Godfrey handed Peter the glass, which Peter held up to clink against his own.
“To … Roman,” said Godfrey. He’d been searching for something leavening and innocuous but that’s what came out.
“To Roman,” said Peter, and in his eye was a sort of strange character Godfrey had caught at odd moments all through the meal, not so much a maturity as a nature consciousness as though he were at times a boy exactly of his years and others a soul out of time wearing a boy mask.
Godfrey noticed him squeeze Letha’s leg, and that filled him with a gladness that surprised him considerably. But he was glad. That his strange daughter had found this strange suitor, that there was a person in her life to touch her like that. Here was a woman he had made.
Once the table was cleared he made a show of skepticism when Letha said she would drive Peter home, but, as she pointed out, he’d been drinking, and neither broached the idea of rousing Marie. And by now he had privately abdicated any responsibility of being another obstacle between them. They would run into plenty without his contribution. He gave them the parting admonition “Behave,” counting on that they would do the contrary. They would live.
A real live woman. What did you know about that?
* * *
From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:
CW: It was that dream again, the one in the mill. But it was different this time, this time the moment comes, I don’t know whether to hide or to turn and face it, but this time I can see someone outside, someone out the window. It’s Francis Pullman. I can tell because … God, I hate saying this out loud, but because of that creepy dead eye. And that’s the only thing that changes, he’s just standing out there not saying anything, and I’m still stuck in the same place but with a dead man watching me.
NG: Do you have any idea what significance Pullman or Pullman’s ghost would have here?
CW: I … This is going to sound a little crazy, Doctor.
NG: I think you’re in the right place.
CW: The look on his face.
NG: What do you mean?
CW: He wasn’t saying anything, but I knew he was telling me something by the look on his face.
NG: Is it something you’re comfortable sharing here?
CW: He was telling me … You are going to lose your soul.
NG: …
Peter’s Hierarchy of Shit He Can Live Without
It was the last day before the Snow Moon, and when the eighth-period bell rang it dismissed not only the student body for the day but also the last hot minute of denial on Peter’s part of what he had been putting off for the last two weeks: now he would have to tell her. Women and talking, the way it just went together like drawn and quartered. He walked from study hall to his bus, wincing at the prospect, when Alex Finster and Tom Dublyk appeared at his flanks, with an additional one or two behind. This was not the reprieve Peter had in mind.
“Full moon tomorrow,” said Alex.
Peter said nothing.
“You got spunk in your ears, Rumancek? I’m talking to you, you dirty Gypsy piece of shit.”
Peter did not take his eyes from the exit sign down the hall over the wave of heads.
“Aw, he’s probably just down his girlfriend’s in a coma,” said Tom.
The question, Peter knew, was simple: make it to the bus. They wanted him to give them a reason. If people were going to jump you, they just jumped you; these shitheads needed him to give them a reason. So it was the simple question of just keeping his mouth shut and getting on his bus.
Alex called him a deaf Gypsy faggot and as they passed through the door the crush pressed their bodies together and Alex turned his head and breathed hot in Peter’s ear.
“Probably needs to run home and suck Sleeping Beauty’s dick,” said Tom.
Just keep his mouth shut long enough to board bus 89. They wanted him to give them a reason but Peter had been on the wrong end of enough beatings to know that nothing was worth it. This was what made Peter not like Roman; Peter had control. When they can take that from you there is no floor under what else you can lose.
Tom drew two fingers under his own nostrils, inhaling deeply. “Is that pussy I smell?”
They were outside now and the buses were in an idling line no more than fifteen yards away. Fifteen yards, an achievable goal.
Alex put an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “So where’s the wolf half come from, anyway?” he said.
He thought this intrusive familiarity would goad Peter into reacting. Just enough smart to get on the bus.
“Your mom toss a steak between her legs and say, ‘Come and get it, boys’?” said Alex.
Peter hit Alex in the balls.
