When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  I wanted to look away. I really did. But there are some things in this life that demand your sight, your vision. This was a scene played out particularly for my delectation. There was no one in the world, at that moment, apart from them and me. We existed on opposite sides of a pane of glass. But it didn’t matter—I was in their thrall. And they seemed to be in mine. As though I’d become a lonely Rapunzel at the top of a tower.

  The others started to gather, too, standing very still in a group and gazing up at me. They smiled their grisly smiles and called to me in words or moans or hisses. Blackhat Roy was there with his two missing toes, but he stood apart, crouched at the line of trees that was the beginning of the woods on the opposite side of the street. A boy I recognized as Wilson Laramy stood at Polly’s side. Without seeming to think, and while still gazing up at my window, he reached blindly to his right, found Polly’s wrist, and guided her hand down to his crotch. Without shame, and still repeating the prayerful tautology of my name, her left hand closed around his penis. Casual—it was all so casual. You would think they had no idea what nakedness was.

  Then they were all there together, as though by the instinct of pack animals, all casting their lewd voices up at me, their skin spectral and yet hideously biological, bleeding, lurching cadavers regurgitated by the earth and sent wandering down the abandoned thoroughfares of our little town—and here they were, uncharacteristically still, all their unclean gestures pointed in my direction—as though to tempt me, as though to mock me for not being tempted, as though the land itself hated me for existing so dry and tidy above its fecund soil.

  And that’s when Polly started to laugh, high and hysterical—a harsh, shrieking laugh that had no sense in it. And when she laughed, the others laughed, too, and they started to split off from the group—as though suddenly roused into action. First one ran off down the street, followed by two more. Then another—until the only one left was Polly herself, who, when her laughter died away, licked her lips slowly, her tongue moving between her teeth.

  Then she, too, turned to run down the street in the direction the others had gone—and I was left to stare at the empty street, the ratchety shadows of tree branches against the lamplight, the only sounds the ticking of the grandfather clock down the hall, the insistent tapping of a twig against the glass of my window, and the stiff flood of my own pulse in my ears.

  * * *

  The bald white maggotry of it! The spitting, drooling indecency of it! I couldn’t sleep that night thinking about it. I can’t sleep this night remembering it. We live in an eggshell. We swim in phlegmy albumen—the world outside tap-tap-taps against our chalky home. I stand beside my marriage bed, staring down at my husband, who snorts with rough sleep. I am forever gazing downward at people who live in dream worlds. The breachers, too. They run through the night, but they run in sleep, they run undercurrents deep in memory. In the morning there is no shame because they were not themselves—or their selves were buried so deep that their waking minds are blameless for their nighttime deeds.

  I don’t sleep the way others do. I fear sleep—and I fear not sleeping.

  Once the pack below had gone, I sat in my room, clutching at myself in the pool of moonlight cast through my windowpanes. My head was crowded with so many things it ached with fullness—Peter’s compulsory kisses, his hot boy-breath, the pressure of his hand over my lung, like a medical examination, the hiss of voices in the street, the exposed reechy bodies of those I see in school every day, Turandot, the princess of death, my father declaring me fifteen—fifteen!—his embarrassed eyes focused on the project of scrubbing a pot in the sink.

  So much shame. I live in an eggshell.

  There is so much shame.

  * * *

  The next day, I saw Polly in school. She sat next to me in our biology class. She said she was exhausted and rested her head on my shoulder.

  She asked me what was the matter. She said I looked worse than she did.

  I told her I hadn’t slept well.

  She called me poor Lumen, and there was no hissing in the way she said my name.

  I didn’t like how people could be one thing at night and another thing during the day.

  I asked her if she didn’t remember the night before—coming to my window, calling my name.

  She said she didn’t remember a thing.

  But I could tell by the way she said it that she was lying, and I told her so.

  She shook her head and said in a voice filled with sadness but not apology:

  “Oh, Lumen, these things—it’s like they happen to different people. Other lives.”

  So we went on, scribbling away about centrioles and lysosomes and Golgi bodies and other microscopic organelles that committed invisible acts of violence and love upon each other many times every second.

  Chapter 3

  That was the year in my life when everyone I knew went breach, one at a time, little oily kernels of corn popping against the pot lid, until I was the only one left, a hard, stubborn pip in the bottom of the pan, burned black.

  Menarche was my magic word that year. Before I went to sleep each night, I whispered the word thirteen times—once for each regular moon and once for the Blue Moon, just in case—hoping that mine would come. My father, he never asked a thing about it. He gave me a fair allowance. It was understood that I would be self-sufficient enough to purchase my own products and take care of myself when the time came. So he remained unaware that I was not bleeding like the other girls were.

  At my annual checkup, I lied to the doctor about it. I told him I had my first period six months before. He asked if it was happening regularly. I told him yes, regular. Regular as could be.

  Polly seemed particularly taken with her breaching. She painted herself with the new habits of womanhood—the tip of her finger on her lower lip when she was lost in thought, a languorous lean against the school lockers when she spoke with boys, fingernails colored somber browns and oxblood reds.

