SHE PLAYED WITH MY HAIR and vetoed chunks of wardrobe; one sticky afternoon she brought me to the elementary school parking lot and taught me how to drive. She still refused to call me Dex. “Your name is Hannah,” she said. “Who lets some stranger give them a new name? It would be one thing if you didn’t like it. But seriously, to decide to be someone new just because some weirdo tells you to?”
I did like my name—that was the thing of it. I’d forgotten that: I hadn’t known there was anything wrong with Hannah until Lacey told me so.
Nikki was too careful to talk about Lacey. Instead she talked around her, let me creep to my own conclusions. “I don’t know why you listen to this shit when you obviously don’t even like it,” she said when I fast-forwarded through one too many Nirvana songs.
“Of course it matters what people think of you,” she said when I told her I didn’t need her help repairing my reputation, that my reputation was irrelevant. “Anyone who tells you different is trying to screw you.”
“Some people can’t help being freaks, so they’ll try to drag you into freakhood with them,” she said, thrusting an armful of hand-me-downs at me. “But you’re different. You’ve got options.”
She talked about herself, and maybe that was the thing that slowly suckered me into trusting her. She was bored, she told me, not just with Battle Creek and her friends and her dysfunctional parents and her perfect brother with his dull college girlfriend and obedient premed life, but with herself, too, with waking up every morning to perform “Nikki Drummond.”
“You have no fucking idea, Hannah,” she said, in the middle of a rant about the girls who assumed themselves adored members of her royal court. “When I say shallow, I don’t mean like a sandbar. I mean like a puddle.”
“They’re shallow?” I said, with a pointed look at the issue of Seventeen in her lap. She’d just spent the last thirty-seven minutes gaming the “Who’s Your Perfect Beach Boyfriend?” quiz to ensure she scored high enough to match with “Golden God.”
She threw it at me. “Of course I’m fucking shallow. But I know it, that’s the difference. Like I know that reading Nietzsche doesn’t make you deep.”
She pronounced his name correctly, almost pretentiously, with the same faux German accent Lacey had used.
“Everything is crap,” Nikki said. “It’s the people who don’t get it that tire me—the ones who think anything fucking matters, whether it’s their nail polish color or the meaning of the fucking universe.”
She was buzzed. Nikki, I understood by then, was always just a little buzzed. I’d seen enough Lifetime movies to know this was not a good thing. She talked about having power over people, how it was dull but necessary, because the only other option was letting people have power over you. Sometimes she even talked about Craig.
We did this only when we went to the train station, which we did only when she was in a very particular mood. I didn’t like it there. They hadn’t told her exactly where they’d found the body, she said, whether it was on the tracks or in the old station office or hanging half in and half out of the boxcar, as if he’d tried at the last minute to flee from himself. We might have been sitting on grass that had been flattened by his body and fed with his blood. I didn’t believe in ghosts—even as a child eager to believe in anything, I never had—but I believed in the power of place, and who was to say there wasn’t something about the old station, something so sad about the sound of the wind rattling through its broken windows that it had infected Craig, attuned him to his own pain? It was the kind of place that whispered.
Nikki said it hurt to be there, but that sometimes pain was good.
“I miss him,” she said once, dangling her legs over the tracks, picking at the dirt under her nails. “I didn’t even like him that much, and I fucking miss him. All the time.”
I’d learned not to say I’m sorry, because it only made her mad. “He should be sorry,” she always said. “Plenty of people should be sorry. Not you.”
Once she lay down along the edge with her head in my lap, and said that maybe she was to blame. Her hair was softer than I’d imagined. I brushed her bangs off her forehead, smoothed them back. The roots were coming in, dirt brown. I wondered when her hair had gone so dark, whether it had ever really been the color of the sun, or if that was just how I’d needed to remember it.
“Don’t be a narcissist,” I said. She liked that.
“Do you worry you’ll never love anyone again?” I asked her.