Free The Animal Girl by John Fulton

so thick I flinched, moved my other arm out in front for protection, and found only cold air.
    â€œI need to go back,” I said. Her hand on my face pushed me against a wall. The shed smelled of earth and dampness and old metal tools. With a kick of her leg, the shed door slammed shut and the small triangle of light became a chink. “Please,” I said.
    â€œCoward,” she said. I couldn’t see her, though her hand darted from my neck to my crotch, where she pulled up sharply until it hurt. “You little ass-kissing …” She let go of me, then dug her hand into my butt and pushed me against her. “Ten points, Billy,” she said. She wedged her knee forcefully between my legs. “Kiss me now.” And even as her tongue entered my mouth and our teeth clattered and her hands tightened on my face, clawing at the bones, I wanted to be inside standing above the dead woman, anticipating the proper thoughts and feelings, and then, looking down at her white, reconstructed face, thinking and feeling them.

THE ANIMAL GIRL
1
    The summer job Leah was interviewing for at the university biomedical laboratory did not exactly require her to kill anything, but it did involve the deaths of animals, several of them every week. Franklin, Leah’s father, who had been a research doctor and was now an administrator at the University of Michigan Medical School, had gotten her the interview. It was part of his recent campaign to jolt her out of her slump, to revive, educate, and edify Leah, who at seventeen was friendless, had no direction, no interests, was homebound out of choice and very much in the way of her father and his new girlfriend, Noelle.
    Leah was unpleasant to be around, and she knew it. Franklin was too much in love. Only three years ago, her mother, Margaret, or Maggie, as everyone had called her, had died and left Leah and Franklin devastated. Leah wasn’t ready for her father to be happy again. How weird and stomach-turning it was to see him emerge in the mornings from his room, still in his pajamas, with a full smile above his thick beard—all that bushy facial hair he’d grown in the last years because he’d been too grief-stricken to trim it. And now he was smiling, too often and too obviously. He’d been nagging at her to make more of a social effort, to go out. “Boys aren’t against the rules, you know,” he said. “You’re allowed to be interested in them.”
    She’d shrug. “Whatever,” she said. Once, she had let him have it. “I don’t need to fall in love, okay? Maybe you do. But I don’t.” He’d backed off and left her alone.
    So when he asked her to consider the job, she said no. “Please, Leah. You already have an interview. It’s a chance for you to learn about science, to see what’s going on, to get some exposure.”
    â€œI’m not interested in science.”
    Franklin slumped over in his chair. He was a large man, six foot three, with big bones and a soft midsection, and seeing his thick, ungainly body fall in disappointment, seeing his hands, large as bowls, beseechingly laid out on the table, had its effect on Leah. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go. Then I’ll say no.”
    â€œThank you,” Franklin said.
    Leah showed up at the interview looking as she usually did: dumpy in her overlarge Levi’s and white T-shirt. The laboratories were subterranean, windowless, a labyrinth of narrow hallways with exposed water pipes running the length of the low ceilings and long fluorescent-tube lighting that coated everything in a naked whiteness. The close, unnatural odors of chemicals hung in the air, despite the respiratory whirl of the ventilation system. Max, an old colleague of her father, was the researcher she’d be working with. He kept his office dark: Two desk lamps and the bluish glow of his computer screen gave the space a cavelike dimness.