by Amy Bright
That last one might have just been Alberta.
"I don’t want to do this tour," Poppy said. "Come on. We’re signed in. Want to just wander around the park until Mom picks us up?"
I followed her back out the gates. We had never actually belonged on the field trip. Who knew how Mrs. Haynes and Aunt Lynne had decided it would be a good idea for us to go. Poppy was being slippery, sneaking around with her body all elastic and camouflaged against the building. I didn’t know where we were going. All I knew was that Poppy had a thing about the high-level bridge. Every time we went by it together, she’d do that trick with the music. Turn it up sky high and blast our eardrums. Now Poppy was leading us away from it and away from the fort.
I didn’t think we were going to do anything for Halloween next week. I didn’t even remember seeing a box of mini-chocolate bars around the house. Who knew what Aunt Lynne was planning on handing out to the kids.
I’d had a good Halloween the year before. It had just been me and Niall, and we had taken two boxes of Halloween candy down to the beach. We got a little high and snacked ourselves silly. I picked out all the Snickers bars and left the M&M's. Niall had even dressed up for the occasion. He had a gross plastic mask from Spirit, the Halloween specialty store that only opened for the month of October, and he used it as protection between the sand and the ass of his jeans.
"You know where we’re going?" I asked Poppy.
"Give me some credit," she said. "I’ve lived here my entire life."
"Yeah, but you’re, like, twelve, Pops."
"You’re so weird," Poppy said. "I bet you weren’t even popular at your old school."
"I was okay," I said, caught off-guard by her bitchy comment.
Poppy led the way through the river bottom. The grass was up to my thighs and we mostly kept to the paved paths. I could hear the Old Man River rushing by us on the right. I hugged my arms around my chest and stayed five steps back. Poppy looked like the skinniest Himalayan guide, her purple parka leading us to safety.
"You high again today, Hunter?" Poppy asked me.
"No."
"Sure," Poppy said.
Poppy walked her requisite five steps in front of me. I had memorized the back of her head, her high ponytail swinging. It bugged me a bit that she thought I was a pothead. I hadn’t been back to the house downtown since I took Poppy. Who would have guessed she’d be familiar with half the people there.
"Hey, Hunter?" Poppy asked, calling back to me.
"What?"
"There’s somewhere I have to go tomorrow afternoon. Want to come with me?"
Sometimes Poppy was the biggest little enigma I knew.
"Somewhere?" I said. "Want to be more specific?"
"Just tell me yes or no," she said.
"Sure," I said quickly, not wanting her to give up on me. "I’ll go with you."
Me and Poppy went down to the river and sat on the cool flat rocks. She skipped a couple into the water. When it was time to go back, Poppy purposefully took the long way to the fort, avoiding the bridge completely. I didn’t know how she could ignore it like that. All I wanted to do was tip my head back and look up through the metal trestles. But Poppy avoided it.
We were late to meet her mom and to get a ride back home. Poppy didn’t say a word as she climbed into the front seat of the car. She just blasted the music again and went back to ignoring me.
The next day, me and Poppy left her house after lunch, when her mom had to run some errands. She led the way, with me just a step or two behind her. I counted each step I took.
Mom was big into pedometers for a while. She read somewhere that a healthy human being is supposed to take 10,000 steps a day. I can’t remember how close to that she actually got. The pedometer didn’t really measure how much she moved around in the yoga classes she taught. Seeing a big 2,500, day after day, got to be depressing for a health nut like Mom.
I was already at six hundred steps when Poppy turned up a street I’d never been to before. I didn’t ask questions. Maybe I was going to get my 10,000 in. Then I’d have something to tell Mom when I called home. A conversation starter that was better than announcing that my blood work was normal week after week.
The counting was drawing attention to something else I’d been doing lately. Numbering the days since Niall went under. Three hundred and twenty-seven.
