Openers
Copyright © Shayna Krishnasamy 2010
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 9780981335216
Cover Photography: anneleven
Contents
Excerpt from The Grimly Queen
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Excerpt from The Grimly Queen
I meet Regan at a party I’ve been dragged to by a well-meaning friend who’s taken it upon herself to get me out of my funk. She forces me out of bed and into a shower, squeezes me into a bubblegum pink tube dress, and keeps telling me I look “smashing” (the influence of a Brit boyfriend who later gets her pregnant, and over whom she will try to commit suicide, twice).
The party is at one of the off-campus dorms and has spilled exuberantly onto the lawn where some jocks are playing drunken football in the snow with their girlfriends on their shoulders. I’ve lost my friend and am loitering with no real purpose on the front steps, marveling at the snowy lawn laid out before me. (It’s been so long since I’ve been outside that I’m actually shocked to see the snow as we get into the Brit’s car. My friend gives me a look. What did you expect? she asks. It is December, after all. To which I reply, with vague surprise, It is?) The air is cold and the trees are threatening and my legs are bare. I wish I were at home in bed.
The door opens behind me and somebody comes onto the landing. I’m immediately resentful (as I’ve recently become of anyone invading my silent contemplative space, even if that space is a public space, especially a public washroom). I consider abandoning the stairs but discard the idea on the stubborn grounds that I was here first. I pull my jacket more tightly around me and wish I had a beer. Maybe if I had a beer I’d be drunk and unable to feel resentment at all, or at the very least I could throw it in this person’s face.
I’m not going back in there, she says.
I wouldn’t have looked over otherwise. I would have steadily ignored her until she’d gone off to join the jocks, or to make out with a Physics major, or to do any number of things I wouldn’t have the nerve to do. Instead, I glance over at her. It’s obvious from her tone that she isn’t aware of me, standing here, hating her.
The light from the hallway illuminates her dark hair, the tweed newsboy cap pulled low over her eyes, her hunched shoulders (like she’s flinching, expecting to be hit). She’s staring straight ahead, out at the sky and the tops of the buildings across the street, and is her chin quivering? Are her eyes filling with tears? I’ll never know, because right then, inexplicably, I decide to strike up a conversation.
I don’t blame you, I say. (It doesn’t startle her, I always remember that. Regan isn’t one to be surprised.)
She looks over at me, ever so slowly, her chin pausing mid-way through the turn, as though reconsidering. At first I think her annoyed, but her expression corrects me; her eyes bright and dancing, her skin ever so pale and yet blotchy, fevered. (Frankly, she looks a little unstable. She looks just like my Aunt Heidi did right before she set fire to her neighbour’s azaleas.)
They’re buffoons, she says, focusing on my left shoulder. Every one of them.
Absolutely, I say with confidence (the first time I’ve ever felt confident about anything in my life). I wouldn’t go back in there if you paid me.
She crosses her arms over her chest. Her breath comes out in gaspy clouds.
I say (rambling, unsure of what I’m going to say next until I say it), There’s a bus stop on the corner. You can get out of here right now. You don’t have to stay here, just because they expect you to.
Where would we go? she asks. (We? That’s right, we. Forever after, we). She drifts over to my side of the stairs and leans on the green metal railing, standing just a bit too close, her shoulder nudging mine.
I pause. I try to think of the most exotic destination possible. I say, hesitantly, Madagascar?
Naturally, she says. She kicks some snow under the railing and watches it fall to the ground below, mesmerized. I suddenly notice her designer gray pea coat, her expensive, though battered, leather boots. (Who exactly am I talking to?)
She looks up at me and again I notice her dancing eyes, the nervous twitch of her smile (her manner awakening in me once more the simple joy of study, of worship). And they’ll never find us? she asks, playing it as a joke, though it comes out as a plea.
Oh no, they will, I answer, my eyes fixed on hers, watching them widen, ever so slightly. But not before we’ve forgotten all about them.
She smiles and nods in appreciation, and we lean on the railing, side by side. (This is the beginning of Regan and me, right now. This is it.)
The door bursts open behind us and I fall into shadow. A tall boy wearing a tuxedo jacket and boxers steps out.
Regan, he says, will you please come in and tell Chem that it was Marie and not Mona? He’s driving me nuts! I don’t know why we let him come along. If he brings up Barcelona one more time I’ll kill him, I swear to god.
I watch her prepare. She straightens her shoulders and puts on an easy expression. She steadies herself, swallowing her trembling as though it were medicine she’s resigned to taking. Then she turns around.
She says (her voice vastly different than it was a moment ago, deeper somehow, and steadier), It’s funny how Chem becomes unbearable only when you’re losing to him at poker.
He sighs with his whole body. Just come the fuck inside, Regan, he whines. I can’t take these people without you. Alright?
On this last word he does look at me, for a split-second, before turning on his heel and going back in.
She takes off her hat and ruffles her hair and puts the hat back on. She reaches for the door and pauses, her fingers on the handle.
Without looking at me she says, I believed it for a moment, didn’t you?
And she’s gone.
