When We Were Animals(47)

“Yeah, a good guess.” I moved toward him and gave him a kiss. “That’s for your good guess.” Then I backed away again.

“All right, all right.” He rubbed his palms together and stared at the ceiling. After a while he said, “Dickens.”

“Because of David Copperfield,” I said. “Not for Tale of Two Cit-ies.”

“So I’m right? Two out of four. That leaves me six guesses for the last one. How do you like my odds?”

“I don’t like them at all.”

“Remember: fate.”

“I remember.”

“Okay, let’s see.” He glanced over at my bookshelves.

“Hey, no unfair advantages.”

“Sorry.”

He covered his face with his hands.

“Ernest Hemingway,” he said eventually.

I gave him a look.

“Okay, no critiques on the wrong guesses, please. Oh, I know. Who’s that guy who wrote the Buddha book?”

“Hermann Hesse?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Sylvia Plath?”

I shook my head.

“Kurt Vonnegut?”

“No.”


“Oh, wait, I know—Lord of the Flies.”

“That’s not an author.”

“What was his name?”

“William Golding. And no.”

“Damn it. How many guesses is that?”

“You have one more.”

He was quiet for a long time, his face buried in his hands, and I liked how his sandy hair hung tousled over his fingers.

Suddenly he sat up, looking pleased with himself. He reached out for me and pulled me to him so we were sitting next to each other on the bed. Then he leaned in close. I could smell his skin.

“I got it,” he said. “Do you believe I’ve got it?”

“No,” I said, my voice almost a whisper.

“Well, I do. I’ve got it. Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

He said it slowly, each syllable a victory:

“J. D. Salinger.”

I looked at him for a long time, that pristine boy with his acrobatic teetering between glory and shame. Our faces were impossibly close. We shared the heated air—what he breathed out, I breathed in.

“Well?” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I got it, didn’t I?”

And I said, “You got it.”

We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments.

It was nothing. Three words. Two of them were even plosives, or stop syllables. You got it. Nothing at all. It was a flake of a moment, a fingernail of time—but it was there in that narrow margin between one thing and another that I saw who I really was.

He placed his hands lightly on my chest as though to encase my lack of breasts and protect them from harm. Just as you do with newly planted saplings.

The look on his face, beneath features scarred by moonlit nights in the wild, was awfully earnest—and I didn’t think that anything Peter Meechum wanted to do could be very bad. It was a legitimate, daylight thing—it was something done all over the world all the time. It had nothing to do with that ugly, lecherous, queasy feeling in my stomach during the three nights of the full moon. This was something else entirely.

As an act, it was cool, somber, polite.

He removed his clothes, and he told me I should remove mine as well. After that, I lay down, and he scooted his body over mine. His chest against me was bony and raw.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you ready?”

“Uh-huh. Yes.”

I didn’t know what to expect. There was a pinch, a slight off feeling, as of something being lodged where it shouldn’t be. Like a piece of spinach between your teeth. It hurt a little, but not so much. Peter was very careful and considerate.

“Okay?” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “You don’t have to keep asking.”

So he closed his eyes and went about his business. I watched him, a little firebrand of industry, chugging away at his given chore. It made me think of those chain gangs from movies, the prisoners all shackled together, swinging their pickaxes in unison. The idea made me smile, but I didn’t want him to think I was laughing at him, so I turned my head and hid my face in the pillow.

His face grew a deep red color, and then I knew he was done, because he fell off me to the side and made sounds that suggested pride and relief.

I felt something leaking out of me, so I went to the bathroom. I took some of the stuff on my fingers to examine it, because it was new to me. It was slippery and a little sticky, and it smelled like pancake batter. I thought about all the invisible, microbial creatures swimming around in it, and it made me a little nauseated, so I washed my hands. But I wished them all well, his little sperms, as I sent them down the drain.

I wasn’t on the pill, but I was pretty sure you couldn’t get pregnant when you were amenorrheic.

I was suddenly shy again, so I wrapped a towel around myself before I went back to the bedroom. Peter was still collapsed on the bed, all used up.

“You have to get dressed,” I said. “Before my father gets home.”