Some people said hello to me. Polly made brief conversation—and even Rose Lincoln, whose arm was still in a sling, wished me well in a way that made me think magnanimity was her newly forged weapon.
Somehow, without realizing it, I had become everyone’s odd cousin. I existed as a nagging, peripheral figure in their lives—recognized only in specialized circumstances. I had become occasional. To leave a conversation with me was to return to real life.
No one asked me to dance, and I sat for a long time on the bleachers, alone on the dark periphery of the gym, watching the figures of my peers sway back and forth in each other’s arms, hating them for all their pretty pretenses.
When a group of boys passed by, I could hear them talking about Mr. Hunter, who was supposed to be one of the chaperones. I hadn’t seen him all night, but these boys had observed him walking the grounds of the school, cursing aloud. He swayed as he walked, said one. He was drunk, said another. The boys laughed.
“Where?” I asked.
“What?” they said. They were startled to notice me there in the dark.
“Where?” I said again. “Where was he going?”
“I don’t know,” said one of the boys, shrugging as though to suggest he wanted no part of whatever freakishness Mr. Hunter and I shared. “Looked like he was going toward the football field.”
*
I walked down to the field, the crinoline of my pink prom dress rustling against my skin. The field was not lit, but a glow reached it from the school grounds behind me. I was conscious of looking ridiculous out there, where no one was.
I didn’t see Mr. Hunter at first, but I found him by the sound of a glass bottle being tapped with steady persistence against a metal rail of the bleachers. He was up in the very top row, gazing out over the field and the stars in the sky beyond.
“There she is,” he called out when he saw me. I hiked up my dress and climbed to the top of the bleachers.
“Do you want to hear a story, Lumen?” he said when I reached him. “Now it’s time for me to tell you a story. I quit my job. I quit it. I’m leaving. I’m going as far as I can go. Maybe Tibet. Have you ever eaten Tibetan food?”
“You’re leaving? But why?”
He shook his head.
“You can’t get it back,” he said, “once it’s gone.”
“But you left once before.”
He drank from the bottle.
“You have to be dauntless in this life. If at first you don’t succeed at quitting, try, try again.” Then he looked at my dress and seemed to notice it for the first time. “What are you dressed up as?”
I sat on the cold metal bench beside him, and the folds of my dress creased uncomfortably beneath me.
The moon was overhead, a waxing crescent, and he asked me if I weren’t afraid to be alone with him.
“Jesus, girl,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to hang out with drunk, lying reprobates on emptied-out school property? You’re going to stroll yourself into victimhood one of these days. Aren’t you afraid?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should be.”
He stood suddenly, wobbly with drink. Leaning over me, he gripped the bar behind me on either side of my head and brought his face down close to mine. I could smell the thick, acrid stench of alcohol. He licked his lips and smiled a threatening smile, and the bleachers tremored under his grasp.
I closed my eyes. I waited for whatever was coming.
There was another sound, and when I opened my eyes, he was standing upright, looking down at me with trepidation, even a little disgust.
“Goddamn it,” he said, seething. “Goddamn you! No fear. Not an ounce of fucking fear. You invite—you invite—destruction. What’s the world to you, huh? A place to die in? You aren’t even a girl—you’re a…you’re a tragedy. There isn’t a monster in the world—not a monster in the world till he meets an eager victim.”
He reeled backward, and I thought he might fall, but he recovered himself.
“How come?” he said, almost pleading now. “How come you aren’t afraid?”
I wanted to tell him that I was afraid. But his fury was wide—he raged against things larger than just me.
“You can’t—” he started, then he used his sleeve to wipe his mouth. “You can’t rub yourself against death like that. You just can’t.”
He wanted me to understand. There was a desperation in his eyes. He shook his head, and he collapsed onto the bench again. For a long time he said nothing but just looked out at the scattered stars.
Then he said:
“Your mother, she was the same way.”
“You weren’t lying, were you?” I said. “I mean, the things you said about running with my mother. Those weren’t lies.”
He just looked at me for a long time. I wondered what he saw in that frilled pink gown. Whatever it was, he must have deemed it fit.
He drank again and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “All right,” he said then. “Time for another story. Last one. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” I held my breath. I clutched at the fabric of my dress, wanting to tear it.
We sat side by side. He looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and it was no conversation. It was a kind of shared aloneness—words dropped in the void, verbal flotsam for whoever might see fit to collect it.
“She never went breach,” he said. “You were right about that. That was a true thing. She was never a real breacher. It was something wrong with her maybe, her genes. Something didn’t click like it was supposed to. She didn’t feel the drive. No natural love of the night. But this is what you didn’t know. She pretended. It was when it happened to your father. She wanted to run with him. So she pretended, and he kept her secret. Nobody knew. She took her clothes off, just like the rest of them, and she ran. You think about it the right way, it’s romantic. Her and him—the night.”