by Suzette Mayr
Walter snared by another circle, layers and layers of concentric circles, till they touch each harsh point on the curve, they pin him to one sad fact. He didn’t do his job. He failed that dead boy. A hundred million squeezing circles.
Not a single person in the room was actually the dead boy’s friend. Especially not Walter who, as his school counsellor, should have been the star at the top of the tree.
Walter sitting alone with his crinkled papers in the empty room, cookie crumbs down his shirt.
Faraday
After the debriefing circle, her head still manky, Faraday hooks her bag around her shoulder, scoots from the room and stows herself under the graffitied stairwell at the north end of the school in a cubbyhole where no one except the janitor ever goes. She settles herself on the shining concrete floor, thinks about maybe placing a flower on Patrick’s desk or taping one to his locker, maybe a red rose. But her wallet clinks only the ugly change— pennies, a nickel masquerading sometimes as a quarter. Her new unicorn bag vacuumed out her bank account and she doesn’t know how much roses even cost — she pays for flowers only on Mother’s Day and her elder brother Jonas brokers the deals. But someone would knock the flower off; Jésus and his posse would torture its petals. Pluck them one by one like the legs off a spider, and neigh at her while doing it. Why does he always do that? His neighs usually sink into the regular white noise of talking, bells buzzing, shoe soles squeaking, but sometimes one pierces her wall and she has to duck before it spatters her. Unicorns not a joke. Not an affectation. When her blessing of unicorns finally arrives, she and her unicorns will heal them all.
But Jésus has done much worse to other people. He once lit a boy’s hair on fire and knocked the cafeteria cash register to the floor, the horrendous crash, then sucking silence in the cafeteria.
To buck herself up, Faraday draws a unicorn on the palm of her hand with her second-best pen. The legs too short. When will the funeral be? She should have asked during the circle. She wonders why the dead boy chose to hang instead of carbon monoxide or pills. She’d probably opt for car exhaust. But she would never kill herself anyway, she notes in her daily journal for her psychologist, Dr. Linus Libby, because then she’d miss out on her plans to become a large-animal veterinarian. Because unicorns are real, there are websites from all over the world, she isn’t the only believer, there are sightings and healings at least once a week. She’s only told Linus and Linus’s receptionist (that was a mistake): her own unicorn, maybe even unicorns, will sniff her purity in the wafts of sex-obsessed unvirgins doing it in their parents’ houses, in their boyfriends’ fathers’ Suburbans, the school basement, the football field. And the unicorn’s alicorn will heal everything it touches. All this bitterness and stupidity like the debriefing circle and those toolshed debriefing counsellors pretending to reach out while they huddle together over their Styrofoam cups in the hallway after the circle, laughing like best friends. Her unicorn will gash a hole into the giant chain-link fence and she and the unicorn will leap away to a finer place. Which finer place she isn’t sure. Finer than under this set of stairs, huddling into herself.
She wishes the dead boy had talked to her; she could have told him divine help would gallop down the hall any day now, she has arranged it, a blessing of unicorns is on its way to save them all, maybe during English, maybe a Monday morning, what a glorious day that will be, a Monday whinnying with unicorns. Even though they never talked at all, only when he ordered his large iced cappuccino at the Tim Hortons where she works Saturdays and Friday evenings. — Sometimes I think about killing myself, she could have said, — Everybody does. Like when I got a D in biology and it cremated my average. She could have grabbed his sleeve and said, — Hey! You! Patrick Furey! There’s too much caffeine and sugar in those iced cappuccinos! Then she would say, — Do you like Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show? My uncle watches it, and the actor who played Sulu on Star Trek just married his boyfriend Brad. My uncle told me about how Sulu and Brad wore matching white tuxedo jackets with black trousers and bow ties, the music was a Japanese koto harp and bagpipes, and they made their entrance to ‘One’ from the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. Isn’t that romantic?
She and the dead boy would have made a date, gone to the mall, chewed two-for-one burgers with extra pickles in the food court. She runs her fingers up and down the ridges of her second-best pen.
She lifts her new bag to her nose. Inhales.
— Hey.
