by Carrie Mac
In a corner of the bandstand, Brady held a fork over the flame of a small butane torch. The end was wrapped thick with masking tape, so it wouldn’t get too hot to hold. Zoe took one look at that and knew it was going to hurt. The others stood in a tight circle until Beck nodded; then they stepped aside and Janika led Zoe into the middle.
Beck stepped forward. “You will not speak, understood?”
Zoe nodded.
“Roll up your sleeve,” Beck instructed. “Up to your shoulder.”
Zoe took off her jacket and pushed up her left sleeve.
“No, your right one. We all have it on the right arm.”
Zoe rolled up her other sleeve. What on the right arm?
“Arm out, palm up. Lindsay will hold you steady.”
The fork glowed a fierce orange. Beck took off her jacket and pushed up her own sleeve. On the fleshy inside of her arm, just below her shoulder, were four raised scars, lined up like the prongs of a fork. “This is the Beckoner mark.”
Zoe sucked in her breath.
“Rule number one.” Heather stepped into the circle, grinning. “No speaking, at all, unless we give you permission.” Zoe saw Beck frown. “Unless Beck gives you permission, I mean. Rule number two: keep your eyes open.” Heather sounded happier than Zoe had ever heard her, yet she couldn’t want this. This was going to make Zoe a real Beckoner. This meant she was one of them, as much as Heather was. Surely, she didn’t want that? “Rule number three: if you cry or yell or scream or even close your eyes, it’s over. You don’t get another chance. Rule number four: once it’s done, there’s no turning back. You’re one of us, forever.”
Suddenly, Zoe understood. That stuck-up prima donna thought Zoe couldn’t hack it. She thought Zoe would chicken out. She thought Zoe would fail. There she was, ticking the rules off her fingers, all the while thinking Zoe couldn’t handle it. Zoe narrowed her eyes at Heather.
“It’s ready,” Brady said, still holding the fork over the flame.
“Are you ready, Zoe?” Beck asked.
“You never asked me that,” Heather said. “You never asked any of us that. Just get on with it. She’s not going to make it, are you, Zoe? You’re going to scream so loud someone’s going to think you’re being raped. So long, Zoe.” She gave Zoe that little fake wave, that billboard-bitch wave that might as well be mechanized. “Been a splash, sweetie.”
Bad move, Heather, Zoe thought. Don’t ever tell Zoe that she can’t do something. Don’t tell her how she’s going to react. Don’t presume to know her, when you don’t. Don’t think for one nasty little slice of a second that you’re so almighty you’ve got her figured out. Go home, Heather, and rot in your palatial princess suite, with its antique sleigh bed and in-floor heating and dedicated phone line. Zoe forgot all her doubts about being associated with the Beckoners. In that moment, she just wanted to prove Heather wrong.
“I’m ready.”
“So what, now we do it when she says so?” Heather looked to the others for support. “We need her permission?”
“Shut up, Heather.” Beck didn’t look at her. “I decide when I do it.”
“Great, glad to know there’s still some element of surprise.”
“Shut up, Heather.”
“Fuck you, Beck. Tell me to shut up one more time and I’m leaving.”
There was a silence, carefully loaded by Beck, a long pause that made it clear that Beck was thinking that might not be such a bad idea. Heather folded her arms and stepped back into the circle. Zoe had to fight back a smile.
Zoe stood in the middle of the circle, shivering. She tried to stop by taking deep breaths, but that didn’t work. She looked at the floor instead, trying to see past the wood slats, to the ground below. She imagined being there, huddled in the damp dark, looking up at this scene. She imagined she was not this person who was about to be branded.
Then a sour stench hit her nose like a full-force fist. Pain sliced through her as if she was being cut in half by it. Lindsay was holding her shoulders so tight Zoe couldn’t move, even if she had wanted to bolt. She clamped her free hand over her mouth and bit down hard on the fleshy skin below her thumb. She opened her eyes as wide as they’d go and stared up at the starless sky, slivers of smoke slipping into sight. That was her skin, burning, the smoke shifting into the atmosphere, particles of her joining the universe. Beck watched her face while the others counted.
