by Katia Rose
“Two scoops of passion fruit in a waffle cone, please.” She shoots me a smug glance. “I’ll have coconut shavings and rainbow sprinkles on top.”
“I’ll have two scoops of the maple bacon,” I tell the guy behind the cash register when he looks at me, “also in a waffle cone.”
I get my wallet out and pay as Stéphanie thanks me.
“You’re such a guy,” she teases, once we have our ice cream in hand. “Maple bacon? You can’t enjoy an ice cream cone unless it’s got meat on it?”
My cone starts dripping almost as soon as we step outside.
“Have you ever had maple bacon ice cream?” I demand. “It’s amazing.”
“No, thank you.” She makes a disgusted face.
I hold my cone out in front of her.
“Try it,” I order. “Now.”
I expected her to take the cone out of my hand, but the whole world seems to slow down and then freeze when she flicks her eyes up to mine and leans towards the ice cream. She drags her tongue up the length of both scoops. Then she’s pulling away, and I can hear the sounds of the city again.
I cover the groan that rises in me with a cough. Stéphanie stares straight ahead, and I swear I see those pink patches appear on her cheeks again.
She knows exactly what she just did.
I find myself smiling. This girl is much, much more than meets the eye.
We’re only a block down from the bustle of Avenue Mont-Royal, and without discussing it, that’s where we head next. The street is crawling with pedestrians, all ducking in and out of the shops and restaurants as they try to minimize their time in the heat.
“I think the paparazzi just found us,” Stéphanie says, pointing to where two girls across the street are trying and failing to hide the fact that they’re taking pictures of us right now.
I wave and they look terrified for a moment before they smile and wave back, then take off running up the street.
“Does that happen a lot?” Stéphanie asks me.
We’ve both devoured most of our ice cream already, and she takes a bite out of her cone.
“Will I sound like a douche if I say I’m used to it?”
“You always sound like a douche,” she replies around a mouthful of waffle cone.
I laugh and bite into my own cone.
“I’m not actually used to it,” I confess. “It still feels fucking weird.”
Just last night there was a girl standing in the foyer of my apartment building, pretending to look like she was waiting for someone. I saw the way her eyes lit up when I walked in, though. She had what I call the ‘Fan Face’ on. I gave her the autograph she asked for and we took a picture together as she told me how much Sherbrooke Station’s music changed her life.
“Have you had to deal with any crazy people yet?” Stéphanie asks.
“There’s been some...overeager people, but no one totally crazy yet.”
“Watch out,” she warns. “You haven’t met my roommate. She loves you guys.”
We pass by a record shop. I’m itching to stop and flip through the ‘On Sale’ bins set out on the sidewalk, but Stéphanie is already walking towards the bookstore next door.
“Do you want to go in? Oh, wait.” She glances at what’s left of her ice cream cone. “We probably can’t bring these.”
Then she swallows the whole thing in one bite, and I’m left trying not to groan again.
Inside, the store is small and overstuffed. In addition to books, they sell stationary and kitschy desk ornaments. The whole place reeks of some sort of floral perfume. I prefer the haphazard shelves and musty scent of a used book store, but I watch Stéphanie as she pokes around, picking up notebooks to read whatever motivational bullshit they have printed on their covers before setting them back down.
She disappears around a corner and then starts calling my name.
“Ace, come look at this.”
I find her leaning over a table with an ornamental sign set on it that reads, ‘La Poésie.’ There’s a display of classic poetry set up: Byron, Whitman, Keats and the like, along with some more recent stuff like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Stéphanie’s holding up a book with a drawing of a black bird on the front, its wings spread in flight.
“Like your tattoo,” she says.
I swallow. “Yeah, like my tattoo.”
“That’s not why you got it, is it? Because of the poem?”
She taps the book’s cover. It’s a volume of Poe.
“Are you saying I don’t seem like the literary type?”
“I can’t see you sitting around reading books of poetry in your spare time”—she stops and grins—“but maybe there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
I trail a finger over a hardcover collection of Byron’s letters.
“Poetry is the reason I found music,” I admit. “When I was a teenager I tried so hard to write poems, and they were all shit. They were so bad even I knew they were shit, but when I started setting them to music they just...took off, like I’d breathed life into them.”
I hadn’t planned on telling her all that, but at the sight of the raven, with its feathers spread and it’s claws drawn up—almost exactly like my tattoo—the words just spill out.
“Poe was the first writer that really made me feel something. I found a book of his stuff by accident when I was only ten. I was way too young to understand most of it, but the way he created entire worlds out of nothing...I wanted to do that too. For the first time in my life, I had this urge to create.”
I pause and shake my head. “No, urge isn’t the right word. It was this need—this dark, painful, beautiful and soul-splitting compulsion to make something, to take all the things inside me and get. Them. Out.”
My fingers curl around the edge of the book. I hear the shake in my own voice. I can’t look up at Stéphanie. Instead, I turn around and leave the store.
“Hey.” She’s only a few seconds behind me, reaching for the top of my arm to stop me in my tracks. “Wait.”