She clicks her bag closed, the fabric still stiff. Peeks sideways at who’s kneeling down beside her.
— Nice bag, says Petra. Eyes moonstone-blue.
Faraday pulls her bag into her belly. Petra crosses her legs, the ends of her hair falling forward, buzzing and scorching as they dip into Faraday’s face.
— Nice bag, Petra says again, her hand resting on the bag’s flank. — I saw you crying this morning.
Faraday thinks, Evil.
Faraday feels naked as a larva, her skin damp and tender.
Petra’s hand rests on Faraday’s bag, her fingers spread out, obscuring all but the tip of the unicorn’s alicorn. Is Petra evil? Petra didn’t crumble cookies or cry in the debriefing circle. Faraday once saw Petra play the cello in the school orchestra, and it felt as though she were stroking her bow across Faraday’s body, transforming her blood into light that moved through her belly, breasts and head when she heard the music Petra pulled from those strings, Petra’s eyes closed, her silvered eyelids smooth, her mouth a red frown. Could someone who conjured such beauty be evil? Could she not be? Petra leans in, the irises feathered around her pupils, jagged fault lines, blue mountainous landscape, and grips Faraday’s shoulder, each finger articulated against Faraday’s bones. Faraday’s skin flinches, ripples.
— Why are you crying when you didn’t even know him? asks Petra. Faraday yanks back. Her mouth clamps closed to retard her green-juice breath.
— I talked to him, says Petra. — Did you ever talk to him? I doubt it, but look at my dry eyes, dry as the Gobi Desert. You’re crying about someone you never even talked to? You wouldn’t have been bothered to wipe your shoes on?
This is not a good question. Faraday thinks of a better one.
— I don’t know why you’re even bothering with me, says Faraday, her maggot’s mouth poking around in the dark. — So you can hound me to death too?
— I could sue you for that, says Petra. She straightens up, her neck slim as a cello’s. — Yes, I’m going to sue you.
Petra wipes her hands on Faraday’s bag. Her fingers knobbly and pale.
The clasp on Faraday’s new bag pokes into her belly. Petra’s eyes clear goblets.
— See you in court, says Faraday, her hooves sparking as she kicks at the floor and stands.
Here is what Faraday would write for Patrick’s obituary if anyone asked her though no one will. Waiting for the bus home, she composes the obituary anyway, muttering as she kicks snow chunks off the sidewalk, sends them skidding into the road, tears slithering over the hills and valleys of her nostrils:
Furey, Patrick — Passed away suddenly on February 17, harassed to death by Petra Mai after he tried to hook up with her boyfriend. A nice, quiet boy, he had clear skin like in the commercials and he could have been a model or an actor. No one knew much about him, but a true gentleman, he handed Faraday Michaels her eraser that one time. He liked to drink large-size iced cappuccinos. He has left a hole in the universe, and deserved a better time of it at school. A funeral will be held somewhere, maybe. Students from his school not invited.
Petra
That boy being dead has nothing to do with Petra and her cello fingers even though all the plebs in this school hush into silence, their faces swinging toward her with military exactness, grenade pins for eyes whenever she walks into a classroom, opens a washroom door.
What about the fact that his nickname was Homo and everyone called him that? Maybe he was depressive like her great-grandfather who blew out his own brains with a pistol and
was therefore predisposed to killing himself? What about genetics?
Petra stretches her shirt cuffs over her freezing cold fingers. She didn’t do anything. I did not physically knot the cord around his neck and kick away the chair, thinks Petra, tugging a music stand out of the pile in the corner of the music room. I didn’t. None of us did. The end. Then she remembers she’s supposed to be in chemistry right now.
The dead boy didn’t come to chemistry or English class for the first time the day before yesterday. Today is the third day of his not coming to school. In the debriefing circle, Petra listened to the details: he killed himself, poor bugger, her grandmother would say. Poor. Bugger. Bugger. Bug. Her. So he killed himself. So sad. Too bad. So now he’ll stop molesting her boyfriend. So glad. All she did was say she was going to rip his dick off. All she said was that she was going to kill him. Of course it was a joke. In chemistry, she faces the blackboard, his stool and table ahead and to the right of her. She can smell that stool, she can smell the dusty death germs crusting it— it smells like two boys instead of one, one of the boys dead. Sad. Glad. The other boy, hers, alive and also absent. Wednesday. Glad. Sad. Not texting her, answering her texts and her calls only once.
