X in Flight

by Karen Rivers

  Back in the living room, you try to type something, anything again. You make yourself a deal, your bed calling to you louder than your desire to make this project any good. You will do it without stopping. You bet yourself that you can write it all in not-one-second-more-than-thirty-minutes. You set the timer and type. Force yourself out of you.

  At the end of it, the buzzer goes and you stop exactly then, mid-sentence, and hit print. You don’t read it over or do another copy. You just staple it together and put it in your bag for tomorrow. Then you go lie on your bed and wait for your father to come home. It’s late. You can’t sleep until he gets home. You know you can’t. Until then, you’ll read and read and read until you begin to feel squirrelly from all the alternate lives you inhabit. It’s only when you hear his keys drop on the hall table and his pocket change hitting the jar that you can relax. Until then, you are always slightly tense. Poised for disaster. Brittle. Listening. When he gets home and you hear him coughing or sighing or flushing the toilet, then you are okay. He comes home after midnight, he was hosting some kind of conference, something that involved dinner, drinks, shmoozing. Probably Cassidy, too. You’ll be tired tomorrow, you think, as you snap off the book light and drift into an uneasy sleep, clutching the novel to your chest like it’s a teddy bear.

  A few days later, your teacher stands at the front of the classroom, holding all of your papers in his hands like they are precious documents that deserve to be under glass. He rubs the top page absent-mindedly. His sweater is the exact colour of newsprint. The way the sun is sloping through the window shines in his eyes, and he squints. You can suddenly see how young he is. He hasn’t shaved. He looks almost cool, almost hot. Pretty okay, in fact. How old is he anyway? He doesn’t look that much older than you.

  Why are you thinking this? You blush ferociously, the heat crawling up your neck and making your skin itch like you have scabies. The teacher is saying that some of the papers were good and some were surprising. He hesitates, then says, Cat. And you can hear, again, the way he feels about Cat and it makes your stomach cramp up. He asks her to read her paper which isn’t a paper but a poem. You hate her because you wish you’d thought of that.

  She reads it perfectly. Her voice dancing, like she’s seconds away from bursting out laughing. Like she couldn’t care less. Her voice is steady and bored and curls over at the edges with a light kind of sarcasm. Her gaze drifts around the room lazily. You wish so much that you could be like that.

  The funny thing is that, what she reads is totally familiar. Recognizable. Like something you heard a long time ago and are only just remembering. She didn’t even write it, you realize. You cough, as though you almost blurt that out but you can’t. Of course you don’t say anything. You know he thinks she wrote it, he thinks she’s brilliant. The tickle in your throat turns into a choking laugh. At him or at her, you aren’t sure. Later, you will look up the words you remember and see that the poem was actually written by someone named Merwin, you remember that it won a famous literary prize. Your teacher is much too stupid to know this. But what he does know is that when the winter sun shines low through the window, you can see through Cat’s shirt. You can see her breasts. She is thin in a different way than you are. Her thinness has curves. Yours doesn’t.

  You hate her. You wish she’d be your friend. You want to laugh at her or with her or both. You are overcome with the fact that you are dying to meet her eye so that you can say, I know it’s not yours. You look at the floor instead.

  When Cat has finished reading (it’s a very good poem, you have to agree), the teacher says, Ruby?

  And you say, Pardon? Which comes out as more of a croak than a word.

  And he says, Can you read yours? I’m not really asking, I’m telling.

  Oh, you say.

  Oh no.

  You get up because he told you to although it’s killing you to do it. Is this your reward for writing something he thinks is good? You have to read it out loud? You’d rather jump out of a plane than talk in public. Your knees shake and your hand trembles and you feel like you might cry or throw up or both. But you don't.

  It feels like at least ten minutes before you finally drag yourself to the front of the room and you can see the cloud of boredom and vague disinterest hanging over your classmates. Two people are asleep. Joey is one of them. Probably he’s your best friend although your friendship with him is a secret that lately has been limited to when he’s drunk and lonely. Everyone except you calls him “Tic. ” In addition to living in your building, Tic’s dad shares an office with your dad. They’ve been friends forever. You know Joey better than you know anyone but he’d be surprised to know that. To him, you’re like some kind of relative that he horses around with but has never really seen. Not really.

