Anywhere But Here (50 page)

We walked past the games lined with sailors, where there were
machine guns, colored ducks, everything with bolted rifles, and went to watch the bumper cars. We stood there listening to the hard thwacks of cars until the showers of sparks slowed above and the power began to drain. I closed my eyes and opened them again to look up at the sparks on the netted ceiling. The blue and white fire seemed magic, like sparklers, and it held a few minutes after in your eyes.

They took us farther into the woods. It was dark but there were noises all around us. Hal seemed to follow the invisible sounds to a place.

Then we were standing in a clearing on pine needles. I could feel the damp tall trees above us. The stars hung tiny in the sky. There were other people on the ground, five feet away, but we didn’t know them. A girl was lying on an old army blanket, her knee out facing me like a face. A guy leaned on top of her. There was a flashlight on the edge of the blanket and the beam hit the marbled orange/yellow bottoms of her feet, hooked over the boy’s white back. He fell, grunting, as he drove her into the ground. It happened again and again. That went on for a while and then he screamed, high like a girl, and he was still for a second, his neck lifted, thick and dead, but his right eyelid and right foot were flinching.

He rose to his knees and she still clung onto him. She lifted a few feet off the ground, her butt spread into separate muscles, her legs around him, hanging on. One by one, he took her hands off his shoulders and let her slide back to the blanket. She sat there picking at the wool. She bent down and I saw her face for a moment. She looked like Rosie Griling. I thought I recognized her; at the same time, I thought it couldn’t be. Her lip was bleeding, she was pretty. A strand of her hair fell over her mouth.

Then another boy stepped out of his pants and lowered onto her, like someone starting pushups. He was still wearing his socks and T-shirt. She rearranged herself under him. I didn’t like watching. It felt funny being a girl.

A flowered dress bunched up under her armpits. Her underwear lay twisted, a few feet away on the dirt. I looked back at Benny like I wanted to go home and he put his hands, lightly, on
my shoulders. It felt safe and good to be in layers of old clothes, the same clothes as the boys wore. I was thinking they would never do this to me, I was family. The girl looked all yellow and white and the boy kept pushing her down. Another boy tore open a package of wieners. They got on their knees by the blanket. The one who was on top of her moved. They passed the package of wieners between them, someone threw down the cellophane wrapping. It glittered in the flashlight light. They stuck the wieners in her, first one, then another. She shuddered, then started to sit up, her hands coming to her face.

I turned around and said I wanted to go home.

Nobody had been talking and those boys heard me. They stood and wiped their hands on their pants. Those boys weren’t old. They looked like regular boys, except we didn’t know them. They were dressed in good warm clothes and they started circling around, their bike wheels wobbling in the dirt.

Hal lifted me on his shoulders. “We’ll go now.”

She was still sitting on the blanket, her stomach wet and shiny. She sat there with her legs sprawled out, patting her belly like a baby, as if someone would have to come and dress her. Her hair fell and covered half her face.

“Come
ON
, if you want a ride,” one of the boys yelled to her.

She hung her head farther down.

“Where’s my lipstick?” she said. She looked up at them and then around. It seemed the first time she saw the trees.

“We’re getting out of here, now,” one of them said.

“You guys want her?” He was talking to Hal and Dave, who were still standing with us on their shoulders. “Go ahead. You can have her. She likes it.” The boy looked back at the girl. “Maybe they’ll buy you your lipstick.”

They rode away, handling their bikes roughly, standing up and pulling. I watched the lights on their handlebars draw jagged paths through the dark and then I closed my eyes against Hal’s back.

The last night of summer, Benny and I slept outside. Benny stood there, scuffing his sneakers on our porch, at midnight, when he
was supposed to. We took a blanket and a box of Graham crackers and walked across the yard to the hickory tree. Benny had climbed out his bedroom window and left it open. It was easy for me to get away. During that summer, Ted often stayed late, watching television with my mother in the living room. I crawled out of the downstairs bed, when I couldn’t sleep, and woke up in the tight, cold twin bed across from my grandmother in the attic. Anyway, my mother wouldn’t miss me. She was a heavy, greedy sleeper and nothing woke her.

