by Amy Bright
Even her hair had lost its Bride-of-Frankenstein frizz. It was like she had stopped trying to look like a Grade 1 teacher, losing the piano-key earrings, the rainbow-toe socks, the weird jewelry she used to pin to the front of her sweater.
We ate our Pizza Hut pizza when it came to the door, complete with two cans of Coke and garlic bread sticks.
"How are you recovering from everything?" Aunt Lynne asked.
She meant my pill overdose. I wished Dad was there for that. I would’ve killed to see the expression on his face when Aunt Lynne asked about my attempt. Other than Bridge, no one had asked me directly about that day.
"It was dicey right after," I told her. "I couldn’t eat much."
"And now?"
I wolfed down another piece of pizza and hoped she got the message.
"I made you an appointment to see a doctor," she said. She’d let her pizza slice flop sideways on her plate. "Once a month while you’re here. Your parents and I think it’s good to have someone monitoring you."
"I’ve been fine," I said.
The pizza was seriously skimping on the toppings. Half a slice of pepperoni and a scrawny mushroom hung out on my slice.
"Hunter, what do you think you’re doing here?" she said, suddenly serious.
"Getting out of Dodge," I said. I tried to grin, but the stringy cheese got in my way.
"Look," she said. "I’m not your parents or your sister. I wasn’t there when it happened."
"Neither were they."
"But I love you just as much as they do. I think getting out of town for a little while is a good thing for you."
"Change of scenery," I said.
Aunt Lynne put her elbows on the table, her fingers tented together.
"This isn’t a vacation," she said. "This is living a normal life. You are going to take care of yourself, and that includes seeing a doctor on a regular basis. You’re going to help me around the house and with yard work. You’re going to go to school."
"No way," I said quickly.
"Hunter."
"No," I said. "I am not going to some shitty high school just because you think it’s a good idea."
She tucked her hair behind her ears, readying herself for Round Two. Firing Squad B. I didn’t give her a chance. I got up from the table and went out the back door. I gave it a slam. A nice punch.
I started walking up the alley, gravel crunching under my shoes. I crossed the street and went up the next alley, and then the next. But then I thought about Aunt Lynne, back at her house. What would it look like if I took off on the first night I was there? Besides, I didn’t know Aunt Lynne’s address, and I wasn’t planning on getting lost in some redneck town the first night I got there.
After opening the gate into the backyard, I settled for sitting on the back porch.
Aunt Lynne lived in an ordinary neighborhood, rows of houses with an alley at the back. The house across the alley was two stories with the windows lit up inside. The yellow light made a happy face, two eyes, a nose, and a grinning mouth. Through a bottom window, I could see a girl sitting at a table with her legs pulled up and crossed campfire style. One hand was propping up her chin and the other was holding a pencil.
The back door creaked open. Aunt Lynne sat down beside me on the cement, and all I could think was, Oh, that’s why she kept her boots on. Maybe she knew I was a runner before I did.
"Who’s that?" I asked her, pointing at the house across the alley.
"Poppy Haynes," she said.
She looked young. Her hair was loose and long, with bangs cut straight across her forehead. They were little-kid bangs. She stretched out one of her crossed legs under the table, like she was shaking out the pins and needles.
"You know, she’s homeschooled," Aunt Lynne said. "When I said you should try to do things the way you normally would, I wasn’t thinking."
"Normal didn’t really work out for me," I said.
"I think maybe we should try something different," she said. "This isn’t Victoria. You’re not my son, you’re my nephew. Maybe school doesn’t have to mean a public high school."
She dropped her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. I shrugged her off, just for a sec. It felt too friendly. Like something Niall would do. But Aunt Lynne put her arm right over my shoulder again. This time I left it.
"Are you staying out here for a while?" she asked me.
I nodded my head.
Instead of going back into the kitchen, Aunt Lynne stayed right where she was. It pulled at my chest, her sticking around like that. It gave me a feeling I wanted to memorize like my favorite song.
