Dylan Landis - Normal People Dont Live Like This

I t is not true that if a girl squeezes her legs together she cannot be raped.

Not that Rainey is being raped. She doubts it, though she is not sure. Either way, it is true that the thirty-nine-year-old male knee, blind and hardheaded, has it all over the thirteen-year-old female thigh, however toned that thigh by God and dodgeball. You may as well shove Bethesda Fountain into the lake as try to dislodge the male knee.

Thats where she is: on her back, on the grass near Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Angels darken in the dusk on the fountains dry tiers, and Rainey watches through the slats of a bench. She had started to walk the lip of the muted fountain, but Richard wanted to inspect the thin silty edge of the lake.

Not far, he said. A constitutional.

How far is far, thats what Rainey wanted to know. She didnt care what a constitutional was.

The lake edge quivered and Rainey saw that the water was breathing. Richard dipped his hand in Raineys hair and said, You could turn the fountain on.

Richard plays French horn, and Raineys dad says all horn players are a little strange. Rainey likes to court this strangeness because Richard is three-quarters safe, he is appreciative in ways that do not register on the social meter, he responds invisibly, immeasurably. She has tasted the scotch in Richards glass. Her dads attention was elsewhere. He was riffing on the piano in their living room, spine straight and hands prancing, head shaking no no no its too good , the man up to his shoulders in sound. Her first taste had burned and she looked at Richard why dont you just drink bleach and he smiled try growing up first, and she was good at this kind of talking, eye dialogue, with nuances from the angle of the head. Then she swallowed without wincing and looked at Richard for affirmation and he raised his eyebrows are you sure you want to go farther and she arched her neck so his gaze would have something to slide down I want to go far, and she drank the entire rest of his glass.

At the lake near Bethesda Fountain, Richard extended two fingers with broad white moons under the nails. He tilted her chin so she stared at his big face against the bruised sky. You generate energy, he said. You could turn on a city of fountains.

The eighth-grade boys do not have pores.

Richard said, You radiate power and light, and he led her, electric, to the grass.

Rainey has tea-rose oil between her toes, because one day a man might smell it there and be driven genuinely out of his mind, and she has a wedding band on her left forefinger because her ring finger is too small. Both of these things, the rose oil and the ring, she claimed from the medicine cabinet after her mother got into the cab. She looked for the plastic compact with its squashy white dome, but that was gone.

It is true that Rainey radiates power and light. And it is true that she loves making Richard say these things. She loves that he is a grownup and yet he seems to have no choice. This fascinates her, just as it fascinates her that mothers look at her strangely. They are like mirrors, these mothers, the way they register the heat disturbances that emanate from under her skin.

It could be true, but it could also be a lie, that a teenage boy can get an erection just by brushing against a womans arm on the bus. Mr. Martin in sex ed was very specific about the circumstances: boy, woman, arm, bus. As Rainey interprets this it is the Broadway bus, an old green 104 lumbering uptown at rush hour, and the woman is eighteen, no, she is twenty-one, and carrying a white shopping bag with violets on it, and wearing a lavender cardigan. The top three buttons are open, no, the top four, but it is her slender, sweatered arm as she squeezes toward the back of the bus that engenders the event.

It is a lie that if a girl doesnt do something about the erection, it will hurt so badly that some injury will be caused. Mr. Martin said this too.

Rainey ran the tip of her tongue along the rim of Richards glass and said, When Im sixteen, will you date me?

Only with your fathers permission, Richard said. She waited for him to glance toward the piano, but he didnt.

It is a lie that Rainey will be allowed to live with her mother in Boulder when she is sixteen, because her mother belongs to an ashram now, and Rainey understands that by belongs to, her mother means belongs to, the way lipstick or leotards belong to a person. It is also a lie that her father and Janet are just friends. Rainey has plastered herself to the wall outside Howards bedroom and listened to the strange symphony of sexthe oboe of a groan, the violin singing Oh my God, the cello that is her father murmuring into some part of the body that is bent or curved.

I take it back, Richard said. When youre sixteen Ill marry you.

Rainey is under Richard on the grass now and she gasps from his weight, and it is true that it sounds like desire, and it is true that she likes hearing herself make the sound.

Richards hands are mashing her wrists. His hands have hair on the back. Andy Sakellarios, who might or might not be her boyfriend, has smooth hands. Richard is a fire she has lit, and men are flammable, and Rainey believes it is her born talent, the one she sees reflected in the mothers eyes, to set the kind of flickering orange fire that licks along the ground. Rainey accepts the pressure of Richards knee and hands like she might accept the force of a river before she lies down on its current. Outside Boulder the river had been colder than cracked ice on her back teeth. Rainey had let the water swirl her hair, let the cold polish her bones. She loved how surrender felt like a flower opening and she loved having the power to choose it. She ended up nearly a half-mile downstream where her mother found her at a campsite with boys, bikini dripping, drinking Miller from a can.