of that particular thread.I had higher hopes for “Girls on Fire” than the book was able to deliver. If you are interested in a story examining the perils of dangerous girl friendships, just get your hands on “Heavenly Creatures”.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Eh. The book started out pretty promisingly, all smalltown mean girls-y punk rock outcast noir, but got progressively more heavy-handed to the point where what should have been the big climactic reveal just made me feel kind of weary.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The book says that the author has written YA novels but this is the first book geared towards adults. I am not sure why this is an adult book outside of the language and a few select incidents. The subject matter was for me at least very YA. The story is essentially about the interaction between three girls: Lacey, Hannah/Dex, and Nikki.Lacey is the neglected, wild child, sexually experienced, rebel. You could also add whore.Hannah/Dex is the requisite, easily influenced mousey teenager who falls under Lacey's influence.Nikki is the requisite female teen bitch, ultra popular, narcissist.The story definitely has a few twists, the girls all behave deplorably for some, most, or all of the book. But I kept thinking haven't other authors covered this territory already? I mean ok I am a 50+ male but this seemed to be teen porn and I felt like an outsider looking in. Do all isolated small town girls experiment with lesbian sex, anal sex and drinking and drugging out of boredom? There are a few side stories around the clueless parents of each of these girls, and there is the usual slams against religion and conservatives, ( not surprising as the author graduated from the temple of elitism Harvard) but the situations, dialogue, and views and beliefs of Lacey and Hannah/Dex, are constantly repeated, to the point of ridiculousness.The problems I had with the book were:1. There seems to be a trend among young female authors to go out of their way to prove they can write just as raunchy as a man. Sadly oftentimes the result reads like the "letters" to Penthouse magazine in the 80's.2. Why did this story take place in 1992? Was it so Nirvana and Kurt Cobain could play such a pivotal role? Did Nirvana play a pivotal role for the author. Because for me it just reminded me of how awful the whole grunge music movement was. Plaid, heroin, no makeup, depressing music, is not what life is for most people.3. The death of Craig (Nikki's boyfriend) when it is finally revealed at the end of the book, and what happens to Nikki, is not only grossly implausible, but it shows a lack of caring about the reader, and comes off as lazy on the part of the author. Without giving anything away, a Barney Fife level of competence by the police or medical examiner, would have shown that this was impossible to have happened the way the author describes it.I am waiting for the time when female authors quit trying to 1. Over shock their readers.2. Write the next Gone Girl.3. Can develop a story and or characters the reader will care about.I gave the book 4 stars because for a summer book it was entertaining, and the author can clearly write, I just hope her next adult attempt will actually be about adults, and not a YA book trashed up to get an R rating.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5‘Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.’Girls on Fire left me incredibly conflicted and I sat on my review for several weeks hoping that time would help elucidate my feelings. (It did not. Yet here I am.) Girls on Fire consists of the types of teenagers of a Megan Abbott novel; Dare Me is the one that immediately comes to mind. These teenagers are not the teenagers of a Sarah Dessen novel. They are crude and vulgar, whose actions go well beyond shocking and insulting. I was constantly bouncing back and forth between being impressed by their brazenness and appalled by their impudence. It was a bit exhausting.‘I loved it. Loved it like Shakespearean sonnets and Hallmark cards and all that shit, like I wanted to buy it flowers and light it candles and fuck it gently with a chainsaw.’Girls on Fire is set in the early 90s when Nirvana was at the top and Real World was everyone’s obsession. A small town in Pennsylvania is horrified after the supposed suicide of the town jock, Craig Ellison. No one thinks he could have done it but the evidence clearly proves otherwise. While the story begins with Craig’s death, and is constantly affected by it, the girls are center stage. Hannah Dexter is diffident and Lacey Champlain is fearless, so when Lacey takes “Dex” under her wing, their relationship becomes increasingly virulent the more time the duo spend together. Nikki Drummond is the requisite “mean girl” of the school and Lacey and Dex’s whole relationship is based off their shared hatred of her.The writing was opulent and whenever the story lost me slightly in its meanderings, the writing always kept me enticed. The story though, there was something excessive and tiresome about the way these young women were written. Something superfluous about their actions and their demeanor in general. The relationship between Lacey and Dex was intense and so very exorbitant. It wasn’t that the writing didn’t properly portray their relationship with one another, but rather it was written with such detail that you became a part of them and a part of their relationship. The whole thing was distasteful and depleting and something that you definitely did not want to be a part of.It’s a coming of age tale, about the metamorphose that, especially in individuals so young, can undergo because of the lives they’re forced to lead and the people they choose to surround themselves with. Bit by bit, each girls story unfolds and I once again found myself torn between how exactly I should be feeling. Despite my wavering opinion and low rating, this was certainly an audacious story to tell and is likely a very accurate portrayal (if a bit extreme) of female relationships and all the dark niches that are rarely exposed.‘What matters isn’t how we found each other, Dex, or why. It’s that we did, and what happened next. Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That’s us, Dex. Accidental fusion.’
