When We Were Animals (3 page)

“Plus,” she went on, “she was bleeding. You know?”

I said nothing. I was paralyzed—as though I were standing on a precipice, stricken with vertigo, unable even to pull myself back from the edge. This was large, multitudinous. My mind was a color, and the color was red. The needling water on my back felt like it was falling on a version of me that was a long, long way away.

“They put her in the bathtub,” Polly said. “I stayed with her when they went downstairs. The water, it turned pink. She says she doesn’t remember anything, but I can tell she does. I think she remembers all of it.”

For a time, we were both silent. She picked the wet blades of grass off her hand, and I watched her. It was time to move the sprinkler, but I had to know more, and I couldn’t break the spell the conversation had put me under.

Finally I mustered the courage to ask a question:

“Did she get pregnant?”

“No,” Polly said. “She told me they put her on the pill before she went breach. She said all the parents do it.”

I thought about my father. It was difficult for me to imagine him giving me that kind of pill. How would he do it? He could make a joke out of it, bringing it to me on a burgundy pillow, as though I were a princess—and we could pretend it meant nothing. We could pretend my secret and shameful body had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I was determined to skip breaching altogether.

“And she said something else,” Polly went on.

“What else?”

“See, I was sitting on the toilet next to the tub, and she closed her eyes for a long time, and I thought she was asleep. I was just looking at the pink water and all the dirt that was in it. There were little leaves, and I picked them off the surface. She was so dirty. She came back so dirty.”

“What else did she say?”

“So I thought she was asleep, and there was this little twig in her hair and I wanted to take it out for her. So I went to take it out, but when I tried she grabbed my wrist all of a sudden and gave me a look.”

“What kind of look?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t like it.”

“Was it angry?”

“No. Not exactly. More just…I don’t know. Like a
jungle
look, you know? But it was only for a second, and then she let go of my wrist and smiled at me. That’s when she said it. She said it’s all right. She said it’s nothing to be afraid of. She said it hurts, but it’s the good kind of hurt.”

“The good kind of hurt?”

“That’s what she said.”

I didn’t want Polly to see that I was confounded by this notion, because she herself seemed to have accepted it as an obvious and universal truth, the potential goodness of hurt. It was important to Polly that she be in the know about all things adult, and she lived by the rule that performance eventually leads to authenticity. So it was difficult to tell what she actually understood and what she was only pretending to understand.

For my part, I squirmed uncomfortably in my ill-fitting swimsuit. These things seemed entirely detached from the books I read, from the math and science I was so adept in the mastery of. I sometimes wondered (as I sometimes still do) if I had gotten off track somehow, if maybe I wasn’t as natural as those around me, if perhaps my life were unjoined from the common lives of others.

The way my teachers looked at me, I suspected they could tell I didn’t belong. Especially Mr. Hunter, the drama teacher for the high school kids, whose curious and fearsome gaze I was sure followed me wherever I went.

The sprinkler splashed us with its rainy metronome, and there we lay in the growing shadow of my big house, the two of us, blasted through with the abject discomfiture of our tiny places in the world.

We were fourteen by the following summer, and Polly had developed even further, her hips having shaped themselves into curves—which I thought must have been in some way responsible for the new saunter in her walk. There was still no shape to me at all. I wore colorful dresses and put ribbons in my hair as evidence that I was, in fact, a girl. I stood naked before my bedroom mirror and, with the intention of luring out my stubborn and elusive womanhood, recited Edna St. Vincent Millay poetry I had learned by heart. I smeared honey on my chest, believing it might help me grow breasts. Honeybees are industrious—they can build anything. But the poetry seemed not to possess any magic, and my father found the sticky honey-bear bottle on my nightstand one morning and explained that it was bad for my teeth to snack on it in the middle of the night.

Over the previous year, Polly had begun spending more time with Rosebush Lincoln and the other girls from school. She never excluded me, and I made a concerted effort to join together with all the girls when they sunbathed by the lake or got a ride into the next town to go shopping at the thrift stores. But Rosebush always made it clear that I was only to be tolerated because I was allied with Polly, that my visa into the world of Rosebush Lincoln was temporary and most definitely revocable. I was put on notice.

