Watching her step closer, I wondered if we could have been friends.
Or maybe it would be something slightly less innocuous than a question — a statement. God, it’s cold. I saw you on the bus. Ah to be a teenager in love. Thank God the train’s coming. It’s creepy here by the graveyard.
She stopped near enough that I could see the crusty whiteness at the corners of her mouth. I turned my gaze to her feet and anticipated her voice; high and cheery, I guessed.
“I really” (high and cheery indeed) “grossed you out on the bus, didn’t I?”
I looked up at her, disbelieving, my heart going swift and hard. How dare she notice, how dare she accuse me.
“It’s one of my grandmother’s specialties, in case you were wondering.”
Her eyes were bloodshot. I watched the poor capillaries doing the best they could. I prepared myself to inform her that she had not grossed me out at all. But then my heart started to mess around, as it had tended to do in recent months, shivering and jabbing inside me.
“Anyway,” she continued, sparing me, “this is kind of awkward, but do you have a tampon I can borrow? I’m desperate.”
First: I was right! Second: Where would she go to insert this tampon? Third: A tampon cannot be borrowed. Fourth: I had an unopened box in my bag. Fifth: I remembered him in the fluorescent drugstore asking me what was the point of buying tampons, given the situation.
“Sure.” I attempted joviality. “As long as you promise not to return it.”
She grinned. I laughed nervously.
“I knew you’d be the right person to ask.” She said this in a scary, meaningful way, and my fingers were quivering as I unzipped my bag and pulled out the brand-new box of tampons and tried to break through the packaging. Meanwhile the train was approaching, she was staring at me, the plastic continued to defy me, I yanked out a pen, she stared at me like she knew something, I jabbed the pen at the plastic, the plastic gave way, I grabbed and peeled.
It was a merciful moment, the moment when I finally placed a tampon in her palm. The sacred white tube. I added a second, a third.
My period had not been coming. It did not come, and it did not come, and it did not come, it did not come, it did not come. This was not due to pregnancy; if only. There were other, sadder factors at play.
“Thank you,” she said, and then, “thank you, thank you,” as I added each additional tampon. It crossed my mind that perhaps she was just a normal girl. “I’m so desperate,” she said. “You really saved the day.” But then I became certain that she wanted to hurt me, because she kept going on about her gratitude, through her gratitude implying the richness of her flow, and surely my envy must have been there on my face, yet still she went on. The train was getting near, and I wanted — needed — it to arrive, to bear me away from this moment.
“The zombies are playing awful hard tonight, aren’t they?” she said, pointing toward the playing field where the green grass was beginning to freeze over. They ran back and forth across it, a smear of great brightness in even greater darkness. I listened to their voices, screams of victory and screams of defeat. Even from this distance it was possible to see the blue tinge to their skin. I shivered; she could read my mind.
The train screamed its way into the station, drowning out the sounds of the soccer-playing zombies. The bleeding girl said one last thing to me, though I will never be sure, because the train was screaming right beside us: “You always give something up to get something else.”
When the doors of the train opened I rushed into the car ahead of the one she boarded. We could not be together for another second. Yet I knew she was there, standing at the front of her car, looking through the windows, staring at the back of my neck. I forgot to mention that I’d noticed a tattoo on her neck. A gray smear of something anatomical, an anatomical heart or plant or something.
A train passed on the track beside us, another outbound train, going slightly faster in the same direction. The sign read OUT OF SERVICE and as the train pulled ahead of us I observed that there was nobody on it except in one car a figure in a blue uniform. This person was wearing a blue winter hat and I stared hard, trying to figure out if the hat was part of the uniform or if the employee had done a very thorough job matching the hat to the uniform. Then, as he turned his head, I saw that the figure in the uniform had the face of a wolf. The wolf gave me a glimpse of his face, not meeting my eyes, and then turned back to his original position. Did he give half a nod to someone in the car behind mine?
But when I twisted around to check, I was shocked to discover that she wasn’t standing at the window as I had pictured.
There were only four other passengers in my car, afloat in sleep. No one had seen what I’d seen, and I did not scream.
* * *
Just then a small bubble of blood emerged from deep inside me. It appeared on the cusp, beneath my underwear beneath my jeans, and quietly popped. The sound of a minuscule kiss. Followed by a brief yet definite rush. By the time I got off the train at my stop I was crying with gratitude. My face wet. I walked into November. A car that in another life would have accelerated through the yellow stoplight and killed me did not accelerate and kill me. Alive and bleeding, I arrived at my doorstep to find that his name had been rubbed off the tag beneath our doorbell.
THE BEEKEEPER
People and things are disappearing in the city. These people are girls between the ages of eleven and seventeen who have not yet been stiffened by life in skyscrapers, who have not yet donned the hood and trousers, who, in a different era, would have been milkmaids, weavers, beekeepers. These things are objects the aforementioned girls have used. A brush, for instance, containing loose strands of hair. Bedsheets slept between, bath towels wrapped around, slippers slid into. Pencils gnawed upon, notebooks written in, magazines flipped through. A spoon used to eat soup, a fork used to shovel food, a knife used to spread or to cut.
This is why, notwithstanding the dangers one may encounter outside the city, Maebh’s parents are sending her to The Farm, and have ordered me to go with.
* * *
“If you had to choose,” Maebh says, “which would you hate least: to have spiders crawling all over you, or rats, or snakes, or frogs, or bees?”
She sticks her skinny leg out the window of the car — yes, the car — which I am steering through the countryside — yes, the countryside — past the orchard — yes, the orchard. It is hot late afternoon and fragrant with rotting fruit. A circumstance unimaginable to anyone from the city. Unimaginable to me three days ago. I feel drunk.
“I do not know,” I say. She has been asking me these kinds of questions throughout the entire journey; I do not think she is cruel, and I do not think she intends to highlight the vast differences between us, but still she is constantly doing so. Unlike her, I have not been to The Zoological. I do not know what a spider is, not really, nor a rat, nor a snake, nor a frog, nor a bee. In the city we do not have such exotic creatures. I have only seen moving pictures of these animals.
“Come on,” she says, flicking her pearly toenails against the side-view mirror. “You gotta pick one. Spiders, rats, snakes, frogs, or bees?”
“Rats,” I say. “Because they are mammals.” This, at least, is a fact I have learned.
“Hm,” she says. “Good point.”