The Society of S

Kathleen found time to talk to me about what to expect at the dance. She said she was busy after school most days with rehearsals for a class play and with flute lessons. But as it happened, she would be free on Wednesday after school, and we could meet downtown at the thrift store to hunt for costumes.

I was examining a rack of dresses when she rushed in. She’d had her hair cut so that when she stopped moving, it fell to frame her face. “You look cool!” she said to me, and I said, “So do you.”

But I thought that the Kathleen who met me at the thrift store wore too much makeup. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, and her hair had been dyed black; it was darker than mine. “You’ve changed,” I said.

She seemed pleased to hear me say it. “My new look,” she said, lifting her hair to show me her ears. Silver hoops and studs punctured her lobes and upper ears — I counted seven on each ear.

We hadn’t met for nearly two months, and I’d begun to think our friendship was at an end. But her eyes glistened with affection.

“I have so much to tell you,” she said.

We worked our way through the clothes, pulling out hangers, nodding or grimacing, as she talked. The smell of mothballs, stale perfume, and sweat was intense, but somehow not unpleasant.

The news from the McG house wasn’t all good. Bridget had developed asthma, and her wheezing kept Kathleen awake some nights. Mr. McG was being treated badly by the local supermarket where he worked; they made him work weekends now, because someone else had quit. And Mrs. McG acted “all worried” about Michael.

“Why?” I asked.

“That’s right, you haven’t seen him lately.” Kathleen shook a pink satin dress, then shoved it back into the rack again. “He’s let his hair grow, and he’s got into some trouble at school. He’s developed a major attitude.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. “Do you mean he’s a bully?”

“Michael a bully?” She laughed. “No, more kind of uncooperative and intense. He’s reading about politics a lot. He acts mad most of the time.”

That could be interesting, I thought. “What’s he wearing to the dance?”

“Who knows?” She pulled out a tight-fitting black sequined dress. “You are so trying this one on.”

I ended up wearing that dress. Kathleen found one in red satin, vnecked front and back. She said we should wear masks, but I preferred not to.

On Halloween night, Michael showed up at our front door wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with the word ANARCHY painted across it. He didn’t wear a mask, either. We looked at each other with relief.

His hair had grown past his shoulders, and he was thinner than I remembered. His dark eyes seemed larger and his face smaller. We stayed in the doorway examining each other, not saying a word.

Some movement behind me made me turn around. My father stood by the wall, watching us; on his face was an expression of utter revulsion. I’d never seen that face before. His eyes and mouth turned downward at their corners; his shoulders pulled back, rigid, and his chin jutted forward. I said something inane (“Hello?”), and he twitched — an odd spasm that briefly convulsed his face and chest. I must have blinked, I thought then, because he suddenly wasn’t there.

When I turned back to Michael, his eyes were still fixed on me. “You look,” he said, “different.”

Michael drove us to the school.

In the backseat, Kathleen and her friend Ryan, a short, blond-haired boy I’d met the previous summer, talked incessantly, often at the same time. Ryan wore a devil’s mask.

“Bridget whined all through dinner. She really wanted to come tonight,” Kathleen said from the backseat. “She felt she deserved it. This afternoon, when the school held the Halloween parade, she won a prize for best ghoul.”

Kathleen said that some parents had wanted to cancel the school’s Halloween events, claiming that they celebrated Satan. She and Ryan laughed loudly at that.

“It’s all my work,” Ryan said in a raspy voice, stroking the horns of his mask.

Michael and I didn’t say much. Sitting next to him excited me. I stole glances at his hands on the steering wheel, at his long legs.

I noticed that Kathleen had put on plenty of makeup; her face was white, her eyes were ringed with black, but somehow tonight the makeup made her look younger. I felt I looked much older. The black sequins outlined my body, showing the world a self I’d barely glimpsed before. The previous night, I’d had fantasies of sweeping across a dance floor, enthralling everyone in the room with my presence. The fantasies seemed possible, now.

The dance was held in the school gymnasium, and an enormous statue of Jesus, arms outstretched, welcomed us. As we walked in, everyone did seem to watch us. Michael and I didn’t look at each other.

The room was hot, and the smells of the people in it were overwhelming. It was as if every scent Kathleen and I had ever sampled at the drugstore — the shampoos, the deodorants, the colognes, the soaps — simmered in the dimly lit room. I took shallow breaths, afraid that I might faint if I inhaled more deeply.

Michael steered me toward a row of folding chairs against one wall. “Sit here,” he said. “I’ll get us some food.”

The music boomed from enormous black speakers set in the corners of the gym. The sound was too distorted for me to discern a tune or lyrics. Kathleen and Ryan were already gyrating on the dance floor. Kathleen’s dress picked up the ever-changing glow from a color wheel on the ceiling. The fabric looked as if it were on fire, then doused by blue water, then engulfed again by yellow and red flames.

