by Beth Goobie
“Smoke on the Water” faded and Sal removed the headset, returning to her body, the thick posts of her legs, and the bright cramps that threaded her arms and chest. With a groan, she sank to the floor and splayed herself, face down.
“What you listening to?” asked Dusty.
“The screaming in my head.” Exhaustion was a drug, small pools of peace that lapped through her body. If only she never had to move again.
“Screaming anything in particular?” Dusty chomped casually on a Dorito.
“Just screaming.”
“Screaming’s best when there are no words,” agreed her brother. “You got Mom worried though. She heard you and came downstairs to inquire after your emotional health, but you wouldn’t answer her.”
“Huh?” Sal rolled over to face him. She couldn’t remember her mother coming into the room.
“Your eyes were closed,” Dusty shrugged. “You were screaming, and you had the headphones pumped to what level?”
“Seven,” said Sal, putting on her glasses and checking.
Dusty’s eyebrows skittered. “I explained scream therapy to her. Showed her a few paragraphs from one of my psych textbooks. Told her not to take it personally.”
“I didn’t know she was there,” muttered Sal. “I thought she had another board meeting.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Dusty crumpled the Doritos bag and bounced it off her head, then retreated into silence, watching the corner lava lamp ooze through itself — a relic from their mother’s adolescence. Sal knew he wouldn’t come right out and ask her why she’d been seven-level screaming. All the demons in hell couldn’t drag such a question from his lips. No one in their family took the direct approach, preferring to flutter in wordless sympathy about a sufferer, like a moth around a candle flame, getting its wings singed. It was as if they’d all signed a contract to keep things calm and even-paced, to never look beneath the surface where the bad things lurked. Unfortunately, no one had explained the consequences of this kind of contract, the way it left you alone with the things that mattered most, carrying them like a cupped handful of water.
Maybe that was why she went underground to let the wildness out. One crazy afternoon when she was ten, she’d watched Dusty and Lizard cover the rec room’s ceiling, walls and floor with orange shag carpet. Lizard had dubbed the result “Retro-Whatever” and the room had become the acknowledged domain of the Hanson offspring, fervently avoided by their mother. Down here in Retro-Whatever no one poked, prodded, or asked for emotional status reports. Down here, you put on “Child In Time” and let Ian Gillan scream.
“My period’s coming.” Sitting up, Sal traced the shag carpet imprints on her forearms. “It’s a woman thing.”
Dusty nodded, expressionless.
“Well, have you ever been a woman?” Sal demanded, suddenly on the defensive.
“Have you?” deadpanned her brother.
“Getting there.” She tossed a throw cushion at his head. “Faster than you’ll reach macho manhood, Tarzan.”
“Granted.” Dusty’s eyes skimmed her face, hesitant. With a sigh he flopped back in the beanbag chair, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if something of all-consuming importance had summoned his attention upward. Watching him, Sal felt a rush of affection that was almost pain. How she loved his skinny, intelligent face, the shy vigil he maintained over her and the great lengths he went to hide it. But she couldn’t tell him any of this — it would mean dipping beneath the surface, and it was crowded down there. Who knew what she’d come up against? In silence, the two of them splayed at opposite ends of Retro-Whatever, the stereo shut off, the glory vanished. Quietly, the air rebuilt itself, brick by brick. The Wall — in this family they lived it, breathed it, ate it.
“Hey Sally-Sis, just tell Mom goodnight before you go to bed, okay?” Dusty asked softly, counting orange shag threads above his head. One, two, yum yum goo. Three, four, I want more. Five, six, grunt, smack, lick. She could almost hear his thoughts, a feeding rhyme he’d taught her when she was still in diapers. His lips moved soundlessly as he chanted — her brother was also an expert at vanishing inside his head. And if he wanted her to, well, she would track down the eternal clicking of her mother’s laptop keyboard and interrupt those whizzing fingers long enough to deliver a perfunctory goodnight kiss. It shouldn’t be too stressful. It wasn’t like her mother to do much more than sigh when anyone tried to lure her attention temporarily from her computer screen. And for Dusty — well, for Dusty, Sal would do anything.
