“Who is it?” I asked.
“Philip Anderson,” he said. “Me.”
I looked closer at the picture and could see some resemblance in the eyes to the man sitting in front of me. But I realized then that Mr. Hunter must color his hair, because the boy in the picture was blond.
“You’re from here?” I said.
He nodded. “Born and raised. When I left for college, I thought I would never come back. I was ready for the real world, you know?” He shrugged. “I managed to stay away for nine years.”
“Why did you come back?”
“I don’t know,” he said, leaning back, his eyes narrowed in thought at the pipes suspended from the ceiling. “I don’t think I quite know how to be anywhere else.”
“But your name,” I said. “How come you changed it?”
He looked down at me, his eyes weighty with meaning. “Sometimes you don’t like the person you’ve become. Sometimes you’d like to try being someone else for a while. You wouldn’t understand.”
It was quiet then, and he drank and I smelled the spirits.
“Then you breached?”
“I did,” he nodded. “When I was your age, I used to breach. Now I do this instead.” He grinned and raised his cup.
“You knew my father?”
He nodded. “I was nothing to him. A kid. I’ve seen him since I’ve been back. We’ve talked. He has no idea who I am. Your parents, they were ahead of me in school. They were seniors when I was, I don’t know, maybe in seventh grade.”
“Wait,” I said, my breath catching. At the suggestion of my mother, something inside me fell from a shelf and smashed. “You knew her? My mother?”
The springs in his desk chair creaked. His face seemed to change. He rubbed it, then rubbed hard at his eyes.
“We ran together. Sometimes,” he said. “Felicia,” and his eyes were now pink, holding on to tears.
“You’re lying,” I said. “She never breached. You’re still lying.”
He was sick, this man. And me, I was young and foolish and unkind.
“You look just like her, you know. She had skin like yours. And your eyes.”
“She didn’t breach,” I said again, shaking my head. “Stop lying.”
“The moonlight. Sometimes it makes it so you can see right through people’s skin. Your mother, her veins are something I remember. Nobody was ever as beautiful. I miss her. We all do.”
“Stop it.”
“You look just like her,” he repeated, and his hand reached out to touch my face.
I recoiled, standing quickly and knocking my chair over.
“You’re a liar,” I said, my eyes burning. “You fucking liar.”
He shook his head.
“Darling,” he said, kindly, as I rushed out.
*
Because there was nothing to be done, because there was nowhere to go, because there was no one to interrogate or confess to, I ran to the mine. I allowed myself to cry.
People were never what you thought they were. I was ugly and alone, and the world was ugly, too, uglier every day, and there was death in everything, because it didn’t matter how many maps you drew, because everywhere was the same place, and you could be fanciful about it but what was the point, especially right there interred in the earth, where it was quiet and where there was nothing to keep your mind from burning itself with running, with hating itself and loving itself, too, because that’s what it is to be a teenager, after all, when your little sluglike body aches for things it doesn’t understand, glows in its very pores from the effort to explode itself over the world…
So I cried because I could not explode myself, because we are too tiny altogether, too weak and malleable, because our bodies are not even the fingernails on God’s hands.
I cried until I howled, my voice a tinny echo in an empty cave. I howled like a beast—I howled like a dying thing—I howled like a little girl. I howled until my throat was dry, and then I blubbered, and it was nothing magical at all. I cried until my tears were useless, until I was numb to all my little tragedies.
III
Chapter 10
As a result of that tumorous instinct that grows in some boys, Blackhat Roy treated many of his defeated enemies with the basest kind of contempt in school. In math class, to the mocking delight of a group of jackal boys, he bit Rose Lincoln’s pencils in half so that she had to write with one half and erase with the other. He targeted, especially, anyone associated with Peter Meechum. He would have his revenge.
His new girl, Poppy Bishop, continued to trail behind him, because sometimes she liked the way he, upon her request, would attack those she didn’t like. But his attentions to her were capricious at best, and sometimes he would turn on her. She took tap dancing lessons, and once, he told her to get up on top of the table during lunch in the cafeteria and dance.
“I don’t think I should,” she said.
“Do it,” he said.
She climbed slowly to the top of the table and shuffled her feet a little. Everyone watched her quietly. Her face went empty.
“That’s not dancing,” said Blackhat Roy. “Faster. Here, you need more space?” And he used his arm to clear a wide space on the tabletop, sending people’s lunch trays to the floor. “Faster!”
She danced faster, trying to make taps with her sneakers.
“It doesn’t sound right,” he said. He looked around to the others. “It’s usually better. She’s not at her best today. You might not know it, but she’s got a good body under there. Cute little oval birthmark on her left tit. Poppy, show ’em your birthmark.”
She stopped dancing and stood frozen. She crossed her arms over her chest.
Since nobody else would do it, I crossed the cafeteria and made myself as tall as I could in front of Blackhat Roy.
“Stop it,” I said. “Leave her alone.”
“We’re just having some fun. What’ve you got against fun?”
“Stop torturing people.”
“What do you care? You don’t even like these people.”