I thought about Niall at night, right before I slipped away into sleep. That’s when I wondered how it was for him. What it looked like on the other side. A deep black hole that he could finally slide down. Jump down. Leap into.
I took another step after Poppy.
Nine hundred.
"So, we’re going to real school now?" I called up to Poppy. She’d turned up the long sidewalk that led into the high school.
She shrugged her shoulders and I watched them rise and fall from behind. I imagined she was a gopher. Just poking out of her hole to take a look around. Shrugging herself back down again.
We walked into the school. It’d been so long since I’d been inside one. The long, waxed hallways with broken-up and busted lockers lining the sides. You could see shoulder marks dug into the metal, from where someone got pissy and slammed a poor kid into his locker.
I think I figured this was the last place Poppy would want to be. There was no way I could’ve guessed she’d barge right in through the front doors.
"Jesus, Pops, can you slow down? What are we doing here?"
Poppy spun around on her heels and waited for me to catch up. She could’ve fit in here. She had an army-green jacket on today, something fitted with a hood and buttoned cuffs. It was cooler than what she normally wore. She had tight jeans with brown ankle boots. Drop her into any school and she’d at least be middle-tier, if not floating with the popular kids. Maybe a popular kid who opted into band.
Scratch that.
Opted into choir. That was cooler.
"Someone stole something from my house," Poppy said. "I’m getting it back. Are you coming?"
"Christ," I said. "What’d they steal?"
She’d already hurried ahead of me. I couldn’t tell what her final destination was. Even though a high school is a high school is a high school, it’s still hard to pinpoint just where exactly the littlest-Poppy-who-could was heading. Cafeteria? The office? Library?
I heard the cheering before I saw the open double doors. Poppy was making a beeline right for them.
The gym.
"Poppy!" I yelled. She disappeared through the opening without taking a second look in my direction.
The school floor was so shiny I swore I could almost see my own distorted reflection in it. Chasing after a pre-teen. Keeping her out of trouble. It shouldn’t have been so hard to walk through a pair of double doors, but it was giving me some major anxiety. I took a little breath, feeling like the opposite of a man, and followed Poppy in.
I couldn’t find her right away. The bleachers were just a wall of indistinguishable faces. I couldn’t tell one from another. The sound in the gym was as blurry as the crowd. Just a wall of noise, all of it cheering, aimed at the center of the court.
I looked at the court just in time to get hit in the face with a flying basketball. It knocked against my cheek like a fist, making my entire face vibrate. The basketball bounced away and to the door, where an old man picked it up and threw it back to center. The cheering switched right over to laughter. Me, the butt of the joke in a school I didn’t even go to. I lifted my hand in a wave—an I’m okay gesture that everyone ignored. Poppy didn’t step forward to claim me. I leaned up against the wall, taking a breather before venturing further in to find her.
"Hunter, dude. That really you?"
Now I was sure I was hallucinating from the hit I took to my face. The basketball knocking loose some brain matter and making me confused. Because I could swear that Josh was standing in front of me, lanky as ever, wearing a red basketball jersey with matching shorts.
"Josh?"
"Shit, man. What ar
e you doing in Alberta?"
"What are you doing in Alberta?"
Josh barked out a laugh and leaned over. He put his elbows on his thighs and caught a breath.
"Playing basketball. We got a tournament. This is where you’re living now? Middle of nowhere?"
"It’s a city," I told him.
"Guess we’re not here long enough to see any of it," Josh said.
"When are you leaving?"
"Tonight. Heading up to Calgary next. Coach set this all up. Giving us a little tour of the prairies. We’ve been riding around in a charter bus for the last week. We’re heading back to Victoria in a couple of days."
"Man, I wish I’d known."
"I asked your parents about you a couple of times. They wouldn’t tell me where you were living. I never would’ve guessed here, that’s for sure. So they did a good job hiding you where no one would look."
A whistle blew a shrieking pitch and Josh looked toward center court.
"I better go. Are you sticking around?" he asked.
