When We Were Animals(57)

I left them then. I wasn’t in the mood to defend two new breachers—both of whom were bigger than me—from the ravages of the natural world.

I was feeling barbarous, and I hated myself a little.

I found a quiet length of the lake edge and walked into the water to cleanse myself of Blackhat Roy’s humors—his blood and his urine. But I had been marked, I knew, deeper than the skin.

I floated on my back. I let myself drift. The night sky was cloudless. So many stars on a night like this. The heavens were crowded. No one bothered to look at the happenings of one small town on one meager landmass on one satellite of one middle-aged star. Maybe no one cared about the moral transgressions of a girl floating on a lake under the moon. Sometimes it was comforting to be nothing at all.

I wanted to run. I needed to run—run like I did on that first night. My muscles ached for it.

But I clenched my teeth and my fists, and I floated. I would hold myself together—I would keep myself contained. Otherwise my body could burst to pieces. It could all break apart. There were shivering hairline fractures everywhere.

*



When I couldn’t be still anymore, I swam to shore.

Blackhat Roy was there waiting for me. He was alone. He sat on the sandy verge. The claw marks on his cheek had stopped bleeding. They were black in the moonlight.

He watched me emerge from the water but said nothing. He leaned back casually, his palms on the sand. I hated him, but I knew why people followed him. There was some of the follower in me, too.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I’ll run.”

“I’ll catch you. You know I’ll catch you, right? Are you one of those girls who runs just so you can be caught?”

I went to walk past him up the shore to the woods—but he reached out and caught my ankle. His fist made a shackle, the grip so tight I thought it would snap my bones.

“Let go,” I said.

I looked down. His penis was rigid. There was a snarl on his face.

“Let go,” I said again, “or I’ll hurt you.”

But he didn’t let go. Instead, he said:

“A hurt is just a different kind of kiss. You want to bite me? Then bite me. Let’s make each other bleed.”

That’s when I attacked. With both my hands made into claws, I swiped at his face below me. I shrieked, primal, pure in a different way, like a banshee, like the true spirit of human pith. There was nothing left of the world beside muscle and blood and bone and thirst.

He pulled my ankle hard, and I fell to the sand. My fingers were wet with his blood and sweat, but I kept striking.

I wanted to hurt. I wanted to hurt everything. I wanted to cause pain.

I thought this must be what evil feels like for those who perpetrate it. Desperate thirst. A craving beyond voices. A will to action that has nothing to do with brains or spirits or codes.

I’d never been so aware of my bones, of my tendons, of how they fit together and stretched—of what a body is really for.

So maybe goodness is a thing of the mind while badness is a thing of the body.

I tore at him, and it felt awful and the awfulness felt good, and the goodness of the awful feeling made me crazy.

He did not move to block me or attack me back. Instead, the skin of Blackhat Roy became the territory of my violence. And he smiled. He did smile. The moonlight showed his teeth, all exposed in a grin.

I struck at him until I was out of breath, until the muscles in my arms ached, until my fingers were bloody and bruised. I found that I knelt over him, that I had climbed on top of him, lemurlike. He lay back, and I straddled his lower belly. If I leaned back, I could feel the tip of his penis against the base of my spine.

I breathed. I sniffled and discovered that I had been crying. When I wiped my forearm across my face, it came away with smeared blood and tears.

Then Blackhat Roy spoke.

He said, “I’m giving you a count of five. If you run now, I won’t chase you. If you don’t run, something is going to happen. Do you understand?”

I watched the blood trickle down his cheeks. One red rivulet collected in the whorl of his ear. Like a beautiful shell found on the beach—consecrated or defiled by the runoff of savagery.

“Do you understand?” he said. “Nod if you understand.”

My head nodded. My neck was sore, the muscles rigid, my skin jittery with popping clusters of nerves.

“Five,” he said. “Four.”

Yes, something would happen. And my body was unclothed against his. And the night was impossibly loud with the chatter of crickets. The blackest kinds of things were exposing themselves. And, far from turning away, I nuzzled against them. Evil was a body thing. A blanket stinking with sweat.

“Three, two,” he said.

I looked to the woods. I could run, but I wasn’t running.

Something would happen. And it might be a thing of horror, for I knew that horrors did happen to those who welcomed them.

If you do not flee from the altar, that’s when you become wed to the devil.

“One.”


I leaped up and ran as hard as I could through the trees. Behind me, I could hear his laughter grow distant and mocking.

*



I had made a map of our small town, and on the map I had put tiny symbols to mark the houses of all the people I knew so I could see how we stood in relation to each other. I knew where everyone lived. I could have gone anywhere.