Lacey was a driver—I would come to understand that. She was always inventing field trips for us: We drove to a UFO landing site, a Democratic rally where we pretended to be Ross Perot groupies and a Republican rally where we pretended to be Communists, a sixties-style drive-in with roller-skating ushers, and the Big Mac Museum, which was lame. They were, more than anything, excuses to drive. That first day, she invented no destination; we drove in circles. Motion was enough.
There was something deliciously numbing about it, the sameness of the clapboard houses and seamed concrete, the day unspooling behind us as we circled the town. I tried to imagine how it looked to her, determinedly idyllic Battle Creek with its antique stores and its ice cream shoppe, its empty storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs, its chest-thumping pride, every forced smile and flapping flag insisting this was the real America, that we were salt of the earth and blood of the heartland, that our flat green corner of Pennsylvania was a walled-off Eden, untouched by the violence and sin endemic to the modern age, that the town mothers worried only over their pie crusts and garden weeds, the town fathers limited themselves to one after-dinner beer and never prowled beneath their secretaries’ skirts, the sons and daughters had only sitcom troubles and, despite their hormones and halter tops, knew enough to wait. When something went awry, when a golden child slipped a gun in his mouth and bled brains on damp earth, it could only be evidence of attack or contagion, an incursion of them, never a fault line through the heart of us. When night came, it was easy to ignore the things the children did in the dark.
It was impossible, seeing home through her eyes, like seeing your own face as a stranger would. This was my greatest fear, that Battle Creek was my mirror. That Lacey would look at one, see the other, and dismiss us both.
“I can’t believe you have a car,” I said. I didn’t even have a license. “If I had one, I’d drive away and never come back.”
“Want to?” Lacey said. Like it would be that easy to Thelma-and-Louise ourselves out of Battle Creek for good. Like I could be a different girl, my own opposite, and all it took was saying yes.
Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, all revealed to me in a single burst of glaringly obviously light. Maybe it took longer than one car ride to slough off a lifetime of Hannah Dexter—a careful study of the right bands, the slow but steady creep of delinquency, flannel and combat boots, hair dye and shrooms and the nerve to violate at least a handful of commandments—but that’s not how I remember it now. That’s not how it felt then. It felt, right there in that car, like I could choose to be Dex. Everything after was paperwork.
“We drive straight through, we could make it to Ohio by midnight,” Lacey said. “We’d be at the Rockies in a day or two.”
“We’re going west?”
“Of course we’re going west.”
West, Lacey said, was the frontier. West was the edge of the world, the place you fled in search of gold or God or freedom; it was cowboys and movie stars, surfboards and earthquakes and pitiless desert sun.
“So, you want to?”
Three times that year, like some fairy-tale temptress, Lacey asked me to leave with her, and every time I refused, imagining I was being prudent, refusing to give into the temptation of running wild. Not understanding that the wild was waiting for me in Battle Creek—the danger was in staying.
That time, I didn’t say yes or no. I only laughed, and so instead of the promised land, she drove us to a lake. Twenty miles out of town, it had a swimming beach for families, a dock for fishermen, reeds and shadows for lovers, a muddy bed of empty beer cans for the rest. That day it was all silence and space, leafless branches overhanging a gray shore, abandoned docks where ghosts of children past bounced on invisible rafts and dove into sparkling blue. Winter had come, and the lake belonged to us. I’d been there before, though not often, because my mother hated the beach and my father the water. Building mounds in the sand beside a beach full of kids living in an L.L.Bean ad, shaded by beach umbrellas, tossed from fathers’ shoulders into the water, I always felt like the defective half of a Goofus and Gallant comic: Gallant builds a castle with a moat; Gallant buries her mother in the sand; Gallant practices her dead man’s float and does handstands on the muddy lake bottom. Goofus lies on a towel with a book while her mother pencils through work files and her father opens another beer; Goofus teaches herself to tread water and wonders who would rescue her from drowning, since neither parent knows how to swim.
Lacey shut off the engine and the music, dousing us in awkward silence.
She breathed deep. “I love it here in the winter. Everything dead. It feels like being inside a poem, you know?”
I said I did.
“Do you write?” she asked. “I can tell you’re the type. The word type.”
I said I did, again, though it had only the most tenuous connection to truth. Somewhere in my room was a pile of abandoned diaries, each filled with a few stilted entries and several hundred blank pages, each a reminder of how little I had to say. I preferred other people’s stories. For Lacey, though, I could be a girl who made her own.