by Amy Jones
Mags turned to him sharply. “Shut up, you piece of shit. I live here. I should be asking you why the hell you’re here.”
“Jesus, Maggie, you need to chill out. Here, have a hit.” She nudged the bong forward on the coffee table with her toe.
“Hey, what are you doing? You think that weed grows on trees?” Elias reached over and tweaked Frankie’s breast, then leaned in and stuck his tongue in her ear. Frankie giggled, running her hand up his thigh as she curled back into him, shutting Mags out.
Mags closed her eyes. Elias was just the latest in a long line of boys with their tongue in Frankie’s ear. With their piercings and tattoos and hoodies they might as well have all been the same boy, but Mags remembered each and every one of them. She remembered Nate and Jonas and Jimmy and the one who just went by Bug, remembered their dirty fingernails and bad teeth, the smell of their shoes, their slack-jawed faces glowing pale and haggard in the light from the television. She also remembered their hungry eyes following her as she moved around the apartment, their bodies pressing up against her in the narrow hallways, their faces too close, their hands finding their way into secret places in the dark. As though they were entitled to take whatever parts of her they wanted. As though she owed it to them.
She never said anything to Frankie, though—Frankie with her too-wild laugh, who made her own body fit perfectly against each boy’s body, conforming to each new shape as easily as water flowing into a glass, their words becoming her words, their thoughts her thoughts. Frankie needed a vessel to pour herself into, and when she didn’t, she spilled out everywhere, flooding their apartment with her rage, her need. Mags never had any doubt whose side Frankie was on.
It had always been that way, would always be that way, Mags knew, no matter how much she wished it weren’t true. The problem was, Mags had nowhere else to go. So she stayed trapped in their stinking, suffocating, broken life, eating her peanut butter sandwiches and sleeping in her clothes with a kitchen knife shoved in the crack between the couch cushions, staying away from the apartment as much as she could. Not letting herself think about the future, even for a second, never pulling her focus from the mere act of survival—of getting through each day, each hour, each minute—for fear of stumbling, of losing what little she had. For Mags, there were no big dreams or dark nightmares—just this endless tightrope, which she walked without looking down on one side or the other, constantly moving forward. One foot carefully in front of the other, never knowing when it would end.
* * *
“You can’t have everything you want all the time,” Mags’s mother, Karolina, always told her when she was growing up. But to her mother, “everything” meant “anything,” and “all the time” meant “ever.” Karolina worked as an orderly at the hospital, and spent her days mopping up vomit and emptying bedpans, stripping soiled sheets and getting yelled at by nurses, doctors, and patients alike. She had grown deathly afraid of disease and wore a paper mask over her face everywhere she went, even to the grocery store or to Mags and Frankie’s school, which mortified the girls. When Karolina got home from work, she wouldn’t let her daughters touch her until she had showered with her disinfectant soap, coated her entire body in hand sanitizer, and put on clean clothes. Mags supposed it was ironic that Karolina ended up slipping and falling in that shower, knocking herself out and drowning in the water that had pooled in the basin that never seemed to drain properly.
Now, as she sat on the floor of the bathroom—her math textbook open in front of her, listening to Elias and Frankie laughing in the next room while a heavy bass beat shook the floor—Mags thought about her mother’s words. When Karolina died three years ago, it was up to Frankie, then just barely eighteen, to make sure that Mags got everything she needed, and nothing she wanted. Frankie had managed to get herself on disability, but that barely covered the rent, and the government cheques that came for Mags once a month evaporated in a literal cloud of smoke. At first, Mags had walked dogs, shovelled snow, raked leaves, but her money disappeared from her piggy bank while she slept, so after a while she didn’t even bother. For Mags’s thirteenth birthday, the first one after she had lost her mother, Frankie gave her a box of Froot Loops. She took it out on the fire escape and dug the cereal out of the box with her hands, eating it by the fistful while she watched the buses careening down Barrington Street, splashing pedestrians with the water that was perpetually gathered in the gutter, regardless of how long ago it had rained. It was the first time she had eaten cereal that wasn’t oatmeal, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted. It hadn’t occurred to her, then, that cereal wasn’t a normal birthday present, that she might have asked for more.
