When We Were Animals(30)

“Don’t worry,” he said after a while. “Probably I won’t hurt you. I don’t get much joy out of hunting down defenseless animals. Not much.”

He unleaned himself from the fence, stretched himself to his full length, and rotated his head quickly in a way that produced an audible crack in his neck. He started away, and I thought everything was over between us—but then, before he had walked very far, he turned back.

“But when you go warg,” he said, “then you better watch out. Because I think I’d like to chomp on you a little.” He smiled when he said it, as though he wanted me not to fear his threats but to savor them.

I didn’t move until he was completely out of sight, then I got my bike from the cage and rode home fast. The icy air blasted my face, but I was not cold. My lungs burned sulfur, and I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. When I got home, I showered—and in my stomach, I could feel the deep bowl of my guts. They sloshed around as though I had all the violent seas of the world inside me.





Chapter 4




Just as the streets of our little town were plowed, another snow came and buried us again. People speculated that we were in for a rough winter. The lake froze early, and it froze wide. That year ice skaters could go farther out than they ever had before. I went skating myself, but I went in the early morning, when nobody else was there. I did spins and twirls, and I thought I must be the most elegant sight, a lone skater in the sunrise. When others began to show up, I glided to the shore and sat on a stone to remove my skates. They would always be surprised to see me. Their thought was to have been the first—but they weren’t. Sometimes things work that way.

Peter continued to avoid me. And Polly spoke to me as though I were a child—when she spoke to me at all. As soon as the final bell of the school day rang, I rushed home to avoid any further contact with Blackhat Roy, whose eyes seemed to track me in the halls from one room to the next. I had somehow wandered into his domain, and now I couldn’t escape. Once I had lamented being invisible, but now there was nothing I desired more than to be out from under his gaze. He seemed to know when I came into a room, because his head would swivel on his neck and those dark eyes of his would nail me to a wall. Even in the cafeteria, swarming with hundreds of moving bodies, echoing with a constant din—even there, when I walked through the doors, I could see that dusky, scabrous face of his looking through the crowd at me, a still-pale petal in an algae-covered pond.

So instead of looking things up in the library after school, where I knew I’d be discovered, I took my books to the deserted school auditorium and studied there.

I was very much enamored with maps that year. Maybe it was because my father was a geologist and was always looking at elaborate technical diagrams that made earthly landscapes look like strange outlined amoebas on the page. I sometimes thumbed through his books, tracing the curved lines with my finger. But really my interest was in conventional maps. I looked them up in old atlases. I followed their legends, exploring—mistaking, perhaps, the paper on which the world was printed for the actual world itself. I read books that had maps printed on their endpapers. As the events of the book unfolded, I would turn back to the endpapers and locate them on the map. I liked how the linear progression of time over the course of a novel could be condensed into a single map image, as though it were all said and done before the book even started—as though all of any person’s life could be reduced to just a legend explaining some fixed map we could not see.

I drew maps in my notebooks during class. Sometimes simple maps showing the spatial relationships of the students in a classroom, maybe with arrows illustrating their various kinds of connections. Or sometimes complex maps of the entire school building, featuring dotted lines that traced my regular routes from class to class.

My father liked my maps. He said they showed a unique mind, the kind of mind that existed above itself and was able to see itself in context. Context, he said, was a very important thing. So I said the word to myself thirteen times that night before I went to bed, and it became one more in my arsenal of magic words.

What I was working on that day, sprawled on the warm wooden floor of the empty stage, was going to be a Christmas present for my father. It was a very large and detailed map of the town and all the places in it that were significant to the two of us. Like the drive-in where we used to see movies but didn’t, for some reason, anymore. Like the tree in the cemetery under which my mother lies buried. Or the exact place on the freeway where we almost got into an accident and he had to pull over on the shoulder and tell me how much he loved me, how much more than anything else in the world I meant to him. I know it was a strange one to include, but it made sense in my unique mind, and I believed he would understand.

I made our house the center of the map. I drew it in pencil first and then in fine black pen to get as much detail as possible. You could even see into the upstairs window of the house if you cared to look. And there, framed in the window, was the teensy-tiny figure of a girl standing before an easel, drawing a map.

It was nice there in the musty auditorium, the sound of my scratching pencil echoey in the large space, the heavy, muffling curtains hanging loose over the hard wood. The moving air from the vents ruffled them slightly, and they rippled like vertical oceans. I liked the rows of unpopulated seats staring at me, their lower halves all folded up except one on the aisle that was broken and remained always open, a poor busted tooth in that grinning mouth. There is nothing to fear in such cavernous and sepulchral spaces. You fill them with the riots of your imagination.