Maya roars with laughter. “What is it with you and shit these days? Is that all you think about?”
“Answer the question!” Ana commands.
“It’s an idiotic question,” Maya points out.
“You’re idiotic! Diarrhea or an open door . . . always open. No matter where you go to the toilet. For the rest of your life!”
Maya giggles. “I’ve got a class now.”
Ana shudders. “How can we possibly have played this game our whole lives without you understanding the rules! You have to answer! That’s, like, the whole point!”
Maya shakes her head teasingly, Ana gives her a shove, Maya laughs and shoves back, but Ana jumps out of the way so nimbly that Maya falls over. Ana sits on top of her, grabs hold of her hands, and yells, “Answer before I mess up your makeup!”
“Diarrhea! Diarrhea,” Maya half laughs, half shouts.
Ana helps her up. They hug each other.
“I love you, you nutter,” Maya whispers.
“Us against the world,” Ana whispers back.
Then they get ready for yet another day.
* * *
There’s a flutter somewhere between your stomach and your rib cage, like a flag flapping in a storm, those first moments when you fall in love with someone. When someone looks at you, those days after the first kiss, when it’s still your incomprehensible little secret. That you want me. It’s a vulnerability; there’s nothing more dangerous.
By the time school starts for the day, someone has written three words on Benji’s locker with a red pen: “Run, Benji, run!” Because they know that’s what he did last night. He’s been untouchable for so long in this town that the slightest crack in his armor will be exploited mercilessly by his enemies. He ran from a fight. He fled. He isn’t the person everyone thought he was. He’s a coward.
They watch him when he arrives, waiting for a reaction when he reads the words, but it’s as if he doesn’t even see them. Maybe that’s why they start to worry if he’s understood. So when an entire school day passes without Benji showing the slightest sign of regret or shame, someone yells, “GO ON, RUN, BENJI! RUN!” when he walks past the cafeteria. William Lyt and his guys are sitting at a table in the far corner. It’s impossible to know who shouted, but Benji turns around and does as they suggested.
He runs. Straight at them. At top speed, with his fists clenched. Other pupils throw themselves out of the way; tables topple, chairs go flying. When Benji stops dead a foot from William Lyt, one of Lyt’s friends has leaped under the table, two more are practically sitting in each other’s laps, and one moves backward so hard that he hits his head against the wall.
But William Lyt hasn’t moved a muscle. He sits still, eyes open, meeting Benji’s stare. And Benji sees himself in him. He, too, has crossed a boundary. The cafeteria is silent, but the two eighteen-year-olds can hear each other’s heartbeats. Calm, watchful.
“Sore feet, Ovich? We heard you ran all the way from the forest,” Lyt snarls.
At first Benji looks thoughtful. Then he takes off his shoes, then both his socks, and drops them into Lyt’s lap. “Here you go, William. Your only chance of a three-way.”
Lyt’s jaw tightens, and his reply is more clenched than he would have liked. “They’re sweaty. Like a coward’s.”
He’s trying not to let his eyes land on Benji’s watch but fails. He knows who Benji got it from, and Benji knows he knows, so jealousy eats away at William when Benji grins. “I was actually looking for you in the forest, William. But you never dare take part in fights when the numbers are even, do you? You’re only tough on video. That’s why your team never trusts you.”
Small dots of shame burn on William’s cheeks. “I didn’t know there was going to be a fight, I was at home, it wasn’t me who burned the jersey,” he snaps.
“No, you’re not man enough to do that,” Benji replies.
He turns and leaves the cafeteria, and only then does William Lyt shout something. Benji doesn’t hear what, the only words he hears are “GODDAMN HOMO!”
Benji stops so that no one sees him tumbling into the abyss that’s just opened up in front of him. He sticks his hands into his pockets so no one will see them shaking. He doesn’t turn around so that Lyt can’t see what’s happened as he asks, “What did you say?”
Lyt repeats what he said, encouraged by the unexpected advantage. “I said your coach is a disgusting goddamn homo! Are you proud of that? Playing on a bullshit rainbow team?”
Benji fastens his jacket so his pulse isn’t visible through his shirt. Lyt shouts something else, and all his guys laugh. Benji walks out into the corridor, and through the crowd he sees a polo shirt. Green today. The teacher’s eyes are pleading, as if he wants to say “Sorry” but knows that the word is too small.
* * *
There’s a flutter inside Benji then. A flag coming loose in a storm. He can’t let anyone make him that weak, not this season. He leaves the school, walking slowly on purpose, but as soon as he’s out of sight he runs. Right into the forest. Slamming his fist into every tree he passes.
* * *
A younger boy stops at a different locker in the same school. Twelve years old. Covered in bruises. Yesterday he grabbed a branch and threw himself into a fight without hesitation in order to smash the legs of someone who was trying to hurt Benjamin Ovich. That sort of thing doesn’t go unnoticed in this town.
Today there’s something hanging from his locker. At first he thinks it’s a trash bag. He couldn’t be more wrong. It’s a black jacket. No logos or emblems or symbols, just a perfectly ordinary black jacket. It doesn’t mean anything. It means everything. It’s far too big for Leo, because they want him to know that he can’t become one of them until he’s much older. But they’ve hung it on his locker so that everyone in his school will get the message.
