by Sarah Ellis
When Mr. Zinck left, Charlotte stood on a pile of Streets and Roads and pushed open a high window. Faint squeals floated up from the yard below. The primaries were having PE.
“All right. Secret weapon.”
Charlotte pulled Pride and Prejudice out of her book bag and settled into an old wooden teacher chair.
“You glue. I read.”
“So. This thing. Is Tom going to be there?”
It took Charlotte a second to think who Tom might be. Why was Dawn calling him Tom?
“Tom Ed? I don’t think so. He’d like to but he might have a shift on Saturday.”
“You asked him already?”
“Sort of. We were just talking.”
“When?”
What was this? The Spanish Inquisition?
“This morning. At breakfast.”
“You had breakfast with him?”
“Well, I was eating my cereal and he walked by. It wasn’t like we were ordering up the Lumberman’s Special.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Never mind. Just read.”
Charlotte put her feet up on the radiator and started in on chapter one. It was like dropping in on a friendly neighbor. And it was a chance to bring Dawn along with her for the visit. They used to read the same books but not so much this year.
“Isn’t Mary awful? Does she remind you a bit of Dorcas? She’s so serious and boring! Dawn? Dawn?”
“Who’s Mary again?”
“She’s the third sister.”
“Oh, yeah. Pathetic. I don’t get it. Everybody’s so mean and sarcastic in this book. Mr. Bennet’s horrible to his wife. And he gets away with it.”
“But Mrs. Bennet’s ridiculous. She’s so out of it. It’s hilarious. And she’s not the worst. Wait until you meet the minister!”
“I just don’t see what’s so funny about it.”
Charlotte shifted. The chair creaked. If somebody didn’t find something funny you couldn’t talk them into it. Plus, Dawn sounded mad. What was going on?
Dawn snapped another rubber band onto a copy of Fun with Science. “Why do you like this so much, all these mean, rude people?”
Now it sounded like an attack. When Dawn got in this mood it was no good fighting back. Charlotte swallowed a mad-back reply. Just answer the question.
“I just like it. Maybe because they are so the opposite of Quakers. It’s kind of a relief.”
“What’ve you got against Quakers?”
“Nothing. Quakers are fine in real life. But in stories … Okay, so Quakers have this thing about not judging. They work at it. Like, in Meeting. Well, you went there that one time. Did you notice that even when somebody says something really dull everyone just listens? You’re supposed to avoid going ‘yes, but, yes, but’ in your head.”
“I thought that was nice. Kind.”
“Yes, but! Sometimes it’s so fun to just admit that somebody is conceited or mean or stupid and to think of the perfect come-back. Like Mr. Bennet does. But it’s just in a book so nobody gets hurt. It’s the fun of pretending to be bad.”
“Okay, go back to the mean people. But when are we going to get to the romance part? It’s going to be Darcy, right? The one who’s acting like a jerk?”
“It takes a while to get there. I’ll skip forward.”
Once Elizabeth and Darcy started falling in love Dawn seemed to relax, even joining Charlotte in hating the poisonous Miss Bingley.
By three o’clock Charlotte figured Dawn was enough in the Jane Austen groove that she could pull it off.
“This thing I’m supposed to read. Have you written it yet?”
“No. I’m going to work on it tonight. Maybe …” Charlotte was about to say that Tom Ed might help when he got home from work, but something made her swing onto a different path.
“Maybe we can rehearse it tomorrow after school. Why don’t you come over?”
Dawn tossed her paintbrush into the glue pot. “Do you think Tom’ll be there?”
Oh, good grief.
“Maybe.” It was Charlotte’s turn to be shruggy.
* * *
Normally Charlotte’s school-morning routine was extremely efficient. She had figured out a way to stay in bed until eight o’clock and still get to school on time.
But Thursday morning Puff had other plans for her. At ten to seven she decided to launch herself off the dresser right onto Charlotte’s stomach — a full four-point antelope-feet landing.