"We’ll get through this," she said. "You’re going to be fine."
A week later, Aunt Lynne woke me up from the first real dream I’d had in months. Shaking my shoulder and calling my name. I opened my eyes and it was gone.
I couldn’t remember a thing about it, except that it had been there.
"Hunter," she said. "I thought you set an alarm. It’s after eight."
"I never wake up this early," I said, sitting up in the bed. The green sheets were wrapped around my body. I was rolled up tight, pig in a blanket. A watery light slanted through the blinds, but it was mostly dark in the basement room. I could spend all day in there and barely know noon from midnight.
"You do now," she said. "Come on. If you want to eat breakfast, you better get moving."
I heard her footsteps on the stairs and then the sound of plates clinking in the kitchen. That sound signaled the end of my weeklong vacation.
I was sleeping well at Aunt Lynne’s. In Victoria, I’d given up on sleep. There was only so long I was cool with tentacling my arms and legs out like an octopus in bed, flailing around from side to back to stomach to side all night until I passed out from exhaustion in the morning. Here, it was head-hit-the-pillow sleep, which had a lot to do with how Aunt Lynne had slapped a handyman sticker onto my shirt and given me a to-do list a couple of pages long. I’d been raking up leaves, cleaning out the gutters, painting the back fence, and cleaning out the garage. I had thick calluses on my palms made out of popped and popped-again blisters. I was Stanley Yelnats from Holes, without the happy ending.
"I picked up some more cereal," Aunt Lynne said, lining up four boxes on the kitchen counter. Mini Wheats, Raisin Bran, Honey Crisp, and Cheerios. I reached for the Mini Wheats and filled up a bowl. We were relying hard on take-out, but Aunt Lynne had started a grocery list and taped it to the fridge.
"When you’re finished, we’re going next door," she said. "You can meet Mrs. Haynes and her daughter Poppy. Be your usual happy Hunter self, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of them."
"My happy self?" I said, using the cereal bowl like a mug and drinking the rest of the milk.
"Pretend you are going to be here forever," she said. "Put down some roots. Don’t burn bridges."
She shot her advice using bullet points. Bang bang bang. Machine-gun fire.
"Try," she said. "And brush your teeth."
I checked my breath in a cupped hand cave, breathing into the hollow.
I’d been in Lethbridge for a week, but Aunt Lynne hadn’t given me much of a chance to leave the radius of her house and yard. I’d been to the grocery store with her once, walking down the long aisles and nodding my head when she asked if I’d eat yogurt, chicken, broccoli. Into the cart they’d go. Twice I’d sat in the car with the radio blaring while she ran into the Chinese or Indian place downtown to get us our ordered-out dinner. Other than that, I’d been housebound. An inside dog.
"Last thing," Aunt Lynne said, standing at the front door, hand on the doorknob. "There is no Mr. Haynes, so don’t mention him. Don’t ask about him. I’ve known Mrs. Haynes and her daughter since I moved here, and I’ve seen what they’ve had to go through over the last year. Poppy’s dad is not around. You need to know that."
"I won’t say anything."
My aunt left her hand on the doorknob and gave me a look.
"I won’t say a word,"
I said again.
Satisfied, Aunt Lynne opened the door and ushered me through. We crossed the alley.
If there was one thing about Lethbridge that I loved, it was that it was far away from the ocean. The smell of the air was pure prairie. Not a hint of salt water. The wind was bone dry. It sucked the spit off my teeth and left me winded.
The house behind Aunt Lynne’s was a little bigger, a little neater, and depressing as hell. Mrs. Haynes was compensating with her outfit, one of those matching three-pieces: pink shirt, pink jacket, pink blouse underneath.
"You must be Hunter," she said, taking my hand with two of hers.
"Hi, Mrs. Haynes." I was expecting her to say, "No, please call me Jackie or Samantha or Mary or Trish." But she left it formal.
"Poppy’s in the living room. Why don’t you go and introduce yourself."