Alex doubled over and tripped over his own feet and fell and Peter broke for it. The other boys were just behind him, but the moment’s lapse in their reaction was all he needed to get to the bus, whatever was nearest, something at least he could hang on to and kick. He made passing eye contact through the bus window with those girls, the Sworn twins, staring at him with those spooky little eyes, but if staring was the worst of it there were things worse than eyes.
He leaped up the steps but then one of the twins’ eyes widened (which?—lost to history) and she yelled, “Watch out!” but Peter knew: he had lost, and a hand seized him by the ponytail and wrenched him down off the bus and he was shoved to the pavement, finding himself in a ring of boys and looking up directly at Duncan Fritz, 210 pounds of Duncan Fritz who had not been seeking this fight but now that a fight was in the air could not pass it up. This is what a fight cost you: the right to abstractions, like “fair.” This is one of the things a fight cost you. Peter attempted to bring his hands up in protection, but before he could Duncan punched his face. It was like looking into a very bright spotlight, and a quick succession of half a dozen flashes of this spotlight followed before Peter was successful in getting his hands into place and curling his knees into his chest and wheezing blood into his palms and waiting for the kicking to begin.
But then sharp elbows broke through the ring surrounding him and another combatant entered the fray and he felt the weight of this new body come down on top of him and a pair of arms encircle his neck. It was not a lot of weight and the arms were shaking and skinny like a girl’s. It was a girl. It was Letha. Letha had thrown herself on top of him.
Things were quiet again. Letha clung to him, shaking. There flowed from the center of her body a power so great even now Peter could feel it in his Swadisthana, and it caused her whole body to shake with her intention of not letting go of him.
“Aw fuck,” someone said eventually. The party was over before it had begun: this stalemate alongside the immediate threat of some authority’s arrival caused the mob to drift, deflated. As suddenly as the tribe lust for sacramental violence had arisen, the pregnant girl was a real wet blanket.
Letha helped Peter up. His hair was loose and in disarray and his face was red and bleeding from cuts over his eye and his mouth. And although he was standing now and okay what she saw in her mind’s eye was that other boy standing over him and hammering his fist into him again and again. She had never herself seen such violence before but knew instinctively and unequivocally that the only real way to fight it was with its equal and opposite, and she kissed his face. She covered the face the other boy had beaten with fists with kisses that were the fluttering of moth wings. An eye for an eye.
Peter leaned his forehead against hers. He put his thumb to her mouth and wiped his blood from her lips. She was crying and mucus was leaking from her nose. He drew his index finger along her upper lip.
“Snot,” he said.
He fished a spare hairband from his pocket and pulled his hair back in its ponytail. He took her hand.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Hey!” barked a voice like clapper boards and Vice Principal Spears seized Peter’s elbow. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“He’s coming with me.”
The vice principal re
leased Peter. His face paled twice in the twin reflections of Olivia Godfrey’s sunglasses.
* * *
Peter and Letha went with Olivia. Shelley, for whom Olivia had come, sat in the bed of the pickup, and the three of them in the cab, Letha in the middle, tucking her legs to the side of the gearshift. Olivia had furnished Peter with her head scarf and he held it to his bloody mouth. The inside of his cheek wall was torn and he worried it with his tongue. Olivia, in response to a question that had not yet been voiced, said, “He’s the same.” She lightly rapped Letha’s thigh, which at first seemed like a gesture of solace—but she needed room to shift.
She drove them to the Rumanceks’ trailer. She told Letha, “I really should take you home, darling.”
Letha said nothing. Olivia made a display of mulling her adult responsibilities and relented.
“Call your mother, at least. She is wound rather tightly these days.”
At the sight of Peter’s split lip and swollen eye, it took Lynda the better part of fifteen minutes to grieve and rage. She spat on her own breast, calling some of the more voluptuous curses on the poison wombs that conceived such monsters that could do that to a face so handsome. Then she calmed to practical maternal authority and cleaned him up and gave him a tea with two crushed aspirin and a joint and sent him to the bed with a Saran-wrapped frozen pork chop against the swelling. Olivia stayed to have a discussion with Lynda.