There is nothing about the dead boy’s stool to distinguish it from any other stool except that the boy who normally sits there is dead. The dead boy scribbled on the wooden edge of the table in front of the stool with ballpoint pen (blue) and pencil (mechanical). He tried to sketch anime faces but wasn’t very good, the heads turned out bottom heavy; he drew overlapping triangles in blobby pen and coloured in the overlapping parts with pencil.
She tries to copy down the notes and numbers scrawled in chalk across the board, the chemistry teacher’s pants hanging flat as a movie projection screen over his non-ass. The scatter of dandruff all over the shoulders of his black shirt — Petra wants to throw up all over him, then maybe he’ll break down and wash his hair. She flips through her binder to the periodic table: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron. Boron. The bare tree branches curling and uncurling like agitated fists outside the window, and the sky dribbling with clouds. An airplane slides past, furtive. She tries not to breathe the same air as the desk— but it’s futile trying to escape the death molecules in the room. Her boyfriend’s chair empty. She texts him now. No answer. After chem, her career and life management class. Maybe she will text him during that class — she already has her career and life managed, and all they ever do in career and life management is watch videos about smoking and people’s skulls cracked open from drunk driving. Even the teacher knows that class is a joke, and sneaks from the room after the first five minutes of whatever film she’s stuck in the DVD player. Last class the teacher announced that on Friday, representatives from the Royal Bank of Canada would be presenting on compound interest. Wahoo!
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon. She is going to get an A in chem and an A+ in career and life management.
That desk belongs to a dead person, she thinks. A. Dead. Person. Even the wood is infected. She wonders what the dead boy smells like now and how decayed he is. How creeped out she would be if she were to see him right now. She could handle it. She and her dog Chopin once discovered a dead coyote pup in the park and she wasn’t creeped out by the rot, although Chopin raised her hackles. Are there maggots nesting in Patrick Furey’s eye sockets? He died Monday, day before yesterday. Approximately fifty hours ago. In the movies he would be a hill of maggots. Unless he was cremated. Do ashes smell? No one teaches them anything around here. Probably the chem teacher has all the credentials, but if she asks him, he’ll just say, — That’s a morbid thought, isn’t it? and lean forward, his pupils fast-forward flipping through their own dandruffy periodic table.
Ashes probably smell like fire. Like jumping into a burning lake.
She will smell her uncle Leonard’s ashes in the urn in the living room when she gets home. She checks her phone. No beautiful little icon of an envelope waiting to be opened. Last Friday was Valentine’s Day. Even though she was kind of mad at Ginger because of the dead boy, her Valentine’s Day just a little bit tainted because of the dead boy who wasn’t dead yet, she and Ginger made love Valentine’s Day, then the Saturday after Valentine’s Day and almost Sunday, but then his grandfather rattled the back door with his key before they could get their jeans fully off. Petra sat on Ginger’s lap while they listened to the CD she made him of her favourite music from the fourteenth century. They propped their biology textbooks open and pretended their little notes to each other were homework. They ate chicken wraps for lunch together on Monday. While Homo was offing himself. She kissed Ginger goodbye Monday after lunch, texted him Monday night, but when she texted him Tuesday about what a cunt her piano lesson was, he didn’t answer. Tuesday night he was a frosty drink. So frozen she couldn’t even sip.
Sitting so close to where the dead boy sat, she can hear the germs skittering out toward her and all over the other tables and stools, onto people within the stool’s cursed circumference. Germs with hands and feet and claws and hooves. That stool should be in quarantine. She can’t accidentally bump it with her hip, she can’t inadvertently brush it with her clothes or books or bag. She doesn’t even want to walk on the floor near it. She wants out. She wants a hot, disinfecting shower. Brush and floss her teeth three times. No one can understand how much this boy criminally fucked up her life. Her boyfriend. He’s caught fag germs. She gazes at the pocked wood of the table. Really, it should be incinerated. She will have to warn Ginger away from that area too. While he’s inside her is probably the best time. Maybe she can get her mother to call the janitor. She tries to ignore the cold air around it. He’s the one who interfered with her life, he made the choice to encroach on her territory— he made the choice to kill himself. Now his dead germs dissipate into the air in this classroom, her clothes, her hair, her nostrils.
