When We Were Animals(16)

I wondered how long it would be before he discovered any number of other taller, prettier girls to help him with math. But somehow one of my childhood incantations had borne him to me, and I relished it with the desperate appetite of someone fated to die the very next day.

“It’s an offense to my masculinity is what it is,” he would say dramatically. “My having to be taught math by a wee girl.”

He said it in a way that made me not mind being called a wee girl.

“We’ll have to compensate,” he went on. “After you explain tangents, you have to promise to let me beat you at arm wrestling.”

“Tangents are easy,” I would say. “It’s just relationships. Angles and lengths. If you have one, you also have the other. I’ll show you.”

In my room, sprawled out on the carpeted floor, I drew diagrams for him on blue-lined notebook pages.

“How do you draw such straight lines without a ruler?” he asked. “Your triangles are amazing.”

He ran his fingertips lightly over my triangles, as though geometry were a tactile thing.

“They’re perfect,” he said.

“They’re not perfect.”

He eyed me.

“Maybe you don’t know what perfect is,” he said. “Those right there—that’s what perfect looks like.”

That was something about Peter. His language made things happen. Things became funny when Peter laughed, and they became ridiculous when he labeled them so. He seemed, somehow, to belong prematurely to that category of adults—people who drove the world ahead of them, like charioteers, rather than being dragged along behind.

The truth is, I was in love with him—Petey Meechum, who was now Peter, who held a carrot stick in the corner of his mouth like a cigar while he was lying on his stomach on the floor of my room complimenting my triangles.

He sighed heavily and rolled over onto his back. He raised his arms toward the ceiling and used his splayed hands to make a triangle through which he peered, squinting, at the overhead light.

“After I graduate high school, I’m leaving,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“New York.”

I didn’t ask why New York. He would tell me without my prompting him.

“It’s like a city on fire,” he went on. “The streets are always smoking from underground furnaces.”

“Steam,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

“What?”

“It’s not smoke. It’s steam.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked it up once. I saw it on TV and wondered what it was. There’s a steam-heat system under Manhattan. Sometimes it leaks.”

His hands fell to his chest, and he was quiet. I felt bad for knowing more about his dream city than he did.

“What will you do in New York?” I asked, trying to resuscitate his vision.

“Lumen, don’t you ever feel like you want to leave?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this place. This weird little town with its weird little traditions. Other places aren’t like this, you know.”

“Every place has its own ways,” I declared reasonably.

He rolled over again, back onto his stomach, and there was something beseeching in his tone when he spoke again.

“But don’t you ever just want to get out? To go somewhere else? To be somebody else—even just for a little while?”

I looked down at the triangles in my notebook. The secret to drawing straight lines is that you use your whole arm, not just your hand and wrist. My father taught me that.

“I like it here,” I said.

“What do you like about it?”

I wasn’t prepared for follow-up questions. Part of me always resented having to justify my likes and dislikes. Other people didn’t have to. No one ever asked Blackhat Roy what it was he liked about hunting knives. Everyone just knew he kept a collection of them, all oiled and polished, in his bedroom.

“Come on,” I said to Peter. “You have to understand tangents. They’re going to be on the test tomorrow.”

*



“I never see you in church,” he said on another afternoon.

My father and I were not churchgoers—but we had frequently driven by when services were being let out, and I wished sometimes to be among those enlightened folk who had occasion to dress in finery in the middle of a plain Sunday morning.

Peter had taken to removing his sneakers when we were studying together. He tucked the laces neatly inside and set them side by side by the door. I liked seeing them there—that one touch of alien boyness that transformed my bedroom into something less than familiar.

“My father never took me,” I said.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Kind of.”

“You kind of believe in God, or you believe in a kind of God?”

I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a boy who takes off his shoes in your bedroom that God is a thing of the mind—but a very, very lovely thing of the mind? I stuttered along for a few moments before he let me off the hook.

“You know, I didn’t used to believe in God.”

“You didn’t?”

“Huh-uh. For a long time I didn’t. And then one day I did. Just like that. Does that ever happen to you? You’re going along, minding your own business, seeing things the way you’ve always seen them—and then all of a sudden those things look different to you?”