When We Were Animals(67)

You sometimes want answers, and you sometimes go looking for them.

The next day I went to the auditorium after school, even though I knew it was a play rehearsal day. I sat in the back row and watched.

Peter found me there and tried to get me to leave with him, but I wouldn’t.

“What do you want to stay here for?” he said. “You’re not even in the play. You’ve got nothing to do with it.”

Mr. Hunter could see me talking with Peter, and our eyes met while he directed the students on stage and I shooed Peter away.

“Go on,” I told Peter. “I’ll talk to you later.”

The auditorium emptied out, the students hopping down from the stage, walking past me up the aisles, chatting and ignoring me. I shifted against the hard back of the seat, my skin feeling itchy, as I heard their laughter die out behind the closing doors until all sound had been drained from the auditorium and a great deafness took over. The air was dead still, and I felt flushed. Mr. Hunter stood on the stage at the opposite end of the empty hall, but I didn’t make a move toward him. Instead I waited for him to come to the back row, where I sat. Eventually he did.

“Lumen?” he said.

“Everybody lies,” I said. “That’s what you told me.”

“Lumen, are you all right?”

“I think I found out something,” I said.

“What did you find out?”

“Are you really—your name, is it really Evan Hunter?” I asked.

He looked confused.

“Evan Hunter,” I said. “Born in 1926. He wrote Blackboard Jungle. You know what else? He changed his name, too, to write cop books.”

“Lumen, there are lots of people with the name—”

“Liar.” My hand jumped to my mouth. I had surprised myself with my impudence.

Then he laughed, but it was a terminal kind of laugh, a laugh that meant the end of something.

“Okay,” he said and started walking back down the aisle toward the stage. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Come on if you’re coming.”

He led me behind the stage to the drama office, a little closet of a room with exposed pipes overhead and tall, gray metal cabinets with a fine coating of dust on the tops of them. He sat at the desk and pulled a bottle from a drawer and poured some into a plastic cup. It smelled strong.

“You want?” he said.

I shook my head. Then he downed it in one gulp and poured himself another, then capped the bottle.

“All right,” he said with a heavy breath. “You want to talk about the truth of things? Is that what we’re doing?”

I said nothing. An awful moment passed, and then another. Finally he shifted and took out his wallet, removed something from it, and slapped it on the desk in front of me. It was a faded photograph showing a skinny teenage boy standing outside the doors of a school. The school I recognized—it was my own.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Philip Anderson,” he said. “Me.”

I looked closer at the picture and could see some resemblance in the eyes to the man sitting in front of me. But I realized then that Mr. Hunter must color his hair, because the boy in the picture was blond.

“You’re from here?” I said.

He nodded. “Born and raised. When I left for college, I thought I would never come back. I was ready for the real world, you know?” He shrugged. “I managed to stay away for nine years.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I don’t know,” he said, leaning back, his eyes narrowed in thought at the pipes suspended from the ceiling. “I don’t think I quite know how to be anywhere else.”

“But your name,” I said. “How come you changed it?”

He looked down at me, his eyes weighty with meaning. “Sometimes you don’t like the person you’ve become. Sometimes you’d like to try being someone else for a while. You wouldn’t understand.”

It was quiet then, and he drank and I smelled the spirits.

“Then you breached?”

“I did,” he nodded. “When I was your age, I used to breach. Now I do this instead.” He grinned and raised his cup.

“You knew my father?”

He nodded. “I was nothing to him. A kid. I’ve seen him since I’ve been back. We’ve talked. He has no idea who I am. Your parents, they were ahead of me in school. They were seniors when I was, I don’t know, maybe in seventh grade.”

“Wait,” I said, my breath catching. At the suggestion of my mother, something inside me fell from a shelf and smashed. “You knew her? My mother?”

The springs in his desk chair creaked. His face seemed to change. He rubbed it, then rubbed hard at his eyes.

“We ran together. Sometimes,” he said. “Felicia,” and his eyes were now pink, holding on to tears.

“You’re lying,” I said. “She never breached. You’re still lying.”

He was sick, this man. And me, I was young and foolish and unkind.

“You look just like her, you know. She had skin like yours. And your eyes.”

“She didn’t breach,” I said again, shaking my head. “Stop lying.”

“The moonlight. Sometimes it makes it so you can see right through people’s skin. Your mother, her veins are something I remember. Nobody was ever as beautiful. I miss her. We all do.”