by McLay, Craig
But above all, she hated Mr. Stavros. He was fat and ugly and smelled like fish. He yelled at her parents, calling them lazy and ungrateful and stupid and worse. He barged into their apartment whenever he felt like it and never showed up when they needed something fixed. He would take out wads of cash from his pocket and wave them at her father.
“You see this?” he would yell. “This is what comes from hard work, you lazy skoulikia! Any more complaints and I will report you!”
Near the end of their first winter, Violet’s father contracted viral pneumonia and couldn’t go to work for almost a month. He was fired by the hotel and too weak to look for another job. Her mother picked up a night job in a dry cleaners’, but it wasn’t enough. When they weren’t able to cover the rent, Mr. Stavros showed up immediately, thumping down the stairs like an angry bull. Her mother was at work. Her father was lying on the futon that doubled as the family bed. His breathing was raspy and his colour the same as the mildewed ceiling.
“Look at you!” Stavros bellowed. “Lazy pig! Lounging around when you should be out working! I am kicking you all out today! If this furniture is still here in two hours then it is mine!”
Stavros moved to grab her father on the couch, but Violet positioned herself in between. He pushed her aside with a fat and sweaty hand to the face and bent over to grab her father by the neck, shaking him violently.
“Do you hear me, malaka?” he yelled. “Out of my house! I do not care if you are pretending to be sick to cheat your employer! Today you are all gone!”
Violet picked herself up off the floor and looked at the small, fat man she hated. The rage she had been feeling was, strangely, gone. Something about her had changed, though. Her calm was so unnatural that Stavros actually stopped assaulting her father for a moment and looked at her.
“What about you, little skyla?” he spat. “Think you are going to call the police? I think you are not!”
Violet shook her head. It felt like there was a silent cyclone spinning in her brain, but it was one that she had absolute control over.
“No,” she said, with a voice much larger than her own. “I think I am going to kill you.”
Stavros started laughing. He laughed until he tasted the blood running from his nose. Gushing, in fact. He let go of Violet’s father and staggered backward, reaching up with a shaking hand to try and stop the flow, but the blood only backed up and poured out of his mouth instead. He made a sound that was half gag and half scream before slipping on the wet floor and falling on his back. He was dead even before his head hit the bottom stair.
The autopsy would later show that every vein and artery in his head had more or less exploded at the same time. He had died of what the coroner described as the largest cerebral hemorrhage ever recorded. Stavros did have high blood pressure and a family history of diabetes and heart disease, but nothing to suggest he was a prime candidate for the neurological equivalent of Chernobyl. When they had used the cranial saw to get through the skull to examine the brain, they were stunned to discover that there was no actual brain matter left. The contents of his head had just run out like soup from a pot.
Violet had no doubt that she was responsible, but no idea how she had done it. She tried a similar experiment on her Grade 1 teacher, Mrs. Crepusky. She didn’t hate Mrs. Crepusky to the point where she wanted to kill her, just give her a bloody nose or an unpleasant-looking boil on her chin or something like that. Mrs. Crepusky was an older woman with poufy, peroxided hair who wore lots of jewelry and clearly considered the non-white children in her class, especially the ones still in the process of learning English, to be little more than a nuisance. Violet could count on one hand the number of times she had been picked to demonstrate something on the board or participate in a read-along. Mrs. Crepusky’s late husband was a police officer who had been suspended after shooting two unarmed young Somali men acting suspiciously outside of a liquor store. The Special Investigations Unit did not recommend charges, but did advise that he be pulled from active duty and see a counsellor. Neither of those suggestions sat well with Mr. Crepusky, who tolerated the desk job for 14 months before locking himself in his garage and shooting himself.
None of Violet’s attempts had any effect on Mrs. Crepusky, however, although she did leave early one day with a headache, which Violet took as a positive sign. Undeterred, Violet tried similar experiments on her bus driver, crossing guard and an obnoxious boy in her class named Maaz, who made a habit of sticking his hands down his pants and then shoving his hands in people’s faces or lunches. All of these experiments were met with the same nonexistent-to-indifferent results. Violet began to wonder if maybe she just wasn’t angry enough at these people. Maybe that was what it took. She tried working up the necessary emotion and even picked a couple of fights with Maaz, but all that got her was a trip to the principal’s office and a note in her agenda. Maybe, she thought resignedly, the whole thing hadn’t been her doing. Maybe she didn’t have any special power. Maybe Stavros’s stupid brain had just self-destructed all on its own. She gave up trying.
Her father died two years later. He had recovered from the pneumonia, but he was never really back to his full self after that. He was always sick with something: an endless series of colds, flus and coughs. One doctor whom Violet reckoned to be at least 80 years old at an after-hours walk-in clinic said he thought Mr. Greensleeves probably had asthma and prescribed a steroid inhaler that only seemed to make the coughing worse. He was working nights as a security guard in a chemical plant. They were supposed to give him a mask to complete his patrols of certain areas, but the only one they had didn’t fit properly.
