Take the Stairs

by Take the Stairs (retail) (epub)

  “First blood on the curve!” yelled Cyclops in triumph. He whopped Three-speed on the back and knocked him over.

  The gang noticed me then, ready to do the jump. I saw their faces, surprised. Silver ducked his head and moved off the track. The others followed.

  “You’ll be hamburger, Newbie,” Cyclops called.

  I ignored him and started my ride before I got too scared to try.

  I sighted the best line over the jump and around the curve. Yet before I even got to the jump my body stiffened up and the bike travelled a bit away from me. Then I was on the ramp, nervous and jittery, and I told myself to see it through. No turning back now.

  My bike took off into the sky and there was nothing but air under me. I stopped myself from squeezing the brakes to get control—if I landed with my front tire locked I’d crash for sure. Then my front wheel hit the ground spinning and jetted me toward Drop Dead Curve.

  I wavered a little too close to the edge of the trail and pruned the bush with my helmet. My head spun and I fought the urge to plant my heels into the ground. Then I was hydroplaning across a mud puddle that the rainstorm had left behind. Fast enough that not too much goop got in my brakes and gears. I got through the puddle without plowing to a stop, and with a little more confidence. I had made the jump and I wasn’t down yet.

  I had a sudden, unexpected burst of energy. Where it came from I didn’t know, but suddenly I was stoked. I twisted like fire toward the curve.

  I remembered to slow down for the corner. I stayed on the upside of the trail and made a wide arch, looking only at the inside of the curve where I wanted to go next. With my weight on my outside pedal, I leaned hard into the corner until I almost fell to the inside.

  My front wheel made it over the loose rocks on the curve then I started accelerating again and in no time I had negotiated Drop Dead Curve clean. No crashes. I couldn’t quite believe I had done it. I pulled to a stop further down the trail and looked back to make sure.

  “I did it!” I yelled, shaking my fists at the sky and letting out a whoop of joy.

  In Dad’s car, my sister could beat me in a race any day, but I could make Drop Dead Curve. With the jump. On my beautiful old bike. It was incredible. I felt like I could ride up a vertical rock face with no problem. I was glad for the transit strike. I was glad for kicking man and smirking guy. Because everything had come together for this moment.

  Then Jumpster was running down the trail. On foot. She skidded to a stop in front of me and looked at me curiously. What was she thinking?

  “You were in the zone, weren’t you,” she said, so close I got a whiff of her flowery shampoo mixed with the salty scent of summer sweat.

  I was a little shaken, caught off-guard. I had never had the courage to look right at her. Her eyes were a gorgeous warm swirl of green and golden-brown. Her face was flushed from the heat, and a damp lick of hair swung down one side of her face.

  “I don’t know.” I’d heard them talk about the zone before, but I’d never been sure what they meant. I couldn’t tell if I had been in the zone or not, but I was loving the attention of Jumpster.

  Her wet, pink lips opened into a smile, and she didn’t take her eyes off me. Even when Cyclops hustled up behind her and broke the moment. Sometimes, I could kill him.

  “Maybe you just had a good tailwind,” she said as Silver and Three-speed showed. I noticed how none of them tried the curve.

  “Tailwind.” Cyclops took up the word and tried it out. He slapped me hard on the back. I struggled not to fall over. “Guess you earned your name, Tailwind.”

  I was speechless. I broke a grin. Maybe I did have an invisible force behind me, directing me. A tailwind.

  I sneaked another look at Jumpster.

  “I couldn’t have a better name,” I said to Cyclops, even though I couldn’t care less about him. Jumpster was still smiling at me.

  Grains of Sand

  Magda

  Apt. 220

  “PASSIONLESS PACKAGES OF PORK MEAT.” That’s what Mark called his parents, and most adults. Mark said that we would experience all of life. The joy and the sorrow. The love and the suffering. Not just feeble feelings, but violent emotions that would erase our power to think. Passions that would take complete possession of us.

  Mark wanted to become a writer. He wanted to move people with his words. He wanted to go to university for English after our world trip in the summer. He had his life planned out, and mine.

