WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I threw out my retainer with my lunch. Didn’t even notice until it was time to slip it back in my mouth and go to class, and that’s when I freaked the fuck out—because I could see it, wrapped in a napkin on the corner of my tray so it wouldn’t get gummy with French bread pizza. Sliding into the garbage on top of Terrence Clay’s leftover spaghetti and the tuna fish salad that Lindsay North, getting the same head start on anorexia she’d gotten on boobs, had tossed out uneaten. You want to know what my life was like before you? It was like, given a choice between going home without the retainer and taking a swim in a Dumpster, I didn’t even have to think. The janitor gave me a boost, and then watched me pick through the banana peels and clumps of spaghetti—I’ve blocked that part out, for the sake of my sanity. What I remember is that I found my retainer. I took it to the bathroom, ran it under some hot water, and—I try not to think about this, because it makes me feel like I’ve got bugs laying eggs inside my skin—I put it back in my mouth.
“Careless,” the janitor said after he pulled me out, after I’d finally stopped crying. “Means that much to you, why’d you throw it out in the first place?”
You tell me, Dex. Why would a person do that?
You came for me, like nothing had happened, like we were still Lacey and Dex, you and me forever. I felt more like a witch than usual, because I’d commanded it, you need me, and there you were. Needing me. You pretended it was a gift, like you were giving for once instead of taking, but you needed me to tell you what to do next.
You told me what my mother said when you went looking for me at the house: Lacey doesn’t live here anymore. But you didn’t say how she said it, regretful or worried or relieved. Lacey doesn’t live here anymore. Turns out that, even in Battle Creek, some secrets keep—especially when they’re about something people would rather not know.
You took her suggestion and came for me in the Giant parking lot, and when you found me, you didn’t look at me like I was some charity case, and you didn’t ask me stupid questions, you just said, Lacey, I have a surprise for you, something you’re going to like.
Lacey, trust me.
What would you have done if you’d known the truth, Dex? That when you tapped on my window, you were—for the first time in months—not even a speck on my mind. It was Halloween, and that night, of all nights, I was thinking about Craig, and about Nikki. I was thinking kind thoughts about Nikki and how I’d held her while she cried. I wondered if she felt it, on this night, dressed up somewhere in some stupid slutty kitten costume, laughing and drinking and finding someone else to make hurt as much as she did. If she’d been the one to tap at my window that night, I would have let her in, and I would have taken her into my arms and sung her to sleep. I would have given her what I owed her, because I couldn’t give her what I’d taken, and maybe she would have done the same for me.
It wasn’t her. It was you.
Your face, a ghost materializing on the other side of the glass, that hopeful smile, same as the first time I ever talked to you, like maybe, if you pressed your hand to the window, I would meet it with mine.
You had a surprise for me, you said. That night, of all nights, a surprise in the woods.
ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE was a girl who loved the woods, the cool sweep of browning greens, the canopy of leafy sky. Hidden in the trees, she picked flowers and dug for worms, she recited poems, timing the words to the bounce of her feet in the dirt. In the woods she met a monster, and mistook her for a friend. Into the woods they went, deeper and darker, and carved a sacred ring around a secret place, where the monster dug out pieces of the girl and buried them in the ground so that the girl could never truly leave, and never bear to return.
Once upon a time, another time, there was a girl who screamed in the forest of her dreams and woke up to grasping fingers and dead eyes, more monsters to carry her back home, and this is when the girl realized it was her fate, to live under the rotting bark and the molding stones, that she could escape, but always, somehow, the woods would claim her.
That’s your kind of story, isn’t it, everything tidied up and turned pretty. You wouldn’t like to hear that once upon a time there was a girl who got totally fucked up by what happened to her in the woods, that there was blood and piss and shit and death, that the woods were where the girl turned into a killer and a devil and a witch, and that even the thought of going back, especially to that place, on that night, made bile rise up in her throat and she had to rake her nails down her palm so hard she drew blood just to keep from screaming.