Monoceros

by Suzette Mayr

  Ginger bangs out the front doors of the school— he doesn’t care who sees him— and he slides over ice and hurdles over snowbanks all the way home. Just in case it’s true. Is it true?

  — Home already? asks his grandfather, reading a Czech newspaper on the computer. His trifocals sliding off his nose. — Interesting, he says.

  Ginger texts Furey. Then after five minutes he thumbs in the phone number. Language leaks from the phone and burns in his ear, not Furey’s moonlit voice but a man’s voice with too much breath between the letters in the words. — Yessss? Whooo? Were you a friend of his? asks the plastic chunk, the sun, the past tense, exploding in Ginger’s ear.

  His grandfather clicks off the computer and tells Ginger that if he’s decided he’s home for the day, he can shovel the sidewalk. Snowed almost as deep as his knees last night, the mail deliverer will refuse to make it past the gate. Grampa might throw his back out again if he tries to shovel it himself so be a good boy and clear the walk, yes?

  Because Furey told Ginger he loved him while they were doing it the last time, and what could Ginger do with that information? He had no idea what container to put those words in, how to hold them without them depositing their ooze all over. He just wanted to get away, he needed him and Furey to be done. He wishes he could push the words, all in a clump, back into Patrick’s mouth, that he could clump them into an icy snowball and whing them back.

  Because his girlfriend Petra guessed the truth. And Ginger didn’t deny that he wasn’t sure he wasn’t sort of maybe in love with Furey, even though for sure he was still in love with her. But he had to tell Furey it was over anyway.

  Petra is the gentlest soul on the planet— too gentle, he sometimes thinks as he listens to another song she’s written for him, this one about the first time she touched his penis, and plays for him on the cello or piano, and sometimes she sings too, she sang for him in front of his friends and he nearly folded from embarrassment. The kind of girl who whines ewwwww and points her toes around earthworms and spiders and slasher movies and sucks him off in her parents’ bedroom even when she knows her parents will be home any minute. But she has no gentle feelings around the dead boy.

  Sleep no longer visits Ginger after his girlfriend scribbles u r a fag on the soon-to-be-dead boy’s locker, and then announces the graffiti to Ginger like it’s something to be proud of, the discovery of a wormhole, smiling so hard it looks like the dimples in her cheeks are touching in her mouth.

  Because Monday morning, he texted Furey, asking for his grandmother’s locket back. It seemed the right thing to do. He would give the locket to Petra. The normal thing to do.

  Ginger wonders, if he’d just let Furey keep the locket, sucked up the fact that he’d been weak and given Furey a present like Furey and he were a real-live couple, would Furey still be alive? Ginger wouldn’t have to see or feel that dead desk in the middle of his English class, know the absence of that subtle, muscled odour winding toward him from the other side of the classroom. The missing Furey like the missing tooth in his grandfather’s mouth. An empty hole, no smooth pink gum to grow over, what can grow over such space? He pictures Furey not slinking around, not sneezing, not cramming for departmental exams. (Not kissing him, fingers not undulating over every bump of Ginger’s spine.) Wonder blisters the roof of his mouth, what does Furey look like right now? This very instant? Would Furey still have lips and what do the lips feel like? Is there a suicide note? Is Ginger in it? He cups his nose with his hand. Smells the damp wrinkles in his palm.

  His nose is running.

  He wrestles the shovel out from the basement, knocks over a rake, the push-mower handle bangs against the wall. His teeth bang together.

  — Aren’t you going to put on proper pants, Tomáš? his grandfather calls, wedging himself between the screen door and the door frame, his hands twisting the architecture of the newspaper. His grandfather yells something else, the sound ricocheting off the streetlight pole, but Ginger is already scraping the shovel hard against the concrete, clanging it against car tires submerged in snow, pinging it against chain-link fences, the shovel’s metal bowl clanking the sides of the steps, Zamboni-ing down the driveway, scooping, punishing the sidewalk. He heaves new snow, heaves grey honeycombed snow beneath a layer of dirt and gravel. His breath hurtles out. The slap of the cold clashes with his heat, his blood cells speeding past valves and sphincters. He whams and scrapes the shovel down the neighbours’ sidewalk: the woman with the refrigerator-white skin and red hair who growls at him in unison with her three pug-nosed dogs, the bus driver at the end of the block whose car got set on fire. The couple with the Trans Am and the dead Chevy sedan parked on their lawn. The two tiny kids cocooned in snowsuits who roll out of the house each morning shouting insults in Burmese. He bulldozes piles from the gutter and hurls the snow and dirt into the middle of the street, onto people’s lawns, over the fence into their backyards.

