When We Were Animals(29)

“If you’re going to do it,” I overheard him saying, “just do it, and shut the f*ck up about it.”

Even as he said the words, he was watching me rather than them.

I rushed around the corner out of his sight. I didn’t know what his gaze meant, but I wanted to get out from under it.

It was later that day that Blackhat Roy spoke to me for the first time in my life. It was at the bike cage, where he leaned against the chain-link enclosure—it bowed with his weight. I walked by, trying to be nothing to him, trying to reduce myself.

“Hey,” he said. “Come here.”

I went over to where he stood.

I flinched when he reached out to me, but he just tugged at the white ribbon in my hair.

“What are you trying to look like?” he said.

“Nothing.” This was untrue. We are all, in one way or another, trying to look like something—but we don’t like to be called on it.

“You look like a Creamsicle.”

“Creamsicles are orange, not white,” I said victoriously. Then I chanced to look down and see that I had worn my orange winter jacket over my white cotton dress and white stockings. “Oh.”

He tilted his head to the side and seemed to examine me. Then he leaned forward toward my neck and inhaled deeply.

“You haven’t gone warg yet. You’re late.”

I said nothing. I wanted to run.

“Can you feel it? I remember—I could feel it growing in me before it came. Like a tumor or something. A sick feeling in your stomach. Your guts all rolling around. Then it came, and I wasn’t scared anymore. Are you looking forward to not being scared?”

He did not wait for a response from me. He seemed to have something in his teeth, and he rolled his tongue around in his mouth until he got it. He plucked it out with two fingers and held it up to look at. It was a piece of pink gristle from the school meat loaf at lunch. He flicked it away and returned his gaze to me.

“Me,” he said, “I’m fourteen months already. Longer than anyone else. Maybe I’ll never come out the other end. That happens sometimes, you know. Sometimes you stay breach your whole life.”

“I never heard of that.”

He shrugged.

“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes people don’t breach at all. They just skip it.”

“Now we’ve both never heard of something.”

Behind me I was aware that two freshman girls were walking across the parking lot. Roy grew silent, and his hyena eyes watched them until they were out of sight.

He leaned back and wound his fingers around the chain link over his shoulders. This is where I’ll admit that I’d never really looked at Blackhat Roy before. He’d always been an abstraction to me, like big human notions such as horror and courage and mortification. But now he was forcing me to look at him, all of him. Some people, when they’re breaching, don’t quite get back to their regular selves when the full moon is gone. For some, like Roy, their breacher sensibility follows them into the daylight, throughout the month, the entire year. This was the worst kind of breacher when the full moon rose—and between moons, even during the daylight, you could still see the feral radiance behind the eyes.

He had grown bigger—I never really noticed it until now. He was no longer the runty creature I remembered from grade school. He had a thick mop of curly hair that fell down over his wide brow. He was dark, and it looked like he needed to shave. When he drew his hand across his jawline, you could hear a gristly static. His teeth were crooked, and the way his lips curled into a smile made you feel complicit in all sorts of crimes—things you didn’t even have names for.

His hands, wrapped around the metal ligatures of the cage, were scarred and dirty and short-fingered. The nails were worn down to almost nothing and one of them was ripped off completely, as though he had paws made for digging, hands for labor or violence.

“How come you didn’t save me today?” he said. “How come you didn’t rescue me?”

“I don’t know.”

“How come you didn’t keep your boyfriend from attacking?”

I said nothing.

“Is it because you figured I deserved it? Because you thought I must’ve done something wrong? Is that the reason?”

I shivered, and my throat tried to close up. I didn’t know what would happen to me.

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“Well, you’re right. Did you know it’s considered bad manners to take a piss in somebody’s locker? I guess we learn through our mistakes.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, my voice pleading.

“Didn’t you?” His teeth gnashed, and for a second I thought he would use them to rip my throat out. I would have run, but I was pinned in a way that was a mystery to me. “Guess what. I may be rotten, but I ain’t the only one. I know it was you.”

“What?”

“You pulled the fire alarm that one time. You did it. And I know why. Did you think I forgot about that?”


I didn’t know what to say to him, this furious and filthy golem of a boy. What could possibly be shared between us, apart from fear and calamity? I wanted to be away from him—I wanted him back in his cell in the abstract part of my brain, where I could trace him in the safe trigonometric functions of my daily life. But he wouldn’t go. Maybe he would do what Peter couldn’t. Maybe he would attack. Even here at school, because the boundaries of wilderness and civilization were nothing to Blackhat Roy. I closed my eyes and waited for whatever would come.