  Peter went breach a few months after we kissed in the attic. I had wondered if I would see a dramatic change in him, but he was the same. I asked him about his breach nights, but he didn’t like to talk about them. He said, “You shouldn’t be thinking about me when I’m like that.” If anything, he became all the more proper and gentlemanly to compensate for whatever it was he did when the full moon rose. I admired his rectitude, but it made me feel lonely, too—as though he were visiting me in some foreign country where I lived all by myself, and we were both pretending that the rest of the world didn’t exist.

  This truth is, I liked my strange country. But I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me, as though I were in quarantine. Couldn’t they see my aloneness was a freedom rather than a prison?

  Once, though, Peter brought me something back from his breach night. He said, “Look. I found it by the river.”

  He put it into the palm of my hand. It was a little metal heart with a loop at the top, a charm lost from a bracelet.

  “It’s old,” I said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s tarnished.”

  “See?” he said. “It was waiting there for a long time. Waiting for me to find it and give it to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He smiled.

  “I think about you,” he said, “at night, when I’m out there.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I guess I think about being near you. I think about how it’s like there’s a bubble around you.”

  “A bubble?”

  “A big bubble. A block wide. It goes where you go—you’re the center of it. And every object gets a little bit better while it’s in that bubble with you. It’s always very bright where you are.”

  And I was bright just then. I was breathing very hard. The only thing I could do was get myself as near to him as I possibly could, so I leaned in and put my head against his chest and listened to his heart.

  * * *

  Hondy Pilt was an interesting ca
se. He had first gone breach when Peter had, during the same moon, and the next day in school the breachers seemed to have a newfound respect and even admiration for him.

  I asked Polly about it.

  “I don’t know what it is about him,” she said. “You just want to follow him. He ran through the woods—I’ve never seen anyone run like that. I mean, Lumen, he was beautiful.”

  “Really?”

  “I know it sounds stupid, but it’s no joke. We followed him, and he took us to this clearing on the side of the mountain. Nobody ever knew it was there. He stood on this rock jutting out over nothing. If he fell…but he didn’t fall. He put his arms out. Like the sky was his or something. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

  It was true—there was something different about him, something even I could witness during the day. He had always seemed like someone struggling against invisible forces, but now there was a peacefulness about him—as though he had arrived at a place and recognized it as a true home, as though he had discovered a back door into heaven and waited patiently for the rest of us to find him there.

  I tried to speak to him. In the cafeteria a couple days later, I brought him a banana as an offering. I had always been kind to him—more than most, I believe. I said hello. I asked him how his day was going. Usually he smiled back and uttered a few guttural words of greeting. That day, though, his eyes didn’t even meet mine. He was gazing upward, as though he could see the sky through the ceiling. He reached out and put his big hand over my little one, and he just held it there for a long time. I didn’t know what to do, so after a while I took my hand back and left him there smiling to himself.

  I had wanted him to share his secrets with me, but instead what I got was consolation. The last thing I wanted was to be pitied by Hondy Pilt.

  Amenorrhea. I looked it up. That’s what it’s called when you don’t get your first period by age sixteen. At first I wondered what it had to do with the end of a prayer—where you say, Amen. But then I realized it was probably “men,” as in “menstruation,” and “a,” as in “not”—so “not menstruating,” amenorrhea. That’s the word I tried to counteract with my magic word menarche.

  Where did all that blood go if it wasn’t evacuating my body? I worried. Did it collect somewhere? Did I have a sac in my thorax that was growing larger every day with unshed blood? That was crowding my other organs? If not blood, what was my body spending its time in the production of? All flowered fantasies and brain work?

  Two months after Hondy Pilt and Peter Meechum went breach, the second, smaller Parker twin went breach. That meant I was the only one in my grade who hadn’t. In fact many of the people in the grade below me had already started going. It was something you couldn’t hide. Your absence on those nights was noticed.

  Polly tried to console me. She said it was a sign of great maturity to breach late. Rose Lincoln was not so kind. She said it was because I was underdeveloped, obviously—that I was repressing my womanhood. “You have to have a grown woman somewhere in you scrambling to get out,” she explained. “How come you don’t want to let her out? You can’t stay a girl forever, you know. After a while, girlhood’s just a shell for something else.”

  To Rose Lincoln I was a shell. A dry husk. One of those disappointments like cracking open a peanut only to find there’s no nut inside.

  I knew I wasn’t going to go breach at all. But I hadn’t known what it would mean—watching everyone else as though we were on opposite sides of a wide river. I could hear them frolicking in the distance with their puffed-out bodies and their bleeding wombs. I felt that I was waving to them from my exile. Sometimes someone waved back.

  So I said my magic word every night, and I looked at myself in the mirror every morning to see if any part of me had grown.

  Peter Meechum petted me like a poodle and was in constant care not to corrupt me with his newfound adulthood. I wanted his hands on me, but he was reluctant.