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hannah Dexter was just a bland girl going through the motions until Craig decided to kill himself and through their small town into chaos. After feeling the burn of humiliation at the hands of Craig's love Nikki Drummond, she bonds with fiery newcomer Lacey and they become inseparable. Lacey dubs Hannah Dex, giving rise to a persona who cares about music, experiencing life, rejecting the norm, and Lacey's approval. Dex is suddenly somebody, but is it the person she wants to be or the person Lacey wants her to be? Lacey is pretty clearly hiding something and won't share with her best friend no matter how close they get. Her secret threatens to destroy their relationship and their small town.Girls on Fire is an intense read that takes place in the early 90's featuring teenage girls in the most dramatic point in their lives. Everything is about surviving the horrific landscape of high school where one wrong move can destroy you. While I like aspects of these girls, each of them is so steeped in manipulating others and projecting a socially appropriate or a socially disastrous image that they become desperate and willing to do terrible things. Hannah is pretty bland and fine with doing well in school, but then Lacey turns her life upside down. Lacey introduces her to drugs, parties, Nirvana, and not caring what others think of her. Lacey's approval means everything to Hannah and she will do anything to keep it. Lacey has her own issues and secrets. Her whole persona is designed to be rebellious. Hannah makes her feel powerful because Lacey molded her new persona and manipulates her when it suits her. To Lacey, she's being benevolent and protecting her, but it's clear she just wants to control something in her life when she controls nothing. Her home life is horrible with an alcoholic mother and a controlling, religious stepfather. Nikki Drummond, on the other hand, is the golden girl externally, but the queen bee mean girl underneath. She can manipulate anyone to do exactly whatever evil move she wants and come out looking like a paragon. All of them choose to be cruel to each other and all of them come out with scars they try to hide from the others.The format of the book is interesting. The "Us" sections are Lacey and Hannah's alternating points of view. The "Them" sections show other people's point of view like Hannah's, Lacey's, and Nikki's mothers. It shows that absolutely everyone has inner depths beneath what they project to the world no matter what their age or experience. We see their true selves and their inner thoughts. Everyone tempers themselves to fit in to whatever society they are a part of. Every character has something to relate to and thoughts and feelings they would never share with anyone else. At first I thought it should have been a teen book, but the violence, the sex, the grey morality, and the honest and multilayered depiction of each character is much more adult.Girls on Fire is a magnetic read that I couldn't put down. Robin Wasserman's amazing writing crafted a complex story that was masterfully revealed through multiple points of view. Craig's suicide story loomed in the background of the entire narrative until all is revealed in the final pages. The only flaw I found was the ending. I just didn't quite believe it, but it had an interesting symmetry with the rest of the plot. I look forward to the next book Robin Wasserman comes out with.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girls on Fire by author Robin Wasserman takes place in a small town in Pennsylvania during the ‘90s. Hannah Dexter had managed to stay under the radar at high school until her senior year when a humiliating encounter with popular girl, Nikki Drummond, brings her to the attention of Lacey Champlain. Fueled by their mutual hatred for Nikki, they form a strong but unequal bond. Lacey takes over Hannah’s life, renames her Dex, changes her style from nondescript to grunge and introduces her to casual sex, binge drinking, the music of Kurt Cobain, and a couple of bad boys suspected of dabbling in drugs and Satanism. Dex’s mom has misgivings about the relationship between the two girls but her father seems to enjoy his daughter’s new rebelliousness and her new friend – perhaps a little too much. Running in the background is the story of the suicide of Nikki’s boyfriend, Craig, the previous Hallowe’en, an event that has raised a lot of questions and created some hysteria in the small town about Satanism. Girls on Fire is a well-written, compelling and suspenseful YA novel. It is also almost unceasingly dark. The narrative is divided between Lacey and Dex as they give us their own separate stories, an Us section in which we get their shared perspectives and a Them in which we get the perspective of others. Wasserman does a fascinating job of showing how toxic teenaged relationships can become as the story and their relationships move towards what can only be a bad ending for everyone. She has created some extremely unlikeable characters doing increasingly disturbing things and somehow makes us care how it will turn out. A definite high recommendation from me.Thanks to Edelweiss and Harper Publishing for the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for an honest review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hannah Dexter was considered a normal, albeit quiet and somewhat isolated, teenager. She went to school, studied, and avoided any attention or trouble. All that changed when she was befriended by the "new" girl, Lacey Champlain. The story of their friendship and devotion are revealed in Girls On Fire by Robin Wasserman.Hannah Dexter quickly goes from being the invisible kid in school to Lacey's mini-me sidekick Dex, wearing Doc Martens and flannel shirts, listening to grunge rock, and taking on the resident mean-girl and queen bee, Nikki Drummond. Dex and Lacey want to escape small town life and go about it in all the wrong ways (think of an evil and darkly twisted younger version of Thelma and Louise). Their friendship spirals from being supportive to a level of devotion that is unsettling. Although the main characters of Girls on Fire are teenagers and the story does contain a certain amount of teenage angst and drama, this is anything but a young adult novel. Ms. Wasserman introduces a host of dark and evil behaviors such as Satanism and rape. The language is coarse and filled with profanity. The action takes place in a small town in Pennsylvania during the earlier 1990s. Girls on Fire is not an easy read (or at least it wasn't for this reader), primarily because of the dark nature of the two primary characters as well as the profanity and violence. (Yes, my inner prude raised its head several times and I had to set the book aside just to regain my equilibrium.) I think that this is going to be a book that people either love or hate (not hate the writing but hate the dark side that is revealed in the book). I didn't like the characters or even where the story went, but I appreciate the talent of Ms. Wasserman to pull me into a story that I constantly wanted to turn away from. Girls on Fire is not for the faint of heart but it is a read that you won't soon forget.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I just finished reading Girls on Fire and I’m not completely sure how I feel about it. I both love and dislike it at the same time. I think that Robin Wasserman is a very talented writer and I really enjoyed the premise of the story; it was intense, dark, and even terrifying at some points because of just how far these girls were willing to go. On the other hand, I felt that there was just something missing from this novel to completely captivate me.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hannah Dexter has led a fairly mundane life in the small town of Battle Creek, where everyone knows everyone else and everything that happens to everyone. But her life is turned upside town by two events: the suicide of a local boy, Craig, and the arrival of a new girl, Lacey, who quickly becomes the town's resident bad girl. Hannah and Lacey unite over their hatred of the town's "it girl" Nikki Drummond. Lacey transforms Hannah into Dex--a darker version of Hannah--who adores Lacey and Kurt Cobain's music (this is the early '90s after all). But Hannah doesn't realize that Lacey is hiding a secret from her, a pretty big one, which threatens to destroy the very fabric their friendship is based on.
