When We Were Animals(55)

I wondered if she and Peter had been having sex in the rain, and I thought I might enjoy killing her. But such instincts in me seemed to go straight to the brain, where violence takes seed and grows larger over time rather than permitting itself release in the moment. I would say nothing.

Idabel McCarron came up to me and pressed her slippery body to mine. I allowed it, because the sensation was new to me—and, besides, we were all a little rain-drunk.

“Did you hear?” she whispered in my ear. “He’s back.”

“Who?”

“Look.”

She pointed, and just at that moment, emerging from the lake like some mammalian vestige of prehistory, was Blackhat Roy.

He was different—I saw it immediately. He seemed larger, for one thing, a bigger, more solidified version of himself—though after just three months, I don’t know if that was possible.

Peter was also seeing him for the first time. He left Rose Lincoln’s side and approached Roy. The two stood face-to-face on the lakeshore in the rain. When they were together like that, I could see that Roy still had to angle his head up to meet Peter’s eyes. But he was bigger. I swear it. Somehow he commanded more space.

“I thought you were in Chicago,” Peter said quietly.

“I’m back.”

“Why?”

“You want to hear the whole story? It might cause you grief.”

He was different. In my mind, I tried to telegraph to Peter to be careful, because Blackhat Roy was different.

Thunder quaked in the distance. The rain unfurled sideways, like a sheet pinned to a clothesline in the wind. We didn’t shield ourselves from it.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Peter said. “You don’t belong here.”

“Really? I would have thought this is exactly where I belonged.”

“You terrorized those people.”

It seemed that Peter, along with everyone else, had convinced himself of certain fictions about that night.

“Terrorized!” Roy laughed. Then he said the word again, as though he didn’t think much of it. “Terrorized.”

That’s when Peter struck him, his closed fist cutting across Roy’s jaw. But Roy didn’t move. He put his hand up to his face—as though curious about the pain he found there. Then he raised his voice, because he wasn’t just talking to Peter—he was talking to all of us.

“Nobody cares about your noble faggotry. You want dominance? This is how you get it.”

And he grabbed Peter’s shoulders and kneed him in the crotch. Peter went down, and Roy was on top of him. For several minutes we watched as the two grappled together on the wet earth, the lightning capturing them in gaudy white tableaux, their blood, as they clawed and bit at each other, streaming together with the rain.

Peter stood no chance. There was no fairness in the way Roy fought, no reason, no daylight. He fought as though the choice were pain or death and he had made his decision years before. Peter curled himself into a ball on the shore, but Roy kept after him, crouching over him, biting through the skin of his neck, licking the blood from his lips while Peter whimpered beneath him.

A great foulness, and we all stood and watched. Some, boys and girls alike, rubbed their hands unconsciously between their legs as they observed. We had appetites back then. We knew what we felt.

*



The rain stopped. The tree branches overhead continued to drip for a while, but they finally stopped, too.

Once he was through with Peter, Roy walked away. I kneeled over Peter, trying to clean him up, but he hit my hands away.

“I’ll kill him,” he hissed. “Kill him.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“He’s filth.”

“Put your hand on your neck. Otherwise you’ll get dizzy.”


He would not let me touch him, but I tended to him as best I could and made sure he got home in the morning.

Me, I snuck back into my house and was in bed before my father woke. As my bedroom turned pink with early light, I fell asleep and dreamed of boy-skin made slick with blood.

*



The next day I went to Peter’s house, but his mother told me he didn’t want to see anyone. I asked if I could write him a letter, and she gave me a pad of notepaper and a ballpoint pen.

I wrote:

Peter—

I’m sorry about what happened to you. It doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it’s a hideous world. Please call me if you need anything.

Love, Lumen



That night I went back to the lake. It seemed to me that things had changed, and I wanted to see how.

Peter was not there. Instead there was Blackhat Roy. Just like that. And so masters and slaves are nothing but the turn of a card.

It was Blackhat Roy, pulling along, as if on a leash, Poppy Bishop, a girl I knew who herself had just started breaching. She was his. She had regressed to infancy, as some do under the influence of the full moon. Her violence was an infant’s violence, as was her sensuality. She trailed along behind Roy, sucking her thumb and using her other hand to tug on her earlobe. When she had a tantrum, she became hysterical, striking out this way and that with a toddler’s murderous rage. Afterward, when she settled down, you might find her curled up, her head in Roy’s lap, nursing at Roy’s indifferent penis as though it were a binky.