None of this made Mags sad—it just made her angry. But anger wasn’t an emotion Mags had the luxury to feel. So she swallowed it down, feeling it bubbling under the surface, trying to escape. It woke her in the middle of the night, her feet pressed rigidly into the arm of the couch, back sweaty against the scratchy upholstery, ragged breath squeezing through her lungs. But in the morning, she would feel her aching jaw, her throbbing head, and know she had won, the pain her prize for keeping the anger locked in, her prize for surviving.
From the next room, the bass beat transitioned into a steady, rhythmic banging that Mags realized was the couch against the wall. She grabbed a bath towel and pulled it down over her head, trying to block out the sound. Against her leg, she felt her phone buzz. A text from Sam.
Wat u get for 4?
Mags consulted her sheet, then typed N = 5.
No. How
N + 1/N = 78/15. Multiply all values by N, form quadratic equation, solve.
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Sam replied. Mags smiled, the sex marathon in the living room temporarily forgotten. Being with Sam had given her a tiny respite, a moment of ease in her world of constant vigilance. They had only been dating for two months, but in that time she had allowed herself to take a breath, to let her guard down, to raise her eyes from the tightrope, if only for a second.
Should have studied instead of playing with ur dumb boys
She waited until Sam’s :-| appeared on the screen. Sam had met Paul and Zac, the guitarist and drummer of Nietzsche’s Watering Can, at rock camp the previous summer, and when their bassist quit a month ago, they’d asked Sam to step in. Paul and Zac were both twelfth-graders from Halifax West who were obsessed with Star Trek and World of Warcraft. In 95 per cent of the possible universes out there, Paul and Zac were not even a little bit cool. Sam resided firmly in one of the other 5 per cent, and Mags knew he would do anything to be a permanent part of the band. Including let her beat him at math.
It was cool tho, he added. We wrote a new song. It’s in Klingon.
Super cool, Mags typed back, adding a :-/. Mags liked Nietzsche’s Watering Can—she did. She thought they were as solid as any of the bands she’d seen in town, and if they had a real singer rather than Paul and Zac just trading off tentative verses between guitar solos, they could actually play some gigs. That’s if they stopped writing songs in Klingon. That was probably the clincher.
How dare u, Sam responded. I’m going to sing it to u later. Over and over and over.
Suddenly the bathroom door opened, hitting the back of Mags’s head. “Ow! Watch out,” she said, turning around.
“Christ, Maggie.” Elias leaned against the doorframe. “What are you doing down there? I gotta take a piss.”
Mags tried to shut the door, but Elias held it open with his toe.
“Do you mind? I’m trying to do my homework.”
Elias laughed. “In the bathroom?”
“I don’t have a room, remember? You and Frankie are on my bed.”
“Oh yeah.” Elias gave a half-smile, exposing a mouth full of chipped grey teeth. She could feel his eyes on her, as tangibly as if he were actually touching her with his grimy little hands. “You should come out and join us.”
“No thanks. I think I’ll pass.” Mags grabbed her books and her phone and stood up as slowly and calmly
as possible. No sudden movements, no loud noises, no aggressive comebacks, nothing to draw attention. She had been here before, knew every possible outcome of this encounter like she knew her own skin. “I’ll wait in the hall.”
“Hey, wait.” Elias blocked the door. “Your sister’s right, you know. You need to relax.” He reached out and touched her cheek with one finger, drawing it down over her jawline and onto her neck.
She cringed at his touch but didn’t move. “The bathroom’s all yours, okay?” She fixed her gaze past his head into the hallway, her destination. Then she felt his finger drop down to her clavicle, and she instinctively flinched, her shoulder jerking upward, shrugging him off. Big mistake. She quickly tried to move around him, but he caught her by the waist.