“Your wish is my command.” Grunting to her feet, she stumbled stiffly toward the door.
She woke to the last warmth of autumn. Outside her bedroom window, leaves glowed cranberry and gold. Opening the screen, Sal breathed in their heavy wet scent and stroked the raindrops that slid, still dreaming, across their glistening surfaces. In the early morning light, the ornamental crab tree that guarded her window was an impossible scarlet, a myriad of tiny stained-glass windows. She plucked a single radiant leaf, ducking the immediate reverberation of water droplets. Then she pinned the leaf to her bulletin board beside the empty Cheezies bag and headed downstairs for breakfast.
Her mother was in the kitchen, inserting Tupperware containers into her briefcase. Sal knew the sandwiches sealed inside one of those containers were layered with meat, cheese and lettuce, their crusts carefully trimmed. Carrot and celery sticks were lying in the other container, crisp in a pool of water, and the accompanying bottle of kiwi juice would go straight into the office fridge upon her mother’s arrival. Ms. Hanson had prepared the same lunch every workday for the past decade. Last fall, Sal had had to work herself into an emotional cyclone before convincing her mother that she really really would absolutely and terminally die if she ever had to ingest a similar lunch in front of her high- school friends.
“And just what do you think you’re going to eat?” her mother had demanded.
“The four major food groups,” Sal had replied. “French fries, gravy, hamburgers and pop.”
“Smart ass,” her mother had said. “It’ll give you zits.” Then, too tired to argue, she’d handed over the lunch money, and Sal had realized she had her mother in the palm of her hand. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with being doted upon. Rather, it was the fatigue factor — since her mother had been promoted to supervisor at work, she no longer had any residual energy to deal with her sprouting adolescent offspring. Other than a very well-intentioned chat about vaginas and penises, tampons and condoms, and a definite NO! to body piercing and tattoos, Ms. Hanson had left Sal to clamber into maturity on her own. It wasn’t a formula for bosom buddies. Every now and then, Sal caught her mother giving her quick confused glances as if unsure from which orifice her daughter had originally emerged. Other than this, they were supersonic jets, occasionally crossing each other’s tailwinds.
“Did you finish studying for your math quiz?” Picking up her briefcase, her mother turned toward the door.
Math quiz? Faking composure, Sal frantically scanned her brain for data regarding her first-period math class, but The Wall Live must have blown it somewhere past Pluto. Then she remembered.
“That was Tuesday, Mom.” A perfect circle of bran muffins sat awaiting her and Dusty on a plate — everything her mother did was so geometric. Snagging the biggest one, Sal stuffed half of it into her mouth. She loved the way raisins exploded softly onto her tongue. “Don’t give me a heart attack.”
“Just asking. Don’t you take a heart attack.” Her mother retreated into her customary wounded stance and the air sagged the way it usually did between them, weary and bruised. “It’s a mother’s job to ask these things, y’know.”
“Hey, why not quit and apply for employment insurance?” Sal spoke without thinking, the joke an exuberant flash passing through her brain.
“Parents don’t get insurance,” snapped her mother, jamming on her sunglasses. “No matter what happens, they’re stuck with it.”
The screen door slammed behind her, a
nd Ms. Hanson’s heels descended the outside steps in sharp precise clicks. Open-mouthed, Sal stood in the empty room, staring at the door. Suddenly, the kitchen shifted into a dark swerve around her. There was the familiar ooze of her brain into memory, and she could feel the tight line of the seat belt once again trapping her against the seat. Then someone began screaming as the car left the road and jolted in and out of the ditch, headlights fixed on a large aspen, the dead-ahead brilliant trunk.
“Mom!” She had to get back, back to the place her mind had been before ... before what? A dark dizziness lifted, and Sal found herself swaying in the sunlit kitchen, the screen door still quivering in its frame. She remembered ... something about Mom being angry, leaving the house angry. Terror ascended on huge wings. Not angry — her mother couldn’t leave angry. It was a really bad idea to get into a car feeling angry.