  — Greetings, snow angel! shouts a woman with skin brown like an old-fashioned kitchen table, a woman he’s never seen before, his shovel having led him blocks past his house; he squints against the fluffy snow-white of her hat, scarf and mittens, the gleam of her teeth. She waves one of her mittens at him, her mouth shining with her smile; he scrapes and scoops so he won’t have to look at such awful happiness.

  He pushes the shovel past raging Rottweilers, whining German shepherds. Pit bulls, Labradors and Heinz 57s; supercilious cats supervising from their windows, their tails snapped around their feet; an iguana on a windowsill lolling under a heat lamp. The more packed the snow the better, because he can hit at it with the shovel’s sharp edge and stab at the broken sheets of snow, peel it like scabs off the concrete, bash its edges, slice into its core.

  — Don’t gouge my grass! barks a mottled pink-skinned man in a hat high as a bread loaf. — You’re digging up my grass.

  — Cheers, mate! Ginger sobs as he shovels, his mouth stretched and gaping, his throat leaking the words.

  The clouds burn and smoke in the setting sun. How many houses, businesses, city blocks? He shovels on, his shoulders and arms bursting off his torso, his back one long band of pumping blood. But better this, better splinters and calluses, liquefying shoulders and frozen cheeks, than sitting wedged into a desk, buzzing at a hole in the middle of the classroom floor, bonking his forehead against the windowpanes like a fly, not breaking anything at all.

  He stumbles through the front door and kicks off his boots to find his grandfather peering into a giant bubbling pot, stirring with a long metal spoon. Swing music belching from the radio.

  Where r u? beeps his phone. A text from Petra. He turns his phone off.

  The phone in the kitchen rings.

  — Your girlfriend’s on the phone, says Grampa.

  Ginger holds the telephone receiver up to his frozen face and he says to Petra, — I feel like a jar of Cheez Whiz. Way past the due date. What does that mean, Petra? Exactly what it sounds like.

  No, he’s not falling out of love with her, of course he loves her, will always love her. He needs to get off the goddamn phone.

  Grampa boiling up a giant pot of goulash, Grampa stomping around the kitchen with his favourite T-shirt stretched over his potbelly, sweat stains blossoming, browning in his armpits. Ordering Ginger to sit.

  Ginger contemplates the steaming meat and gravy puddle on his plate. Pokes it with his fork, then sets the fork back down.

  Later, Ginger falls backwards onto his bed, each one of his eyelashes sticking up like spikes on a dog collar, he is freezing but sweating so hard he can feel his skin frying, sweat punching out every pore.

  He noses his fingers for just one ghost of Furey’s perfume.

  Wednesday

  Walter

  These crisis team professionals — more credentialized than Walter— long, slow flaps of their borrowed angels’ wings as they descend on the school, drop their bags, hang their coats in the Guidance office. They perch, freshly showered and combed, in his office, then they p
erch in a placid row in this room.

  They all sit — students, crisis team, counsellors, the drama teacher— in their plastic chairs in the debriefing circle, barnacled to the floor. Chewing on cookies and celery sticks, quaffing orange and green unnameable-fruit drinks, in this choreographed circle of grief. The three members of the crisis management team are assembled in their chairs with their dour, stone faces, and Pam, the other guidance counsellor at Walter’s school who elected to be on the crisis team this year, polishing all the moist, pink students’ faces with her whispery voice as she explains the facts of the death:— His mother found him in his bedroom. He hanged himself. He left no note.

  Pam’s voice stinging as she goes about cleaning and sterilizing, embalming and stitching up the violence. — Not a single person in this room should feel any guilt. No one is to blame, she says. Pam folds her hands in front of her chest, her eyes blinking quickly. — Not his friends. Not his family. She closes her eyes for a moment. What she doesn’t say: Not even the dead boy. Her words hang chest-level from her praying fingers.