We split ways, Mrs. Haynes and my aunt forking off into the kitchen, while I wandered down a hallway to the living room. A flat screen was mounted on the wall and a giant kitchen-table-sized coffee table was in the middle of the room. Poppy, with her straight bangs and her knees pulled up to her chin, sat on a couch under the rectangular window. I plopped down beside her. A small gray cat named Gregory hung around the house. When he jumped up on the couch, I patted him from head to tail.
"Hey," I said. "I’m Hunter."
"I’m Poppy," she said.
Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail. She reminded me of a horse, a tiny pony at someone’s farm. She had a couple of Band-aids on her arm, the gross skin-colored ones that look like leprosy.
It only took a couple of seconds with her to know what the Band-aids were for. The kid wouldn’t leave her arms alone. She scratched at them with her short and stubby nails, working away at a piece of her wrist. I wanted to pull her hand away. I wanted to put a pair of gloves on her, the human equivalent of how you stop a dog from chewing at his paws. Put socks on him.
"Do you like homeschooling?" I asked her. She looked at me then for the first time. Before, she’d been staring straight ahead, not even using her peripherals. Now she turned head-on. Her eyes were dark brown and flanked by the longest lashes.
Gregory leapt from my lap to hers.
Traitor.
"It’s okay," she said. "It’s better than going to normal school." Poppy reached for the remote. "Want to watch TV? They might be a while."
"Sure."
After that, me and Poppy got into a routine of homeschool at her house. Her mom, call-me-Mrs.-Haynes, was the timekeeper, switching our subjects after an hour. We were in a perfect rotation of Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Math.
One week of being homeschooled made me realize that learning is only a tiny piece of school. Most of school is about what goes on while the teacher isn’t looking, about the people you’re trying to avoid, or the people you’re trying to spend more time with. Take that away and I guess you really do learn something.
Poppy scratched at the checkerboard of Band-aids up and down her arms while she did her work, without even seeming to notice she was doing it.
A week of being homeschooled made it routine, and I broke that routine when Aunt Lynne made me take a morning off to see a doctor.
"The doctor at home didn’t say anything about getting checked-up," I told Aunt Lynne while we drove to the clinic.
"Well, Google says you can have complications from a pill overdose," she said, honking at a red Chevy that cut her off. "Kidney failure, liver problems, respiratory and circulatory issues."
"Yeah, I’m not having any of those," I said. "Picture of health."
"Humor me," she said, before laying on the horn again.
She stayed in the waiting room while I stripped to my boxers, was weighed, measured, poked, and prodded. When we left, I was minus four vials of blood and had a scratchy throat. I swear, maybe you don’t go into the doctor’s office sick, but you always come out of it with a cold.
"Can I maybe skip homeschool today?" I asked her.
Aunt Lynne snorted. "No, Hunter," she said. "You cannot skip homeschool."
She dropped me off at the Haynes’s and parked in her alley driveway. I gave her a wave, just the tiniest turn of my palm. She waved back and went inside to meet her music students.
Aunt Lynne taught piano in the front room of her house. When I was home in the evenings, I helped out with the door, ushering in six-year-olds to seventy-year-olds while the latest lesson was finishing up. I didn’t mind hearing teenagers polishing up concert pieces. The worst was listening to the kids clunking out scales for the first time.
"Hey, Pops," I said, when she let me into the house. The nickname just slipped out of my mouth.
"How was your appointment?" she asked.
"Healthy as a horse," I said, winking.
Poppy wasn’t even a teenager yet. Grade 7 and there was something pretty little-kid about her. Maybe it was because she didn’t dress like a hipster. Long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and no jewelry. It made her look out of touch.
"Mom didn’t think you were coming back after lunch," she said, "so she didn’t leave anything."
"She’s not here?"
Poppy shook her head.
"Hey, Greg," I told the cat, bending down to pick him up. He always slunk in on a ten-second delay. "Gregory looks like he could use some fresh air." I looked up at Poppy. "How about you?"
"You want to leave?" she asked me.
