But what Peter showed me I’ll never forget. It was the land brought to life, the earth made conscious. And it was beautiful. It really was.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It means that it doesn’t matter what it means,” he said. “It means that it’ll be okay, Lumen.”
* * *
The third night I went into the woods because I was finished with other people and their capricious ways. I wanted my freedom to be mine alone. A wind blew through the trees, and the moonlight lit up all the icy branches, and it was like I was surrounded by stars.
The next morning, when I woke, my body was covered in crystals of ice. I was in the backyard of my house, on the lawn, in a little concavity my hot body had made in the snow. Sitting up, I saw a ghost of myself on the ground.
The sun was up, just visible on the horizon. I guessed it must have been five o’clock. My father would still be in bed.
“You sleep nice.”
The voice came from behind me. My body, still moon-driven and instinctive, shot rigid into a crouch. Flee or defend.
Blackhat Roy, still naked, too, sat on the stoop of my back porch. He looked haggard and somehow raw. He was raked with dirt, his hair caked with dry, frozen mud. He scratched at himself casually.
“Your eyelids,” he said. “They flutter when you’re asleep. You remember what you were dreaming about?”
“You’re supposed to be going to Chicago.”
“Leaving tonight.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Now, me,” he went on, “I remember all my dreams. I wish I didn’t. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. I wake up in the middle of some fucking fantasyland campfire story, and it takes me a while to get my bearings. You know, what’s true and what isn’t. Where are you really? In the middle of some horror show with smiling dogs, or maybe an orgy of alien women, or maybe just tucked safe away in your bed. It’s a goddamn nuisance is what it is. You ever have that problem? Not knowing for sure what’s real?” He scratched behind his ear and picked something from his hair—a bug of some kind—then crushed it between his fingers. “Or have you got it all figured out?”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“How come?”
“Why are you here? What do you want?”
“You really want to know?”
Suddenly I didn’t like being naked around him. It was too personal, too intimate. Now that the sun was rising over the horizon, it was no longer just nature and breaching. Now there was something else involved—the shame of day. I stood and turned sideways, folding my arms over myself as best I could.
He chuckled, and I was embarrassed about my paltry modesty.
“Let me go inside,” I said.
“Who’s stopping you?”
I was keenly aware that I would have to pass close by him to go up the porch steps into the house. Taking two steps forward, I watched him to see what he would do—but he made no move. His eyes followed me as I got closer, and, as I put my foot on the first step, I thought his arm might shoot out and he might grab me by the ankle. And what then? Where would he drag me? What dirtiness would he scrape onto me? How would it feel on my skin? Would I hate it?
I bolted, running up the rest of the steps until I had my hand on the knob of the back door. Only then did I turn around to find he had not moved at all—he hadn’t even turned around. I looked at his back. There were scars all over it, little white and pink indentations highlighted by dirt and grime.
He had not seized me. He had not dragged me off somewhere, and now I didn’t know how I felt about that.
“You shouldn’t have attacked those people,” I said.
“Is that what you think happened?”
“You attacked them. I saw you.”
“If you saw it, then you know better. Sometimes you get tired of being the town garbage. And sometimes, when you’re tired like that, you realize that the only way to keep from being the prey”—he turned to look at me—“is to put someone else in your place. Besides, the whole town loves a slaughter. How come I don’t get to enjoy myself in the same way once in a while?”
I knew what he said was true, but I had no answer for him.
“You should go home,” I said.
“Home,” he grunted, turning away again. “Right.”
“You act like you’re separate from it.”
“From what?”
“All of it. What everyone’s going through. The breaching.”
“Pomp and faggotry,” he said. “Girl shit.”
“But you’re doing it, too.”
“Nope,” he said simply.
I waited for him to say more, and eventually he did. Though he did not turn around, so I still could not see his face.
“What I do, it’s personal. I take responsibility for it. It’s me. It ain’t some hormones or rite of passage or mass hysteria. I don’t fucking cry about it in the morning.”
* * *
By the time the sun went down, Roy was gone.
I was nervous, because it was the fourth night. Usually the breach went three nights—but the jury was still out on what form of sinner I was. So I thought maybe I would go out again. Maybe for me it was an everyday thing for the rest of my life.
But when the sun went down, I didn’t feel the urgent tugging in my chest. I was able to keep my bedroom window closed. And so I knew I would be free of it for another month.
When school started up again after the holiday, things were different. People weren’t exactly friendlier. They didn’t strike up conversations with me in the cafeteria—but sometimes they gave me a cursory nod as they passed. And I noticed something else, too. When I walked down the hallways, people moved out of my way. Before the winter break I had had to be very conscious of where I walked, because if I weren’t careful people would simply walk right into me. But now there was an understanding of presence, a mutual shifting of bodies as they moved through space.
