When We Were Animals(12)

I love the smell of the encyclopedia. When no one is looking, I bury my nose deep into the crease of the binding and breathe in the book. No one else does this. I do not witness any of the other students sniffing the pages of Great Expectations when the paperbacks are handed out in our English class. Me, rather than putting my nose to it, I casually fan the pages with my thumb, which sends into the air the pleasant aroma of wood pulp and ink.

In the library I sit at a carrel, the farthest one in the back corner, and I search through piles of books looking to understand my name. The dictionary does me little good, but I have no hard feelings toward it—I love the way the pages are thumb-notched to make the finding of particular letters easier. If you look at each page individually, it has a unique half-moon cutout at the edge.

In another book I find this, which is the equation for luminance, which I take to mean the quality of luminousness, the quality of me:





I recognize again my symbol, the superimposed I and O together. One and zero. Something and nothing. On and off at the same time. I look up the Greek alphabet to discover what my symbol is called. It is phi, and it can be pronounced either fee or fye—which are the first two syllables of the giant’s song as he is threatening to eat Jack, who went up the bean stalk: Fe-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Blood. It always comes back to blood. You start with light, and you end with blood. But not mine. I am fifteen, I sit in the library with my itchy ankles, and I have not gotten my period yet. I am the last of anyone I know. I am afraid of blood, disgusted by it, and maybe my own fear has suppressed my bleeding.

I go back to the equations, which are black-and-white, pure and lovely.

I find another equation. The best one yet:





It’s the equation for luminous intensity. That’s how much calculation is required to measure the intensity of me. You see how my symbol, the phi, is gone? The candela is still there, but the lumen is nowhere to be seen. Maybe that means you can’t measure the intensity of a thing in relation to itself. You have to put it against others and measure the difference between the light given off by each one.

You have to put Lumen in the lake and see how still she stands, skimming the surface with her pale palms, embarrassed at the flatness of her own chest, noiseless and inert amid the raucous clamor of other boys and girls.

*



Many of the people in my grade went breach that year. I stayed home and studied. Many of the girls acquired and lost a series of boyfriends. I listened to old records my father told me he listened to when he was my age. Many of the bodies around me in school seemed to be undergoing some torturous flux—people coming to school not just with red pimples on their faces but also with rips and tears in the overused skin of their arms and necks. They were savaged. My skin remained smooth and unscored.

Polly came to my house one day, the second day of Worm Moon, and showed me a large purplish bruise on her arm.

“How did you get that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“How could you not know? Does it hurt?”

“It happened, Lumen,” she said. “Last night it happened. I went breach.”

“You did?”

“Look.”

She showed me again her bruise.

“What was it like?”

“I don’t remember very much.”

They said you remembered the breaches better after you had been through a few of them. Very few people could remember their first.

I looked at the bruise, and she displayed her arm proudly.

“It looks like a hand,” I said.

She tried to twist her head around to see it better.

“See?” I said, pointing at the pattern. “One, two, three, four. Like fingers.”

“Someone probably grabbed me?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll ask around. Maybe somebody else remembers.”

“Do you have anything else?”

She blushed. She knew what I was asking.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t know.”

Then I told her something that was a lie.

I said, “I wish I could have been there with you.”

I had no desire to go breach. The thought of running wild, that mortification, made me clammy and sick. But I was trying to be a good and decent friend.

She believed what I told her. Most people my age looked forward to the breach. It meant you had become something else. You were no longer a child. You were a true and natural person.

Clutching my shoulder with her hand, she reassured me.

“It’ll happen for you soon,” she said.

I looked down at my diminutive frame, my bony, nondeveloped chest.

“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.