I stopped and looked at her. “At school, you mean? To whom?”
“To your friends,” she replied. Then, “Oh.”
I didn’t have to tell her that she and I hadn’t yet met when it had happened. All is fair in war. “Anyway. I was there last night when they brought his parents out of the water. I saw the daddy. He had the same adaptations as Agway.” I tried a cash advance on my credit card. It laughed in my face. I didn’t even bother to check my savings account. It had always been a joke. Savings accounts were for people with something left over to save. I took a deep breath. “Evelyn?”
“Yes?”
“Can you possibly lend me the money to take the waterbus back home, please?” The words hurt coming out of my mouth, like spitting out glass.
“Oh! Yes. Of course.” She dug in her purse and I looked away, ashamed.
“Wait a minute,” said Evelyn. Her hand was still in her purse. “Where you said your car was?”
I sighed. “At the mall by the medical centre.”
“So how you plan to get to your house when you reach Dolorosse?”
“Walk.” In my high heels, one of them broken. Over the rocky ground.
“And how long that will take, Chas… Calamity?”
I shrugged. “An hour, maybe.” More like two, and massive blisters on my feet, shoes on or off.
“No, that won’t do.” She snapped her purse shut, linked her arm through mine. “Come along.” She began walking me back through the mall.
“What? Come where?”
“Why are you walking like that?”
“I broke my shoe. Evelyn, I have to get home.”
“And I will take you home. Let me just see if Samuel’s finished work yet.” She pulled a phone out of her purse, hit speed dial.
“Samuel? Hello, my love. Surprised you’re at home at all. No, I’m at Courtice Plaza. I’m with a friend. No, I…” She giggled. “After you know I don’t have eyes for anyone but you. Listen; you can come and get us? Me and my old school friend Calamity. We have to take her home to Dolorosse.”
I knew that tone so well. Had heard it a million times in the school cafeteria as Evelyn organized her posse to do just what she wanted them to. I pulled my arm out of hers. “You don’t have to take me anywhere. Just lend me the waterbus fare. I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” I had no idea how I was going to do that, but never mind.
“What?” Evelyn asked me. Into the phone, she said, “Hold on a minute, nuh?” She took the phone away from her mouth. “Calamity, we’re going to take you. All right? End of story.”
Anger was like a red mist in front of my eyes. She started to talk to Samuel again. I turned on my heel and walked away from her. Maybe a passer-by would lend me waterbus fare.
“Calamity!”
I ignored the sound of shoes tap-tapping behind me. I headed for one of the exits.
“Calamity!” She caught up to me, put her hand on my elbow. I yanked it out of her reach.
“No, Evelyn. You can’t order me about. You’re not queen of the schoolyard any more. You can’t always have your way. Go home to your beloved Samuel and leave me alone!” I could feel my eyes springing water. Somehow, the blurriness made the garish micro minis on the mannequins in the clothing store look even more shameful, if that were possible. I was to the steps, making my way down with that careful, crabways movement that old women in heels adopt. When had I become an old woman?
“Calamity. I’m sorry.”
I stopped. She was standing at the top of the stairs, cell phone dangling from one hand.
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I was so awful to you.”
Good thing I was holding on to the bannister, or surprise would have pitched me down those stairs one time. “When?” I asked, milking it.
“Just now. I should have asked you if you wanted a lift. But Samuel says he’s willing to take you, and we—”
Her words were music. I wanted more. “When else?”
She drew herself up. “How you mean? I said I was sorry.”
“Not sorry enough.” I kept clanking down the stairs.
I heard her give a deep, shuddery breath. “Calamity, come back here! You stubborn as any mule, you know?”
I spat the words at her over my shoulder. “That’s a change. You used to say I was as ugly as a mule.”
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” she screamed, her voice weepy.
I kept going.
“All right, then! Jesus. In school.”
I stood still a moment, puffing. It was work to walk down stairs nowadays. I used to run up stairs like I was ascending to heaven. And Cedric had just told me it was only going to get worse. “In school what?” I said.
