When We Were Animals(25)

“And,” he went on, “that’s when I thought, ‘That’s my girl. Whatever comes at her, she’ll be able to handle it.’ My little Lumen.”

He put his open hand on the side of my face, and I leaned my head into it a little bit.

I went to school, and my head was filled with that story all day. It wasn’t until many hours later that I realized something.

He hadn’t actually answered my question.

*



After school that same day, as I was riding my bike home, Peter met me by the side of the road.

“Come on,” he said. The way he said it was not nice at all.

“Where are we going?”

“Just follow me.”

His parents had given him an old Volkswagen on his sixteenth birthday, and it was parked a little way down a side road. He got in, started the engine, and waited for me to join him.

Sometimes people wonder why they do the things they do. I don’t wonder. He was Peter Meechum, whom all the girls love, and I was nobody, whom nobody loved. He had given me a command, and I was particularly good at obeying commands. And I had never been invited into his car before. So I went.

I hid my bike in the trees by the road and got into the car. The interior smelled of rust and oil.

He drove into the woods, then turned off the tarmac onto a dirt road. It was cloudy, and there were no shadows on the ground. Everything looked flat, too close. You could suffocate on the grayness of the world. The road was unmaintained. Weeds grew up between the tire tracks, and deep divots jostled my body about inside the vehicle. A weathered road sign lay in the tall sumac, half buried by hard dirt. It announced that the road was a dead end. But everybody knew it was a dead end. Even I knew where this road led.

I looked at Peter, but his gaze remained sternly forward.

Soon the trees opened up, and the dusty sun shone down on the wide expanse of the quarry. Peter brought the car to a stop and shut off the engine. I wondered if he would force me to walk into the mine just as Rose had forced Hondy Pilt to do the year before. But he said nothing. The only thing to be heard was the wind groaning in the trees.

He opened his door and got out, and I got out, too.

“This way,” he said.

I followed him around the rim of the quarry to a small grove where the streamlet from the mountain above collected into three small pools before continuing down into the mine. There was a grassy clearing in the grove, and when you were in it you felt protected and safe. That day, though, it was cold. A sharp breeze made a whistling sound through the grove. I shrugged myself deeper into my coat and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Now what?” I said.

“Lay down.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m going to have sex with you.”

The expression on his face was determined and dire.

When I didn’t move at all, he took me by the shoulders and led me to the place where he wanted me to lie. Then he exerted a slight pressure with his hands, almost nothing, really, and down my body went as if by mystical coercion. Maybe he had magic-spell words, too, that he used to cast conjurations. You cannot always understand boys, the things they do. They act, sometimes, as though in thrall to severe but natural forces. They can be waterfalls or wind gusts.

I sat down at first, then he gave me another little push, and I lay back. The dry autumn grass tickled my neck. I stared up into the gray sky, circumscribed by the tops of needled evergreens. It felt like the sky was particularly low that day—a ceiling you could almost reach up and brush your fingers across.

Then Peter stood over me, looking down at me as though he were a giant and I was a poor little farmer at the bottom of a bean stalk.

“I’m going to have sex with you,” he said again.

“No,” I said—because that seemed to be the thing I was supposed to say.

“You said I was ugly.”

“No,” I said again. I wanted to reach up and run my fingertips across the sky. I thought it must be silky and lush. Maybe my hand would sink into it. I was no longer cold.

He kneeled down and leaned over me.

“Take off your pants,” he said.

“No,” I said. I could hear my voice saying it. It was a charming voice—I was charmed by it. I could hear myself saying it in the space between the trees. My voice there between those leaves that fretted and shivered.

Then Peter was unzipping my pants and tugging them over my narrow hips. When he got them to my ankles, he realized he had to take my shoes off as well, so he wrenched them off without untying the laces. It was a very awkward process, and I felt sorry for him—and I kept laughing inwardly at the girl whose body was being turned this way and that.

He must have gotten my underpants off, too, because I could feel the reedy grass tickling my bare bottom.

So there it was. The whole thing. The low ceiling of the sky above, the ticklish sumac beneath, and me sandwiched between the two, my bare lower half looking like a ridiculously pale chicken leg, I suppose, one sock tugged partly off my foot like a floppy dog ear.

Peter unbuckled his own pants and took them off. His underpants were plaid. He stood over me.

“Are you going to do it?” I asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“It’s happening anyway.”

“Okay.”

He moved my legs apart and kneeled down between them. At first he just examined me with his eyes. Then he fell on me and started moving against my body. His muscles were rigid, his weight on me like a load of lumber pressing me to the ground. They were lurching movements, spasms of anguished effort. He did not kiss me at all. Before there had been lots of kisses and not much else. This was the reverse of that. So maybe kisses were the opposite of sex. Maybe they were the birth of the death of sex.