A week later, having survived another school day and a long stretch of homework in the library—anywhere was better than home—I biked home through twilight drizzle, feeling, in the surge of wind and adrenaline, that this was manageable, these two-hundred-some days to be endured before the rest of my life.
I dropped the bike in the driveway and was about to head inside when the horn blasted. I turned to see a car idling at the curb, its high beams flashing an SOS. The horn sounded again, impatient, and the passenger door swung open. Kurt’s voice scratched at the night.
Lacey was home.
LACEY
Smells Like Teen Spirit
IT TOOK ME MONTHS TO stop thinking about her lips. I liked them smiling, pussy pink and quirked at the corners, but I liked them every way. Pouting. Sucking. Trembling. I told her that the flask made me think of her, spun her some bullshit about flappers and daring girls sucking the marrow out of life, but—truth? I just wanted to see those lips pursed around the silver spout.
That’s the kind of thing that came back to me in all those dead hours staring at Jesus, pretending to pray: things I was meant to have forgotten, Nikki’s lips and Craig’s dead eyes and a canopy of leaves the color of blood and fire. Horizons had no horizon. Some girls got sent home after a couple weeks; others were stuck there for years. Your golden ticket: a letter home saying that Jesus had finally turned the bad seed good. No one knew how you got it. There were demerits and credits and an impenetrable algorithm ranking us on a hierarchy of salvation, but nothing to suggest that surviving one day got you closer to anything but more of the same.
I didn’t think about the future. I refused the past, pink lips and the smell of gunpowder. I thought about you.
My own version of prayer, my own religion. The church of Dex and Lacey. Where the only true sin is faithlessness. I would have faith you could forgive me. I knew I could forgive you anything.
They were big on forgiveness at Horizons. Disclosure of past sins was mandatory, the bigger, the better, so we amped them up. The Screamer’s occasional toke became a drug addiction; the Skank’s ill-advised habit of masturbating to her father’s Soldier of Fortune collection became oedipal lust; even the time Saint Ann kissed some nerd in her church group so he’d help her with her chemistry homework was a gateway to prostitution. The Sodomite’s sins were self-explanatory, and every time she confessed to fantasizing about one of us stripping naked in the outdoor shower, they assigned her to wood-chipper duty and an extra hour of praying the gay away. Imagine if they knew what I’d done in the woods. How good it had felt.
It was fun watching them pretzel-twist themselves trying to forgive our imagined pasts. That was Shawn’s mandate: We were all equal here. We were all, once we’d dipped ourselves in the lake and sworn our fealty to God and country and Shawn, cleansed.
You tell me, Dex, what kind of a bullshit god doesn’t care what you did or who you hurt as long as you say you’re sorry?
Forgiveness for the mistakes of the past, revenge for the trespasses of the present: That was the Horizons way. When you got toilet-toothbrush duty for giving your counselor the finger, or solitary for trying to lubricate your unit with laxatives in the pudding, that wasn’t punishment; it was correction. Curtsy and say thank you, lest you be corrected some more.
It got easier once I found ways to correct myself. Digging into my wrist scar with a paper clip, just a little—that was enough to clear my head. They wanted us fuzzy. Pliable. That’s what the skimpy rations and the middle-of-the-night prayer calls were all about. The hours of verse memorization, the time in the dark place—it was CIA-brand torture. Survival was a matter of maintaining control, staying steady.
That’s why, about three weeks in, I threw out my pills.
I ALMOST WENT CRAZY, IN THERE, without them, until I came up with the game. Or maybe the game was me going crazy. Either way, it worked. At Horizons, the devil was everywhere. Any time you cursed, lusted, cried yourself to sleep, forgot to ask permission before taking seconds at dinner, that was the devil getting his claws in you. So I figured, they want it so badly, let ’em have it. Something real to hate. Something to fear: me.
The next time they asked us for confessions, I gave them one to remember. “I killed a boy, once,” I said. The Skank and the Sodomite leaned close, like they knew this one was going to be good, even before the punch line: “I fucked him to death.”
I’d get it from Heather for that one, later; we all would, the punishment of the one visited on the many, the righteous burning alongside the sinners. But confessions were sacrosanct. Call it my Scheherazade moment, Dex, because I did it to save my own life. “Not literally, of course,” I continued, “but it was the fucking that got him into the woods, and kept him there once he realized what we were all about. A boy like him should have run screaming in the other direction once he saw the altar, the poor little cat, the knife. Nice boys like that don’t mess with the devil.”