“One, one thousand, two, one thousand...”
Silently, Zoe named the constellations she couldn’t see: Ursa Major, Big Dipper...Orion...Andromeda. She couldn’t think of any more. They tumbled around in her head with the same chaotic velocity as her heartbeat. Then Beck lifted the fork away and it was over.
Zoe was one of them. She was a Beckoner. She meant to look at her arm right away, but she looked for Heather instead, who was halfway to the parking lot, swearing like a drunk. Janika hurried after her, calling for her to wait up.
The only thing Zoe could compare it to is when she got her first period.
She and Alice had been camping in the Rockies, the summer Alice was massively pregnant with Cassy. They were in the provincial campground, surrounded by convoys of German tourists in rental campers. After a week of trading English swearwords for German ones, Zoe woke up sticky and damp between her legs. She knew what had happened. The same thing that landed Alice on the couch three days every month, clutching the hot water bottle to her belly, talk shows turned low so they wouldn’t make her headaches worse. She moaned and groaned, but through it all insisted that your monthly was Mother Nature’s way of announcing your womanhood and it was nothing to be ashamed or afraid of, no matter how excruciating your cramps might be, or what a bitch you were the week before.
After Alice gushed all over her, grabbing her cheeks in her hands and blinking back tears as she soaked Zoe’s face with kisses, they left to drive into Banff to get the sleeping bag cleaned and to buy tampons. Zoe made Alice pull into the first gas station on the highway so she could get a good look at herself in a decent mirror. There were three people ahead of her in line for the bathroom. While she waited, she braced herself for the new Zoe. She was a woman now. Yesterday, she hadn’t been. She would have to expect to look completely different, right?
When it was her turn at last she stood in front of the mirror and wept. She looked exactly the same, only dirtier and pimplier after a week of camping.
That’s how she felt the morning after the initiation. She looked exactly the same as the day before, except now she also had a seeping wound she’d been ordered not to doctor, because it scarred better if she didn’t put anything on it.
alice
Zoe didn’t see her mother the night of the initiation. She didn’t see her all the next day, either, which was a Sunday. Zoe woke to find Cassy asleep beside her, on her belly, diapered bum sticking up, fists under her chin. A note on the fridge thanked Zoe for looking after Cassy for the day. Zoe had not been informed that that was what she was doing with her day, and while she was mad at Alice for presuming that she’d have nothing better to do, she was thankful for an excuse to stay home and hide from the Beckoners. Zoe packed Cassy into the stroller and walked to the video store for a load of movies, which she watched one after the other while Cassy carefully and repeatedly dumped out and refilled her dinosaur cup with grapes.
“Eat them, bratscicle,” Zoe said when the grapes started to get slimy.
Cassy shook her head.
And that was the extent of their conversation for the day.
She finally saw Alice on Sunday night, but if Alice noticed anything different about Zoe, like how she favored the arm with the scar, or how she skulked around holding on to a secret, she didn’t mention anything.
“When am I going to get paid for all this babysitting?” Zoe said when her mother walked in the front door.
“We all have to do our part, Zoe.” Alice looked haggard, as if she’d had a long hard day at work. However, it was her day off, so it was more likely she’d found someone to
party with. She smelled of the bar, although all the bars in Abbotsford were closed on Sundays.
“In other words, I’m never getting paid for it?” Zoe scooped Cassy away from her pile of blocks and started stuffing her into her jacket. “I’m donating my time so that you can go and party?” Zoe headed for the door, Cassy in tow.
“You know, you’re lucky to have a roof over your head.” Alice sunk onto the couch, her coat bunching up to her shoulders. “Maybe you should come donate some of your precious time at Fraser House, so you don’t go losing perspective on how good you got it, a roof over your head and food in the cupboards. That’s a hell of a lot more than some, you know.”
