Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,121

still me when I did not feel like me? Was I the girl my mother bore, my father adored, the one Jack loved? Jack. I thought an unthinkable thought, something about asking for mercy, about going back in time, back to him.

The car thrust to a laborious and inexact stop at the intersection by the post office in East Hampton. The placid mechanical hum and puckered clicks from the streetlight slit the air, and the bloody electric haze it made warmed Rourke’s face as he looked left into the dead May night. Though he was in profile, I could see his eyes. I could see his fear, and in it, the place where I resided.

Rob’s voice came, soft under his breath, breaking through to Rourke, “Green light.”

When we pulled into the driveway, Mark and Rob stepped out of the car, with Mark helping Kate, asking when she thought she would be heading to college.

Rourke leaned down and gave me his hand, lifting me out. In the slender murk produced by our bodies, his hair touched my hair and his breath mixed with mine. When I turned to go, his left hand caught my waist, cupping it, his body pushing up behind me. Bending slightly, his right hand came down around my front to grab my right inner thigh. I was lifted slightly as his fingers found the run in my stockings, and through the shreds he found my skin, clutching up into obscurity.

27

The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it’s the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it’s only right that we grow overbig in someone else’s space. Perhaps we need to tire and differentiate, leave and adapt.

“Hey, Evie,” people kept saying, and I kept saying, “Hey.”

Sara Eden joined me on the curb in front of the school, where I was sitting, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Sara looked especially pretty all dressed up. Her eyes sloped at the farthest edges, like the opened wings of a tropical bird. Her skin was rich dark brown like a friar’s robes, her teeth perfectly even. A car engine quit alongside us. Sara waved. I listened to the tinkling fuss of her bracelets. “That’s my cousin. Marika.”

“What a pretty name,” I said. “Marika—like a spice.”

Sara pulled her braids back incompletely on the side nearest me in the disarming way that some girls have. Though I had not felt sad before, with Sara there I felt sad. She was going to Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., and D.C. is one of those places people never come back from. They don’t necessarily stay, but they almost always go from there to elsewhere. Sara was asking me about Alicia’s graduation party. I’d already said no, to Alicia and also to her, but it occurred to me that I might not see either of them so much anymore.

“So what do you think? I’ll pick you up at five, okay?”

Sure, I said, five is fine.

I’d remained in place for fifteen days after Rourke moved away, not leaving my house, moving only to touch the things I knew he’d touched—the door frame, the bookshelves, the couch, the paper dolls and the sailboat I’d made, the section of the kitchen counter on which he’d leaned. I kept my schoolbooks on a windowsill in my mother’s bedroom upstairs, where I labored to observe beyond the greening leaves the street his car had traveled. There was a chair, petite with a round swirling mauve seat and painted black wood. It was not a comfortable chair, but it was there that I sat every day until dark, except for brief hours at school, briefer hours in bed. Everyone was good to me and kind, deferring, always deferring. They seemed afraid for me, though it wasn’t necessary. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know that my path had been decided, that when I moved through the present, it was as if through a paraffin corridor. I would have spoken of such things, but it was likely that I would not have been heard. When anyone asked what I was doing, I would say, studying. If no one answered the ringing phone before I got to it, I would lift the receiver and drop it. It was always just someone calling, just a person, not Rourke.

From a quilted, sequined sack, Kate withdrew a tangle of bobby pins. She secured her graduation