Swimmers

by Amy Bright

  He was acting weird at school that day. I watched him dig a hole in his desk with an unsharpened pencil all through last period. It was journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth style, the way a drill looks when it’s moving in the ground. Niall was making some serious headway into the center of his desk, and it was sketchy as shit.

  When the bell rang, Niall didn’t move. He held onto the edges of his desk like he was trapped there, the four sides growing high and making a box around him. He was sweating. Fat drops of that stuff were falling on his papers. Mrs. Brook watched him carefully. Niall kept gripping the edges of the desk, really white-knuckling them, until I walked over and said, "Niall, Mrs. Brook is going to get you in a lot of shit if you don’t stand up right now and walk out of the classroom with me."

  It was the first time I’d ever talked to him, after a whole year of passing him in the hall. He looked right through me. His eyes were spacey and gone, but he stood up, long legs awkward and odd.

  "Hey, you can lean if you want," I told him, "because you’re not looking too good."

  "Yeah," Niall said, holding onto my arm with a vice-grip. "Yeah, thanks."

  We walked out of the classroom and into the hallway, his fingernails digging into my arm.

  "Hunter, is everything okay?" Mrs. Brook asked, shouting from her classroom.

  "Yeah, we’re fine."

  Niall had zombie legs. Those tent-pole legs. I got the feeling he was all loose change, barely holding it together.

  When we got out of the school, I leaned Niall against the side of the building and adjusted my backpack, the straps over my shoulders. There was a skinny line of school buses parked in front of the school.

  "Look, do you need to get a bus or something?" I asked him.

  "I’m not going home yet."

  "Yeah, well, I think it might be a good idea if you did."

  "I know I look bad," he said. "I was going to walk home. If you want to come, that would be cool."

  "Yeah?"

  "It’s twenty minutes. We can cut through the woods."

  Niall started walking. He didn’t check to see if I was following, but I was. He brushed his hands against his pockets, trying to find where they opened and, when he removed them, he was holding a couple of pills. They weren’t circle-shaped. These ones had edges that made them into tiny pentagons.

  "You want one?" he asked.

  "What is it?"

  Niall tossed one into his mouth and set one right down in the middle of my hand. I didn’t drink, hadn’t even taken a sip of beer from some uncle at Christmas, but I took a pill from Niall, something that looked messy.

  "It’s prescription," Niall said. "It’s fine."

  "You take this stuff a lot?" I asked him.

  Niall shrugged. It was the biggest "yes" I’d ever seen.

  I didn’t know the woods enough to cut through them. They’re all over the place in Victoria, these little pockets of trees growing together frantically, afraid of the future development that could mess with their routine. Niall seemed to be okay. We moved from the rocks and dirt to a narrow path that looked to run the whole way through.

  "What are we supposed to do now?" I asked.

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I don’t know."

  I could feel it a little. Right there.

  Niall sat down twice, and the difference between sitting and standing was enormous. When we found the wall, we were almost on the other side of all the trees. Niall climbed on top and sat with his feet dangling down. I climbed up beside him. The cracks we used as footholds were filled with green moss.

  When we came out on the other side of the woods, Niall put his arm out to stop me from going any further. A row of houses sat in front of us, spread far apart because of their acre yards, their iron fences, their circular driveways.

  "It’s probably better if you don’t come in," Niall told me. "Maybe another time."

  "Oh," I said. He looked like he needed someone to check up on him. This close to passing out on the grass.

  "My parents are home," Niall said. "They’re not so big on company."

  It was another month before I was finally let into that house. Niall’s parents stayed on the top floor and didn’t come downstairs for anything. I found out they were a mess because Niall had a sister who had died in Vancouver. Her pictures were all over the house, on mantelpieces and bookshelves. Niall never looked at them for too long. He walked through his house with blinders on, eyes on the carpet in front of him.

  "Was it hard? What happened?" Penner asked, snapping me back into that office, slingshot-style.

  "I guess," I said.

