by Carrie Mac
Alice always kept emergency cash behind the phone bills in the file cabinet, and it was when Zoe went in there to help herself to some money to rent a movie that she noticed the amount of the last phone bill. It was triple what it should be. It was as much as they spent on groceries for an entire month.
They’d never had a phone bill for that much. Zoe wondered if Alice had skipped paying for a couple of months, so she looked back, but no, all the bills they’d received since they’d moved to Abbotsford, except for the first month, were all that much or more, and every single long distance call was to the same number in Whitehorse.
Zoe took the bills downstairs, perplexed. Leaf was at the table cutting a puppet stage out of a cardboard box for Connor and Cassy, who were playing on the floor, piling up blocks and knocking them down. Zoe showed him what she’d discovered.
“Classifieds.” He sliced out a wide arch. “She’s met someone. Probably on the Internet.”
“My mother doesn’t know how to use the Internet.”
“Then a newspaper ad, unless it’s some long lost relative or something.”
“We don’t have relatives. The only long lost relative is Kenneth, my father. He Who Shall Not Be Mentioned.”
“An old boyfriend?”
“No. She’s a staunch graduate from the love ‘em and leave ‘em school of dating.”
“Someone new then.” Leaf shrugged. “So what?”
“So what? Why won’t she tell me about it? I’m down here making dinner and doing the laundry and practically raising her youngest child, and she’s up there having phone sex with some bushman of the north?”
“Yeah.” Leaf set the box on the floor. “That about sums it up.”
After listening to her speculate all over the place for nearly a week, what if this and what if that, Simon finally clutched her shoulders and said through gritted teeth, “Just call the damn number and ask.”
So Zoe did, but after the man said hello she’d chickened out and hung up. Maybe she didn’t want to know that bad.
Zoe tried listening at Alice’s bedroom door again, carefully setting the glass quietly against the door, but Alice heard. She managed not to hear when Cassy was screaming because Zoe was washing her dinosaur cup, but she could hear that?
“Scram.” She snatched the glass and kicked the door shut with her foot.
The next day, Zoe had been talking about the bushman again, in the Dungeon after school with everybody there, even Teo. He was still April’s official bodyguard, even though Zoe tried to convince him that it was all over. April had been quiet, typing away, and then she suddenly sighed, dropping her hands to her lap.
“Just ask her.”
The others looked at Zoe, eyebrows raised.
“She tried that already,” Simon said. “Her mom wouldn’t tell her.”
Zoe looked at her shoes.
“Well?” Simon said. “You’ve asked her, haven’t you?”
“No,” Zoe muttered.
“Why not?” Leaf asked.
Zoe was about to tell them why not, but soon realized she didn’t have any good reason except for that’s not how things worked in her family. Outright asking? Too easy?
The next day was Teo’s birthday. Wish was making pizza for them all next door. The boys and April convinced Zoe to ask Alice while they were all there to make sure she did it. They trooped next door and everyone but Zoe slipped upstairs to wait in Zoe’s room while she stayed downstairs to ask Alice, who for a change was not busting out of the house to go to an AA meeting. She was curled on the couch under an afghan, settling in to watch I Love Lucy on the channel that came in the least fuzzy.
Zoe plunked herself down on the other end of the couch and waited for a commercial break, as Alice was always testier if Zoe tried to talk to her when a show was on.
“So,” Zoe hoped her voice sounded casual. “Who’ve you been talking to all the time, on the phone?”
“You think that’s any of your business?” Alice’s eyes were locked on the TV.
“Yes.”
“What makes you think that, huh?”
“The fact that you might as well be on another planet.” Zoe fought the urge to launch into an inventory of all the reasons that made it her business. “You have no idea what’s going on around here.”
“I don’t, do I?”
“No, you don’t.”
“You could tell me anytime you felt like it.”
“And you could maybe bother to ask.”
Alice pushed aside the afghan and sat up.
“Can you guess?” She lit a cigarette and looked at Zoe, even though the show had come back on. “Come on, guess.”
“I have no idea.”
“None?” Alice smiled. “Sure you do, come on, take a guess.”
“I don’t want to guess, Mom. Just tell me.”
“Harris.”
“Harris Kellerman?”
Alice looked back at the TV. “He’s the only Harris I know.”
“You dumped him.” Zoe thought back to when they left Prince George. “What does he want with you?”
“What do you think?” Alice made a great production of getting up and turning up the volume. “Do you mind?”
“Do I mind what?”