"I don’t know. I’m looking for someone."
Josh raised an eyebrow. "What kind of someone?"
"It’s a long story," I told him. I got in a bit closer, a shuffle step toward him. "You heard anything about Niall?" I asked him.
Josh’s face pinched up. He shook his head slow. Looked like a scene from a Zack Synder movie. Everything made more serious by drawing it out.
"He hasn’t changed, man," Josh said. "Sorry."
Josh gave me a slap on the back before joining the rest of his team. I recognized them in the weird way you know people from school. I didn’t hang out with any of them but we’d had classes together. Maybe it was because Alberta was the last place any of them expected me to be, but no one took a second look over.
I scanned the bleachers again, wanting to find Poppy and get out of there. As good as it was to see Josh, it also brought up a heap of things I had successfully pushed out of the way when I moved in with Aunt Lynne. As good as it was to see him, nothing had changed. Nothing made any of it even a little bit better.
Poppy materialized to my left, shooting me a look from hell. "Okay, let’s go."
"You get what you came for?" I asked her.
She was wearing a backpack over her shoulder. She pulled it tighter.
"Yeah."
She led the way out of the gym, but I wasn’t letting her get away with her five-steps-ahead rule. I wanted to know what was so important that she had to go in there for it.
I waited until we were outside the school and out on the front lawn before I grabbed the hanging strap of the backpack. That was the problem with the one-strap operation. Made it easy for someone like me to pull a trick like that and tug the whole thing off. Poppy stopped in her tracks.
"Let go," she said, her voice firm.
"Who’d you get this from? You disappeared, Pops. If you’re going to drag me out of the house on some mission, you better tell me what it is."
"It’s nothing," she said.
Maybe I was just a bully, because I yanked hard on the backpack strap right then and pulled the entire thing away from her body. It was lighter than I thought it would be. Even though I didn’t know what was in there, I guess I figured there would be some weight to it.
"Give it back."
I was already unzipping the zipper. I had a good foot in height on Poppy. I kept the pack above her head, doing everything just out of her reach.
"No, I want to know what was so important that I had to run into Josh," I said. "That was my high school basketball team in there. Not that you noticed. I moved here to get away from people I used to know. You dragged me right into it."
That got her to stop. It gave me a chance to look into the backpack and figure out what was so important. But it was nothing. Just an old pair of brown boots. Men’s boots.
Poppy didn’t explain. She slung the pack over her shoulder and walked home.
D E C E M B E R
O n t h e B u s
"How old is she again?" Lee asked. We were careening around a mountain corner on our way to Kelowna. I was sitting beside her, leaving Poppy snoozing by the window.
"Twelve."
We were both looking at Poppy. She had been sleeping for almost half an hour. I’d watched her head bob forward about a million times before she let it drop on the headrest behind her.
"And what? You’re at her house every day?"
"Homeschool," I told her. My hand formed a semi-cool finger-gun and I pretended to shoot it into the seat ahead of me. "Pretty cool, huh?"
"So they didn’t send you to school?"
"Yeah, because that was working so well before."
The bus ride was filled with more of these awkward quiet moments than the catching-up you’d think we’d be doing. Both of us working hard at considering our response, steering into the right direction.
"What was that like?" she finally asked.
"She’s a cool kid. Kind of quiet. We just hung out and did work."
I thought about us sitting at the big wooden table in the kitchen, with Poppy and her eyebrows focused on her paper. She’d give me this look all the time, when I was playing around or not doing work, this one that stopped me right in my tracks.
"And so, what? No drugs? Nothing? Just living with your aunt and hanging out with her?" She bobbed her head in Poppy’s direction.
"Jesus, Lee," I said. Holy hell all up in my cheeks. Instant red.
"Okay, okay," she said. "Just asking. Because before you left," Lee started.
"I know. I’m not doing anything,"
I was only lying halfway. A white lie. Barely a lie at all.
