Girls on Fire

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

Girls had to believe in anything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe the things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true. They wondered, sometimes, if they'd made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened that couldn't be satisfied, to pain that couldn't be felt, a rage that couldn't be spoken.

You could love something and still understand it had ruined your life.

I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments

The love you needed was the kind best avoided.

Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.

Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousness will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song. Come down come away with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel's, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other.

The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness.

Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it's neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I'd only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.

Impossible not to see them, not to remember what it was like, when it was like that. To sit there, shivering, as the sun dips toward the horizon and the wind blows cold over the waves, as the sky blazes red and darkness gathers around the girls, neither of them knowing how little time they have left before the fire goes out. Remember how good it felt to burn.

That if I pretended hard enough nothing was waiting to claim me, nothing ever would.

...Which is to say, I'd been lonely for so long, I'd forgotten that I was. That feeling of disconnection, of grief for something I'd never had, of screaming into a void and knowing no one would hear me---I'd forgotten that was anything other than the basic condition of life.

She felt, at times, that what had seemed like an infinity of choice turned out to be a funnel, life narrowing itself one bad decision at a time, each mistake cutting the options by half, spiraling her ever downward until there was nowhere left to fall but into a small, dark hole that had no bottom. Choosing

The girl was troubled; the girl was trouble. As all girls were troubled, as all girls were trouble.

Pick a pair of them, lost in each other, a matched set like a vision out of the past. Nobody special, two nobodies. Except that together, they're radioactive; together, they glow.

I think you grow up different, by the water. You grow up knowing there’s a way out.

According to Lacey I had the lyrics all wrong. I sang like it sounded to me, because those words sounded right: I loved you I'm not going back I killed you I'm not going back.

I knew we were better together than we were alone, and better still than everyone else, and that was enough.

See them in their golden hour, a flood of girls high on the ecstasy of the final bell, tumbling onto the city bus, all gawky limbs and Wonderbra cleavage, chewed nails picking at eruptive zits, lips nibbling and eyes scrunching in a doomed attempt not to cry. Girls with plaid skirts tugged unfathomably high above the knee, girls seizing the motion of the bus to throw themselves bodily into their objects of affection.

Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.

There had to be consequences. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.

What it would be to be like one of them. To have power, be seen, be heard, be dudes rather than sluts, be jocks and geeks or bros or nice guys or boys-will-be-boys instead of quantum leaping between good girl and whore. To be the default, not the exception. To be in control, to seize control, simply because we happened to have a dick.

Girls had to believe in everything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

Dex’s mother knew what it was to lose herself in someone brighter, to be trapped by the gravitational field of another sun. She knew what happened when it emerged that the sun was only a lightbulb, and what happened when the lightbulb burned out.

I don't believe in Our Dark Lord of the Underworld or the rising of the Antichrist, I don't believe in child sacrifice or wild midnight blood rituals, and I don't believe that I can call on the power of Satan to knock some cheerleader off her pyramid. Wearing black felt safe. Wearing it on my skin, the mark of something vicious, that felt right.

Now I wonder, Nicki said. Didn't we all? What it would be like to be one of them, to have power, be seen, be heard, be dude rather than sluts, be jocks or geeks, or bros or nice guys, or boys will be boys, or whatever we wanted instead of quantum leaping between good girl and whore. To be the default, not the exception, to be in control, to seize control, simply because we happen to have a dick.

They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong.

My secret self, the scarecrow-Lacey built of twigs and mud and bark, the Lacey who was made of forest and would someday be summoned home.

It was only ours the way everything was ours: because the world we created between the two of us was secret and wholly owned.