"Girls on Fire" is an oddly captivating and compelling novel. The story unfolds before you and you're powerless to stop the events as they occur. It's told mainly from the alternating points of view of Lacey and Hannah, and we slowly learn about the events that led to their friendship and its aftermath-- and also Craig's suicide. The book wasn't a particularly fast read for me, but it was fascinating. It's an accident where you can't look away, even though you know something horrible will happen. This book is dark and disastrous and makes you afraid to ever send your children off to high school.
Parts of the novel are a bit cliched (it's almost too dark, too awful) but it doesn't stop it from being intriguing and captivating. It pulls you in to Lacey and Hannah's world and as time somehow moves forward, yet we learn about what happened to Craig in the past, Wasserman does an amazing job of unfurling her plot. I was drawn to the book and the characters. Tragic Lacey, confused Hannah, evil queen Nikki: you can see them so clearly in your head. The book almost casts a spell over you as it sucks you into its world. The writing is intense, the storyline is intense, and you're left almost breathless at the end. I didn't really enjoy the book, per se, but I appreciated it. It's a wild ride, a dark one, and definitely one worth taking.
I received an advanced copy of this novel from Edelweiss (thank you!); it is available everywhere on 5/17/2016. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Where were you,
Who were you,
On Halloween, 1991?
Were you in the woods on Halloween 91', one boot "of age" grounding your young teen body while the other foot danced freely in the burning fire of your soon to be future memories, your burning regrets, and to come; the ashes and remains, your real life nightmare.
Because us girls, we always burn bright, but we never know for just how long... our poor sad naive selves, thinking it will last forever but it can't, it might last the summer but it's sure to end in deadly destruction.
Anything that burns that high, that bright, must crack, pop and faulter.
We always go to bed with the fire burning bright, not knowing that when we wake up there will be nothing but ash and a distinct smell of whats left, sulfur latching on and dancing up our noses, causing Sunday's worst headache, prolonging it by drenching you down with what have I dones, what did I says, who am i in the dark of the night like our careless drunken, dancing bodies are strangers to the shells of our daytime tv selves.
Like the freaks & monsters only come out at night and hoping you weren't/aren't one of them... but you are, we all are atleast once on a Mayan calandar.
If only we could go back to those times as a whisper in the wind and say "keep dancing, breathe the fire, let it consume you because it won't last long now"
or "get the fuck out of dodge, you stupid bright eyed little wayward girl".
Would you rewrite your history, never knowing how good it must've felt to burn bright, the fire that only comes once, and can level all of humanity around you in seconds, even you... just completely destroy your soul for one night, or if you're lucky, longer.
Maybe thats what "deja vu" is... our futuristic souls coming back in time to tell us what we didn't know then and we don't listen, because the fire is just all too consuming.
It felt so good and although I still have nightmares of what the fire left around me, I yearn to light myself on fire to feel it all over again, and again, and again...
I'll always chase that dragon, alot of us will, if you don't... were you ever really on fire?
Did you ever step both boots in?
Like quicksand eating you whole;
But us girls, we love digging our feet in, just to feel the cold, sun bleached sand on our perfectly manicured, and polished white or black toes.
Like the polish determines what caliber we are, separating girls alike with what mask we choose to wear.
We're not all that different, who we choose to portray may be but inside no, we all hurt the same, feel pleasure the same, and make mistakes that we either learned from or were too deep to leave the wreckage in the past.
Because we all were there on Halloween 91' and we weren't at the same time, a time of a new music revolution, say no to drugs, and say hello to be perfect or else... Satan will grab you by the throat.
We all have THAT year, that night, remembering it like a horrible anniversary of all the things we did when we were young and not so bright.
You didn't have to be there to know how it felt, because we all have our own version of it.
This book was the best dark coming of age story, I've ever read. This author didn't hold back and she pinched you at all the right times, slicing you open to the connection of "Girls on Fire" and your own story of burning out bright.
It can hurt to remember, but it feels good to know you aren't alone in the remains of "once upon a time there was a girl, or there were two girls or a whole group of friends that dissolved quicker than you can blink because they felt invincible... and were not"
"Girls on Fire" begins with a popular jock found dead in the woods with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head.