Bursting through the screen door, Sal stumbled on the steps and had to grab the railing for balance. “Mom!” Her ankle gave off a sharp twinge but she ignored it, running alongside the car, hanging onto the doorhandle as her mother backed down the driveway.
“What?” Unrolling the window halfway, Ms. Hanson glared balefully over her sunglasses.
“I think I passed,” Sal panted, scooping words off the surface — this word, that word, any word that might change the expression on her mother’s face.
“Passed what?”
“My math test!”
“Oh.” The tired intricate lines on her mother’s face softened. So many, Sal thought. Why hadn’t she noticed them before? “That’s good, honey.”
“And Mom ...”
“Yes?”
“Drive careful, okay?”
Her mother’s eyes reddened. She blinked rapidly, then looked away. “You have a good day, sweetie,” she said huskily. “Take care of yourself, too.”
“I will, Mom, I promise.” Catastrophe averted, Sal stood in the middle of the street, waving her mother to the corner and out of sight. When she turned back to the house, the sudden dark swerve in the kitchen had been forgotten and the memory tucked back in its place, safely underground with the darkness and the dead where it belonged.
She was late for band practice as usual, everyone else seated, their fingers skimming casually through various warm-up scales. As she came through the door, her eyes darted instinctively to the back row of risers where the brass section ruled. Directly at their midpoint sat Willis Cass, trumpet raised to his lips, ascending a gleaming line of notes. He hadn’t noticed her enter, his wolfish gaze prowling the ceiling, floating with the sound of his trumpet. After yesterday’s session with Shadow Council, encountering him in the middle of something as normal as a Concert Band practice felt like receiving a jolt of electric shock. Sal’s eyes leapt guiltily away, she grabbed clarinet #19 from the wall cabinet and maneuvered through the hedge of front-row music stands. But in the moment before she sat down, she felt her gaze pulled again toward the trumpet section. This time, she found Willis watching her, one eyebrow raised and a smile puckering his lips. A flush hit her hard, leaving her charbroiled and helpless. Hastily she sat down and began joining the joints of her clarinet, ducking her head to avoid Pavvie’s pointed glance as he stepped onto the podium. The conductor rapped his baton and lifted it, the room inhaling a brief four-second silence as he gave the introductory beats to “In the Mood.”
“Earth to Planet Marduk, cover your ears,” Sal hissed at Brydan, just beating the cacophony that erupted on all sides. Sticking her reed into her mouth, she masticated furiously, then slid the reed onto the mouthpiece and tightened the ligature. Settling her fingers onto the holes, she pretended to play along.
“Hey, where are we?” she whispered, elbowing Brydan slightly.
Beside her there was no change, no finger shooting toward the page and jabbing at a specific bar. Turning toward Brydan, Sal quirked an eyebrow expectantly but he continued to sit, his eyes riveted to the page, tooting through a series of whole notes as if the entire future of the S.C. Concert Band depended on his getting each and every one correct ... as if his own existence depended upon it.
A sick brilliance twisted Sal’s gut. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Elbowing Brydan again, she willed him to turn toward her, but he kept his gaze rigidly on the page, a third-degree blush mounting his neck. Panic began picking up different parts of Sal’s brain and walking off with them. Brydan hadn’t acted like this yesterday afternoon, and the word had been out then. He’d known, surely he’d known. This had to be some kind of joke, or maybe he’d gone into temporary malfunction and was experiencing vertigo. It happened — people lost their minds for seconds, here and there, then regained them. Didn’t she lose hers several times a day? And didn’t she also have an empty Cheezies bag pinned to her bedroom bulletin board, concrete evidence that her friendship with Brydan Wallace was going to continue against all odds, proof that what was happening here at this very moment was a fluke, a five-second fling with insanity? Brydan’s current actions were impossible. She was going to make them impossible. Fiercely, she elbowed him a third time. Swaying slightly in his wheelchair, he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead.