In the bedroom, Letha lay with him and draped an arm and a leg over his body. Still superstitiously keeping herself between this body and the world.
He prodded at the fissure in his mouth again.
Letha winced. “Stop that. I can see you doing that.”
Peter looked at her. This funny little person who had put all the love inside her between him and a kicking that might have had who knew what end. One of Nicolae’s main criteria in determining a woman’s quality was whether or not she would help with moving the furniture. Not some womanly business like picking up the odd lamp or box of dishware, but really get in there with the men and put some teeth in it. What do you say to that, Nic?
But the fact remained that Peter still had to tell her what he’d been avoiding in the first place. He had to tell her what was going to happen tomorrow night and she was not going to like it. Especially now. She was not going to like hearing it any more than he was going to like saying it. But it did not change the fact that he had to tell her, and waiting would only make it worse. He shut his eyes and smelled her hair. In a minute.
There was a knock on the door. Lynda entered with Olivia. They had agreed it might not be safe for Peter to stay here. The full moon does bring it out in people, observed Olivia. Peter nodded, in no mood to challenge this unlikely turn of events. He rose and packed an overnight bag for Godfrey House.
* * *
Olivia set Peter up in a spare bedroom. In the corner there was an old mirror mounted on wooden trunnions and angled slightly up, and from where Peter stood it caught the reflection of the wall portrait of an old man with a hawk face and previously commented-on green eyes and the ghost of a smile like he’d just stuck the knife in without your even noticing.
Olivia put her hand on Letha’s shoulder. “I took the liberty of calling your father.”
She turned to Peter, looking at his mangled face. He could not read her expression behind the sunglasses. She put her fingers to his face but he didn’t flinch. The soft knowing of her touch did not hurt him.
She left to give them a few minutes.
“Boys…” she said under her breath. “Boys…”
Peter looked into the mirror. His Swadisthana may have given him a heightened sensitivity to the frequency, but he had always been just as happy that this had never migrated up into the Third Eye. The Third Eye had struck him as depressingly literal. But tomorrow night would come the turn, the turn where he would have to do what had become inescapable since Roman got himself arrested. What the fact was, was inescapable since the night they found Brooke Bluebell. He would have to scent the vargulf and hunt him down and tear his throat out. It made him weak and he wanted just to lie down, but he was supported by the ongoing pain of the beating. Pain providing nothing if not a sense of priority. He did wish now for just enough of the Third Eye to provide him a view in the glass of how the world would look the morning after next, but all it contained was his own ugly beaten face. In the mirror, hands came around his midsection and clasped.
“Let’s go see him,” said Letha.
They went up to the attic. Shelley was downstairs; when not sleeping she held her brother’s privacy as inviolate. He lay under the window. Pairs of owl eyes glimmering in the trees creating a flickering vigil. There was more natural black on Roman’s scalp, and his cheeks were patchy with stubble. Letha knelt.
“I didn’t even know he could grow facial hair,” she said. She looked at his face. In the moonlight she could see the delicate veins in his eyes.
“If you were going to run away, would you tell me?” she said.
“I’m not going to run away,” said Peter.
“I’ll go with you if you run,” she said.
He looked out at the round moon.
“I’m not fast enough to outrun this,” he said.
She looked at the curl of Roman’s ear, like a?, and knew there was more to come and she would hate it just as much as she hated that her best friend was in a coma and seeing the beating of the first boy she had loved with all her body. She knew that whatever he was about to say was going to be like that, so she focused on the faintly luminous down of hair in Roman’s ear and she waited for it.
“I need you to promise me something,” said Peter. “Tomorrow night I need you to promise me you’ll be home at sundown and no matter what that someone else is with you until the sun comes up. The whole night.”