A shot heard round' the block with questions of suicide or satanic rituals as the 90's had been a decade of what are the children capable of? Kurt Cobains better days, set the tone to this gritty, teenage angst wasteland up and down the pages, chapter after chapter titled all of Nirvana's best
"Something In the way", "Come as you are", "Nevermind"
And two main characters you'll end up hating to love. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Someone please get a fire extinguisher because they are hot!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This one kept me hooked. It was sad and fun and I cared for the characters. It was a parent's worst nightmare. This is a book I kept thinking about after finishing. Wasn't able to write about it right away. It's probably in my top 15 for this year.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5a gripping read
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Mean girls and outcasts gone wild. Disturbing story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53.75
Wow. That was an incredibly dark and well written mess of a story. I say that with affection. It did drag in parts, and the need to be dark, at times, overwhelmed the plot. It tried just a tad too hard. Still, I rather enjoyed it. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Read from May 24 to 31, 2016I just don't know. More thoughts later.I still don't know about this one. It's the first time I thought a book needed a huge TRIGGER WARNING on it. From some of the early buzz I read, I thought there'd be more love of the '90s. I wasn't expecting it to be so graphic and violent. There were aspects that made me cringe while reading. I felt for Hannah Dexter. I could relate to her lonely existence. At some point every teenager feels like that, right? Heck, I even felt that way through most of college. But the ending...what to say about that ending? It was disappointing even though unavoidable. Other reviewers have suggested that fans of Megan Abbott will love this and I agree. Had I seen those comparisons to Dare Me previously I would have skipped this one (I gave that one a two star review). They've also mentioned earlier Gillian Flynn works...again, I would have paused a little longer before picking this one up. If only I read reviews (or even book jackets) before reading a book!Because I can't quite get rid of the icky feeling I got with this one, it's getting a whopping 2 stars. It's right for some readers, but ultimately not my thing.
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- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Another book from the long, long ToB. I again chose this as it was availabe at the library overdrive as audio. I agree that this book caught that something that teenage girls go through but it way too far into dark and too much pornography. By the time it ended, you just want it to be over. This is labeled young adult but I wouldn't want my young person reading this book, there is lots of swearing, gutter talk, sexual content and plain bad behavior. Inexcusable bad behavior. The book uses different POV. The setting is the early 90s, Goth, grudge. I could have been the mother of these girls.
Book preview
Girls on Fire - Robin Wasserman
Dedication
For my father, who believed that I could.
Epigraph
In the Age of Gold,
Free from winters cold:
Youth and maiden bright,
To the holy light,
Naked in the sunny beams delight.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
Queen of lies, every day, in my heart.
—KURT COBAIN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Today
Us: November 1991–March 1992
Dex: Before Lacey
Lacey: Me Before You
Dex: Story of Us
Lacey: If I Lied
Them
Us: April–July 1992
Dex: The Devil’s Playground
Lacey: Good Intentions
Dex: Urge Overkill
Lacey: Blood Ties
Them
Us: July–October 1992
Dex: Paper Cuts
Lacey: Endless, Nameless
Dex: About a Girl
Lacey: Smells Like Teen Spirit
Dex: Negative Creep
Lacey: Something in the Way
Dex: Love Buzz
Lacey: Come As You Are
Them
Us: Halloween
Dex: 1992
Lacey: 1991
Dex: 1992
Lacey: 1991
Dex: 1992
Lacey: 1991
Dex: 1992
Them
Us: After
Us: Best Friends Forever
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
About the book
Read on
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
TODAY
SEE THEM IN THEIR GOLDEN hour, a flood of girls high on the ecstasy of the final bell, tumbling onto the city bus, all gawky limbs and Wonderbra cleavage, chewed nails picking at eruptive zits, lips nibbling and eyes scrunching in a doomed attempt not to cry. Girls with plaid skirts tugged unfathomably high above the knee, girls seizing the motion of the bus to throw themselves bodily into their objects of affection, Oops, sorry, guy, didn’t mean to shove my boob in your face, was that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me.
Try not to see them, I dare you. Girls, everywhere. Leaning against storefronts, trying so hard to look effortless as they dangle cigarettes and exhale clouds of smoke; tapping phones while shrieking about how Mom is a such a bitch. Girls hitching up skirts by the liquor store, hoping for a handle of vodka if they show enough leg; girls in the makeup aisle, gazing helplessly at the nail polish display like they can hear you silently cheering them on, willing them to scoop those cherry reds into a bag, to succumb to temptation and expectation, to give in.
Give in: Pick a pair of them, lost in each other, a matched set like a vision out of the past. Nobody special, two nobodies. Except that together, they’re radioactive; together, they glow. Nestled into a seat in the back of the bus, arms tangled, foreheads kissing.
Long for the way they drown in each other.
Follow them off the bus and onto the beach, as the one in charge—there’s always one in charge—shakes her curls free. Her makeup is expertly applied, her beet lips excessively large, kissable. The other girl wears no makeup at all, and her hair, bone straight and dyed platinum, flaps in the ocean breeze. Watch them lick soft-serve, pink tongues flicking spiraled cream. Watch them turn cartwheels in the surf, watch them slurp Dorito dust from sticky fingers, watch them split a pair of earbuds and stare up at the clouds, their secret soundtrack carving shapes in the sky.
Try to hold yourself back from rising over them, casting them in aging shadow, warning of millennial futures, the end of days, days like this, warning them to taste each sugary minute, to hold on tight.
Hold back, because you know girls; girls don’t listen. Better, maybe, to knock them out, drag them into the sea. Let this perfect moment be the last, say, Go out on a high note, girls, and push them into the tide. Let them drift off the edge of the earth.
Impossible not to see them, not to remember what it was like, when it was like that. To sit there, shivering, as the sun dips toward the horizon and the wind blows cold over the waves, as the sky blazes red and darkness gathers around the girls, neither of them knowing how little time they have left before the fire goes out.
