When We Were Animals(59)

He chuckled a little. “Did you ever try not to?” he said.

“Where did you go?”

“Down to the railroad tracks. Watched trains go by. Thought about hopping one of them.”

“What stopped you?”

“I’m not afraid of running away,” he said. “But I won’t run away from him.”

I said nothing.

“And,” he continued, “also you.”

“Oh.”

He looked at me hard, and I blushed.

I put my hand to my neck, a mirror image of the place where he had his wound.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Aches, mostly.”

“Can I see?”

“Do you really want to?”

I nodded.

He got up from the chair, took off his shirt, and knelt before me. The bandage was right at the base of his neck, where his shoulder began.

“You do it,” he said.

With my finger I tugged at the edges of the tape until they came free, then I folded the bandage back.

The skin was purpled and raw, the laces used to stitch him up blackened with blood and so tight that they pooched the skin up into bumpy ridges. I ran my fingertips over the raised script of his damage to see what might be read there. I had never really thought about stitches as being the same kind of stitches as in sewing—but they were. I thought that flesh must be a pliable and rude sort of fabric, difficult to work with. I pictured an old woman with a thimble pushing a long needle through his worsted, pinched-up skin. Our bodies are craftwork.

I put the bandage back and pressed the tape back into place.

He looked up into my eyes, and I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. Instead he just leaned forward and pressed his head to my chest. I put my arms around him and stroked his hair.

*



Back at home, I shut the door of my bedroom, leaned against it, listened to the silence of the house, and felt myself jaundiced, yellowed by life. Strangely, I was relieved to be away from Peter Meechum, whom I loved.

In school the following day, Polly wanted to talk to me about her new adult preoccupations. I found excuses to escape her.

Funny: now that all these people were talking to me, I wanted nothing to do with them. Was it possible, I wondered, to be out of sync with everyone else for your entire life? I felt walled up behind bricks. Like holy people, who are also out of sync. It was called immurement—the practice of walling people up—a fact I had discovered when I had done my research on saints and anchorites.

Even Rose Lincoln seemed more interested in me since I had stood up to Blackhat Roy.

“Did you do all the rest to him, too?” she asked, her dark eyes bright. “It’s like a devil got at him.”

I was a devil now. It was no surprise. And the worst kind of devil is the kind that believes itself to be holy. Like Satan—the morning light, the angel. One’s taste for corruption, it seems, has everything to do with one’s memory of goodness. The inversions braid around each other, and it is too hard not to fall.

*



It was that same week that Miss Simons, my physics teacher, offered to give me a ride home. She pulled up in her car beside the bike cage. Her hair was still done up, and she still wore her fashionable lipstick.

“Lumen, would you like a ride?”

I told her no, thank you. She had never offered to give me a ride before, and I thought it might have to do with her hearing about me going breach. When you were raised by a single father, sometimes women felt the philanthropic need to step in and have surrogate maternal chats with you.

“Come on. I’d enjoy it. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

“But my bike.”

“I’ll help you put it in the back.”

A previous version of me would have been concerned about being seen getting into a teacher’s car. I mused on that while she and I hoisted my bike into the back and I climbed into the passenger seat.

“Do you want to know a secret?” Miss Simons said as we pulled out of the parking lot. “I was married once.”

She paused and glanced over at me to make sure I appreciated the gravity of that revelation. I didn’t know what response would satisfy her, so I said the most innocuous thing I could think of.

“You were?”

“That’s right. It was a long time ago, and I was very young. It didn’t last long. Fifteen months total. Almost immediately we both knew it was a mistake.”

She talked for a little while about her ex-husband, about how he was now an important person on Wall Street, about how she begrudged him nothing, about how she had been single for a long while because she was determined not to make the same mistakes she had made before.

I listened patiently, wondering why I was chosen for these privileged glimpses into the woman’s past, until finally, while the car idled at a stoplight, she turned to me with great earnestness.

“The reason I’m telling you all this, Lumen, is that—see, I’m fond of your father. Very fond of him, actually.”

Oh. So she had a crush on my father. She was asking my advice about how to approach him. Maybe even asking my permission. I was touched by her deference while at the same time determined never to trust her again as long as I lived.

The red light turned to green, and the car glided forward again. We were just around the corner from my house.