She was making fun of me, or she wasn’t. She was like me, or she wasn’t.
“That’s not how I’d do it, anyway, if I were going to do it,” she said. “Not with a knife.”
“Then how?”
She shook her head and made an uh-uh noise, like I was a kid reaching for a cigarette. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“My what?”
“Your plan, for how you’d do it.”
“But I wouldn’t—”
“Whether you’d actually do it is beside the point,” she said, and I could tell I was running out of chances. “How you would kill yourself is the most personal decision a person can make. It says everything about you. Don’t you think?”
Why I said what I said next: because I could see her getting tired of me, and I needed her not to; because I was desperate and tired and could still feel the wet seeping into my jeans; because I was too tired of not saying all the things I thought were true.
“So shooting yourself in the head is Craig-speak for My girlfriend is a cunt and this is the only way to break up with her for good?” I said, and then I said, “Might have been the only smart thing he ever did.”
She didn’t have to tell me, later, that this was the moment I won her heart.
“I’m Lacey,” she said, and gave me her wrist again, sideways this time, and we shook hands.
“Hannah.”
“No. I hate that name. What’s your last name?” She was still holding on.
“Dexter.”
She nodded. “Dex. Better. I can work with that.”
WE CUT SCHOOL. “THIS IS a day that calls for large quantities of sugar and alcohol,” she said. “Possibly fries. You in?”
I’d never cut before. Hannah Dexter did not break the rules. Dex, on the other hand, followed Lacey straight out of the school, thinking not about consequences but about stick a tampon up your cunt and how, if Lacey had suggested we burn the place down, Dex might just have gone for it.
Her crap Buick got only AM frequencies, but Lacey had stuck an old Barbie tape recorder to the dash. She turned it up as loud as it would go, some screaming maniac trapped in a hell chamber of jackhammers and electroshock, but when I asked what it was, there was a sacred hush in her voice that suggested she’d mistaken it for music.
“Dex, meet Kurt.”
She flicked her eyes away from the road, long enough to read my face.
“You’ve really never heard Nirvana?” It was a brand of fake incredulity I knew too well: You really didn’t get invited to Nikki’s pool party? You really don’t have a Swatch? You really haven’t kissed/jerked off/blown/fucked anyone? It wasn’t the veiled snobbery I minded but the implied pity, that I could fall so unthinkably short. But with Lacey, I didn’t mind. I accepted the pity as my due, because I saw now that it was unthinkable that I’d never heard Nirvana. I could tell it was making her happy to solidify our roles, she the sculptor and me the clay. In that car, miles opening between us and the school, between Hannah and Dex, between before and after, I wanted nothing more than to make her happy.
“Never,” I said, and then, because it was called for, “but it’s amazing.”
We drove; we listened. Lacey, when the spirit seized her, rolled down a window and screamed lyrics into the sky.
That Buick: ancient and wheezing and spotted with bird shit and, even on that first day, like home. Love at first sight, like I knew already it would be our getaway car. Its glove compartment, with its heap of maps, crusty nail polish bottles, mixtapes, old Burger King wrappers, emergency condoms, dusty pack of candy cigarettes. Its leather seats exhaling cigarette fumes, though Lacey, her grandma dead of lung cancer, refused to smoke. “It belonged to some dead lady,” Lacey explained, that first day. “Three full-body details, and the damn thing still stinks of cigarettes and adult diapers.” It felt haunted, and I liked it.