“Come on, now,” Elias hissed into her ear, reaching his hand up over the front of her shirt and cupping a breast. “Don’t pretend you didn’t like it.”
With one swift movement, Mags brought her knee up between Elias’s legs. He made a sound like a balloon slowly deflating, his eyes bulging comically, his legs clamping together, pinning her knee in place.
“You bitch,” he breathed, grabbing her leg and pulling her toward him. Mags clung to the sink behind her as he pulled, and when she finally wrenched her foot free, she drove it into his crotch. This time he slumped to the ground, his face turning a pale shade of green.
“What is going on here?” Frankie said, pushing Mags aside as she flew into the bathroom and crouched down beside Elias. “Maggie, what did you do?”
“What did I do? He grabbed me. Your disgusting boyfriend tried to feel me up!”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Elias moaned. “She grabbed me. When I told her to get off me, she kicked me in the nuts.”
“He’s lying!”
“She’s lying! Look at her!” Elias motioned up and down with his hand. “She’s like a nympho or something. She couldn’t keep her hands off me.”
“You wish, you disgusting piece of trash.” Mags turned to her sister, who was still on the floor, her arm around Elias’s shoulders “Frankie, come on. You know he’s lying, right?” But as she spoke she saw the fear flicker in her sister’s eyes. It had been there even before she stepped into the bathroom. It had probably been there since the day she was born.
Frankie jumped to her feet. “You pathetic bitch!” She began pummelling Mags with a shower of frenzied fist falls that sent Mags stumbling backward through the bathroom door.
Mags held her arms up in front of her face to ward off the blows, her anger giving way to disbelief. “You’re going to believe him over your own sister?”
But Frankie kept coming at her, a blur of red face and red hair, the dark maw of her mouth, the milky whites of her eyes. “I always knew you were a little skank who just takes everything she wants!”
That’s when Mags felt something come undone inside her, the dam she had been holding up since her mother died, every muscle in her body engaged in keeping her anger from flooding the world. Why that was the moment that pushed her over the edge, she couldn’t say. But she felt it, so viscerally, a steaming geyser erupting from deep within her gut and blasting out of every pore. “You’re the pathetic one!” she yelled, pushing Frankie back through the bathroom door to tumble over Elias, who was still lying on the floor. “If I wanted to date a slimy little weasel-faced drug-dealing subhuman, I could go down behind the Dairy Queen on Spring Garden and find my own!”
For a split second, Mags saw Frankie falter. But then her face hardened once more. “Get out!” Frankie screamed. “I never want to see your face again, you fucking whore.”
Mags grabbed her backpack and ran out of the apartment and into the elevator without looking back. As the doors closed, she slumped to the floor. She couldn’t say how long she sat there, head bowed over her backpack, before getting to her feet and pressing the button for the lobby. She had to go down; that much she knew. Beyond that, though, she was lost.
At least it wasn’t raining anymore. But the rain-slicked streets had frozen as night fell, the sidewalks coated in a sparkling film of ice that could take your feet out from under you and the breath from your lungs. Mags made her way carefully down Barrington Street, which was deserted except for a small, middle-aged man pulling a suitcase behind him, likely heading for the bus station. Mags thought briefly about following him until she remembered the city had taken out all the benches at the station, hoping to stop people from camping out there.
She had two dollars in her wallet and two minutes left on her cell phone.
Mags had never asked for help before. She had always prided herself on being able to make it on her own. But now, it seemed too overwhelming, too impossible.
Two dollars and two minutes. Enough for bus fare and a phone call. And for the first time ever, she knew someone who might actually pick up.
* * *
—
“Don’t worry, my parents are never home,” Sam said as he ushered her through the door. His bass was still strapped around his neck, hanging limply in front of him as he led her through the cavernous halls of his empty house. “When they are, they never come down here.”
It was her first time at the Coles’ house. Mags had never even been in this neighbourhood before, with its wrought iron and brick, and its wide, manicured lawns that swept down to the Northwest Arm. She had known Sam was well off, but she hadn’t really registered that he was rich. He seemed embarrassed about it more than anything, so she kept her questions to herself. What would she have said, anyway—hey, you’re rich, why didn’t you tell me? Rich people never thought about money. The more you had, the less important it seemed to become.
