“It’s stupid to be jealous,” I said.
“Jealous?” She was a wild thing, suddenly. “Jealous of what? Of her? Of you? Do you know what a fucking favor I did for you, Dex, turning you into something? If I wanted a charity project, I could have gone and read to old ladies or joined the fucking Peace Corps, but I didn’t. I chose you. And you? You choose the fucking mall?”
She was the one who’d taught me that words mattered, that words could make worlds, or break them.
“I’m going, Lacey.”
“Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, talking too fast. “The bitch doesn’t matter. You matter, Dex. Me and you, like before. That’s all I want. Just tell me what I should do.”
Tell me what I should do. This was power.
I couldn’t say, Go fuck yourself.
I couldn’t say, Tell me what I should do. Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.
Somewhere below us, the front door opened and closed, hard. A baby screamed, and Lacey’s mother shouted her name in a witch’s howl; it broke the spell.
“I’m going, Lacey,” I said. “I’m done here.”
“Yeah.”
But I didn’t need her permission anymore.
I DIDN’T MEAN FOR IT TO be the end.
Or maybe I did.
She came back to school in head-to-toe black, with a silver pentagram around her neck and a bloody tear painted beneath her eye. We didn’t speak. By lunch, rumor had congealed into fact: Lacey had Satan on speed dial. Lacey had snuck into Mrs. Greer’s room and turned her contraband cross upside down. Lacey had fallen into a trance on the softball field and started speaking in tongues. Lacey drank pig’s blood for breakfast; Lacey kept a bloody rabbit’s foot in her pocket for luck; Lacey had joined a death cult.
“She’s desperate for attention,” Nikki said that night on the phone. “Your attention, probably. Don’t fall for it.”
Nikki didn’t ask me what I thought Lacey was up to, but she was the only one. People who hadn’t spoken to me since junior high accosted me in the halls, wanting to know whether Lacey really thought she could call Satan’s wrath down upon her enemies, whether I thought she could. I liked it.
My mother asked me, occasionally, why Lacey never came around—it didn’t seem like she was disappointed, more like she thought I was hiding something she needed to know—but I usually mumbled something about being busy and hoped she wouldn’t bring it up again. My father pushed harder, told me that whatever Lacey’d done I could forgive, and I wondered what made him think that she was the one at fault. Or why he couldn’t decide whether we were better off with or without her. I didn’t ask. This was how we conversed, now, my father talking at me while I played a wall. I couldn’t remember why I was so angry with him. Because he’d kept things from me; because he hadn’t fixed things for me; because in some indefinable way he’d taken Lacey from me, which seemed an even greater sin now that she was back. Because he didn’t like the Hannah I’d become, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.
Don’t you miss her, he said, and of course I did, and he was also saying without saying, don’t you miss me, and of course I did that, too. But it was safer like this, to be a wall. To be Hannah. My father, Lacey—neither of them understood why that mattered, staying safe. They didn’t know what it was to wake up on damp ground with a stranger’s boot toeing your flesh, to find words on your skin that named your secret self. They didn’t still, sometimes in the shower, rub themselves raw, imagining ink seeping into their skin, invisible brands leaving permanent marks. They didn’t know what it was not to remember.