I STAYED IN MY ROOM. SAFE territory. My room: fifteen feet wide, thirteen feet short, beige from floor to ceiling, with matted knots in the carpet from where our cat had puked her life away. A twin bed with Strawberry Shortcake sheets, because, according to my mother, sheets were expensive and grown-up was a matter of opinion. Shuttered windows that let through slats of light in the early afternoon and a rusty full-length mirror papered with remnants of Lacey: wrinkled postcards from Paris and California and Istanbul written by people long dead and rescued from yard sale bins; deep thoughts courtesy of deep thinkers, inscribed by Lacey in stern black marker; for Lacey’s sake, a cutout of Kurt, his granny cardigan matching his eyes; at the center of it all, a Dex-and-Lacey photo collage that captured none of the important moments, because for those we were always alone, no one to hold the camera. A particleboard bureau stickered with glow-in-the-dark stars that three years of scraping couldn’t clear away. Stacks of books pressed up against beige wallpaper, spines stretching to the ceiling, every book an adventure that meant climbing or toppling or ever so gently working one out of the middle of a stack, Jenga for giants. There was a card table desk in the corner, stacked neatly with the year’s final papers (failures) and report card (“disappointing”), and buried beneath them, for some future scrapbook of shame, two copies of the local paper—the edition with the letter to the editor telling the story of the wild girl passed out in the ruins of an abandoned party, and the weekend edition with the editorial, with its anonymous but all-knowing first person plural: We believe the girls in this town are up to no good, we believe modern music and television and drugs and sex and atheism are rotting our youth, we believe this girl is as much to blame as her toxic culture and her lax parents, we can’t blame her but we can’t afford to excuse her, so it follows that we must use her as a warning, lest we lose another of our brightest youth, and we the people of Battle Creek, the parents and teachers and churchgoers and goodhearted folk, we must do better.
I CALLED HER LINE IN THE middle of the night, after my parents were asleep. Every night. All night, sometimes, just to hear it ring. No one ever answered.
No, her mother finally said, she didn’t know where Lacey went. No, I shouldn’t call back.
MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY ALL the time. Not at me, she said. Or not just at me.
“I don’t care what anyone says,” my father said, standing in the doorway of my room a few days after—and maybe not, but he’d never stood like that before, like a trainer at the mouth of a cage, waiting for something wild to make its move. “You’ll always be a good girl. Maybe without Lacey around . . . things will settle.”
Without Lacey, I was incapable of wildness, that’s what he was telling me. When I had Lacey, he had a little piece of her, too, could love me more for the things she saw in me. Now that she was gone, he expected I would revert to form. I would be the good girl, his good girl, boring but safe. He was supposed to want that.
I READ.
Lacey had always discouraged reading that was, as she put it, beneath us. We should spend our time on mind-expanding pursuits, she said. Our mission, and we were obligated to accept it, was an investigation into the nature of things. The fundamentals. Together we paged through Nietzsche and Kant, pretending to understand. We read Beckett aloud and waited for Godot. Lacey memorized the first six stanzas of “Howl” and shouted it over our lake, casting her voice into the wind. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, she would scream, and then tell me that Allen Ginsberg was the oldest man she would be willing to fuck. I memorized the opening and closing lines of “The Hollow Men” for her, and I whispered it to myself when the dark closed in.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
It sounded like a promise.
Without Lacey, I slid backward. I tessered with Meg Murry; I crept through the wardrobe and nuzzled my face into Aslan’s fur. I swept the dust and warmed the fires in Howl’s moving castle; I turned half invisible with half magic, drank tea with the Mad Hatter, battled Captain Hook, even, occasionally, hugged the Velveteen Rabbit back to life. I was a stranger in a strange land. I was an orphan, abandoned and found and saved, until I closed the book, and was lost all over again.
I read, and I wrote.
Dear Lacey, I wrote, sometimes, in letters I hid in an old Sears sweater box, just in case. In my terrible handwriting, with smearing ink, unstained by unfallen tears, I’m sorry, I wrote. I should have known better.
Please come home.