Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility

by Theodora Armstrong

  “Yeah, I guess. It doesn’t make her sad.” I mean the last part as a question, but my voice comes out flat and dull. Elgin puts an arm around my shoulder. “I’m fine,” I say, but he pulls me closer and wraps both arms around me. I nestle in closer to him, his breath in my ear. For a second it feels like he’s going kiss me, but he doesn’t. Kate’s been gone awhile and I wonder if she’s watching us from a distance — part of me hopes she is.

  When she comes out of the trees Elgin doesn’t move. I try to edge away, but he holds me tightly so I let myself sink back against him and try to look nonchalant. Kate stands in front of us with her hands on her hips. It’s the first time I’ve seen her look awkward. She looks at Elgin then looks at me, propping herself up against the wall next to us. “You guys talking about me?”

  “Yeah,” Elgin says. I can tell by the way he says it he wants to mess with her.

  “What’d you talk about?” she says.

  “We talked about why you two aren’t friends anymore.” Elgin finally lets me go.

  “What do you mean, not friends anymore?” Kate says.

  “I never said that.” I look at Elgin. “Tell her I didn’t say that.”

  “I’ll have another,” Kate says. Elgin grabs two more beers from his backpack, handing one to Kate and cracking the other.

  “So what, we’re not friends anymore?” Kate says, looking at me.

  “Elgin, why would you say that?”

  He shrugs and laughs, suddenly indifferent to the whole situation. “I’m going back to the car. I’m gonna to put on some music and smoke some more weed. Come if you want.” He walks off in the direction of the parking lot. “Come in peace,” he yells over his shoulder.

  Kate’s watching the falls. She looks angry, the mist and the noise engulfing her. Her anger is mute, but I can feel it like a heat coming off her body. She chugs her beer. “Want to go to the car?” I ask. I say it so quietly I don’t think she’s heard me. When she turns, her eyes have gone cool again and she’s smiling. “No, I don’t want to go to the car,” she says. I feel like I’m being lured into something and back away from her instinctively. “You know we came here for you,” she says, her smile broadening. The words should sound kind, but they don’t.

  “What do you mean?”

  In the parking lot Elgin has turned on the car, his high beams slicing through the forest.

  “Elgin thinks you’re lonely,” she says, staring at me like she’s looking for a reaction.

  “I’m sad about Max.” I can hear hip hop playing from the car and I take a step toward the music.

  “I mean lonely all the time.” Kate’s smile is gone. “You should know, Elgin is being nice to you because he feels bad.”

  “That’s not true,” I say, looking Kate in the eye.

  “He feels bad for you.”

  “We’re friends.”

  “He’s not your friend. He’s nice to everyone. He’s just that kind of guy,” Kate says, and now she’s smiling again, gently the way someone would if they were talking to a child. “I just don’t want you to be confused. That’s why I’m telling you this.” She reaches out to rub my arm, but I pull away from her.

  Elgin is making his way back from the parking lot, the headlights blacking him out. “Are you guys coming or what?”

  ~

  ELGIN SAYS WE SHOULD go to Mosquito Creek to get out of the heat. It’s too hot for late September — Indian summer. Everyone’s prickly from it. We sleep late, skip classes. So far no one has missed us. We spend the morning in bed together eating dry cereal. The milk’s gone bad. Elgin keeps the bedroom window shut against the highway noise and all I hear are our feet in the sheets and his deep breathing. We’ve had sex seventeen times. I keep track in my agenda book with a small x no one could decipher.

  After his mom leaves for work — I wait for the shower, the teakettle, the mug in the sink, the car out of the driveway — I get up and Elgin stays in bed. He loves to sleep. The most he’s ever slept is twenty-six hours straight, the night after his stepdad left. He told me he slept deeply, like someone had knocked him out. He says he never has dreams and I tell him that’s impossible. Even dogs dream.

