When We Were Animals (5 page)

“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 the 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.

So I liked thinking our breaching was related somehow to that antique practice.

Of course the difference in spelling must have been significant. I looked up breach in the dictionary. “A legal infraction.” Definitely. “A break or a rupture.” Plenty was broken, plenty ruptured. “A fissure made in a fortification.” That one stumped me for a while until it occurred to me that the civilized world, the daytime world, is a kind of fortification against nature and night and brutishness—then it made sense.

But it was the fifth definition of the word that intrigued me most. Apparently breach is also the word for what a whale does when it breaks the surface of the water and leaps into the air.

I wrote that in a box in my research notes, and I drew a picture of a whale bursting from the surface of the ocean. It seemed at odds with the other definitions, and yet at the same time not.

When I slept I dreamed of whales, huge seabound creatures, mustering their power, changing their course, diving deep and then swimming up in a straight vertical, from the dark depths of the ocean floor through the murk to where the light penetrates, up farther and farther, their bodies all muscle in the act of violating the logic of their natural home, thrusting themselves upward, crashing through the surface, feeling the unwet open air on their barnacled skin, taking flight for one tiny moment—taking flight.

Then it chanced
to happen that my life became joined with the lives of others.

That’s how it occurs, just like that, like the passage of midnight, the hand of the clock creeping past the midpoint of twelve. The minute before midnight and the one after are practically the same, except that they are a full calendar day apart. That’s what happened to me. One day things were different.

It was in the tenth grade, and it happened, really, because of Blackhat Roy Ruggle. It was during lunch in the cafeteria, and I was sitting at the table next to Rosebush Lincoln’s when he approached her. Rosebush was in tears because earlier in the week her father had initiated divorce proceedings against her mother and had gone to live in a house the next town over, and earlier that day she had also received a C on an English paper.

“What is she crying for?” said Blackhat Roy to anyone who would listen. He was gypsy dark, with black hair that was always a little greasy. He was short, but there was an inherent ferociousness in him that you wouldn’t want to see any taller. There might have been something handsome about him if it weren’t for the nastiness.

Rosebush tried to ignore him.

“No, seriously,” Roy went on, declaiming in a loud voice that hushed those within its range. “I want to know. What is she crying for? Is she worried she won’t get into Notre Dame? And then what? What’s a Rosebush who doesn’t go to Notre Dame?”

“Stop it,” said Rosebush, hiding her face in the crook of her arm and allowing herself to be comforted by Jenny Stiles, who had the shortest hair of all the girls in school.

“Oh, wait—I get it,” said Roy. “See, the last time I got a C, the principal gave me a fucking trophy—so I guess it’s all relative. And what she’s worried about, see—what she’s worried about is that if she gets a C, then that’s her first step to becoming like me.”

“Cut it out, Roy,” somebody else said.

“Stop it,” said Rosebush.

But he leaned in close to her.

“Take a look, Rosebush. It’s your future talking. After you fail out of school, we’ll get married and have a barrelful of kids. We’ll feed them cat food and squirrels and pray every night before we go to bed that little Festus won’t burn down the neighbor’s house. My father’s hit the road, so you won’t have to deal with him getting drunk and groping you at the wedding. Hey, wait a minute—do you think that’s why your dad left? Shame? Do you think he’ll give a toast at our wedding?”

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” cried Rosebush. She stood suddenly, escaped the grasp of Jenny Stiles, and began beating her little fists against Blackhat Roy, who backed away slowly, hands in the air to show he was not fighting back—a cruel, bemused expression on his face.

Then, as I watched, others intervened. Petey Meechum was there first, pushing himself between Rosebush and Roy.

“Stop!” he said to Roy. “Leave her alone, asshole.”

There was a sudden stillness as everyone waited for Roy to explain himself. He looked around, and a sourness crept into his face. What he said was this:

“Cunt.”

That was another magic word, I realized that day, because of the power it had over people. They cringed as if struck, as if that single syllable were a weapon more powerful than teeth or fists. It was a dangerous word.

Blackhat Roy walked away then, but I heard something else that maybe no one else heard. It was something he said to himself, under his breath, while everyone else was rushing to Rosebush to comfort her.

“She doesn’t get to cry,” he said.

I didn’t understand what he meant, but then again I did. Still, I felt sorry for Rosebush and her gone father and her C.

It was the very next period when I did something I never would have done if I had had the time to really think it through. The class was history, and we were taking a test. Rosebush sniffled miserably over hers. Me, I answered the questions without much difficulty. It was all material that I had put on flash cards for myself earlier in the week, while, I imagined, Rosebush’s father had been moving from room to room in his house identifying what was his and what was his wife’s.

Blackhat Roy was also in that class, and when he asked to use the bathroom I had an idea. I waited two minutes, then asked if I could use the bathroom as well.

Outside the room, I turned left down the empty hallway toward the boys’ room rather than right toward the girls’
.
I could smell the smoke coming from the restroom, so I knew he was in there. There was a fire alarm on the wall to the left of the door, and then I watched my hand rise up and pull the red lever down. I ran the other way down the hall so that I could be seen emerging from the girls’ room while everyone poured into the hallways amid the screeching bells.

Funny. Sometimes the whole world moves just for you.

But why did I do it?

For one thing, it saved Rosebush. The history test, having been compromised, would need to be rescheduled. But that wasn’t really why I did it. Not really.

What happened was this. The principal called Blackhat Roy into his office and accused him of pulling the fire alarm. No one thought to accuse me of anything, even though I was also out of the classroom at the time the alarm went off. I was Lumen Fowler. I was a good student. I was childlike of stature, and I was unimpeachable.

They couldn’t prove Roy had done anything, but they didn’t need to. In the process of being accused, he grabbed a glass paperweight from the principal’s desk and threw it through the window of the office onto the lawn outside, where it almost struck a fourth grader passing by. That was enough to get him suspended for two weeks.