by Vicki Grant
There were more people at the lake than there had been the day before. It didn’t bother me. They were scattered on various rocks so it’s not like they were right on top of us, but Dolores didn’t like it.
“I guess we’re going to have to go hard-core,” she said, and led us down another trail.
It was clearly not as well known as the first one. We got all scratched up by the branches and at one point had to kind of scramble over some rocks where water swamped the path. By the time we got to where we were going fifteen minutes later, sweat was bubbling on my upper lip.
We were higher above the water at this end of the lake and it was totally quiet. The only other person was a canoeist paddling out by a little rock island.
“What I tell you?” Dolores said. “Totally worth it, n’est-ce pas?”
She took Murdoch’s shirttail and wiped the sweat off her face. He didn’t even blink. I wondered what they got up to when I wasn’t around. My heart thumped.
I left them alone and went off to change. I’d brought my old bathing suit this time. The one I used to swim in at Williams Lake. It was a blue-green floral print and I liked the way the halter top made me look like I actually had almost-significant boobs. I’d put it in the bag for the Sally Ann the night before but took it out again. Nick and Carly couldn’t ruin everything for me. I liked that bathing suit. I was going to keep it.
I adjusted my pseudo cleavage and found my way back to the lake. Murdoch was wearing real swimming trunks today. His legs didn’t look so unnaturally long in them.
Dolores was wearing another Giant Tiger special. It was black with a little skirt and there was something sort of 1920s about it. She’d taken off her glasses and was wearing red lipstick. It was the first time I realized how cute she was.
“Going in?” I said.
“Nah,” Dolores said. “I’m going to warm up first.” She lay back down on her elbows with one leg bent at the knee, like an old-fashioned pin-up girl, only with green hair.
“Warm up? Please tell me you’re kidding.” Murdoch’s tongue hung out like an old dog’s. “I’m dying …”
“Well, forget about her, then,” I said. “Come on in with me.”
“You sure?” It was like he was asking permission to swim in my own personal lake. It made me laugh. “You sound worried.”
He rubbed his hand over his stomach and looked at his feet. He had a faint brown birthmark on his chest. “I am, a little.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know … Scared you’re going to go all Harry Houdini on me again, I guess.”
I pulled my face back. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“You know. Setting another World Underwater Record, or whatever it is you were trying to do yesterday.”
“Oh, that.” My laugh sounded totally fake. “Don’t worry about that.” I headed down the rock in front of him. I was embarrassed. What had I been thinking yesterday?
I stood at the edge of the lake and swung my toe through the water.
“Did you take ballet lessons?” he said.
That embarrassed me too. I put my arms above my head and pirouetted into the lake.
I bobbed back up just as Murdoch was jumping in and caught a faceful of water. I started to cough. Stuff sprayed out my mouth and nose. It was so gross it made me laugh.
“You okay?”
Murdoch had such a worried look on his face that I laughed harder, which, of course, just made me cough harder. I began to dog-paddle back to the rock, all bug-eyed and sputtering like a little kid. I could barely keep myself afloat. Murdoch swam toward me, grabbed my arm and pulled me to shore. He lifted me up onto the rock. His hands went practically right around my waist.
I was still laughing but I was snorting now too and letting out big slimey burps that tasted like Monkey Paw ice cream.
He was going, “You okay? You okay? Just nod or wink or breathe or something.” His forehead was all dark and knitted together into one big unibrow of concern.
“I’m fine. Really.” I gulped down something oysterish that was stuck in the back of my throat. “Just laughing.”
“That was laughing?” His face unknit. “This was the second time in two days you almost gave me a stroke.” He shook his head and hoisted himself up on to the rock beside me.
“Yeah, well, you deserved it. I’m still paying you back for the, you know … shower incident.”
He hung his head. “I’m never going to live this down.”
“Oh, come on. I have as much to be embarrassed about as you do. More. I mean, I knew it was a bunny tail when I put it on.”
His head bounced and I saw he was laughing. There was something about his laugh that I liked. Something about how little noise he made, just in general. For a big guy, he took up surprisingly little room. It was a nice change from what I was used to.
Neither of us had much to say after that. Just for something to do, I tried to spot the canoeist again. Murdoch put his glasses back on but only looked at his knees. Eventually, he said, “Nice day, eh?”
I was going to tease him about saying something so lame but he beat me to it.
“Sorry …” He turned up one corner of his mouth. “I’m not known for my conversational abilities.”
“Oh. I don’t know about that. You were holding your own back there when we dissed your choice of ice cream.”
He looked at his legs again and smiled. I noticed how dark his lips were. “Yeah, well, you hit on one of my passions.”
I realized that I liked teasing him. It reminded me of something.
No. Someone. Gregor.
I hadn’t thought about Gregor in ages. We’d been friends a few years ago. He was a little, sort of nerdy guy. Cute —but not “boyfriend material,” as Carly used to say. The two of us had spent a lot of time like this, just goofing around, laughing, teasing each other, following private jokes further and further into stupid places until nobody else knew what we were talking about half the time.