(It’s only later, when I find my well-meaning friend and the Brit falling out of a bathroom together, that she slurs to me how she was asking around on my behalf, and there was someone, a girl, King Lear something or other, haha, and she was looking for a roommate, and so she just went ahead and gave her my number, because she seemed really cool, and she was wearing these great boots.
Probably rolling in it, too, she says, one arm wrapped around my shoulder. All these kids are, you know. They don’t live in this dorm, no sir.
What are they? I ask.
Bloody rich, she says as we trip down the stairs. Bloody born with bloody silver spoons in their mouths. Bloody loaded.
Like you?
Bloody hilarious.)
She calls the next day. I’ve drawn the blue industrial blinds against the sunlight, turning the room into an underwater cave, the incessant ringing muffled by the water. I can hardly hear it.
Hello? I answer quietly (afraid it might be my mother, who likes to use her love against me, or Trina’s brother, who gets hostile when I don’t laugh at his dirty jokes).
Wait, who’s this? asks the person on the other end (a boy, but not the brother).
I frown at the cordless phone, wondering. Did I call someone?
I hear the sound of grappling as the phone is handed off, and a laugh. Then a deeper voice yells, Regan!
I sit up in bed, the covers slithering off my body, reluctantly releasing their mold. For reasons I don’t understand, my heart begins to pound.
There’s more shuffling and shushing and at one point the phone hits the ground (followed by a series of grunts and a voice clearly stating, Uncalled for!), and th
en there’s a sudden silence. I wonder if the line has gone dead.
I hear her say, Well aren’t you clever, now go away. (A pause). Go!
A door slams.
Hi, Regan says (though it’s more of a sigh).
Hi, I reply.
Silence seeps between us like blood from a wound. She seems to be catching her breath. I picture her sitting all alone on an enormous four poster mahogany bed, while I’m here alone on my bed in this cluttered room.
So… I begin.
So, she interrupts, suddenly alert. She says, When are you moving in?
Part 1
I have a nervous breakdown at the beginning of my second year, and I find it supremely disappointing. It begins quite suddenly on a rainy afternoon in October when my Ancient History professor mispronounces the word “ostensibly.” The lecture had been dull from the start—an extensive examination of the units and ranks of the Roman legion—and though the mistake is instantly registered in the back of my mind, it takes me a moment to surface from my note-taking haze and glance up. I lift pen from paper and pause expectantly as the professor squints at the ceiling, the pinky of his right hand taping off an invisible beat. His clothes (a short-sleeved button down and unflattering pleated pants) are wrinkled, and I briefly wonder if he slept in them. (This is the limit of my intellectual capacity mid-lesson. Any pause in the flow of talk leaves me suspended in thought, unable to move on without the lecturer’s guiding hand. I am at his mercy.) Biting on the cap of my pen, I watch curiously as the professor smoothes his mustache with thumb and forefinger, his eyes wandering to the rain pattering on the window, and (zeroing in on the crux of the matter now, the tiny action that changes me forever) skips over his linguistic error without a word.
It all happens in the space of ten seconds (hardly a blip on the radar of the other students, most of whom didn’t notice his mistake in the first place). As the professor’s even lecturing tone once again fills the room, I stare ahead in mild astonishment, still waiting for the embarrassed shrug, the mumbled correction that never came. Then, blinking away my puzzlement, I flip to the next page in my textbook, ready to refocus.
But I can’t.
This minor misstep of the teacher’s (Glen Hinkler, an assistant professor who will never get tenure) grabs my attention like nothing before. I become mesmerized by his quiet oratory quirks (the way he averts his eyes when he tells an off-colour joke, his continual incorrect use of the expression “be that as it may”). I begin to mentally chronicle each snafu, abandoning my class notes for this far more entrancing form of study.
It’s a project that extends into all my classes as I notice overbites and tendencies to exaggerate, hand gestures and facial tics (though no other professor ever captures me as completely as Glen, my angel in ill-fitting khakis). I continue to bring my books to class, to go through those familiar motions of opening notebooks and uncapping pens, but I never take a single note. I’ve found a new branch of learning, an uncharted territory of academic delights. I’ve never felt so stimulated, my mind alive, my attention riveted. Nothing else matters to me. Nothing comes close.
It lasts no more than a month. The spell breaks abruptly the day Glen comes to class with a cold, his usual drawl replaced by a nasally whine so discordant to my ears that I literally cringe. Slouched in my seat, I gape at the tissues littering his desk, the shake of his shoulders with each damp sneeze. What did I ever see in those beady eyes, that collapsing chin? What was I thinking?
Mortified that someone might see my disappointment (having already suffered the quizzical stares of my classmates as I sat, empty-handed and dreamy, as they scribbled), I grab a pen with trembling fingers and grope for the first line, desperate to throw myself back into old patterns, to feel safe, to feel right.
But again, it’s no good. Unable to stand the sound of Glen’s voice as he drones obscenely about the Second Macedonian War, I stare at the empty page as the slow minutes pass, completely disoriented. All around me the other students are absorbed in the lesson, and I watch them with envy, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Twenty minutes before the end of class, when I can take it no more, I grab my things and stagger for the exit.
