When We Were Animals(11)

“You were supposed to take the blame,” she said.

“I did,” I assured her. “I did. I told my dad I did it.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I swear.”

“Then how come I’m the one being punished for everything? How come Idabel’s mom told my mom I was a bad influence?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a liar.” She pointed one long finger at my chest.

“I’m not. I told my dad it was me.” I paused. “It’s just—I don’t think he believed me.”

Rosebush Lincoln looked disgusted.

“Oh, that’s just great. You can’t even convince people you’ve done something wrong when you try. Just stay away from me from now on.”

*



At that age we didn’t know what we did. Or, rather, we understood that it was impossible for things to go any differently. We were too young to change the course of bodies in motion.

My husband, Jack, he’s a schoolteacher, but a new kind of schoolteacher, a kind we didn’t have when I was a child. He works with kids who are At Risk—as though safety were such a common commodity that you could easily hang a tag from all those young people who didn’t possess it. He has one girl—Natalie, who prefers to be called Nat—who sneers and curses and spits sunflower seeds at his shoes while he’s trying to have regular, humane conversations with her. She has been sent to the principal’s office many times for fighting with boys and other girls. She, too, knows about tearing out hair.

Trying to get her to rationalize her behavior, Jack asks her why she does the things she does.

“I don’t know” is her reply. She says it as though the question is an absurd one and has no true answer.

I am curious how she would respond if I had my hands squeezed around her throat. (Would her muscles grow taut, wild?) But I also understand the authenticity of what she says. People like to talk to teenagers about consequences. They like to explain how certain actions may lead to reactions that are undesired. But this is the wrong conversation to have. Teenagers understand inherently how one thing leads to another—but to them the point is moot, because the action that initiates its consequence is just as inscrutable as the consequence itself. The mouth that spits at my husband might as well not be her mouth at all. His shoes might as well be anyone’s shoes, the room a room far away in some other nondescript American suburb.

That is the way of the young. They see something we don’t: the great machines that turn us, indifferent to our will, this way and that.

So I wasn’t angry at Rosebush Lincoln for asking me to lie to my father. And I wasn’t angry at her when she shunned me for not having lied well enough. And I wasn’t even angry about the things she did to Hondy Pilt. All she did was play her part in a tableau that, as far as I was concerned, couldn’t have gone any other way.

Sometimes, when I was a girl, I climbed onto the roof through the gabled window of my second-story bedroom. From the chimney peak, I could see all the way up and down the street. It was as tall as my world got, and it was wonderful. Those summer evenings, I would lie on the sloping shake, securing myself with the soles of my sneakers, watching the stars come out. From my meager height, I beheld the whole entire world as I knew it. And what could be bad about all this?





Chapter 2




My name is Lumen. My father says my mother gave me the name because it means light. I am a light, and I light the way. That’s what the North Star and guardian angels do. But my name also means this:





is me, Lumen. Lumen as a unit. is how many candelas. Candela is another beautiful name. I wish I knew someone named Candela so we could be Lumen and Candela, and we would define each other in measurements of light. The mathematics of illumination. is another unit, steradians, but that is an angular measurement—it defines the direction in which a light is shining. If the light is democratic, if it is loving and gentle and good, if it doesn’t prefer one angle over another, then the equation becomes even more beautiful:





Because there are four pi steradians in a perfect, all-encompassing sphere.

Here I am, now matured to fifteen years of age, and my grades are excellent, the best in school, and I am also smaller than all the other girls in my class, delayed in my growth—stunted, even—and I stay in the library after the final bell rings to look up my name in the large, dusty encyclopedias.

Who could know me? Not my mother, who was dead before I remember. Not my friends, who seem to have found their way into an idea of adulthood. Maybe not even my father, who is generous to a fault and believes so heartily in the errorlessness of me that I wear myself out with being his good daughter. So maybe these books know for certain who I am. They seem so absolute about what they know. They etch my name in perfect symbols. They draw lines to define me, they show how Lumen equates to other delicious little glyphs. I want to be the precision of these equations. Then I could justify who I am.

So yes, there I am in the library, turning the pages of encyclopedias. My ankles itch under my socks. Many of the other boys and girls in my class, Polly included, have gone down to the lake to swim. The boys have tied a rope to a tree branch that overhangs the lake. They swing out over the water and drop in, like dumplings. Once in, they make a game of submarining their way to the girls and grabbing their legs to startle them. Some boys flip the girls head over tail. When this is done, the mandate of the flipped girls seems to be initial outrage followed by affable censure. I have gone to the lake, too, on occasion, but mostly I sit on the shore and watch. When I do go into the water, I wait patiently to be pinched or tumbled by the underwater boys—but perhaps I am prey too meager for their tastes. My hair stays dry.