“The name is Dex,” I said, and it was the last thing I would say to her that night or the two that followed. The silent treatment was still the only real weapon I could muster.
I must have seemed ridiculous. At least as ridiculous to her as my father seemed to me, cheering me on behind my mother’s back and making the occasional frontal assault with vague references to their shared posthippie past, invoking long-lost good causes and heroic stands, though my mother shut him down every time, in a way guaranteed to make both of us feel like shit. “She doesn’t care about feminist politics any more than you do, Jimmy,” I heard her say, after I’d tossed my burnt meat loaf and returned to my room. “She’s simply infatuated. You should know the feeling.”
She’d unplugged my phone and was monitoring the ones downstairs.
“No, Hannah can’t come to the phone,” I heard her say that Saturday morning. “Please stop calling.”
Lacey, I knew, would never stop calling.
Maybe this was it, the catalyst we needed to finally escape. Maybe I could finally shake off my suburban shackles, fuck high school and college and my permanent record, climb into Lacey’s Buick, slam my fist on the dashboard, and grant the permission I’d withheld for so long, say Go west, young man, and chart a course to freedom.
When I packed for school that Monday, I slipped my escape fund, all $237 of it, into my backpack, along with my copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and the first mix Lacey had made me, the one with HOW TO BE DEX scribbled across it in permanent marker—all the essentials, just in case. I waited for her in the parking lot, desperate for proof that she existed, and as I waited, I composed revenge plans in my head, a gift for Lacey, because before we escaped we’d need to avenge ourselves against the enemy. We would sneak through Nikki’s window and shave her head; we would slit the seams of her prom dress, just enough that the gown would dissolve as they placed the crown on her perfectly coiffed head; we would frame her for cheating; we would find someone to break her heart.
They were lame schemes, cribbed from Sweet Valley High books and half-remembered teen movies, but evidence of my will. Lacey would supply the way.
Except that when Lacey finally showed up—not a half hour early, as I had, bouncing with eagerness and certain she was feeling the same way, but twenty minutes after the start of homeroom—and I cornered her in the parking lot, she didn’t want to hear about my revenge schemes, and she wasn’t full of sympathy for my weekend of torment. She didn’t, in fact, seem particularly concerned about my problems at all.
“How worried do I have to be?” she said. “Is your mother the kind who’s going to call mine?”
“Depends whether she thinks it’ll torture me or not.”
“Fuck, this is serious, Dex. You have to ask her if she’s planning to tell. Get her not to.”
“That’s going to be hard when I’m not speaking to her.”
“So fucking speak to her. What is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know, Lacey, maybe being a prisoner in my own home has driven me crazy? Maybe it’s been a little difficult, having my own mother look at me like I’m some criminal who’s going to shiv her in the night? Maybe I’m a little worried that she’s forbidden me from seeing my best friend, and I thought my best friend might be a little worried about that, too.”
“You’re seeing me right now.” She sounded distracted, as if there could be anything more important to think about.
“How are you not getting this?”
“How are you not getting it, Dex? I can’t have the Bastard finding out about this. I can’t.”
“Oh, but it’s totally fine when I get caught?”
“That’s not what I meant. But, okay, yeah. You seem pretty fine to me.”
“Oh, I’m awesome, Lacey. Everything is fantastic.”
“You don’t get it—”
“I get that it’s okay for me to get in trouble as long as you don’t get in trouble. Even though this whole fucking thing was your idea.”
“Can you for one millisecond entertain the hypothesis that not everything is about you, Dex?”
I heard myself spit out the world’s ugliest laugh. “Tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”
She didn’t say anything. I willed her to. Say something; say anything. Fix this.
“Well?” I said. “Really? Nothing?”
“Please ask your mother not to tell mine.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
SCHOOL HURT WITHOUT LACEY THERE, even more because she was there, just no longer mine.
I was the angry one. I was the righteous one. I was the one avoiding her in the halls and getting on the bus after school instead of waiting for her car. So why did it feel like she’d abandoned me?
Temporary, I told myself. She would apologize, I would forgive, all would be the same. But when I saw Nikki, I couldn’t say anything. It felt different, not having Lacey at my back. All the things I wanted to say, all the fuck you, how dare you, what gives you the right curdled in my throat, and I knew how they would come out if I tried.
You won.