  You like him. Like, you really like him.

  This is something that you hate admitting even to yourself. It makes you crazy to replay in your mind that moment you thought he was going to kiss you. The snap in his eyes when he told you to leave. You tell yourself that you don’t like him at all, that it’s just a proximity thing. It’s just because he’s around. But it isn’t. It’s something else. Something about the way he smells that makes you blush. You wish you could shut off the crush and have a crush on someone else, anyone seems like they would be easier to like than Joey Ticcato, who is really, when you think about it, a complete jerk.

  Now from your position at the little wobbly podium front and center, you glare at him and cough hard, but he doesn’t move. He’s practically snoring. You don’t know why the teacher doesn’t wake him up. You think, I’ll talk quietly so he won’t hear me. Or loudly, so he will.

  You think, I’ve got no reason to be nervous, they won’t remember this tomorrow.

  You read:

  My name is Ruby and I’m the girl that no one notices. You’ve seen me before, or you’ve known me since the first grade, or you think my father might be famous, or you remember that I’m the girl from the fire. I am the girl from the fire. I remember it, but it isn’t who I am. I’m not afraid of fire although everyone thinks that I am. I’m not afraid of very much of anything although I look like someone who would be. I think. I’m sure that’s how people see me, because I’m blonde and pale and blush easily.

  It’s like reading something someone else has written. The words feel strange to you, and slippery like guppies that have jumped out of the tank and are wriggling around in shag carpeting, impossible to save.

  My name is Ruby, and I tell myself that I’m not afraid. I can see things about you that you don’t think I see. I know things I shouldn’t know. I understand things. I think I’m different. I think everyone thinks they are different from everyone else.

  My name is Ruby. Half of what I wrote is a lie, but I won’t tell you which half.

  At this moment, you pause because you are about to sneeze, but the sneeze doesn’t come. You know you must look demented, reading this, which – when you wrote it – seemed vaguely literary and interesting in a dramatic way and now sounds annoying, stupid, crazy and pretentious, all the while trying to either sneeze or not sneeze. You stare at the light for a second and the sneeze backs off. Then you start reading again.

  My name is Ruby. I’m a girl who goes to school and does her homework. I don’t go to parties. I don’t play sports. I’m afraid that one day, I’ll be old. I wonder who I will be in between now and being old. I don’t remember who I was before. I hope I know myself when I’ve moved on. I hope I remember.

  I hope no one thinks I’m crazy.

  You clear your throat and keep reading, even though at this point you would rather stop than anything in the world. This is torture. This is absurd. This is not happening. Your voice is coming back to you through a long tin tunnel.

  I hope I am crazy. I hope people like me. I want to be liked. I want to be taller. I want to be prettier. I want to be more popular.

  Here your voice breaks a bit, but you think, they aren’t listening anyway. You are very n
early whispering because the tinny-echo sound of yourself is so off-putting..

  I want to go to college. I want to know what I want. I want to finish this essay. I want to know who I am. I want to be able to answer that question with something other than my name.

  Who Am I? I am Ruby. I’m just a girl. That’s all. I have blonde hair and fair skin and I’m not that tall and I had braces when

  That’s the end. Finishing mid-sentence. You sit down and your face is as red as your name. It’s pulsing with humiliation. You are so embarrassed. You want to die, right away. NOW. You want to vanish. You want to kill yourself. Anything, something. How humiliating. Awful. What were you thinking? Why did you write that? Why did you READ it? Which is worse? It’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done. You wish you had refused. You wonder if you can just drop out. You could just stop coming to school. You’re over-reacting. You try to breathe normally. You hate drawing attention to yourself and blushing and panting is doing nothing to make people look away. You close your eyes. No, that’s not working either. Your hand—well, your whole body – is shaking like there is an earthquake of which you are the epicenter.

