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Here’s how the fire happens —
Out of the corner of Jennifer’s spellbound eye, licking up the frame of the only halfway decent bar in Devil’s Kettle. Needy pulls on her hand but they stumble, suck up smoke; their fingers tug and finally slip apart, a burning beam slamming down between them.
By the time Jennifer gets outside, the boys from Low Shoulder are putting Needy in their van, her grip white-knuckled as she clings to the open door. Their eyes lock, Needy’s wide and panicked behind her glasses. One lens is cracked, fracturing her blue iris. “Jennifer!” she screams, and Jennifer is already scrambling for the mace on her keyring, trying to run but tripping over the heel she broke inside — she loves these boots, fuck — and shouting back, “You fucking dicks! Needy!”
Those many hands suck Needy into the dark interior of the van. Door slams shut. They drive off.
Jennifer showers. She gets into bed and lets her mother tuck her in, poodle sheets up to the tits and her arms folded over them like she’s in her own coffin. “Oh, honey,” her mom says and smoothes her hair back, kisses her temple. She smells like ham after her date. She shuts off the light when she goes but the door is rimmed by the glow off the hallway.
Jennifer drove home and parked, left the door of the Sebring open without even realizing until her mom tore in half an hour later. Baby! she exclaimed, breathless as a Lifetime movie, and clasped Jennifer’s face in her hands; her smoky hair, her ashen cheek. That’s how her mom talks, honey, baby, Jenny, sweetie, doll. And of course the next words out of her mouth: “Where’s Needy?”
Wouldn’t Jennifer like to fucking know. She told dirtbag Roman, she said something to the guy who rolled in with the ambulance, but there were people with burns and shit, oozing blistered skin and gaspy breaths, so no one cared about some girl who went off with the band. “Needy wouldn’t do that,” Jennifer said. “It was those MySpace creeps, she was snatched, like hello, can we get an Amber Alert?”
They told her they’d file something. Jennifer texted Needy, she called, but there was a jingle from under the front seat of the car and she dug around until she found Needy’s phone there, her own name blazing up at her from its small screen.
WHR R U
HELLO?
R U OK
Light flashes under her door.
Jennifer bolts up.
Needy’s in a bad way. Her sad little purple tank top is all ripped up and there’s something dark in the gaps, same as whatever’s weighing down her blonde hair, crusted into the corner of her lips. Her fingernails are blackened underneath, grime caked under the ragged, bitten edges. She isn’t wearing her glasses but she still has her necklace, BFF on its gold heart laying between her collarbones.
“I can’t believe I liked those assholes,” Jennifer says. “I’m totally deleting those MP3s.”
She goes into sleepover mode. She doesn’t wake her mom, though she’s bound to see the wet muddy footsteps Needy dragged up the cream carpet of the hallway, uneven and barefoot. Instead Jennifer brings Needy into the bathroom to scrub her down, but under the bright bulb she can see that Needy’s smeared all over with blood. She’s lit up crimson. It gets on Jennifer’s hands, vibrant and sticky, and on her mom’s good towels, and the bathmat.
“Jeez, Needy, plug it up,” she says absently, her hands shaking, because Needy is just staring at her, staring and staring with her huge unblinking eyes in her serious face, and then she grabs Jennifer — grips her wrists tight with those filthy hands and will leave an imprint even after Jennifer washes the dirt off, scrapes and bruises like bracelets.
“Don’t worry,” Needy says. Her voice is rough and gravelly, dredged up through the muck. Her eyes are sleep-bruised pink underneath, but somehow that only makes her look more beautiful, dangerously beautiful the way she’s always been, but also kind of like the sepia photo of a dead woman you might find in an attic. She’s haunting. “They’re dead.”
“Dead? What do you mean, they’re dead?”
“I killed them.”
Then she pukes in Jennifer’s lap.
The whole story comes out later, like, way later — at Chip’s funeral, Needy tear-streaked in a black dress she borrowed from Jennifer, their hands clasped next to the hole in the earth. “I didn’t mean to, I swear,” she says miserably. “I was just really hungry.”
Their fingers are interlocked, a mess of knuckles, and it actually hurts how hard they’re holding onto each other. “How’d he taste?”
“Good,” Needy breathes, like the beginning of a binge good, like the Dorito dust at the bottom of the bag good, like ice cream right out of the carton.
“Huh,” Jennifer says. “I would’ve thought he’d be bitter.”
Those few weeks in between are weird in Jennifer’s memory, jagged and knocking into each other. Needy sitting in class spine-straight, her hair this gleaming curtain down her back, her face clear and purposeful. It was impossible not to look at her all the time. Something in her had been smoothed out, conditioned, and Jennifer wanted to touch her, not in a creepy way, but just to see if she was made of the same stuff as before. She reminded Jennifer of these little ceramic figures her grandma used to keep on the top of her piano, milkmaids with blushing cheeks, hard and lovely like that, except Needy’s eyes were cold.
She doesn’t need her glasses anymore. That’s the one thing Jennifer can’t get over.