It was as though I had become suddenly visible.
In the girls’ restroom, I encountered Polly and Rose Lincoln. They were brushing their faces with powder and looking at themselves in the mirror. First they sucked their lips in, then they puckered them out.
Polly still looked pretty beat up, but there seemed to be no animosity between the two of them.
“Lumen!” Polly said when she saw me. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
“We didn’t see you after the first night,” said Rose. She didn’t look away from the mirror.
“You didn’t try to stay in, did you?” said Polly.
“No,” I said.
“It’s strange the first couple times, I know.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“What, this?” Polly said, gesturing to the abrasions showing through the powder on her face. “It’s nothing. I didn’t mean to frighten you the other night. Sometimes things get a little emotional in the moment. But everybody gets busted up sometimes. Life, you know?”
“One thing you can say about Polly,” said Rose approvingly. “She knows how to take a beating.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You should come with us next time,” Polly said. “We’ll take care of you. Shouldn’t she, Rose?”
“Uh-huh,” said Rose.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on,” Polly said. “I know you just started, but mine’s almost over. Just for once I’d like to run with you. Don’t you want to run with me?”
Rose Lincoln closed her powder case with a snap and turned to us.
“She won’t come with us. She’s too busy praying at manger scenes.”
“I wasn’t praying,” I protested.
“Where were you the night Roy almost killed those people?”
“I was there.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Yes, I was. I was watching, and it didn’t happen that way. It wasn’t just Roy.”
“Watching!” Rose Lincoln scoffed. “
All you ever do is watch. Well, don’t pray over me. I don’t need it, and I don’t want it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“But I wasn’t praying,” I said lamely.
“Never mind,” Polly said. “You’ll run with me next time, won’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes.”
Promises are easy to make. You utter a word or two, and it’s done. But those are magic words, too. They speak of a defined future to which you are required to adhere. They commit you beyond the length of your experience.
What they do is they take away possibility.
Promises are the opposite of hope.
* * *
My father said, “You look tired. Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Come here. Let me feel your forehead.”
I went to him. He placed his palm on my forehead.
“You feel a little hot. You’re sure you’re not getting a fever?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “You’ve been cooking. It’s probably your hand that’s hot.”
He looked at me with suspicion.
“Really, I’m okay. Look.”
Then I did some dancing twirls, the kind I used to do for him as a girl. He clapped. He was delighted. He was convinced, once again, that everything was just fine.
* * *
And there was something else. Peter started visiting me in the afternoons, as he had earlier in the school year. He looked at me in a new way since I had gone out during the last moon—as though he had never had sex with Rose Lincoln, as though he had never taken me to the woods and been unable to rape me.
One day after school, he showed up on my doorstep with two wooden mallets and a large bag hoisted over his shoulder.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Croquet!” he said. “It’s the game of kings.”
“Is it?”
So we drove the wickets into the frozen ground of my backyard, and, bundled in our coats, we hammered our colored wooden balls through them. It felt good—like reclaiming for civilization the very same lawn where I had woken up in shame just a couple weeks before.
Afterward we went up to my room. While I organized my homework into prioritized piles, I could feel his eyes on me.
“I’m something to you now,” I said, turning to him.
“You were always something to me,” he said. “But for a while you were too much of a something to me. You were all the way up here, and I was all the way down here.” He used the full stretch of his arms to make his point.
“So now I’m all the way down there with you?”
“Not quite.” He smiled. “But at least you’re close enough that I can see you from where I am.”
“And where’s Blackhat Roy on that scale?”
Peter shook his head. “It’s good he’s gone. That guy was bad news. Really, Lumen, you don’t even know how bad.”
He was restless and disinclined to study. While I copied dates from the world history textbook onto note cards, he browsed the books on my shelves. Once, I had to stop him.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t open that. Put it back.”
He held in his hands a composition notebook he’d plucked from my shelves.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Just notes.”
“What kind of notes? School notes?”
“No. Other kinds of notes. Lists and things.”
He gave me a teasing smile.
“Like what? What kinds of lists? Give me one example, and I’ll put it back.”
“I don’t know. Like a list of my favorite authors.”
“Hm. Interesting.”
But he put the notebook back, as he had promised.
For ten minutes he helped me sort note cards into thematic categories. Then, without warning, he leaned over and kissed me. He pushed his chest against mine, and I liked how our breathing became one breathing. With my eyes closed, I could almost forget about everything.
