“I just . . .” The cigarette fell out of his mouth and plunked to the floor without a sound. “I just wanted a smoke.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“I’m wondering . . .” He closed his mouth and swallowed.
“Wondering what?”
“Why a girl—a beautiful girl—would spend her time in a room that stinks of fire.” He swallowed again. “What are you doing up here?”
I relaxed my shoulders. “You think I am beautiful?”
He released a shaky breath and ran his fingers through the blond hair at his forehead, exposing a grisly collection of long red scabs that crisscrossed his hand.
“Oh . . . your poor skin,” I said, and stepped forward into the light. “What cut you? Not bayonets, I hope?”
“No.” He lowered his fingers and looked at them. “Barbed wire. We run large sheets of metal fencing across no-man’s-land to separate our trenches from the Krauts’, and all sorts of macabre things get stuck in it.”
“Including your hands?”
“Yeah, my hands, and my pants, and my . . .” He kneeled down and patted the floor until he found that horrible old cigarette. “My friends . . . my enemies.” He stood back up. “They get snared, and there’s nothing we can do besides pull the things out when bullets aren’t whizzing past our skulls.” He crammed the cigarette between his lips without lighting it and slumped against the wall’s black filth. His eyes traveled toward the pit. Air fluttered through his nostrils in an unsteady patter. His mind went somewhere else. Every limb, every muscle and contour of his face took on that same war-weary rigidness I’d seen before. I half believed that if I leaned my ear next to his, I would hear the sound of artillery fire.
“I’ve always liked spending time with soldiers,” I said, and I rubbed my finger through the soot on the wall, pleased with the mark I’d made. “At least the kind ones. The handsome, boyish ones. They make me feel I’m more than just a starving girl in a battle region.”
He turned his head toward me, and his eyes warmed and softened. He liked what he saw—I could tell by the way he held his mouth on the cigarette, rolling the wrinkled white cylinder back and forth with his lips, the way I used to play with sticks of candy.
“Do you want to be my sweetheart?” I asked with a boldness I’d learned from all the young soldiers—both the French and the German—who had taught me the ways of seduction.
The right side of his mouth edged into a grin. “Your sweetheart?”
“Oui.”
“You won’t even tell me your name.”
“It’s Emmeline.”
“Emmeline? Hmm, that’s pretty.” He cocked his head, and his eyes brightened. His skin pinked up. “Say, you look just like Lillian Gish, now that I take a good look at you in the moonlight.”
“The American film actress?”
“Yeah, you’ve got those same big, dark eyes. The same long, curly hair.”
“Oh, I love the cinema.” Using my finger as a paintbrush and the muck on the wall as my paint, I drew a crude sketch of a movie projector with giant reels and a boxy body. “I haven’t seen a motion picture since before the war. My favorite was Notre-Dame de Paris, about the hunchback, with Stacia Napierkowska as the tragic Gypsy Esméralda.”
“You like monster films?”
“Just the beautiful ones.”
“Beautiful monsters?”
“Oui.”
“Huh. I’d like to see that.” He smirked and shifted his weight. “Do you get Lillian Gish pictures over here in France?”
“No”—I shook my head—“not up here in the north. The Boche only allowed German films when they occupied our village. I’ve seen her photograph, though, in a magazine my sister once stole from a burn pile for me.”
“Well, she’s a real looker.”
“Does that mean you like how I look?”
He smiled and breathed a whisper of a laugh that confirmed that he did.
“Come here.” I stepped backward and beckoned with my finger toward my shadowed corner.
“Where?”
“Come with me, Yank soldier. I want to take good care of you.”
He drew the cigarette out of his mouth and knitted his brows. “What are you, a vampire?”
“That’s not a nice question to ask a girl.” I settled back down on the floor and picked up my yarn. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“You’re the only girl I know who wants to ‘take care’ of a fellow in the bombed ruins of a bedroom in the dark of night. I think I might have to call you Carmilla instead of Emmeline.”
“Who is Carmilla?”
“A bewitching female vampire from an old novella.”
“Oh.” I resumed my knitting. “Well . . . I am not a vampire.”
“You don’t bite?” he asked with a grin that showed off a dimple in his right cheek.
“Tell me your name, Mr. Poe”—I smiled as well—“and I’ll let you come close enough to find out.”
He tucked the cigarette into his pocket and wandered toward me, and my swaying needles, and the thin blue rug that concealed some of the ugliness in the room. Three yards away, his boots triggered a groan in the floor that seemed to be a protest against his weight. He stopped and sidled over to the safety of the wall.
“My mother was a teacher,” he said. “She named me Emerson—after good old Ralph Waldo.”
I shrugged. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He was an essayist and a poet we Americans have to learn about in school. Friends back home called me by my initials, or sometimes they used Sonny, which I hate more than anything. Or else they’d just call me by my last name, Jones.”
“Emmeline and Emerson.” I snickered and coaxed the yarn around the needles. “That almost sounds too silly to be the names of a leading man and his lady.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I met his eyes. “Come lie down next to me, Emerson Jones. Escape the bloody war with me.”
