Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  The Ferocious Feline

  JOSEPHINE AND KELLY asked Principal Olsen if the school had a newspaper.

  “Well, we usually do. What do you need a newspaper for?” Principal Olsen replied.

  “One of our friends is missing, and we want to see if there’s anything in the paper about it,” Josephine said, breezily.

  “Yeah, we want to check it out,” Kelly said, chewing on a strand of hair.

  “She was with us on Friday night at the Mac’s,” Josephine volunteered.

  Kelly nodded, her eyes never leaving Josephine’s face.

  “Well, that’s just terrible that she’s missing,” Mrs. Olsen said. “What do you think could have happened to her?”

  “She runs away all the time,” Josephine suggested. “Maybe she tried to kill herself.”

  “I saw her walk up the highway,” Kelly interjected. “So she probably got picked up by a bunch of guys. That’s what guys like to do. They probably took her away with them and that’s why she’s not around.”

  “Well, I think she jumped off the bridge into the Gorge!” Josephine announced, excitedly.

  “I really hope your friend is found,” Mrs. Olsen said, before reminding Josephine that she should really demonstrate her commitment to education by attending class that afternoon.

  Mrs. Olsen would later write, “As a principal and former counselor, I have both training and many years of experience in observing both verbal and nonverbal communication. I was left with the clear impression that both Josephine and Kelly were mixing together fact and fiction.” Moreover, she found that “neither girl expressed any emotion or concern about the missing girl. There was a distinct lack of effect.” The whole conversation with her two students, Principal Olsen notified police, was “very disconcerting.”

  • • •

  Kelly and Josephine perused the Times-Colonist for news of a missing girl. (“I think that was the first newspaper I ever bought,” Josephine said later. “I usually just buy magazines.”)

  Their hearts may have skipped when they saw the headline of the newspaper dated November 16: TEENAGE MURDER REMAINS UNSOLVED. But the article reported on the case of two Oak Bay teenagers who had gone to Seattle for the weekend and been discovered shot and killed in a town in the middle of Washington. The killers had never been caught; the killers committed their murder ten years ago.

  As for local news, the weather forecaster predicted for Wednesday, showers; for Thursday, showers; for Friday, heavy mist. Under the drawings of clouds and raindrops, a line of text read, “Rain, rain, go away, but it won’t.”

  Masked bandits had smashed into a home and made off with two thousand dollars. Gingerbread house recipes were on page C5. Councillors refused to okay a high-rise.

  As for crime and attacks, the only news concerned a woman who had been badly bruised by a “ferocious feline.” The unfortunate woman had been taking her silky terrier, Rufus, for a walk when a cat in an alley lunged at her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the woman, now with one hundred and twenty-nine bites, explained. “It was behind a Volkswagen and it took a six-foot leap out at me, with God as my witness.”

  Kelly and Josephine might have come across the pan of Mame, put on by the Victoria Operatic Society. The play about a high-spirited woman living in New York in the 1920s was “marred by melodramatic acting,” and an actress who “gives the part her all, but can’t yet carry the brash self-assurance the role demands.”

  The girls expected the headlines: BODY FOUND IN GORGE, or even, MISSING GIRL, 14. But the absence of such news of Reena confused them as the absence of her body in the black waters would soon confuse the men of the Dive Unit.

  “So where’s Reena?” Josephine asked, reaching for the comics and the classified ads.

  “I don’t know,” she’d later say was Kelly’s sardonic reply. “She’s probably floating around somewhere.”

  Mrs. Smith Offers Advice

  WITH BARRETTES in her brown hair and the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled down over her hands, Kelly sat before her guidance counselor.

  Mrs. Smith looked at the notes from Kelly’s teachers:

  Kelly challenges me constantly.

  She is angry.

  Confrontational.

  “Kelly,” Mrs. Smith said, gently, “what are these issues with your teachers about?”

  “I’m a slow learner,” Kelly said. “I need to learn at my own pace. And teachers make me keep up. And they make me do the work. And I get angry. And I explode.”