The feel of her slender fingers, warm against my bicep even in the summer heat, and the sight of her white skin against the dark ink on mine are too much to handle. I go rigid, drawing in a sharp breath, and she lets go.
“Sorry,” she breathes, like she’s made a mistake.
Touching me was definitely a mistake, but I don’t know who’s going to suffer more from the consequences—me, or her.
“It’s okay,” I grunt.
It’s like I’m in two places right now: standing on a street corner with a gorgeous girl who makes my blood boil with the mere ghost of her fingertips on my arm, and crouched down in a dim corner of the Westmount Elementary School library. I used to sneak in there at recess. At first, I had no interest in reading; I only went so I wouldn’t have to go outside with the other kids. Spending an hour in the quiet, gloomy library was a million times better than all the screaming in the schoolyard.
I only opened that copy of Poe because of the cover. The school’s edition had a raven on it too, perched on the branch of a dead tree. I had to read it in quick snatches, always on the lookout so I could duck into a different aisle every time the librarian passed by.
“Ace? Ace, hello?”
“Hmm, what? Sorry?”
“I just said I should probably go,” Stéphanie tells me.
I reach up to scratch my neck, trying to seem casual instead of completely vacant. “Yeah, me too.”
“Thanks for the ice cream.”
“Thanks for the catharsis.”
She gives me the hint of a smile. “Anytime.”
When she heads off in the direction of the metro station, I stand outside the bookstore and watch her go. That perfect ass and those long, toned-as-fuck legs are even harder not to stare at when she’s wearing leggings. I can still feel her hand on my arm. I look down at my bicep, half-expecting to see that her fingerprints have melted into the ink.
10 Kamikaze || Walk the Moon
STÉPHANIE
&nbs
p; After three weeks of private classes, my sessions with Ace have become such a regular part of my schedule that it’s strange to remember there was a time when I didn’t tutor Montreal’s most famous rock star in the art of meditation.
“I still can’t believe you teach Ace Turner how to meditate,” my best friend, Jacinthe, drawls from where she’s putting mascara on in front of her mirror, reminding me that Ace and I’s arrangement is far from normal.
“It’s weird,” I tell her, the two of us speaking in our native French. “Sometimes I totally forget he’s famous, and then sometimes it’s all I can think about. It’s like there’s two of him, you know? The one I’ve seen in newspapers and heard on the radio, and the one I actually know.”
“Mmm,” she hums vaguely, her bottom lip dropping open as she coats her eyelashes one final time.
Jacinthe has much more experience in the famous people department than I do. She dances professionally and once spent a year on tour with a big time company, but now she mostly does things like movies and music videos. She also has a cult following on Instagram and picks up modelling jobs from time to time. Celebrities don’t often faze her.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come out tonight?” she asks me. I know her pout is because of the lipstick she’s putting on and not for me, but her pleading sounds genuine all the same.
“I teach an intermediate ballet class at nine in the morning tomorrow,” I remind her, “and you know I don’t like going out.”
We’re spending a few hours together at her apartment before I know a swarm of glamorous girls are going to swoop in and sweep her off into the night.
“Anymore,” she answers pointedly. “What happened to the old you, Stéphanie Cloutier-Hébert? You used to be fun.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “What happened is that I got my shit together and stopped destroying my own life.”
“Hein, attends.” She sets her lipstick down and turns to face me. Her bottom lip is dark red while the top one’s still nude. “I’m just kidding. I’m proud of you, and I support your decisions. That’s why I just spent the past three hours watching reruns of Yamaska with you when I could have been pre-drinking with all my bitches and hoes.”
She says the last part in English and makes what’s supposed to be a gangsta hand motion. I groan.
“Seriously,” Jacinthe urges, “I’m glad you’re not that girl anymore. You seem happier.”
You seem happier.
I’ve heard that from almost everyone who knew the ‘old’ Stéphanie, the one who would have been halfway through a bottle of vodka at this time on any given Friday night. I thought I was happy then, surrounded by people who would have done anything to get a piece of me. I thought I’d found a way to feed the fire inside me, the one that threatened to burn me up from the inside out. I thought if I laughed hard enough and sang loud enough and danced in enough crowded rooms pressed up against faceless men, I could be as happy as I told myself I should feel.
“There!” Jacinthe smacks her lips together and puts on a Bostonian accent. “Goy-juss! Just goy-juss!”
She is gorgeous. She’s three inches taller than me, with the same willowy body but slightly more boobs. Her hair brushes the small of her back when it’s down, and shifts between shades so much when she moves that I’ve never been able to decide if it’s brown or auburn.
We met at a dance competition when we were eleven. It was one of the only chances I ever had to compete as a kid, and I won my division. Jacinthe placed second. Her parents came over to demand who my coach was and where I took classes, and when they found out I didn’t have a coach and was only at the competition because one of my studio’s teachers had been nice enough to bring me, they brushed off the thought that I could be a threat to their daughter’s career.
I didn’t see Jacinthe much for a year or two after that, but we talked almost every night on MSN. When we finally got old enough to hang out without parental supervision, we were inseparable. We used to choreograph our own routines to Taylor Swift’s country ballads, shouting along to words we barely understood since neither of us spoke great English.