“Ooof.”
Her job done, Puff made a fast retreat.
Charlotte squinted at the clock, turned over and tried to get back to dreamland, which had been something ingenious involving embroidering with Smarties. However, the trouble was that Puff hadn’t exactly landed on her stomach. When Dawn got a see-through model of the human woman, one of the things that surprised them was where the human stomach was located. Nowhere near the bellybutton. Way higher. The part that people called the stomach was actually full of intestines of various sorts plus organs including the specific organ that was now fully awake, the bladder.
Sleep. Come back, Smarties! Charlotte distracted herself by thinking of the word organ and how weird it was that it was the same word as organ as in church organ. Or those Hammond organs. Like the opening music to that soap opera, As the World Turns. Yes, she had watched the odd show during her week of afternoon TV. In that show you heard the organ music and you knew something was about to happen.
The distraction stopped working.
On the way to the bathroom she noticed that the door to Tom Ed’s room was open, his bed neatly made.
What was that dark spot on the toilet seat?
It moved. Oh, no.
Charlotte jumped back.
Was it? Yes, it was.
Charlotte knew all about the wonder of nature’s architects and she had read Charlotte’s Web because of course she would, namesake and all. But none of that helped. She just loathed spiders. It was something about the way they moved. Skittering. They made her skin crawl. Arachnophobia. One of the back-row boys had presented a book on phobias in class.
Downstairs toilet it would have to be.
What with the bladder landing and the spider shock and making her way downstairs, Charlotte decided she might as well just stay up. She’d have time for morning extras like breakfast and blow-drying her hair.
Standing at the sink waiting for the water to run cold for a drink, she stared out the window letting her eyes wake up. The backyard was sunlit. The lawn was silver with dew except for a green track across it, curving around to behind the shed.
Who had walked across it?
Move over, Nancy Drew. Charlotte Quintan, girl sleuth, wandered outside to gather clues.
What she saw when she rounded the corner of the shed didn’t immediately make sense. It was like one of those find-the-hidden-picture games. You had to look twice to see the upside-down raccoon hidden in the leaves of a tree.
James and Tom Ed were there, Tom Ed with his back to her, James facing. They were wrestling.
No. Not wrestling. Hammerlock, half nelson? No.
They were kissing.
Charlotte was trapped, frozen between needing to stare, to make it make sense, and wanting to disappear.
Her brain had just sent the message to her feet to swivel and go when James shifted and looked over Tom Ed’s shoulder. His eyes met hers, an electric shock of a glance.
Charlotte didn’t decide to run away. It just happened and she was back in her room, her pajama cuffs soggy around her ankles, a sing-song voice in her head.
James and Tom Ed sitting in a tree.
K.I.S.S.I.N.G.
First comes love …
Somewhere in the house there was this toy called a View-Master, a device with t
wo lenses and a lever. When James outgrew it he handed it down to Charlotte, along with a box of discs. Grand Canyon. Wonders of the World. Big Cats. 3-D. You loaded the disc, clicked down the lever and you got the next picture.
Charlotte rolled up the legs of her pajamas, sat on the end of her bed and made up her own View-Master disc.
James at the dinner table never looking at Tom Ed. Click. Tom Ed saying “James” in that slow way. Click. The look on James’s face when she asked to go along on the trip to 100 Mile House. Click. Tom Ed’s brother telling him how to avoid the draft: “Tell them you’re a bedwetter or a faggot.” Click. A boy named Sue. Click. Frank Zappa in a dress. Click.
Then an image from the summer before. Cousin Patty was visiting. Twenty years old from Toronto. Walking along English Bay beach with James and Patty, eating chips and showing her the sights. There was always a row of muscle-men wrestling guys who sat against the wall working on their tans.
As they walked between the muscle and the water James started to tease Patty and Patty teased right back, “I don’t think it’s me that’s getting the attention.”