He grinned with a sheepish hunch of his shoulders and peeked back at the space where the door should have stood. “Your family might come up. Or one of the fellas will decide to go nosing around like I did.”
“You and your Yank troops are occupying our house?”
“No, your mother is just letting us stay in the barn for the night. She’s cooking us a meal in exchange for food and supplies. I just . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck and seemed a little off-balance. “I got curious about this part of the house when she ordered us—no, barked at us—not to come up here.”
“Ah, a mischief-seeker.” I patted the floor beside me. “Come lie down, lovely Emerson. I swear I am not a vampire. I will not bite.”
He sauntered over the precise way I expected a Yank to walk, with a cowboy sort of swagger to his hips. Less graceful than a Frenchman, not as stiff as the German boy who once spent time with me up here, after the shell blasted through the roof.
My American soldier stood over me with his hands at his sides. “Is this something you’ve done before? ‘Escaped’ with soldiers?”
I tutted at him. “You sound like my mother.”
“I’m just curious what type of girl you are.”
“Are you sure you truly want to know?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes.”
I ran my fingers over the completed five feet of my darling scarlet scarf. “Well . . . I am an imaginative girl. A romantic one. One who tells ghost stories to test the bravery of boys who are being a little bit rude.”
“Really?” He grinned. “Well, go on, then. Test me.”
“Are you certain?”
“Tell me a ghost story that’ll make me tremble in these big old boots of mine.”
“All right. I only know one such story, and it goes like t
his . . .” I took a deep breath. “One afternoon when I was knitting in my bed”—I nodded toward the missing half of the room—“that stray shell that’s buried down there in the ground plummeted through the roof”—I licked my parched lips—“and killed me.”
He turned his head toward the void where my bed should have been.
“Now . . . it seems,” I continued, with chills running across my arms, “I’m stuck up here . . . all alone. Maman yells at the other children if they sneak down the hallway to hunt for me. She uses the word morte—or dead—to keep them away, which hurts worse than the pain of the shell itself. At least that was a swift and instant pain.” I sighed.
My beautiful American lowered himself down to his knees in front of me, and his eyes were gentle.
“Well?” I toyed with the soft red yarn. “Did that frighten you?”
“I’m like that too,” he said.
I snorted a laugh. “What? Dead?”
“No.” He cracked a small smile. “‘I have been half in love with easeful Death,’ like Keats said in ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ I’m obsessed with the idea of dying. I write poems about it. I imagine the same type of things you’re imagining. ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’”
My mouth fell open. “You’re in love . . . with death?”
His smile widened. He remained crouched in front of me. “I don’t usually stumble across a girl who’s drawn to my dark view of the world, but I have to say”—he rubbed his chin and looked me over—“I find it awfully attractive.”
My eager fingers trembled on the scarf. “Is that why you joined the war? To die?”
“God, no.” He settled back on his heels. “My father badgered me into enlisting. He’s always trying to do his best to make a man out of me.”
“Why would he need to do that? You seem manly enough.”
“Why, thank you.” His cheeks reddened, and he beamed with a bit of the devil in his eyes. “But I grew up in a house crammed full of sisters, and I was Pop’s only chance for some extra masculinity in the place. Two years ago he even pushed me to join the football team, but instead”—he chuckled from deep in the crook of his throat—“I published a satirical poem about high school pigskins in the school’s literary journal. Even received an award for it.”
“What are ‘high school pigskins’?”
“It’s what we call our great American football.”
“Oh.” I nodded. “Well, no wonder your maman named you after an author. You should be creating your beautiful poetry instead of hunting down the Boche.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not what my father thought.” Again, he pulled out his cigarette and stuck it in his mouth, but he didn’t dare light it. Good boy.
“Earlier this year,” he continued with the stick wedged between his teeth, “my older sister decided to volunteer as a Red Cross nurse in the war. She’s always been the charitable type, so it wasn’t all that surprising. Pop then sat me down and said, ‘By God, boy, if our sweet Amy—a five-foot-tall girl, no less—is risking her neck over in France, then you sure as hell better make a goddamned soldier out of yourself.’”
Emerson stayed stone-still for a moment and seemed to hear the echo of his father’s words in the room with us, so much so that I peeked behind me just to make sure his “pop” wasn’t there. The unlit cigarette quaked in his mouth. Another rousing American war song echoed down below. Then he shrugged. “So . . . here I am.”
“I’m sorry.” I gulped. “Do you like being a soldier?”
“Do you like living in the charred ruins of a house that reeks of hell?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, the trenches are worse, I can tell you that. Blood and bullets and bodies from all sides, and there’s no escape. No relief. I’m sick to my stomach all the time out there.”
“I thought you said you were drawn to darkness.”
“Not that type.” His teeth clamped down on the cigarette. “Less gore and shrieking would be preferable. ‘Easeful Death.’”
I set the yarn and the needles aside and lured the cigarette out of his mouth with my thumb and middle finger. The heat of his breath warmed the back of my hand.