As he led her down to the basement, Mags immediately started to relax. It was clearly Sam’s space—bare walls, clothes and papers littering the floor, an old wooden dining room chair in one corner with a quilt draped over it, his bass stand next to it.
“Is there a bed under there?” she asked, pointing to a pile of books and sheet music in a corner.
He swept the sheet music onto the floor. “Sorry. I guess I should have cleaned up a little.” He sat down on the spot he had just cleared, and Mags sat next to him. Other than the chair and the bed there was no furniture, but it felt homey, real. It felt like Sam. Out of the detritus he fished out a speaker, which he propped up on the bass stand. “Can I play you this song I found today?” he asked. “It made me think of you. Like, the singer, I mean. She reminds me of you.”
Mags nodded, and Sam began fiddling with an iPod he produced from under a mountain of clothes. After a moment the song began to play, the singer’s voice filling the room. “I like it,” she murmured. “It’s really good.”
“Wylie Daniels. She used to be the singer for Open Curtain. Remember them?”
“I think so.” Mags noticed Sam’s jeans had a hole at the knee and she stuck her finger through, moving it in a circle over his kneecap as the song kept playing.
He scraped a nail lightly against one of the bass strings, and it sounded like the noise an insect would make. “I’m thinking of naming my bass.”
“Like a girl’s name?”
He shrugged. “I guess. Jaco Pastorius called his bass the Bass of Doom.”
“That’s pretty badass,” she said, her finger spelling out the words on Sam’s knee as she spoke them. P-R-E-T-T-Y B-A-D-A-S-S.
“Yeah. I guess you can’t really top that.” He plucked a string. “Did you know that Jaco Pastorius was killed by a security guard at a club when he was only thirty-five?”
“You’ve told me about a million times.”
It was actually the first thing he had ever said to her, sitting on the steps of their high school one afternoon, him smoking, her drawing on her backpack with a Sharpie, kittens with daggers in their teeth, skulls with flower crowns. He was an odd, skinny kid—T-shirt sinking into his concave chest, a little ratty moustache struggling on his upper lip, but with a subtle swagger in the stretch of his legs as he slid over to her. And when his should
er brushed against hers she felt a fizz of heat rising in her belly. Did you know that Jaco Pastorius was killed by a security guard at a club when he was only thirty-five? She took his cigarette from him with a shaking hand. I bet you say that to all the girls.
“That fucking guy,” Sam said now. “Imagine what he could have done if he had lived another fifty years.”
“Maybe nothing,” said Mags. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.
“I don’t know whether that’s a silver lining or super depressing.”
“Let’s say silver lining,” she said. “That way we can believe we’re not missing out on anything.”
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Sam said. He turned to her, and his eyes were so blue she was momentarily speechless. Had they always been that blue? Had she just never noticed before?
“Yeah,” she said finally, breaking his gaze. “I mean, it’s okay.” They both knew that it really wasn’t.
“Okay.” He paused. “It’s weird that you’re here. But I’m glad you are.”
Mags didn’t reply, but her fingers traced out I L-O-V-E Y-O-U. Sam’s head twitched, and she wondered if he had been able to feel her words on his kneecap. “So, let’s hear the Klingon song,” she said, pulling her finger back, flustered.
Sam shook his head. “No. It’s bad.” He picked up the iPod again. “It’s so depressing. This whole thing is full of half-finished tracks.”
“So? Finish them.”
“But writing is hard.” He stuck his lip out in a mock pout. “The music is okay, it’s just the stupid lyrics. You know, hence the Klingon. And the grocery list.” One of their songs was literally a grocery list they had found on the floor of Zac’s garage. “Apples, bananas, skim milk, popsicles,” Paul would mumble tunelessly through some extensive feedback. “Toilet paper, chicken wings, fabric softener.”