  I headed down the stairs to Mark’s room in his parents’ basement—where we had spent many passionate afternoons instead of going to science lab. The familiar smell of damp gym socks, musty books, and scented candles calmed me. Dusty sunrays streamed light through the two small windows. I could breathe deeper in this room, which was wider and longer than my whole apartment.

  Across the room, Mark was bent over his huge wooden desk, staring down at something he’d written, willing characters into life with the power of his pen. He didn’t look up. Was he writing me another poem?

  My toes dug into the deep carpet as I tiptoed around his waterbed toward him. He was a little too skinny with a narrow face, a pointed nose, and a thin mustache. Yet his hair was black silk under my fingers, and his blue eyes sparkled when he got excited about what he loved—writing poetry and me.

  I kissed the back of his neck and buried my nose in his sweet-smelling hair. Then I just said it, trying to still the quiver in my voice.

  “Don’t you wish we could keep the baby?”

  “Just a minute. I’m thinking.”

  His words were a knife, cutting through my hopes.

  I held my breath and waited, marvelling at the artist before me even though I was hurting. On his desk was The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Mark had read it three times, and I’d read it, too. Mark liked me to read the same books he did so we could talk about them. This book was about a man who woke up one day to discover that he had changed into a giant bug. Overnight, he had become a disgrace, an outsider, an alien. I could relate. I woke up to discover a baby growing in my belly.

  “Huh?” Mark finally looked up.

  I said it again, with less hope this time. “Don’t you wish we could keep the baby?”

  His faced looked pained. He let out a sigh. “We’ve talked about this already, Magda. We decided this together. A baby doesn’t fit with our plans. And we’ve already made the appointment.”

  I wasn’t really asking to change the appointment. I knew I was too young to have enough money, food, and even love for a baby. Only seventeen. I was able to have a baby, but not able to raise one. Something didn’t seem right about that. Still, Mom had dropped out of high school to raise me. But I didn’t want her life. I didn’t want to live in the Building forever. It was too confining, too limiting. At the Building I was only the mistake my mother had made when she was fifteen.

  “Hey, Sidekick?” Mark tried to tease away the dark clouds that were gathering around us. He didn’t like the usual love names—sweetie, honey, snuggle-bunny. He said they didn’t mean anything because everybody used them too much.

  Mark didn’t get it. When I asked him if he wished that we could keep the baby, he was supposed to say yes. Then we would hold each other and cry together about how we couldn’t. About how we were kept in chains. How we had the bodies of adults, but were only given the responsibilities of children. And how we were blamed for messing everything up.

  Yet he didn’t get it.

  “We can’t keep it, Magda. You know why we can’t do that.”

  A lump grew in my throat.

  “He’s not an it.” I could feel the baby was a boy.

  “You know what I mean.” He tried to hug me but I stiffened and pulled away. Mark shrugged and turned back to his writing. I saw the hurt look on his face and was glad.

  I knew all the reasons why we couldn’t keep our son. We had talked and talked and talked about it. Yet Mark was supposed to pretend. He was supposed to understand that I needed to mourn with him. M
ourn the loss of our child.

  Petra would have tried to help, but she’d vanished in the summer. If only she were here. But then, I guess I wasn’t there for her.

  If I told Mom, she would understand how I wanted to make something with Mark, but she would never listen to talk of keeping the baby. According to her, I was supposed to make different choices than she had. Lead the life that she couldn’t.

  Only Mark could understand how a baby would be so nice—someone for him and me to love. Someone we could hold onto forever.

  * * *

  I KEPT THE APPOINTMENT. Mark came, too. The hospital was an ancient, brown brick building with several modern sections awkwardly built on. I travelled down the dingy hall, flat on my back in a crinkly blue robe. Mark jogged beside me, holding my hand in his limp grip. I was afraid they would wheel me past mothers admiring their new babies behind smooth glass, but we saw no mothers, no babies.

  The nurse dropped Mark off at a crowded waiting room. Mark ducked his head and hurried in. He had his writing pad and his favorite mechanical pencil ready. I tried to say goodbye, but the words got caught in my throat.