* * *
He’s got brothers now. You don’t touch him again.
* * *
It takes a huge amount of trust to fight at someone’s side. That’s why violent people prize loyalty so highly and are so sensitive about the slightest sign of treachery: if you retreat and run, you’re exposing me to danger, making me look weak. So Benji knows he’s let Teemu and the Pack down. And that isn’t tolerated.
Even so, he pulls himself together after a few hours in the forest and walks back into town. He wipes the tears from his cheeks and the blood from his knuckles. He can’t let anyone think there’s anything wrong with him; everything has to carry on as normal. Even when blue polo shirts have torn him apart, even when he knows that the Pack might want to punish him for running from the fight in the forest. Because where would he go if he didn’t have Beartown?
So he goes to work, stands behind the bar in the Bearskin, pours beer. The more crowded the bar gets, the more he avoids eye contact with other people. Several of the guys from the forest are there: Spider, about whose intelligence Ramona usually says, “He’s about as smart as mashed potato, that one.” But he’s loyal; in the forest Benji saw him stick just behind Teemu the whole time, not because he was scared but because he was guarding his leader’s flank. Spider was bullied all through childhood for being so lanky and crazy, but he found a place in the Pack. You can’t buy that sort of devotion.
Beside Spider sits his physical opposite, a short, neckless man, as wide as a brick shithouse with a beard as thick as an otter’s pelt. He’s called Woody because he works as a carpenter, because that’s what his father did. Once someone asked Woody if he’d rather have a more imaginative nickname, but Woody just snorted, “Are you gay or something?” If he’s any smarter than Spider, he keeps it well hidden, but he was in the same class in school as Benji’s sister Gaby and she says, “He’s no genius, but he’s not a bad guy.” Woody’s first love is having fun: beer, hockey, friends, girls. Drinking, dancing, and fighting. If there’s any kind of trouble going on, he’ll be there without a thought for the consequences, and if there’s an offer of a scrap in the forest he never hesitates.
But he and Spider have other friends, too, hardly hardened warriors, who seem almost to consider fighting a shared hobby. Like golf. One of the guys who works with Woody is so sweet that if he sees you on a Tuesday he wishes you a good weekend, just in case he doesn’t see you again before Friday. Another has four cats. How can anyone with four cats be dangerous? But he is.
The men who make up the Pack aren’t extremists; what makes them dangerous is simply the fact that they stick together. Against everything, through everything, for one another. Benji remembers a book he read by some journalist who said on the subject of sport and violence that “every large group you don’t yourself belong to is a threat.”
There are men in Beartown who grew up with Teemu but who now work in offices; they wear white shirts rather than black jackets, but if Teemu calls them they still come. One became a father and started studying at college to give his kid a better life, and he got a monthly grant from the kitty at the Bearskin when his student loan wasn’t enough. Another has a sister in the big city who got beaten up by her boyfriend and the police said they couldn’t do anything. A third has an uncle whose printing business was threatened by a gang running a protection racket. The sister is happily married to a better man now, and the uncle never got any more visits from the gang. If Teemu ever calls in those men, they come. That’s why they prize loyalty and are so sensitive to betrayal.
Neither Spider nor Woody is looking at him now, but Benji is well aware that if they want to hurt him this evening, they’re not going to warn him first.
* * *
Maya and Ana go their separate ways after school. Ana lies and says she has to check on the dogs, even though it’s actually her dad she’s going to check on. She feels ashamed. Maya lies and says she’s going out for a run, even though she’s planning to go home and curl up under the covers. She feels ashamed for different reasons. They’re like sisters, they’ve never had secrets from each other. But Kevin broke something between them, too.
* * *
It’s almost closing time in the Bearskin when the crowd at one end of the bar parts discreetly. The bar gets a little quieter, not enough to have been noticed by strangers but enough for Benji to notice.
“Two beers,” Teemu says, looking him hard in the eye.
Benji nods and pours them. Teemu watches his hands; they’re not shaking. Benji respects the situation he’s in, and he isn’t afraid. Teemu takes one of the beers and leaves the other on the counter. It takes a long time for Benji to realize what that means. So he slowly picks it up, and Teemu leans across the counter and touches his glass to his in a toast. So that everyone sees.
“You’re one of us, Ovich. But we can’t take you out into the forest anymore. I got it wrong yesterday. You could have been hurt, and we need you on the ice.”
“A little kid showed up in the forest . . . Leo . . .”
Teemu grins. “We know. Tough kid. If you hadn’t taken him off, he’d had have kept fighting until he got killed.”
“He’s only a boy,” Benji says.
Teemu stretches his neck, and something inside creaks. “Boys become men. If the cops start asking Leo questions—”
“—he won’t say a thing!” Benji promises.
“We’re counting on that,” Teemu says.
Benji can see that Teemu finds the idea that the general manager’s son dreams of rushing through the forest in a black jacket amusing. That Peter has tried for years to curb the Pack’s influence over the club but now can’t even stop their influence over his own child. He leans over the counter and touches his glass to Benji’s again.