  While he sleeps I look around the house. There’s not much that’s interesting, but it’s not about finding something secret or dirty. I open the same boxes and drawers and find the same things. All their windowsills have my finger marks through the dust. The bedrooms are always messy. His mom’s closet smells like body odour and something else — maybe the peppermint candies she’s always sucking. They never have any fruit. I’ve only ever seen Elgin eat cereal and microwaved sausage rolls dipped in ketchup. The couch has deep sags, like there are invisible bodies watching TV. I don’t know why it’s exciting — maybe because it’s not mine. Sometimes I feel like I’m not really here. It’s like being a ghost or a tourist. Sometimes I think about Kate’s bare feet in the exact same spots.

  I crawl back into bed and run my finger along each of Elgin’s eyebrows. “Wake up,” I whisper. His mouth twitches and I run my finger along his lips. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

  One year my parents took Carlie and me to Maui for Christmas. It was hot, but we strung Christmas lights on our balcony. I touched everything in the hotel room before we left — the TV, the lampshade, the towels, the hair dryer — like it was some sort of ritual. I wanted to because I loved it there. And maybe because I thought I’d never be back.

  PAUL SHUTS THE DOOR and takes a seat behind his big, crappy desk. If it fell on you it would kill you instantly. I’ve thought about that a lot in this office. “How many classes have you missed since the beginning of the year?” He picks up a pen and taps it against his lip. I have to go see the school counsellor every time I’m late now. The secretary is so tired of giving me late slips she barely acknowledged my presence this morning. Usually she makes a big deal, staring me down, huffing at the other secretaries, her fluffy bangs fluttering around for what feels like forever before she’ll fill out the slip. This morning she must have seen me coming; the late slip was sitting on the counter already filled out and she was back at her desk doing paperwork.

  “I’ve missed a few classes,” I say. “I’ve been sick.”

  “You look fine to me.” When Paul smiles he shows a mouth full of abnormally long teeth. One of his incisors is dead, grey and creepy. “What made you late this morning?”

  “I was sick to my stomach. Really sick. I was throwing up. Berries and seeds and something else, like animal fur or something.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “No, probably not.”

  There’s a photo sitting on the windowsill behind Paul’s head. A woman sits at a table scattered with half-empty dishes. There are candles burning as though the dinner is a celebration, maybe a birthday. She’s laughing and she looks young. Her hands are small like a girl’s. “Is that your daughter?”

  “That’s my wife.” Paul turns the frame away from me. “Do you have a doctor’s note?”

  “No. Do you think I should go to the doctor?” I look back quickly at the clock: ten to ten. Elgin’s probably still sleeping. “Could I have leukemia? Kids my age get that all the time, don’t they?”

  “I don’t think leukemia is common.”

  “I should get to class.”

  “Yes, you should, but you’re here.” He crosses his legs under his desk. Today he’s wearing tan-coloured Birkenstocks. I find his toes offensive even from a distance. He wears sandals in the winter too, but with socks. It’s hard to believe even when you’re sitting right in front of him. Some girls think he’s good-looking, but I don’t see it. All I see is that dead tooth. “Why are you here?” Paul says. When I look up he’s giving me the raised eyebrows and I wonder if he can tell I had sex this morning. He comes around and stands behind me where I can’t see him and talks about my opportunities, my potential,
my budding possibilities. He talks about flowers and loses me, then he asks me if I’m distracted by some of the guys at school.

  “No,” I say.

  He asks me if I still think about Max, but when he says his name what I see is a puffy, bloated body busting up on the jagged rocks along Ambleside Beach, the same rocks Kate climbed down on her thirteenth birthday when we were drunk on a shared beer. Her party dress ballooned around her in the water.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t think about Max.”

  Out the window Rana is smoking in the courtyard in plain view. Something has happened to her, like she decided to become a completely different person this year. She doesn’t take any bullshit anymore and she gets away with everything. Somehow at school she always manages to stay below the radar. At home is a different story. She sees me sitting in the office and sticks her tongue into her cheek like she’s giving a blow-job.

  “You and Elgin Murphy are dating?”

  I snap back to attention. “What?”

