When We Were Animals(22)

This truth is, I liked my strange country. But I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me, as though I were in quarantine. Couldn’t they see my aloneness was a freedom rather than a prison?

Once, though, Peter brought me something back from his breach night. He said, “Look. I found it by the river.”

He put it into the palm of my hand. It was a little metal heart with a loop at the top, a charm lost from a bracelet.

“It’s old,” I said.

“How can you tell?”

“It’s tarnished.”

“See?” he said. “It was waiting there for a long time. Waiting for me to find it and give it to you.”

“Thank you.”

He smiled.

“I think about you,” he said, “at night, when I’m out there.”

“What do you think?”

“I guess I think about being near you. I think about how it’s like there’s a bubble around you.”

“A bubble?”

“A big bubble. A block wide. It goes where you go—you’re the center of it. And every object gets a little bit better while it’s in that bubble with you. It’s always very bright where you are.”

And I was bright just then. I was breathing very hard. The only thing I could do was get myself as near to him as I possibly could, so I leaned in and put my head against his chest and listened to his heart.

*



Hondy Pilt was an interesting case. He had first gone breach when Peter had, during the same moon, and the next day in school the breachers seemed to have a newfound respect and even admiration for him.

I asked Polly about it.

“I don’t know what it is about him,” she said. “You just want to follow him. He ran through the woods—I’ve never seen anyone run like that. I mean, Lumen, he was beautiful.”

“Really?”

“I know it sounds stupid, but it’s no joke. We followed him, and he took us to this clearing on the side of the mountain. Nobody ever knew it was there. He stood on this rock jutting out over nothing. If he fell…but he didn’t fall. He put his arms out. Like the sky was his or something. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

It was true—there was something different about him, something even I could witness during the day. He had always seemed like someone struggling against invisible forces, but now there was a peacefulness about him—as though he had arrived at a place and recognized it as a true home, as though he had discovered a back door into heaven and waited patiently for the rest of us to find him there.

I tried to speak to him. In the cafeteria a couple days later, I brought him a banana as an offering. I had always been kind to him—more than most, I believe. I said hello. I asked him how his day was going. Usually he smiled back and uttered a few guttural words of greeting. That day, though, his eyes didn’t even meet mine. He was gazing upward, as though he could see the sky through the ceiling. He reached out and put his big hand over my little one, and he just held it there for a long time. I didn’t know what to do, so after a while I took my hand back and left him there smiling to himself.

I had wanted him to share his secrets with me, but instead what I got was consolation. The last thing I wanted was to be pitied by Hondy Pilt.

Amenorrhea. I looked it up. That’s what it’s called when you don’t get your first period by age sixteen. At first I wondered what it had to do with the end of a prayer—where you say, Amen. But then I realized it was probably “men,” as in “menstruation,” and “a,” as in “not”—so “not menstruating,” amenorrhea. That’s the word I tried to counteract with my magic word menarche.

Where did all that blood go if it wasn’t evacuating my body? I worried. Did it collect somewhere? Did I have a sac in my thorax that was growing larger every day with unshed blood? That was crowding my other organs? If not blood, what was my body spending its time in the production of? All flowered fantasies and brain work?

Two months after Hondy Pilt and Peter Meechum went breach, the second, smaller Parker twin went breach. That meant I was the only one in my grade who hadn’t. In fact many of the people in the grade below me had already started going. It was something you couldn’t hide. Your absence on those nights was noticed.

Polly tried to console me. She said it was a sign of great maturity to breach late. Rose Lincoln was not so kind. She said it was because I was underdeveloped, obviously—that I was repressing my womanhood. “You have to have a grown woman somewhere in you scrambling to get out,” she explained. “How come you don’t want to let her out? You can’t stay a girl forever, you know. After a while, girlhood’s just a shell for something else.”

To Rose Lincoln I was a shell. A dry husk. One of those disappointments like cracking open a peanut only to find there’s no nut inside.

I knew I wasn’t going to go breach at all. But I hadn’t known what it would mean—watching everyone else as though we were on opposite sides of a wide river. I could hear them frolicking in the distance with their puffed-out bodies and their bleeding wombs. I felt that I was waving to them from my exile. Sometimes someone waved back.

So I said my magic word every night, and I looked at myself in the mirror every morning to see if any part of me had grown.

Peter Meechum petted me like a poodle and was in constant care not to corrupt me with his newfound adulthood. I wanted his hands on me, but he was reluctant.