“Fuck,” I said, like I agreed, because whatever she meant by it, I did.
I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter what her mother and her stepfather did with each other, that I understood they weren’t a part of Lacey, and Lacey was no part of them, had sprung fully grown, goddess-style, blooming in a field or melting from the sun. That other people were irrelevant to us; that they existed only for the pleasure of dismissing them, simulacra of consciousness, walking and talking and pretending at an inner life but hollow inside. Nothing like us. Lacey herself had taught me that, when she read us Descartes. You can only know your own insides, Lacey said. The only real, certified and confirmed, is you and me. I wanted to remind her what she’d taught me, that we could leave together, that life was only as cruel as you allowed it to be, that Battle Creek belonged to us by choice and we could choose to abandon it.
I wanted to tell her that nothing I’d seen had scared me, that nothing had changed, but she already knew me well enough to hear a lie in my voice.
I wanted, most of me wanted, to save her.
Beneath that, though, there was a cold, shameful relief. I had come to need Lacey so much that it scared me. But if her life was this broken, if there was nothing beyond our closed circle but ugly mess, then it opened up the unthinkable possibility that Lacey needed something, too. That if I passed her tests, shaped myself to fit against her edges, that something could be me.
“My father loved the water.” She found another rock and fired it hard at the lake. “He liked to take me to Atlantic City, when we lived in Jersey. There was this mechanical pony thing by the casino, and he’d leave me with, like, a bucket of quarters. Enough to ride all day.”
“That’s a lot of pony riding.”
“Seemed like heaven to me. You know what they say about girls and horses.” I could hear a little of the Lacey I knew peeking through, winking at me. “Also, I was an idiot.”
“All six-year-olds are idiots.”
“He promised one day he’d take me to ride a real pony. I guess there are these beaches in Virginia where they run wild in the sand? Just ponies everywhere, like you’re back in time or something.”
“Chincoteague,” I said. I’d read Misty of Chincoteague eleven times.
“Whatever. I don’t know, because we never went.”
I could have told her that my father was the king of broken promises, that I knew all about disappointment, but I was afraid she’d tell me I knew fuck-all about anything, and she’d be right. “I’ve never been to the ocean,” I told her, and these were the magic words that brought her back.
Lacey squealed. “Unacceptable!” She pointed at the car. “In.”
For six hours, we drove. The Buick bumped and wheezed, the cassette player ate Lacey’s third-favorite bootleg, the crumpled AAA maps beaconed our way, and while I hovered over a suspiciously discolored toilet seat and then washed my hands with sickly gray soap, examining myself in the mirror for some clue that I’d become the kind of girl who lit out for the territories, some trucker tried to feel up Lacey in the Roy Rogers parking lot. We drove until the car swerved off the highway and into a parking lot gritty with sand, and there we were.
The ocean was endless.
The ocean beat and beat and beat against the shore.
We held hands and let the Atlantic wash over our bare feet. We breathed in salt and spray under the dawning sky.
It was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Lacey gave that to me.
“This is how I’d do it,” Lacey said, almost too quiet to hear under the surf. “I’d come out here at night, when the beach was empty, and I’d take an inflatable raft into the water. Then I’d hold on, and let it carry me out. Far enough that no one would ever find me. That I couldn’t change my mind. I’d bring my mother’s sleeping pills, and my Walkman, and a safety pin. And when I was out far enough that I couldn’t hear the waves breaking anymore, that the raft was just bobbing on the water and there was nothing but me and the stars? I’d do it. In order. The order matters. Pills first, then the safety pin, just a tiny hole in the raft, small enough that it would take some time. Then I’d put on the headphones, and lie down on the raft so I could see the stars and feel the water in my hair, and I’d let Kurt sing me home.”
I was supposed to be the one who paid attention, the one who listened to the chaos of the world and understood—that, Lacey said, was the whole joy of me—but so often that year, Lacey talked and I didn’t hear her at all.