The Frenzy (2 page)

I’ve never been able to figure it out and I’ve never seen the cabin again but Corey and I imagine this is our real home, a house made of roots. I feel better here than in my little-girl room with the stuffed animals and the canopy bed. It’s hard to breathe there. Everything smells of sickly sweet air freshener, bleach and toxic cleansers. In the woods it smells bittersweet, of leaves and earth. The air is humid and sticks to us like clothes. The fireflies glow—our lanterns, keeping us safe. We find a moss bed among the roots of a tree and we are quiet. I hardly need to say any words to Corey. We understand each other without words. I can tell just by looking at him if he is happy or sad, if he isn’t feeling well and if he wants to make love, which is pretty much always, but we don’t. Dried leaves crunch beneath our small bodies as we roughhouse on the damp, mossy ground. The light is dappled and dark green. My hands reach up and stroke Corey’s face. His
cheeks are smooth—he still doesn’t need to shave—and his nose is broad. He puts his soft, full mouth over mine and I feel the fatigue leaving me. Here we escape our families but also time and even our bodies. We become something else altogether.

My parents don’t know about Corey. They would never admit it but the color of his skin makes a difference to them. I have to hide our relationship from them and every day it gets harder.

Corey Steele and I met when we were in first grade. For a long time we thought of each other as just being there, sort of permanent fixtures in the classrooms as we passed through elementary school. We were always in the same class but we never really talked. Still, I always looked for him on the first day and I always made sure I knew where he was on the playground, who he was playing with, what he was wearing. He told me he had the same feelings about me. He remembered things I said and did as a kid in perfect detail.

Most people thought I was weird but Corey seemed to admire me. Like how I got in trouble for screaming at Kenny Martin because he called Sadie Nelson, the girl who didn’t come to my birthday party, fat. (When I reminded Sadie of this after she didn’t show up to my party, she told me she hadn’t needed me to defend her; it just made her look worse and more unpopular.)

Corey was the quiet, kind one. He told me he usually just felt invisible. He was one of a very few black kids in the school and I was always on the alert, waiting to pounce on anyone who made a racial comment. They never did, at least around me. Maybe they could see in my eyes what I would have done to them.

But sometimes people called Corey other names, maybe because he was so quiet and shy. He hardly said a word and had even been tested for autism because of it. When my mom’s bridge club partner’s son Dale Tamblin called Corey a retard I scratched him until he bled. I was suspended for a week but Dale Tamblin never bothered Corey again.

Corey and I finally got to know each other better toward the very end of seventh grade. The middle school was a lot bigger and after the first year we started hanging together at lunch because we didn’t really know anyone else we wanted to spend time with and it felt like we needed the protection. Neither of us had any close friends. Corey hung out with his brothers on the weekends and I was almost always alone up until we became close. My one friend, Pace, had transferred to a private school where he wore a uniform, continued to excel at sports and pined after boys in secret and on the phone to me.

One spring night before I became really close to Corey, I snuck out of the house and rode my bike to a party on the outskirts of town. It was in a big farmhouse and a metal band was playing in the barn. I only liked alternative music and the screeching guitar was giving me a headache. There were a lot of older kids there, but a few of the cool kids from my class, too; I’d overheard them talking about the party—that’s how I
knew about it. I’m not sure why I went: I guess I was just restless. Everything had been different after the incident with my mother and the wolf. I was always jittery when the sun went down. My skin itched. I lay awake smelling the night, wanting to be out in it.

That night I had called Corey but he didn’t answer so I went to the party alone. I had some beer from the keg and I was standing by myself, almost hypnotized, staring into the bonfire when Carl Olaf came over to me. He looked pretty cute and his dimples popped out when he grinned.

“Hey. Liv, right?”

I nodded and smiled but tried not to let my teeth show. They are small and sharp; I thought they looked weird. I kept staring into the fire. My cheeks flamed with heat.

“You’ve got pretty hair.”

I thanked him.

“Can I get you another PBR?”

I held out my plastic cup and he went to refill it.

When he came back he took my hand and we sat in a dark corner of the barn. The animal smell made my head spin.

“You don’t have too many friends, huh?”

I shook my head.

“And you don’t say a lot.”

I shrugged. I could get like this with people, almost mute in spite of the outbursts I had from time to time. I noticed that it happened to Corey, too—the muteness. But later, when we got closer, it didn’t happen to us with each other.

I wanted Carl Olaf to kiss me, then. I wanted it because I didn’t want to be the weird girl without any friends. I was sick of being weird. My mother had never been weird. Beauty queens were not weird. Bridge club presidents were not weird.

Carl Olaf pulled me behind the chicken coop. He told me that my lips were the reddest he had ever seen. I do have very bright red lips—it embarrasses me. “You’re not wearing lipstick, are you?”

I shook my head no.

He pulled me down into the straw and kissed me and I let him. I didn’t mind. I kissed him back.

Then Carl Olaf put his hand up the back of my shirt. He hesitated. His fingers made their way around to the front. He let them linger over my breast. He pulled my bra to the side and stroked. He gasped. He pulled his hand away.

“What the fuck,” he said.

I jumped to my feet with my hands across my chest.

“It’s true,” he said. “It’s true.” He was laughing. “Hairy teets!” He got up and staggered away, sniggering.

I had a thin layer of downy, reddish hair on a lot of my body that had started growing when I turned thirteen. When I saw it I thought I looked beastly; no boy would ever love me. My mom took me for painful laser treatments to remove it but they hurt so much. Waxing and shaving didn’t last. Sherry Lee and Kelly Reddy must have told Carl. They were girls without even a trace of stubble on their smooth, tan bodies
and they had roared with laughter when they saw me change my clothes in PE. Once they tied my hair to the back of my chair during math class.