Charlotte had forgotten all about that confusing exchange.
Click. Tom Ed and James at the corner of the shed. Hair. Hands.
Bright. Real. 3-D.
Thirteen
Doodling. At this point in the year you didn’t really care what your notebooks looked like. You also didn’t really care about people who played an important role in the foundation of Canada. Charlotte drew spirals as the Blinker tried to keep the back-row boys on task.
The questions just kept spiraling around. Was Tom Ed “like that”? Was James? What was that whole world about?
Charlotte didn’t have much to go on. Of course she’d read about that man who went to Sweden and turned himself into a woman. There was Liberace and all that glitter. The subject came up at Meeting once and the Friends were all calm and accepting but Charlotte had heard the boys at school insulting each other.
However. James and Tom Ed? They didn’t seem to fit any of that. They didn’t seem girly or fancy. And when did James go from disliking Tom Ed to wanting to kiss him? What about Alisha, the girl James took to grad?
Charlotte hadn’t crossed paths with James or Tom Ed before school, and what was she going to say to them when she did? Would James be mad at her? Had Tom Ed seen her running away? Did James tell him? Did anybody else know? If James could be …? She didn’t even know what word to use if she didn’t use the schoolyard insults. Homosexual? Five syllables made it sound like a medical condition. Astigmatism. Monique had that. Queer? Was that insulting?
If James, who she thought she knew better than anyone, could be queer, anybody could. Anybody single. She browsed her brain for single adults near and far. Miss Biscuit, one or both. O. O. McGough. Prime Minister Trudeau! Yikes. Was this one of those big secrets that everybody just somehow agreed to keep, like the fact that one quarter of all the women you see must be having their periods?
What else was out there hidden in plain sight? How many more upside-down raccoons?
A line of spirals ran off the edge of the page.
* * *
“Earrings? What do you think? A bit of sparkle? And maybe boots. Can I borrow your brown boots?”
Charlotte looked up from the rock she had been kicking all the way from school. “What? Sorry.”
Dawn held out an open bag of chips. “I know I should look serious but still like a kid mostly.”
“No, thanks, I’m not hungry.”
“Huh? You’re never not hungry. Oh, well, more for me.”
Overnight, Dawn had obviously bounced back from whatever was bugging her. She was acting like a yo-yo these days.
“Do you think it’s better if I read the script or try to memorize it, or maybe I should use those cards.”
I saw Tom Ed kissing James. I saw James kissing Tom Ed. You’ll never guess what I saw this morning.
Charlotte used to tell Dawn everything. Now she didn’t know how.
When they came into the kitchen, Mom had her head in the oven. She was wearing her usual cleaning outfit of Claude hand-me-downs. She looked like a lumberjack.
“Oh, you two. Good. Time for a break. I’ve heard that there are ovens that clean themselves. How about the big-brains work on that instead of putting men on the moon.” She peeled off her rubber gloves.
“Let’s get out of these fumes, shall we. Hungry? Wait till you see the snacks.”
In the living room there was a big flat box on the coffee table. Chocolates, candies, dried fruit, nuts, cookies, all in their own little compartments.
“Help yourself.”
Dawn plucked a large chocolate cookie from the cookie zone. “What’s with this?”
“They’re a present from Tom Ed. News of the day. He’s flown the coop.”
“What?”
Dawn gasped. “Where to?”
Mom started patting pockets — overall pockets, shirt pockets.
“Here we go. He left a note.”
She read it out loud.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Quintan, James, Charlotte and Claude,
Thank you all kindly for your warm hospitality. You will always be my first Canadian family. I have a chance to go with some other Americans to Nelson. They’ve got a place up there that sounds good. I had to decide in a hurry. I apologize if it is discourteous to leave without saying goodbye in person. I will write when I get settled. My final check from work will come to your house. Could you forward it to V. Popoff, Box 242, Nelson?
Yours sincerely, Tom Ed.