“You had a look at the cupboards lately?” Zoe took down four boxes of macaroni and cheese, a half empty box of soda crackers and three chicken noodle soup mixes. “That’s all there is.”
Alice held up a finger. “Watch where you’re going with that, missy.” She closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the couch.
It had to be a new man. Even Alice was pretty good about keeping food in the house. She might not be the kind of mother who was very organized about it, but she’d usually come home with a couple of bags every other night or so, and it had been almost a week since she’d done any shopping at all.
“Cassy and I’ll go to the store.” Zoe fished in her mother’s purse for her wallet. Her hand landed on a letter. Zoe checked that Alice’s eyes were still closed before she peeked at it. It was a love letter, written by someone who was trying hard to write neatly. The words sloped down to the right, “Sweetheart, Even the thought of your firm...”
“Get the hell out of my purse!” Alice cleared the space between the couch and the table in two steps. “What the hell you digging in there for?”
“Money! For food?”
“Well, Jesus, Zoe, don’t go snooping.” Alice handed her a twenty and took her purse back to the couch with her. “Get me a pack of cigarettes out of that, would you?”
Zoe let Cassy walk the whole way to the store, which meant the trip took nearly an hour, rather than the fifteen minutes it would have if Zoe had gone on her own. Cassy stopped to look at everything that caught her eye. She collected pebbles, squatting down and dropping them into her dinosaur cup. Zoe walked behind her, wondering about this man, this love letter writer, this somebody who was thinking about Alice’s firm whatever.
When she and Cassy got home, Alice was upstairs in her bedroom on the phone with the door shut. Her purse was on the couch. Zoe rifled through it, looking for the thick cream colored paper, but it was gone.
fallout
The pain of the branding was much worse on Monday. It had only really throbbed all day Sunday. That hadn’t been so bad; but by mid-morning Monday, Zoe couldn’t remember what it was like not to be in pain. It ached, it throbbed, it seemed to have developed its own voice and was now screaming in agony. The throbbing was a constant soft thud. When Zoe closed her eyes the thudding got louder. “Dumb, dumb, dumb,” it seemed to pound in her head and Zoe couldn’t disagree. She ducked into the handicapped bathroom between classes and locked the door. She looked at it in the mirror. It was festering, probably writhing in the clutches of some gross infection. Before she headed out, Zoe rinsed it with cold water, wincing back the tears.
Science was next. Just after Mr. Turner had taken off after attendance and most of the class was gone, Zoe showed Simon the scar and told him about Saturday night.
“You didn’t!” Simon’s lips curled in disgust at the sight of the wound. He lowered his voice so that the few others who’d stayed behind wouldn’t hear. “You are in so deep. I don’t think there’s anything left for me to even say.”
“But I had to—”
“I don’t see any puppet strings.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Don’t give me that shit. I completely understand.” Simon grabbed her wrist. “Come with me.” He dragged her into the hallway. “Okay. I’m all ears. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I didn’t get a chance to think.” Zoe pulled her sleeve gingerly back over the wound. “It just kind of happened.”
“Bullshit.” He folded his arms and frowned. “You want this?”
Zoe shrugged. She’d just wanted to wipe that smile off of Heather’s face, which she’d accomplished beautifully. She opened her mouth to say that, but then she decided she didn’t want him to know that about her.
“You would’ve done the same thing if you were me, Simon.”
He took an extra long drawn-out breath before answering. “Um, no, Zoe. I would not have done the same thing if I were you.”
“What would you have done?”
“Told them in no uncertain terms to get that cow brand away from my perfect, blemish-free skin, thank you very much.”
“Oh, sure. As if.” Zoe wanted to tell him that would not have worked. She wanted to tell him that he had to be there to understand why she went through with it. He had to have seen the way Heather gloated. Zoe wanted to tell him about how Heather thought she couldn’t do it. How she was just so bloody sure Zoe wouldn’t go through with it. She wanted to tell him it was no different than Teo’s Gemini tattoo at the base of his neck. She wanted to take his hands and make him stay there until he’d tell her he didn’t think less of her.
