When We Were Animals(44)

The next morning, when I woke, my body was covered in crystals of ice. I was in the backyard of my house, on the lawn, in a little concavity my hot body had made in the snow. Sitting up, I saw a ghost of myself on the ground.

The sun was up, just visible on the horizon. I guessed it must have been five o’clock. My father would still be in bed.

“You sleep nice.”

The voice came from behind me. My body, still moon-driven and instinctive, shot rigid into a crouch. Flee or defend.

Blackhat Roy, still naked, too, sat on the stoop of my back porch. He looked haggard and somehow raw. He was raked with dirt, his hair caked with dry, frozen mud. He scratched at himself casually.

“Your eyelids,” he said. “They flutter when you’re asleep. You remember what you were dreaming about?”

“You’re supposed to be going to Chicago.”

“Leaving tonight.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Now, me,” he went on, “I remember all my dreams. I wish I didn’t. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter. I wake up in the middle of some f*cking fantasyland campfire story, and it takes me a while to get my bearings. You know, what’s true and what isn’t. Where are you really? In the middle of some horror show with smiling dogs, or maybe an orgy of alien women, or maybe just tucked safe away in your bed. It’s a goddamn nuisance is what it is. You ever have that problem? Not knowing for sure what’s real?” He scratched behind his ear and picked something from his hair—a bug of some kind—then crushed it between his fingers. “Or have you got it all figured out?”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“How come?”

“Why are you here? What do you want?”

“You really want to know?”

Suddenly I didn’t like being naked around him. It was too personal, too intimate. Now that the sun was rising over the horizon, it was no longer just nature and breaching. Now there was something else involved—the shame of day. I stood and turned sideways, folding my arms over myself as best I could.

He chuckled, and I was embarrassed about my paltry modesty.

“Let me go inside,” I said.

“Who’s stopping you?”

I was keenly aware that I would have to pass close by him to go up the porch steps into the house. Taking two steps forward, I watched him to see what he would do—but he made no move. His eyes followed me as I got closer, and, as I put my foot on the first step, I thought his arm might shoot out and he might grab me by the ankle. And what then? Where would he drag me? What dirtiness would he scrape onto me? How would it feel on my skin? Would I hate it?

I bolted, running up the rest of the steps until I had my hand on the knob of the back door. Only then did I turn around to find he had not moved at all—he hadn’t even turned around. I looked at his back. There were scars all over it, little white and pink indentations highlighted by dirt and grime.

He had not seized me. He had not dragged me off somewhere, and now I didn’t know how I felt about that.

“You shouldn’t have attacked those people,” I said.

“Is that what you think happened?”

“You attacked them. I saw you.”

“If you saw it, then you know better. Sometimes you get tired of being the town garbage. And sometimes, when you’re tired like that, you realize that the only way to keep from being the prey”—he turned to look at me—“is to put someone else in your place. Besides, the whole town loves a slaughter. How come I don’t get to enjoy myself in the same way once in a while?”

I knew what he said was true, but I had no answer for him.

“You should go home,” I said.

“Home,” he grunted, turning away again. “Right.”


“You act like you’re separate from it.”

“From what?”

“All of it. What everyone’s going through. The breaching.”

“Pomp and faggotry,” he said. “Girl shit.”

“But you’re doing it, too.”

“Nope,” he said simply.

I waited for him to say more, and eventually he did. Though he did not turn around, so I still could not see his face.

“What I do, it’s personal. I take responsibility for it. It’s me. It ain’t some hormones or rite of passage or mass hysteria. I don’t f*cking cry about it in the morning.”

*



By the time the sun went down, Roy was gone.

I was nervous, because it was the fourth night. Usually the breach went three nights—but the jury was still out on what form of sinner I was. So I thought maybe I would go out again. Maybe for me it was an everyday thing for the rest of my life.

But when the sun went down, I didn’t feel the urgent tugging in my chest. I was able to keep my bedroom window closed. And so I knew I would be free of it for another month.

When school started up again after the holiday, things were different. People weren’t exactly friendlier. They didn’t strike up conversations with me in the cafeteria—but sometimes they gave me a cursory nod as they passed. And I noticed something else, too. When I walked down the hallways, people moved out of my way. Before the winter break I had had to be very conscious of where I walked, because if I weren’t careful people would simply walk right into me. But now there was an understanding of presence, a mutual shifting of bodies as they moved through space.