Remember how good it felt to burn.
US
November 1991–March 1992
DEX
Before Lacey
THEY FINALLY FOUND THE BODY on a Sunday night, sometime between 60 Minutes and Married with Children. Probably closer to Andy Rooney than Al Bundy, because it would have taken some time for the news, even news like this, to travel. There would have been business to attend to in the woods, staking out the scene with yellow caution tape, photographing the pools of blood, sliding the body into a useless ambulance and bagging the gun—there was a universal logic to such things, if TV had it right, a script to follow that would get even our sorry Keystone Kops past the hurdle of touching a corpse, seeing and smelling whatever happened to a body after three days and nights in the woods. From there, who knew how it worked, officially: where they took the body, who was tasked with calling the parents, how they extracted the bullet, what they did with the gun, the note. Unofficially, it did what bad news did best: spread. My father always liked to say you couldn’t shit your own bed in Battle Creek without your neighbor showing up to wipe your ass, and though he said it largely to get a rise out of my mother, it had the whiff of truth.
It was always my mother who answered the phone. They found him, that boy from your school,
she said, once the show had gone to commercial. We were all facing carefully away from one another, toward the giant Coke bottles dancing across the screen.
She said they’d found him in the woods, found him dead. That he’d done it to himself. She asked if he’d been my friend, and my father said that I’d answered that already when the boy went missing, and that I barely knew him, and that I was fine, and my mother said, Let her speak for herself, and my father said, Who’s stopping her, and my mother said, Do you want to talk about it, and my father said, Does she look like she wants to talk about it.
I did not want to talk about it. I told them I might later, which was a lie, and that I wanted to be alone, which was the truth, and that they shouldn’t worry about me, because I was fine. Which was less true or false than it was necessary.
We’re sorry about this, kid,
my father said as I made my escape, and these were the last words spoken in my house on the subject of Craig Ellison and the thing he did to himself in the woods.
HE WASN’T MY FRIEND. HE was nothing to me, or less than. Alive, Craig was Big Johnson shirts and stupidly baggy jeans that showed off boxers and a hint of crack. He was basketball in the winter and lacrosse in the spring and a dumb blond with a cruel streak all year round, technically a classmate of mine since kindergarten but, in every way that counted, the occupant of some alternate dimension where people cheered at high school sporting events and spent their Saturday nights drinking and jerking off to Color Me Badd instead of sitting at home, watching The Golden Girls. Alive, Craig was arguably just a little less than the sum of his meathead parts, and on the few times our paths crossed and he deigned to notice my existence, he could usually be counted on to drop a polite witticism along the lines of Move it, bee-yotch as he muscled past.
Dead, though, he was transformed: martyr, wonder, victim, cautionary tale. By Monday morning, his locker was a clutter of paper hearts, teddy bears, and basketball pennants, at least until the janitorial staff were instructed to clear it all away amid fears that making too much of a fuss might inspire the trend chasers among us to follow. A school-wide memorial was scheduled; then, under the same paranoid logic, canceled; then scheduled again, until compromise finally took the form of an hour of weepy testaments and a slideshow scored to Bette Midler instrumentals and the flutter of informational pamphlets from a national suicide hotline.
I didn’t cry; it didn’t seem like my place.
All of us in the junior class were required to meet at least once with the school counselor. My appointment came a few weeks after his death, in one of the slots reserved for nonentities, and was perfunctory: Was I having nightmares. Was I unable to stop crying. Was I in need of intervention. Was I happy.
No, no, no, I said, and because there was no upshot to being honest, yes.
The counselor sponged off his pits and asked what disturbed me most about Craig Ellison’s death. No one used the word suicide that year unless absolutely necessary.
He was out there in the woods for three days,
I said, just waiting for someone to find him.
I imagined it like a time-lapse video of blooming flowers, the body wheezing out its final gaseous waste, flesh rotting, deer pawing, ants marching. The tree line was only a couple blocks from my house, and I wondered, if the wind had been right, what it might have carried.
The thought of the corpse wasn’t what disturbed me most, not even close. What disturbed me most was the revelation that someone like Craig Ellison had secrets—that he had actual, human emotions not altogether dissimilar from mine. Deeper, apparently, because when I had a bad day, I watched cartoons and hoovered up a bag of Doritos, whereas Craig took his father’s gun into the woods and blew a hole through the back of his head. I’d had a guinea pig once that did nothing but eat and sleep and poop, and if I’d found out the guinea pig’s inner turmoil was stormier than mine, that would have disturbed me, too.
Weirdly, then, the counselor shifted gears and asked whether I knew anything about the three churches that had been vandalized on Halloween, blood-red upside-down crosses painted across their wooden doors. Of course not,
I said, though what I knew was what everybody knew, which was that a trio of stoners had taken to wearing black nail polish and five-pointed stars, and had spent the week before Halloween bragging how they would put the devil back into the devil’s night.
"Do you think Craig knew anything about it?" he asked.
Wasn’t that the same night he . . . you know?
The counselor nodded.
Then I’m guessing, not so much.
He looked less disappointed than personally affronted, like I’d just ruined his Murder, She Wrote moment: Insightful bystander unveils dark truth behind hideous crime.
