When We Were Animals(41)

I could name almost everyone I saw—because I was the kind of girl who knew everybody’s name, even though I was allied with none of them. There was Ellie Wilkins, Carl Bodell, Frenchie Lassister, the twins Margot and Marina Anderson, Wally Kemp, Gary Tupper, George Ferris, and also George Dodd. Mildred Gunderson, Marcel Judd, Theo Kaminer. Cameron Mayer, whom most people just called Monkey. Adelaide Warren and Sue Foxworth and Florabel McCarron (who had started breaching so early that she was picked on by the others and had to be hospitalized after her first full moon). John Stonehill, Joel Phelps, Barbara Montgomery. Worth Loomis. Sylvia Hitchcock.

Rose Lincoln was there, too, looking like a matriarch overseeing the soldiery of her empire. She walked among them, her head held high and regal, her pale body indifferent to the bodies around her.

Peter Meechum was there, the king to Rose’s queen. He lay atop the gazebo roof, stargazing, while Bessie Laurent nestled against him, her hand moving with a lullaby rhythm between her legs. He paid no attention to her. And that was good, because I was quite sure I loved him—and that I could with very little remorse bite the tongue right out of Bessie Laurent’s mouth. That was the kind of clarity you could have on nights like these. All the fine-tuned complications of the day give way to the big absolutes: love, hate, life, death, good, evil, boy, girl, angel, fiend.

Blackhat Roy was there, too. He was relegated to the margins.

I watched them from the safe distance of the diner roof. I watched them, because these were my people. These were the people I had been born to. This was my heritage on true display.

Then, in the distance, there was the sound of a car engine. Headlights on the horizon.

Sometimes people came from the outside. Travelers. We were a long way off the main freeway through the state, so it didn’t happen often. But sometimes it did.

Some of the breachers below scattered by instinct. Others stayed. Blackhat Roy stayed, drawn by curiosity nearer the road, to the base of a granite monument in the shape of an obelisk. Peter stayed, raising himself up on his elbows. Rose Lincoln leaned against a tree trunk and crossed her arms, waiting.

The car drove once around the square, its windows rolled down. We could hear loud, overlapping voices coming from inside, the voices of teenagers like us.

Unlike us.

“This is it? I don’t get it.”

“I thought you said we were gonna find a liquor store.”

“This place doesn’t seem so scary. Why’s everybody always warning us about it?”

“Fucking Mayberry.”

“Aren’t there supposed to be ghosts or vampires or something? What the f*ck?”

Then they must have spotted the breachers who had made no effort to hide themselves. The car stopped at the edge of the town square, and one of the boys got out and said, “What the hell is this?” and the others also got out and began to laugh and point. “They’re naked!” they said, and, “What are they? Hippies? Is this what we’re not supposed to see? Hippie bullshit?”

I watched from my perch on the roof. Blackhat Roy, his body covered in soot, moved closer to them. He cocked his head slightly as if considering the visitors.

It was one thing for the breachers to attack one other. That was accepted. That was the nature of the place. It was our nature. But this was something different. Outsiders, the few we got, were usually left alone. It was a precarious balance that worked out most of the time. On the one hand, breachers normally preferred to roam the dark woods rather than the overly bright downtown streets. On the other hand, most residents from neighboring towns stayed away from us during the full moon out of a superstitious fear of the town’s reputation. But sometimes there were exceptions in both cases—the habits of breachers were broken, and the mythologies of the town were forgotten by the outsiders.

I might have warned them. I might have called down to them to get back into their car and drive away. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

The five of them were out of the car, some still pointing, some laughing with gaudy, wide mouths, some revolted. That’s when the other breachers emerged from around corners and from the dark of alleyways. They came out, naked all, and surrounded the travelers.

Two of the five were girls, and they didn’t like what was happening. They got back into the car and begged the three boys to take them home. But the boys continued to laugh. “A town full of retards,” one said.

“Please!” the girls said from inside the car. “Please come on!”

But then something strange happened. From my height, I could see that the breachers, led by Peter Meechum, who had hopped down from the gazebo roof, were closing not around the travelers but around one of their own, Blackhat Roy.

It was a sign of dominance, territoriality. I understood it instinctively. Instead of attacking the interloper, attack one of your own. Put on full display the untamed wildness of your power.

By the time Roy saw what was happening, it was too late to run. I could see, even from my height, the panic in his eyes. His head turned around, wondering from which direction the first attack would come.

“It’s gonna hurt, Roy,” I could hear Peter saying. “You know it’s gonna hurt.”

But then something occurred to Blackhat Roy. Instead of defending himself, he turned on the travelers, the boys laughing and pointing from their car.

“What do you f*cking know about hurt?” he said to the boys. “You and yours. I’m gonna teach you something about hurt.”