When I did not respond, he came and stood close to me—so close I had to crane my neck to look up at him. His eyes were raw, and his breath was hot. I felt sorry for him—all that fury and nowhere to put it. I thought it must be difficult for him, for boys. They get temperamental when they can’t shape the world into what they want it to be. It’s easier for girls. Girls are raised knowing that the world is unshapable. So they know better than to fuss.
“I saw you with Blackhat Roy,” he said. “What did he do to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Stop it, Lumen. At the quarry. The mine. I saw you come out with him. He hurt you.”
“Everybody hurts everybody.”
“No.”
He said no, but I wondered how could he not see that.
Cruelty is the natural order of things. Through algorithms of brutality does mankind build its greatest monuments. It’s when people begin to see violence as personal that they struggle. It had nothing to do with Peter Meechum. For that matter, it had nothing to do with Blackhat Roy. Goodness and badness had nothing to do with anything.
But Peter let it get to him. He was a believer in the meanings of things. If I was hurt at the hands of Blackhat Roy, well, according to Peter, that was different from my being crushed by a toppled tree. I realized that I once used to think that way, too.
“I’m sorry, Peter.” But, in truth, I wondered what I was sorry for. Maybe for him and the conception of the world he carried in his honorable brain.
“But I love you,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But why?”
“You know why. Because you’re better. You’re better than everybody.”
I wondered where he had gotten that notion. I wondered, for the first time, if that was the impression I gave—if somehow that was one of the things that kept me separate from others.
“That’s just something to say,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“No—it’s true,” he insisted. “You are better.”
“No, I’m not. I’m worse. Your love, it’s beautiful—but it isn’t true.”
He looked appalled.
“But he’s a monster,” he said.
“I know.”
He waited for me to say more, but there was really nothing left to say.
“I’m going in,” I said and stepped around him.
But he called after me.
“How can you be that way? You didn’t used to be that way.”
I had gotten to the front door, had my hand on the knob, but I turned back to him. He looked small there on my lawn. I wished for a moment that I could see him as I had seen him in grade school. I wished to have once more so simple and pure a longing.
I shrugged.
“I used to picture us getting married one day,” I said. “You and me. I mean, when I was little. I wrote my name over and over as Lumen Meechum. But it doesn’t sound right, does it?”
I looked at him sadly.
“Lumen,” he said, and there was a reaching in his voice.
But I didn’t reach back. I went inside and shut the door behind me.
*
I was losing friends, of course. Voids opened up everywhere around me.
Polly and I no longer had much reason to speak to each other. Her disapproval was polite and absolute. I didn’t know what, exactly, she disapproved of in my behavior—I didn’t know what stories she had been told or whether they were true. But it didn’t matter. Her disapproval was right and proper—the common way for two friends to grow apart. It was not for me to get in the way of a natural progression of events.
Peter Meechum was through with talking, but he still watched me from a distance. He was afraid of me, but some part of him must have believed I could still be his. Boys are the most romantic of creatures—their faith is as pure as it is ridiculous.
Rose Lincoln, on the other hand, became increasingly aggressive toward me in school, doing a lispy, babyish impression of the way I speak and throwing old bras at me in the locker room during gym. She didn’t like it that I had become the focus of so much boy attention.
I felt for her. I really did. The smallness of her spite was growing pathetic and tiresome to those around her, and there was no other version of Rose Lincoln to fall back on. What happened when your whole identity went out of style? What happened when the boys you used to fascinate were now more interested in some awkward polyp of a girl who had done nothing to invite their affections while you felt yourself growing indistinct against the dusty backdrop of the world? What did you do then?
For one thing, I suppose, you went on the attack.
It happened during gym class on the field, where the girls were playing softball now that the weather was getting warm. We wore brown shorts and yellow shirts, the school colors. The shorts were tight on some of the girls, who stuck out their behinds with proud vulgarity. On me, the shorts hung like a loose sail in the doldrums, the twiggy masts of my legs pale and meatless.
My team put me in right field, which was okay. It was peaceful out there. Nothing happened, really. You could look at the clouds and listen to the clamor happening elsewhere. You were a placeholder, and nothing was required of you.
If the ball was ever actually hit to me, no one expected me to catch it. My teammates shrugged their shoulders. It was a vagary of the game, a blind spot in the field. Nothing could be done.
But I hated being at bat, hated the moment when our team ran in from the field and I was given a number in the batting order. I couldn’t hit. I swung too soon or too late. I had an agile mind, but not a speedy one—not a mind that worked in harmony with my limbs. And if I were lucky enough to hit the ball, it was a strengthless strike, the softball inevitably making a few bounces to the pitcher, who tossed it easily to first base long before I could ever make it there.
On this particular day, Rose Lincoln was on the other team, and she played catcher when my turn at bat came.
I picked up the aluminum bat from the ground, which was muddy from the rain the night before. I stood sideways at home plate and lifted the bat into the air as I had observed the other girls do. But I must have been doing it wrong.