  Mrs. Smith nodded. Mrs. Smith was a soft and comfortable woman who wore very large glasses, and her hair was gray, and though she was beloved by many students at Shoreline, she had, on this Tuesday morning, heard not a word about the missing girl, the beaten girl, the drowned girl.

  Mrs. Smith was meeting Kelly to discuss the referral process, which was a polite term for removal. Later, Kelly’s parents said it was Kelly who wished to leave Shoreline because she didn’t like all the bad kids, but Mrs. Smith’s notes from the counseling session of Tuesday, November 18, state that Kelly was being referred to another school due to her confrontational manner and the fact that she was constantly “disrespectful,” “disobedient,” and “disruptive.”

  Mrs. Smith needed to prepare a form for Kelly’s transfer to the new school, and, as required, she asked Kelly if she had a probation officer.

  “No,” the girl responded, “but I might.”

  “Well, what’s this about, Kelly?”

  “People think I beat up somebody.”

  “Why do people think that?”

  “Well, they think I was with a group of people who beat this girl up at the back of the Tillicum Mall. I wasn’t anywhere near it.”

  “So you don’t need to worry then.”

  “Yeah, but the girl who got beat up, her parents are phoning around and they say they heard a rumor that I beat her up and that I’d thrown her body into the Gorge.”

  “Well, boy!” Mrs. Smith replied.

  “But I didn’t do that, Mrs. Smith.”

  “How would her parents know about you in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said, and she began to spin around in the chair.

  Mrs. Smith looked at the girl spinning about. She observed her to be “fidgety” yet “calm and collected.” Mrs. Smith told Kelly the girl’s parents were probably very concerned about their missing daughter and probably called people they thought might know something about her whereabouts. Kelly stopped spinning in the chair then, and Mrs. Smith returned to the business of their meeting.

  “Kelly,” she said, gently, hopefully, warmly. “I’d like you to see a counselor at S. J. Willis.”

  “Why?” Kelly asked.

  “Well, Kelly, you’ve always refused counseling, but Kelly, there are some issues you need to explore. There are some issues in terms of how you can work at not exploding in class and being angry and confrontational. Kelly, something needs to happen. We need to make sure—I need to make sure that when you go out the door here, you’re going to get some help, because my feeling is that nothing’s changed, Kelly. You’re still that angry little kid you were in grade 8.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Kelly said to Mrs. Smith. “I know I have this anger, Mrs. Smith. I know it.” Gazing at her feet, she spun in the chair slightly, a half-turn. “I like to punch people.”

  “I know you do,” Mrs. Smith said. “Your suspension record clearly shows that.”

  “Punching bags just don’t do it for me. They just don’t cut it.”

  “No, Kelly, punching bags don’t seem to work for you.”

  “Yeah, I like to hit people. I like to punch them.” At this, she began to make a smacking sound, punching her own palm, demonstrating the punching that she liked to do.

  “You need to address that. Otherwise you’re going to carry this around to your old age. And things are not going to get better for you. It’s time, Kelly. You’re making a fresh start at another school. It’s time to make a
fresh start in your personal life too. You know, I would really like for you to make an appointment with a counselor at S. J. Willis. I’d really like for you to take that next step and have a counselor approach you the minute you get in the door.”

  “Okay,” Kelly said.

  “Will you promise me that you will see a counselor the minute you get in the door?”

  “Yes,” Kelly promised.

  “Good. That’s a good thing.”

  And later in her file, Mrs. Smith, who believed in the teachings of Jesus Christ and Oprah Winfrey, would write: “Kelly is well aware of her anger. We discussed it quite openly.”

  Stick with Da Crew

  LAILA LIFTED THE STRAW to her lips; she sipped on the Coke, and then removing the straw and brushing back her long hair with her fingers, each adorned with a different golden ring, she whispered to her friend. “Teha, if I tell you something, you can’t say anything. I trust you.”

  “I promise you,” Teha said. “I won’t say anything.”

