She shivered, then put her arms around me.
“Come on,” she said. “Hug me. It’s cold. Let’s just forget about everything up till now. The past is dead and buried. That’s what the breach is all about, right?”
I put my arms around her. Beneath the perfume of her shampoo, her hair smelled like something else—the fecund tang of earth and rot.
*
My second visitor of the day was Blackhat Roy. I saw him coming from down the street, and I rushed to meet him outside so my father wouldn’t see him at the door.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Heard the news,” he said. “You’re out. You’re fair game.”
“I’m not out.” In the daylight you scoff at the shadows you cowered from the night before. I had my mother’s blood. I knew I was different. I had faith that I was still not like the others. “I was helping my friend, and I was attacked. I ran.”
“Spent all night running away?”
“Go away.”
He sniffled from the cold, wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“I saw you,” he said.
“When?”
“Last night. In the woods.”
“You didn’t. I remember. I ran away from everybody.”
“Fuck everybody. It was just me. And you saw me, too.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“The way you looked at me,” he went on, ignoring my denials, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. You didn’t just want to tussle—it was like you wanted to rip me to pieces.”
He seemed delighted by the fact. The way he said it made it seem lascivious.
“No,” I said again. “I was just running. But I’m not doing it again.”
“You want to know the truth? I stayed out of your way. I’m not scared of much, but last night I was a little scared of you.”
He smiled when he said it, a smile of filth and gloating. So what was that churning I felt in my belly when he winked at me?
“See you on the wild side, girl.”
I went back in the house and shut the door on him.
In the kitchen, my father was making ginger tea, which was our favorite.
*
What was I?
Defective, for one thing. I had grown wrong somehow. My atoms and molecules were failing to adhere to one another the way they should have. My organs were stunted, dwarflike. My body was one pale refusal.
It didn’t matter that everyone else was doing it. Their doing it was native—my doing it was criminal.
Even in this I had failed. Everyone was relieved that I had finally gone breach—they felt that they could talk to me now, that I was one of them, joined together in their wild union. But I wasn’t one of them after all. I was still different. They welcomed what I feared. They jumped when I cringed. They howled while I whimpered.
Not that I was looking to be like the others. But to be between was too much to bear. To be defined by betweenness is not to be defined at all. It is to live your whole life at dusk, which is neither day nor night and therefore an hour of sad nothing caught between one kind of life and another.
This was my inheritance from my mother.
If I was truly out, as Blackhat Roy had said, why wasn’t I glad? And if I hadn’t fully gone breach, then what had caused me to blister myself with running?
And that was something else, something my brain burned to think on. If I was still as breachless as my mother’s blood had made me, then the night before—when I had stripped myself bare and woken in the melted snow at dawn—who was the girl who had done that? What was she driven by?
What excused her actions if those actions were not to be excused by instinct and biology or the horrible magic of this place?
*
Not everyone in our town acquiesced to the breaching so easily. It was difficult, sometimes, for parents to accept that their children could behave in such a way. Sometimes they even tried to delay the breaching or prevent it. There were urban myths about ways to keep your child from breaching. Giving them high doses of thiamine was one. Another was to make them sleep in a fully lighted room throughout their teenage years. For a while, before I was born, I even heard that some parents had begun to believe that if they kept their children shaved, completely hairless, the breaching would not set in. So for a period of five years or so, according to my father, there were a bunch of bald, eyebrowless teenagers walking around.
I was fascinated by the idea. I liked to close my eyes and picture it. And I wondered about these parents. What did they believe? That savagery was something you donned as though it were a pelt?
Other parents believed it was the town itself, our pinprick location under the moon, that was the cause of the breach. Sometimes parents would send their children away for the breach year to live with relatives in safe-sounding places such as Florida or Colorado or Arizona. And moving away did seem to work—insofar as the children did not see fit to run wild over the warm, sandy streets of Scottsdale. Sometimes, if they could afford it, the whole family would relocate and then return when the coast was clear.
So that worked—kind of. Except not really, because when they returned, the breachers seemed different, odd. It wasn’t just that they no longer belonged to the town—though there was that. It was something else. I remember studying Caroline Neary when she came back after a year of living with her aunt in San Francisco. It was her eyes. She seemed scared. Not of anything outside—but of something else. I think I knew what she was scared of. There was something trapped in her—something grown too big to fit in her body, something stretching her at the seams because it wanted to get out but couldn’t. She moved out of our town the minute she graduated from high school—and we all thought she would be better off for it. But then we heard the distressing news, just a few years later, that she had impaled herself on a picket fence by jumping out the second-story window of her pleasant suburban home in the middle of the day on a Saturday.