“For fall projects?” Anna said. She gets confused if you change the subject too quickly.
“No,” I said, “just for tonight.”
“Why?” she said.
But I didn’t really have a reason.
“I’m not stripping,” she said. But she laughed.
“Nymphs do it,” I said.
“Do what?” she said.
“Bathe in the moonlight,” I said.
Anna’s eyes were glowing in the dark. “I don’t even know what nymphs are,” she said.
I told her that nymphs were beautiful young girls that live in the woods. “Spirits,” I said.
She said she didn’t want to be a ghost and I told her they weren’t ghosts exactly. I mentioned how they were related to the Greek gods.
“Are they immortal?” she said. Boy, did she know how to irritate me.
“Sometimes,” I said, “not always.”
“Most of them live for a long time,” I explained, “unless they have an argument with one of the gods. And they never lose their beauty or grow old,” I told her.
I also said that a woman’s breasts were born to live in the moonlight. I was really hamming it up until I had Anna blushing and laughing. I knew she wanted to do it.
“Just for a minute,” she said.
So we did it. We took off our tops and settled down on the floor, on our backs. We made ourselves cozy in the little box of moonlight.
“I don’t think the door’s locked,” Anna said. She started to get up but I grabbed her hand.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “no one can get in. And if they do,” I said, “they’ll be punished for looking at us.”
“Only the animals can look at us,” I said. And in fact Anna’s cat was doing just that. Staring at us from the bed.
The moonlight was coming in the window and it was almost like something definite. It wasn’t just empty air, it had fingers, it attached itself to our bodies. I noticed how Anna’s skin was a lot whiter than mine but I tried not to look because I didn’t want to make her nervous.
I told her how one day it wasn’t going to be just moonlight all over us.
“I know,” she said. “I think about it sometimes.”
“I think about it almost as if they were already on top of me,” she said.
Once I tried to get Luke to lie on my stomach to see what it would feel like. I don’t mean sex. I wasn’t naked or anything. I just wanted to understand the weight of another person. But it didn’t work. Luke just put his head on my stomach and then I petted him until we fell asleep.
“It’s going to hurt,” Anna said.
“Probably,” I said.
All of a sudden we burst out laughing. Then it was quiet for a while, except for my heart which was going about a mile a minute.
“What do you think of Kevin Ryder?” I said.
“Guukh,” Anna said. “Horrible.”
“Why?” I said.
She looked at me like I was off my rocker. “The clothes,” she said. “The hair.”
“Who does he think he is?” she said. “The devil?”
“He’s pretty nice,” I said.
Anna just shrugged and yawned. She was getting pretty comfortable on the floor, and so I peeked at her belly again. Boy, I couldn’t get over the whiteness of it. It looked like it was dusted with powder. It really did.
The heat was blasting in the house but I could feel the chill of moonlight on my skin like the invisible fingers of aliens. Plus other things, also invisible, passed between Anna’s body and mine. I bet I could have become pregnant with something that came off of her, some of that white powder. The alien fingers were moving it back and forth between us like bees.
If I could only put the white belly and the blue hair together, I’d have the most beautiful monster in the world.
Suddenly I noticed Anna was crying. It wasn’t sobbing, it was just quiet lines down her face. I looked at her and she looked at me.
This is happening, I think. Anna is crying. For some reason it made me happy.
“I don’t know,” Anna says to herself.
“I’m bleeding,” she says.
I don’t understand, and then she touches her stomach. “It started this morning.”
I ask her if it’s her first time and she says, “yes.”
She wipes her eyes.
“Maybe we should do some homework,” she says. “I don’t feel like sleeping yet.”
She stands up and puts her shirt back on. She gets her books and brings them to the moonlight. It’s the same world we’ve been living in, but different now. Everything starts to glow. The cat sees it. He sees the miracle. He comes over and rubs himself against Anna’s leg. Anna opens a book and inside is a picture of a bird, as well as the bones of a bird.
Awful, I say to myself. Lufwa.
Anna puts the book between us and we begin to do our homework inside the miracle. We’re in no rush. We have all the time in the world. We’re like the secretaries of god.
The first time I bled I thought I was going to die. I also cried.
When I first found out about Helene I didn’t cry right away. I was too busy noticing how many people were screaming in outer space and wondering why I had never heard them before.
There are a lot of worlds we don’t even know about.
In the moonlight I remember thinking: Anna bleeds today. In four days H.S.S.H.
Today I tried all the planets. Plus I tried about a hundred new Spanish words because it’s a language she studied in school. There’s still a Spanish dictionary in her room. And the planets probably popped into my mind because of the play. The Moons of Pluto. Tonight’s the big night, my big date with Ma and Da. Yesterday I had a terrific fit, with tears and everything, and Da called to get an extra ticket.
But as for the planets and the Spanish, nothing worked. Incorrect password, it said every time. After a while I started to feel like a criminal. Finally I moved on to the Bhagavad Gita for some inspiration. Do you know that book? I remember the day Helene bought it. We were coming out of Greenways Market with Ma, and a lady in colored sheets came up to us in the parking lot. I guess she was some sort of religious book dealer. Ma said no thank you but Helene wanted to take a look. Helene was pretty generous when it came to people in parking lots. Plus the book only cost five dollars and it had full-color illustrations. So I tried Krishna, Sanjaya, Arjuna, plus a bunch of other interesting names. Incorrect password, down the line.
Have you ever seen a picture of Krishna? He has blue skin and he was actually born that way, it’s not a dye-job. Sometimes he has two arms, sometimes four. He wears a gold crown with a peacock feather at the top. He’s fairly attractive, in a foreign sort of way. In the introduction to the Bhagavad Gita there’s a whole history of his life. When he