When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

He went back to tending my palms, rinsing away the hydrogen peroxide and bandaging the cuts.

  But something wasn’t right. The reason he didn’t know what time my curfew was was because I was almost always home for the night by eight o’clock, hunched up on one corner of the couch, reading a book. His punishment was absurd—not a real punishment. And that’s when it occurred to me: he didn’t believe my confession. He was humoring me.

  My suspicions were borne out the next day when Rosebush Lincoln confronted me on the street outside the drugstore where they sold colorful ices.

  “You were supposed to take the blame,” she said.

  “I did,” I assured her. “I did. I told my dad I did it.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I swear.”

  “Then how come I’m the one being punished for everything? How come Idabel’s mom told my mom I was a bad influence?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a liar.” She pointed one long finger at my chest.

  “I’m not. I told my dad it was me.” I paused. “It’s just—I don’t think he believed me.”

  Rosebush Lincoln looked disgusted.

  “Oh, that’s just great. You can’t even convince people you’ve done something wrong when you try. Just stay away from me from now on.”

  * * *

  At that age we didn’t know what we did. Or, rather, we understood that it was impossible for things to go any differently. We were too young to change the course of bodies in motion.

  My husband, Jack, he’s a schoolteacher, but a new kind of schoolteacher, a kind we didn’t have when I was a child. He works with kids who are At Risk—as though safety were such a common commodity that you could easily hang a tag from all those young people who didn’t possess it. He has one girl—Natalie, who prefers to be called Nat—who sneers and curses and spits sunflower seeds at his shoes while he’s trying to have regular, humane conversations with her. She has been sent to the principal’s office many times for fighting with boys and other girls. She, too, knows about tearing out hair.

  Trying to get her to rationalize her behavior, Jack asks her why she does the things she does.

  “I don’t know” is her reply. She says it as though the question is an absurd one and has no true answer.

  I am curious how she would respond if I had my hands squeezed around her throat. (Would her muscles grow taut, wild?) But I also understand the authenticity of what she says. People like to talk to teenagers about consequences. They like to explain how certain actions may lead to reactions that are undesired. But this is the wrong conversation to have. Teenagers understand inherently how one thing leads to another—but to them the point is moot, because the action that initiates its consequence is just as inscrutable as the consequence itself. The mouth that spits at my husband might as well not be her mouth at all. His shoes might as well be anyone’s shoes, the room a room far away in some other nondescript American suburb.

  That is the way of the young. They see something we don’t: the great machines that turn us, indifferent to our will, this way and that.

  So I wasn’t angry at Rosebush Lincoln for asking me to lie to my father. And I wasn’t angry at her when she shunned me for not having lied well enough. And I wasn’t even angry about the things she did to Hondy Pilt. All she did was play her part in a tableau that, as far as I was concerned, couldn’t have gone any other way.

  Sometimes, when I was a girl, I climbed onto the roof through the gabled window of my second-story bedroom. From the chimney peak, I could see all the way up and down the street. It was as tall as my world got, and it was wonderful. Those summer evenings, I would lie on the sloping shake, securing myself with the soles of my sneakers, watching the stars come out. From my meager height, I beheld the whole entire world as I knew it. And what could be bad about all this?

  Chapter 2

  My name is Lumen. My father says my mother gave me the name because it means light. I am a light, and I light the way. That’s what the North Star and guardian angels do. But my name also means this:

  is me, Lumen. Lumen as a unit. is how many candelas. Candela is another beautiful name. I wish I knew someone named Candela so we could be Lumen and Candela, and we would define each other in measurements of light. The mathematics of illumination. is another unit, steradians, but that is an angular measurement—it defines the direction in which a light is shining. If the light is democratic, if it is loving and gentle and good, if it doesn’t prefer one angle over another, then the equation becomes even more beautiful:

  Because there are four pi steradians in a perfect, all-encompassing sphere.

  Here I am, now matured to fifteen years of age, and my grades are excellent, the best in school, and I am also smaller than all the other girls in my class, delayed in my growth—stunted, even—and I stay in the library after the final bell rings to look up my name in the large, dusty encyclopedias.

  Who could know me? Not my mother, who was dead before I remember. Not my friends, who seem to have found their way into an idea of adulthood. Maybe not even my father, who is generous to a fault and believes so heartily in the errorlessness of me that I wear myself out with being his good daughter. So maybe these books know for certain who I am. They seem so absolute about what they know. They etch my name in perfect symbols. They draw lines to define me, they show how Lumen equates to other delicious little glyphs. I want to be the precision of these equations. Then I could justify who I am.