  Walter sits upright in the hard plastic chair, made for a person much narrower than him, hands resting on his thighs. His body arranged like a test-drive dummy’s hurtling at a concrete barrier, his body swaddled and trussed in layers of spiderweb, his inside scraped clean as a corpse’s on an undertaker’s table.

  All the crisis team members except for Pam wear neatly ironed ties and foreheads, their slacks creased, the lap of the one woman’s dress shiny, her pregnant belly bulging and smooth as a beetle’s back, like these people never sweat or sit down, never spill ham sandwich crumbs or mango juice on themselves like Walter does. The radiator murmurs behind Walter’s back, the fluorescents hum above.

  — Let’s go around the circle one by one and share what we’re feeling right now, Pam prods, her hands clutching the Kleenex box. — Who’s first?

  The dusty heat circles Walter, his armpits moistening under his sweater, Pam’s words baking together into one long, overcooked sentence. He knows the one debriefing woman is named Margaret or Margarita or Marga, he knows her from a teachers’ convention when she gave a panel on how to discipline without appearing to discipline. He nicknamed her Margarine because he couldn’t keep all the Margs straight, and this one seemed like she was carved from a block of Becel, especially when she talked about the ‘limp-wristed’ approach to discipline. Whatever that means. The beefy one in the grey pants is named Kyle, and then the blonde, big-jawed one Jed. Margarine, Kyle and Jed. Here to save them.

  — How well did you know Patrick? asks Pam, her mouth stretched at the first sobbing girl to her right, Madison.

  — Who me? Madison hiccups. — I stood behind him once in the lineup for pizza in the cafeteria. He was in my English class and TA.

  Madison pounds her head with her fists, the loudest, most flamboyant mourner in the room, her head slaps sideways into her friend’s lap, she’s clutching her cellphone. The friend strokes Madison’s hair and nods.

  Pam tut-tuts, rustling in her jean dress and sloppy cardigan, slips from kid to kid with her box of Kleenex, doling out white puffs. As if Kleenex could be enough. As if any of their debriefing circles could ever loop wide enough to fix a school.

  One girl went to kindergarten with the deceased boy. They fought over a green crayon.

  — My name’s Owen, the next boy in the circle announces. — My locker is right next to Patrick’s. I know he’s in a better place.

  Owen abruptly pushes his chair back and fetches himself another handful of potato chips. Howling Madison shoves a cracker into her mouth and gums it.

  The scarfing, the quaffing, the gulping and stuffing as this crowd of grievers cram food into their faces.

  The girl named Petra is the only one in this round who isn’t eating or drinking, isn’t crying, says, Pass, when it’s her turn to speak. Her back straight, body at attention. Walter will follow up with her later. Her dry, flat-mouthed face more troubling than the hysterics in the room. And maybe the girl with the unicorn bag, Faraday, the grey sweeps of skin under her eyes, her relentless clasping and unclasping of her bag.

  He checks the students in the room against the class list he’s brought with him— Tomáš Ginger missing. He will call Tomáš’s house later today.

  Faraday knocks her bag against Walter’s knee. — I puked my toast and coffee this morning, she says, the whites of her eyes red and itchy-looking.

  Her irises a flat, tissue-paper colour. Like cataracts. Not the colour of regular human eyes. What is she, Portuguese? Maybe Brazilian. Italian? Unicorn hair barrettes, unicorn bag, unicorn binder, unicorn voice.

  Next to Faraday, Fumiko licks the tears around her own black-lipsticked mouth. Pam dollops another tissue into Fumiko’s hand.

  — I took the bus with him almost every fuc— almost every single day, sobs Fumiko, her face melting and streaking, her eyes emerging red and naked as a baby rat’s. — Patrick sat in the back by himself and I prefer the benches at the front, y’know, because I can see out the windshield and know where I’m going?

  Pam, Margarine, Kyle and Jed nodding, nodding. Walter wanting to brush a fleck of orange Cheezie from Fumiko’s cheek.

  — He sat at the back of the bus with his iPod on, says Fumiko.

  — We as a society all just sit in buses looking straight ahead, and my mother says we as individuals are all stars in this big, beautiful constellation? Like, I thought coming to a Catholic school this wouldn’t happen. Are Catholics allowed to kill themselves? The same shitty self-murder happened in my last school, that’s why my parents made me leave, what’s all this crap about he’s in a better place? He’s not in a better place, he’s in the ground!

