“No.”
“Oh, wait, I know—Lord of the Flies.”
“That’s not an author.”
“What was his name?”
“William Golding. And no.”
“Damn it. How many guesses is that?”
“You have one more.”
He was quiet for a long time, his face buried in his hands, and I liked how his sandy hair hung tousled over his fingers.
Suddenly he sat up, looking pleased with himself. He reached out for me and pulled me to him so we were sitting next to each other on the bed. Then he leaned in close. I could smell his skin.
“I got it,” he said. “Do you believe I’ve got it?”
“No,” I said, my voice almost a whisper.
“Well, I do. I’ve got it. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
He said it slowly, each syllable a victory:
“J. D. Salinger.”
I looked at him for a long time, that pristine boy with his acrobatic teetering between glory and shame. Our faces were impossibly close. We shared the heated air—what he breathed out, I breathed in.
“Well?” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I got it, didn’t I?”
And I said, “You got it.”
We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments.
It was nothing. Three words. Two of them were even plosives, or stop syllables. You got it. Nothing at all. It was a flake of a moment, a fingernail of time—but it was there in that narrow margin between one thing and another that I saw who I really was.
He placed his hands lightly on my chest as though to encase my lack of breasts and protect them from harm. Just as you do with newly planted saplings.
The look on his face, beneath features scarred by moonlit nights in the wild, was awfully earnest—and I didn’t think that anything Peter Meechum wanted to do could be very bad. It was a legitimate, daylight thing—it was something done all over the world all the time. It had nothing to do with that ugly, lecherous, queasy feeling in my stomach during the three nights of the full moon. This was something else entirely.
As an act, it was cool, somber, polite.
He removed his clothes, and he told me I should remove mine as well. After that, I lay down, and he scooted his body over mine. His chest against me was bony and raw.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“Uh-huh. Yes.”
I didn’t know what to expect. There was a pinch, a slight off feeling, as of something being lodged where it shouldn’t be. Like a piece of spinach between your teeth. It hurt a little, but not so much. Peter was very careful and considerate.
“Okay?” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “You don’t have to keep asking.”
So he closed his eyes and went about his business. I watched him, a little firebrand of industry, chugging away at his given chore. It made me think of those chain gangs from movies, the prisoners all shackled together, swinging their pickaxes in unison. The idea made me smile, but I didn’t want him to think I was laughing at him, so I turned my head and hid my face in the pillow.
His face grew a deep red color, and then I knew he was done, because he fell off me to the side and made sounds that suggested pride and relief.
I felt something leaking out of me, so I went to the bathroom. I took some of the stuff on my fingers to examine it, because it was new to me. It was slippery and a little sticky, and it smelled like pancake batter. I thought about all the invisible, microbial creatures swimming around in it, and it made me a little nauseated, so I washed my hands. But I wished them all well, his little sperms, as I sent them down the drain.
I wasn’t on the pill, but I was pretty sure you couldn’t get pregnant when you were amenorrheic.
I was suddenly shy again, so I wrapped a towel around myself before I went back to the bedroom. Peter was still collapsed on the bed, all used up.
“You have to get dressed,” I said. “Before my father gets home.”
“Okay, but kiss me first. Come here.”
He held his arms out, so I went to him. He wanted a long kiss, one of those drawn-out ones from before—but it seemed to me that our sex had changed the kind of kisses called for. So I gave him a quick peck and an amiable pat on the bare shoulder. His skin was flushed and clammy.
He stepped into his underwear and his pants.
“Are you getting dressed, too?” he said.
“Yes.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want you to see me.”
“You are aware we just had sex, right?”
“I know, but still.”
“Tell you what,” he said, turning to face the closet door. “I promise not to peek. Let me know when you’re decent again.”
Which I thought was, after all, a very nice thing.
*
And also: I’m still waiting. With everything that happened after that day—all the things I have done.
When will I be decent again?
Chapter 7