Then I met Nick. I still hung out with Gregor, but things were different, and a while later, he got a girlfriend too and we didn’t see a lot of each other after that. I hadn’t realized how much I missed him — or at least missed the way I used to be with him—until now.
I put my fist in front of Murdoch like a microphone. “And what else do you feel passionate about, Mr. Latimer?”
He squirmed a bit but then he nodded in a thoughtful way and pretended to take the mike. “Hmm. Well. Quality footwear … Uh … Mad Magazine … And, of course, the early films of Jim Carrey. What about you, Miss Wickwire? What do you feel passionate about?” He adjusted his glasses with his thumb and index finger. It was a nice touch.
“Passionate?” I was going to say neon-ribbed condoms but I wasn’t sure if he’d get it. It might just have been weird. “Nice sheets, I guess. I hate those really thin ones that get the linty balls all over them.”
“Cheap T-shirts do that too.”
“Don’t like those either.”
“You’re a woman of taste.”
“Thank you.”
“Anything else?”
A little wind blew across the water on to my wet skin. I rubbed my arms and thought.
“Well … Good conditioner, I guess. Something not too greasy. You know how it is.”
“I don’t, actually. Don’t use conditioner.”
“Really?” I tugged at a piece of hair that was sticking straight up from his head. “I’d never have known …”
He flicked my hand away and patted his hair back down. He was enjoying this too—although he turned away when he saw me thinking that. I thought of Carly and changed the subject.
“How many are you looking for?”
“How many what?”
“You know. Things I feel, um” — I suddenly felt sort of ridiculous—”passionate about.” “Oh. Well. Say three …”
I perked up my voice and said, “Okay. I also feel quite strongly about … fresh bread. I won’t eat it i
f it’s stale.”
“Wow. Picky, picky. I’ll eat stale bread.” “Yeah, but you’ll eat anything.” “True.”
I fluttered my legs and looked out over the water. “Sheets, conditioner and fresh bread … god. I never realized how shallow I am.” I laughed, but sort of meant it too.
“Like, next to me? Shoes, Mad Magazine and Jim Carrey? I’m not exactly Nelson Mandela either, you know.”
“No, guess not … Quite a pair, eh?”
He nodded, but didn’t look at me. I realized I didn’t know many shy people. My friends had always been right in the front row, hamming it up for the camera, grabbing the mike.
I noticed the canoeist, pulling his boat up on to the little island. He was wearing a white sunhat and a backpack. I wondered if he was a scientist of some type. (Something about the hat just screamed nerd to me.) Maybe there was some rare miniature turtle or water lily in the lake that he was studying.
Other people had passions. It was weird thinking that.
I turned back to Murdoch. “Is there anything you really are passionate about? Like, seriously, I mean.”
“I was being serious.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He put his hands up. “Seriously.”
“Right.”
He leaned back and kind of levered his feet out of the water. “Size eighteen. Trust me. I care about good shoes.”
“And Mad Magazine?” I wasn’t going to let him off that easy.
“I’d love to draw like those guys did. In fact, I dropped out of second-year engineering in January so I could spend more time working on it. I spend hours and hours every day now trying to draw like them.”
“Boy. You must be serious. That’s more time than you spend eating.”
He gave this little sniff of a laugh. I wondered if I was going too hard at the whole food thing.
He moved his leg and adjusted his trunks. The hair on his calves made me think of spider legs. I thought of bringing up the book idea but I didn’t know how.
“That just leaves the early works of Jim Carrey,” I said.
“Okay, I exaggerated there a bit. It was the only thing I could come up with off the top of my head.” He bit his cheek like he had a dirty secret. “He was pretty funny in Ace Ventura though, wasn’t he?”
Something about that made me happy in a really simple way. “I loved that movie when I was a kid! I knew all the words and everything.”
We tossed around some of our favourite lines and it was fun for a while, but then it got to feeling sort of forced. The talk drifted off again. Murdoch scooped up a couple handfuls of water and splashed them over his back.
I realized that skinny was the wrong word for him. He had muscles. He just didn’t have much covering them. An ectomorph. Biology, if nothing else, was coming back to me.
The Ectomorph and the Amoeba. Maybe I could do a book about that for all the baby nerds out there.
“So what are you passionate about?” He tried to make it sound like just a casual question, but it obviously wasn’t. “And don’t say sheets or conditioner either. I mean really.”
I put my hands on the edge of the rock and peered into the water. Little waves kind of shivered across my reflection.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing. At least right now anyway. I guess there was stuff I used to be passionate about, you know, once upon a time and everything.”
“Such as?”
We were both looking straight across the lake now. It was like having a conversation with someone driving a car. Nobody took their eyes off the road.
“I don’t know.” I honestly didn’t.
For the longest time, nothing came to me, then for some reason I thought of my coach and her fire-in-the-belly pep talks. “Maybe winning the regional basketball championship. That seemed kind of important back then, I guess.”
I was just going to leave it at that but something happened and I said, “I had a boyfriend too.”