Even to people who gave Craig more credit than I did—maybe especially to them—the suicide was a puzzle to be solved. He’d been a good boy, and everyone knew good boys didn’t do bad things like that. He’d been a high school point guard with a winning record and a blow-job-amenable girlfriend: Logic dictated joy. There must have been extenuating circumstances, people said. Drugs, maybe, the kind that made you run for a plate glass window, imagining you could fly. A game of Russian roulette gone wrong; a romantic suicide pact reneged; the summons of darkness, some blood magic that seduced its victims on the devil’s night. Even the ones who accepted it as a straightforward suicide acted like it was less personal decision than communicative disease, something Craig had accidentally caught and might now pass on to the rest of us, like chlamydia.
All my life, Battle Creek had reliably been a place where nothing happened. The strange thing that year wasn’t that something finally did. It was that, as if the town shared some primordial lizard brain capable of divining the future, we all held our breath waiting for something to happen next.
THANKS TO SOME AMBIGUOUS CAUSAL link the school administration drew between depression and godlessness, a new postmortem policy dictated that we spend three minutes of every homeroom in silent prayer. Craig had been in my homeroom, seated diagonally to my right, at a desk we all now knew better than to look at directly. Years before, during a solar eclipse, we’d all made little cardboard viewing boxes to stare up into the dark, having been warned that an unobscured view would burn our retinas. The physics of it never made sense to me, but the poetry did, the need to trick yourself into looking at something without really seeing it. That’s what I did now, letting myself look at the desk only during those three minutes of silent prayer, when the rest of the class had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, as if secret looking somehow didn’t count.
This had been going on for a couple months when something—nothing so bold as a noise, more like an invisible tap on the shoulder, an unspoken whisper promising this way lies fate—pulled my eyes away from the lacquered surface scuffed by Craig’s many etchings of cocks and balls, and toward the girl in the very opposite corner of the room, the girl I still thought of as new even though she’d been with us since September. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on Craig’s desk, until they weren’t anymore. They were on me. She watched me like she was waiting for a performance to begin, and it wasn’t until she rolled her eyes skyward and opportunity slipped away that I realized it was opportunity I’d been waiting for. Then her middle finger ratcheted up, pointing to the ceiling, to the clouds—unmistakably, to the Lord Our God in Heaven—and when her eyes dropped to meet mine again, my finger rose of its own accord in identical salute. She smiled. By the time our teacher called, Time’s up, her hands were folded politely together on the desk again . . . until she raised one to propose that school prayer, even the silent kind, was illegal.
Lacey Champlain had a stripper’s name and a trucker’s wardrobe, all flannel shirts and clomping boots that—stranded as we were in what Lacey later called the butt crack of western Pennsylvania—we didn’t yet recognize as a pledge of allegiance to grunge. The new kid in a school that hadn’t had a new kid in four years, she defied categorization. There was a fierceness about her that also defied attack, and so she’d become the two-legged version of Craig’s desk, best glimpsed only from the corner of your eye. I looked at her head-on now, curious how she managed to weather Mr. Callahan’s infamously fearsome glare.
You have some problem with God?
he said. Callahan was also our history teacher, and had been known to skip over entire decades and wars in favor of explaining how carbon dating was nonsense and all the coincidental mutations in history couldn’t account for the evolution of the human eye.
I have a problem with you asking me that question in a building funded by public taxes.
Lacey Champlain had dark hair, almost true black, that curled over her face and bobbed at her chin flapper-style. Pale skin and blood-red lips, like she didn’t have to bother dressing goth because she came by it naturally, vampire by birthright. Her nails were the same color as her lips, as were her boots, which laced up her calves and looked made for stomping. Where I had a misshapen assemblage of lumps and craters, she had what could reasonably be called a figure, peaks and valleys all of appropriate size and direction.
Any other objections from the peanut gallery?
Callahan said, fixing us all with his look one by one, defying us to raise a hand. Callahan’s glare wasn’t as intimidating as it had been before the morning he officially informed us Craig wasn’t coming back, when his face crumbled in on itself and never quite came back together, but it was still grim enough to shut everyone up. Smiling like he’d won a round, he told Lacey that if praying made her uncomfortable, she was welcome to leave.
She did. And, rumor had it, stopped in the library, then headed straight for the principal’s office, constitutional law book in one hand, the ACLU’s phone number in the other. So ended Battle Creek High’s brief flirtation with silent prayer.
I thought something might come of it, that silent second we’d shared. For days afterward, I kept a stalker’s eye on her, waiting for some acknowledgment of whatever had passed between us. If she noticed, she showed no sign of it, and when I turned to look, she was never looking back. Eventually I felt stupid about the whole thing, and rather than be the feeble friendless loser who fuses a few bread crumbs of chance encounter into an elaborate fantasy of intimacy, I officially forgot that Lacey Champlain existed.
Not that I was feeble or friendless, certainly not by the Hollywood standards that pegged us all as either busty cheerleaders or lonely geeks. I was always able to find a spot at one table or another at lunch, could rely on a handful of interchangeable girls to swap homework or partner on the occasional group project. Still, I’d filed the dream of a best friend away with my Barbies and the rest of my childish things, and given up expecting Battle Creek to supply me with anything resembling a soul mate. Which is to say, I’d been lonely for so long, I’d forgotten that I was.
That feeling of disconnection, of grief for something I’d never had, of screaming into a void and knowing no one would hear me—I’d forgotten that was anything other than the basic condition of life.