When there’s nothing else to do, you can always watch the birds. The finches, their twitchy and mechanical little bodies—they go where they want to go, driven by impulse and instinct. The finch does not dwell in consideration of its nature or the nature of the world. It is brazen and unapologetic. It hammers its little bird heart against the blustering wind, and its death is as beautiful as its life.

It was that
year, that summer, that I followed the other girls to the abandoned mine. What did they used to mine there? I want to say gypsum, because gypsum is a lovely word and a gypsum mine is a pretty thought to have. It was on a different end of the woods from the lake, and the entrance to it was at the base of a small overgrown quarry. The parents of our town instructed us to stay away from the quarry because of lurking dangers, but it was always beautiful and peaceful to me. In certain seasons there was rivulet of melted snow that came out of the mountains and trickled irregularly down the stony sides of the quarry and ran finally into the mouth of the mine. If you went there alone, you could just listen to that plink-plonk of water and be tranquil. You could lie in nests of leaves, all those dying oranges and reds, all those deep browns that come from what green used to be, shaded by the old-growth trees that leaned over the lip of the quarry, and you could be nothing at all.

The mouth of the mine itself was weeded over with sumac and creeper vine, and there were two sets of mine-cart rails that emerged from the opening like tongues and ended abruptly on the floor of the quarry. You could wonder for hours about where those tracks went. Miles of underground passages beneath the town, maybe a whole underground city, with tunnels that opened in your basement! I explored our basement once, looking for an opening into hidden Atlantis—but all I found were forgotten mousetraps with hunks of dried-up cheese.

It was almost exactly a year after my conversation with Polly under the sprinklers, and her sister, Shell, was still breaching.

“I don’t think she’s ever going to stop,” Polly said miserably. “What if she doesn’t stop before I start?”

“You? But we’re only fourteen.”

“It’s not unheard of. My parents said it’s not unheard of. It’s different for different people. Plus I’m developing early in other ways.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen yet.”

“It better not. My parents are going to throw a big party for her when she’s done. That’s how relieved they’ll be. They said I’m not going to be half as bad as her.”

It seemed as though this were a source of disappointment for Polly.

So when she came to my house on a weekday morning in July, telling me that everyone was going to the quarry and that we should hurry to join them, I followed her. If I didn’t follow her, I reasoned, I might be left behind forever—a child who simply misses the chance to grow up.

So we took our bikes, pedaling hard and purposefully. On other days we might have been leisurely about our pace, weaving in lazy arcs back and forth across the empty roads. But that day was different.

Arriving at the quarry, we saw four girls already there—Adelaide Warren, Sue Foxworth, and Idabel McCarron with her little sister, Florabel, in tow. We scrambled down into the quarry, bringing tiny avalanches of white silt pebbles after us.

“Where’s Rosebush?” was the first thing Polly said as a greeting to the other girls.

“I don’t know,” said Adelaide. “Look what we found.”

We all gathered in a circle around the thing on the ground. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was—a wispy thing like smoke or frayed burlap, it moved with the breeze. Hair. It was a long skein of mousy brown girl hair.

“It was ripped out,” Sue said.

“How can you tell?”

“Look.”

She reached down, gathered its tips into a bunch, and picked it up. Dangling from the base of the lock was a scabby little flake that I quickly understood to be scalp skin.

Florabel shrieked and started running in circles.

“Shut it,” her sister said.

“Whose is it?” Polly asked.

“I don’t know,” Sue said. “Better be a local girl.”

A fierce territoriality is the by-product of uncommon local practices. Whatever happened in our town was manageable as long as it stayed in our town. We were not encouraged to socialize with people from elsewhere. We were taught to smile at them as they passed through. Every now and then some teenager from a neighboring town would get stuck here during a full moon—and the next day that outsider would usually go home goried up and trembling. That’s when trouble came down on us—authorities from other places going from door to door, kneeling down in front of us kids trying to get us to reveal something. But for the most part, people left us alone. Ours was a cursed town to outsiders.

