After class, in the hallway once again, Romulus pushed his way through the crowd until he caught up with Fay, but once he reached her side, he wasn’t sure what to say. The certainty he’d had in class faded. Maybe the troll was talking about someone else. How could he ask her what she was doing tomorrow night? She carried her books against her chest, her chin down, as if she were mulling over something.
“Fay?” he said.
She looked up, smiled at him. “Hi, Romulus. Isn’t your next class the other way?”
He blushed; he could feel his face heating, and the heat embarrassed him even more. It was all he could do not to turn away, but he had committed himself now. He had to know.
“I wondered if you wanted to go to the Senior Choral Recital. It’s tomorrow at seven.” As the words slipped out, he knew he’d never be able to keep the date. At seven the sun was still up, but it was a two hour concert.
Her expression fell. “Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t. Not tomorrow. I… have other plans.”
In the pause he heard the truth. The troll’s note was about her. And he knew where they’d go too: Chaney Park, a spot on the bluffs overlooking town. It’s where the troll always took his dates. He was legendary about it.
Fay smiled again, her face perfect in the bustling hallway. Her eyes glistened. Even as his heart ached, he marveled at her eyes that were brighter than they should be, as if they reflected a crystal light no one else saw. Then he caught a hint of her smell. Like everyone else, she smelled of shampoo and deodorant, but underneath was her own essence, a spring-drenched forest, nothing fleshy at all.
“I’d like a rain check, though,” she said. “Ask me again another night.”
Romulus blinked in surprise, and she was gone. Just kids bumping against each other, making their way from room to room.
That night the moon rose in Romulus’s window, white and fat and unblinking. His lights out, he sat on the edge of his bed, breath short, skin on fire. Inside he was all pressures and cramps, legs trembling. Dad would know what to tell him, but Dad had stolen out the back door when the sun went down. The moon had never seemed so large; it was larger than the window, and the light had never seemed so potent, so penetrating. Romulus scratched at his chest, popping buttons. Where the light touched felt better, not cooled, but caressed in warmth.
Romulus whined, biting in the sound he really wanted to make. He pulled his clothes off. A part of him worried his mother would come to check on him, and what would she think, him standing naked in the pale, moonlit square in his room? She’d caught him in the bathroom the other day, staring in the mirror. She’d said without pausing, “Your father plucks his, you know.”
“What?” he’d said.
“Most people have two eyebrows.” She leaned past him, buffed a spot on the counter, then left.
Confused, he’d looked at himself again. Although he hadn’t been thinking about it at the time, he’d always considered his eyebrows his best mark, in a lupine sort of way, and the shadow between them a distinguishing feature. Dad plucked his?
Of course, he was his father’s son—she wouldn’t be surprised to see him naked in the moonlight either. Still, he worried she might come in. The other part, though, saw himself leaping through the window. He thought, I must go to the forest. Already the trees quivered, waiting for him. And in the trees they would expect him, the entire panoply: elves, fairies, goblins and giants. The other creatures lost in mythical, evolutionary time.
But there would be trolls there too, and dragons. All the old maps said so: in the unexplored areas, here there be dragons.
From the moon-tinted hills beyond town, a thin howl rose in the light. Very lonely. Very far away.
Romulus tried a howl back, a tentative utterance that couldn’t have made it past their front gate.
He did it again, louder. It hurt tearing through his throat that wasn’t quite shaped for it, but it felt good too. Once more. A door popped open across the street, and a neighbor stuck his head out. Romulus buried his head in a pillow. No way Dad heard that, he thought, but he didn’t try it again; and when the moon rose high enough so the light was not so obvious, he curled on the floor to fall asleep.
The day passed miserably until Mythology, where he hoped he could figure a way to warn Fay, but no matter how he thought to phrase it, his message sounded unbelievable. In the classroom’s afternoon mugginess he doodled at the bottom of his notes. Fay split her attention between Campbell, who moved meticulously through the history of the Knights of the Round Table, and the troll, who smiled slyly at her when she turned toward him.
“Many retellings of Arthur’s legend say that after the boy king took the throne at fifteen, and under Merlin’s tutelage, he rid his country of monsters and giants,” said Campbell.
Romulus sketched a sword rising from a lake. If he had Excalibur, he thought, he would rid this classroom of a monster himself.
When the bell rang, Fay continued writing her notes. The troll stood beside her, put his hand on her shoulder, then spoke softly in her ear. Romulus scrunched his toes in his shoes to keep himself from springing from the desk.
That evening Romulus finished dinner, told Mom and Dad he needed to take a walk, and went out the back door, but not before he caught a knowing glance between them.
Chaney Park was a six mile hike up a gravel road that rose too steeply the last three miles to bicycle, and Romulus figured he could be where kids parked by 8:30 or so. There was no question about using the car. He shuddered to think of himself behind the wheel, driving a two thousand pound vehicle, and the moon pouring through the windshield like a million biting ants.
The houses on his street were new brick and crisply-painted bi-levels, but a block over was an older neighborhood, where the roofs rose to steep peaks, and every house sported a single attic window, a lone eye watching him trudge toward the edge of town. Behind him the sunset flared orange and yellow, but before him only the bluffs’ tops caught the last pale sliver of daylight, and they didn’t hold that long. The woods below already swam in shadows. He crossed the railroad tracks; the blacktop changed to dirt, and soon, thin-trunked trees rustling with spring growth lined the path on both sides. He trudged up a long hill. At the crest he looked back, the town spread out behind him, stretched along the river, a tiny fiefdom at this distance. Streetlights could just as well be campfires, the baseball stadium glowing on the other side of town, a castle. He turned and walked into the dale beyond, losing the town and the day’s final glow at the same time. A few stars twinkled in the sable blanket.
Romulus took deep breaths. He hadn’t walked at night out here before. He felt keen, sharp. Another breath. Oak. Old oak that had started growing before the town existed. There were other smells he recognized too: fox, a shy one who must have crossed this path only seconds before he came into sight; and squirrel, and damp ferns dripping into moldy leaves, some so deep in shadow that winter’s frost was only inches below.
In the distance, wheels crunched through gravel, and engine noise rose above the murmuring forest. Romulus loped off the road and into the brush, around a great ball of roots from a fallen tree. He gripped two gnarled, woody wrists and peered out. A moment later a car roared by, radio blaring a steady rap thump. A snatch of laughter and a beer can clattered against a rock. Then dust.
He waited until the air cleared before stepping from behind the tangled dead fall. In the hills above, the car’s rowdy passage rose and fell. Hands jammed deep into his pocket, he continued his walk, thoughtful, now that the car had gone. What if Fay wanted to be with the troll? There would be nothing to warn her about. This trek to Chaney Park could be seen as little more than stalking her. There wasn’t much he could do anyway. Still, he pushed onward, leaning into the road’s steepness, taking each hairpin turn with measured deliberateness. His legs buzzed pleasantly, and he felt as if he could go forever if he had to. With his eyes closed, he imagined trotting along through the forest, tireless, behind deer maybe, waiting for one to drop from exhaustion. He smiled at the image. Several more times he leapt into the covering woods as more cars drove by. He didn’t see the troll’s car.