  “How long have you been seeing each other?” He’s sitting behind his desk once again, chin cupped in hand, leaning toward me like a girlfriend who wants all the gossip. His tactics are obvious to the point of being sad.

  “We’re friends.” I examine Paul’s face carefully and wonder how he found out about us. When Kate and Elgin broke up the whole school was devastated, like the world stopped making sense and all hope was gone. It was a load of crap and I would have told that to anyone if anyone had bothered to ask me. Everyone wanted to know why, but there was no reason, things just died the way things do and Elgin and Kate went back to eating lunch in their regular spots, Kate in the drama room with friends, and well, no one ever really saw Elgin eat lunch before he was with Kate, so he just went back to wandering through the field and the smoke pit and now I guess he’s with me. The alcove beside the library is still empty.

  “We hang out sometimes.”

  Paul is smiling and nodding, wanting a little more. Could he actually be spying on me? Would Paul crouch in the pine tree outside my bedroom window? Can you climb a tree in Birkenstocks? I squint and he picks up his pen again and runs it along his bottom lip. “You’re friends, though?” he says.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  “He’s barely attended any classes this year,” Paul says, flipping through attendance records. “Do you know what’s going on with him?”

  “Nope.”

  Paul looks out the window and catches Rana taking a long drag from her cigarette. She drops it quickly and heads for the cafeteria. “I worry about you guys,” he says, shrugging his shoulders like it doesn’t really matter whether he does or not. It’s hard to tell who he’s talking about specifically. “If you see Elgin, tell him I’d like to talk to him? Let’s make grade ten a better year, okay?” He goes over to his bookcase and fidgets with the spines of the books, pulling one out and then pushing it back in. “I gave you my cell number if you ever need to talk.”

  “Sure.” I pick up my books and make a phony attempt to look like an enthusiastic student.

  “I’m here for you guys.” He pats my shoulder and squeezes my arm. “Use me.” The warning bell for second block rings. As I stride out of the room, I look at Paul over my shoulder and catch him staring right at my ass.

  I MAKE IT INSIDE the portable before the second bell rings, but I can feel Mrs. Sasaki watching me the whole way to my desk. She makes some kind of joke about having to put an exponential number next to my absences. It’s stupid and everyone laughs and then we learn how to graph the sine or the cosine or something like that. The portable is like a huge oven. I imagine the principal opening the door at the end of class and finding us all baked and crispy. Rana is sitting beside me gouging a big long mark down her desk with her compass. She turns to me and mouths this sucks dick and I wonder where she suddenly got such a foul mouth. She pulls her cigarettes out of her backpack, stuffing them into her pocket and raising her hand to go to the bathroom. I slump down in my chair and check my phone. Elgin’s sent me two text messages already.

  When the bell rings, I’m one of the first ones out of the class and I go stand in the thick weeds behind the portable to call Elgin. I twist a long piece of grass around my finger and after the first ring he picks up. “Let’s go for a swim,” he says. I can tell by his voice he’s pacing. He hates being in the house by himself.

  Mrs. Sasaki walks around the corner of the portable and I know she’s trying to catch me smoking. I turn my back to her, but she walks around in front of me to tap her watch before heading back to the classroom. The bell sounds and I peek around the portable. The parking lot is quiet and everyone is in their classes. I can hear the sound of hundreds of pencils scratching.

  CARS WHOOSH ABOVE ON the overpass as Elgin pedals hard up the steep part of the trail that leads to Mosquito Creek. I’m perched on the back of his bike, one hand on his shoulder for balance. The sweat collecting on his T-shirt forms a wet band down the curve of his back and two others under his arms. He stops by a natural pool deep enough to swim in and we strip down to our underwear. The leafy trees glow pale green in the heat and the evergreens look dry enough to ignite, like one misplaced cigarette butt could send the whole forest up in flames. In the distance I can still hear the cars speeding along the highway. My gaze floats up to the big pine trees and I think about how from far away the forest looks perfect, like every tree has been chosen for its spot on the mountain, but up close it’s messier. There are rotten logs with hornets’ nests and thick, sticky spiderwebs and dried pine needles stuck to everything. Kate and I used to come here when we were younger and I wonder if she’s the one who first brought Elgin here. “I like this spot,” I say, slipping into the pool, pretending I’ve never been here before.

