If there’s a hell, it smells like suntan lotion and sweaty Benetton cotton, and tastes like warm Coke; it sounds like easy listening and urgent whispers; it feels like being X-rayed, radioactive stares penetrating baggy clothes to the naked flesh beneath. I could feel myself mutating; I was the hideous swamp monster come to crash the soiree, and the Lacey in me wanted to play the part, tear a swath of destruction, give them a reason to stare.
Instead, I drifted toward the closest thing to a safe harbor: Jenna Sterling, Conny Morazan, and Kelly Cho, who styled themselves so aggressively as the Three Musketeers that they’d dressed the part every Halloween since they’d met. They were a self-contained unit, occasionally glomming in lockstep onto creatures a little higher up the food chain but never breaking formation. Jenna, with her Barbie hair and chunky field hockey legs, had once cried when forced to partner with me on some fourth-grade math project—memorably demonstrating the concept of remainders. Able lieutenant Conny was an expert at completing Jenna’s sentences when Jenna found herself unable, which was often. And then there was Kelly, who’d landed here like an alien back in first grade, still learning the English for recess and blackboard and weirdo, suffering the boys who pulled their eyes into slits and spoke in nonsense syllables they called Karate Kid Chinese even after she reminded them, yet again, that she was Korean. Somewhere along the way she’d lost the accent and the baby fat, and now was the only one of the three to consistently have a boyfriend, even if it was usually some youth group kid she’d picked up at church.
They hadn’t been at the foreclosure party; girls like these didn’t go to parties like those. Whatever they’d heard afterward, they hadn’t seen it happen.
I’d never quite mastered the art of joining a conversation in progress, so I stood there creeping on their huddle, waiting for one of them to acknowledge my existence.
“So where did she go, anyway?”
It took me a beat too long to realize the question was directed at me. “Who?”
“She probably has no clue,” Jenna said. “She’s like . . .”
“Clueless,” Conny offered, and Jenna nodded her assent.
“So do you or don’t you?” Kelly said.
“What do you think?” I said, with a tone that suggested duh, of course I did.
Result: eagerness. “So? Where?”
“Juvie, right?” Jenna had a wholesome midwestern look I’d never trusted. She was the kind of girl who brought her field hockey stick to class and experimented with Body Shop perfume combinations until she found the one that made her smell most like apple pie.
Conny snorted. “Mental institution, more like.”
“New York City, that’s where they all go,” Kelly said.
“They who?” I asked.
“You know . . .” Less confident now. “Girls like Lacey. Who . . .”
“. . . run away,” Conny supplied. “Like in Pretty Woman.”
“Pretty Woman is about LA.” Nikki had suddenly materialized by my shoulder in her witchy way. “And I highly doubt Lacey ran away to be a prostitute.” She hooked a finger around one of my belt loops and tugged me away from the Musketeers. “Hannah Dexter. You want to get out of here?”
It took me a moment to realize this was an invitation, not a command—or maybe that’s just a convenient excuse for why, instead of coming up with a clever retort or giving her the finger, I said yes.
I DON’T KNOW WHY MY MOTHER insists on this crap,” Nikki said, monologuing us through the woods. Complaints about finger food and her mother’s friends led to the laundry list of adventures for which all Nikki’s actual friends had abandoned her: tennis camp, arts camp, Jewish camp, Allie Cantor on a teen tour of the Grand Canyon, Kaitlyn Dyer shopping (and doubtless fucking) her way across the Continent, less Virginia Woolf, more Fergie. (It destabilized my world to hear Nikki Drummond reference Virginia Woolf.) She complained about the humidity and the gnat swarms, the creepy pool cleaner whose gaze always lingered one second too long, the hassle of shaving her bikini line, the tedium of reruns, the gall of her parents to refuse to pay for call-waiting on her personal line. She whined and sipped from an airplane bottle of something brown and illicit, and seemed not nearly as concerned as she should have been about what I might do to her in the woods.
The trees closed around us, dark and lush and whispering. The afternoon had taken on a fairy-tale inexorability: The witch told me where to go, and like a child lost in the woods, I followed. Until, finally, she stopped—walking and talking both, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the endless stream of complaint might indicate some jangling of nerves until she abruptly fell silent.