  Faraday hugs Fumiko, their embrace all elbows and hair and the smell of drowning.

  — When’s the next debriefing circle? sobs Madison, her head still in her friend’s lap.

  — Whenever you want, says Kyle, his mouth soft, his eyes brown and wide as a puppy’s. — We’ll be in the Guidance office all week. More debriefing circles this afternoon and tomorrow all day from 7:30 in the a.m. to 4:30 in the p.m. We’re here, he points to his own chest, — for you, he points to everyone in the circle.

  Pam nodding violently in agreement. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes damp and wide behind fishbowl glasses, her black bangs sticking to her forehead.

  — Yes, we are here for you, proclaims Margarine, stroking her belly, pursing her lips at the floor.

  — Let’s go around the circle one more time, says Pam, patting her hot cheeks. — And each of us say one good thing we’re going to do for ourselves to feel better after we’ve left this room.

  — Well, says Owen, the plate on his lap dribbling potato chip crumbs. He clears his throat, his Adam’s apple so pointy it almost breaks the skin as it elevators up then down. — I’m a really good snowboarder. I’m going to get my brother to help me tune my board.

  — Very cool, says Jed. He crosses his arms and nods his blonde head abruptly.

  Walter steps over his chair and peels a small cardboard plate off the stack on the refreshment table. He heaps the cardboard with bright, synthetic vegetable nuggets, pours himself a cup of green juice, kids’ voices chattering about hugging their dogs, playing Divinity XII, playing hockey, getting a sister to help them dye their hair after school. He scrapes his chair back into the circle, back down into the tiny seat, which sighs under him, just in time to have missed one good thing he could do to make himself feel better.

  Faraday’s body exhales a gust of stale sweater smell as she turns to Walter. X-raying him, her eyes moving from the top of his expansive forehead to the tips of his scuffed leather shoes, her unicorn bag and Fumiko’s hands clasped in her hands, Walter’s hands tangled into a ball of fingers around the plate and cup on his lap.

  — Did Patrick ever come talk to you? asks Faraday.

  Walter begins gargling through the soup of a half-chewed, genetically modified broccoli floret, the words dropping from his mouth
, a crumbling bolus, when Madison pipes, — There’s no more napkins left!

  Owen the potato chip boy whose locker is next to the dead boy’s and who’s a really good snowboarder suddenly slides from his chair to the floor, his body splayed and tentacled with too-long arms and legs reaching across the tiles, the cardboard plate spinning to the side. The crisis team flocks to the fainted boy.

  Walter gathers his skin from around his feet where it’s accordioned in a heap. Kyle, Jed, Margarine, Pam, Pam, Margarine, Jed, Kyle, Pam, Kyle, Jed, Margarine make Walter want to break wind, spit broccoli gob into heat vents, these Margarines, Kyles and Jeds exactly those kinds of perfect, controlled pricks who peaked in high school, the phys-ed types, the muscled types, the let’s-ogle-sixteen-year-old-girls-but-pretend-we’re-not types, the pretty, nasty girls, the locker room types who probably would have helped write u r a fag on a dead boy’s locker.

  Walter crams more vegetables into his mouth, his mouth so full he couldn’t speak if he wanted to. He cringes away from this debriefing circle the way moles cringe from the light, moths flee the dark, maggots veer from live flesh. The crisis team finding Walter’s scab and picking it, even though it stings and flames with every poke and pick, tearing it off, then taking a break to stuff in another cookie or potato chip, while the dead boy is still dead, and the alive ones, including Walter, r all fags.

  Owen is escorted to the nurse’s office, Pam propping him up by the waist and shoulder.

  — Come talk to us in the Guidance office, Margarine, Kyle and Jed murmur to the students, their hands open, their wings folded.

  Each point in the circle of students drifts in arbitrary directions, into thinning clots. Walter pretending to study his list of classroom names while Kyle, Margarine, Jed and a stray student pick through the remaining chocolate chip cookies, push the raisin and oatmeal ones in heaps to the sides of the plates. Sip green juice from Styrofoam cups. The consistency of the sour-cream dip flecked with dill degenerating from cream to mucus then to a clear jelly where it touches the edges of the bowl.