It’s the same in every class. My hypnosis lifted, I find that my courses (Chinese Buddhism, Macroeconomics I, 19th Century British Prose), so painstakingly chosen only a month before, can no longer hold my attention. I’m distracted, foggy, unable to grasp even the simplest of concepts. I fall into a perpetual state of mourning for the loss of something that was (though never important) everything to me, ever so briefly.
I unravel at a steady unassuming pace. Overnight I develop an aversion to the very campus I once loved (its rolling lawns dipping before me, daunting and impossible to cross). Studying, once my all-time favourite activity, becomes more and more of an impossibility as my eyes refuse to focus on the notes, my fingers fidgeting at the pages until they tear. My disintegration is so silent, so private, that its addition to my life makes me even less interesting than I was. (And that’s saying something.)
I take to spending my days exploring the city, a world beyond the university, where I can grieve without drawing attention. I hop on strange buses and ride them for hours, spending whole nights trying to find my way back. I go to movies one after another in distant parts of town, gorging myself on theatre popcorn and soda until an usher asks me if I’m trying to make myself sick. Incapable of concentration on anything of value, I revel in nothingness, in doing and being nothing (whole hours dedicated to sitting, staring, whole days given over to stillness). I stop eating proper meals, stop showering, stop thinking altogether. I truly believe that if I try hard enough I can make myself cease to exist.
My roommate doesn’t find it amusing. It doesn’t help that Simon, my ex-boyfriend, is stalking me at the time. He leaves long rambling notes of love on the dry-erase board on our door as I finally take to my bed, leaving the room only to snack and pee. It’s left to Trina, the roommate, to deal with Simon, and frankly she’s had it up to here with his sonnets mumbled into the answering machine, his wilted flower bouquets left hanging, as though murdered, from the doorknob.
Squinting through a fog of sleep, I try with all my might to see her point of view. Simon is lanky, freckled, and exasperatingly persistent, all qualities that could easily rub five foot two, foul-mouthed, rugby-playing Trina the wrong way. And it is a little irritating that Simon only fell in love with me after I caught him making out with the brunette at the pizza place, which he accused me of forcing him to because of my “needyishness” (a word he once made up during a fight, along with “fuckabitch” and “snobockery”).
I tell Trina to have a little sympathy and she tells me to get a little backbone.
What the hell is wrong with you? she asks, kicking a crumpled origami lovebird across the room. Why don’t you just tell him to get a goddamn life?
She glares at me, her Psychology major brain analyzing my sullen look, my arms clenched around my middle.
I shrug.
Well, she says fiercely, either get rid of him or get the hell out. I can’t take anymore of this hand-holding shit.
I stare at her, dumbfounded. Where would I go? I blurt, grasping the bed covers (feeling their soft security, their protection).
Somewhere out there, honey, she says with exaggerated patience. Somewhere out in the world.
I contemplate this as I watch Trina shimmy into a tiny strapless top (that only emphasizes her back fat) and slam out the door to go celebrate this afternoon’s big win, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.
(Out in the world?)
I meet Regan at a party I’ve been dragged to by a well-meaning friend who’s taken it upon herself to get me out of my funk. She forces me out of bed and into a shower, squeezes me into a bubblegum pink tube dress, and keeps telling me I look “smashing” (the influence of a Brit boyfriend who later gets her pregnant, and over whom she will try to commit suicide, twice).
The party is at one of the o
ff-campus dorms and has spilled exuberantly onto the lawn where some jocks are playing drunken football in the snow with their girlfriends on their shoulders. I’ve lost my friend and am loitering with no real purpose on the front steps, marveling at the snowy lawn laid out before me. (It’s been so long since I’ve been outside that I’m actually shocked to see the snow as we get into the Brit’s car. My friend gives me a look. What did you expect? she asks. It is December, after all. To which I reply, with vague surprise, It is?) The air is cold and the trees are threatening and my legs are bare. I wish I were at home in bed.
The door opens behind me and somebody comes onto the landing. I’m immediately resentful (as I’ve recently become of anyone invading my silent contemplative space, even if that space is a public space, especially a public washroom). I consider abandoning the stairs but discard the idea on the stubborn grounds that I was here first. I pull my jacket more tightly around me and wish I had a beer. Maybe if I had a beer I’d be drunk and unable to feel resentment at all, or at the very least I could throw it in this person’s face.
I’m not going back in there, she says.
I wouldn’t have looked over otherwise. I would have steadily ignored her until she’d gone off to join the jocks, or to make out with a Physics major, or to do any number of things I wouldn’t have the nerve to do. Instead, I glance over at her. It’s obvious from her tone that she isn’t aware of me, standing here, hating her.
The light from the hallway illuminates her dark hair, the tweed newsboy cap pulled low over her eyes, her hunched shoulders (like she’s flinching, expecting to be hit). She’s staring straight ahead, out at the sky and the tops of the buildings across the street, and is her chin quivering? Are her eyes filling with tears? I’ll never know, because right then, inexplicably, I decide to strike up a conversation.
I don’t blame you, I say. (It doesn’t startle her, I always remember that. Regan isn’t one to be surprised.)
The Grimly Queen Page 1