  “My mom and I used to pick blackberries under the highway,” Elgin says, jumping into the water. “They always tasted like gasoline.”

  “That’s disgusting.” I float on my back, let Elgin slip his fingers through mine and pull me around the pool. “Why’d you eat them?”

  “They were there,” he says, releasing me and ducking underwater beneath my body, coming up the other side and spraying water droplets over me. “I kind of like the taste,” he says. “I’ll go pick you some.”

  “No, thanks.” I close my eyes. He traces my body with his fingertips. The mushrooms we took at his house start to kick in, every sensation multiplying.

  “You should stay over tonight,” he says, his lips brushing my ear underwater, sending shivers over my scalp, down my spine to my fingertips.

  “I don’t think your Mom will like that.”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  “She doesn’t like me.” For some reason this makes me laugh, maybe it’s the mushrooms. The evergreens dip down and I stretch my arms up trying to touch them.

  “What do you tell your parents?”

  “That I’m at Kate’s.” The water feels like oil over my skin, colours itself pink and then back to green. “My shrooms are really working,” I say, rubbing my hands over my face, staring wide-eyed at Elgin.

  “Really? I don’t feel anything. Maybe I need more.” He wades over to his pile of clothes and pulls the baggie of mushrooms out of the pocket, eating another stem. “They still think you’re friends?”

  “With Kate?” I’m playing with my cheeks, hollowing them with my fingertips. “My parents don’t know anything.”

  We climb out of the water and sit on a flat rock across from each other, legs crossed, knees touching, transfixed, like it’s hard to break eye contact. “If it’s any consolation,” Elgin says, “my mom hated Kate too.”

  “Sure, that makes me feel better.”

  “She called her a tramp.” Elgin laughs at the word. “Who says that? She assumed we were sleeping together.”

  “You were.” I reach out and touch Elgin’s nose.

  “Is that what Kate tol
d you?” He kisses the tip of my finger.

  “What do you mean?” I peer up into Elgin’s face.

  “Hey,” he shrugs, “it’s not like I didn’t want it to happen.”

  “Why are you telling me this right now?” I hop off the rock back into the water and paddle a circle in the pool. “I’m so fucking high.”

  “You asked,” Elgin says, kicking water at me. “Is it a big deal?”

  “She lied.” I swim up and pull Elgin back into the water, wrapping my legs around him.

  “To who?” He pushes the wet hair out of my face.

  “To everyone.”

  “Did she?”

  “Jesus,” I say. “I don’t know.”

  A fat, angry horsefly circles the water, weaving between us. I swat at it, but it keeps coming back. It buzzes near my face and I throw myself under the water, my legs still wrapped around Elgin’s waist. The iciness electrifies my skull, but I try and stay under as long as I possibly can, until the air presses against the walls of my chest and I start to get dizzy. The water is a shattered mirror and I can see Elgin, a million pieces of him, swatting and splashing at the bug. He stops and the mirror fuses. I glimpse something, more of a feeling than a sight, as he stares through the water at me. His hand reaches in and pulls me to the surface, the air burning my lungs. The horsefly dives at our faces as we climb up the rocks and grab our bundles of clothes. Elgin races down the trail like there’s a cougar chasing us. I trip after him, twigs and rocks digging into the bottoms of my feet, the buzz filling my ears. We run down a hill and Elgin stops suddenly, wrestling me into his arms. He holds me close to him and covers my mouth. “What?” I say, muffled by his hand.

  “Listen.” The forest flutters around us in a gentle breeze, cool over my wet skin. There’s nothing: no buzz, no horsefly. Elgin takes his hand off of my mouth and kisses me, his tongue warm and heavy. When we pass back under the highway, I pick a blackberry off the bush. Elgin was right — they taste like exhaust, but there’s a sweetness in them too.