When We Were Animals(68)

“Stop it.”

“You look just like her,” he repeated, and his hand reached out to touch my face.

I recoiled, standing quickly and knocking my chair over.

“You’re a liar,” I said, my eyes burning. “You f*cking liar.”

He shook his head.

“Darling,” he said, kindly, as I rushed out.

*



Because there was nothing to be done, because there was nowhere to go, because there was no one to interrogate or confess to, I ran to the mine. I allowed myself to cry.

People were never what you thought they were. I was ugly and alone, and the world was ugly, too, uglier every day, and there was death in everything, because it didn’t matter how many maps you drew, because everywhere was the same place, and you could be fanciful about it but what was the point, especially right there interred in the earth, where it was quiet and where there was nothing to keep your mind from burning itself with running, with hating itself and loving itself, too, because that’s what it is to be a teenager, after all, when your little sluglike body aches for things it doesn’t understand, glows in its very pores from the effort to explode itself over the world…

So I cried because I could not explode myself, because we are too tiny altogether, too weak and malleable, because our bodies are not even the fingernails on God’s hands.

I cried until I howled, my voice a tinny echo in an empty cave. I howled like a beast—I howled like a dying thing—I howled like a little girl. I howled until my throat was dry, and then I blubbered, and it was nothing magical at all. I cried until my tears were useless, until I was numb to all my little tragedies.





    III





Chapter 10




As a result of that tumorous instinct that grows in some boys, Blackhat Roy treated many of his defeated enemies with the basest kind of contempt in school. In math class, to the mocking delight of a group of jackal boys, he bit Rose Lincoln’s pencils in half so that she had to write with one half and erase with the other. He targeted, especially, anyone associated with Peter Meechum. He would have his revenge.

His new girl, Poppy Bishop, continued to trail behind him, because sometimes she liked the way he, upon her request, would attack those she didn’t like. But his attentions to her were capricious at best, and sometimes he would turn on her. She took tap dancing lessons, and once, he told her to get up on top of the table during lunch in the cafeteria and dance.

“I don’t think I should,” she said.

“Do it,” he said.

She climbed slowly to the top of the table and shuffled her feet a little. Everyone watched her quietly. Her face went empty.

“That’s not dancing,” said Blackhat Roy. “Faster. Here, you need more space?” And he used his arm to clear a wide space on the tabletop, sending people’s lunch trays to the floor. “Faster!”

She danced faster, trying to make taps with her sneakers.

“It doesn’t sound right,” he said. He looked around to the others. “It’s usually better. She’s not at her best today. You might not know it, but she’s got a good body under there. Cute little oval birthmark on her left tit. Poppy, show ’em your birthmark.”

She stopped dancing and stood frozen. She crossed her arms over her chest.

Since nobody else would do it, I crossed the cafeteria and made myself as tall as I could in front of Blackhat Roy.

“Stop it,” I said. “Leave her alone.”

“We’re just having some fun. What’ve you got against fun?”

“Stop torturing people.”

“What do you care? You don’t even like these people.”

It was not the response I was expecting, and I wondered if what he said was true.

One of his friends, Gary Tupper, took me by the arm, saying, “Come on, pocket size, I’ll give you a ride to class. Hop on my shoulder.”

“Don’t touch her,” Roy said to him.

“How come?”

In response, Roy punched him in the solar plexus.

It took a minute for Gary to catch his breath and get himself upright again.

“Jesus,” he said. “I was just…”

But by then it was over. Poppy Bishop had climbed down from the table, everyone in the cafeteria had resumed eating, and Blackhat Roy was long gone.

And still he came to my house sometimes at night. I spotted his old Camaro in different places on my block—not always just in front of my house. One night, approaching a full moon, I went outside to talk to him. I walked down the street to the place where his car was parked—at the corner, under a street lamp. I’d tried before, and he had just driven off when I approached—but not this time. He was waiting for me. I wondered what he would do when I accused him of stalking me. He was rough and humorless, but there was also a fragility in him that fascinated me. Many times in school he looked away from my gaze, and I wondered if he might be ashamed. I was not another Poppy Bishop to him. He did not make me dance or call me names. I wondered what I amounted to in his world.

I approached his car from behind and noticed that the driver’s-side window was down. I would demand that he leave me alone, and if he attacked, I prepared myself to fight. Blood could be spilled—we needed no moon to give us permission.