My heart hit hard against my chest. I was listening to someone else talk. “I was pretty passionate about him for a while.” I looked up at the sky and laughed but it sounded horrible. “At least until he dumped me for my best friend, that is.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“No. No. Who cares?” I flicked a little speck of something off my leg. “I’m certainly trying not to.”
“Hmm. Yeah. Trying not to care is the worst.”
“Tell me about it …” This was surprisingly easy. I turned just enough to get a glimpse of him. His shyness was rubbing off on me. “You get dumped too?”
“Uh. No.”
“Great. So I’m the only loser here.” “I didn’t mean that.”
“Just kidding. Sorta, anyway … What happened to you?”
“Well, uh, my dad.”
“Oh. Ick. My turn to say sorry.”
“Nah.”
I wanted to ask him what happened but I couldn’t make myself do it. We looked at the lake some more.
After a while Murdoch said, “My father’s bipolar. You know, manic-depressive.”
Then after a little while more he said, “It makes things kind of difficult. He’s up. He’s down. He does crazy things. He’s not a bad guy—I mean, I love him and everything— but you have to sort of learn not to care, otherwise he’d drive you crazy too. Mom finally had to just let him go. He turns up every so often and it’s good for a while and then it isn’t and we have to clean up his mess and start all over again. It’s hard on Mom. I know she’s worried Natalie’s got a bit of that in her too—but, hey, not much you can do about it. Just the way things are. Kind of another reason I decided to take a year off school. I needed some time to, you know, clear my head, be there if Mom needed me, whatever.”
I would have loved to say I know what you mean but I had nothing to add. Nothing in my life compared to that at all. I’d been dumped by a boyfriend. Big deal. Happens every day. I felt ridiculous nodding, but it was the only thing I could think to do.
The silence was agonizing.
“Now you’re scared of me,” Murdoch said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re scared my father’s nuts and you think I might be too.”
He lunged at me with his hands out and his teeth bared. I screamed and flew back.
“See?” he said. “Told you so.”
I laughed and pushed him away like we were old friends.
“What are you guys laughing about without me?” I’d almost forgotten about Dolores. “Come up here immediately and explain.”
Murdoch looked at me and made a we’re in trouble face.
“I said immediately!”
Chapter 30
We climbed up the rock and found Dolores lying with her hands crossed over her chest, her eyes closed, her face blank.
“You look like a corpse,” I said.
“You should be so lucky.” She opened one eye, stared up at me like an angry crow, then closed it again. “Though, come to think of it, this wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Lying in a fetching little outfit on an isolated outcropping, one’s nose sprinkled with freckles, one’s skin scented with pine …”
Murdoch and I started spreading our towels out on the rock.
Dolores sat up. “You’re not listening. This is important, people. If anything ever happens to me …”
I shifted a few centimetres to the left so the sun hit me directly. “What do you mean ‘if anything ever happens to me’? Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“You don’t know that. I could be in a car accident or eat a poisonous mushroom or just simply give in to despair and decide to off myself—who knows? In any event you’re going to have to know what to do.”
Murdoch nodded in a fake-serious kind of way.
I twisted my hair up, then put my arms straight at my sides. The sun felt like a spa treatment. Let Dolores talk. Why fight it? “Fine. What do you need us to do?”
“You’ll have to sneak into the ICU—I suggest y
ou dress in scrubs so as not to arouse suspicion—then you’re to bring me here, to this exact place, at which point I want you to toss the hideous Johnny shirt they’ll no doubt have stuffed me into and lay me out in …”
She looked down at her bathing suit. “Not this. It’s cute but not right. I have a black Marilyn Monroe-esque halter dress with not-so-subtle pink polka dots that’s more the vibe I’m looking for. BTW, it’s in my closet, next to my Ugandan Girl Guide uniform. Anyhoo, put me in that, being extra careful not to break my gnarled and atrophied limbs …”
“Your limbs wouldn’t atrophy that fast if you just ate a poison mushroom.”
Dolores ignored me.
“Whatever. Lay me out on this rock, like some glorious sacrifice to the Mother Goddess. Stay with me. Stay with me right to the end.” She reached over and touched my knee. “And then, my darlings, I shall die happy.”
I made an okay sign with my fingers.
“Perfect. So that’s settled. We have a few minutes left before I nod off to sleep again so I’ll do my best to sound interested and turn the floor over to you … How would you like to die?”
When neither of us answered, Dolores said, “Murdoch. You first.”
The girl would make a great dictator and/or teacher someday.
“Murdoch?”
“I don’t know. On stage, I guess.”
I opened my eyes. Murdoch pulled his hair back off his face and sort of smirked. He had a very straight nose.
“On stage?” I said. It was the last place I’d imagine a guy like him.
“Yeah. I’d like to die on stage.” He lifted a shoulder like what’s the matter with that? “I’d actually like to be jumping up to strike one final chord and die just as my fingers hit the strings. The last thing I hear is the crowd of 200,000 rabid fans chanting Mur-doch, Mur-doch, Mur-doch.”
Dolores said, “Excellent.”
I said, “I didn’t know you play guitar.”
“I don’t—but I’d also like to die when I’m 100, so I got time to learn.”