We stopped in Vernon to let a handful of people off the bus. The driver stretched his legs outside, loading and unloading luggage from the storage underneath. I watched him out the window. He had a Santa Claus beard, white at the top, but still grey at the bottom. The hipster couple with the laptop got off the bus together. The girl pulled her toque down over her hair, messing up her bangs.
It was a knee-jerk response, I guess, that made me reach over and tuck Lee’s hair behind her ear. Her long bangs escaped from her ponytail. She blinked her eyes closed, her long eyelashes brushing against her cheeks. I put my thumb on there, on her closed eyelid, gentle as possible. She pushed her cheek into my palm. My hand shaped like a C, holding the side of her face.
"Can we not fight about Poppy?" I asked. "She’s cool, Lee. And she’s been through some stuff. And we’re not going to talk about it right now. That’s her thing, and she hasn’t even talked about it to me."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing," I said. "Can we not talk about Poppy?"
Lee nodded against my hand.
"We can not talk about Poppy."
Across the aisle, Poppy looked like she was still asleep. But I knew it was completely possible that she was pretending, and she’d listened to the whole thing. Lee opened her eyes again. She made an easy smile.
"Have you seen him?" I asked Lee.
She shook her head slowly.
"No."
"Who has?"
"Josh, I think. Some people went from school. A big group. His parents are there."
The bus started to go into a long dark tunnel leading through the mountain. The driver honked three times, the sound echoing off the walls. I made a wish because I was supposed to. Closed my eyes and hoped.
N O V E M B E R – D E C E M B E R
It was Aunt Lynne’s idea for me to go swimming. I shit you not, she thought it was a good idea for me to get back in the water.
Swimming was just one more activity tacked on to the end of a long list of activities. Aunt Lynne shuffled me from appointment to appointment, from lesson to lesson. I had almost zero downtime and, any time I had a spare minute to myself, I ended up using it up on Poppy.
Aunt Lynne bought me a pair of trunks at SportChek before she took me to the pool. She didn’t check my size or ask for my preference of color. So I ended up with a pai
r of black large. Could’ve mistaken me for a killer whale.
Instead of dropping me off at the pool, Aunt Lynne found a parking space in the lot and came in with me.
"Don’t you have errands to run or something?" I asked her.
She patted her purse. "I brought a magazine. I’ll wait until you’re done."
Aunt Lynne went up to the observation deck, the poolside edition of something out of Star Trek, to keep an eye on me from overhead. This pool was bigger than the community pool I’d taken swimming lessons at in Victoria. A pair of diving boards were at one end and a pale blue shallow area at the other. The middle pool was divided into ten skinny lanes. Six of them were marked by upright flutter boards. Free-swim lanes.
"You sure you’re serious?" I yelled up at Aunt Lynne.
She didn’t look away from her magazine. Kim Kardashian’s big lips were staring me right in the face from the back of Us Weekly, but Aunt Lynne wasn’t giving me the time of day. I adjusted my backpack over my shoulder and went back to the change rooms to switch over into my trunks. I took my time about it. No reason to rush things. Chlorinated water would have no problem going up my nose any time of the day.
While I changed, I thought about something Poppy had said the other day. She asked me a question about the ocean as we were working on Science short answers at her kitchen table. We were doing tides. In and out, ebb and flow.
Did you ever just go swim in the ocean? she asked me. Like, just run out on the beach and jump in and go for a swim?
It took me off guard. Lots of Poppy’s questions weren’t the ones I was ever expecting. They were just to the side of normal. Or else they started out okay and then they took a weird turn.
Stop, I wanted to tell her. Don’t ask about that.
She didn’t know what happened out on the ocean with Niall that day—that I really had jumped into the ocean and swam for my life. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t know. But at that moment, I wanted her to be smart enough to just guess the right answer. I wanted her to be a mind reader, and to turn that power on to find out about Niall, and then I wanted her to turn it right off again, just as fast.