The November Girl

by Lydia Kang

  “Oops!” Hector reaches out to steady me. “Okay?”

  It’s odd, how he checks in with me this way. He seems to search for an answer to satisfy him, like “Yes” or “No” or “May I hold your shoes?” I stare him down, trying to understand his intentions, and he looks away, discomfited by my eyes. He consciously steps farther away from me, and I don’t like this, either.

  I don’t know what to do.

  Because you’re trying to be something you aren’t. Stop trying.

  But she’s incorrect. Part of me has always belonged in the realm of humanity, but I keep having to remind myself of this. And now I’m remembering things like mewling hunger, and clothing, and care. They are utterly complicated, like the English language and its mockingly arbitrary rules, but I am enjoying practicing this side of myself with Hector. I want to stay here. I should like to lick more chocolate off the corners of his mouth, if given the opportunity.

  Yes. I would like to stay here awhile.

  You’re making a mistake. You’ll suffer.

  I ignore her.

  “Look at this fellow.” Hector stops on the side of the path.

  I step closer and see a tiny beautiful blue-spotted salamander among the sticks and detritus of fall. This time of year, they aren’t out and about. Their blood gets more sugary to prevent them from freezing, and they stay hidden beneath rocks.

  The salamander is dead.

  Hector points. “Look, there are more.”

  And there are. Six or seven, out in the open, dried and dead from the cold and exposure. Usually the island creatures understand the timing of things. I make sure that the balance is kept, the cycles of renewal and slumber. But something is wrong. I didn’t sense that their death was coming. Worse, it has come too soon.

  “They shouldn’t be out here where they don’t belong,” I say, more to myself than to Hector.

  “Tell me about it,” Hector says, and I look at him sharply. The wind is strikingly quiet, letting me absorb his words for a change. She wants me to admit the truth, and also show me a warning. This is what might happen. This is what you’ve started.

  Hector shivers from the wind at his back. A wind that I didn’t create.

  “Let’s go home,” he says.

  Home. Such an odd word, one that hasn’t fit into my world. The cabin has its moods and whims, and tolerates my presence. Father is not there. I am used to fitting into a space larger than anything a human conceives of—in crevices and pockets and atmospheres of pressure that aren’t comforting. But when Hector says home, for once I actually understand him.

  “Yes,” I say. “Let’s go home.”

  ...

  That week, I count down the remaining days to November. After the St. Anne, I am tepidly appeased, but it isn’t enough. The closer to November it gets, the more trouble I will have controlling myself. I had decided not to bend to my nature because of Hector, but as the hours go by, my needs will try desperately to surpass any rationality.

  Hector spends hours listening to the radio. He watches the Coast Guard ships decrease in number and eventually leave the wreck site of the St. Anne, and he watches me, too. Furtively, out of the corner of his eye, such as when I’m eating. He doesn’t comment when I leave a plate of food alone.

  I am hungry, and I am not.

  It’s a strange thing, needing food. Listening to the complaints of your body all the time and obeying the whims and growls of flesh. But my physical hunger sometimes feels like a phantom, standing in for something far more nourishing.

  Hector and I finish the last of the flour, making pancakes. Father knew how little I ate, and the food stores he’d left were more a token of care than anything substantial. There is no more jam, no sugar. The new provisions from the camp store are piled on the countertop, but it’s a small pile. Hector watches that, too, like it’s going to vanish if he turns his back. And yet when he spies me studying the pile from afar, he’ll quietly bring me a wrapped bar before I can ask if it’s okay to eat. Even though we’ve nearly outeaten the tiny house.

  And not just that. The house has grown too small for us, though the math doesn’t work. We’re still just two people, yet together, we’ve managed to expand and become something that needs far more space than these walls. I bump into him constantly. The house seems keen on keeping me off balance. Hector doesn’t seem to mind; he cannot hide his smile every time we softly collide.

  I look out the window, staring at the clouds, but they’re ominously silent. So I turn on the weather radio and sit with it for almost an hour. Hector thinks I’m simply concerned with the forecast.

