What I Loved

neck.
    "I'm worried about you, Mark. You're exhausting yourself. I think a quiet night at home would do you good."
    "I'm okay. I'm just hanging out with my friends." Mark reached over and patted my arm. "Really, we just listen to music and watch movies and stuff. The thing is, I'm young now. I'm young and I want to have fun and experiences now when I'm young." He looked at me with sympathy, as if I were the living embodiment of the adage "too little, too late."
    "When I was your age," I said to him, "my mother gave me a piece of advice that I've never forgotten. She said, 'Don't do anything you don't really want to do.' "
    Mark's eyes widened.
    "She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don't do it."
    Mark nodded soberly and then continued to nod several times. "That's smart," he said. "I'm going to remember that."
    Saturday night, I went to bed knowing that Mark would be leaving the next day. The knowledge of Bill and Violet's imminent return affected me like a sleeping pill, and not long after Mark left the house, at around eleven, I fell asleep. Sometime during the course of the night, I had a long dream that began as an erotic adventure with Violet, who didn't look like herself, and then turned into a dream in which I was walking down long corridors in a hospital, where I found Erica in one of the beds and discovered that she had given birth to a baby girl. The child's paternity was in question, however, and just as I was kneeling by Erica's bed and telling her that I didn't care who the father was, that I would be the father, the baby disappeared from the hospital ward. Erica was strangely indifferent to the missing child, but I felt desperate, and suddenly I was the one lying in the hospital bed, and Erica was sitting beside me pinching my arm in a gesture that was supposed to comfort me but didn't. I woke up with the peculiar sensation that someone really was pinching my arm. I opened my eyes and jerked up in surprise. Mark was leaning over me, his head only inches from my face. He lurched backward and began to walk toward the door.
    "Good God," I said. "What are you doing?"
    "Nothing," he whispered. "Go back to sleep." He had reached the doorway to my bedroom, and the ceiling lamp in the hallway lit his profile. His lips looked very red as he turned away from me. My arm was still stinging. "Did you want to wake me?" Mark spoke without turning around. "I heard you yell in your sleep and I wanted to make sure you were okay." His voice sounded deliberate, mechanical. "Go back to sleep." He disappeared, closing the door softly behind him.
    I turned on the lamp beside my bed and looked down at my forearm. There was a haze of red on it. The color, which looked like the traces of a pastel crayon, had matted some of the hairs. I brought the arm closer to my face and noticed a circular pattern of tiny irregular indentations like pock marks gouged into my skin. The word that came to mind made me breathe faster: teeth. I looked at the clock. It was five o'clock in the morning. I put my finger to the red again and saw that it wasn't crayon but something less waxy and softer—lipstick. I got out of bed, walked to the door, and locked it. After I returned to bed, I listened to Mark shuffling around the room across the hall. I stared at my arm and scrutinized the marks. I went so far as to bite my own arm rather gently and then compare the ridges in my skin. Yes, I said to myself, he bit me. The inflamed circle notched into my arm faded very slowly, despite the fact that the pressure hadn't broken the skin or drawn blood. What could it possibly mean? I realized that it hadn't occurred to me to run after Mark and demand an explanation. For two weeks, I had been wobbling between trust and dread when it came to Mark, but my worries had never veered toward suspicions of madness. This sudden, inexplicable, thoroughly irrational act threw me completely off balance. What on earth would he have to say to me when I saw him later in the day?
    I woke and slept and slept and woke for hours. By the time I crawled out of bed and lumbered toward the coffee machine around ten, Mark was sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal.
    "Boy, you slept late," he said. "I got up early."
    I grabbed the bag of coffee from the refrigerator and began spooning its dark contents into the filter. An answer seemed impossible. While I waited for the coffee, I stared at Mark,