Just then there was a sound in the trees above, and we gazed up to find Rosebush Lincoln standing next to her bike on the lip of the quarry.

“I’m here, creeps,” she said and let her bike fall to the ground. Strapped to her back was a pink teddy-bear backpack whose contents seemed heavy enough to make it an awkward process to climb down to the floor of the quarry. Once at the bottom, though, she sloughed off the pack and came over to where we stood.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the hair that Sue still held in her fingers.

“Hair.”

“Uh-huh,” Rosebush said. “I know where that came from. Mindy Kleinholt. My brother says she’s been going around all week with a new hairstyle to cover the empty spot. Happens.”

Rosebush shrugged with a casual world-weariness that made her seem thirty-three rather than fourteen.

Sometimes the thunderclouds gather overhead, and sometimes your haughty cat refuses its food, and sometimes you are partially scalped in a moonlit quarry. Such things are a matter of chance and hazard.

Rosebush, whose lack of interest in the hair made everyone forget it at once, unzipped her teddy-bear backpack to reveal what she had been struggling to carry: six tall silver cans of beer connected at the tops with plastic rings. She set the cans on the ground before us, stepped back, and presented them with an expansive gesture of her arms.

“Behold,” she said. “My brother stole it from the grocery store, and then I stole it from him.”

“It’s double stolen,” said Adelaide, crouching down in front of the beer and running her finger in a delicate circle along the top edge of one of the cans. She was fairylike, always, in her movements. “It’s still cold,” she added.

“It’s iced,” explained Rosebush. “We have to drink it before it gets skunked.”

So she passed around the cans to the other girls. I took one but found it difficult to open, so Polly opened it for me.

“Where’s one for me?” Florabel said.

“You don’t get one,” said her older sister.

“Cheers, queers,” Rosebush said, raising hers.

Everyone drank. I lifted mine in imitation of drinking, but I didn’t let much get into my mouth. Just enough to wet my lips and tongue. The taste was awful, like moldy carbonated weed milk. The other girls crinkled their noses as well.

Rosebush lectured us.

“You have to drink it fast,” she said. “Hold your nose if you need to.”

“I’m going to enjoy mine throughout the afternoon,” said Sue.

“Me too,” said Adelaide.

“Suit yourselves,” Rosebush said and shrugged.

We sat on the stones, holding our cool cans of beer. I stopped pretending to drink from the can, because nobody seemed to be paying attention to whether I was or not. Instead I put my fingers in the icy trickle of water running down out of the hills.

At one point the conversation turned to boys, and Rosebush brought up Petey Meechum.

“We nearly kissed the other day after school,” she announced.

“What’s nearly?” asked Sue.

“Nearly,” Rosebush repeated in a tone that suggested any further calls for clarification were forbidden.

“He once told me I had pretty hands,” said Adelaide, then she held them up for the benefit of any admirers.

“Anyway,” Rosebush went on, irritated, “Petey Meechum is the kind of boy who puts girls into one of two categories. You’re either a potential lover or you’re a permanent friend.”

At the words “permanent friend,” her gaze landed on Polly and me. Polly looked down, submissive. I made my face blank, like cinder block.

“How can you tell the difference?” Adelaide asked.

Rosebush seemed about to attack, but then she shrugged it off, as would a predator that grows bored with easy prey.

“Believe me,” she said, “when you’re nearly kissed by him, you can tell.”

Then she addressed me amicably.

“On a related topic, do you know who I heard was actually interested in you, Lumen?”

“Who?” I asked miserably.

“Roy Ruggle,” said Rosebush.

“Blackhat Roy?”

“He’s only got eight toes,” Polly contributed. It was well known that Blackhat Roy had exploded two toes off his right foot when he was trying to modify a Roman candle with a pair of pliers two years before.

“But he’s dark,” said Rosebush, “like Lumen. And he’s more her height. Also, he never goes to church, and neither does Lumen. You know, I sit right next to Petey in church. He tells me about his grandmother who died. Did he ever tell you about her, Lumen? You can tell by the way he talks about her he knows about pain. To endure suffering—it’s the most romantic thing of all, don’t you think?”