8-1

The oracle on the rug dumped the bones into the fire. What was supposed to be a sacred act felt hardly different from tossing food on a grill, not helped by the way the children were introduced to the ritual. Crowding them in, and having the teacher/chaperone stand in front with his hands splayed as if that would keep them from stumbling out, did not feel to Clover very sacred.

As the stink of burnt feathers filled the room and the teacher murmured for them to at least try not to cough directly on each other, Clover was already holding her breath. She was wondering…about the nature of animal sacrifice, the nature of power, why feathers stunk so bad, why they didn’t come in with breathing masks or something, how badly the oracle probably coughed, and why this trip was a stupid idea.

When the teacher asked for questions, Clover was the first to raise her hand, which she would do in a bad mood as well as a regular one, whether she had an idea or not—although usually she did.

A different kid was picked before her. “What does the fortune say?”

“It’s not a fortune so much as a forecast, like a weather forecast,” the teacher said. “We have to wait a few minutes for the oracle to read the smoke pattern and the cracks in the bones.” The oracle looked meditative. “Yes, Clover?”

“Why don’t we use human bones?”

The question went unanswered for several long seconds. In her eyes that meant it was a good one, the only one that mattered.

“…Actually, people have used human bones,” the teacher replied slowly. “Some people still do. Some cultures will break their bones upon death. In fact, we used to do that, but we never, ever do it anymore.”

“What’s so bad about it?”

The kid next to her nudged her shoulder. “Only one question,” he whispered. Clover smacked him away. He was right, but the teacher rarely enforced that rule.

“Well, keeping the bones of the dead unbroken is part of how we respect the dead.”

“We didn’t respect them before?”

“We just respected them differently.”

“We don’t respect birds?”

“…No. Next question?”

Looking back, viewing her six-year-old self as if she were in a diorama, in that tiny square of the garden temple, and in all the days of school she could still recall, it was incredible to Clover how thoroughly she believed she was the main character of her own story—convinced that she was the greatest, the smartest, the only one who followed the rules (at the right times), and that the bad answers people gave her came out of their own idiocy (for which maybe they couldn’t be blamed) when really they were just tolerating her, knowing she would put up with an easy answer. For many days she would go on raging, quietly and internally, at the idea that people were so hypocritical about the birds they loved and the birds they didn’t.

The question she’d asked seemed emblematic of all the cold things she’d said and done. If only the other kids had a better sense of comic timing. Then they would have shuffled a collective step away right when Clover dropped the human-bones question, and maybe she would have become aware of her coldness that early. Already she ignored the kids who’d tried to become her first friends. They were boring, and she had work to do. She embraced competition—excelling in a rules-based system amplified everything she stood for—and her height and reach, even then, gave her an edge. When she raced, she kept running, and when she wrestled, she hammered faces to the ground. Though usually silent, she was a sore winner.

She felt ashamed—or not. It occurred to her one rainy day as her mother encouraged her to have fun in the puddles that Clover had done many things she should probably feel ashamed of. Not thrashing the people she won against—it did not occur to her to feel bad about how skilled she was—but telling white lies, and staying up longer than she was supposed to. It was supposed to come with a feeling, like fear and pain and satisfaction. That was the way everyone talked about it.

Her mother nudged her shoulders and asked her what was wrong. Clover smiled back and played as instructed, but she had started to approach herself as a puzzle and to wonder if there were other pieces missing.

As she grew a little older, she became aware that nobody liked her, and that maybe they would prefer it if they thought she felt ashamed. She performed shame, asking fewer questions and taking fewer challenges, letting her grades slide, and enacting the cartoon ritual of letting her head hang low. This wasn’t exactly what people wanted either. After months of letting school life sweep her along in this way like a stream, she realized she had missed her chance. People knew too much about her, who she really was, and she was the idiot for having thought she could hide, or change, in a single-school town.

Years later she tried to cultivate a new style, attempt laughter. It was a saving throw for her final semester. But there was no response. Her peers were still the same. The bullies she traded blows with were the same people—the ones who, as children, either thought they were right to punish her or were simply bored—but their strategy was different. They just ignored her.

Years before, her mother enfolded her in her arms, swaddled her in blankets on her lap in a rocking chair. She hummed sweet music as she pushed them back and forth, reveling, after long errands on a drippy day, in a warm fire. Clover was wondering about shame again. She was also hoping Mom would stop humming and rocking the chair soon, partly so that Clover would have a good excuse to climb off of her lap and go away without Mom saying much, and partly because she did not like her humming or the creak and motion of the old wooden chair. The blankets also made things too hot.

Mom asked, running a hand through her daughter’s hair, “Do you love me?” Usually Clover would answer “yes,” because that was what Mom wanted to hear and it might allow her to climb off her lap and go away. She decided to answer “no.”

Her mother held her tighter and nuzzled her forehead. “You’re so silly.”

She doesn’t believe me.

Clover stared straight ahead, past her, lost in thought. She didn’t enjoy being with this person or doing many of the things she wanted her to do. Maybe there really was nothing there. It could have been a silly thought experiment, except that as she grew older, she only grew more convinced that she could not love anything beyond herself.

What she took pleasure in were her own victories. The things people could give her. This didn’t change.