“I was horrible to you in school, all right? I been thinking about it ever since I saw you the other night. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said all those awful things. I’m sorry I egged my friends on to make fun of you. I’m sorry I super-glued your locker shut.” She snuffled.
“I don’t know where your necklace went, Evelyn.”
She crossed her arms and looked away. “Huh. Well, I don’t know about that.”
“It was only a game we used to play, anyway! Sometimes I got lucky.”
“You told Mr. Baldwin where to find his calculator. You found Ahmed’s maths book behind the tennis court. You found Ulric’s tobacco pipe. But the one time your best friend asked you for help, you wouldn’t. I still don’t understand why. That was my favourite, my birthday necklace, with the moonstones.”
“You lost your necklace a few weeks after Mumma dis-
appeared.”
“So what?”
I sucked my teeth. “Think, nuh? My mother got lost at sea. What you suppose happened to her?”
“That she probably fell out of her boat somehow and, you know, drowned.”
If she’d even gone out to sea that night. “And what you think her body would have looked like if it had been found?”
“Bloating, necrosis, morbidity.” The doctor’s training had kicked in. “Extremities nibbled away by…oh.”
“Exactly. You think I wanted to find my mother’s body in that condition?” Or chopped to pieces? I thought. “So I stopped the finding game. Completely. And it went away. Even if it was only luck why I found things, I turned it off. I’m a blasted luck repellent, let me tell you.”
She was crying, the tears glowing neon, reflecting the stores’ lights. She had always been able to turn those tears on and off at will. She sniffed. “I was jealous of you, you know,” she said.
“What?” I took two steps back up the stairs.
“I was. So envious I hated you sometimes.”
“What the fuck did you have to be jealous of me for?”
“They let you climb trees. They bought you toy trucks. You know how bad I wanted a Johnny Lightning Plymouth Duster?”
She saw my blank look.
“Hot Wheels! The Plymouth Duster was acid green.”
“Ah.”
“And you could swear!”
“Not in front of Dadda. Mumma didn’t mind. She thought it was funny.”
“Both my parents minded. Ever had your mouth washed out with soap?”
I screwed up my face. “No.”
“Daddy only did that to me once. He never had to do it again. To this day, I can’t stand the smell of Pears soap.”
“So you got your mouth washed out with soap. My mother died, Evelyn. Ran away from me and Dadda and got her damned self drowned. You made my life in school hell for five years because your parents wouldn’t buy you a toy car?”
“When you wouldn’t help me look for my necklace, I thought you’d stopped liking me.”
“Not then, no. But you sure made certain I hated you after-
wards.”
“I’m sorry.” She was sobbing outright now.
“Oh, stop it. It’s not your fault Mumma disappeared. But it is your fault that you were being a jealous, selfish brat who couldn’t l
ook beyond her own spoiled self long enough to see how I was grieving.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
My feet hurt. I sat on the stairs, sideways so I could still see Evelyn. Her tears slowed a little. She watched me cautiously. She looked bloody pitiful. “So,” I said, “you were jealous of me because I could get away with saying ‘fuck’ every so often?”
She sat too, at the top of the stairs. “And because you lived in such a cool place, and your parents let you climb trees, and you got to row to the mainland in your own boat.”
“Whenever I had to do that, it felt like my arms were coming out of their sockets by the time I reached the mainland.”
“Yes, but you got to do it. Mummy drove me everywhere, made me sit properly in the car in my proper little dresses with my knees properly together. Proper little China girl.”
“Oh, poor you.”
“You don’t give a damn, do you?” She hit the word “damn” shyly, like someone unused to saying it.
“No, I don’t. I don’t because of you putting mud in my hair, because of you getting everyone else to call me ‘Charity Girl,’ because of watching you get everything: all the nice clothes; all the nice lunches; all the nice friends.”
“Yes, if you think of it that way, I guess I wouldn’t care about me either.” She shuddered.
