Lacey, somehow, was still laughing. “You see that? She’s still trying to turn you against me. That’s what I’m afraid of, Dex. Not getting in trouble. Not what she’ll do to me—what she’ll do to us. She’ll break us again. She will.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Nikki said. “This is what she does, Hannah. She wants you to believe it, that everything is my fault. Nothing is yours. You’re the one who walked away from Lacey. You. Lacey knows you don’t want to see that. She knows you like it better the way she tells it, where you’re not responsible. You don’t like what you saw on that video? Don’t let it happen here. Don’t just lie there and let her fuck us both. Please.”
Lacey smiled. “See? She can’t help herself. She hates that we have each other.” Lacey wanted me to hear it, because she believed that I believed in us. “This can only end one way, Dex. Take the knife.”
“Take it!” Nikki shouted. “Take it and use it, because if you think she’s ever letting you out of here, you’re as nuts as she is.”
Lacey set it down on the floor between us.
“I said I was sorry,” Lacey said. “But you have to be sorry, too. Then everything can be like it used to be. Better.”
Better, because there would be nothing between them anymore. Better, because we would have a secret of our own to protect; because we would be indivisible; because we would, finally, be the same.
“You love me, Dex?”
I couldn’t not love her. Even then.
“Then prove it,” she said.
That night we did mushrooms for the first time, after we’d looked into the face of God, after the cows in the field and the boys in the barn, Lacey had spirited me away, had parked the car for the night on the side of a deserted road, deciding, with our minds still reeling and eyes still following invisible angels, that would be safer than driving home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but Lacey said it would be better in the grass, under the stars. It was cold and damp, but we weren’t in a state to care. I curled up on my side, and she pressed her chest to my back and curved an arm around me, holding on. Do I belong to you? she’d whispered into my neck, and I’d said yes, of course, yes. You won’t leave me, she said then, and it was command, and it was request, and it was truth, and it was prayer.
“Don’t make me do this,” I said.
“I won’t make you do anything,” she said, and not enough of me was relieved.
“You pick up that knife, and you do whatever you want with it,” Lacey said then. “Your choice, not mine.”
“No, Hannah,” Nikki said. “You can’t do that.”
But I could, that was the thing of it. I could do anything. It was simple physics, biology: kneel, pick up the knife, carve. I could make my body perform each of those steps, and inanimate objects—floor, knife, skin—would give way to my will. It would be simple, and then it would be done.
And I would have been the one to do it. That was the thing of it, too.
As simply as picking up the knife, I could have walked to the door and kept going. But where would I go, without Lacey, and who would I be when I got there? Lacey thought she knew who I was, deep down, Nikki, too, and I couldn’t see how it was so easy for them to believe there was such a thing, a me without them, a deep down where no one was watching. That I wasn’t just Lacey’s friend, Nikki’s enemy, my father’s daughter; that somewhere, floating in the void, was a real Hannah Dexter, an absolute, with things she could or could not do. As if I was either the girl who would pick up the knife or the girl who would not; the girl who would turn on one or turn on the other, or turn and run. Light is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it’s neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I’d only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.
This was collapse.
THEM
THEY HAD ALL BEEN GIRLS, once upon a time. If they were afraid now, of their girls, it was only because they remembered what it was like. Girls grew up; girls grew wild. Girls didn’t know themselves and the sharp-toothed needs breeding within, and it was a mother’s job not to let them.
Girls today thought they didn’t need their mothers, thought their mothers didn’t understand, when their mothers understood too well. Girls today didn’t know what it was to march through crowded streets hoisting signs and screaming slogans, to kiss boys off to war, to watch the news and see boys burn, to lie in browning weeds and weave a crown of thorns, to wrinkle and bloat and sag, to watch doors close, life narrow, circumstances harden, to hate the girl you were for the life she chose for you, to want her back. Girls today wanted to believe they were different, that girls like them could never grow up into mothers like these.
They let their girls believe this was true.