A car horn honks on the street, and Jacinthe glances out the window beside her. “Oh, they’re here.”
“In a car?” I ask. “Do I have to get all responsible and ask if you have a DD?”
“Yvonne’s family has a driver,” Jacinthe says breezily, like the answer should be obvious. She catches me staring at her and laughs. “Mon dieu, I sound like such an entitled bitch. How did I become such a douchebag, Stéph?”
She’s one of the only people I let call me Stéph.
“You’ve always been a douchebag,” I tease her.
She smoothes her ponytail in the mirror and then stands up, grabbing a purse that matches her burgundy bodycon dress.
“Do you want to call an Uber or something?” she asks me.
“I live eight blocks away, Jazzy. Some of us still know how to walk.”
We leave the giant studio apartment Jacinthe’s parents found for her after I announced I’d be moving out of our old place. We’re only on the third floor, but we take the elevator because Jacinthe’s heels are so high they’re an actual health hazard.
We say our goodbyes in the foyer. I head up the sidewalk, the strains of music drifting out of open windows reminding me of that first walk I took with Ace. We’ve taken a lot of walks since; we’ve gotten in the habit of ending our meditation classes with an ice cream or a trip to Parc Lafontaine. That first walk was the only time we’ve been together in the dark, though.
In some ways, I feel like I’m only getting to see one side of Ace, meeting him in the daylight. He’s the kind of man who was made for the night, for singing on stages in smoky rooms with that rasping, keening voice of his. He calls to the darkness in people, croons to it, coaxes it out.
I shiver despite the warmth of the night, suddenly glad I don’t get to see that side of him.
My apartment building comes into view. I can see our kitchen window from here. Molly’s face and cloud of curly hair comes into view for a moment, her head bent over the sink before she disappears again. I lean my back up against a lamppost, not quite ready to brave the stuffy air of our apartment just yet. The heat wave is finally breaking, but our place doesn’t have enough ventilation for that to make much of a difference.
I pull my phone out to check the time and see I have a text notification from Ace. We traded numbers a week ago after he was late for a session and I almost walked out, assuming he wasn’t going to show.
Are you busy tonight?
I can’t figure out how seeing that question under his name makes me feel, but whatever it is, it sets my heart racing. I type and re-type about five different replies before I settle on one.
Sort of. I have class in the morning. Why?
He takes a few minutes to respond.
We just wrapped up a day of recording. I haven’t eaten in about nine hours and I’m at a pizza place near your street.
I ask him what that has to do with me being busy. His reply comes right away.
Care to join me?
Twenty minutes later, I’m sliding into a booth at a pizza chain as Ace takes the seat across from me. A large Hawaiian pizza sits on the table between us.
“You’re a bad influence,” I announce.
He smirks. “You are far from the first person to say that. I won’t deny it’s true, but how exactly am I being a bad influence right now?”
“This pizza,” I tell him, “and all the ice cream. I dance for a living. I have to maintain a very balanced meal plan, and you’re fucking it up.”
“I really don’t think your lithe physique is going to be endangered by some ice cream and pizza,” he argues.
“It’s not about weight gain or carbs or anything like that,” I explain. “I probably eat double the amount of food you do. It’s just that I try to put healthy stuff in my body. It does a lot of work for me, and I like to take care of it.”
H
e presses his palms together in front of his chest and bows his head.
“My body is a temple,” he mocks.
“My body is a temple!” I protest.
Ace laughs as I pry a piece of pizza out of the box. I thought he was exaggerating when he told me he hadn’t eaten for nine hours, but it seems I was wrong. I’m only halfway through my first slice when he reaches for his second.
“So,” he says, after making it all the way down to the crust, “what did you do today?”
“Was that meant to be condescending?” I ask. “Like, ‘Oh, I recorded a new album with my famous band today. What did you do with your little pleb life?’”
“Pleb?” he scoffs. “I would never use the word ‘pleb,’ and to answer your question, no. It was not meant to be condescending. I genuinely want to know what you did today.”
I don’t even have to say it out loud. My next question echoes between us without me voicing it.
Why?
Why does he care about what I did today? Why are we eating pizza together on a night when we’ve got no excuse to be in each other’s company, other than that we enjoy it? Why does it feel like the few feet of space between us is suddenly way too much to tolerate, especially when he’s staring at me the way he is now?
“I had a shower,” I blurt.
He drops his pizza. I blush.
Now the image of me, naked and wet, is hanging in the air between us along with the ‘Why?’
“That was this morning,” I rush to add. “Then I went to visit my mom. After that I had a contemporary class, and then I hung out with my friend Jacinthe. Hardly compares to recording an alternative rock album that’s probably going to sell thousands of copies.”
“Thousands?” he repeats. “You severely underestimate my band.”
We joke around some more, but there’s a tension lurking beneath our smiles. I can’t eat any more pizza, and despite how ravenous he just was, Ace doesn’t seem to be able to either.
“You want this?” he asks me, holding up the cardboard box as we step outside of the shop.
“Ben non, je t’en supplie. Please, no. Take it away."