  You look over, quickly, at Joey. You are beyond relieved to see that he is still asleep. His friend Rob (“Robbo," everyone calls him, because no one has a normal name here) bounces an eraser off his ear and he yelps like a poodle. You pretend not to notice. You think you’d like to get up, walk out, and never ever ever come back again.

  X. is staring at you. Oh God. Really staring. He hates you. He is always staring at you and it makes you feel small and separate. God, you think, that stupid essay. You don’t remember writing that or why you wrote it. You think, Oh my God, they’ll think I’m no fun. Who writes crap like that? It was supposed to be funny or ironic or both.

  You hate school. You hate yourself. You can’t stop thinking it; it’s like a loop in your brain: I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself. You look down at the floor until the class ends. They’ll forget, you tell yourself. They’ve already forgotten.

  I liked your essay, Cat whispers, smiling at you across the quiet pimply kid who stinks like sour milk who sits between you. She’s grinning like you’re friends now. You’ve passed some kind of a test. You aren’t friends with her. Your embarrassment is so violent that you almost want to punch her, if only that other kid wasn’t in the way.

  You nod and say loudly, Yeah, good poem.

  You don’t have that many friends. You have people who don’t frighten you who you eat lunch with. Cat scares you. You glare at her. You look away. When the bell goes, you grab your stuff and you hurry. You go into the bathroom – the stall at the end with the toilet that never stops running – and wait there until the bell goes again, writing your initials on the wall over and over again to the sounds of rushing water.

  You wipe the wall off with your bare hand before you leave. For the rest of the day, it will look like you’ve been picking blackberries, juice smeared across your palm and fingers.

  My name is Ruby, you think to yourself. And that’s the whole fucking story.

  X.

  Chapter 4

  Here is a snapshot of what it’s like to be me:

  Ka - POW, I say out loud.

  I watch the ball explode off the tee and float down the raggedy-ass field so far I can’t see it. I need glasses, you know. Maybe you’ve seen me squinting. But for some stupid reason, I can’t seem to bring myself to let anyone know. Honestly, I feel like glasses are for smart kids, book-reading kids, not for me. I can’t explain it, but I can’t pull off the look, you know? And contacts… Well, fuck that. I don’t want anything in my eye. No thanks. Besides, Deer sure as hell can’t afford them and I have better things to spend my money on. I’d really rather not see. What’s there to see anyway? I don’t need to see the golf ball once it’s left my club. I trust that it’s going to go where I wanted it to go. I know how to place it on the face of my club to make it go anywhere. Why bother checking? I like watching the white fluff of the ball floating away from me like the dandelion seeds I blow with Mutt in the summer, lying in the cow’s field we call a “yard”, staring up at the blue cup of sky. I like losing the ball into the distance. What difference does it make where it lands? It’s not like you can change the path of it once it’s started its trajectory. After contact, it’s on its own. Doing its own thing.

  That’s sort of like a metaphor for life, no? I get the feeling that you get what I mean by that. Like it’s happening anyway, whether you’re looking or not.

  I kick another ball onto the practice mat from my stash. I have done this a million times, believe me. Golf is my life. These white balls. This rubber tee. This club.

  I line it up. Wiggle the club. My shoulder pinches, so I hold the club behind me and twist and stretch my back and shoulders. It’s cold out here today. The air is so hard it’s like trying to breathe solid ice. I’m shivering. My skin is prickly from goosebumps, reacting to the air. Should be wearing a parka, but who can practice in something like that? I’d rather be bare armed, frozen, muscles stiffened up.

  Sometimes, I can see how we’re all animals, you know? I feel it. Not like animals play golf or anything like that. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying: the way my body moves and twinges and knows things from sense alone. I just like it. Like the way when I wind up to swing, I can feel my tendons pulling, ligaments retracting. I’m tall and skinny, yeah. But I’m stronger than you think. Stronger than you know. In my head, I’m ripped and fine. Sinewy. Powerful. Different than I look.

