When We Were Animals(51)

He sat pharaohlike, with his palms flat on his thighs, almost completely hairless except for the top of his head and the curls around his lumpy genitals. His skin looked pink in the light of the street lamps, ruddy and young. His stomach bulged a little, and there was a roundness to all the parts of his body. He was a large boy—but my instincts told me I didn’t have to defend myself from him, so I relaxed and breathed more deeply.

“How come you’re not with the others?” I said.

He smiled up at the serene stars.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “How long’ve you been breaching? It’s got to be over a year now, right? Are you ever going to stop?”

The street lamps buzzed their electrical buzz.

“Yeah,” I said, as though he’d actually answered. I glanced around to make sure no one else was in the vicinity. “You want to know something? I’m not a real breacher. At least, I’m not the same kind as other people.”

I watched for his response. Perhaps he would look at me with shock and horror. Perhaps he would march off to unite with the common heart that was not mine.

His gaze came down from the sky long enough to look me in the face.

But the pale gentleness of his eyes did not change. My secret shame, the starry sky, a leaf of newspaper blown down the middle of an empty street—to Hondy they were all of a kind. The progress of the slowly turning earth. We turned with it.

And I suddenly wanted to tell him more, to tell him everything.

“My mother, she never breached. That’s how I know. See, I have her blood. So I can’t be a real breacher. I’m something else. Something worse, probably—because for me it’s not about nature. You understand? It’s not natural for me. Even this—being here like this—it’s a lie. And my father, he doesn’t know. He’s been alone for a long time. He misses my mother more than anything. Sometimes that’s all he is, the leftovers of my mom. And sometimes I do things with Peter Meechum, who used to be called Petey, and I don’t know why he wants to be around me, really, he could have any girl—but there was also Roy Ruggle, who everyone calls Blackhat, and he’s gone now, and everyone’s happy about it except me, and I don’t know why I feel bad for him but I do, and Rose Lincoln used to be called Rosebush, and everybody seems to have a new name except me—I’m just Lumen, which means light, but I think there’s something gone rotten in me, Hondy—”

I stopped short. It seemed that the night might crack apart.

“I’ve gone rotten somehow,” I said. “I used to be good. I used to know things. People used to give me prizes for what I knew. Now I don’t know anything, and I don’t even know what good looks like anymore. Remember we used to send valentines to everyone in class? They had hearts and flowers and shy girls in dresses and boys with straw hats? That’s what good looks like to me now. That’s how far away. And I don’t know what it means, except that I’m rotting out from the inside.”

Hondy Pilt shook his head.

“No,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

I went over and sat next to him. He looked at the stars.

I wanted to smell his skin, and I did, putting my nose at the place where his arm met his torso. He smelled of powder.

Then my lips were on his chest, but it wasn’t like kissing—instead, they were parted slightly, and I brushed them over his skin as though I were reading some truth in the textures of him.

He looked at the stars.

He was so much bigger than I was. I leaned into him, pressed my little body against his. From my memory, a phrase throbbed into my brain like a heartbeat—“more than the sum of our parts”—and I liked it. I wondered what was made in the meeting of our skins. Something large but invisible.

I’d confessed to him.

I reached over and put my hand on his genitals. They were soft and warm. They felt strangely loose, unincorporated.

I wanted to stay there all night, but Hondy Pilt pushed me away. With one hand on my shoulder, he pushed me back as though I were a blanket somebody had thrown over him on a hot night. There was no malice in the act, the same way you don’t blame a door for being open or being shut.

Was I an open door or a shut one?

He stood, his attention suddenly caught by something I couldn’t see down the street. Some vagary of the night, I supposed—there were so many things I did not see.

*



My father got the map I made him for Christmas framed and hung it in his office, where he could look at it all the time.

Peter Meechum continued making love to me in the afternoons. He said it made him very happy. One time he wondered aloud why I only had sex with him between full moons—which made me the exact opposite of some other girls. He wasn’t really asking, so I didn’t feel the need to answer him.

And it turned out that January’s Brittle Moon was the last breach for Polly. When February’s moon came, Polly remained indoors.

“Only eleven months,” she said. “I was cheated.”

“Maybe you just mature faster than other people,” I said to reassure her.

“You’re right. Maybe that’s what it is.”

She smiled, satisfied. She seemed to take it to heart. Suddenly she had no more patience for childish things. Her first order of business was to redecorate her bedroom. She told her parents she could no longer tolerate the pinks and purples. What she required, she told them, were what she called “tasteful blues and creams.”