When We Were Animals(64)

“Maybe she’s looking for someone to beat her up a little,” I offer.

Helena leans back and looks at me for a moment, then she laughs again with all those white teeth of hers.

“I like you,” she says. “You’re funny.”

I smile graciously.

“I better get back to it,” she says. “Gotta keep up the stride. But promise me we’ll talk again.”

“Okay,” I say.

And then she’s off, running loops around our little park. I watch her without looking like I’m watching her. I wonder what she eats. Probably oats and grains, radishes and kale. I imagine she has many recipes for quinoa. I pick at my fingernails. I suppose if you cut her, her blood would shimmer a bright, healthy color.

*



It was spring. The world had thawed, melted, and dried out. Summer was ahead of me, followed by two more years of high school—followed by what? It was impossible to speculate. They said I was destined for so much.

I returned to the mine—I did—to visit my friend Death, who had brittle wheat for hair. I wondered, briefly, if I should report her to the authorities. Then I decided not to. Half buried in the earth, her skin dried to papery thinness, she had been there for many, many years. Whoever might have been looking for her once was looking for her no longer.

I wondered also who she was and if there were some way I could find out. But there was no one I could ask without disclosing what I’d found. And I didn’t want to do that.

She belonged to me.

I went to the public library and searched archived newspapers for any clues about who the dead girl used to be. But I had no idea how long she had been there or what she had looked like before she had died. I couldn’t even really tell how old she had been.

What I did learn was that girls disappear all the time. They just vanish. I wanted to cut out all the newspaper photos of those lost girls and make a collage of them on my wall. But how much of a memorial did my life have to be?

*



In May Peter began to talk of getting back at Blackhat Roy. “He can’t just come back here like that,” he said. “He can’t just grab whatever he wants. He hasn’t earned it,” he said. “I’m going to stop him,” he said.

In the afternoons we had sex. I closed my eyes and liked the feeling of the sunlight from the window on my skin. Afterward I felt warm and blanketed, and I pressed myself into his arms. He compared me, in abstract terms, to the world at large. “You’re the best, truest thing I know. You’re not part of all the nonsense. You’re above it.”

In school, Blackhat Roy seemed to want to tear down to dust all the things that people like Peter spent so much elaborate energy erecting. I began to think of his viciousness and Peter’s benevolence as two tides of the same shifting movement.

“You know what?” Roy said. “I’ve been watching you. Mostly everyone else looks right past you—like you’re nothing to worry about. Your smallness, they think that’s all you are. But I know different. I’ve tasted you. You’ve got some meanness in you, Lumen Fowler, just waiting to get banged out.”

He grabbed my arm up near my shoulder, and he squeezed it hard, as though he would drag me to the ground right there in the hall of the school. But then he smiled and let go and walked away. My breath returned, trembling, and for the rest of the day I found my mind was unable to focus.

And yes, it wasn’t like Peter Meechum at all—not like him, with his concentrated and generous adoration. Roy was something else. Brutal. Unapologetic but also unwaveringly true. You needn’t have worried about social convention around Blackhat Roy. You could drop it all—and sometimes you could almost get the impression, when speaking to him, that you were seeing the world as it actually was.

And there I was, in the emptying hallway of my school, my chest burning—as though Blackhat Roy had persuaded me to open my mouth and swallow a burning ember, as though he had talked me into it somehow.

And now I could feel it, the searing in my lungs and my stomach and other places, too.

*



I walked into the woods. First I went to the lakeshore, where the sun was low on the horizon and dappled the surface. Then I walked to the quarry, where everything was still but the little rivulet running into the mine. It was wider now, with the season and the melt from the mountains above. There was no one around.

The light grew richer, more full of gold. The sun would set soon. I walked farther, but it was between moons, and I got lost. If I wasn’t nosing my way by instinct through the landscape of the moonlit night, then it seemed I was just wandering.

For a long time I went around and around, the sun getting closer to setting, until I climbed to the top of a very high ridge to get a better view. But on the other side of that ridge, I discovered an industrial park—low glass-and-metal office buildings with trapezoidal parking lots between them. I had somehow stumbled upon a back route into civilization. What’s more, I recognized the office park. It was in one of those buildings that my father worked.

This was clearly a sign, and I clambered down the opposite side of the ridge and went in search of the meaning of things.

When I found my father’s building, I realized the sun was just at the right angle in the sky to show me the insides of the place. I could see him there in his office, bent over his desk, examining some complex paper chart against a spreadsheet on his computer screen. The last time I had visited his office was many years ago when I was too sick to go to school. I must have been eight years old, and he had sat me in the break room with coloring books, and everyone was very nice and seemed to want to talk to me all day.