  West winds nearing forty-five knots by afternoon

  Hmm. Already angry with me, it seems.

  A slight chance of thunderstorms in the early evening

  That’s a threat. Or an invitation.

  Temperatures holding at forty-five, dropping to thirty overnight

  It’s funny how I used to listen to the forecast to tell me what I already knew. It was a spineless friend that would parrot my own thoughts and feelings. Now I’m needing the radio to interpret for me. I’m becoming an outsider in my own life.

  The day before November 1, Hector wakes up and makes a breakfast of oatmeal. He watches me carefully as I lift the spoon to my mouth. I swallow and repeat until the bowl is empty. He barely lifts his own spoon. His own gruel has gone congealed and cold as he watches me lick the bowl clean.

  “That oatmeal was salted,” he says.

  I blink at him, not knowing if I’m supposed to answer.

  “I substituted sugar for salt. A lot of salt. On purpose.”

  I blink again. What is he trying to say? But he only gets up to eat his oatmeal alone outside the house, staring at where the wreck of the St. Anne should be.

  That’s when I realize he’s testing me.

  He does it several times that week. Once, he tells me, “Anda, it’s windy outside,” when it isn’t. The air is so still, it hangs heavy like curtains in a shut room. It’s another test, only I’m not sure if I should fail or succeed. So I bring the wind. It hits Hector so hard that he trips and falls backward, agape.

  “Yes,” I agree with him. “It’s windy outside.”

  Another time, he remarks on how he misses the green leaves in spring.

  “Fall is always so gloomy,” he says, which confuses me. A cycle is a cycle, and the cycle is magnificence itself. But it upsets him. When I don’t respond, he goes outside and paces next to the house. I’ve already forgotten that I need to be careful about what I do. I ought to conceal myself and what I am, but it’s not easy when I’ve never been able to hide from him. Not once.

  I lift my forefinger, pushing against sleep and slumber inside the soil, and force a marsh pea vine into the cutting air, letting the pea flowers bloom with pink and purple duskiness. Hector sees it immediately. His eyes widen as he watches the display, before plucking the narrow stem bedecked with flowers. He stares and stares, turning it left and right. He stares at them so long, the sun sets hours later and he’s still fixated by their ghostliness in the dark.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  HECTOR

  None of it makes sense.

  I hold the flower until it wilts in my hand, and then lay it carefully on the ground. In the gloom just past twilight, I can still see it, the pale pink against the soil’s darkness. As soon as it touches the ground, it disintegrates. When my fingers touch where it was, the only thing that comes away is ash.

  I don’t have words for the theories forming in my mind. There are too many things that don’t make sense. Part of me wants to leave and run clear over to the other side of the island. But part of me knows that somehow, I’d arrive and find her waiting for me.

  There are too many reasons to stay. Like having a bona fide roof over my head. And the fact that Anda doesn’t ask me questions or psychologize me to death. I haven’t ever spent this much time in the presence of another human and not felt like running away. It’s narcotic, the feeling I get b
eing around her.

  That night, I wash up and get ready to sleep. Anda has been in her room, door closed, for hours. I don’t bother her. Since I’ve camped out in her place, she hasn’t asked me to leave. And she doesn’t say things like “good morning” or “good night.” I’m relieved not to abide by all the fake words that people use. It used to bother me when people said hi, what’s up. Because they didn’t really want to hear the answer, the truth. So I wouldn’t answer. That may explain why I have no friends.

  I curl up on the sofa, pulling a nubbly knit blanket over me, and shut my eyes. It’s a relief knowing that my uncle isn’t in this cabin, or on this island, or within a hundred miles. Even with the camping, I’ve never slept as peacefully as I have on this island, frozen ass and all.

  Just when I’m drifting off, a shuffling noise rouses me. I don’t move, just listen carefully. It’s a shuffling of feet, and I crack one eye open in the darkness. The moon is full and shining through the window, casting a weirdly bluish-metallic rectangle on the floor near the sofa.