“Have you heard my little brother’s coming home? And your coach is going to let him play! You and my little brother! And that Amat, the one who’s as quick as a weasel after a chili enema. And Bobo, the big meathead! You’re not like the older players, those greedy mercenaries, most of them don’t even want to live in Beartown! They just want to get out of here. But you lot, you’re a Beartown team made up of Beartown guys!”
Before the evening is over, Spider, Woody, and a dozen other black jackets have drunk toasts with Benji. He’s one of them again now. You might think that would make things easier when his secrets are revealed, but the exact opposite is what happens.
29
She Kills Him There
Anxiety is a truly remarkable thing.
* * *
Maya walks home alone, like iron on the outside but a house of cards inside. The slightest little breeze is all takes. Today it was the line in the cafeteria. The crowd. Someone backed into her accidentally; she doesn’t know the boy’s name, and he didn’t even notice. They hardly touched each other. It wasn’t his fault. But Maya was plunged back into hell again in an instant.
When she and Ana were younger, they used to count butterflies all summer. It’s different now, Maya counts them in a different way. She knows they die when the leaves fall.
Anxiety. It’s such a peculiar thing. Almost everyone knows what it feels like, yet none of us can describe it. Maya looks at herself in the mirror, wonders why it can’t be seen on the outside. Not even on X-rays—how does that work? How can something that bangs away at us so horribly hard on the inside not show up on the pictures as black scars, scorched into our skeletons? How can the pain she feels not be visible in the mirror? She’s become so good at pretending. Goes to school, sits in classes, does her homework. She plays her guitar, perhaps that helps, unless she’s just imagining that. Perhaps her fingers just need to be kept busy. She’s looked into the books her dad reads about “mental coaching,” and they talk about the brain having to steer the body but that sometimes the reverse is the only way to survive. She’s seen depressed adults do the same thing: keep moving, exercising, and cleaning and renovating their summer cottages, finding things that force them to get up in the morning: plants to be watered, errands to be run, anything so they don’t have time to think about how they feel. As if we hope that physical activity, tiny everyday rituals, might lull the anxiety to sleep.
Maya has learned to master her own skin, not let it burst with the fire that’s burning inside her. She imagines that if she can just fool everyone else, she might eventually be able to fool herself. But the slightest little thing can set her back: a lamp that looks like the one Kevin had in the corner of his bedroom or the brief creak of a floorboard that sounds like someone finally coming up the stairs in his parents’ house after she had spent a lifetime screaming. She can go for weeks where everything is okay, then suddenly there’s a noise or a smell and she’s back there again. On his bed. With his hand around her neck and his overwhelming force pressing against her mouth.
The boy in the cafeteria line just brushed against her; it meant nothing to him but flared like fire for her. She held the panic attack inside her like a bomb.
* * *
When people talk about rape, they always do so in the past tense. She “was.” She “suffered.” She “went through.”
* * *
But she didn’t go through it, she’s still going through it. She wasn’t raped, she’s still being raped. For Kevin it lasted a matter of minutes, but for her it never ends. It feels as though she’s going to dream about that running track every night of her life. And she kills him there, every time. And wakes up with her nails dug into her hands and a scream in her mouth.
* * *
Anxiety. It’s an invisible ruler.
* * *
The police station in Hed is overloaded and understaffed, like every other small-town police station. It’s easy to make fun of delayed response times and never-ending investigations, as if the staff were doing it on purpose. But the police officers aren’t all that dissimilar to any other professional group around here: if you give them the time and opportunity to do their job, they’ll do it. Give them a group of hockey fans dressed in red who show up battered and bruised at the hospital, and they’ll ask the right questions. Give them a forest they know, and eventually they’ll find something in it. br />
“Over here!” one of them calls after they’ve spent over an hour fine-combing the clearing where they’ve figured out that the fight took place.
He tosses something to one of his colleague.
* * *
A shoe. Just the right size to fit a twelve-year-old.
* * *
Leo is sitting on the steps in front of the house. Maya looks surprised. “Why are you sitting here?”
“I’ve lost my keys,” he mumbles.
Maya peers at him suspiciously. Notices that he’s wearing a tatty old pair of shoes. “Where are your new shoes?”
“I’ve gone off them,” her brother lies.
“You nagged Mom for months to get them for you!”
Maya is expecting her brother to give as good as he gets, but he just sits there staring down at the ground. His face is swollen, he’s got a black eye, he has been telling everyone he got hit in the face by a ball in PE, but no one saw it happen. And Maya heard whispering at school today about a black jacket hanging on his locker.
“Are you . . . okay?” she asks cautiously.
He nods. “Don’t tell Mom I’ve lost my keys,” he begs.
“I’m not going to tell on you,” she whispers.
They’ve done a lot of mean things to each other, but they’ve never told on each other. She was the one who taught him that, one night when she was twelve and had been to her first big party and came home later than she’d said she would but didn’t get found out by her parents because she knocked on Leo’s window and climbed into the house that way. “We don’t tell on each other,” she told her sleepy little brother back then, and he was smart enough to realize that one day he’d benefit from the agreement.