When We Were Animals(56)

And there were two other new breachers, too. A boy and a girl I recognized from school—from the grade below mine. They held hands like Hansel and Gretel finding their way through the wilderness of mythology, and they were frightened.

I didn’t like to look at Blackhat Roy—who seemed to have contempt for everyone around him—and I thought about running off on my own. But I wanted to stay and look at the new members of the brood.

The skin of the two new ones—their names were Ben MacClusky and Mandy Cavell—shimmered pale against the trees. They seemed somehow brighter than the rest of us. As though we all started out luminescent and then faded over time. As though we were all just waiting for our lights to gutter out.

Mandy Cavell was not entirely naked. She wore a pair of white cotton underpants.

Blackhat Roy left Poppy Bishop sucking her thumb atop a rock and approached Mandy Cavell. He said nothing for a moment, instead just walking a slow circle around her while she stood there breathing hard. Then he stopped in front of her.

She would not meet his eyes. Her own gaze had been cast demurely downward, and then Blackhat Roy positioned himself in such a way that his genitals must have been directly in her line of sight.

“Hey,” he said. And he had to say it again before the girl looked up at him. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

She had no answer to this.

“Don’t you want to take those off?” Roy said to her.

She shook her head.

“I think you do,” he insisted.

She looked at him. Then she looked at the boy next to her, but he was no help. His eyes snapped back and forth between the trees and all the naked girl bodies around him.

“You want to take them off,” Roy said again. “But you don’t do it. Why not? What’s the point of fighting against yourself?”

“It’s not nice.”

Roy laughed.

“Not nice,” he said. “That’s true. Nice is one thing it’s not.”

Mandy Cavell looked around helplessly. I felt for her. She reminded me of some lost version of myself.

“Stop it,” I said to Blackhat Roy.

I emerged from the shadows, and everyone looked at me. I didn’t like all those eyes on me, but I was feeling hard, and it was a feeling new to me—and I wanted to own it for myself. Somehow Peter’s beating the night before had made me romantic for suffering.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

Blackhat Roy did leave the girl alone. Instead he came and stood in front of me. I didn’t feel like quailing, so I didn’t.

“Leave her alone why?” he asked me.

“What do you care if she wants to leave her underwear on?”

“Do you see anybody else out here with diapers?”

“Isn’t she supposed to be able to do what she wants? Isn’t that what this is all about? Or are you just replacing one kind of conformity for another?”

He looked down at me, and his eyes wanted to gnaw on my bones.

“No,” he said. “I’m just showing concern. When the moon’s out, you should be able to piss where you want.”

Then, without moving, Blackhat Roy let go a stream of urine that splashed against my thigh and ran down my leg. It tickled as it streamed over my ankle and between my toes and made a muddy puddle around my foot. The smell was sharp, and the heat of it in the cold night made a steam that rose between us as our eyes locked.

I made no move. But this wasn’t a refusal—not at all. It was an engagement. I stood still, allowing his urine to soak my leg. It went on for an absurdly long time. At first the others laughed. They brayed at this new spectacle. But then, when I refused to run or even look away from his gaze, they got silent again. They recognized that something was happening. They saw that this was not the end of something or a punch line, but really just the beginning.

When he was done, we continued to look at each other. I wondered what his eyes were telling me, then I thought it must be an invitation to violence.

Part of me wanted just to turn and leave—part of me knew that would be the true victory. The animal is no more diminished than when you turn your back on it.

But there was another part of me, and it was hungering to rip and tear. It was wanting to sunder the whole beautiful and ugly world, to play in the exposed guts of all that beauty and ugliness.

It was a desire to kill, and it was ecstatic.

My right arm shot up, my hand like a claw, and it tore across Blackhat Roy’s face. Three irregular lines of blood appeared on his cheek where my fingernails had torn him. As we faced each other, saying nothing, the blood began to seep from the cuts, trickling over the ledge of his chin and down his neck.

Everyone was quiet. Tiny waves broke against the lakeshore.

Still, he made no move. A smile spread slowly across his face, and his eyes narrowed.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Good.”

Then he raised a hand, and that’s when I flinched for the first time. But he didn’t strike me. Instead he put his hand to his own cheek to wet his fingers with his blood. Then he reached out and drew a bloody fingertip down my chest, making a vertical stripe of his blood between my nipples—like the longitudinal line where they cut you open for an autopsy.

*



He had made his point. He returned to his girl, Poppy Bishop, who clung to him.