  So yes, there I am in the library, turning the pages of encyclopedias. My ankles itch under my socks. Many of the other boys and girls in my class, Polly included, have gone down to the lake to swim. The boys have tied a rope to a tree branch that overhangs the lake. They swing out over the water and drop in, like dumplings. Once in, they make a game of submarining their way to the girls and grabbing their legs to startle them. Some boys flip the girls head over tail. When this is done, the mandate of the flipped girls seems to be initial outrage followed by affable censure. I have gone to the lake, too, on occasion, but mostly I sit on the shore and watch. When I do go into the water, I wait patiently to be pinched or tumbled by the underwater boys—but perhaps I am prey too meager for their tastes. My hair stays dry.

  I love the smell of the encyclopedia. When no one is looking, I bury my nose deep into the crease of the binding and breathe in the book. No one else does this. I do not witness any of the other students sniffing the pages of Great Expectations when the paperbacks are handed out in our English class. Me, rather than putting my nose to it, I casually fan the pages with my thumb, which sends into the air the pleasant aroma of wood pulp and ink.

  In the library I sit at a carrel, the farthest one in the back corner, and I search through piles of books looking to understand my name. The dictionary does me little good, but I have no hard feelings toward it—I love the way the pages are thumb-notched to make the finding of particular letters easier. If you look at each page individually, it has a unique half-moon cutout at the edge.

  In another book I find this, which is the equation for luminance, which I take to mean the quality of luminousness, the quality of me:

  I recognize again my symbol, the superimposed I and O together. One and zero. Something and nothing. On and off at the same time. I look up the Greek alphabet to discover what my symbol is called. It is phi, and it can be pronounced either fee or fye—which are the first two syllables of the giant’s song as he is threatening to eat Jack, who went up the bean stalk: Fe-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

  Blood. It always comes back to blood. You start with light, and you end with blood. But not mine. I am fifteen, I sit in the library with my itchy ankles, and I have not gotten my period yet. I am the last of anyone I know. I am afraid of blood, disgusted by it, and maybe my own fear has suppressed my bleeding.

  I go back to the equations, which are black-and-white, pure and lovely.

  I find another equation. The best one yet:

  It’s th
e equation for luminous intensity. That’s how much calculation is required to measure the intensity of me. You see how my symbol, the phi, is gone? The candela is still there, but the lumen is nowhere to be seen. Maybe that means you can’t measure the intensity of a thing in relation to itself. You have to put it against others and measure the difference between the light given off by each one.

  You have to put Lumen in the lake and see how still she stands, skimming the surface with her pale palms, embarrassed at the flatness of her own chest, noiseless and inert amid the raucous clamor of other boys and girls.

  * * *

  Many of the people in my grade went breach that year. I stayed home and studied. Many of the girls acquired and lost a series of boyfriends. I listened to old records my father told me he listened to when he was my age. Many of the bodies around me in school seemed to be undergoing some torturous flux—people coming to school not just with red pimples on their faces but also with rips and tears in the overused skin of their arms and necks. They were savaged. My skin remained smooth and unscored.

  Polly came to my house one day, the second day of Worm Moon, and showed me a large purplish bruise on her arm.

  “How did you get that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “How could you not know? Does it hurt?”

  “It happened, Lumen,” she said. “Last night it happened. I went breach.”

  “You did?”

  “Look.”

  She showed me again her bruise.

  “What was it like?”

  “I don’t remember very much.”

  They said you remembered the breaches better after you had been through a few of them. Very few people could remember their first.

  I looked at the bruise, and she displayed her arm proudly.

  “It looks like a hand,” I said.

  She tried to twist her head around to see it better.

  “See?” I said, pointing at the pattern. “One, two, three, four. Like fingers.”

  “Someone probably grabbed me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll ask around. Maybe somebody else remembers.”

  “Do you have anything else?”

  She blushed. She knew what I was asking.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  Then I told her something that was a lie.

  I said, “I wish I could have been there with you.”

  I had no desire to go breach. The thought of running wild, that mortification, made me clammy and sick. But I was trying to be a good and decent friend.

  She believed what I told her. Most people my age looked forward to the breach. It meant you had become something else. You were no longer a child. You were a true and natural person.

  Clutching my shoulder with her hand, she reassured me.

  “It’ll happen for you soon,” she said.

  I looked down at my diminutive frame, my bony, nondeveloped chest.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Sure it will. Probably next month. Then we’ll go out together.”

  I turned away, but in the mirror I caught her glancing apprehensively at my stubborn body.

  “It’s going to happen soon,” she reiterated. “It happens to everyone.”

  Of course that was the common thinking. It happened to everyone in our little town. But I wasn’t so sure it had to be that way. Though Polly couldn’t see them, my teeth were clenched tight inside my mouth. She didn’t know it, but I had made a determination many years ago that I still clung to as though it were a fierce religion. I wouldn’t go breach. I wouldn’t do it.

  My mother hadn’t, and neither would I.

  I wouldn’t.

