Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,56

I said, kissing him. “Sorry for making you angry.”

He raised his head, saying, “Okay, so let’s see the new face.”

11

Cafeteria tables are laid in strategic rows like trenches. That’s in case they have to get to you fast, or get you out fast, or get away from you fast. Such are the grim inferences you learn to live with in high school. Madame Murat and Pat Egan, the one-armed shop teacher, circled the room, acting superior as prison guards. I wondered why they acted superior, since they were there just like we were there, only they’d been there longer and we were getting out first.

Jack and I were sitting by the windows in the corner. He was doing calculus, I was studying. Not exactly studying so much as staring at the patterns of text on the page, which were coming together and apart before my eyes like pieces at the bottom of a kaleidoscope. At the table to our left, Peter Palumbo and Daryl Sackler lunged emphatically, playing that football game boys play with the triangular folded paper. To our right, girls with tipped-in shoulders and nodding breasts huddled together over brown bag lunches.

Outside it was raining like crazy. Sheets of water pounded the roof, going straight over the gutters, past the windows, and onto the saturated ground. I could see past the parking lot, and into the sober queues of the potato fields on the opposite side of Long Lane.

The storm had started the night before at two in the morning. Twelve hours is a long time for a hard rain. I suspected it was a special rain, a monumental rain. I wanted to go into it with fanned-out arms, to bow and stomp and dance something similar to an Indian dance. I wanted to be touched by it and changed. It was rain to pray into, rain to save the world.

Jack and I had witnessed the very first drops the night before. The water tapped like rat teeth at my bedroom window. Jack said, “Listen.” His head tilted curiously, like an animal’s head. The beads of rain stuck to the glass, beached and lonely. We stared in the manner of zombies.

“Time is it?” he asked.

I said, “About two.”

“I don’t even feel tired. You feel tired?”

My head hurt and my eyes burned. My throat was sore. “A little tired, I guess, yeah.” We’d been arguing for hours, though Jack refused to call it that.

“Disagreeing,” he said, “is sufficient.” Adding, “Strenuously.”

“Are we at odds?”

“Yes.” Jack nodded once. “We are at odds.”

I did not like to be at odds with Jack. It was like being in a rowboat with only one person rowing. My oar would be raised, skimming the glassy lake, and Jack’s would flail—digging too deep, flying too high, ticking spastically. It would take us forever to go nowhere.

I had certain feelings, I’d told him. “Inside. They need relief.”

He peered through me as if to a minuscule spot on the wall.

I asked if he knew what I meant.

“Of course I know what you mean,” he snapped. Then he reminded me emphatically that I was not an animal. “You are separated from depravity by a conscience.”

Even if it was crazy to consider the activity of a few witless nerve endings as depraved, I did not disagree with him. Other girls hadn’t mentioned such feelings, so I knew that I was at the very least abnormal. It was common knowledge that if a girl was assertive in regard to sex, it was because she wanted to keep a boyfriend or steal a boyfriend or act out against her parents and society. Possibly she craved togetherness. I’d never heard of a girl who wished to alleviate the tingling sensations along the walls of her vagina, or at the posterior rim of its base, or in a third place, sort of an alcove where the seam of low underwear hits, only on the inside. No girls I knew ever spoke of seeing a boy or seeing a man and thinking thoughts.

“The job of the conscience,” Jack was saying, “is to marshal urges. Otherwise, any object in your field of vision is eligible for fucking.”

I thought he was missing the point.

“I’m not missing the point,” he said. “It’s not a particularly sophisticated point to miss.”

Jack stood and did something he never did, which was to tuck in his shirt. His scaly hands crammed the fabric down in bunches, and he began to pace. “Your problem is that you haven’t read enough. If you’d done