When We Were Animals (11 page)

Behind me I was aware that two freshman girls were walking across the parking lot. Roy grew silent, and his hyena eyes watched them until they were out of sight.

He leaned back and wound his fingers around the chain link over his shoulders. This is where I’ll admit that I’d never really looked at Blackhat Roy before. He’d always been an abstraction to me, like big human notions such as horror and courage and mortification. But now he was forcing me to look at him, all of him. Some people, when they’re breaching, don’t quite get back to their regular selves when the full moon is gone. For some, like Roy, their breacher sensibility follows them into the daylight, throughout the month, the entire year. This was the worst kind of breacher when the full moon rose—and between moons, even during the daylight, you could still see the feral radiance behind the eyes.

He had grown bigger—I never really noticed it until now. He was no longer the runty creature I remembered from grade school. He had a thick mop of curly hair that fell down over his wide brow. He was dark, and it looked like he needed to shave. When he drew his hand across his jawline, you could hear a gristly static. His teeth were crooked, and the way his lips curled into a smile made you feel complicit in all sorts of crimes—things you didn’t even have names for.

His hands, wrapped around the metal ligatures of the cage, were scarred and dirty and short-fingered. The nails were worn down to almost nothing and one of them was ripped off completely, as though he had paws made for digging, hands for labor or violence.

“How come you didn’t save me today?” he said. “How come you didn’t rescue me?”

“I don’t know.”

“How come you didn’t keep your boyfriend from attacking?”

I said nothing.

“Is it because you figured I deserved it? Because you thought I must’ve done something wrong? Is that the reason?”

I shivered, and my throat tried to close up. I didn’t know what would happen to me.

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“Well, you’re right. Did you know it’s considered bad manners to take a piss in somebody’s locker? I guess we learn through our mistakes.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, my voice pleading.

“Didn’t you?” His teeth gnashed, and for a second I thought he would use them to rip my throat out. I would have run, but I was pinned in a way that was a mystery to me. “Guess what. I may be rotten, but I ain’t the only one. I know it was you.”

“What?”

“You pulled the fire alarm that one time. You did it. And I know why. Did you think I forgot about that?”

I didn’t know what to say to him, this furious and filthy golem of a boy. What could possibly be shared between us, apart from fear and calamity? I wanted to be away from him—I wanted him back in his cell in the abstract part of my brain, where I could trace him in the safe trigonometric functions of my daily life. But he wouldn’t go. Maybe he would do what Peter couldn’t. Maybe he would attack. Even here at school, because the boundaries of wilderness and civilization were nothing to Blackhat Roy. I closed my eyes and waited for whatever would come.

“Don’t worry,” he said after a while. “Probably I won’t hurt you. I don’t get much joy out of hunting down defenseless animals. Not much.”

He unleaned himself from the fence, stretched himself to his full length, and rotated his head quickly in a way that produced an audible crack in his neck. He started away, and I thought everything was over between us—but then, before he had walked very far, he turned back.

“But when you go warg,” he said, “then you better watch out. Because I think I’d like to chomp on you a little.” He smiled when he said it, as though he wanted me not to fear his threats but to savor them.

I didn’t move until he was completely out of sight, then I got my bike from the cage and rode home fast. The icy air blasted my face, but I was not cold. My lungs burned sulfur, and I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. When I got home, I showered—and in my stomach, I could feel the deep bowl of my guts. They sloshed around as though I had all the violent seas of the world inside me.

J
ust as the streets of our little town were plowed, another snow came and buried us again. People speculated that we were in for a rough winter. The lake froze early, and it froze wide. That year ice skaters could go farther out than they ever had before. I went skating myself, but I went in the early morning, when nobody else was there. I did spins and twirls, and I thought I must be the most elegant sight, a lone skater in the sunrise. When others began to show up, I glided to the shore and sat on a stone to remove my skates. They would always be surprised to see me. Their thought was to have been the first—but they weren’t. Sometimes things work that way.

Peter continued to avoid me. And Polly spoke to me as though I were a child—when she spoke to me at all. As soon as the final bell of the school day rang, I rushed home to avoid any further contact with Blackhat Roy, whose eyes seemed to track me in the halls from one room to the next. I had somehow wandered into his domain, and now I couldn’t escape. Once I had lamented being invisible, but now there was nothing I desired more than to be out from under his gaze. He seemed to know when I came into a room, because his head would swivel on his neck and those dark eyes of his would nail me to a wall. Even in the cafeteria, swarming with hundreds of moving bodies, echoing with a constant din—even there, when I walked through the doors, I could see that dusky, scabrous face of his looking through the crowd at me, a still-pale petal in an algae-covered pond.

So instead of looking things up in the library after school, where I knew I’d be discovered, I took my books to the deserted school auditorium and studied there.