Two days after the funeral, a letter came advising that Mr. Moe Greensleeves was now legally able to call himself a pharmacist and dispense drugs according to the laws of the province of Ontario. Violet’s mother framed the letter. Violet took the letter out of the frame the following day and burned it. Like the man it was addressed to, the letter and its false promise of the future went up in smoke.
Violet’s mother was furious. She said she would write to the Ontario College of Pharmacists and request another copy of the letter. Violet promised that she would burn that one, too. Violet’s mother took two quick strides across their tiny kitchen and did something she had never done before: hit her daughter in the face and knocked her to the ground.
Violet got up slowly. She could feel the cyclone starting to spin in her head again. She took a deep breath.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said in a voice that sounded much larger than her own, then ran out of the apartment.
Money was always a problem. They moved seven times in five years, once in the middle of the night. Somehow, Bridget got her hands on a used video camera and started interviewing her daughter for a documentary project about the immigrant experience. At first, Violet would clam up and refuse to say a word, but talking to the camera gradually became easier and easier. It was a silent stranger who said nothing. Although her mother asked the questions, her voice was like a disconnected echo in the background. Violet found the camera was the one thing she could actually talk to. It even got to the point where she looked forward to the sessions. She talked about how she hated school because the teachers treated her like an idiot and everyone else treated her like a leper because she didn’t give a damn about algebra and often wore the same clothes more than once a week. That and the fact that some of them thought she was mentally disturbed. She had once lost her temper with a little punk named Seth Gavigan who had grabbed her from behind on the concrete pad that passed for a playground and loudly asked “if her pussy was as brown as the rest of her.”
She had no memory of what had happened next, but Seth had gone to the hospital where they put emergency caps on the remains of his front teeth and Violet was suspended for two days. She had no memory of hitting him. Some kids said that Seth’s head had snapped back and bounced off the bicycle rack all by itself, but others (mostly the girls who didn’t talk to her) had said that V
iolet had hit him in the mouth with a metal bike lock. Since one story was a lot more believable than the other, the results weren’t in doubt.
Bridget’s application for an arts grant to complete the editing on the movie was rejected. Somewhere in between moves four and five, the camera disappeared. Violet didn’t know if it was lost or if her mother threw it away, but that was the end of the electronic confessionals.
Things got worse at school, too. Because of her supposed assault on Seth Gavigan and other incidents of anti-social and disruptive behaviour, Violet was put on a modified learning program. She felt like a rail car full of dangerous material that was being shunted into an abandoned mine. They recommended that she see a psychologist. They even suggested putting her on a waiting list for an “enhanced security” school that dealt specifically with aggressive behavioural problems.
The world was out to get her, but she was going to get it first.
-7-
“You two are idiots.”
Max and I were in the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of his plan to blow up the Weather Station when we were interrupted by the dark-skinned girl with unnervingly intense green eyes. She was attractive and she was talking to us, so we did not immediately tell her to get lost, even if we were plotting revolutionary terrorism in what had been up until that point (we assumed) our top secret headquarters.
I was arguing that we were without transport, that our initial attempt to obtain said transport had been a dismal failure and that we had yet to test any of our improvised explosive devices due to my belief that we would most likely blow ourselves up. Even if we did succeed in pulling it off, we would probably be arrested for sure this time and accomplish nothing more than destroy a useful source of information on the latest driving conditions for commuters.
Max was arguing the opposite view.
“Don’t be such a weenie. You know that GDI VP who has a house on the edge of town?”
I did not, but pretended that I did. This would ensure Max got directly to the point. “Uh huh.”
“You ever notice it’s always nice and sunny over that place? I mean, like, all the time? It never rains. No, I take that back. It always rains every other Tuesday morning from 10:15 to 10:35. And then it stops. Precisely.”
“You’re fulla shit.”
“Am not!”
“How did you determine this? Did you stake out his place for a month?”
“Not a month. Three weeks.”
“Why did you sit in front of this guy’s place for three weeks? Don’t you think you’d be spotted? I’m sure he’s got security systems out the wazoo.”
“Of course not,” Max said. “I planted a sentry cam. Far enough away to keep an eye on things, but not close enough that it’d be noticed. When I reviewed the footage, I found that it only rained twice the whole time. Both times it was a Tuesday morning. The rest of the time was bright, sunny and twenty-five degrees. We had shit weather in town for eight of those days. For us, it was pissing down rain and ten.”
“So you’re saying this guy has two thermostats in his house? One for inside and one for outside?”
Max nodded. “That is exactly what I am saying. Data doesn’t lie, man.”
“I am one hundred per cent with you on the whole revolutionary thing, but I think you’ve gone off the broad beam on the weather part.”
“Au contraire, Commander. Once we take away their control of the weather, we take away their control of us. It’s the first step on the road to freedom.”
“Or the nuthouse,” I muttered under my breath. At least the Weather Station was unmanned. If we did succeed in blowing it up, no one was going to get hurt. Except, probably, us. “Okay, though. Say we do manage to do it. What then? If they catch us, they’ll call us terrorists.”