  Anda walks to the window where the moonlight is streaming through, and the light illuminates her white hair like a halo. She stares out the window at the moon on the lake water. Her hands are balled in fists, like she’s quietly struggling with something. There’s a tiny plop. I raise my head just a bit to see a liquid splash on the floor. Is she crying?

  She turns. It’s too late to hide that I’m awake. Her hands are still in fists, and her eyes are red-rimmed and hostile.

  Oh shit. Here it comes.

  She steps closer to me, and I don’t move a muscle. I’m afraid to look her in the eye, but that becomes impossible when she kneels by the sofa and we’re face-to-face. There are a million emotions across her features, and none of them are peaceful. She reaches out, and her warm hand slips right under my jaw, right against my windpipe.

  It’s a weird gesture. If this were a Marvel movie, she’d have lifted my whole body by the neck to fling me through a wall. But she just holds her palm there. And then something changes in her face. Curiosity flits across her features, and her fingers move from my neck to the patchy beard under my jaw.

  I’ve never grown it out before, and it’s long enough that it’s passed the itchy stage. I’ve seen myself in the mirror, and it’s not a full beard, either. I’m only seventeen, after all. Her fingers explore my chin, then move up my cheeks. Her other hand joins the exploration, and I swallow, wondering if she’s going to slit my throat next. Part of me thinks I can take her down. The other part of me is unsure.

  “Do you like it?” she asks uncertainly.

  I’m going to assume she’s talking about my beard, not her exploration of said beard.

  “I don’t know,” I answer finally. I swallow again. “Do you?”

  She cocks her head to the side, then leans in close. Her breath smells a little like the wind outside. She rubs her cheek against the stubble, softly. When she sits back, she touches her own cheek.

  “I like everything about you, Hector.” Her hand goes back to petting my face. Weird, weird, weird. “What does it look like when it’s gone?”

  “If I had a razor, I’d shave it off for you.”

  “I have one. I borrowed it from the camp store in Windigo.”

  Maybe I should tell her that there is no such thing as “borrowing” disposable razors. Unless people are trying to catch some sort of disease.

  “It’s only fair. You cut my hair,” she reasons.

  I’m a little afraid of saying no. “Okay. Let’s do it,” I say with more bravery than I feel.

  She beams at me.

  Inside the cabin, she digs up the disposable razor still in the paper packaging. I thought she was just quietly gobbling chocolate the whole time she was in the camp store. In the bathroom, I find a small bottle of liquid castile soap the color of olive oil and a cup of water to rinse the razor in. The bathroom is too cramped and small, so we move to the living room. Still worried about being spotted by boats near the shore, I light a candle instead of using the lamps and set it on the table next to the sofa.

  I peel the razor out of its packaging and hesitate. The idea of a razor in her hands makes me nervous, even though the worst she could do is nick me.

  “You’re nervous,” she comments.

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you, Hector.” She looks at the razor in my hand and frowns. Her hair resembles white silk. “On purpose, I mean.”

  “I know,” I murmur. Without thinking, I blurt out, “Would you, though?”

  “Would I what?” she asks.

  “Would you hurt me, if I asked you to?”

  Anda abruptly widens her eyes and moves away from me. I put out my hands, realizing what a fucked-up question that was. “I’m sorry. Never mind. Just ignore that. Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t.”

  “Sometimes,” she says slowly, “I do things I shouldn’t.”

  We take simultaneous deep breaths.

  She pours the soap into her wet hand and lathers up my face. I kind of feel like a puppy being shampooed by a toddler. She’s really sloppy, and lather drips on my lap and shirt. But I don’t say anything.

  “Okay.” I hand her the razor. “I’m all yours.”

  I lean forward, and she kneels in front of me. After guiding her hand with a few strokes on the flat planes of my cheeks, I let go and close my eyes.

  She holds my jaw with one hand and slowly drags the razor across my other cheek. I make the standard, face-warping expressions so she can shave off my sparse mustache, and she has to stop because of a fit of laughter.

