This time, though, it was different. I had seen it. Had just one breacher been there, or two, they might have made a display of animalistic defiance and run off. But it wasn’t just one breacher, it was a whole pack. Violence, I discovered, could be contagious. It fed off itself until it had lost its purpose. The result was five teenagers mauled in our town square on the day after Christmas.
The attacks were just too brutal to be ignored. Two of the boys and one of the girls were hospitalized. One of the boys had had his eye gouged out and would have to wear a glass eye for the rest of his life. One of the girls was a cheerleader and had promised her parents and her pastor that she would remain a virgin until the day she married. Someone had to be held responsible.
So our sheriff questioned some of the breachers. It didn’t even take a whole afternoon. All we needed was a scapegoat, and we had one readily at hand. The next day everybody knew that Blackhat Roy had been held responsible for the crime and would be sent away to live in Chicago with his uncle.
I hated him. Still, when I thought about him going far away, part of me ached for him.
On certain days in the spring, in late April, say, it is possible to believe what the animals believe—that horror and beauty are hearty allies, and that when you live in the full roiling of your guts it’s impossible to make distinctions between them.
*
Late that afternoon, near sunset, Peter Meechum came to me. He came to the front door, rang the bell, and stood there looking mournful and respectable.
“I came to apologize,” he said.
“For what?”
“For everything.”
I wondered about his willingness to apologize for everything in the world. It was the marvelous kind of stuff that martyrs are made of. He stood there, sheepish and strong, and his smile was just on the final edge of regret, ready to break through to whatever passionate gesture was next. Maybe I was still weak to the fact that he seemed interested in me when there were so many other girls whose doorsteps he could be standing on—but it was more than that. He was wound up, kinetic, and you felt that you could either go along with him or be left behind—and I wanted to go with him.
I invited him in, but he didn’t want to be indoors. Instead we walked, wrapped in our winter coats. I kept my eyes on the shoveled sidewalk, paying close attention to whether or not I stepped on the cracks. I wondered if he would try to take my hand, and I left it dangling just in case—but he seemed morose and inattentive.
“You know where I’ve been all morning?” he said.
“Where?”
“Church.”
“Oh.”
“It used to make me feel better,” he went on, “but it doesn’t anymore. I forgot how to be good.”
“You didn’t forget.”
“All the things I’ve done. The way I’ve behaved. Do you ever feel like you’re two entirely different people? I mean, there’s the person you know you should be, the person you want to be, the person everybody else would like you to be. And you can be that person most of the time. It’s work. I mean, it’s hard—but you can do it. But then there’s this other person who does awful things. The sun goes down, the moon comes up—and suddenly you’re watching yourself do ugly things. Like you’re complacent, at a distance, just watching the happenings of your body as if you had nothing at all to do with them. Do you ever feel that?”
I was silent for a moment. But he didn’t give me a chance to answer before he continued.
“No. You wouldn’t know about that.”
“Maybe I would,” I asserted.
“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t understand.”
“I do. I promise.”
His smile was generous, but he didn’t believe me. I wanted to be something in his mournful life—a comfort or a remedy. Simple fancies, but my chest ached with them.
“Listen,” I said. We stopped, and I got in front of him to look up into his eyes. I put my hand on his chest to reassure him. I wanted him to feel the truth of what I was saying. I wanted to press it directly into his heart as though it were soft clay. I could feel the confession spilling out of me, and there was no stopping it. “Listen,” I said again, “sometimes…I don’t know…sometimes I hate myself. Especially lately. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who I am anymore—what I am. My dad, he doesn’t know I go out at nights. I can’t tell him. I’m not a breacher like other people, I don’t think. I can’t be. I don’t want to be. But I don’t know. My mom, she used to make dolls—except now I don’t know if she really did. I wish I could make dolls. I wish I were the girl who made dolls instead of the girl who—”
He put his arms around me. “Shh,” he said. “It’s okay.”
He held me and stroked my hair for a few moments until I calmed down. Then, when he let me go and looked me in the face, his expression had changed completely. His mood had transformed—he was elated. Had I done that to him? Did I have that kind of power?
“Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “I want to show you something.”
He pulled me into the middle of the street.
“Wait,” I said. “We’re going to get run over.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He let go of my hand, took me by the shoulders, and turned me around so my back was to him. He put his head over my right shoulder, and I could feel his breath on my cheek.
“Look down there,” he said, and I looked at the row of houses and the purple sunset beyond.
“What?” I said.