“They’re not going to catch us,” Max said. “Besides, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
“Freedom from what? Nice weather?”
“The weather is just the tip of the iceberg,” Max insisted. “They run everything.”
“Who does?”
“HIG. It’s the largest private holding company in the world. They own oil and gas companies, defence contractors, tech firms, agricultural, think tanks, political parties…you name it!”
“Mmmm,” I nodded, trying to look like I agreed. From experience, I knew that it was a bad idea to get Max talking about HIG for the same reason that it was a bad idea to get my father talking about the pros and cons of the original Star Trek TV series versus its later spinoffs. Like an avalanche, it was easy to start, but it only stopped when it reached the bottom of the mountain after engulfing many innocents in the process.
I’m not big on conspiracy theories. Although I think it unlikely that Oswald acted by himself (unless you believe he loaded two different kinds of ammunition into that crappy Italian rifle and waited until shot #3 to use the hollowpoint), I think most of them are wishful thinking. We like to believe that things don’t just randomly slide out of control; that there really are great mysteries that can be decoded and solved. That if we look hard enough, we will find secret rooms where powerful people meet to decide the fate of humanity. Unlike Max, I just didn’t believe that level of control could possibly exist.
Aliens in Area 51. Explosive charges placed by work crews in World Trade Center plaza in the days before the planes hit. A human face carved on Mars. Blackbeard’s treasure buried in a sinkhole on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia.
Unlikely.
“So, as I was saying, what happens if we succeed?”
“Then they’ll know we’re on to them!” Max said. “Word will spread. They’ll start losing control one Weather Station and one tiny bit at a time. You and I will be the Marx and Engels of the next great revolution!”
From the Marx perspective, I pictured us as more of the Harpo and Zeppo variety, but I kept this to myself. “Okay.”
“Don’t you want to at least try to do something great before you die?” Max asked. “Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of people out there go through their lives like cows. They are herded together, stand where they’re told, munch grass, watch cars go by, defecate, procreate under supervision, milked or slaughtered. No matter what happens, I refuse to be a cow.”
This, I reflected, was why I hung out with Max. He might be borderline crazy and a future maximum security inmate, but at least he had ideas that extended beyond making the varsity volleyball team or getting into a top-tier university. He wasn’t a jock or robotic, violin-playing hyper-achiever. He wasn’t one of the stringy-haired, leather jacket-wearing rubbies, either. The ones who smoked, wore stained T-shirts for terrible thrash metal bands, and already had the hollow-eyed, defeated expressions of the shift workers they would undoubtedly one day become. In junior high, your demographic options for friends are extremely limited.
No, Max was none of those. In school, like me, he was a mostly quiet kid who got okay marks but was constantly being told that he could do much better if he only applied himself a little more. He was allergic to trying to impress people. Since he didn’t really care about marks, he saw no need to get great ones.
Max wasn’t an outlaw. He didn’t see the point in breaking any and every rule for the sake of it. The only thing that would achieve would be to waste practically every afternoon in detention, and, as far as Max was concerned, there were far more valuable things he could be doing with his time. Like plotting to overthrow the government. Or whoever might be controlling the government.
Max was a genuine rebel. Unbalanced and possibly dangerous, yes. But I didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he should have been dead years ago. There was no point in living the rest of his life like it was an English assignment to be properly formatted and handed in on time. People were too scared to live the kinds of lives they really wanted. Scared of poverty. Scared of disease. Scared of jail. Scared of being separated from the crowd. I had heard the speech many times.
I mostly agreed with it,
too. My dirty little secret was the fact that I was scared of all those things, too. Around Max, however, I tried to maintain a brave, revolutionary front.
It was around that point in the discussion that we realized we were not alone. We both recognized the girl who had somehow managed to sneak up on us – she was in our North American History and Biology classes – but until that moment had never said a word to either of us. Women did not routinely pass through our orbit. Our galaxy did not exactly contain an asteroid belt of female attention. We were short, somewhat scraggly kids who paid only minimal attention to our personal appearances and had no involvement in sports or extracurricular activities whatsoever. People probably thought we were pretty weird. We gained a certain amount of notoriety after the foiled convenience store robbery, but that was short-lived. Some people thought we were trying to score meth or too dumb to know we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“How did you find us?” Max said.
“I followed you,” she said, walking around us and into the headquarters. “Wasn’t exactly hard. So this is your headquarters, huh?”
“Hey wait!” Max said, jumping up to try to head her off. “Where do you think you’re going? This place is top secret!”
She grinned. “Look, I know you guys were trying to steal that truck, okay? There are easier ways to get your hands on transportation.”
“You’re not supposed to be in here!” Max said, running around and scooping up anything that looked vaguely incriminating.
I was more intrigued than alarmed. “How do you know we were trying to steal that truck?”
“I was watching,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been watching you guys for a while now.”
“Watching?” Max said. “Who do you work for? HIG? GDI? RCMP? CSEC? Who?”
She sat down on the chair recently vacated by Max. “So you guys are planning something big, huh?”