  "You guess?" He asked the question with a smile, which meant he didn’t expect me to answer. "Okay, Hunter," he said, repeating my name like a mantra. "We’re done for today. But we’ll talk about your friends again next week, especially Niall. You think we can do that?"

  "Sure."

  He watched me leave.

  I bumped into Lee when I was leaving his office, slamming right into her, yellow hoodie, jeans, legs and all.

  "Hey, careful, okay?" Lee said.

  I backed away, shrugging my shoulders at her.

  "Jesus, Hunter," she said, when I didn’t say anything. Guess I was all glued up from my talk with Penner. "Say sorry, at least."

  "Sorry," I said. I looked at her then. A crease formed between her eyes, deep and pronounced, but she wasn’t pissed off.

  "Yeah, well, watch where you’re going," she said.

  For a second, it was just us, standing in front of the secretary’s desk. What I told Penner was true. I hung out with Niall. But before Niall, before I noticed him sitting at that desk, there was Lee.

  She leaned over the counter to talk to the secretary. She was on her tiptoes, even though she was tall enough to see over. I took one more look at her yellow hoodie before I headed out the glass doors and went back to class.

  D E C E M B E R

  O n t h e B u s

  Me, Poppy, and Lee were all bundled up and clinging to the shoddy heat being filtered through the bus. The Greyhound was only a quarter of the way full, if that. Either it wasn’t a popular time to be traveling through the Rockies, or else Greyhound had suffered a major setback.

  I had been sharing a pair of headphones with Lee and, when she leaned away from me to look out the window, the headphones yanked out of my phone and flooded our section of the bus with Drake. An older woman sitting directly in front of us whipped her head around so fast, showing off her hyena-glare. She pursed her lips, an aging case of duck face, probably puzzling out why the three of us were traveling together. After that, she kept taking micro-turns in her seat whenever we were too noisy, catching me in the corner of her eye and holding me in one place.

  Everyone on the bus was either a double or a single. I could only see the tops of heads, and it did not tell you very much, that small amount of a person. Old or young, mostly, not much in between. White and gray or brown and blonde. Short and permed or long and styled. Not all of them were going to Victoria. There were about a dozen stops along the way. But I was curious about who would be left when we got all the way west, as far as you could go.

  And it made me wonder who was going to be waiting for me on the other side, welcoming me back home. It was a multiple-choice game with no right answer: a) Mom, b) Dad, c) Bridget, or d) None of the above.

  Or it could be surprise answer e) Mr. Penner. I’d had a couple of months with him when I still had to go to school, between what happened to Niall and leaving Victoria.

  Homeschooling with Poppy in Lethbridge was cool. It was the first thing I’d felt good about in a while. No bells. No intercom. No announcements in the morning. Just a table and a bowl of snacks, with Poppy’s mom stacking paper and handing out pencils. Me working on my Grade 11 work and Poppy working on Grade 7.

  When I remembered the direction the bus was headed in, my stomach punched my lungs, heart, and kidneys some quick one-twos. It was asking: What do you want to go bac
k for? But then there was Lee’s hand holding on tight and the mountains signaling the slow climb home, and Poppy at the window, bobbing her head with the music from Lee’s phone, and I tried hard to make myself feel normal.

  When the bus pulled up to the station in Banff, we had ten minutes to stretch our legs. Banff looked like BC, with those mountains and fir trees laden with snow. It was blizzarding at the top of the mountain; you could see it swirling when you tipped your head back.

  When me and Bridge were still in single-digit ages, Dad took us skiing. The whole time, I remember being cold and wet. Cold from the weather, wet from falling down every time I tried to pizza-slice turn. But I also remembered the way it felt when you were that high up the mountain and the fog suddenly fell beneath you. Instead of looking up at it, it was down below you, under your skis. You knew you’d have to tip forward and swish and slide through it to get to the bottom.

  "So, how are we going to do this?" Lee asked. We were third from the front of the line at Subway, scanning the menu on the wall. "Split them or have our own?"

