They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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88 A What do I even remember of the years in school? I would go to visit F in his lab. I would hold the mice in my hand. Their nails scratched at my palm and I imagined his days, lifting them from the cage, their feet tickling his heart line. It’s not just that memory begins in childhood, but that we learn to make memories as children. Later we can’t alter those molds, only add to the series. I believe this. I still feel the daddy longlegs on my ankle as a child. I kicked it off and cried out. I smelled wild grapes, I smelled lavender, the well-kept gardens mingling. I clipped the chives and my brother and I folded them up in our mouths and chewed, onion and dirt, then breathed on each other. We ate the sweet clover we found in the fields. Filled jars with fireflies. Snow was the cold’s answer to fireflies, I thought later. In the winter F and I walked out into the fields to smoke. The path had disappeared and we tromped our own way, snow slipping beneath the tongues of our shoes. In the twilight the snow was 89 pricks of cold light on our faces, in our eyelashes. We stopped and smoked by the red pines, which had been planted together and were all the same height. When we were high enough we made snow angels, the snow not deep enough, so my backbone rubbed roots I couldn’t see. The seat of F’s pants was stiff with ice when we got back, the denim holding its own made-up form. I laughed at it, we laughed. In the morning the fields were crusted over with light, and I wished that we had never gone out. Our footprints ruined what would have stretched unbroken, past the tennis courts, to the trees. Our path marring what would have been wildness. Wildness—what we all hunted for as children, among the beds of dead needles, rocks we hid from each other behind, the mud of the streambeds and the moss we’d take turns lying in, looking out for spiders. We were never far from home then, from the street where shrubs crept in demurely. We longed to get lost but even when we pushed each other farther into the woods, when we challenged one another, it was a game, a show. We would never starve to death there, no matter what we said. We would never have to eat squirrels, berries, mushrooms. The squirrels ran from us anyway, we couldn’t tell good berries from bad, we knew nothing about mushrooms except to stomp on the puffballs. F and I had walked out, the snow blowing; it was hard to see but we trekked forward. We laughed at ourselves, at our cold hands as we tried to light the joint and snowflake after snowflake stiffened our knuckles, extinguished the flame. Then we lit it and this was a victory. When we got back inside, we stood stripped to our underwear in the bathroom, running hot water over our hands, we laughed. His curls were wet where snowflakes had been, and in the mirror I saw the shallow valleys 90 between his ribs, the ridges of bone in the fluorescence, the thin living skin. ...