I was very much enamored with maps that year. Maybe it was because my father was a geologist and was always looking at elaborate technical diagrams that made earthly landscapes look like strange outlined amoebas on the page. I sometimes thumbed through his books, tracing the curved lines with my finger. But really my interest was in conventional maps. I looked them up in old atlases. I followed their legends, exploring—mistaking, perhaps, the paper on which the world was printed for the actual world itself. I read books that had maps printed on their endpapers. As the events of the book unfolded, I would turn back to the endpapers and locate them on the map. I liked how the linear progression of time over the course of a novel could be condensed into a single map image, as though it were all said and done before the book even started—as though all of any person’s life could be reduced to just a legend explaining some fixed map we could not see.

I drew maps in my notebooks during class. Sometimes simple maps showing the spatial relationships of the students in a classroom, maybe with arrows illustrating their various kinds of connections. Or sometimes complex maps of the entire school building, featuring dotted lines that traced my regular routes from class to class.

My father liked my maps. He said they showed a unique mind, the kind of mind that existed above itself and was able to see itself in context. Context, he said, was a very important thing. So I said the word to myself thirteen times that night before I went to bed, and it became one more in my arsenal of magic words.

What I was working on that day, sprawled on the warm wooden floor of the empty stage, was going to be a Christmas present for my father. It was a very large and detailed map of the town and all the places in it that were significant to the two of us. Like the drive-in where we used to see movies but didn’t, for some reason, anymore. Like the tree in the cemetery under which my mother lies buried. Or the exact place on the freeway where we almost got into an accident and he had to pull over on the shoulder and tell me how much he loved me, how much more than anything else in the world I meant to him. I know it was a strange one to include, but it made sense in my unique mind, and I believed he would understand.

I made our house the center of the map. I drew it in pencil first and then in fine black pen to get as much detail as possible. You could even see into the upstairs window of the house if you cared to look. And there, framed in the window, was the teensy-tiny figure of a girl standing before an easel, drawing a map.

It was nice there in the musty auditorium, the sound of my scratching pencil echoey in the large space, the heavy, muffling curtains hanging loose over the hard wood. The moving air from the vents ruffled them slightly, and they rippled like vertical oceans. I liked the rows of unpopulated seats staring at me, their lower halves all folded up except one on the aisle that was broken and remained always open, a poor busted tooth in that grinning mouth. There is nothing to fear in such cavernous and sepulchral spaces. You fill them with the riots of your imagination.

Absorbed as I was in my map, I hadn’t heard Mr. Hunter enter from backstage and leaped up when he spoke to me.

“What’s that you’re doing?”

“Nothing,” I said and quickly gathered my materials, clutching my map to my chest. “Working. There’s no play practice tonight.” I knew the schedule, you see. I liked to know in advance where people would be and where they wouldn’t be.

He stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing at me with a foreign, unreadable expression. Under a tweed jacket, he wore a button-down shirt that had come a little untucked over the course of the day. He looked younger than my father, but I couldn’t tell by how much. He had told us that he grew up in a small town outside Chicago, and I had always wondered why someone from Chicago would come to a town like ours. He had a ragged growth of stubble on his chin, and his eyes always looked like they knew more than he was telling.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”

“What about?”

“What do you think about trying out for the play?”

“Me? I can’t act.”

“Everybody can act,” he said, shrugging. “Everybody
does
act.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“The best kinds of actors are the ones who perform so often—so religiously—that they don’t even realize they’re doing it.”

“I guess,” I said.

He would not take his eyes from mine for a long while, and I found I couldn’t take mine off his, either—as though some unbreakable current connected our brains.

Finally he breathed in deeply, stretched, and looked up into the rafters.

“Anyway,” he said, “think about it. All acting is just lying. You know how to lie, don’t you?”

I said goodbye and rushed out as quickly as I dared. The sun had gone down, and the overhead lamps had buzzed on in the deserted parking lot.

Everybody else believed they could see my very soul. So why did I feel so blind?

It’s true that
I am a Christmas baby—or at least close enough to count as one. I was born on December 23, Christmas Eve Eve, and so I am one of that breed for whom the celebration of existence gets irrevocably tangled up with garlands and lighted trees and window displays. No one likes a Christmas baby. The occasion requires that people purchase two different kinds of wrapping paper. It is too much celebration altogether, and it makes people queasy with indulgence.

Throughout my young life, my father did his best to make my birthday special—so we never put up a Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, the day after my birthday. There was no talk of the holiday at all until that day.

This year was special, because it was my sixteenth birthday, and sixteenth birthdays put you in a different category from the one you were in before. In the morning, my father told me we could do anything my little heart desired. But actually I was feeling a bit unwell, and all I really wanted to do was stay indoors and make pizza and watch movies on television and pretend that the world outside didn’t exist.

“Done and done,” he said and made me waffles.

Then he brought me a little wrapped box and dropped it on the table in front of me.

“I’ve been saving it for you for a long time,” he said.

