When We Were Animals(53)

“Oh,” I say. “No one. Just doing some cleaning.”

“You’re losing it,” she says. “Let’s us girls have a couple Bloody Marys and go put dirty magazines in Marcie’s mailbox. What do you say?”

Lola is lawless. She sees me as the innocent she delights in corrupting. I wonder what she might look like running wild in the woods, naked under the moonlight, tearing at life with her painted fingernails.

She tells me stories about her life before she came here—in New Jersey, where her husband was acquainted with some bad men who sometimes cleaned their guns at her kitchen table. She means to appall me, so I widen my eyes and shake my head slowly back and forth.

We all have stories to tell. Our demons are sunk deep under the skin, and maybe we use stories to exorcise them—or at least know them truly.

*



Beggar’s Moon came at the end of February. I went into town—but different parts of the town, the places where the others never went. I ran until I was out of breath, my burning lungs heaving for air while I stood naked and alone in the middle of an empty supermarket parking lot. There was an unearthly luminescent glow coming from the supermarket, and I walked toward it until I stood on the sidewalk in front of the massive plate-glass windows. Next to me was a recycling bin filled with empty beer bottles. It gave off an acrid smell that I found comforting. The rear of the store was dark, but they had left the overhead lights on in the front. I pressed my palms to the glass, wanting to feel the nighttime haunt of a place that the daylight had seen all populous.

Surely spirits lingered. Surely they moved slower than bodies, always half a day behind their corporeal counterparts. I knew this to be true, because I felt my own spirit still alive somewhere in the daylight, left behind in the comfort of my bedroom, reading a book or calculating trigonometry. My spirit was graceful and true—something to make my father proud.

I felt it alive somewhere. Somewhere else.

There was a sound behind me, and I turned. It was Roddy Ewell. We knew each other from school. He was in the grade below me, and he was small, too. I had wondered, the previous year, if he might ever consider being my boyfriend. Though it had been a long time since he had crossed my mind at all.

He casted a splay of shadows beneath the humming lamps of the parking lot—as though his own spirit were manifold and on the escape.

“I followed you,” he said.

“Why?”

“How come you don’t run with everyone else? It’s not natural.”

I turned my back to him and gazed through the plate glass into the empty store. There was a delicate magic to empty places. I wished myself inside and wondered what it would take to break the window with my head.

“Never mind,” he said behind me. “I like you. Can we do it?”


“What?” I said, not looking at him. “What did you say?”

“I said, can we do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Oh, that. No.”

“But the moon.” He pointed at the sky, though there was no moon to be seen because it was hidden behind clouds.

“No.”

“Why not?”

This is what I had learned about breachers—you were either weak or you were strong. How you presented yourself determined what happened to you. Roddy Ewell did not bother to attack, because he assumed I presented no threat. He thought, between the two of us, that I was the weak one.

He should not have thought that.

When I didn’t answer, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my body. I could feel his penis, erect, against my bottom. I turned myself out of his grasp and shoved him backward.

“Stop it,” I said. “You’re pathetic.”

He cringed, surprised. “What?” he said. This was not going as he had imagined it. My defiance had caught him off guard.

I hated his weakness. I wanted to kill his weakness. I could feel the violence in me twitching all up and down the nerves of my body.

“You’re different,” he said. “You didn’t used to be like this.”

For reasons I did not care to explore, this was unacceptable to me. I reached for one of the empty bottles from the bin next to me, and I threw it at him. He flinched, and the bottle hit him in the shoulder then fell and smashed on the concrete.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Don’t say ouch.”

I took another bottle and threw it at him. He knocked it away, but it made a gash on his forearm, and there was blood.

“Ouch,” he said. “Stop it.”

“Don’t say it. I told you not to say it. You don’t come to me unafraid. Don’t you dare. You think I don’t know how to make pain?”

I attacked. I leaped at him, this meager boy, even though I was smaller than he, smaller than everyone. I threw myself at him, and we tumbled to the tarmac of the parking lot, the grit digging into our skin. He held his arms up to defend himself, but it made no difference. I clawed haphazardly, my fingernails digging bloody troughs in the flesh of his arms, his chest, his shoulders.

“Stop!” He sobbed. “Please, please stop it!”

I couldn’t hear for all the horror happening in my head. I didn’t think. I couldn’t tell what was happening. All I knew was ravenous hunger. I wanted to eat that little-boy soul. I wanted to chew it up and swallow it so that maybe he could be a little stronger, or so that maybe the world could.