I suppose I am lucky that I didn’t have my period that night, that it was one night short of a full moon, that I was on Lexapro to quiet my anger, so that I didn’t try to attack Carl Olaf the way I had tried to attack my mother.

But Carl Olaf was really the lucky one. At least that night.

Something had risen up in me when he laughed. The animal smell of the barn grew overwhelmingly strong and seemed to have seeped inside of me. The heat of the bonfire where we had stood before now seemed to burn on my skin. I wanted to scream with rage and lash out at Carl with my nails and teeth. I knew these feelings had to do with what happened on my birthday the winter before, but I didn’t understand them. What I did know was this: This thing, whatever it was—it was inside of me and I
knew I had to keep it there.

Carl Olaf was lucky that night but not the next. The following night Carl’s father, Reed Olaf, was the first known victim of the full moon murderer, killed in the woods while he was out hunting deer. My father and his men never caught the killer. I felt terrible for Carl but I never got to give him my condolences because he always leered at me and called me names before I had the chance.

As I was leaving the party on my bike, that night before Carl’s father died, before I had any sympathy for him at all, I saw by moonlight seven boys coming up the dirt road that ran through the cornfields from the town. The boys all had sleek features, dark hair and gold-colored eyes. One of them walked ahead of the others. He was the tallest and he had a fierce expression on his face. The best-looking boy I had ever seen.

Something was wrong, I could tell; the boys seemed
angry about something, or just very determined, in the way they walked so precisely, two rows of three behind the tall boy, shoulder to shoulder, trudging along the road. I was afraid of them but also drawn to them. I hurried past, trying to keep my head down, but I wanted to stare. When I passed by, I looked back. My face was burning with blood as if I were still gazing into the bonfire. The tallest, most beautiful boy had stopped in his tracks and fixed me with his golden gaze. I could feel him reaching inside me, illuminating the dark, hidden tissue of my brain with the flashlight of his mind. It hurt and felt pleasurable at the same time and I gasped.

What happened?
he asked me, without words.

How could he do that? I wondered. How could I hear him? But just in case he could hear me, too, I thought back at him as hard as I could:
I was shamed
.

He nodded as if he understood.

Who was this strange boy and why was he here with the six other boys and why did he notice me? But I didn’t
want to know the answers to these questions, not really. Somehow I knew that I shouldn’t go there, that it was dangerous. So I tried to forget about him.

I rode my bike as fast as I could all the way home.

When I got there I called Corey but I never told him what happened at the party. I was afraid he wouldn’t like me if he knew so I wrote about it in my diary later that night and left it at that. But just hearing Corey’s voice made me feel better, soothed.

We hadn’t kissed or anything yet at that point. We just hung out in the woods and talked. Or sometimes we were just quiet for hours.

We listened to music, too. Corey was always finding the perfect music for me, for us. I asked him to try to find something that would make me cry because I was sick of how numb the meds left me and even though I loved the carefully mixed CDs with names like Tears for Liv, they never quite worked. He brought me every version of Sia’s “Breathe Me” and that finally did the
trick one night, even with the antidepressants.

I didn’t even know how in love with Corey I was. It was more the way you feel about your eyes, or your hands. You just can’t imagine it being any different.

We kissed finally when we were fourteen. I hadn’t really wanted to before, not after the thing with Carl Olaf and also that other thing. Meaning the thing with my mom and the wolf—whatever it was—that I didn’t like to think or talk about. I was afraid that what happened to me after I saw the dead wolf in the truck could happen again if … I didn’t know if what…. If I got angry, of course, but also maybe if I got too excited, or let myself go out of control. But at a certain point Corey and I couldn’t resist and we just kissed and nothing bad happened. It was so sweet and magical and natural, and I didn’t change in any bad way. I just started liking myself a little more and having more confidence. I guess I just felt more complete.

Now, three years later, I touch Corey’s short brush of dark hair. I can almost feel it buzzing with growth under my fingers. I run my hands over his slender forearm, the well-formed slope of bicep with its delicate tracing of veins. His skin is smooth and very dark. I try to understand, but I don’t. I can’t understand why it would matter. Corey could have scales or fur and I would love him, but this is skin, beautiful skin. He smells musky and clean. Today he feels healthy, frisky but calm; I can tell. He stares out into the dark forest and then he looks back down at me. The almost-always-tense muscles in my neck and shoulders relax under his gaze. I know he won’t judge the length of my fingers, the way soft hair grows on my body. He doesn’t seem to mind anything about me at all.

He tells me, “That’s love, Liv. When you accept everything about the other person.”

I hope that he can accept everything about me, I really do.

We were in the woods, just like this, when we saw the gray wolf.

She came and stood watching us from the underbrush, her pale eyes glamorously lined and her muzzle quivering with information.

The wolf population is very small. They are endangered, those wolves, and you almost never see them.

Corey grabbed my wrist and we sat motionless watching her before she vanished into the woods again.

“She reminds me of you,” he whispered. “Beautiful and wild.”

When I looked back at Corey there was awe in his eyes.

The day dissolved into evening around us. We were so mesmerized by the wolf and each other that it seemed we could not move from the spot, until it got very late. Corey kissed my neck and pressed his face against mine. We shivered. The night was coming and we would have to go home.

When I stood up, Corey grabbed at my legs and wrestled me back to the ground. We rolled in the soft mulch and leaves caught in our hair. I pressed my face into his chest and tried to curl up smaller against him so I would never have to leave.