The Lava in My Bones by Barry Webster Page B

she created a seamless cloth woven together with real needs and deeply rooted desires, all unified by an innate logic. In the end, the story was not hers but everyone’s.
    Everyone’s but mine, that is. In hallways, students gave me a wide berth. I’d futilely search the cafeteria for a table where they’d let me sit. Strangely, boys were more frightened than girls. Some essential balance had been disrupted. The janitor often shook his head as he mopped the hallway.
    My new isolation did not trouble me as much as hearing my name whispered everywhere and not knowing what that meant. I peered into the washroom mirror, as behind me, the reflected cubicle doors echoed with a diabolical hiss: “Sssue, Ssssue, Sssssue, Ssssssue.” The sound joined to other words or half-words, verbs without objects or objects without verbs or lone, great big juicy adjectives:
    â€œPiggy-girl, Piiiiig!”
    â€œIt’s ’cause of her condition …”
    â€œSo totally gross …”
    â€œShe dragged him into the bushes …”
    â€œStripped him down …”
    â€œAnd then the disaster!”
    I still couldn’t find the through-line to these shattered sentences which, pasted together, now formed the story of my life.
    â€œWhat disaster!?” I cried. The hissing stopped. Before me a lone, silver tap dripped once into the sink.
    In the hallway, clusters of girls huddled by lockers, and everywhere was that infernal susurrating hiss. “SSSSSue … he had no clue … her glue … the stickiness … got him totally fucked …” Sometimes I’d overhear a refreshing, “This stuff about Sue Masonty is bullshit,” but that was rare. At last, after a month of conjecture, I was able to put the disparate pieces of the tale together. One afternoon, I wandered by the field where the boys were playing flag football. When I stepped onto the bleachers, I heard my name spoken. All the boys had stopped playing; they crowded together, facing me in a tight, protective knot. From hands hung crêpe-paper streamers. Since Jimmy’s injury, the boys were forced to play flag football, not the real rough-and-tumble version, as everyone was now more keenly aware of the fragility of the male body. Someone muttered, “Don’t let her near us or we’ll have to saw ours off too.” The wind had ripped one boy’s streamer and he knelt sobbing, cradling it in his hands.
    It was then that everything fell together in my mind. The story went like this: Jimmy and I had crawled into the space beneath the bushes and proceeded to make love. But when he enteredme, he got stuck and couldn’t get out. The rumour mill had produced various endings. In one, he had to saw his penis off at the root to get free of me and, full of shame, fled into the forest and was now wandering bloodied and penis-less over the rocks of the Canadian Shield. In another version, he was absorbed by me completely and was now crouched suffocating somewhere amongst the twists and turns of my fallopian tubes. In a different version, the mere sight of my naked honey-streaming body terrified him and his penis shrank into his body.
    But hadn’t anyone seen him run fully membered from the bushes? I recalled that he’d been lying face down, and most people were fixated on the rotating ball as it descended through the goalposts. No one cared what happened to it once it crossed the line. Only Estelle had watched, so the story was hers.
    The boys huddled together, their flimsy flags fluttering. The kneeling boy wept bitterly into his torn streamer. He turned toward me and shouted, “Cunt!” He picked up a stone and threw it. The rock bounced off the bench in front of me.
    â€œI didn’t do anything!” I yelled. The other boys crouched and snatched stones from the ground and flung them in my direction. One struck me in the shin; another cut the side of my cheek.
    I turned and ran