When We Were Animals(37)

Eventually, she said, “So?”

“So what?”

“So last night.”

“Yeah.”

“It finally happened.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Everyone was wondering if it was ever going to happen for you. Are you relieved?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Not much.”

“We tried to look for you, you know. But we couldn’t find you. You’re fast. I never knew how fast you were.”

I said nothing. The swiftness with which I had run naked through the woods was an unfathomable topic for me.

Polly, observing my reluctance to speak, stopped in the road and turned to face me. In some dim part of my mind, I found myself enthralled by the abrasions on her skin. I could wander free on the landscape of her injuries.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you all right? I know it’s a big deal. It’s scary. I remember my first time.”

I remembered her first time as well. She hadn’t seemed scared at all. She had seemed proud and gloating.

“Do you remember,” she said, smiling, “how you used to say it wouldn’t happen to you? I mean, you were so convinced that you were different. I bet that seems silly now, doesn’t it? All that worry for nothing.”

“I guess so.”

“You get used to it. You do. You begin to look forward to it, even. Look, we’re young. We’re only going to be young for a little while. Then we’ll be old forever. We might as well enjoy it, you know?”

A car came, and we stepped out of the road into a snowbank.

“You know,” she said, “I kind of envy you that you’re just starting. But it’ll be better now. We’ll be together. It’s like you moved away for a while—but you’re back now.”

The thought that I had traveled so far by accident the night before made me sick.

“It feels wrong, Polly,” I said. “It just feels wrong.”

“But it’s not,” she said. She took my shoulders and gave her head a maternal shake to reassure me. “It’s not. Don’t you see? It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s only beautiful. That’s the only thing it is.”

She shivered, then put her arms around me.

“Come on,” she said. “Hug me. It’s cold. Let’s just forget about everything up till now. The past is dead and buried. That’s what the breach is all about, right?”

I put my arms around her. Beneath the perfume of her shampoo, her hair smelled like something else—the fecund tang of earth and rot.

*



My second visitor of the day was Blackhat Roy. I saw him coming from down the street, and I rushed to meet him outside so my father wouldn’t see him at the door.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Heard the news,” he said. “You’re out. You’re fair game.”

“I’m not out.” In the daylight you scoff at the shadows you cowered from the night before. I had my mother’s blood. I knew I was different. I had faith that I was still not like the others. “I was helping my friend, and I was attacked. I ran.”

“Spent all night running away?”

“Go away.”

He sniffled from the cold, wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“I saw you,” he said.

“When?”

“Last night. In the woods.”

“You didn’t. I remember. I ran away from everybody.”

“Fuck everybody. It was just me. And you saw me, too.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“The way you looked at me,” he went on, ignoring my denials, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. You didn’t just want to tussle—it was like you wanted to rip me to pieces.”

He seemed delighted by the fact. The way he said it made it seem lascivious.

“No,” I said again. “I was just running. But I’m not doing it again.”

“You want to know the truth? I stayed out of your way. I’m not scared of much, but last night I was a little scared of you.”

He smiled when he said it, a smile of filth and gloating. So what was that churning I felt in my belly when he winked at me?

“See you on the wild side, girl.”

I went back in the house and shut the door on him.

In the kitchen, my father was making ginger tea, which was our favorite.

*



What was I?

Defective, for one thing. I had grown wrong somehow. My atoms and molecules were failing to adhere to one another the way they should have. My organs were stunted, dwarflike. My body was one pale refusal.

It didn’t matter that everyone else was doing it. Their doing it was native—my doing it was criminal.

Even in this I had failed. Everyone was relieved that I had finally gone breach—they felt that they could talk to me now, that I was one of them, joined together in their wild union. But I wasn’t one of them after all. I was still different. They welcomed what I feared. They jumped when I cringed. They howled while I whimpered.

Not that I was looking to be like the others. But to be between was too much to bear. To be defined by betweenness is not to be defined at all. It is to live your whole life at dusk, which is neither day nor night and therefore an hour of sad nothing caught between one kind of life and another.