Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,12

through school and get them out of the building. Since it’s unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health.

Stephen fingered the corner of his notebook. He was going to be valedictorian. I wondered if he was annoyed by Nico and Billy and others like them, by the way they occupied the classroom, establishing through body language a right of place that their brains could not. The contrast between their physical conceit and their intellectual timidity made me think of men in small clothes. They’d been given the basics—food, shelter, girls, trouble to cause—but deep down, they were on to the game. You could catch this tiny light in their eyes, this proto-consciousness of slipping supremacy.

Nico had changed over vacation. His football jersey hung closer to his waist than to his legs, his butt was more muscular, his crotch had thickened. I could not help but notice the way the denim of his Levi’s was rounded and slightly whiter there. I knew I should despise him as Jack did, the way he and his friends flirted with female teachers and played buddy with the male teachers, the way they gave congenial grabs to girls in hallways and relied on family ties to get them out of trouble. When Nico got caught stealing from summer houses, Judge Baby released him to his parents without so much as a meaningful reprimand. The boys called him Judge Baby because of the way he talked. Every day they played Judge Baby, cracking themselves up. “I cew-tin-weey hope you’ve gotten the boyish pwanks out of your system, wittle man. You have gweat pwomise.”

Billy had never been in trouble with the police, not that anyone knew of, except he did go through a bay window at his house once when he rode his mother’s spare wheelchair down the staircase, and at several parties he’d swallowed goldfish.

Boys will be boys, that’s what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are expected to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to express. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves. This way those who do succumb to the lure of sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. We are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances from men that we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises, then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars.

Nico and Billy were talking to Annie McCabe. Her voice was inaudible except for the random coo and peep, and the edges of her fine brown hair came forward like crepe curtains to hide her face. I wondered if she had ever masturbated. Probably not. I couldn’t imagine her manicured hands reaching to touch such a damp and pulpy place. Did she have the urge but resist? Or could the situation be precisely as it appeared—that she longed for nothing?

Nico’s simian eyes scanned for a target and rested on me. He swaggered strategically into my aisle, and Billy Martinson followed. I curled over my notebook to draw.

“Hey, Steve,” Nico said in his weedy voice, “looks like you got the hot seat.”

“Guess so,” Stephen replied.

Nico sat sideways in the chair in front of mine with his knees poking into the aisle. He put his elbow on my desk and leaned close, his breath coming in humid strokes. “Hey, baby.”

I said hi and returned to my sketch. My pen moved boldly. It swirled to wobbly heights, making me think of “Irises” or “Starry Night.” Billy settled his lanky frame into the seat in front of Stephen, the four of us carving out a strange chunk in the back of the room.

Breanne said something to Darlene, probably about me.

“What’s that, Breanne?” Billy leaned diagonally to shake her seat.

Nico said, “No whispering. Speak up or forever hold your peace.”

“That’s right,” Billy growled. “Speak up or forever hold my piece.”

Everyone laughed except Breanne, who whined, “Stop it, Billy,” in a voice that vibrated because her chair was shaking.

“St-o-o-p i-it B-il-ly,” Billy imitated, and the late bell rang. Mr. Shepard finally drifted in, coffee mug in hand. He lingered