OUTSIDE OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL EARTH science illustrations, plateaus aren’t unremittingly flat. Even my carefully curated existence of school, homework, TV, and nonintrospection had its peaks and troughs. Gym class was a twice-a-week valley, and that winter, shivering on a softball field in our stupid white skirts every time the temperature rose above fifty degrees, it was more like the valley of the shadow of death, where Craig’s girlfriend and her obsequious posse stood manning the bases while I lingered in left field, fearing much evil.
Craig’s girlfriend: Referring to Nikki Drummond that way was like referring to Madonna as Sean Penn’s ex-wife. Despite his MVP trophies, before his memorable closing act, Craig was inconsequential; Nikki Drummond, at least within the limited cosmology of the Battle Creek High School student body, was God. A spit-shined princess with who, me? eyes and a cherry-red pout, Nikki floated the halls on a cloud of adoration and dessert-themed perfumes—vanilla or cinnamon or gingerbread—though she gave no indication that she did anything so vulgar as eat. Like the girls who worshipped at her altar, Nikki streaked her bangs with Sun-In and flowered her LA Gear sneakers with felt-tipped markers, red and yellow daisies dancing across immaculate white. The girls she favored, and a number that she didn’t, made themselves over in her image, but the chain of command was never in doubt. Nikki commanded; her subjects obeyed.
I was not among them, and most days that still felt like a point of pride.
After Craig’s death, Nikki had briefly acquired an aura of sainthood. It must change a person, I’d thought, to be touched by tragedy, and I watched her carefully—in gym class, in homeroom, in the hall by the disappearing, reappearing shrine—wondering what she would become. But Nikki only became more fully Nikki. Not purified but distilled: essence of bitch. I overheard her in the girls’ locker room, two weeks after it happened, talking to two of her ladies-in-waiting in a voice designed for overhearing. Let them think whatever they want,
she said, and, impossibly, laughed.
But they’re saying you were cheating on him,
Allie Cantor said, theatrically scandalized. Or that you were . . .
Here her voice went subsonic, but I could fill in the gap because I’d heard the rumors, too. In the wake of inexplicable suicide, sainthood didn’t last long. " . . . pregnant."
So?
"So, they’re saying he maybe did it because of you." Kaitlyn Dyer’s voice caught on every other word. Nikki’s girls had been competing over who could put on the biggest show of pain, though I wondered why they assumed this would earn them favor from a queen who had endured so many days of memorials and so much vile gossip, without a flinch.
It’s kind of flattering, right?
Nikki paused, and something in her voice implied a bubblegum smile. I mean, I’m not arrogant enough to think anyone would kill himself for me. But I’ve got to admit it’s possible.
Word—especially that word, flattering—spread; the whispers stopped. Months later, I still watched Nikki sometimes, especially when she was alone, trying to catch her in a moment of humanity. Maybe I wanted proof that I should feel sorry for her, because it seemed barbaric not to; maybe it was only animal instinct. Even the dumbest prey knows better than to turn its back on a predator.
Most of us, by that point in our educational careers, had mastered changing into our gym uniforms without revealing an inch more of bare skin than was necessary. Nikki never bothered. Her bra always matched her panties, and when she tired of showing off the flat stomach and perfect curves she tucked into one pastel set of satins after another, she somehow managed to make even the mandated tennis skirt look good. Me, on the other hand, all saggy granny panties and flabby C-cups bulging from stretched-out lace, dingy white uniform that gave my skin a tubercular pallor—the mirror was my enemy. So that day, the first February afternoon warm enough to play outside, I didn’t inspect myself on the way out of the locker room, didn’t notice until I was on the field and halfway through the first softball inning that all those people laughing were laughing at me, didn’t understand until Nikki Drummond sidled over in the dugout and whispered, giggling, that I might want to stick a tampon up my cunt.
This was the nightmare with no and then I woke up. This was blood. This was stain. I was sticky and leaking, and if Nikki had slipped me a knife I would happily have slit a vein, but instead she just gave me the one word that girls like Nikki weren’t supposed to say, the word that guaranteed from now on, whenever anyone looked my way, they would see Hannah Dexter and think cunt. My cunt. My dripping, bloody, foul cunt.
I was supposed to shrug, maybe. The kind of girl who could laugh things off was the kind of girl who lived things down. Instead I burned, hot and teary, hands pressed against my splotchy ass as if I could make them all unsee what they’d seen, and Nikki’s teeth glowed white as her skirt when she laughed, and then somehow I was in the nurse’s office, still crying and still bleeding, while the gym teacher explained to the nurse that there had been an incident, that I had soiled myself, that I perhaps should be wiped and cleaned and collected by a parent or guardian and taken home.
I locked myself into the handicapped bathroom at the back of the office and stuck a tampon up my cunt, then changed into unstained jeans, tied a jacket around my waist, scrubbed the tears off my face, and dry-heaved into the toilet. When I finally came out, Lacey Champlain was there, waiting for the nurse to decide her so-called headache was bullshit and send her back to class, but—at least this was how we told ourselves the story later, when we needed the story of us to be inevitable—at some deeper, subsonic level, waiting for me.
The room smelled like rubbing alcohol. Lacey smelled like Christmas, ginger and cloves. I could hear the nurse on the phone in her inner office, complaining about overtime and how someone somewhere was a total bitch.
Then Lacey was looking at me. Who was it?
It was no one; it was me; it was bad timing and heavy flow and the cruel dictates of white cotton, but because it was the laughter as much as the stain, the cunt as much as its leak, it was also Nikki Drummond—and when I said her name Lacey’s lip curled up on one side, her finger playing at her face like it was twirling an invisible mustache, and somehow I knew this was as close as I’d get to a smile.