"Sure," I said. "I haven’t seen much of Lethbridge. You want to show me around?"
Poppy tipped her head to the side, giving me the old once-over. My jeans that hugged my calves, looking more like girl jeans than hers did. My zipped hoodie over a V-shirt.
"Do I need a haircut or something?" I asked her. She shook her head. Then she went to the closet and returned with a pair of shoes and a sweater.
"I have to put Gregory in the bathroom," she said. "He’s not allowed to have the run of the house."
"Don’t do that," I said. "We’ll take him with us."
While Poppy got her shoes on, I took a quick look around the boot room. I found some twine on a spool, and I measured it out and tied it around Gregory’s collar. If Lee were here, she’d laugh her ass off. "Hunter Ryan," she’d say. "That is ridiculous."
"You can’t walk a cat," Poppy said. "It’s embarrassing."
"So?" I said. "I don’t know anyone here."
I waited outside while Poppy locked up the house. Gregory went exploring, checking out the bushes along the driveway. I kept expecting him to lift his leg like a dog and leave his mark.
"Be a man, Gregory," I told him.
We walked away from Poppy’s house and down the residential street. It was that late September weather that is halfway between Indian summer and fall. Cold in the shade, hot in the sun. It felt good to be walking instead of sitting shotgun in Aunt Lynne’s car. Walking around made it easier to memorize our location.
"Is there a fast-food place around here?" I asked Poppy. She stayed a couple of steps ahead of me. Lee used to do that when she was mad at me. She’d stay one sidewalk square ahead of me and never let me catch up.
"There’s a Dairy Queen," she said.
"You want to lead the way?"
Poppy did. She didn’t say much. Like when we sat at the big table together at her house, working on Math, and I’d try and crack a joke. She didn’t give away a smile, not even a hint of her teeth showing. I had to work hard to impress her.
"Did you ever go to school?" I asked her.
Poppy’s shoulders stiffened. I’d surprised her out of her fast way of walking. She slowed right down and came into line with me and Gregory.
"Yeah," she said. "I just started homeschooling last year."
"No way," I said. "I kind of figured you’d always been homeschooled."
"No," she said. "Here, we’re passing my old school."
The two-story middle school took up most of the block. Poppy walked by it without turning her head. It wasn’t much to look at. A school is a school is a scho
ol. There was a line of cars parked out front and the bell rang as we walked past.
"Hurry up," Poppy said, picking up her pace.
We didn’t talk much until we got to the Dairy Queen. It didn’t take more than twenty minutes to walk there, but twenty minutes of silence is a lot of quiet.
"You can’t bring the cat in," Poppy told me, looking pointedly at Gregory.
"Shhh," I said, covering his cat ears. "Don’t let him hear you."
Poppy rolled her eyes and I’d never felt so uncool. A twelve-year-old thought I was cheesing up the place.
"Look, take this." I handed over a twenty-dollar bill. Aunt Lynne had paid me for my hard work around the house, making it a little bit better than child labor. "Get anything you want as long as you get me an Oreo Blizzard. A big-daddy large one."
Poppy made a face. Then she turned around and went into the DQ. Waiting for her to pick up our orders, I took Gregory for a walk around the parking lot. It wasn’t until I was a couple of feet away from the entrance that I picked up on that oh-so-familiar smell of someone smoking up.
I followed my nose to the alley behind the DQ, where a couple of kids a little younger than me were leaning on the fence, Jordan Catalano style, and passing around a joint. You’d think I wouldn’t be stupid enough to search for drugs just a couple of months after an overdose. But weed wasn’t pills.
"Is that cat on a leash?" asked a kid who was probably Poppy’s age but looked a lot older.
"Pass me that joint and I’ll let you take him around the block," I said.
The kids laughed, begrudgingly widening their circle and letting me in.
"So where can I get a little more of this?" I asked. "I just moved here."
One of the kids gave me an address that I’d be following later, a little Alice in Wonderland and down the rabbit hole. I tried not to think about how creepy I looked, towering over a group of preteens.