When We Were Animals(82)

He shook his head.

“You can’t get it back,” he said, “once it’s gone.”

“But you left once before.”

He drank from the bottle.

“You have to be dauntless in this life. If at first you don’t succeed at quitting, try, try again.” Then he looked at my dress and seemed to notice it for the first time. “What are you dressed up as?”

I sat on the cold metal bench beside him, and the folds of my dress creased uncomfortably beneath me.

The moon was overhead, a waxing crescent, and he asked me if I weren’t afraid to be alone with him.

“Jesus, girl,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to hang out with drunk, lying reprobates on emptied-out school property? You’re going to stroll yourself into victimhood one of these days. Aren’t you afraid?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should be.”

He stood suddenly, wobbly with drink. Leaning over me, he gripped the bar behind me on either side of my head and brought his face down close to mine. I could smell the thick, acrid stench of alcohol. He licked his lips and smiled a threatening smile, and the bleachers tremored under his grasp.

I closed my eyes. I waited for whatever was coming.

There was another sound, and when I opened my eyes, he was standing upright, looking down at me with trepidation, even a little disgust.

“Goddamn it,” he said, seething. “Goddamn you! No fear. Not an ounce of f*cking fear. You invite—you invite—destruction. What’s the world to you, huh? A place to die in? You aren’t even a girl—you’re a…you’re a tragedy. There isn’t a monster in the world—not a monster in the world till he meets an eager victim.”

He reeled backward, and I thought he might fall, but he recovered himself.

“How come?” he said, almost pleading now. “How come you aren’t afraid?”

I wanted to tell him that I was afraid. But his fury was wide—he raged against things larger than just me.

“You can’t—” he started, then he used his sleeve to wipe his mouth. “You can’t rub yourself against death like that. You just can’t.”

He wanted me to understand. There was a desperation in his eyes. He shook his head, and he collapsed onto the bench again. For a long time he said nothing but just looked out at the scattered stars.

Then he said:

“Your mother, she was the same way.”

“You weren’t lying, were you?” I said. “I mean, the things you said about running with my mother. Those weren’t lies.”

He just looked at me for a long time. I wondered what he saw in that frilled pink gown. Whatever it was, he must have deemed it fit.

He drank again and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “All right,” he said then. “Time for another story. Last one. Are you ready?”

“Yes.” I held my breath. I clutched at the fabric of my dress, wanting to tear it.

We sat side by side. He looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and it was no conversation. It was a kind of shared aloneness—words dropped in the void, verbal flotsam for whoever might see fit to collect it.

“She never went breach,” he said. “You were right about that. That was a true thing. She was never a real breacher. It was something wrong with her maybe, her genes. Something didn’t click like it was supposed to. She didn’t feel the drive. No natural love of the night. But this is what you didn’t know. She pretended. It was when it happened to your father. She wanted to run with him. So she pretended, and he kept her secret. Nobody knew. She took her clothes off, just like the rest of them, and she ran. You think about it the right way, it’s romantic. Her and him—the night.”

He paused and sniffed once.

“The problem was,” he went on, “she took to it. I mean, eventually she liked it. After your father’s year was up, well, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She kept going out. It had bored itself into her some way. It wasn’t about instinct for her. It was about taste.” He licked his lips and thought for a moment. “That’s the difference. It came from a different place inside her. Your father, he tried to get her to stop. Like an addiction. She got pregnant with you, and he thought that might settle her down. But it didn’t. She went out anyway, her belly all swollen up. What I heard is that people revered her, almost, like she carried the full moon inside her. I was still too young to go out myself, but I heard.”

He paused again briefly.

“She was still going when I went breach,” he said. “This was, you know, three or four years later. Everybody knew her secret by then. They’d all gotten suspicious when it went on so long. They figured it out—that she was a pretender. But there wasn’t any…disparagement in it. See, she chose the thing that was forced on the rest of us. We—we loved her, even, because she loved us. I’m not saying you have to understand it. I’m just telling you how it was. Your mother, she was—she was rare.”

I looked over briefly to see his face in the darkness, the glistening orbs of his eyes. I caught a quick glimpse, then looked away again. His story was a private one.

“You,” he said. “I saw her in you. Ever since I got back. You want to know the truth? The truth is I don’t want to see her anymore. It’s been too long. The time comes you have to stop looking at ghosts.”