P.S. Charlotte, I’m so sorry to miss the presentation on Saturday. But I know that you and Dawn will sock it to them!
Dawn’s cookie suddenly snapped in half, showering crumbs over her sweater.
Charlotte tried to make sense of the day. How could Tom Ed be kissing James at seven and be gone to Nelson by four? “Why would he just go like that?”
Mom helped herself to an apricot. “I’m surprised, I must say. It seems a bit abrupt. But I guess it’s to be expected. He’ll want to be with his friends. Lots of the draft dodgers are heading up to the Kootenays with plans to live in communes and such, live off the land. They can join the Quakers and the Doukhobors up there.”
Dawn had picked up the note from the coffee table. Charlotte leaned over to reread it. Tom Ed had terrible handwriting. It looked painful.
Questions ran through her head like bumper cars. What did this have to do with this morning? Was Tom Ed running away? Maybe she had the whole thing wrong. Maybe what she had seen was a goodbye kiss. No. Guys didn’t do that. And even in a split second and even obviously not knowing much about anything, she had seen that it wasn’t a friendly kiss even if guys did do that.
“Cashews?” said Mom. “This is certainly the deluxe mix. I’d say help yourselves while you can because Dad and James will make short work of it.”
James! What did he know about this? How was he going to feel having his name just buried in the family list? Or was there another note just for him?
Dawn stood up. “I need to go.” Her voice was flat.
What? Why didn’t Dawn want to stay and talk over the news? Why wasn’t she brushing the crumbs off her sweater?
“What about the practice and the boots?”
“Oh. Okay, but …”
Up in Charlotte’s room Dawn still didn’t say anything. She started roaming around, touching things, rearranging stuff. Charlotte sat cross-legged on the bed.
“So?”
Dawn gave herself a shake. “How could he?”
“I know. He was always so polite but leaving without saying goodbye was kind of rude.”
“Rude!” Dawn plunked down into the beanbag chair, which exhaled quietly. “Rude has nothing to do with it.”
“What are you talking about?”
> Dawn gave a big sigh. “Charlotte, do you really not know?”
Not know? About the kiss? How could Dawn know about that? And why was she sounding so mad?
“Know what?”
“Tom and I are, well, you know, we’ve got this … thing. We realized on that trip to 100 Mile House.”
“What do you mean? I was there.”
“But you were asleep on the way home. We talked. Really talked. There was this other … force. We both felt it.”
Other force? Dawn was talking like Love Story. This was the kind of thing they used to make fun of.
What had gone on in the front seat of the dull Dad-car when Charlotte was dozing?
“Did Tom Ed … like … do anything?”
Dawn shook her head. “He didn’t need to.”
“What did you say to each other?”
“I told him that he seemed like a person with a secret.”
This was nuts. Dawn wasn’t the person who knew he had a secret. Charlotte was that person. And even she didn’t know the secret on that drive.
“Why would you say that?”
“Well … okay, don’t get mad. Remember I told you about that girl Helen at music camp? At the beginning when she was still being nice, before I became a greaser and not worth talking to, we had this late-night conversation and she told me this line. She said it was magic, a sure-fire way to get a boy to like you. So I tried it on Tom.”
“A line! Since when do you use lines?”
“Since … stop being … you know, that way you get.”
Charlotte took a deep breath. She wasn’t really sure what was the way she got but she tried not to get that way anyway.
“But what did he say when you brought out the line?”
“He looked startled and then he really looked at me, x-ray eyes until he had to look back at the road. And then he took my hand and said how did I get to be so mature for my age and how special it was to have friends who really know who you are and accept you and love you. He said love.”
“But, Dawn, he’s nineteen!”
Dawn punched the beanbag chair and glared at Charlotte. “Oh. You’re just like everybody else. Narrow-minded. How old was Juliet? Thirteen! Those are just numbers. I know I’ll have to wait. Tom knows that. But we’re going to wait together. Or … we were going to wait together.”