  I shrugged, the one-thousandth one this trip. My shoulders just took to it naturally. Up and down. No words necessary.

  I had these moments when I knew exactly what the right decision was. Leaving Victoria. Leaving Lethbridge to go back. But then I had these moments where things just happened because I was checked-out enough not to give a shit about what happened next. Checked-out like Niall had been.

  Poppy was here with me and Lee because I’d checked out a couple of seconds too early, and told her to stuff a few clothes in her backpack, and lifted the straps over her shoulder before I checked in again. I knew I couldn’t take a kid away from home and expect to get away scot-free. It didn’t matter how much she’d wanted to come or how much I wanted her here. She tied me to something that finally felt like normal, and I didn’t want to give that up. Not yet.

  Lee and Poppy worked out what they were ordering, keeping me out of it. I backed out of the line and headed into the men’s room. I washed my hands, Lady Macbeth-style, and knew I should try to pee because I’d seen what the washroom looked like on the Greyhound, and it was basically an upscale porta-potty. But I couldn’t make a move from the sink. I just turned the heat up higher on the tap, the cold extinguished completely. My hands turned pink and then red, and I held them under and watched them soak it up. The bus route was a game of tug-of-war that I lost back in Alberta, and now I was being dragged forward all the way to the end.

  A P R I L

  The flaps of the pizza box were hanging off of my bed. Ham and cheese, Hawaiian minus the pineapple. Mom and Dad had left to go to a benefit dinner on the other side of the city, leaving me twenty bucks for an ordered-in dinner. Penner had given me about a dozen writing assignments to work on since our meetings started. He had sent me home with an assignment for the weekend. His half-hour sessions had started to leach into real life. Now he wanted me to write about my "friends."

  The old piece-of-shit pc was taking up half the space in my bedroom. The only thing that worked was a word-processing program without spellcheck. Its ability to pick up an Internet connection was a crapshoot. I watched the cursor blink on the empty Word document for fifteen minutes, on and off, on and off.

  The only place I could think to start was with Lee. The first sign of my world whirlpooling away was when Lee stopped hanging around. She saw what me and Niall did and she didn’t like it. And I hated seeing her looking all disapproving and sad, so I sped things up a little and helped her see her way out.

  Josh stuck around for a while. I’d known him since middle school. He was always over at Niall’s, lying back on the couch with his feet on the coffee table, watching whatever was on TV and drinking cheap beer with both of us. It was luck of the draw whether he’d be there when Niall called me over. Most of the time he was, and I never could tell if that was lucky or not.

  "Hunter," Josh said this one day, bobbing his head all friendly and dickish at me. "How’s it going, man?" He was sitting on the couch in Niall’s living room, smoking up and messing around with his cell phone. We were all skipping school together, three empty desks in Miss Pearson’s English classroom.

  "Where’s Niall?"

  "Kitchen," he said, jerking his thumb. "You in or out?"

  "In."

  Josh reached into his pocket and pulled out his tin of Altoids and, because I was still way too new, I figured I was getting a mint, something that was supposed to be all fresh breath and just-brushed teeth. He let me pick out a couple of pills, one of this kind, one of those, and shut it again with a little click.

  "Hey," I said to Niall, finding him in the kitchen.

  Niall was quiet, cracking open a beer and playing around on his computer. There’s different kinds of friends, I guess, and Niall was the kind that you could just be easy and quiet around.

  "Hey. You want to see something cool?"

  Niall dragged his laptop across the counter, and we played music videos on YouTube over and over for the rest of the afternoon. He knew all of the stories, the why they were made, the who they were funded by, the what they were about way down underneath. Josh stayed in the living room, the volume of the TV rising and lowering every couple of minutes. When I went over to Niall’s house, it was never any more serious than taking a couple of pills or smoking up, or drinking a little beer and being normal together.

  Sometimes Niall would pass out in the middle of the afternoon, slumping against the arm of the couch with his eyes shut tight. When that happened, me and Josh would turn him on his side, just in case he threw up, and leave the house quietly. Those were the only times I ever checked out the pictures on the mantelpiece, the ones of Niall’s dead sister. I only took a second look when Niall couldn’t see me doing it.

