The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [84]
“Are any of these ‘few others’ girls? You know you can’t have Camarie spend the night if I’m not around.”
“But Camarie is our Forged One!”
“Forged One or no, I’m not comfortable with it. Tell me, has Camarie asked her parents what they think about your great coed, unsupervised role-playing extravaganza?”
He changed tacks. “Camarie is only twelve, you know, Mom. I wouldn’t do anything with her. It would break the Creep Equation.” This was the lesson his algebra teacher had used the first day of eighth grade to demonstrate the practical value of higher math: you took your age, divided it by two, and added seven, “and that’s your dating boundary,” Wallace had explained to her, hunched over a cherry Danish at the kitchen table. “Any younger than that, and it’s creepy. I’m fourteen, which means I can only date someone my own age, since fourteen divided by two is seven, plus seven is fourteen.”
She had overheard enough heedless mid-game snack-break conversations to know how he and his friends really interpreted the equation. And that’s your fucking boundary. Which means I can only fuck someone my own age. She also knew that, like most eighth-graders—or at least the science fiction kids, the British comedy kids—they were all talk, all roostering, their lasciviousness just another role-playing game, a way of trying on their manhood and simultaneously mocking it.
She cleared her throat. “Be that as it may.”
She managed to lay a stress on the last word without making her discomfort audible. Or so she thought. But after four years, Wallace could derive her condition from her voice with some authority. “Your lip?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm. It’s at that hurts-to-talk stage.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“Ha ha.”
“All right, listen, no Camarie. But everybody else is g——eah? Hey, there’s another call coming in. I’m gonna take it, Mom, okay? See you Sunday.”
“Sunday. Be good.”
She returned her phone to her purse, then lay back and gazed at the window, waiting for another car to breast the hill, its headlights taking just the right angle to send a field of stars Big Banging over the glass.
37 ÷ 2 = 18, or thereabouts, and 18 + 7 = 25, so a certain overzealous someone who had punctuated her dreams last night by kissing her neck, disquietingly, like a lover, was too creepy for her by one year.
And a half.
A bit of tissue had come loose from between her molars. She tried to dislodge it with her tongue, and a prickle of light appeared where she had scraped the papillae. Damn. Damn damn damn. It was yet another tiny injury, almost too small to notice, and yet she worried that, like so many others, it would rupture and lose all shape, growing more and more indistinct as the pain took hold. She brought her travel kit to the bathroom, prepared a capful of hydrogen peroxide, and tipped it into her mouth. She had to be so careful with herself. And here was the question: Was it worth what it cost?
Her house was built like all the others, with its roof projecting over the front door to keep it from opening directly into the rain, and it was her pleasure upon waking in the morning to step out onto the porch and take stock of the day. This particular morning arrived hot and bright, with the sky that oddly whitened blue it became when there was no moisture in the air. She was surprised to find a fissure interrupting her lawn. She kept the grass carefully trimmed and watered, and she was sure she would have seen the rift if it had been there the day before. It ran as straight as a line on a map. She traced it with her eyes, following it across her neighbor’s yard and a few others before it vanished into the woods at the end of the block, and then back again until it dead-ended at her front steps.
But that was not the strange