Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman

Author:Robin Wasserman [WASSERMAN, ROBIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: urn:ean:9781408707104
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group UK
Published: 2015-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

THE LAST SUNDAY IN JULY, I went outside. Just a ride around the block, on the bike my father had quietly collected from the postparty wreckage. The sun felt good. The air smelled good, like grass and summer. The wind sounded good, that thunder you could hear only when you were in motion. When I was a kid, bike riding was an adventure, bad guys on my tail and the wind rushing through a mountain pass, passageway to enchantment. The bike itself was magic back then, the only thing other than a book that could carry me away. But that was kid logic, the kind that ignored the simple physics of vectors. It didn’t matter how fast I pedaled if I was turning in circles. The bike always carried me home.

My father was smoking on the porch steps; he’d started in June, after. The cigarettes made the house smell like a stranger.

I dumped the bike on the lawn, and he stubbed the butt into the cement stair.

“Hannah,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just . . . It’s good to see you out.”

“Don’t get used to it.” I said it with my best take-no-shit Lacey front.

He lit up another cigarette. Chain-smoking now. Home in the middle of the day. Probably only a matter of time before he got fired again, or maybe he already had and was afraid to admit it. That used to be the kind of secret we kept. It had seemed romantic, the Don Quixote of it all, his conviction that the present was just prologue to some star-spangled future, but these days he only seemed pathetic. Lacey would have said I was starting to sound like my mother.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I don’t think she’s coming back. Lacey. And I don’t want you thinking it’s about you, that she left.”

Lacey was gone, and he was still trying to claim a piece of her.

“Something happened at her house,” he said. When I asked what made him think that, he admitted—and it had the timbre of admission—“She came here, that night. Before she left.”

Everything went still.

“What did you say to her?

“She needed someone to talk to,” he said. “We talked sometimes.”

What the fuck, the old Dex, the Dex who had Lacey, would have said. What the fuck are you talking about, what the fuck is wrong with you, what the fuck have you done?

She is mine, that Dex would have said, and believed it.

“Your friend had some problems,” he said.

“Everyone has problems.”

“You didn’t know everything about her, kid.”

“What did you say to her?” I asked again. “What did you say that made her leave?”

“All I know is, something happened at home and it upset her. She didn’t want to go back there.”

“But you made her.” My voice was steady, my face blank; he couldn’t have known what he was doing. What was burning away between us.

“No—”

“You told her not to?”

“No . . .”

“So what did you say?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop her. A person has to want to be helped.

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