Such release—you have no idea. Everything absolved. A world where signs meant nothing, where everything was permitted. The claustrophobic restrictions of life falling like clipped fingernails at your feet.
I ran the woods, and I was unstoppable. I thought nothing of school deadlines and frowning fathers. I was entire and alone—blissfully alone. There was nothing outside my skin that mattered—except maybe the odor of tree sap and the brittle ice that depended from tree branches. I wanted to go farther. I wanted to run all the way out of town—through the streets of large cities, leaping from the hood of one taxicab to another, laughing and indifferent.
You could nuzzle your face against the warm world. The undersides of everything. This is how you knew love. There was no ugly. All was beautiful. The bodies, dark or pale, bruised or unspoiled—they were beautiful. The violence was delicious in the way foreign food sometimes is—surprising on the tongue, fresh and sharp. My daytime resentments sloughed away, and I would have gladly merged my life with the lives of others—put my body, all uncovered, against theirs.
Except that I was afraid. Still afraid of myself. And of the others.
Later that second night I watched them from a distance. I ran across them, finally, in the middle of town, and I climbed a dumpster to the rooftop of the Sunshine Diner to observe them. There were so many of them, at least thirty, making loud noises in the square.
They seemed to run in packs, mostly. Like social cliques at school during the daytime. When these packs crossed paths during the full moon, there were fights. Sometimes the fights turned into revelry. Below me I could see some girls, locked into combat on the wide lawn, pulling at each other’s hair, biting, choking, shrieking. But they soon grew tired, and their violence became pathetic, little compulsory slaps as their chests heaved with exhaustion. Even kisses.
Elsewhere, near the gazebo in the middle of the square, a pale pink knot of breachers, most of whom I knew, were locked together in various manifestations of sexual congress. Girls, boys, it made no difference. You were skin, and they were skin, and you buried yourself in the skin of others as they buried themselves in yours. Some of them cried, and some of them howled—and whether the crying and howling was pain or pleasure, you couldn’t tell, and maybe they couldn’t, either. Such are the ambiguities of primal youth.
I could name almost everyone I saw—because I was the kind of girl who knew everybody’s name, even though I was allied with none of them. There was Ellie Wilkins, Carl Bodell, Frenchie Lassister, the twins Margot and Marina Anderson, Wally Kemp, Gary Tupper, George Ferris, and also George Dodd. Mildred Gunderson, Marcel Judd, Theo Kaminer. Cameron Mayer, whom most people just called Monkey. Adelaide Warren and Sue Foxworth and Florabel McCarron (who had started breaching so early that she was picked on by the others and had to be hospitalized after her first full moon). John Stonehill, Joel Phelps, Barbara Montgomery. Worth Loomis. Sylvia Hitchcock.
Rose Lincoln was there, too, looking like a matriarch overseeing the soldiery of her empire. She walked among them, her head held high and regal, her pale body indifferent to the bodies around her.
Peter Meechum was there, the king to Rose’s queen. He lay atop the gazebo roof, stargazing, while Bessie Laurent nestled against him, her hand moving with a lullaby rhythm between her legs. He paid no attention to her. And that was good, because I was quite sure I loved him—and that I could with very little remorse bite the tongue right out of Bessie Laurent’s mouth. That was the kind of clarity you could have on nights like these. All the fine-tuned complications of the day give way to the big absolutes: love, hate, life, death, good, evil, boy, girl, angel, fiend.
Blackhat Roy was there, too. He was relegated to the margins.
I watched them from the safe distance of the diner roof. I watched them, because these were my people. These were the people I had been born to. This was my heritage on true display.
Then, in the distance, there was the sound of a car engine. Headlights on the horizon.
Sometimes people came from the outside. Travelers. We were a long way off the main freeway through the state, so it didn’t happen often. But sometimes it did.
Some of the breachers below scattered by instinct. Others stayed. Blackhat Roy stayed, drawn by curiosity nearer the road, to the base of a granite monument in the shape of an obelisk. Peter stayed, raising himself up on his elbows. Rose Lincoln leaned against a tree trunk and crossed her arms, waiting.
The car drove once around the square, its windows rolled down. We could hear loud, overlapping voices coming from inside, the voices of teenagers like us.
Unlike us.
“This is it? I don’t get it.”
“I thought you said we were gonna find a liquor store.”
“This place doesn’t seem so scary. Why’s everybody always warning us about it?”
“Fucking Mayberry.”
“Aren’t there supposed to be ghosts or vampires or something? What the fuck?”
Then they must have spotted the breachers who had made no effort to hide themselves. The car stopped at the edge of the town square, and one of the boys got out and said, “What the hell is this?” and the others also got out and began to laugh and point. “They’re naked!” they said, and, “What are they? Hippies? Is this what we’re not supposed to see? Hippie bullshit?”