“But it feels so much more hurtful,” she said. “When you’re young, and it’s like there’s a party going on all around you, but you weren’t invited.” She looked away, not at the blood, but at the bare steel wall.
“All right,” I said. “I do know what you mean.” She looked at me encouragingly. “When I was your age, I was different, too. I had to work very hard to pretend to be like everyone else.”
“You’re just saying that,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s true. I had to learn to act like the cool kids, and how to pretend I was tough, and even how to laugh.”
“What,” she said with another of her two-syllable chuckles. “You don’t know how to laugh?”
“I do now,” I said.
“Let’s see.”
I made one of my perfect happy faces, and gave her a very realistic that’s-a-good-one chuckle.
“Hey, pretty good,” she said.
“Years of practice,” I said modestly. “It sounded pretty horrible at first.”
“Uh-huh, well,” she said, “I’m still practicing. And for me it’s a whole lot harder than just learning to laugh.”
“That’s just teenaged self-involvement,” I told her. “You think everything is harder for you, because it’s you. But the fact is, being a human being is very hard work and it always has been. Especially if you feel like you’re not one.”
“I think I am,” she said softly. “Just a really, really different kind.”
“Okay,” I said, and I admit that I was starting to feel a little bit intrigued. Who knew she would turn out to be such a person? “But that’s not a bad thing. And if you can just give it some time, it might actually turn out to be a good thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“And you can’t do that if you don’t get out of here—staying here is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
“That’s cute,” she said.
She was back to being flippant again, which frayed at my new human temper. She had begun to seem interesting, and I had opened up, started to like her, even felt real, actual empathy for her—and now she was slipping back into her aloof, teenage, you-can’t-know disguise, and it made me just a little bit cranky and filled me with the urge to shake her up. “For God’s sake,” I said. “Don’t you understand why you’re in here? These people are going to cook you and eat you!”
She looked away again. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “That’s what I want.” She looked back at me, her eyes large and moist. “That’s my big secret,” she said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
IT’S FUNNY HOW MANY LITTLE SOUNDS YOU CAN HEAR when you think you’re sitting in absolute silence. For example, I could hear my heartbeat lub-dubbing away in my ears, and right next to me Samantha took a long, slow breath—and beyond that there was a metallic whirring sound as the little fan ticked on and blew more cold air across the length of the walk-in refrigerator, and I even heard something scuttling in a piece of paper under the cot I sat on, probably a palmetto bug or cockroach.
Even with all this thunderous noise, the most overwhelming sound was the all-enveloping white noise of Samantha’s last words as they crashed and echoed around the little room, and after a while they stopped making sense to me, even the individual syllables, and I turned my head to look at her.
Samantha sat unmoving, the annoying smile once again in place on her face. Her shoulders were hunched and she looked straight ahead, not really avoiding eye contact so much as just waiting to see what might happen next, and at last it was more than I could stand.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When I said they’re going to eat you, and you said that’s what you want—what the hell do you mean?”
She was silent for several seconds, but at least her smile faded and her face settled into a look of dreamy thoughtfulness. “When I was really little,” she said at last, “my father was always away somewhere, at a conference or whatever. So when he finally came home he would read these stories to me to make up. You know, fairy tales. And he would come to the part where the ogre or the witch eats somebody, and he would, you know. Make these eating noises and pretend to eat my arm, or my leg. And, you know, I mean, I’m just a kid, and I love it, and I’m like, ‘Do it again, do it again.’ And he’d go, ‘Gobble gobble,’ and I’d be laughing like crazy, and …”
Samantha paused and pushed a tuft of hair off her forehead. “After a while,” she went on, quieter now, “I started to get older. And …” She shook her head, which made the hair fall back down onto her forehead, and she pushed it away again. “I realized it wasn’t the stories I loved so much. It was … my dad gobbling on my arm. And the more I thought about it, the more it was just the idea of somebody eating me. Of having some witch or, you know, just somebody slowly, slowly roasting my body, and cutting off little slices, and eating me, and really … liking it. Liking me, and liking the way I tasted and …”
She took a deep breath and shuddered, but not from fear. “And I get, you know, puberty and all that. And all the other girls are talking about, ‘Ooh, this boy, that one, I’d like to do whatever with him, and I’d let him do anything to me’—and I can’t really get into that at all, all the squealing and comparing boys and—Because all I can think about, all I really want is, I want to be eaten.” She began nodding her head rhythmically and speaking in a low husky voice. “I want to be slow-roasted while I’m still alive and can still watch these people chew me up and go, ‘Yum, yum,’ and come back for more until …”
She shivered again and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, hugging herself tightly, and I tried to think of something to say, something better than asking if she’d thought of trying counseling. But nothing came to me, except a favorite remark of Deborah’s.
“Holy shit,” I said to Samantha.
She nodded. “Yeah, I know,” she said.