Michael came back with two paper plates and handed them both to me. “I’ll get us drinks,” he said, shouting slightly to be heard over the music. He went away again.

I set the plates on the chair next to me. Then I began to look around. Everyone in the room — even the teachers and chaperones — was disguised. Their costumes ranged from the hideous (Cyclops, demons, mummies, zombies, and other assorted freaks, sporting gashes and gouges and severed limbs) to the ethereal (fairies, princesses, goddesses of all sorts draped in shimmering fabric). Two boys with scars and blood etched on their faces stared at me.

They all looked terribly eager and naïve. Again, I was glad that Michael and I hadn’t worn masks.

By the time he returned, I felt well enough to take a bite of the pizza he’d brought. A mistake, as it turned out.

The food in my mouth tasted strong and bittersweet, like nothing I’d ever eaten before. I swallowed it as quickly as I could and at once felt a swell of nausea. My face burned. I dropped the plate and ran toward the door, and I managed to make it to the edge of the parking lot before I fell to my knees and vomited.

When I’d stopped heaving, I heard someone laughing — a mean-sounding laugh — not far away. A few seconds later, I heard voices.

“What was it?” Kathleen was saying.

Michael said, “Pizza. Just pizza.”

“The pizza has sausage on it,” Kathleen said. “You should have known better.”

She knelt beside me and handed me tissues, and I dried my face and mouth with them.

Later, Michael sat with me on the cold grass and said he was sorry.

I shook my head. “Normally I would have noticed the sausage. But it was dark, and all the smells confused me.”

Michael hadn’t seemed at all “grossed out,” as Kathleen would have phrased it, by my nausea. “I should be the one apologizing to you,” I said.

He put his hand awkwardly on my shoulder, then took it away. “Ari, you don’t need to apologize to me,” he said. “Not ever.”

And later that night, after I’d cried a little in bed about the disappointments of the evening, Michael’s words came back to me and gave me unexpected comfort. But I wished I had someone to tell about the evening. I wished I had a mother.

“You said Poe was ‘one of us.’”

Next day we sat as usual in the library. My father wore a dark suit that made his eyes seem indigo blue. I felt light-headed, but otherwise well. We didn’t talk about the dance.

My father opened a book of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. “Back to Poe, are we? Does that mean you’ve acquired the taste?”

I opened my mouth to reply and closed it without speaking. He would not deflect me today. “ ‘One of us,’ you said. Did you mean that in the sense of being a bereaved child? Or in the sense of being a vampire?”

There, I’d said it. For a moment the word seemed to hang suspended in the air between us — I could see the letters, floating and twisting like crimson dust motes.

My father tilted his head back and gave me a long look. His pupils seemed to dilate. “Oh, Ari.” His voice was dry. “You know the answer already.”

“I know the answer?” I felt like a puppet, responding on cue.

“Your mind is a fine one,” he said, not pausing long enough to let me bask. “But it seems more comfortable with the prosaic than the profound.” He laced his fingers. “Whether we read Poe or Plutarch or Plotinus, we find meaning not on the surface, but in the depths of the work. The function of knowledge is to transcend earthly experience, not to wallow in it. And so, when you ask me simple questions, you’re limiting yourself to the most obvious answers — ones you already know.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

He nodded. “Yes, you do.”

Someone began to bang on the library door. Then it opened, and Mary Ellis Root’s ugly face appeared. She looked dismissively at me. “You’re wanted,” she said to my father.

Then I did something I hadn’t planned, something I’d never even imagined. I ran to the door and slammed it shut.

My father stayed in his chair. He didn’t even look surprised.

“Ari,” he said. “Be patient. When the time is right, you’ll understand.”

Then he rose and left the room, closing the door so lightly that it didn’t make a sound.

I went to the window. The Green Cross courier van was in the driveway, its engine idling. I watched as the driver carried boxes out of the basement and loaded them into the van.

Chapter Five

Do you ever have the sense that your mind is at war with itself?

Dennis had taught me about the brain stem — the oldest, smallest region in the human brain, lying at the base of your skull. It’s sometimes called the “lizard brain,” or “reptilian brain,” because it’s similar to the brains of reptiles; it governs our most primitive functions — breathing and heartbeat — and the base emotions of love, hate, fear, lust. The lizard brain reacts instinctively, irrationally, to ensure our survival.

Slamming the door in the face of Root? That was my reptile brain at work. Yet, I was ready to argue, it was provoked by a rational desire for knowledge — a desire that my father had dismissed as “prosaic.”

I spent the morning trying to read the poetry of T. S. Eliot with half my mind, the other half struggling to understand what my father had told me and why I needed to know it.

After lessons that day, my father went down to the basement, and I headed upstairs. In my room, I avoided the mirror. I looked suspiciously at the bottle of tonic on my dresser and wondered at its contents. I sensed the presence of an other in the next room, and I told it to leave me alone. I picked up the telephone to call Kathleen and put it down again.