When We Were Animals(45)

It was as though I had become suddenly visible.

In the girls’ restroom, I encountered Polly and Rose Lincoln. They were brushing their faces with powder and looking at themselves in the mirror. First they sucked their lips in, then they puckered them out.

Polly still looked pretty beat up, but there seemed to be no animosity between the two of them.

“Lumen!” Polly said when she saw me. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“We didn’t see you after the first night,” said Rose. She didn’t look away from the mirror.

“You didn’t try to stay in, did you?” said Polly.

“No,” I said.

“It’s strange the first couple times, I know.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“What, this?” Polly said, gesturing to the abrasions showing through the powder on her face. “It’s nothing. I didn’t mean to frighten you the other night. Sometimes things get a little emotional in the moment. But everybody gets busted up sometimes. Life, you know?”

“One thing you can say about Polly,” said Rose approvingly. “She knows how to take a beating.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You should come with us next time,” Polly said. “We’ll take care of you. Shouldn’t she, Rose?”

“Uh-huh,” said Rose.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Come on,” Polly said. “I know you just started, but mine’s almost over. Just for once I’d like to run with you. Don’t you want to run with me?”

Rose Lincoln closed her powder case with a snap and turned to us.

“She won’t come with us. She’s too busy praying at manger scenes.”

“I wasn’t praying,” I protested.

“Where were you the night Roy almost killed those people?”

“I was there.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Yes, I was. I was watching, and it didn’t happen that way. It wasn’t just Roy.”

“Watching!” Rose Lincoln scoffed. “All you ever do is watch. Well, don’t pray over me. I don’t need it, and I don’t want it.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“But I wasn’t praying,” I said lamely.

“Never mind,” Polly said. “You’ll run with me next time, won’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

Promises are easy to make. You utter a word or two, and it’s done. But those are magic words, too. They speak of a defined future to which you are required to adhere. They commit you beyond the length of your experience.

What they do is they take away possibility.

Promises are the opposite of hope.

*



My father said, “You look tired. Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Come here. Let me feel your forehead.”

I went to him. He placed his palm on my forehead.

“You feel a little hot. You’re sure you’re not getting a fever?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “You’ve been cooking. It’s probably your hand that’s hot.”

He looked at me with suspicion.

“Really, I’m okay. Look.”

Then I did some dancing twirls, the kind I used to do for him as a girl. He clapped. He was delighted. He was convinced, once again, that everything was just fine.

*



And there was something else. Peter started visiting me in the afternoons, as he had earlier in the school year. He looked at me in a new way since I had gone out during the last moon—as though he had never had sex with Rose Lincoln, as though he had never taken me to the woods and been unable to rape me.

One day after school, he showed up on my doorstep with two wooden mallets and a large bag hoisted over his shoulder.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Croquet!” he said. “It’s the game of kings.”

“Is it?”

So we drove the wickets into the frozen ground of my backyard, and, bundled in our coats, we hammered our colored wooden balls through them. It felt good—like reclaiming for civilization the very same lawn where I had woken up in shame just a couple weeks before.

Afterward we went up to my room. While I organized my homework into prioritized piles, I could feel his eyes on me.

“I’m something to you now,” I said, turning to him.

“You were always something to me,” he said. “But for a while you were too much of a something to me. You were all the way up here, and I was all the way down here.” He used the full stretch of his arms to make his point.

“So now I’m all the way down there with you?”


“Not quite.” He smiled. “But at least you’re close enough that I can see you from where I am.”

“And where’s Blackhat Roy on that scale?”

Peter shook his head. “It’s good he’s gone. That guy was bad news. Really, Lumen, you don’t even know how bad.”

He was restless and disinclined to study. While I copied dates from the world history textbook onto note cards, he browsed the books on my shelves. Once, I had to stop him.