We settled the blanket on the tall, uncut grass and opened the box of Graham crackers, passing it back and forth. We felt hickory roots under us. There were so many noises; some were insects, some were the highway, and some we didn’t know. It seemed busy outside, like daytime, except for the dark.

It wasn’t cold. The alfalfa field had been plowed and the corn was all picked, but there was a rich smell, like hay, that seemed to come from the ground. Even though school was starting, the air still smelled like summer. And the sky that night washed low and near us. There were white traces, as if the stars had moved and left trails of themselves, chalk dust on the black.

I chewed the end of a weed. I wasn’t tired.

“You shouldn’t care, you like school. You’re good in school,” Benny said.

“I don like it.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“You have a lot of friends,” I said.

Since Theresa and I made friends, other girls didn’t talk to me at school. When they invited me to their birthday parties, they didn’t invite Theresa. And I was afraid of boys. An older boy had come up to me on the playground and teased me, and I’d hit him so hard his lip bled. He’d told and I’d been in trouble with the Mother Superior again.

“I’m afraid of them at school.”

“You have some friends.”

“Theresa.”

“You get nervous,” he said.

“Yeah, I get nervous.” I felt relieved and happy, having said
that. It seemed unimportant now that I’d ever been nervous and I couldn’t imagine feeling afraid again.

“S’cause of your mother.”

“What?” I’d never thought of that and it seemed awful, all of a sudden, for us to talk about her that way. And it was such a night, I didn’t want anything wrong.

“Your family’s different.”

“No,” I said. “She’s fine. It’s just me.”

“Shhhh.” He put his hand on the inside of my wrist, where the pulse is, and he went to sleep like that, his fingers on my arm. Everything outside seemed wonderful to me, and falling asleep took a long time. I kept sliding down in the dark and then my eyes opened again. I don’t know what was more amazing: that our land was so changed and beautiful at night, or that it was familiar. It was our old barn, standing crookedly, casting a pure black shadow, and they were our houses in the distance with their porch lights on, but the sky was shining as I’d never seen it and each stalk of long grass seemed to hold an identical stem of moonlight on its side.

I woke up first and watched the daylight come into the sky. I propped up on an elbow. I heard the six-fifty train. I had never seen a sunrise and I’ve never forgotten that one. I must have moved, because Benny woke up, cranky because he felt cold and sore from sleeping on the ground. He ran home, dragging the blanket behind him. But I was happy. I felt incredibly light, walking over the field. I ate the last Graham crackers from the box. I felt I’d discovered something new that would change me and that my old problems, being nervous and afraid, were gone; already they seemed strange and silly to me.

The fall before we moved to Carriage Court, I wanted to go trick-or-treating with Benny, but my mother said no. She offered to take me in the car; she and Lolly would wait by the curb while I ran with my bag to the doors. But I cried and so she finally let me go.

Theresa Griling came, too, she was the only other girl. Their father had driven back from Florida and they were home again. None of us ever talked about when he was gone. That was when
they took Netty away, at the end of the summer when he came home. At the railroad tracks, we all started running across the plowed frozen fields in one line. I could feel the hard ridges through the rubber soles of my tennies. After a while I didn’t know where we were. The band of my mask hurt my chin and I had to hold up a bunch of sheet with one hand so I didn’t trip.

Then there were dim streets where we didn’t know anybody and the boys pressed up to the screen doors first. They were down to the next houses before Theresa and I got our bags open. But the heavy drop of candy in the paper bag was a pleasure, it seemed we were making progress. When we ran, the hard candy knocked on the sides of the bags and the bags banged against our thighs.

Later, we lost the boys and sat on a curb where we couldn’t even find a street sign. I don’t know how long we stayed there. But finally, the boys came back out of the fields. New guys were with them, riding wobbly circles on bikes. Some of them were smoking.

“Where’s Benny?”

“I dunno,” someone said. “Went somewhere with David.”

“He’s supposed to stay with us.”

“Who says?”

“My mom.”

“Her mom says.” The smokers giggled, cigarettes dropping in the dark.

We started running again, Theresa and me in front this time and the guys on bikes bouncing over the fields. Then they came right up next to us, almost hitting us with their wheels.