His contamination smeared all over the stool, all over his locker— so thick it’s sticky.
His locker. Petra wonders if her sweater is in his locker.
Her love, her fury, woven into that sweater — she bends her face forward so the contaminated desk, the chem teacher’s pants hanging by a smidge to his old-man ass, vanish behind the dense screen of her hair.
She shopped for that sweater for so long her head throbbed like a car accident— mall-head her mother calls it— but Petra knew a brain crash was worth the right knit, the right shade of ice blue, the argyle pattern. She spent almost three hours jerking herself from store to store, looking for the El Dorado of possible four-month anniversary presents for Ginger, and she’s seen him wear the sweater only once, on the day of their anniversary, the week before Valentine’s Day, right after he unwrapped it while they were in his car, while she sang the song she’d written for him, ‘Winter Anniversary: I Love You.’
In the car after school that anniversary day, Ginger pulled on the sweater, then gave her a shaggy white teddy bear holding a red velvet heart with ‘I Love You’ embroidered on it in pink, a yellow rose wrapped in a cellophane cone from 7-Eleven, and a giant anniversary card also shaped as a teddy bear.
— This rose is yellow, she said. — Why didn’t you get a red one?
Ginger tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Shrugged.
— Yellow means friendship, red means love, she said. — Are we just friends? Is that what we are? I’ll go home then.
She smiled in a way she knew showed off her dimples. She could feel the dimples push into her teeth.
— Uh, n-n-no, he stammered. In the shifting, moving angles of streetlight, his face soft like a girl’s. He craned toward her, his hands clutching the steering wheel, and she held his face in her hands. Held off kissing him. Made him wait for her lips.
She expected a bouquet of flowers, at least ten, and red for the colour of love. They were in love, right? Ginger sighed and said he liked her perfume. Smelled like jujubes.
Back at her house, the bear was squished and flattened between the pillows
, underneath their heads, under his hips, between her thighs, on her bed in her room for the first time because her parents were playing bridge at the Penners’.
Just before her parents got home, Petra and Ginger zipped and buttoned their clothes back on, then drove away for a romantic dinner (or as romantic as it could be since he has hardly any money) at Boston Pizza, then they made love again on his bed in the basement, his deaf grandfather upstairs in the kitchen obliviously slapping around an oversized slab of dough with his old swing music blaring. Ginger had ripped the sweater off, tossed it on the floor. She was rubbing her nipples on his, the small of his back curved and smooth in her hands, when they heard Ginger’s grandfather stomping down the stairs.
They bounced to opposite sides of the bed, the blanket splashing to the floor. She dove into her dress, slapped her hands to her Medusa hair and dashed for the corner of the room, not sure what she would find there. Ginger snatched a T-shirt from the floor. She leapt for the blue pool of the sweater, but stumbled back when she saw Ginger’s grandfather framed already in the doorway with a tray of milk and cinnamon buns in his hands. She curled her toes so he wouldn’t notice her bare feet.
— Thought you might be hungry, the grandfather said, shuffling the sweater into a roll with his feet. — Cinnamon buns fresh out of the oven.
He clapped the tray down on the dresser, glasses tinkling, grabbed up a paper towel from a pile on the tray and offered it to Petra.
— So you don’t get any crumbs on your nice dress, he said. Ginger laughed, a quick snort, while he scrambled on another shirt over his T-shirt.
The paper towel flopped over in the grandfather’s hand. She kept patting her hair, the nest on the back of her head, Ginger’s semen running down the inside of her leg.
Grampa stood in the doorway in his saggy brown pants and suspenders. He had maybe three hairs on his entire head. He held out the plate of cinnamon buns.