“Lots of people cared about you. You had all those friends. The teachers loved you. Your parents loved you.”
“And I never once climbed a tree, or rowed a boat to one of the out islands.”
“You never rowed a boat because you never had to. Poor little rich girl.”
“Rich little poor girl.”
“Well, that was original! What the rass you would know about being poor?”
“Nothing. And what you would know about having to be perfect all the time, to be good in Home Ec and Maths? Nothing.”
“They expected me to be good in all of them. And they were both right in the same school with me. They knew everything I did. So don’t give me that shit.”
“Huh.” It was part rueful laugh, part sob. “You right, you know? No wonder we were friends.”
“Used to be friends.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop it. You wearing it out.”
She sniffed again, wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “God, that’s unhygienic,” she said. “If the nurses saw me, they would be horrified. Calamity, you don’t have a tissue or something I could use?”
I sighed and trudged back up the few steps towards her. “Here.” I pulled out the pack of tissues I carried in my bag and handed it to her.
“Thank you.” I sat on the step below while she cleaned up.
“Whatever happened to your father?”
“Dadda? Dead. A few weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
My belly grumbled. I hadn’t eaten since lunch. Food was at home.
“What was it?” she asked. “Your father, I mean.”
“Lung cancer.”
She handed me back the packet with its remaining tissues. “That’s a hard way to go.”
“It’s why I’ve been living on Dolorosse. I was looking after him for the two years before he died.”
“Just you?”
“He only had me.”
“They never found—”
“Mumma? No.”
Silence.
“Well,” she said, “can I?”
“Can you what?”
“Call Samuel. Take you home.”
Silence. I looked down at my toes in their pinching, cracked-heel shoes. Those shoes had cost me half a month’s salary.
“Goddamned baby Jesus on a tricycle in frilly fucking pan-taloons.”
“That means yes?” She tried a tentative smile.
I met her eyes. I did not smile back. Hers faded. “Let’s go, then,” I said.
She nodded and got her cell phone out again.
Michael sat on my single bed, his whole body tense as a spring. I stood on the floor near him. I sucked in my lower lip, then remembered Dadda saying he could always tell when I was nervous, ’cause I tried to suck my bottom lip right off. Michael glanced at me, gave a shame-faced giggle. “Look at the two of we,” he said.
I smiled at that, though it felt like a school of tiny fish was making sport in my belly. “Yes, look,” I replied. I sat on the bed beside him. “Dadda still in town. Going to a fancy restaurant with that woman from the post office. They tell me they ‘on a date.’”
“That’s sweet,” whispered Michael. In his lap, his hands were shaking.
“It’s revolting. Dadda have no business dating.”
Michael pulled back and looked at me. “What, you want him to stay alone forever? Five years now your mother’s gone.”
I didn’t want to think about it. “He not coming home till late tonight,” I said. I reached to touch Michael’s shoulder, but overwhelmed by a sudden terror that he might think I was starting anything, I smoothed a section of the bedsheet instead. Michael and I had always been easy physically with each other, hugging and holding hands. But this was different. Staring at the faded paisley pattern on my childhood bedsheets, I said, “I don’t know what to do now.”
Michael barked with laughter. “God, you’re asking me? Ain’t this was your idea?”
I sighed. It came out trembly. “I know. But—”
“You’re a girl, Chas! I always thought I would do this with a man first.”
“You did? Always?”
“Yes.”
“But you never told me.” I always hoped I would do it with you.
“I never told anybody.”
Even-steven, then. I never told you my secret, either. My throat was constricting. I swallowed around the obstruction. “You want to not do it, then?” Please, I thought. But I didn’t know which: please yes or please no. I didn’t dare look at Michael’s face, so I concentrated on a point below his chin. There was a vein jumping in his long neck. My eyes grazed over his body. I could see a bit of his chest where his white school shirt was open a bit at the collar. He was propped up on his elbow, one hand lightly covering the other. His hands were wide and strong, the nails buffed. Even in his tailored school greys, it was obvious that his legs were hard and shapely. He was a calypso of muscle, style, and grace, and he was beautiful. Too beautiful for me.
