The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman Page B

careful where I put my hands.
    I eased away and sat back stunned and panting and unashamed against the tree trunk. Margie smoothed her sweater, flipped her hair back.
    “I’ll never be able to think about anything else.” My voice seemed thunderous. I lifted the jar, sipped.
    “You’re all I ever think about. Kiss me again, please.”
    I was already moving towards her body heat.
    After a while we just held hands. I felt so good that my mind sought something to worry over. This was habit. There must be something. Then it hit me, and I cleared my throat. “Margie?” Already sorry, I finished it. “Did Wade Madison kiss you at the Christmas bazaar?”
    She sat up, and her hand went away. A drop of water smoldered on the tip of a hand-sized leaf, distillation of the streetlight.
    “I was only ten. We didn’t go together or anything. It was just once.”
    I started to tell her she was the only girl I’d ever kissed, stopped myself with another throat-clearing. Rusty had warned me about such honesty.
    “Does that bother you a lot?” she asked, sounding farther away, emphasizing “that”.
    “Not too much,” I said, though in my new greed I wanted explorer’s rights, my flag only in this territory.
    Margie’s voice changed direction, “Oh,” and I pictured her hugging her knees with her head laid on them. The water bead slid from the leaf, a tiny explosion of lights. “Because I’ve done a lot worse stuff than that,” she said.
    I waited. I made myself say, “What?”
    I think she shook her head. “You’d hate me,” she said. “No fooling. It’s why I tried to kill myself.” She found my hand and squeezed it hard.
    “What?” I knew she wanted to tell me—that it was somehow necessary.
    “Promise you won’t hate me.”
    “Of course, I promise. You can tell me.” I both did and didn’t want to be told. I had nearly decided that she’d had sex with some boy.
    “What?”
    Margie was all shadow. The rain sizzled. A cricket chirped inside the tree with us. Then flatly she said, “I used to let my brother Donny do things to me, you know? Everything. I wanted to, at first. Now I hate myself.”
    A false soberness washed over me, leaving me without the ability to think. I felt like we were holding hands through the window of a train that was about to take her far away and forever. The nervous, stupid urge to laugh brushed past me. Then rage. I wanted to kill her brother, burn everything clean, die myself, end the world.
    I was shaking. The drizzle washed the leaves.
    I remembered to breathe, concentrated on that for a while.
    And then the world expanded. Two kids with problems in a circle park weren’t going to bring on the locusts or oceans of fire. They wouldn’t even hold up traffic. Most of the anger breathed out of me, and my face, at least, grew used to it. I’ve never been able to stay angry. People think I’m understanding. I understand little. But I can bear almost anything, and that’s nearly as good.
    “I’m sorry, Margie,” I said. “That’s about the worst thing I ever heard.”
    “The first times we did it I felt like a saint, or a monster or something,” she said. “I felt smarter than everybody else, and sort of dangerous. Then it started making me sick and I couldn’t sleep and I felt like maybe I was possessed or something. I almostasked my mom to get a priest. Like in
The Exorcist.”
She made a hissing noise. “But I knew it was me. My fault. But I can’t ever erase it. You probably hate me now, right? And I guess I’ll go to Hell about twice over.”
    “I don’t believe there is a Hell,” I said. “And if there is, I’ll be there too, and so will all my friends. Who cares?”
    She exhaled. “You’re nice, but I bet you already want to get away from me. I know what people must think, boys. Anyway, I deserve it.”
    Actually, she was partly right. I wanted to be away from her where I could think about this and decide how I felt and maybe get used to it. I