“See that!” She was triumphant. “You’re a total stranger, but it’s like we already know each other. You feel that, too?”
Although almost everything I’d told her since we got into the car had been a favor-currying lie, it all felt true. It did seem like she knew me, or was conjuring a new me into existence, one question at a time, and it made perfect sense for her to know that girl inside and out. Knowledge is a creator’s prerogative.
“What number am I thinking of?” I said.
She squinted her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples. “You’re not thinking of any number. You’re thinking about what happened at school.”
“Am not.”
“Bullshit. You’re thinking about it, but trying not to think about it with everything you’ve got, because if you let yourself do it, really marinate in it, you’ll start crying and screaming and polishing up the brass knuckles, and that would be messy. You hate messy.”
It wasn’t wholly appealing, being known.
“What are you afraid of, Dex? You get angry, really angry, what’s the worst that happens? You think you’ll make Nikki Drummond’s brain leak out of her ears, just by wanting it?”
“I should probably get home,” I said.
“God, look at you, all pale and squirmy. It’s not a mortal sin, getting fucking mad. I swear.”
But anger like that, it wasn’t smart. There was no upshot to letting myself feel it.
Feeling it hurt.
“Stick a tampon up your cunt,” I said, because maybe that was the way to exorcise it. Get it out of my head and into the world.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what she said. Nikki. Today.”
Lacey whistled. “That’s fucked.” She started to laugh then, but not at me. I was sure of that. “Little Miss Perfect Pottymouth. Fucking ridiculous.” And then, miraculously, we were both laughing.
“You know why I brought you here?” she said, finally, as we sobered up.
“To psychoanalyze me to death?”
She lowered her voice to a serial killer pitch. “Because here, no one can hear you scream.”
As I was wondering whether I’d just entered act three of a Lifetime movie, the kind where the heroine accepts a ride with a stranger and ends up floating facedown in the lake, Lacey stepped to the edge of the water, threw her head back, and screamed. It was a beautiful thing, a tide of righteous fury, and I wanted it for my own.
Then it stopped, and she turned to me. “Your turn.”
I tried.
I stood where Lacey had stood, my Keds ghosting her boot prints. I looked out at the water, skimmed with patches of ice, something primordial in their shimmer. I watched my breath fog the air and fisted my fingers inside my gloves, for warmth, for power.
I stood at the edge of the water and wanted, so much, to scream for her. To prove her right, that we were the same. What she felt, I felt. What she said, I would do.
Nothing came out.
Lacey took my hand. She leaned against me, touched her head to mine. “We’ll work on it.”
The next morning, Nikki Drummond found a bloody tampon stuffed through the vent of her locker. She cornered me in the girls’ bathroom that afternoon, hissing what the fuck is wrong with you as we washed our hands and tried not to look at each other in the mirror.
“Today, Nikki?” And then I did look at her, the Gorgon of Battle Creek, and I didn’t turn to stone. “Not a single fucking thing.”
LACEY
Me Before You
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO know everything, Dex—and for what it’s worth, I’m pretty fucking sure your eyes are bigger than your stomach on that one—you should know that, before it all started, I was like you. Maybe not exactly like, not so willfully oblivious that I’d forgotten what I was trying to ignore, but close enough.
We lived by the beach.