“Well, not since I met you.” The joke didn’t land. Her nails dug into my arm.
“Never say that again.”
“Okay. Okay, Lacey, it’s fine.” Panic. We were in a graveyard and she was freaking out, needing something I didn’t know how to give her because Lacey wasn’t supposed to need anything. “Of course I love you. And of course I’m a good person. And can you just tell me what’s going on so we can get the hell out of here?” I was crying, too. It was a reflex, like contagious yawning or throwing up at the smell of vomit.
“If I tell you to do something, and you do it, whose fault is that?” she asked.
“Depends on what you want me to do, doesn’t it?”
“It shouldn’t depend. Circumstances shouldn’t matter. If it’s my idea, it’s my fault. Your idea, yours.”
“Except it would be my idea to do what you told me to do. I get to decide that. I’m not your puppet.”
“No? No. I guess not.”
I rapped softly at her head, the safest way I could think to touch her. “What’s going on in there, Lacey? I know it sucks that he’s dead, even if he is Craig, but it’s not like he meant something to you.” As I said it, I was wondering whether it was true. Maybe it all made sense in some seedy, beneath-her kind of way, the fervent and unfounded hatred of Nikki, the unprompted tears for a Neanderthal, the words that seemed snagged in her throat, unsaid, unsayable. “Was he cheating on her with you? You can tell me. I get it, I swear.” I didn’t get it, not a guy like him, his meaty hands fumbling at her bootlaces, but love was meant to be strange. “You can’t think it’s your fault, what happened. Even if he felt guilty, or you dumped him and he freaked out, or whatever it was, it wouldn’t be—” I thought about what it would be like to do something and not be able to take it back. “Even if you told him you wanted him to die or something, that wouldn’t make it your fault that he went and did it. You didn’t put the gun in his hand. You didn’t pull the trigger. Nothing is your fault.”
She looked up at me, face tipping into shadow, and smiled. “You think Craig was cheating on Nikki? With me?” She laughed, then, so beautifully, and I don’t know whether I was more relieved that we’d escaped the moment together or that I’d so plainly been wrong. Then she kissed my cheek. “You always know what to say to cheer me up.”
If not that, then what? I wanted to say, but couldn’t, not when she was happy again, not when she’d taken my hand in hers and pulled us both off the ground, sent us spinning, like the grave was a meadow and the moon was bright summer sun. “I can’t believe you thought I could love him.” Her laugh was a witch’s cackle, our dance a ritual that didn’t need spells, only hot blood rising in our cheeks and burning through our veins, an invocation of the gods of love, of whatever force pressed our palms together and whispered on the night wind, You are one.
AND THEN WE WENT TOO far.
“It’s what Kurt would do,” Lacey whispered, and there was no argument to that.
We eased open her window and dropped down to the bushes below. The car was too noisy, so for the first block we pushed it, gear in neutral and shoulders bruising against the trunk. When it was safe, Lacey gunned it, and I jittered in the passenger seat, cans of spray paint slippery in sweaty palms.
Kurt once got arrested for spray painting homosexual sex rules on the side of a bank, Lacey said, up there big and bright for all the rednecks to see, at least the ones who could read well enough to sound out the words. He grew up in an old logging town, Lacey said, full of assholes, their puny brains filled with all the things Kurt smashed with his guitar. Before the guitar, there was spray paint, and there were words. “We have those,” Lacey said. “That’s enough.”
“If we get arrested,” I said, “I swear I will kill you.”