“Let’s forget the gore for a while.” I flicked the cigarette across the floor. “How does that sound, mon beau soldat?”
He took another peek over his shoulder. “This burned old ghost of a room doesn’t seem all that private.”
“No one ever comes up here. Even if they did, we’d hear their footsteps creaking down the hallway long before they reached us.”
“Are you sure you want me to be with you like this?”
I nodded and touched his knee. “I’m not a wild girl, Emerson. Just a terribly, terribly lonely one who feels better around boys who help me forget all my troubles.”
“All right.” He nodded. “I can certainly try to help you forget.”
I smiled. “Lie down.”
With a low moan in the boards, Emerson shifted and stretched out on his back beside me in the barren corner. He lowered his blond head to the faded blue rug and wove his fingers through mine. “Jesus!” His hand flew away. “You’re frosty cold. Don’t you ever go downstairs, Carmilla?”
“Don’t call me that name. Just kiss me.” I leaned over and kissed his soft lips in the shadows of the ruins, tasting sweet outside air and sunshine. “Please . . . say my real name.”
“Emmeline,” he whispered, and he shivered beneath me. “It’s really freezing in here for the summer.”
“Forget the chill. Just forget everything terrible and painful and pretend we’re a handsome couple in a motion picture.” I kissed him again, and although he still shuddered, he let me unbutton his army tunic all the way down to the bottom. My fingers slid beneath his cotton undershirt and found skin smooth and warm as a fever.
His eyelids fluttered. He relaxed beneath my touch. It must not have felt so cold anymore.
“See”—I kissed the salty curve of his neck—“we’re like two lovers, caught in the flickering shadow and light of a beautiful film on a screen.”
He gave a small nod and a murmur.
I let my hand wander down to his belt and the flat metal buttons of his olive-green trousers. His clothing carried the smells of the trenches, dirt and grime and worse, but the scents of war didn’t matter one bit to a girl who dwelled in a house of ash. He was solid and handsome and compassionate, and he thawed my room’s unfathomable chill.
I lifted up my skirts, wiggled my drawers down to the floor, and, with a graceful sweep of my right leg, I climbed on top of him. One never saw such a sight on the screen—a girl, adjusting her underclothing, straddling a boy—but I knew that’s what happened whenever scenes of romance faded to blackness.
He tensed. “Are you sure about this? Your mother . . .”
“She never comes up here—I swear. No one likes to be here. We’re all alone.”
He closed his eyes and tipped back his head, and the strain of the war lifted from his face as steam rises from water. Sighs escaped his half-opened lips, and my old friend the moon stole closer. Light glinted off the tips of my silver needles and brightened the fingers clasping hold of my legs.
See, this is lovely, I told myself. So lovely. You don’t need anything more than this.
I kept him close for as long as I could—two silhouettes intertwined in the dark, rocking together, without any thought to bombs or bayonets or the rat-a-tat-tat of rifle fire across the open fields. That’s why I always adored such paramours. They were paintbrushes dipped in white that smeared away all the ugly colors.
Afterward, he lowered his shoulders back down to the floor and let his head drift to his left. His body relaxed, as if trading the battlefield for paradise.
I pulled the red scarf off the floor and gathered it into a ball in my hand.
“Get comfortable, my Emerson.” I climbed off him, and he rolled onto his side, facing away from the corner, where I stowed the needles and yarn. He fastened some of his clothing back over himself, and I nestled beside him and curled my whole self around his back with my arm strapped over his chest.
“Your mother could still come up,” he said in a voice gone drowsy and low.
“I keep telling you, she doesn’t like to be in here.”
“Your brothers and sisters . . .”
“Claudine hates me these days. She calls me horrific names. They all do. Not like you.” I pressed my chest against his back and drew the heat from his body. “You stayed with me, even when I told you my ghost story.”
“But I’m just . . .”
“Just what?”
“Just . . . another soldier . . . taking advantage of a French girl.”
“No.”
“Yes. I even have a girl back home.”
“A sweetheart?”
He nodded against my cheek. “I don’t think I’ll want anything to do with her when I’m back, though. She wouldn’t understand a single part of this. She was just a pretty neighborhood girl who tolerated my strange ways.”
“No, she wouldn’t understand at all. Stay with me. Close your eyes and stay.”
“Hmm, I’d like to . . .”
I held myself against him and shared his beating heart, his flushed skin, the lulling rhythm of his chest rising and falling beneath my outstretched hand. He fell asleep. The moon slipped away. The red yarn beckoned.
The last time I hosted a boy in my ruined room, trouble followed. But that was simply a matter of being too hasty. All that urgent stabbing, the swift flow of blood, the howls—that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The Germans had to carry the other boy away, half-dead and whimpering, yet alive enough to keep from staying with me. They blamed my father for the violence and shot him dead in our front garden.
This time would be different.
Go on, I told myself with a desperate taste, sharp as metal, burning stronger and stronger inside my mouth. After all that I suffered from the war and my family, I deserved something more.
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys Page 7