  “Well, last Friday, something really bad happened.”

  “What?”

  “Okay. Before I tell you, do you know a girl named Reena? She used to go to Colquitz. She’s in grade 9. She’s East Indian.”

  “I’ve seen her walking in the halls a few times, but I don’t know her that well.”

  Laila gazed around the food court. The girls were sitting near the A&W, where they often went after school. Next to the A&W, there was New York Fries, and next to New York Fries, there was Wok About. On the wall, there was a poster of the ridiculous bear, almost obese, dressed in his orange sweater, with the A&W logo, and he grinned.

  “Well, anyway,” Laila said, still whispering and leaning slightly forward now, after turning around and making sure the other girls eating french fries were farther away. She said, “Well, anyway, we were out with her on Friday night down by the Gorge, near Shoreline, and she was talking some shit, saying she was a Crip and all this other stuff. So we all started walking down to the water to smoke up, and the next thing I know there’s everyone beating the fuck out of her. There was like five people on her, kicking her ass. She had blood all over her face, and she wasn’t moving, so I started freaking out, and saying, ‘If anyone fucking touches her one more time, they are getting a shot to the head!’ Because she wasn’t moving! We were all so scared, so we jet. Me and my friend went back the next day to see if she was all right or was lying there because we didn’t know what happened to her, and when we went back, her clothes were lying all over the beach. I think she got raped. I’m so scared, though, because two days ago, her mom called me and asked me if I knew where Reena was, and I said no. Reena’s mom said she hadn’t come home for five days.”

  Laila looked solemn, and for a moment she looked scared.

  “I think she’s dead, Teha. I don’t know what to do or what to think, but fuck, imagine if she’s dead! That’s so fucked up! If you know anyone talking about it at school, tell them it’s not true. I just know any day she’s gonna show up.”

  “Oh my God, Laila. That’s fucked up. Who started beating her up in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. I was smoking a j and I turned around and people were beating the fuck out of her.”

  “That’s fucked up. How could somebody do that to someone?”

  “Fuck! I tried to stop it!”

  Laila tossed her french fries and Coke into the garbage. She braced herself as if waiting for Teha’s reprimand.

  Teha licked the last of her root beer off the plastic lid.

  “You better hope to God she’s all right, ’cause if not, you are going down with everyone else,” she warned Laila.

  “I know. If one of us goes down, we all go down. We stick with da crew, no matter what.”

  “I know what you mean,” Teha said, because she had heard the expression somewhere before and it sounded familiar, like a line from a dream or a song or a movie. If one of us goes down, we all go down. We stick with da crew no matter what.

  After School

  SYREETA WAS SURPRISED to see Warren in the smoke pit, talking with Kelly and Josephine. Why is Warren spending so much time with Kelly suddenly, she wondered, for Kelly was not his type at all, and he had never been friendly with her in the past. Now he was getting in fights to defend her, and now he was standing there, beside her, and for a second, Syreeta considered walking away. As he saw her approaching, Warren turned to Kelly, who was speaking, and he said to her, “Shhh!”

  Kelly smiled then at Syreeta, in a manner that was neither friendly nor apologetic, only rather insinuating and amused.

  “There’s nothing you can say to Warren that you can’t say to me,” Syreeta said.

  “Oh, I think there is,” Kelly retorted, with a mocking and knowing grin.

  “Why are you keeping stuff from me?” Syreeta asked Warren, but before he could answer, she turned suddenly and raised her voice and said to him, “Keep on talking. I’m leaving.”

  “We’re done talking,” Warren said, and he went to take her arm, but she had already turned her back to him and made her choice to leave the school, as she had left the school on the night of the Russian satellite. The pain wasn’t back in her stomach. Rather, she was flushed with a feeling in between shame and anger. Warren ran after Syreeta as she turned and walked away from the smoke pit and onto the field where the grass seemed tinged with gray, and soon it would be December and there would be no snow on their island, only the sad and constant fog, like a cloud fell from the sky and landed on the grass and robbed the color from the ground.