  From the pictures, you could tell she had long black hair and dark brown eyes. I knew she was younger than Niall by a couple of years. Middle school, maybe. Eighth grade when she died. He never said how, just that it was the reason they moved to the island from Vancouver. It was his mystery, the dark unreadable center.

  "He doesn’t look good," Josh would say when we left Niall passed out at his house.

  "He’s fine." It was always my job to reassure.

  Staring at the blinking cursor, I thought about that year a lot. Me, Josh, and Niall hanging around together and missing school. Now I didn’t have Niall or Josh in my life.

  I never got around to typing up an assignment for Penner. He’d be pissed when I showed up empty-handed at our next meeting, but I didn’t care.

  Most mornings that spring I was back in the bathroom stall at school, jamming my legs up against the metal door to keep it shut. Penner’s next appointments were always sneaking up on me, even though I could bullshit most of it. But it turned out his homework assignments were messing with me a little. They made me take my problems home with me, lay them down on my bed, and unfold them like clean laundry.

  One morning I was in the bathroom, waiting for the bell to ring between one Penner appointment and the next. I was in nowhere zone. I couldn’t feel the toilet seat under me and my legs were tense from holding the door closed. I was waiting out the ten minutes before the bell, when the bathroom door flew open. It was all "mmmummshhh" siphoned in from the hallway, everybody’s voices mixing together.

  "Dude, you in here?"

  It was Josh.

  I got the feeling it was Penner’s fault that he was there. Penner was making me think about people again. He was making me write some paragraph about Josh on a Saturday night, and then making him materialize back into my life.

  "Yeah," I said and let the door swing open. My legs were pins and needles.

  Josh was wearing his basketball jersey. He watched me look at the number, the school name on the front.

  "You didn’t come out to the last game," he said, tugging at his shoulder.

  "Guess not."

  "Whatever, man. Didn’t think you would."

  Somehow, Josh could do all the shit he did
with me and Niall and still play basketball for the school on a weekly basis. It beat me how he did it, but he was pretty good.

  I realized I was still sitting on the toilet, so I stood up and went to lean against the row of sinks. Josh checked himself out in the mirror.

  "You ever think about him?" Josh asked me, his eyes not leaving his reflection in the mirror.

  We didn’t talk about it, me and Josh. The thing with Niall happened over the Christmas holidays. Josh visited him once in the hospital. I didn’t.

  "Sometimes," I said.

  "Man, we haven’t even talked about it. The way he looked when I saw him. Not like he was."

  "I got class," I said, my hand on the door. That nauseous feeling was already in my chest, making me want to puke.

  "Dude, hang on," Josh said, reaching into his pocket. It was like stepping back in time, Josh and his Altoids container. His crooked smile giving it all away. "I got something for you."

  "It’s cool," I told him. "I’m fine."

  "Nah, take this. It’s on me." He held out two pills, pushed them into my palms. "Double or nothing."

  I swallowed one dry and stuffed the other one into my pocket. It was routine. Don’t ask questions; just take whatever’s on offer. Niall taught me that from the very beginning, when we stood in the woods after I dragged him out of class and took him home. Even after what happened with Niall, I still played by his rules.

  "Thanks."

  "Hey, it’s no problem. Glad you’re back to being the old Hunter I remember." He barked out a laugh. "See you around."

  That time, when Josh opened the door to the hallway, there wasn’t any sound leaking back in.

  He left me with my heart jumping around, back and forth in a warning. I stayed in the bathroom after he was gone, thinking back to before.

  This one time last year, in Grade 10, Niall had gotten in a fight out in the high-school parking lot at lunch. Maybe if I’d been around, I would’ve been able to stop him from getting his ass kicked. I wasn’t Mr. Tough Guy or anything, but I had thrown my fair share of punches. Even just roughhousing with Josh. It was all practice for the real thing.