  Thankfully, I was sedated—calmed into a false sleep. A sleep that could obliterate the harsh truth, for a short time, anyway. For only in a drugged state could I allow the unspeakable to happen. Allow those few living cells to be pulled from my body.

  I woke later to a stabbing pain in my gut and the warmth of blood between my legs. The room was spinning, expanding and contracting. I shivered under a thin blanket and inhaled a smell like floor polish. I tried to lift my head off the pillow, but a lead weight had replaced my brain. “Mark?”

  A nurse came instead.

  “Just rest. Shh. You’re at the hospital.” A mask covered her mouth but her eyes were friendly.

  Then I remembered why I was there. The baby was gone. I shut my eyes to force the tears back. I wanted no pain. No feeling. Anesthetic.

  “Don’t come back to me again,” the doctor said at my six-week check-up. “Abortions are not birth control. Take precautions. I will not help you again.”

  As if I hadn’t taken precautions. As if the condom had never broken and my pills were one hundred percent effective. As if I had planned for it to happen.

  * * *

  I WAS NUMB FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THAT—afraid to feel, unable to cry. Even after my body had healed, I couldn’t touch Mark, and Mark didn’t try to touch me. Maybe he didn’t want me anymore.

  Graduation came and went. Mom gave me a present. A donation toward my ’round-the-world trip with Mark. I had been saving for a year, working at the grocery checkout. Now I had enough to go. To leave my life behind and find a new one.

  The morning of our trip, Mark and I sat in his sunny basement room with our gear spread between us, each sewing a Canadian flag onto a backpack. Today, we would load our backpacks with our sorrows and our dreams. Today, we would take off in a plane. Today, I figured, was the day our baby should have been born. Alexander. I had named him Alexander.

  He had Mark’s black hair and my round face. I could catch glimpses of him playing on the floor between Mark and me as we packed. Gurgling happily. A line of drool sliding down his chin. Shining innocence and rainbow love at me with big pancake eyes.

  He was my imaginary child. I had let him slip away, but he was happier where he was. Because he would never hear the slap of anger. He would never feel the cool breeze of Mark’s selfishness. He would never know my betrayal. He would grow up with love, play in green parks with budding trees, and eat sugary snacks in the sticky-sweet sunshine. He would be safe in his motherless, fatherless world.

  I finally wept. Tears that flowed a river of sorrow from my body. My baby was dead but not forgotten.

  Mark watched my tears, but he didn’t hold me. I wanted him to cry, too—find some way to celebrate death and rebirth.

  “Come on, Sidekick,” he said finally. “Are you homesick already? Don’t worry. It’s just jitters. You’ll be better on the plane.” He pulled a paper from his back pocket. “Here, this will cheer you up.” He read his latest poem—his thin mouth pumping words at me like bullets.

  Lovers,

  Like grains of sand,

  Rolling and bumping against each other, Groping,

  To quell the aloneness

  Of human clay

  With sensual illusions

  But never,

  Never finding the life-love of touch.

  “Mark, you do understand! We’ve been divided since the baby. So alone. But now …”

  “Baby?” His astonished eyes showed that he had managed to forget. Then the shadow of a memory passed across his face. A spasm, then it was gone. “Oh, that. I thought we were finished with that.” A pause as he wiped his mind clean of the mess. “Powerful poem, isn’t it?” Mark beamed at me with a sunny smile, his blue eyes glinting.

  I cried more tears. Not because of Mark’s poem. Not because I would never feel Alexander’s touch. Because I saw that Mark—with all his talk of passion—was choosing not to feel. Not to feel the loss of Alexander. Not to feel the torment I felt.

  “Glad you like it.” He folded the paper and put it back in his pocket, still smiling. Then he pushed the backpacks, clothes, and other gear aside. He wiped my tears, wrapped me in his insubstantial arms, and kissed me.

  His lips were thin and dry. Kneeling on the scratchy carpet, I remembered hours of delicious nonstop kisses, never getting enough. I remembered when we discovered the broken condom—how I had joked that he’d be buying diapers soon. I could afford to laugh then, because I couldn’t get pregnant on the pill. I wasn’t making the same mistakes my mother had. I guess the joke was on me.