That night, the night it happened, they slept in Jennifer’s bed together except sometime around dawn Needy started clawing at her, really clawing, leaving these marks all over her arms, her shoulders. Breathing heavy into Jennifer’s neck. Holding onto her thigh. Jennifer was sweating and tired, her skin fizzing all over, her nails busted from cleaning and the smell of bleach still in her nose.
“What,” she said, “Jesus Christ, Needy, what is it?”
Needy’s lips were against her neck, plush and flushed. “I’m still hungry.”
“I’ll get you a hundred cal pack, relax,” Jennifer said, but Needy was shaking her head and then she got up, flew out of the bed like she was really jonesing. She was wearing Jennifer’s clothes, baby tee and shorts, and what was strange was how not-strange it looked. Her body fit itself all of a sudden.
“I gotta go,” Needy said, “I gotta go home,” and before Jennifer could say anything else, she was hauling herself out the open window, gone. Into the dark.
The next day they said Roman had died in the fire, but Jennifer saw him after and she knew he hadn’t.
First it was the Low Shoulder boys going missing, a VH1 footnote, then Roman, then that baby-faced goth Jennifer only went out with because of the look on Needy’s face when Jennifer shot him down. She would’ve fucked him but he didn’t want to, said that meant something to him or whatever, and he dropped her off at home after their little bowling alley tryst. They found him in the woods two days later.
Nothing for a week. Then Chip.
Jennifer gets Needy dressed before the funeral. She sits listlessly on Jennifer’s bed in her widow’s weeds with black sheer stockings, still wearing her Keds. Jennifer puts lip gloss on her but she doesn’t really need it. Needy is a strawberry milkshake. Jennifer can practically taste her.
“I scrubbed that bathroom for you, bitch,” Jennifer says. “Fess up. Best friends don’t keep secrets.”
So Needy tells her.
Needy royally freaked in the van. She was like a feral cat, biting and scratching and kicking, so much that they nearly swerved and went off the road. She kicked the lead singer — Nikolai, fucking poser — in the jaw and that’s when they held her down, knocked her head back against the van floor until she saw stars, then nothing but the velvet dark.
“When I woke up,” she says, lifting her gaze to Jennifer, “they’d tied me down to this big rock.”
She only has bits and pieces. Her head was throbbing and she couldn’t see, their faces pale blurs in the dark of the woods, the falls rushing so loud she could barely hear. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She thinks she screamed. She probably screamed.
They had all this witchy stuff in the van, Needy says, skulls and pentagrams, big black books with red titles. They wanted to sacrifice her. And they did.
“They thought I was a virgin,” Needy says. “Because, like, what? I had my hair in a ponytail and I wear glasses? They wanted to be famous. They needed blood to do it.”
“But they’re not even metal,” Jennifer says.
The last thing Needy saw was the knife, held up high until it shone off the light of the waxing moon, Nikolai’s face reflecting back in it. “Twisted and evil,” Needy says. “Like that petrified tree from when we were kids. Do you remember?”
Jennifer doesn’t.
Nikolai brought the knife down. Again. Again, until Needy couldn’t even feel it anymore, until she was shredded.
The dark was deeper that time.
Jennifer’s fingertip keeps tapping her palm, this irrational nervous tic. She’s not fucking stupid, whatever her report card says, and she knew — she knew something, the same way she knew it was Needy before she turned the corner at school, or how they’d pick up the phone to call each other at the exact same moment. She knew what the news reports said — the deceased was partially consumed, likely by animals — and how Needy fidgeted with her bracelets ahead of each one, chewed her lip; how later it was like she’d stepped off the Victoria Secret runway, the after of every tragic before.
Needy was always so hungry.
“After, I wanted you,” Needy says. “I just wanted you.”
“Jennifer, do you think I’m evil?”
“I think you’re fucking amazing.”
“I’m killing people, though,” Needy says.
“You’re killing boys,” Jennifer says.
Jennifer likes finding out what Needy can do.
In Jennifer’s pink bedroom, Needy sticks out her tongue so Jennifer can light it on fire, pink tip dancing in the flicker off the lighter until it blackens. Jennifer watches it turn smooth and plump between Needy’s lips again like nothing ever happened, and the same is true after the razor, after Needy jumps from the second-floor window of her house.
Jennifer likes making sure Needy is full.
When she gets rundown she’s almost like the old Needy again, frazzled and snappish, but what kind of bestie would she be if Jennifer let Needy starve? She goes through their yearbook with a marker, circling possibilities and crossing out others, but Needy’s nerves get the best of her sometimes. Jennifer starts clicking around the creep database instead, guilt-free snacks registered with addresses listed. It’s easier than ordering Dominoes.
Needy still feels bad, sometimes.
“But isn’t it incredible?” Jennifer asks, her fingers pressing into Needy’s chest like she could reach in and get ahold of her heart if she wanted. “Don’t you feel great?”
“I feel strong,” Needy admits.
“Don’t you feel sexy?”
Needy meets her eyes. Her breathing changes. “I’m hungry, Jen,” she says. “I’m really hungry.”
Jennifer feels like the fire is inside her, like Needy can probably see it burning out through her irises, licking the back of her throat. “Let’s get you something to eat.”