“Let’s—” I blurted out, intending to call the whole project off.
“I want to do it,” he stammered at the same time.
Well, that was that, then. I pulled my eyes up to make four with Michael’s. He was looking at me gravely, his face ashen. “Like you frightened, too?” I asked him.
A rueful smile. “What you think, girl?”
I reached for his shoulder, instead found my hand settling in the warm hollow high on his collarbone, between his shoulder and his neck. He shuddered. He sat up with a jerk, his face rushing in towards mine too quickly. His lips were pursed for a kiss. It looked silly, and terrifying.
My brain shut down. I closed my eyes, made to kiss him back. Our foreheads met with a clunk.
“Ai!” yipped Michael. “Ow, man!” He held his head and laughed, looking sidewise at me. I put my palm to my own aching forehead and laughed along with him. The release of tension only made me even more shaky than I’d already been, but laughter; that was familiar. That we could do together. We giggled, then chuckled, then roared till we were both helplessly weak. Our arms tightened around each other. We were lying in each other’s embrace. How had that happened?
I gulped. I looked up at Michael. “Lewwe try that again, nuh?” I said. I didn’t pay any mind to how my voice croaked out the words.
“What, the head-bumping part?” he asked with a broad smile, which vanished when he followed it up with “or the kiss part?” His voice broke on the word “kiss.”
“The kiss,” I whispered. I put a hand on the back of his neck. It was warm and slightly oily, the way flesh gets after a day in the tropical sun. His neckbones pressed
into the flesh of my hand. Skinny Michael. I pulled his head slowly towards mine. He moved with the touch, leaned in close, stared at me with a look of wonder. So close I could count all his pores. No. I wasn’t going to burst out laughing again. This was too important.
His lips and mine touched. Warmth of lips, my eyes crossing as I tried to keep them in focus. A giggle threatened to erupt from my throat. I closed my eyes. That was more romantic anyway, wasn’t it? Why didn’t all the blasted sex books tell you the important details?
I was so busy trying to deal with each new sensation that I nearly missed it when Michael’s tongue came fluttering nervously against my closed mouth. Startled, I opened my lips a little way, let him in. His tongue tasted warm. That was the only way to describe it. Warm and friendly and muscular and basically harmless. I touched it with my own.
His breath was coming faster. A small moan vibrated up from his throat, entered mine. I was getting damp inside my panties, I could feel it. Was that okay? Would it disgust him? Frozen, I kept kissing him, not knowing what to do next. He smelt faintly of sweat, a good smell. His face filled my field of vision. I fumbled with one hand until I found the buttons of his shirt, started to undo them. My hand descended until it touched his belt. That meant I was close to… I jerked the hand away.
Michael sighed, took his mouth from mine. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. With a determined look on his face, he put his hands to my waist. He undid the belt that cinched my school uniform. I thought my heart would explode, it was beating so quickly. “You want me to take the uniform off?” I asked him. He nodded, still not looking me in the face. I stood, pulled the pinafore over my head, let it fall to the floor. Even in the warm air, my legs pimpled from the chill of being uncovered. My fat legs. Some men liked them that way; I knew that from the comments I got when I walked through the streets of Cayaba. But some didn’t like it. I sat quickly back on the bed, so that the tails of my white blouse gave me some coverage.
Michael sat up and yanked his shirt open. But he hadn’t undone the very last button, the one below the level of his belt. It popped off and flew across the bed. He tried to smile at that, his face a rictus. I just looked. I couldn’t stop myself. Michael and I had been swimming together many times. I’d seen his chest before. This time, the sight of it made my mouth dry. Before I could think about what I was doing, I unbuttoned my own shirt and drew it off. At the bottom edges of my vision I could see the white flashes that were my cotton panties and bra. I was a little, raw girl, trying to do something big.
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