“What’s happening?” I said. “Polly.”
Her breath was coming faster now, and she ran toward the sidewalk and the street beyond.
“Polly, wait!”
I hurried out of my room and down the stairs as quietly as I could, so as not to wake my father, down the hall.
I opened the front door, and it occurred to me again that the blast of bitter night air was a relief. I was overheated, my heart going like crazy, my pulse driving in my ears, and the air seemed blissful and calming. I wondered, in some still part of my frenzied brain, if this was the same beatified air Jesus was born into so many years ago in his little desert manger.
Polly was no longer in the front yard. Now she stood in the middle of the street, her legs bent in a half crouch, poised to run for her life at any moment. But the street was empty. I leaned out the door and looked, and I saw nothing. She was spooked.
I felt bad about the little flare of intolerance I’d had for her just a few minutes before. She was damaged. She needed help.
“Polly,” I called in a whisper, which was as loud as I dared.
She seemed to hear me, because she turned her gaze in my direction for one little moment—a crisis moment of longing and sorrow, regret and fear—then she turned again and ran as fast she could down the street.
“Polly,” I called again, louder this time, but she didn’t come back.
I took a few steps outside, and then a few more. It’s a funny thing, sometimes, what we find ourselves doing. I observed myself as I walked, as though watching the actions of a character on television. Oh, isn’t it interesting what she’s doing. I wouldn’t have expected that of her. When I came again into my own mind, I realized I was standing in the middle of the snowy street in my pajamas and my bare feet.
I couldn’t see Polly anywhere. It was just me under the hazy, big Lake Moon. I turned this way and that, and the only sound I heard was that of my bare feet shifting against the icy surface of the road.
I wondered about that—my feet—and why they didn’t seem to sting from the frozen pavement. I looked back at my house, and it seemed smaller from the outside than it was from the inside—like a puzzle that strained your mind to think about.
In the sudden quiet of the empty night, I thought what a curiously wide place the world was—that you could stand in your nightclothes in the middle of a street and be quite, quite alone.
And then something else happened. It started to snow. They were gentle, quiet little flakes, like the dust or pollen of another season. I raised my arm and saw the snow collect on my skin, glistening along all the fine, light hairs.
You find glory in the strangest places.
I guess I wasn’t entirely surprised by what happened next. I guess I wasn’t. My body told me I had already known.
They came out from behind the trees in the woods across the street from my house. They had been watching me, you see. They had been there the whole time—that was what had Polly so spooked. They came out slowly, their pale bodies steaming in the cold, their skin taut and waxy against the wooded void.
I did not retreat to the house. I watched myself not retreating to the house. It was a wonder.
They came and stood in a circle around me. Rose Lincoln was there, and she approached and stood so close that I could feel her steaming breath on my cheeks.
“You’re lost,” she said.
The others smiled. They seemed to have difficulty standing still for long. It was all girls. It was the first time I realized they traveled like that sometimes, separated by sex. It was a coven, a brace, a klatch. Marina Donald stood right beyond Rose, and I could see her fists clenching and releasing, eager for something to throttle. Sue Foxworth was there, too, looking distracted. She scratched at herself and gazed off into the woods as though she were already running through them in her mind.
Rose Lincoln took one long, languorous look up and down my body.
“Is this what you wear to bed?” she asked. My pajamas had pink and purple hearts on them. They were cotton. The bottoms had an elastic waistband. The top had buttons down the front. She reached out with her painted nails and undid the top button, then she undid the next.
She seemed to lose interest before the third. She sighed heavily and looked at the sky, the snow falling lightly through the air.
“You keep yourself separate,” she said. “Away from us. How come? Is it because you think you’re better?”
I tried to respond. I licked the coldness from my lips.
“I don’t…”
But what did I mean to say? That I didn’t keep myself separate? That I didn’t know why I kept myself separate? Her accusation felt strange to me, because I had never seen myself as having any agency in my exclusion from the crowd. I was the one excluded by them—I was the one kept at a distance by everybody else.
Wasn’t I?
“That’s right, you don’t,” she replied. “You don’t. I know you don’t. All you are is what you don’t.”
Suddenly she reached out with both hands and ripped my pajama top open. The remaining buttons popped and clattered to the icy pavement.
The others in the group closed in more tightly around me. Marina and Idabel McCarron were on either side of me. Their laughter was grotesque as they took off my pajama top and let it fall to the ground. Then I was bare-chested before them. Their nudity was nothing—they seemed not to feel it. How could they not feel it? My chest had never been exposed to anyone before. I was aware of it—my own brute nakedness—and my awareness was an excruciating ache that went all up and down my spine.
“She’s so small,” Sue Foxworth said. The fact that her voice was not accusatory did not comfort me.
Rose Lincoln got closer. She paid no mind to my bare chest. I tried to back away from her, but the girls behind me did not allow escape.
“It’s Christmas,” Rose said, her voice almost a whisper in my ear. “Don’t you want to tear something down?”