The Most Dangerous Thing

as possible. When did you have your last tetanus shot?”

“Last summer, after I cut myself on that rusty fence.”

Sean said: “It’s been at least a few years for me. How long do the shots last?”

We didn’t know. We knew the horrors of lockjaw, though. Gwen’s father had covered that for us in great detail.

“I don’t have any cuts, though,” Sean said. “And I didn’t swallow any water. I’ll be okay.”

We thought at the time that Sean was taking one for the team, that he was willing to forgo the tetanus shot if it meant that we could continue to roam the park with no boundaries placed on us.

But Sean’s only concern was Gwen. He was making this heroic gesture for her because she had been unconscious during his true heroism and unable to appreciate it. Or had she been? Some of us wondered.

“Chicken George,” Mickey said. “He’ll help us, and he won’t ask any questions.”

“There’s no shower there,” Gwen said. “And I don’t want to wear his dirty clothes.”

“Trust me,” Mickey said.

We made our way back through the woods, to Chicken George’s house. He wasn’t surprised to see us. He was never surprised to see us. Although our comings and goings appeared random to us and therefore unpredictable, Chicken George seemed attuned to our movements the way he was attuned to his chickens, the seasons, the park. He was never caught off guard. He examined Gwen carefully, with those strange hands, so pink on one side, so dark on the other. He produced a Goody comb, still in its plastic wrapper, and worked it carefully through her wet, matted hair. He gave her a sheet from the line, so she knew it was clean and fresh, told her to go inside and change out of her wet clothes, wrap herself in the sheet as if it were a toga, and bring her clothes out. He actually said toga, and we were surprised he knew the word.

“To-ga, to-ga,” Go-Go began to chant. We had not seen the movie Animal House. We were too young. But it had filtered down into the culture, and we knew the set pieces, some of the lines. It was soon to be the era of trickle-down economics, but if you asked us, we would have said that adulthood, too, was a process of trickling down, that we picked up the scraps of adult life as surely as we went behind our parents at their dinner parties and stole sips from their glasses, bites from their plates. We shook cigarettes free from open packets, took tiny swigs from the bottles in the liquor cabinet. They knew, they had to know, because we know now everything our children do, no matter how sly they think they are. The difference is that our parents approved. They preferred for us to tiptoe into adulthood through these tiny subterfuges. It’s not a rationalization, but a truth: they encouraged us to lie, to keep things from them, to protect them from what we knew. It started small. The forays into the park. Our friendship with Chicken George. Gwen’s near-drowning, the time the truck almost crushed Go-Go. It started small, and then it got so large, so fast, that it swept us all away.

But the real problem was that Gwen and Sean fell in love. As five, we were mighty, the points on a star. Remember learning how to draw a star? When you are little, it seems impossible, out of reach. You draw lopsided, lumpy things. Then one day, someone shows you the secret. Mickey taught it to Go-Go: one line slashing down, a second shooting up in a diagonal. Straight across, diagonal down, diagonal up. A mere five lines, but when you have finished, there are six shapes within the one: five triangles clustered around a pentagon. Yes, there are even more, you can add and subtract lines, creating more shapes. But if you are true to the integrity of the lines you have drawn, there are five triangles and a pentagon. The pentagon was what grounded us, a magnetic field that held us together. Some might say the pentagon was Chicken George, but it was our talent for secrecy, our sense of ourselves as a single community. Once we five joined, truly joined, it was never boys against girls, or Hallorans against the other two families. No, it was Sean and Gwen who destroyed us. Two of our triangles cut themselves off and ran away together, and we were never whole again. Never.

Less than a week after Chicken George gave Gwen a sheet and dried her clothes by his fire, he disappeared again. And this time, he seemed to be gone gone-his cupboards bare, the line empty of wash, the chickens pecking at our ankles in a newfound desperation, but we had no feed to give them. You couldn’t say the place was clean. It would never be clean. But it was neat, emptied out. Even Chicken George knew that an era had ended. The five of us stopped going to his cabin.

But Gwen and Sean still went. All summer long, they slipped away to that cabin, never dreaming that anyone was watching them.

Chapter Thirteen

“A nd he-” Giggle.

The sentence and the giggle ends before Tim comes through the swinging door into the kitchen and confronts three sets of round, blue eyes. Round with innocence, which, he’s pretty sure, is fake. But also round with cold, if such a thing were possible, like the mass-manufactured ice found at buffets. His daughters have taken to regarding him with round, cold eyes these days, as if by widening them they could empty them of all hints, all clues to their existence and inner thoughts. However, he is pretty sure that their thoughts run something like this: boys boys boys boys shoes boys. And maybe, although he hopes not, partying, although he is unclear if partying is simply a by-product, a place to wear shoes and find boys, or if the partying is the destination, the boys and shoes the vehicles. Even the littlest one, only eight, is in on the act. They are three of a kind, thick as thieves. Identical blue eyes, long blond hair, worn straight and parted down the middle, heart-shaped and heartbreaking faces.

“Good morning,” he says. He knows better-now-than to ask about the interrupted, overheard comment. He knows not to ask anything. Move along, nothing to see here. His daughters remind him of the salamanders he and his brother hunted at the old springhouse. Salmon pink with tiny spots, they were easy enough to see in the clear, rushing water. But to grab one-almost impossible. Only Go-Go had been quick enough, and even he could never hold on to the little buggers. Tim can observe his daughters, but he can’t hold them, not anymore.

“Can I have the car today?” asks the oldest, Michelle. “I have to go to Mary’s.”

“I was going to play golf.” He is careful not to say no immediately, to offer the reason before the rejection. The mere sound of that syllable, no, seems to drive his daughters insane, triggering horrible pouting rages. Instead he tries to let them work their way toward no through inference. If he has a golf date, it stands to reason he will need the car for a good chunk of the day. Certainly his daughters can figure that out.

“Can’t one of your friends take you?” Michelle counters.

He wants to say the same thing back to her. But, no-be Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am: “My tee time is at eleven A.M.”

“I don’t need the car until one,” Michelle says.

“And she could drop me at the movies, then pick me up on the way home,” says Lisa, the middle girl. He waits to see if the baby, Karen, is going to throw herself on the pile, a little pyramid of daughters he will then be forced to knock over with his unfathomable cruelty, his desire to use his own car on his day off. How could he? He is the meanest daddy in the whole wide world. Until recently, he would have given them the car, found another way. He used to believe that if he said yes to all the easy things, the girls would be grateful and well behaved.

Then he saw the much-too-old-for-her boy-twenty, twenty-one?-dropping Michelle off on a Saturday morning, when she was supposedly returning from a sleepover at Mary’s. Who was that? he asked, struggling to keep his voice casual. Oh, Mary’s older brother. He was nice enough to bring me home early when I said I didn’t feel good. The smell of pancakes made me want to vomit.