  You know what else I like?

  I like the way people stare at me. I said I didn’t, but I do sometimes. I just hate why they do it. They do it because they think I’m the next Tiger Woods. If I never hear that name again, it’ll be too soon. What is wrong with people anyway? People have no imagination. Zero. It’s like they are just blank idiots waiting for someone on TV to tell them what to think. As soon as Tiger came along, it was like every black kid in North America must be naturally gifted at golf, it’s just that none of us knew it until he saved us all. He’s like the golfing Jesus of black kids everywhere. Golf is our saviour. Or not. It sure isn’t going to save me. I’m sick of him. Sick, sick, sick. Give me a break. It’s GOLF. It’s a game, not a cure for cancer. He’s just a guy. He’s good, but he’s not a god.

  I’m good. But am I that good? No way. Not a chance.

  You know, on some level, he’s probably sick of himself, too. It’s like somehow his race can’t be separated from his skill, you know?

  If every golfer on the tour was black, no one would comment. I guess maybe it’s like being a white basketball star in the NBA. You just stand out so people can’t stop mentioning it.

  Thwack.

  Do you play golf? There’s a moment you can feel it, when it’s right. The golf club twinges a certain way in your hands. A shudder of vibration. A sound.

  I could teach you. Maybe. If you wanted.

  Ka-POW.

  Yeah. That feels good. I like that.

  Deer is obsessed with Mr. Tiger Woods. There’s a picture of him on the fridge, smiling with his huge teeth whitened so much they look like squares of gum. She loves him. Loves, loves, loves him. But not in that way. Deer loves Tiger the way other people love, I don’t know, the royal family or The Tragically Hip or Jennifer Aniston. The way Mutty loves Clifford the Big Red Dog. Let’s put it this way: we get the freaking golf channel, even though we can’t afford to eat meat more than once a week and sometimes we can’t make the rent.

  Deer sits in her beanbag chair, stuffing envelopes for extra money, her eyes glued to Tiger’s every move across the tiny green patch of the TV.

  X, she says. It’s your turn next. You could be famous.

  Look at that putt, she’ll say. That man is not of this world.

  Plink, she says, when he gets one in the cup.

  I don’t hate golf. I don’t hate Tiger Woods. I just hate how she loves him.

  And honestly, would I want to
be Tiger Woods, even if it was possible? For real? I can’t imagine myself out there on one golf course after another week after week. A patch of grass in Scotland or Arizona or Singapore or somewhere. They’re all the same, golf courses. The flat greenness of them could make you blind or drive you fucking nuts. I think I’d be like people who get lost in deserts and go crazy from the sameness of it all. Sure, tour players are playing for millions of dollars. Bling bling. That kind of money can buy some kind of happiness. Enough happiness for me. Enough happiness for my kid brother. I have to look out for him, you know. It’s not like he has a Daddy either.

  Ka-pow.

  The ball sails off my club like it was meant to be. I shield my eyes from the watery winter sun, which has sunk so low on the horizon it’s starting to look look lop-sided, starring up my eyes with smudges of darkness. Not that it matters. Not like I’m watching the ball flight. Like I can see that far.

  Ka-pow. I slice another one hard into the fence.

  I guess one of the big things to me is that golf -- it’s a game. It just doesn’t seem worthwhile, you know? Is it enough to make a life? To play a game for money? It doesn’t have a point. I want to do something, okay? I know that makes me sound like a huge asshole, but I don’t care. I want to change things. I just don’t know how. Or why. Or if I’ll ever really be bothered to do it.

  Tiger raises a lot of money for kids, Deer says. He’s changed all those lives forever.

  I nod. I know it. I’m happy for him.

  He also wins. All the time. Every time he plays, he’s close, at least.

  Me, I’ve come either first or last in every tournament I’ve entered. I’m not consistent. Guess why? It’s because I don’t fucking care. On the range, I’m consistently good. I like the driving range. The rhythm. The mindless repetition.