You ever think about just doing it? Like he did?
she said.
Doing what?
That got me a look I’d see a lot of, later on. It said you’d disappointed her; it said Lacey had expected better, but she would give you one more chance. Offing yourself.
Maybe,
I said. Sometimes.
I’d never said it out loud. It was like carrying around a secret disease, and not wanting to let anyone think you were contagious. I half expected Lacey to scrape her chair away.
Instead she held out her left wrist and flipped it over, exposing the veins. See that?
I saw milky flesh, spiderwebbed with blue. What?
She tapped her finger against the spot, a pale white line, cutting diagonal, the length of a thumbnail. Hesitation cut,
she said. That’s what happens when you lose your nerve.
I wanted to touch it. To feel the raised edges of the scar, and the pulse beating beneath. Really?
A sudden spurt of laughter. Of course not really. It’s a paper cut. Come on.
She was making fun of me, or she wasn’t. She was like me, or she wasn’t.
That’s not how I’d do it, anyway, if I were going to do it,
she said. Not with a knife.
Then how?
She shook her head and made an uh-uh noise, like I was a kid reaching for a cigarette. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
My what?
Your plan, for how you’d do it.
But I wouldn’t—
Whether you’d actually do it is beside the point,
she said, and I could tell I was running out of chances. How you would kill yourself is the most personal decision a person can make. It says everything about you. Don’t you think?
Why I said what I said next: because I could see her getting tired of me, and I needed her not to; because I was desperate and tired and could still feel the wet seeping into my jeans; because I was too tired of not saying all the things I thought were true.
"So shooting yourself in the head is Craig-speak for My girlfriend is a cunt and this is the only way to break up with her for good? I said, and then I said,
Might have been the only smart thing he ever did."
She didn’t have to tell me, later, that this was the moment I won her heart.
I’m Lacey,
she said, and gave me her wrist again, sideways this time, and we shook hands.
Hannah.
No. I hate that name. What’s your last name?
She was still holding on.
Dexter.
She nodded. Dex. Better. I can work with that.
WE CUT SCHOOL. THIS IS a day that calls for large quantities of sugar and alcohol,
she said. Possibly fries. You in?
I’d never cut before. Hannah Dexter did not break the rules. Dex, on the other hand, followed Lacey straight out of the school, thinking not about consequences but about stick a tampon up your cunt and how, if Lacey had suggested we burn the place down, Dex might just have gone for it.
Her crap Buick got only AM frequencies, but Lacey had stuck an old Barbie tape recorder to the dash. She turned it up as loud as it would go, some screaming maniac trapped in a hell chamber of jackhammers and electroshock, but when I asked what it was, there was a sacred hush in her voice that suggested she’d mistaken it for music.
Dex, meet Kurt.
She flicked her eyes away from the road, long enough to read my face.
You’ve really never heard Nirvana?
It was a brand of fake incredulity I knew too well: You really didn’t get invited to Nikki’s pool party? You really don’t have a Swatch? You really haven’t kissed/jerked off/blown/fucked anyone? It wasn’t the veiled snobbery I minded but the implied pity, that I could fall so unthinkably short. But with Lacey, I didn’t mind. I accepted the pity as my due, because I saw now that it was unthinkable that I’d never heard Nirvana. I could tell it was making her happy to solidify our roles, she the sculptor and me the clay. In that car, miles opening between us and the school, between Hannah and Dex, between before and after, I wanted nothing more than to make her happy.
Never,
I said, and then, because it was called for, but it’s amazing.
We drove; we listened. Lacey, when the spirit seized her, rolled down a window and screamed lyrics into the sky.
That Buick: ancient and wheezing and spotted with bird shit and, even on that first day, like home. Love at first sight, like I knew already it would be our getaway car. Its glove compartment, with its heap of maps, crusty nail polish bottles, mixtapes, old Burger King wrappers, emergency condoms, dusty pack of candy cigarettes. Its leather seats exhaling cigarette fumes, though Lacey, her grandma dead of lung cancer, refused to smoke. It belonged to some dead lady,
Lacey explained, that first day. Three full-body details, and the damn thing still stinks of cigarettes and adult diapers.
It felt haunted, and I liked it.
Lacey was a driver—I would come to understand that. She was always inventing field trips for us: We drove to a UFO landing site, a Democratic rally where we pretended to be Ross Perot groupies and a Republican rally where we pretended to be Communists, a sixties-style drive-in with roller-skating ushers, and the Big Mac Museum, which was lame. They were, more than anything, excuses to drive. That first day, she invented no destination; we drove in circles. Motion was enough.
There was something deliciously numbing about it, the sameness of the clapboard houses and seamed concrete, the day unspooling behind us as we circled the town. I tried to imagine how it looked to her, determinedly idyllic Battle Creek with its antique stores and its ice cream shoppe, its empty storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs, its chest-thumping pride, every forced smile and flapping flag insisting this was the real America, that we were salt of the earth and blood of the heartland, that our flat green corner of Pennsylvania was a walled-off Eden, untouched by the violence and sin endemic to the modern age, that the town mothers worried only over their pie crusts and garden weeds, the town fathers limited themselves to one after-dinner beer and never prowled beneath their secretaries’ skirts, the sons and daughters had only sitcom troubles and, despite their hormones and halter tops, knew enough to wait. When something went