LACEY HAD A THEORY THAT people have a finite capacity for the enjoyment of their favorite things. Songs, movies, books, food: We’re hardwired for specific quantities of pleasure, and once the amount is exceeded, good goes bad. The kicker is, there’s no warning when you’re approaching the limit; the dopamine just flips off like a switch, and there’s one more book for the fire.
Very rarely, Lacey said, you find something for which your brain has infinite capacity, and that, Lacey said, is the thing we call love.
I didn’t believe in that anymore, but I did believe in overdoses and disappointment, and I wasn’t about to risk either on my favorite books. The house wasn’t a safe space anymore—there were no safe spaces anymore—and that only made it easier to leave. When I did, I only ever went to the library. I felt twelve again, fresh out of the kids’ section, stroking the spines in the grown-up stacks as if I could osmose their words through the bindings. I felt almost normal again.
“God loves you all,” promised the woman with the stack of pamphlets who’d planted herself just outside the front door. “But He cannot protect you if you willingly put yourselves in the path of temptation.” It was beak-faced Barbara Fuller, who wore her clothes like a hanger, who’d snubbed my mother more than once at a PTA bake sale, suggesting not so subtly that someone who settled for store-bought was no more deserving of the title mother than Entenmann’s donuts were of the title food. Barbara Fuller was the type who wrote letters to the editor about loose morals and garish Christmas lights, and she had a voracious hunger for the failures of others. That day, she didn’t seem to care that her audience consisted of a handful of bored retirees and one abashed bald guy who looked like he would gnaw his own arm off if his wife—Barbara Fuller’s only avid listener—didn’t let go.
“Satanists slaughter fifty thousand children each year.”
The bald guy picked something out of his nose.
“This is a national emergency. And don’t fool yourselves—there is an active Satanic cult operating in this town.” She raised her voice. “Your teenagers are at risk.”
It was a joke, this woman preaching to us about risk—pretending she knew who was in danger, and of what.
I walked quickly, head down, focusing on the slap of my flip-flops against pavement, the gravel beneath some old lady’s Chevrolet, the crying cicadas, the pulse of blood flushing my cheeks, the jangle of the bike lock as I fumbled with the key.
“They prey on the vulnerable and confused,” she screeched, and I suspected she wasn’t just trying to penetrate the old folks’ hearing aids. I would not look up to catch her looking at me. “They prey on the fallen.”
SUMMER STRETCHED ON. OUR HOUSE whirred day and night with the apologetic wheezing of fans. They stirred hot air; we endured. More than once I read through Barbara Fuller’s pamphlet about Satanism, a copy of which I’d liberated from the trash. Written by one Isabelle F. Ford, PhD, and jointly published by Parents Against Satanic Teachings and the Cult Crime Research Institution, it suggested that an underground network of tens of thousands of Satanists was diligently pursuing a program of grave robbing and child sacrifice.
If only, I thought, because imagine: If there were such a cabal, veins of dark power threading through Battle Creek. If there were others like me, a coven of girls whose secret selves throbbed with pain, who needed blood to feed their hearts of darkness. I’d always longed for a shadow world, ever since I was a kid, searching out garden sprites and bridge trolls, wishing myself into a faerie changeling waiting for the summons home. Now, a new fantasy: spindly arms carving strange symbols in the night, robed silhouettes against the full moon, a bloody altar and a cloud of incense, ritual and invocation, the promise of power. We laughed, Lacey had told me; we hefted an axe in a moonlit field, loomed over something large and vulnerable, and there was joy in power, joy in drawing blood, slashing and slicing and destroying. When I let myself remember, I could almost believe it, that there was, that we did. If only the Barbara Fullers of the world were right and all I had to do was summon the forces of darkness and let them consume me.
I threw the pamphlet back in the trash. One more empty promise.
Lacey never called.
No one called.
Until one night—as if the forces of darkness had materialized after all, in response to my silent request—my mother shouted upstairs to tell me I had a call . . . from Nikki Drummond. When I wouldn’t come to the phone, Nikki called again the next night, and the night after.
On the fourth day, she came to the house.