  And one day after the last night of the full moon, Polly came to my house and told me that Wendy Spencer had gotten an empty soda bottle stuck up in her the night before. She lurched all the way home with it inside her, and the paramedics had to break it this morning to get it out.

  “Can you imagine!” Polly said. “It was stuck. How deep must it have gone to get stuck?”

  “Suction,” I said, picking at the cover of my history textbook.

  “What?”

  “It’s not how deep. It’s suction. They probably had to break the bottom to let the air in.”

  “Oh. How do you know that?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know. It just makes sense.”

  And so that was something else for me to think about when I couldn’t sleep.

  Something was coming, and it had broken glass for teeth. I was running from it, hiding. But in the middle of the night, when I lay awake in my bed listening to the howling outside, I didn’t know which I really and truly wanted: this life or that one.

  * * *

  I pleaded with Mr. Hunter not to read my essay in front of the whole class, but he said modesty would get me nowhere in life. I said it wasn’t modesty, it was just that I didn’t like people reading my writing.

  He gave me one of his curious looks, one that I could feel in my belly.

  “You’ve got a toughness in you, Lumen. More spine than all of them put together,” he said in a low tone. “Why do you hide it?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Why was he talking about my spine?

  “If you want me not to read it,” he said, “tell me not to. Don’t ask, tell.”

  But I could say nothing.

  So he read it aloud and told everyone to pay attention to the diction and the transitions. He didn’t say it was mine, but everyone knew anyway. I hunched in my seat.

  “You’re an excellent writer,” said Rose Lincoln after class. “You’re a master scribe.”

  Later, in math class, when we were all supposed to be working through a sheet of problems, she leaned over and whispered to me.

  “How’s your boyfriend?”

  “What boyfriend?”

  “You know, Peter Meechum.”

  I hadn’t thought about him as my boyfriend.

  “Things got pretty vicious last night, you know,” Rose continued. “He got into a fight with Blackhat Roy.”

  I had seen the scrapes and bruises on Peter’s face, but he was avoiding me in school that day so I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about it.

  “Why?” I asked Rose.

  “Why what, sweetie?”

  “Why were they fighting?”

  “Come on, Lumen. I know you’re a little behind us, but you must’ve heard something about what happens. There is no why. Instinct. Besides, you know how Roy is. He’s got a meanness you can’t do much about. So Peter did what he had to.”

  I didn’t look at her. I tried to concentrate on the math problem in front of me. But the lines and numbers seemed to wobble and blur.

  “Anyway, Peter showed himself a real leader,” Rose went on. “Like a warrior-prince, you know? His skin was smeared all over with blood and sweat—you just wanted to lick him. And he deserved something—I mean, for taking care of that little creep Roy. So I let him have me. To the victor go the spoils, right? That’s me—I’m the spoils.”

  I stood up from my desk so suddenly that I knocked my book and worksheet and pencil to the floor. Mr. Goodwin looked at me curiously. I picked up my things and put them on the desk, then walked quickly out of the room, down the hall, and into the girls’ bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror, my diminutive, ugly little self, and it wasn’t until I could see my eyes filling up with tears that I knew I was going to cry. So I shut myself in a stall and unrolled thick wads of toilet paper to cry into. I made no sound. I’m a silent crier when I wish to be.

  When I was done, I splashed cold water on my face and waited for the redness to lessen. I was in the bathroom so long that the end-of-period bell rang before I got back to
the classroom. When I went in to collect my things, Mr. Goodwin asked me if everything was all right.

  I told him yes, everything was fine.

  Then, on an impulse, I added:

  “I was cutting class.”

  Mr. Goodwin gave me a confused smile, as though he didn’t understand the joke. Then he just shrugged it off.

  “Are you coming to math clinic today? A lot of kids could really use your help.”

  * * *

  Later, when Peter came to my house to study, I remained conspicuously silent about his injuries. At first he tried to hide them or distract me with questions from the textbook. But the more time passed without my asking about it, the more indignant he became.

  Finally he said, “Aren’t you going to ask what happened to me?”

  I shrugged.

  “I figure it happened when you were breaching last night.”

  “But don’t you want to ask how? Don’t you want to know if I’m all right?”

  “Did you have sex with Rose Lincoln?”

  His face changed. Whatever ire he had been fostering toward me was suddenly gone—replaced by twitchy panic.

  “What?” he said lamely.

  “You had sex with her.”

  “Who said that?”

  “She did.”

  “Rose lies. She’s lying.”

  “I don’t think she is.”

  He didn’t say anything. His eyes searched the room. He was in a panic about being caught. I hated him for making me feel sorry for him. He reached out to me, and I pulled myself back so violently that I banged my shoulder against one of my shelves and a pile of books came tumbling down. I was embarrassed and angry.

  “Why did you do it?” I said.

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did. I know what breachers do. They run in the woods. They beat one another up. They have sex together. Isn’t that what happens?”

  “Lumen—”