  * * *

  It wasn’t something I could look up in books, so in order to learn more about the process I had to undertake a course of research that involved keeping secret notes on the things I heard from others. Of Polly I could ask questions directly—and she, before her own breach, provided much information from her experiences with her sister and her sister’s friends. I could query my father on a few details, but it made me uncomfortable to speak with him about such things. Some of the teachers talked about it in school, but their approach to the topic was more abstract than I would have preferred. Ms. Stanchek, who taught us sex ed, referred to it obliquely and in cultural terms, citing breaching as one of the “many local customs that play a large role in determining how young people are introduced to adulthood.” She went on to say, “Some cultures are very protective of their young people and try to keep them shielded from life as long as possible. Other cultures”—and here she winked at us—“drop you right into the cauldron to see if you can float.” I wrote down her words verbatim, because her analogy was baffling to me. If you found yourself in a cauldron, whether you floated was not the issue.

  Mr. Hunter, who taught English during the day and drama after school, referred to breaching in his discussion of Lord of the Flies. “If you want to understand these characters,” he said, “think about how you feel when the moon is full. We might be mysteries even to ourselves. Do you know what you’re capable of? Do you really know?”

  His eyes fell on me, and my stomach went sideways. I looked down, focusing on my pencil tip pressing hard on the white paper. He was an outsider, having moved into our town only around five years ago. He couldn’t truly understand our ways, but he liked to speak of them in provocative terms. I liked him and didn’t like him at the same time. There was something in him that I needed magic to ward off.

  When my notebook on the subject of breaching was filled, about halfway through my sophomore year in high school, I felt that I had a fair understanding of the process—even a larger and more nuanced understanding than many of my peers, who were going through it firsthand. I had filled in the details little by little over the years, assembling the mystery of it as I would a jigsaw puzzle—certain aspects of the picture becoming clear before others.

  Here’s the way it worked.

  As a general rule, when people in my town reached a certain age—anywhere between thirteen and sixteen—they ran wild. When exactly this would happen was a mystery. For some boys it coincided with their voices getting deeper; for some girls it came with the arrival of their first period—but these were rare harmonies. Our bodies are unfathomable. They resonate with so many things—it’s impossible to know what natures they sing to.

  When people breached, they cycled with the moon. When the moon was full (usually three nights each month), those who were breaching went feral. The adults stayed indoors with the younger children on those nights, because in the streets ran packs of teenagers—most of them naked, as though clothes were something they had grown beyond—whooping and hollering, crying out violent and lascivious words to each other, to the night, to those holed up in houses. They fought with each other, brutally. They went into the woods to engage in acts of sex.

  My father referred to the full-moon nights as bacchanals, but a bacchanal, I learned from the encyclopedia, had to do with Dionysus, the wine god, and it refers specifically to drunken revelries. The breachers were almost never drunk—unless they had gotten drunk before the sun went down. Their indulgences came from a place deeper than wine or virtue or vice.

  The mornings after the full-moon nights, the breachers found their ways home and were tended to by their parents, who understood that this was the way of the town and there was nothing to be done about it. Sometimes people got hurt, sometimes seriously—and it was accepted that the damage was simply a physical corollary of the deleterious effects of getting older and being alive in the world. My town had a certain secret pride in that it refused to cosmeticize the realities of adulthood.

  And of course the breach was temporary—it was just a stage. It occurred only three nights a month, and for each individual it lasted only for around a year. After that time you were a true adult, and the next time the full moon rose you stayed inside with the others and listened to t
he howls in the distance and were only just reminded of your time in the wild.

  Some people called it coming of age—as though you were ageless prior to that time, as though aging were something you enter by going through a doorway. Did that mean that coming of age was the beginning of dying? I looked it up in the encyclopedia—all the cultural and religious rituals associated with coming of age. In Christianity there were confirmations, in Judaism bar mitzvahs. The Apache had a process called na’ii’ees—which was a beautiful word to look at—but that was just for girls, and I never found what the boys’ equivalent was. The Amish had their Rumspringa—and this was as close to our breaching as I was able to find. The sober toleration of wildness. The trial by fire. The wide-eyed gaze upon the violent and colorful sins of the world. Some of the articles I read directed me to something that seemed at first to have nothing to do with coming-of-age rites: mass hysteria. Some people believed that such rituals were related to the kind of localized group thought that led to the Salem witch trials. For my part, I never knew how you could tell an illegitimate witch from a real Jesus or vice versa, so I was always careful to give concession to any magic that might be at hand.

  I asked my father why it was called a breaching, and he did not know. It had just always been called that, he said.

  I found nothing about it in the encyclopedia, of course, but right where the article on breaching should have been there was instead an article on breeching—which was a rite of passage for boys who grew up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was called breeching because it was the first time in their lives that the boys wore breeches, or pants. Up until that point they wore little dressing gowns. I was tickled by the idea of all those mighty men in history, like Louis XIV, growing up in dresses—I had not known such a thing occurred. Breeching happened earlier, though, between the ages of two and five. Still, it was considered a significant moment in the boys’ development into men.