I still held fans of note cards in my hands, and I didn’t know what to do with them. When he finally stopped kissing me, I tried to remember where the cards belonged—but my mind was no longer functioning by the logic of categories.
“Is your father at home?” he asked.
“No.”
“When will he be home?”
“Six, usually.”
Peter looked at his wristwatch.
“That’s two hours,” he said. He kissed me again, and I dropped the note cards to the floor and wound my arms around his neck. But when he moved against me, we jostled the desk and my purple pencil cup tipped over with a loud clatter that startled me.
“I think we should stop,” I said.
“How come?”
“I don’t know. It’s a big deal.”
He backed up and eyed me with a playful smile.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. But we’re at an impasse, because I think we should keep going.”
“You do? How come?”
“The usual reasons, I guess.”
“Like what?” I liked this game. “I’m prepared to listen to logic.”
He posed himself thoughtfully on the edge of my bed, a prosecutor prepared to make a complex case.
I laughed.
“You know,” I said. “I’ve never done it before.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Acknowledged. And is it your plan never to do it at all, or do you have an intention to one day make love?”
“It’s not my plan never to do it.” I went over to him where he sat on the bed and stood before him. He looked up at me, and I leaned down to kiss him. He put his hands on my waist. Then he backed away for a moment, again with that sly, strategic smile.
“I see,” he said. “So it’s a matter of situation. Timing, choice of partner, and the like?”
“I guess.”
“So in terms of timing—you just started breaching, I understand?”
“Kind of.”
“And you know the types of activities breachers participate in?”
“Yes.”
“And in terms of choice of partner—would you say that you have a mostly complete sense of the potential romantic partners available to you here in town?”
“Yes.”
He grinned—and I grinned, too.
“I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that this is a case that makes itself.”
“Maybe,” I said. I kissed him again. I wanted badly to be with him, but I didn’t know how to say yes to such things. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You don’t?”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he said, undeterred. “How about a little competition? How about if I can guess the authors on your favorite authors list? How many do you have on the list?”
“Ten.”
“Let’s say if I can guess three, we’ll call it fate. And when fate tells you to do something, you know you better do it.”
“What, with unlimited guesses? That bet’s stacked in your favor.”
“Well, I’d say it’s in both of our favors, but okay. How about ten guesses?”
“Three correct out of ten guesses from my list of ten favorite authors?”
“Right.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, and he narrowed his at me.
“Okay,” I said.
I went to the shelf and took down the composition notebook and flipped to the page that had my list of favorite authors. I inscribe it here for the record:
CHARLES DICKENS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
JUDY BLUME
JACK KEROUAC
EMILY BRONTË
C. S. Lewis URSULA K. LE GUIN
TRUMAN CAPOTE
RUMER GODDEN
James Thurber V. C. ANDREWS
P. G. WODEHOUSE
“Okay,” Peter said, leaning eagerly forward. “Let’s see. How about Shakespeare?”
“No fair,” I s
aid. “That was an easy one.”
“Your predictability is not my problem. How about Mark Twain?”
“Huh-uh.”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
I shook my head.
“Really?” he said.
“He’s probably number eleven.”
“So a good guess.”
“Yeah, a good guess.” I moved toward him and gave him a kiss. “That’s for your good guess.” Then I backed away again.
“All right, all right.” He rubbed his palms together and stared at the ceiling. After a while he said, “Dickens.”
“Because of David Copperfield,” I said. “Not for Tale of Two Cities.”
“So I’m right? Two out of four. That leaves me six guesses for the last one. How do you like my odds?”
“I don’t like them at all.”
“Remember: fate.”
“I remember.”
“Okay, let’s see.” He glanced over at my bookshelves.
“Hey, no unfair advantages.”
“Sorry.”
He covered his face with his hands.
“Ernest Hemingway,” he said eventually.
I gave him a look.
“Okay, no critiques on the wrong guesses, please. Oh, I know. Who’s that guy who wrote the Buddha book?”
“Hermann Hesse?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Sylvia Plath?”
I shook my head.
“Kurt Vonnegut?”
“No.”
“Oh, wait, I know—Lord of the Flies.”
“That’s not an author.”
“What was his name?”
“William Golding. And no.”
“Damn it. How many guesses is that?”
“You have one more.”
He was quiet for a long time, his face buried in his hands, and I liked how his sandy hair hung tousled over his fingers.
Suddenly he sat up, looking pleased with himself. He reached out for me and pulled me to him so we were sitting next to each other on the bed. Then he leaned in close. I could smell his skin.
“I got it,” he said. “Do you believe I’ve got it?”
“No,” I said, my voice almost a whisper.
“Well, I do. I’ve got it. Are you ready?”
When We Were Animals Page 14