Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,96

record skipping. Rourke—engaged in class.

I raised my chin and cocked my head. “Let’s go.”

“Excellent,” he said, somewhat surprised. “Cool.”

Kate started to make me nauseous. One night I was reading in the living room, and she came in and answered the phone. She spoke so loudly that I thought I might get sick. When I tried to get up, I fell back down in a queasy cyclone of confusion. My stomach pitched. I lowered my head to my knees.

My mother’s hand touched my neck. “Let’s get you to bed.”

She tucked the edges of my blanket around me, trimming the perimeter of my body. Probably I resembled one of those homicide outlines, marked indelibly in the position of my collapse. My mother sat. I was consoled by the depression made by her body in the mattress. I drew her hand between my palm and cheek. Maybe I would sleep. There was a chemical coming in, dripping in. I felt microscopic pulses of something, diminutive gates opening.

“When was the last time you ate?” she asked.

My eyes opened—how much time had passed? It seemed she’d been sitting only seconds, yet it had been long enough for me to dream a dream. Something about lost passports and missing luggage and foreign customs officials in a makeshift room set up on the tarmac.

“Be right back,” my mother said. She took back her hand and left me, stepping into the kitchen. A ruthless dusk replaced her, hitting quick, like a prison cell door shutting.

Kate popped in, her hair rippling like a flag. “Sick again?” she said, and I felt another wave of nausea. I pulled the quilt over my face. “Well, excuse me!” she said.

I stopped sleeping almost altogether. The malignancy of night and lust and loneliness made me shift restlessly. All that I’d struggled to suppress during the day would erupt into the dark at night, flooding the silence of my room, and I would call for him. If I slept at all, I would find him behind closed eyes, like an object through bright water, a shivering richness. We would convene—reconvene—in some substitute district, at some alternate age, with him not speaking and me not speaking. In those false regions, at his false side, I found my first peace.

It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can’t talk to your friends; it wasn’t that my friends were untrustworthy, it’s just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life. I composed a list for myself. One column for all the times I’d seen him, another for each time I’d discussed him. Mom’s accountant friend Nargis would have called this a table. I liked the idea of a table, of providing a frame for runaway numbers or dodgy ideas. I noted peripheral details such as conversation, clothes, and weather. I used a code for names, which was somewhat pointless since the list was in my room in my handwriting, and there were not enough characters in my life to outwit a motivated intruder. For Rourke’s name, I substituted the letter S, which followed R in the alphabet. Kate was B, which preceded C for Catherine, and Jack was G, the last letter of Fleming.

Last night at the play S and I sat next to each other in the dark. He has eyes that are black. When you mix paint, black is like all color, but his black is no color. I spoke to him and my voice was strange. Later he kissed me through a window at Dan’s. When he left I wanted to go with him, only I didn’t, though there was a beautiful rain. At home G and I sat all night like we were waiting for something. He said my chapel would be trash by Monday. B & Den came in drunk at 1:30 A.M. and we made vanilla pudding. The pot bottom cooked off and there were Teflon flakes inside, but the four of us ate it anyway. Today B made me sick. She was on the phone between the matinee and evening performances, saying how “in love with Harrison” she is. Mom measured my temperature at one hundred two and put me to bed with tomato soup that tasted like scalding ketchup water. Mom’s hand felt bony and mortal. It’s still raining. It’s been raining since Saturday. Even after five days it’s a beautiful rain.

Seventeen encounters in six months,