  Mark kissed my neck and ran his hands through my hair. His lips pressed mine against my teeth. His fingers were prodding and he smelled sour. Yet I refused to pull away. Mark may choose not to feel, but I never would. I squeezed my fingers into the flesh of his shoulders and cried harder.

  * * *

  AT THE AIRPORT WITH MARK. We were burdened with backpacks, airplane tickets, and a fistful of traveller’s checks. Mark’s parents had dropped us off, waved goodbye to us as we entered the boarding area, and aimed their Volvo for home. We checked our backpacks, and Mark started to talk. I didn’t. I listened.

  “I can’t wait to get to London,” he said. “An adventure, Sidekick. An escape from mediocrity. Out to see the world—to taste all its treasures. To experience all its pleasures. To gather a writer’s wisdom. And who knows—maybe publish a couple of poems along the way? Who’s to say I couldn’t do it? There’s nothing holding me back. Nothing holding me down. I’m as free as a naked baby after a bath.”

  Baby? How could he talk about babies?

  I scrunched my ticket in my fist. I narrowed my eyes at him. He wouldn’t pretend we could keep the baby. He wouldn’t feel the pain with me. He wouldn’t even admit it had happened. And now he was talking about babies?

  A fire raged to life within me. Mark was still talking, but I had stopped listening. I was listening to myself. I didn’t want to go to England. I didn’t want to go with Mark. I didn’t want to be with him at all.

  I started to walk away. Mark noticed his audience was gone.

  “Hey, where are you going? We’re about to board.”

  I kept walking. I’d just been a mirror in which he could admire his reflection. He could find another mirror.

  “Sidekick, you’ll miss the plane.”

  I turned. Two lazy men in suits, bored with the wait, were watching us, their ties like tongues hanging out, drooling.

  “Sorry, honey-bunch-of-love. Can’t go,” I called across the divide between us, knowing the love name would annoy him.

  Mark’s weasel face showed shock and astonishment. He squinted his narrow eyes and shook his skinny head. “What?”

  “I can’t be your sidekick anymore.”

  “Magda! Don’t!”

  Mark lunged out of line then stopped, hesitated. The line began to surge through
the doors. He looked from me to the line, panic on his face. I knew he would be frightened alone, but I wasn’t sorry for him. Maybe it would make him feel.

  Mark stepped back in line. Shaking from my act of courage, I turned my feet toward the door. Mark didn’t call to me again. His dreams were calling to him and he was listening to them. Oceans lay between us now. We lived on different continents. Every step I took away from him carried me further along my own path—a winding, twisting journey with many choices, many directions.

  I left the boarding area. I left Mark. I would cash in my ticket and get my pack back somehow. Then maybe I would find a taxi—use my traveller’s checks to take me somewhere far away from the life that awaited me at the Building. Travel to a new city; find a job and an apartment. Maybe I could find Petra. Maybe I would go to college. Maybe I’d call my mom.

  Opportunity

  Flynn

  Apt. 606

  APARTMENT 601. HUNTER’S PLACE. I waited for the hall to clear. My heart ka-thumped in my throat. When the guy with the big cardboard box got on the elevator, I turned the doorknob, praying it would be locked.

  It opened. Damn.

  The place was dark. I hoped that Hunter would be asleep by now. There was no sound but it stunk like stale beer. Tony’s words and the thought of beer pushed me through the doorway and into the kitchen. I could hardly see. I tiptoed in my sock feet, tripping over Hunter’s cat on the way to the fridge.

  “Yowl!”

  I swallowed a scream. The cat darted under the table. One lonely plastic chair was pulled up to it. I ducked, ready for Hunter’s big fist to find me—to bash me for sneaking into his place.

  Silence. I breathed out slow. Where was he? Why was I doing this?

  Earlier that evening, Tony and I had been hanging out in front of the Building. A Saturday night and we were dry. Nothing to do and no money to buy some fun.