  Syreeta had a particular ability to be both languorous and defiant, and sometimes even the way her hair fell over her full lips could seem like a reprimand.

  Kelly wasn’t Warren’s type at all. She just wasn’t. Her mother might have told her a lady doesn’t worry and a lady doesn’t bother with jealousy. Still, it was rude of him to whisper to Josephine and Kelly, and then let them know that she was not to hear, that she was to be left out. Ever since she’d left Shoreline that evening of the Russian satellite, with the strange and fierce pain under her heart, she’d sensed something had occurred in the darkness of the night. Could Warren have betrayed her? Had he kissed Kelly? It seemed impossible to imagine. But then why had he kicked a girl in the head? The blood on his pants … why would he kick a girl he did not know and had no reason to harm? It all made no sense to her. Warren, as she would later say, “was the gentlest guy I ever knew.”

  Now he was running behind her, yelling her name, and she felt both stiff and very cold, and yet unsure as well, and then he caught up with her, and he was beside her saying he was sorry, and he was holding her hand.

  Though she held his hand, she stayed silent, to punish him, and she did not speak to him or ask him why he was sharing secrets with a girl like Kelly. Walking in silence, they passed some boys with baggy pants and gold chains who were younger than Warren, but dressed a little like him, with baseball caps backward and the revealed waistband of their Calvin Klein underwear. Warren gave the boys this look, as if he was a leader protecting his territory.

  “Oh, you’re real cool, aren’t you?” Syreeta said.

  “I don’t like grubby kids like that,” he explained. She rolled her eyes, and her silent disdain did not cease when they walked past the mallards on the long driveway, and past her friend Alicia who was riding a bicycle that seemed red and silvery. Alicia waved back to Syreeta, and the geese scattered away from the wheels and ran down to the reeds.

  All the houses were the same in the complex, and Chris Fox’s house was the same, and inside there was a black leather couch and a TV. This house is a house, Syreeta thought to herself. It is not a home. Grace Fox was always at work. Syreeta wondered why Grace was kicking Warren out. It wasn’t like her boyfriend would be sleeping in Chris’s bedroom. Warren could have still stayed there. Maybe she’d change her mind. Maybe Dimitri’s parents would let Warren stay there, though this seemed unlikely because Marissa said that Dimitri’s dad
was an old “military guy” and super-strict and didn’t even like Dimitri hanging out with kids from View Royal.

  She walked away from Warren and called her mother. “Can Warren come for dinner?” she said, because even though she was angry at Warren, she knew she would forgive him, and besides, he hadn’t really done anything wrong, and she did not want him to be alone in this house without a meal for dinner.

  In Warren’s temporary and soon to be no more bedroom, she lay on his bed while he went into the closet to change out of his gym clothes. Spice 1 was singing, the song violent and catchy, and the words had a thudding and rising rhythm, and the rap song was the only sound, for she was still not speaking. After a few moments, Warren asked her if she really wanted to know what he was talking about with Kelly and Josephine.

  “If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t want to know,” she said.

  “I’m asking you,” he said, and he left the closet and walked closer to her.

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said.

  The chorus of the song had not yet begun when Warren got down on his knees beside Syreeta. She thought he seemed as if he was about to pray.

  The cross was on his neck, but he did not touch the cross. Rather, he took her hands and held on to them, and their hands were clasped and intertwined. He closed his eyes, and he whispered even though Grace Fox was not home. He said, “It’s not true what I told you about the Native guy.”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” she said, but he did.

  “Haven’t you wondered why that Reena girl hasn’t been around?” he said.

  “Well, she got beat up, so she probably doesn’t want to be around,” Syreeta replied.

  “No, I mean, hasn’t been around anywhere.”

  “I didn’t know she hasn’t been around anywhere,” Syreeta said.

  Then he was holding her hands even tighter and whispering even softer. She listened to the lyrics of the rap song. 187 me say the murder the murder he wrote.