The jerk had choked halfway through the first page and here she was, elbowing a corpse with flyaway ears and a clarinet glued between his lips. What a way to die. Recklessly, Sal launched into the second page. It was a miserably incorrect guess and she was caught flat out in a burst of angry eighth notes when the rest of the band suddenly finished several bars ahead of her. Normally Brydan would have offered his grinning congratulations, but today he sat beet red and ramrod straight, staring dead ahead.
“You shit,” she hissed in full-hearted panic.
“Talking, talking!” Lurching forward, Pavvie rapped the top of their music stand. “Always talking!”
The conductor’s dark mustache bristled and his eyes were pale green accusations. Shrinking into her seat, Sal counted heartbeats until Pavvie once again retreated behind the podium and began a series of clipped instructions to the lead saxophone player.
With a slight cough Brydan cleared his throat and Sal’s eyes darted wildly toward him, begging for a sign, any discreet gesture of friendship. As she watched, his right hand lifted from the clarinet. Slowly, deliberately, his three middle fingers straightened while his thumb and pinkie tucked themselves in.
The air peeled back on itself then, tearing away the surface reality Sal had always known and leaving her with something entirely different. Everything still looked the same, the surface appeared intact, but she knew it was gone, completely gone. What she was left with was a world of strangers who looked like friends — friends she used to believe in, friends with whom she’d tossed small jokes and confidences back and forth, not realizing these carefree disclosures had been small parts of her body, and the joke had always been on her.
Rapping his music stand, Pavvie lifted his baton. “Again, from the beginning!”
Without a sound, scream or whimper, the world continued on, Brydan’s right hand returning to the clarinet and positioning itself for the first note. Everyone loves a victim. Two rows behind her, Sal felt Willis Cass raise his trumpet, his eyes drilling softly into the back of her head.
Chapter Seven
For the rest of the week, they left her alone. No scrolls appeared in her desks and no one flashed mysterious hand signals at her in the halls. In fact, Shadow Council demonstrated such a complete lack of interest in her existence, Sal might have dismissed the entire ordeal except for one minor detail — every student at Saskatoon Collegiate now treated her as if she didn’t exist. Eyes blanked as they crossed her face, voices talked around her, she felt unsubstantial as a breath of air. Former friends were the worst, their eyes glazing with dread whenever they accidentally bumped into her. Brydan had it easiest — he simply ducked his head and treated her as part of his regular hallway obstacle course — but the rest of her friends were eye level and had to keep inventing a sudden interest in their watches or turning in the opposite direction. Feeling in
some way responsible for their discomfort, Sal avoided her favorite haunts and used out-of-the-way washrooms, but it was impossible to predict every encounter. Thursday afternoon, two days after she’d received the third scroll, she entered the girls’ washroom in the tech wing to find Kimmie Busatto coming out of a toilet stall, zipping her jeans.
“Oh my god!” Kimmie cried, her chubby face collapsing as she caught sight of Sal standing, equally stunned, in the doorway. Then her zipper caught and she refocused on it with manic relief, yanking and swearing.
The second day of classes, Sal had already memorized Kimmie’s schedule and she knew it better than her own. Kimmie had just gotten out of History and her next class was English, halfway across the school. Any other girls’ washroom in the entire building would have been more convenient than this one. “What’re you doing in this can?” she whispered, cold realization settling in.
The zipper remained static, caught on a thread and refusing to budge. Keeping her eyes down, Kimmie worked it frantically while Sal counted nuclear butterflies in her stomach. Until that zipper moved, the two of them were trapped in a washroom both of them had chosen in order to avoid encountering each other on the opposite side of the school.
“I hate this place.” Kimmie’s voice was muffled, directed into her chest. “I hate what they do to people here, I hate what they’re doing to my friend.” The thread gave, and she quickly zipped up her jeans. “I hate,” she continued softly, staring at the floor, “myself.” Without looking up, she sidled quickly and carefully around Sal’s motionless body and out the door.