“What are you going to do?” she said pointlessly. She knew exactly what he was going to say and it wasn’t going to improve anything hearing him say it, which made it no less necessary to hear.
“I’m going to kill it,” he said.
She could just barely hear Roman’s breath issuing from his nose.
“You know you’re just a person, right?” she said. “That’s what we all are. We’re all just people.”
“An hour before sundown,” said Peter. “Under no circumstances leave the house. Under no circumstances let anyone in.”
“And then what? The next time I see you you’re in jail? At your funeral? Do I even see you again after that?”
Peter didn’t have an answer and had taken too many hits to the head to make one up fast enough.
“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “I think you’re both fucking full of shit. You think I’m the one who needs protecting? Well, look at you. Look at both of you. What do you need to happen to understand that this isn’t some kind of game? This is life.”
Peter still did not answer; it was not because he didn’t have one but because he was too tired to hear it himself. That what had happened the last two turns was going to happen again tomorrow night, and the whole town knew it. Unless he killed it. That this thing knew who he was and there was nothing he could do now to make himself not part of this. Unless he killed it. That he had a fear now even deeper than the cage and it was for what had happened to those other girls to happen to her, for her to be alive and watching while teeth and claws ripped open sacks of meat and jelly and shit and the life inside her. Unless he killed it. That life is a game, with the clearest stakes possible, and that losing it blows beyond all comprehension. He was not a killer, he did not want to kill anything, fuck all this killing.
He looked for something breakable but not valuable, punctuation, not passion. He selected a desk lamp and hurled it to the floor. Letha startled at the violence, which had been its intended effect, and he hated its efficacy.
“Either do exactly what I say or you will never see me again, you stupid little bitch,” he said.
There was a wash of headlights outside; he
r father was here. Letha lifted Roman’s hand and brushed the tears from her cheeks. She rose and smoothed out her shirt and looked at Peter. Her crying Godfrey eyes were red and green, like the worst Christmas in the world.
After she was gone, Peter sat on Roman’s bed. He put a hand on Roman’s shin and gave it a shake.
“Nobody here but us chickens,” he said.
There was a creak and he looked up to find Shelley hovering in the doorway, reluctant to intrude. She looked at the broken lamp but would not have needed the evidence to know the air of people hurting. Peter said nothing. He bent forward and removed one of his sneakers, and then its mate. He tossed one sneaker and then the other into the air and she watched as he, with an elegiac grace, began to juggle in the dark room.
* * *
The following morning, Peter was prodded awake by his mother. His cheek was a welt of purple and there was a black crust on his lip that had leaked in the night and fixed to the pillow. He wanted to feel better now that he had gotten a night’s sleep and his mother was here, but what he felt hadn’t changed. Yesterday had still happened and so would tonight, and nothing in between changed that giant black hole of suck.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“How do I look?” he said.
She spit on her shirtsleeve and dabbed at the side of his lip.
“Breakfast,” she said.
Olivia had given Lynda the run of the kitchen and this was reflected in the volume of the offering. But it was times like these that require our greatest strength and it had just killed Lynda the night before that she couldn’t feed her baby. Shelley attempted to eat with an exaggerated delicacy to compensate for the increased toll on her nerves, but every so often her salad tong clattered into the punch bowl of Cream of Wheat before her. When their eyes met Peter pulled one earlobe down and cocked the opposite eyebrow and this elicited a faint smile, but when he attempted to return it he only grimaced at the affront to his bruise. Olivia, meanwhile, hid behind smiling eyes and blithe gossip about the recent celebrity scandal as though just as pleased for this amusing disruption of routine. Peter did not know what to make of the upir woman’s sudden hospitality, and didn’t care. His mind was busy with the way Letha had flinched when he threw the lamp, and the lost look in Roman’s eyes when Peter turned his back on him, and the moon that was now on the other side of the earth but couldn’t have exerted greater pull over his thoughts.
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