  “I have to look like this, to make my skin as flat as possible. It’s easier to shave that way.”

  “You look like a clown,” she gasps, trying to catch her breath.

  “That’s nothing new,” I comment, smiling.

  She snuffs out the laughter and looks at me seriously. “What? You think your face is amusing?”

  “Well, sort of. I don’t know,” I say, flustered.

  She sits back on her heels and pauses, opening her mouth and forming her words so slowly, as if each one were created for the first time, only for me. “You are…the most beautiful boy…I have ever beheld.”

  My stomach does a three-sixty. “I’m sorry, what century were you born in again?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Don’t you think you are pretty?” she asks.

  Pretty. Wow. “Not really. I might have lived with my mother forever if I didn’t look so much like my dad.”

  “Do you look like her?”

  I stare at my hands. Deep brown with pale palms. Long fingers. Just like my father’s. “I do. Enough to keep my dad away. He hates her for leaving him and then dumping me in his lap.”

  “But you don’t live with him?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re not on his hands?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what I am.”

  This is the part where my social worker tells me none of this is my fault. Where temporary friends would cuss out my parents for screwing me up, and curse my uncle for being such a shitty pseudo-parent, even without knowing my own suspicions of how dead-souled he really is. Words can’t fix any of it; they just remind me of what’s gone wrong.

  So when Anda stays silent and goes back to shaving me, I mentally thank her and audibly sigh with relief. She reaches for my chin, tilting it up.

  “Be still,” she whispers.

  She drags the razor up my neck, against the angle between my neck and chin, and then over the sharp-angled jawbone. Scrape after scrape, sweep after sweep. Swishing it in the water between strokes, like I showed her. I’m surprised at how good she is at this and how nervous she isn’t. She keeps going until it’s all done. I wipe down my face and neck with a damp towel. When I take it away, I see a tiny red dot.

  “Oh! I did cut you,” she says sorrowfully, and leans in to see the damage.

  I feel the tiny sting on my neck, jus
t next to my Adam’s apple. “It’s nothing. I’ll just—oh hell.”

  Anda’s leaned forward and has her mouth on my neck, her tongue gently probing the area where the nick is. She licks at it the way a child would gently suck a paper cut. It sends ripples of feeling through my chest down to my toes and I grasp her shoulders.

  I want to push her away.

  I want her never to stop.

  Her hands slither up my chest and capture my neck, thumbs at the angles of my jaw on either side. I manage to push her away, just enough to see her eyes—dilated on a circlet of steel gray. I’m afraid she might just tear my jugular wide open and have a bowlful.

  “Hector. Don’t be afraid.” Her eyes drop to my lips.

  “Okay,” I lie. Because I’m terrified of what she could do to me. Of what she is doing, right now. And it has nothing to do with death, or blood. Or even this stupid body.

  She could tear me to pieces for all I care.

  And with that, I close the distance between us and kiss her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ANDA

  It is a peculiar and astonishing thing, kissing.

  I never understood it. Lips are for speaking, for eating, and for conjuring the necessary turbulence and resonance for whistling. They split when they’re too dry; they constantly invite my teeth for a bite.

  But when I kiss Hector, it isn’t just flesh on flesh. Hector tells me things he’s never said aloud. How he appreciates the puzzle that I am, the question with no answer. How he wants to give himself to me, though I’ve never asked for such a sacrifice. How he invites me to something far more precious than he’s ever given before. Something both holy and almost destructive.

  My fingers tingle, and I’ve forgotten that they’re around his neck. I pull so hard on the both of us that I slowly draw us backward. My spine soon drapes over the wood floor beneath me and Hector hovers above, sheltering me from the ceiling, the roof, the disapproving sky.

  You will regret this. Stop—

  But I don’t want to listen to her.

  I’d been traveling further and further away from this. Before, there was the path forward to convergence with the storms and no way to reverse it all. To be like my sisters and leave my father’s side of me behind forever. I thought that was what I wanted; in passivity, in my search to avoid pain, I let it happen.