When We Were Animals(10)

He stopped once, turned, and looked back at us, as if to be reassured.

“Warrior!” Rosebush called to him in a strange, whispery voice.

Then he moved forward again, slowly, until his form was lost completely to the dark.

We waited. A caught breeze blustered through the quarry, rustling the dried sumac, blowing strands of hair in a ticklish way across our lips. We used our fingers to tuck the hair behind our ears, and we waited.

Then, from the deep echoey dark of the mine, we heard a hiss, a monstrous, spitting hiss. Then Hondy Pilt’s voice, a low, whining complaint, followed by quick movement—a crash, the sound of feet advancing fast in our direction, his voice again, miserable and high—and behind it all that feral hissing.

Then we saw him disclosed from the dark, his panicked bulk running toward us.

And then we believed in monsters, hissing creatures like aged demons unearthed from the dry crust of the world. We ran. The woods came alive with the sound of our shrieks. Birds fled and crickets hushed, and we turned and ran from the mouth of the mine, squealing, across the floor of the quarry and up the opposite slope, our fingers digging into the loose gravel for desperate purchase.

We were halfway up the side of the quarry when we heard a loud cry of pain below. Hondy Pilt had emerged from the mine at full speed and had tripped over Rosebush Lincoln’s pink backpack. He now lay curled into a ball and howling on the floor of the quarry. It would get him. He was a goner now—food for the beasts of the earth—and we left him and hid behind the trunks of trees.

Except that then, beyond him, we saw emerge from the mine the monster that had chased him out of its den, hissing and spitting the whole way. It was a possum. Assured that its home was no longer in danger, the creature turned and scurried back into the dark depths of the mine.

Sometimes it happens this way. Your greatest fears in the dark turn out to be nothing more than angry rodents and zealous girls with pink backpacks. Or nothing less.

*



It was all discovered. Hondy Pilt’s forearm was fractured from his fall in the quarry. He would have to wear a cast for the next three weeks, and Rosebush Lincoln would be the first to sign her name on it in pink marker. We suffered little in comparison. Our palms were covered with tiny abrasions from our quick scramble up the side of the quarry. But it was nothing a coat of stinging Bactine couldn’t fix.

Our parents discovered we had been drinking beer, and they intuited that we had been responsible somehow for Hondy Pilt’s accident.

The orchestration of blame was intricate and devious—it was decided that I would take the blame for everything.

After we delivered Hondy Pilt back to the hospital in town, Rosebush Lincoln took me aside to have a talk.

“You have to say it was you,” she said, her voice casual but uncompromising.

“It was me what?”

“The beer. And Hondy, telling him to go into the mine. It has to be you.”

“Why?”

“They won’t do anything to you. You’re too good.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, Lumen. It was an accident. I like Hondy. I didn’t want to hurt him. I’m already in trouble for a million things. My parents’ll kill me. They’re not nice. They’re not like your dad. Please.”

So I did it. While I held my hands palm upward over the sink and my father poured hydrogen peroxide on them, I told him it was all my fault.

“Is that right?” he said.

“Yes. I brought the beer. I told Hondy Pilt to go inside the mine.”

“Really? Where did you get the beer?”

“I stole it.”

“Stole it!” He smiled down at me. “So you’re a thief now, are you?”

“Just that once.”

I looked down at my palms, the hydrogen peroxide foaming in all the cuts.

“And you made Hondy Pilt go into the mine?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”


It had never occurred to me that someone would ask why I had done the things I claimed to do—just as I had never thought to ask Rosebush why she was Rosebush. Why ask? People are like characters in books. They are defined by their actions—not the other way around.

“I don’t know,” I said pathetically.

The smile never left his face. He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to puzzle through my gambit.

“So…well, all these moral lapses—I guess you should be punished.”

“I guess so.”

“Let’s see.” He pursed his lips and tapped his chin with his fingertips. “What time is your curfew?”

What he meant was between full moons. Everyone had the same curfew when the moon was full: sundown.

“Ten o’clock.”

“All right, then. Let’s make it nine thirty for the rest of the week.”

He went back to tending my palms, rinsing away the hydrogen peroxide and bandaging the cuts.

But something wasn’t right. The reason he didn’t know what time my curfew was was because I was almost always home for the night by eight o’clock, hunched up on one corner of the couch, reading a book. His punishment was absurd—not a real punishment. And that’s when it occurred to me: he didn’t believe my confession. He was humoring me.

My suspicions were borne out the next day when Rosebush Lincoln confronted me on the street outside the drugstore where they sold colorful ices.