I undid the wrapping paper at the taped seams (I’m not one of those people who tear through wrapping paper willy-nilly, as though ferocity of consumption equaled appreciation of a gift) and set it aside. It was a jewelry box, and inside sat a little silver locket with floral engravings on the outside.

“It belonged to your mother,” said my father. To look at it seemed to pain him. “I gave it to her when we were sixteen. Now I’m giving it to you.”

Inside there were two pictures that kissed when the locket was closed. One was of my mother and the other was of my father—both when they were my age.

“Her name was Felicia Ann Steptoe,” he said, reciting the bedtime catechism from my childhood, “and she wore long orchid gloves at our wedding.”

It occurred to me on that day that my mother was actually closer to me than if I had been old enough to remember her when she died. She existed entirely in my own brain—she was that close. She was lovely inside there, always posing, always beautiful. She was happy as could be.

I thanked my father for the present, throwing my arms around him and hugging him so tightly he pretended to choke.

“Now you just relax while I do the breakfast dishes,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “I need to know something.”

“What’s that?”

“What time was I born? I mean, exactly.”

“It was in the morning some time. I don’t remember.”

“Is it on my birth certificate?”

“I’m sure it probably is.”

“Can we check?”

“On this day, we seek to indulge,” he said, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel.

He went to the closet in his office and thumbed through the file cabinets to find what he was looking for. I followed him and sat in his desk chair, watching.

Eventually he found the manila folder he was looking for.

“Ta-da,” he said.

Then he took a pale green document out of the folder and scanned it quickly with his eyes.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Here it is. Eight thirty-two, ante meridian.”

I looked at my watch. It was half past nine.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re officially sixteen years old.”

So it was true. I was a year older but still periodless.

I was officially a lot of things. Sixteen was only one of them.

The day after
my birthday was Christmas Eve, and it also happened to be the first night of Lake Moon. There would be no carolers this Christmas, no midnight masses at the church. This would be a Christmas to stay indoors.

My father and I had much to do, since our preparations for the holiday only began that morning. We got up early and picked out a tree from the Christmas tree farm by the freeway. It was my job to stand back and determine its straightness while he secured it in the metal stand in our living room. We decorated and drank eggnog. We sang along to “Good King Wenceslas,” which was our favorite Christmas song—and, as far as I have been able to tell, nobody else’s favorite Christmas song in the world.

We sat together across our small dining room table, and we drank cinnamon-scented mulled wine that had been heated in a saucepan on the stove. My father put a stick of raw cinnamon in each one—and even though the wine did not taste good to me, I liked to be drinking it with him, watching the steam rise from the crystal goblets set on the red tablecloth I insisted on using for the occasion.

After dinner my father put on a Motown Christmas album, and we danced together to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and then we lit a candle for Felicia Ann Steptoe and put it in the window, without somberness, to invite her ghost to visit.

There were very few presents under the tree, but they were all labeled carefully nonetheless. We made sure that some of them—both for him and for me—were labeled “From Santa,” because Santa Claus was the invisible third guest at our miniature holiday. The truth is, we made our aloneness into a gift and gave that gift to each other, and it was our true and main present to unwrap.

I ate fewer frosted sleigh-shaped Christmas cookies than I normally did, because my stomach was still bothering me. So I went to bed early and turned on the radio to be lulled to sleep by “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—and also to drown out before I even heard them the sounds that might be coming from outside. This was a holy night, a peaceful night, and I would not indulge those wild creatures in the street—not even for a second.

It was well
after midnight when I woke up. At first I thought it was the cramping in my gut that had woken me—I thought for sure my period had finally come. But then, surfacing into consciousness, I realized that the voice I was hearing in my ears was actually coming from outside, that it was the voice of Polly. She called to me from the pitchy night.

“Lumen! Lumen, help me!”

I got out of bed, drew the curtains aside, and opened the window.

The first thing I noticed was the quality of the air that blew into the house. It was frigid in my lungs, but it made me feel much better than I had been feeling over the past couple days, and I made a resolution to get more fresh air than I had been getting.

Polly was there, standing just below my window in the front yard. Strange, I thought, that the last time Polly came and stood under my window Peter was sleeping in the den two doors down and knew nothing of it at all. Now he was somewhere out there among them.

Polly looked roughed up. There were bruises on her face, little abrasions all over the pale skin of her chest.

She was naked, her legs lost to midcalf in the snowbank. As part of my research, I had been made to understand that breachers did not feel the cold the way other people did. I was told that their blood ran hotter during those nights. A girl of science, a daughter of facts, I hadn’t entirely believed it until now. Like a beech tree, Polly’s frail white body was planted, unshivering, in the snow, her breath coming in visible puffs between her bleeding lips, her skin varicolored by the string of blinking Christmas lights hung on the eaves of the house. While she may have been hurting from her injuries, it seemed the cold was nothing to her.