“Watch out.” I didn’t know yet what they were doing, I didn’t know I couldn’t say no, that they didn’t care. “That’s my foot.”

They pushed us down in the dirt and we both screamed. One pulled up my sheet and grinned at me. He had a crew cut and pimples and dirty hair on his upper lip. There was nothing in him that I recognized.

The other guy was pressing down Theresa’s shoulders. He leaned over and kissed her, making fake smooching sounds like farts.

“Stop it,” I screamed, kicking, before he did anything. My ears
were cold and humming. I had a headache like one jagged line. He bent down and clamped his hands over my wrists and he was sitting on my legs. But when I looked up, I thanked God, because there was a circle of boys and I saw Benny. “Benny. Make him stop.”

I was so relieved to see Benny I closed my eyes, but then when I opened them again, he was talking to the guy next to him as if he hadn’t seen me.

“Benny!”

But he didn’t look down at me. He wouldn’t. Then, all of a sudden, I felt it. A cold blade against my cheek, under my hair, on my neck. It was a scissors. The guy was cutting my hair. I heard the scissors clicking, the short, snuffling noises the hair made when it came off. Benny knew about my hair, he knew I’d been growing it all my life. It was unusual. Everyone said that about my hair. It was pure black. It was going to be one of the things that would help me get on television. My grandmother said it was so dark you could see other colors in it. I started to cry, but quiet. I didn’t even care about Benny helping me anymore. It was too late. My hair was half gone. I just wanted it to be a dream, but I knew it was true. I just wanted my hair back, that was all I wanted and all I could imagine ever wanting.

The two older guys got on their bikes and rode away. That was the way they were, older kids, worse than lawless. They could just come out, get you alone and hurt you and then ride away. The rest of the guys, our guys, the guys we knew, started running across the uneven field. Theresa staggered up, she was crying, too, but she started following after them.

“Stevie,” she was yelling and running, “Stev-vie, you’re gonna be in troub-bel, I’m telling Da-ad,” but she was falling forward, tripping and then getting up again, heaving harder, and I doubt her brother even heard her, she was so far behind.

I just stayed on the ground till they were far away. There was noise from trucks on the highway somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. Then somebody was running back towards me. It was Benny, but I didn’t want Benny then. He stood ten feet in front of me and screamed.

“Come on. Get up. You want to stay here all night, that’s your business, but I’m supposed to bring you home.”

I’m not going to say anything, I was thinking, I knew I didn’t have to. There was nothing anyone could do to me now because I didn’t care.

“Please, will you please come on. Just this once.” Benny knelt down in front of me, moving his hands, wanting me to look at him.

I was trying to collect all my hair from the ground. The pieces felt light and soft and it was hard to see them in the dark. Mostly, I was doing it by touch. Benny scratched under his sock, but I didn’t care what he did. He took off running then, yelling so the rest of those guys didn’t go without him. I let him. Let them all go. I was wadding the hair in my hand and then dropping the balls in the bag with my candy. At least they didn’t take my candy. The hair wadded up in balls, it was neat, it just made these puffs with air inside. When I reached, my knee touched the scissors. They were still there, little rounded elementary school scissors, the same kind I had at home. They lay open, a thin blue metal. I wasn’t going to touch them.

“Come on, you coming or not, last chance!” I thought I heard Benny but I wasn’t sure anymore. I was lowering my head to the ground, it was almost there, then there. My head felt intricate like an ant farm. I thought I could hear blood moving in tunnels.

But in a while my joints got wrong. My arms felt twisted in the shoulder sockets. I knew I’d better get up. It had been a long time, the trucks were still running somewhere and there was nobody else around, there hadn’t been anybody for hours maybe. I’d have to do something myself. So I started walking with my bag towards the lights, the nearest lights, which were far away.

Ringing the doorbell, I almost fell asleep and a man came and let me in to use the phone. The kitchen gleamed bright and I didn’t even have to think about the number. It was there, the first thing I knew. My mother answered and when she heard it was me, she started screaming. I couldn’t listen to it and the phone dropped down so it was just hanging, knocking against the wall.