The look on Simon’s face made perfectly clear just how much less he thought of her. He turned on his heel and went back into the lab, leaving her out in the hallway feeling as if she’d lost her virginity to some loser she’d thought was cool when they were alone together, but in the light of day turned out to be a freak nobody else wanted to be in the same room with.
One thing didn’t change after the initiation; Heather still acted as if Zoe did not exist. Well, even that did change a little; before, Heather had looked right through Zoe. Now, she didn’t even bother doing that. If they were anywhere near each other, Heather ever so slightly turned her face away in a carefully executed gesture of dismissal. Lindsay, Janika and Jazz didn’t know how to act.
“It’s kind of weird,” Janika confided in her when they were alone together in gym. “We don’t really bring in new people. Or, we did once, but she didn’t really work out.”
Zoe figured Lisa Patterson would put it a little more emphatically than that.
“Well, I didn’t ask for it, did I?”
“You don’t want to be a Beckoner?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
“But you’re acting like it.”
“It’s just Heather...” Zoe wasn’t sure how to end the statement. She kicked at a basketball that had escaped in their direction. “She doesn’t—she’s just so bitchy.”
“But there’s the rest of us,” Janika said. “It’s not all Heather. Heather’s just extra pissed off because of what happened at the park.”
“Is she ever going to be finished being pissed off?”
Janika shrugged as the gym teacher whistled for her to get into the game.
“She’s been pissed off as long as I’ve known her.”
Then why be her friend at all? Zoe watched Janika snatch the ball from another girl and make a basket from halfway down the court.
Simon started talking to Zoe again towards the end of the week.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said as a greeting. “Come with me.” He hooked her arm with his and pulled her towards the ravine.
Teo came along, until the three of them reached the trail that lead down into the ravine.
“Aren’t you coming?” Zoe called behind her as Simon pulled her down the trail.
“I’ve been instructed to keep watch for the Beckoners,” Teo said.
Zoe let Simon drag her all the way down to the bottom of the ravine. It wasn’t likely that the Beckoners would surface any time soon. They’d gone in Janika’s sister’s car to hotbox at Mill Lake. As far as Zoe knew, they weren’t going to be back all afternoon. Zoe had managed to get out of that little escapade. There was no way she could miss h
er lab quiz that afternoon. She was sure that at some point, probably pretty soon, Beck would stop buying the excuses Zoe made up to get out of going with them.
Simon led Zoe to the little clearing where he and Teo hung out when they skipped class.
“Sit.” He pointed to one of the lawn chairs drawn up to an old cable spool table. Zoe sat. Simon paced.
“Am I in for a ‘Simon Says’ moment?” From her sitting postition, Zoe thought Simon looked even taller than he really was. Zoe grinned. “Bring it on. I can take it.”
Simon stopped. “This isn’t funny.”
Zoe removed her grin. “Sorry.”
“This is not some joke, Zoe.” Simon sat in the other chair. “I’ve been thinking really hard about whether or not to tell you this.”
Zoe’s heart started pounding in anticipation. “Tell me what?”
“You know my verbal seizures, as Teo puts them, what I call essential thoughts and information on important subjects?”
Zoe nodded.
“I had to think about whether or not what I’m about to tell you falls in that category. I always kept it a secret. When I promise to keep a secret, I keep it.”
“Then don’t tell me.” Zoe was pretty sure she didn’t want to know, judging by Simon’s conflicted expression.
“I’ve decided I’m going to.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t?”
“I am.” Simon placed his hands on his knees. “I am going to tell you.”
“Whose secret is it?”
“Beck’s!” Simon rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s about Beck. Isn’t everything about Beck?”
“No.”
“Well, this is.” He put a hand to his stomach. “Feels weird breaking a promise.”
“Then don’t tell me!”
“It’s not about not telling you anymore.” Simon placed his other hand on his stomach too. “It’s about me feeling guilty that I didn’t tell you sooner, but I didn’t know they were going to initiate you. If I had known, I would’ve told you. I know I would’ve.”