“I told you what you wanted to know. I’m watching this.” Her eyes wandered up. “Don’t you have guests upstairs? Or did they leave over the roof?”
“What the hell?”
“What?”
“What’s up with you and Harris?”
“Look, Zoe,” Alice stubbed out her cigarette. “We talk on the phone. That’s all.”
“That’s all? Hours and hours a day and you say that’s all? What’s going on? Is he trying to get you back? Is that it?”
“You remember that night before we left? When he came over? He asked me to marry him.”
“Since when did that mean anything?”
“He quit drinking.”
“Again? How many times is this? As many as you? Huh?”
“Watch where you’re going with that, missy.”
“Where I’m not going with that is anywhere near Whitehorse.” Zoe stood up. “Do you get that? There is no way I am moving to Whitehorse. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“It’s kind of hard to understand someone when they’re acting like a spoilt little brat.”
“Must be hard to understand yourself, then.” Zoe turned to leave, but Alice grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t you use that tone with me!” She wagged a finger at Zoe, her voice rising. “Just who the hell do you think you are talking to me like that? Harris is a kind, loving man who treats me right. You want me to turn away from that?”
“Then why did you make us leave?” Zoe yelled at her. In the pregnant pause that followed, she heard her friends moving around upstairs.
Alice went to the bottom of the stairs, hands on her hips, and called for them to come down.
“I think your friends should leave,” she said as they filed passed, eyes on the floor.
“Well, I think they should stay.” Behind her, the others were pulling on their jackets.
“We’ll be at my house,” Leaf mumbled, holding open the door. “Bye, Alice.”
“Uh-huh.” Alice fixed her eyes on Zoe and waited for Leaf to shut the door behind him. “I suggest you take a minute to think before you open that big fat mouth of yours again.”
“Is that a suggestion from one of your precious self-help tapes?”
“You better—”
“I’m not moving to Whitehorse.”
“I’m not deaf.”
“Nobody is moving to Whitehorse.”
“Oh yeah? And just who is it that makes the decisions around here?”
“You, and they all suck!”
Alice reached out and smacked Zoe across the face so hard that Zoe reeled back and knocked into the wall.
“You’re grounded, young lady!”
“Right, nice try.” Zoe walked out and s
lammed the door behind her.
“Fine then, never mind being grounded!” Alice flung open the door and hollered from the stoop. “Don’t even think of coming back here until you are good and ready to apologize!”
Wish and the others were waiting for her next door. It was muffled, but they could all hear Alice ranting through the walls, swearing up a storm. Zoe heard Cassy wailing for her and decided to go get her. She pounded on the door, but Alice had locked it and was ignoring her. Zoe thought she’d outsmart her by going over the roof, but Alice had already thought to lock Zoe’s window. Zoe stood outside on the carport roof in the rain, looking in at Cassy, who had her face pressed to the window, crying for her.
“Go find mama,” Zoe told her, giving up. She waited until Cassy toddled out of the room, sobbing, and then she crossed back over to Leaf’s.
Later, after the others left and Wish and T-Bone had gone up to bed, Zoe and Leaf crawled under the covers of his narrow single bed and turned off the light. The two of them had to spoon tight so neither of them would fall off. They fell asleep like that. Zoe woke in the middle of the night and when she turned to stretch her cramped legs, Leaf woke too, and in the silent still night, the streetlight illuminating their faces, they pulled off each other’s clothes.
“Whoa, hang on.” Leaf twisted away. “I don’t have any condoms.”
“Who said we were going that far?”
“We’re not?” Leaf kneeled over her.
“No.”
“Soon?” He kissed her nipple.
Zoe closed her eyes. She wanted to. If he kissed her there again, it might be sooner than she planned. “Yeah. I think very soon.”
Leaf rolled onto his back. After a minute, he said, “I have an idea.”
“What?” Zoe wasn’t sure what she could handle at this point.
“Let’s make it sound like we’re doing it, and then in the morning we’ll see what kind of lecture Wish’ll think up.”
The two of them bounced and groaned dramatically, breaking into giggles at the sound of the bedsprings creaking like something out of a B-movie.
In the morning, Wish brought them breakfast in bed: eggs and toast and frothy lattes in deep bowls. Either Wish and T-Bone had slept right though the racket, or they weren’t going to bother with any lecture. Not at this point anyway.
In the light of day, the idea of apologizing to her mother didn’t seem so bad. To be honest, Zoe figured she had reason to thank her mother. If they hadn’t had that fight, Zoe would not have ended up in Leaf’s bed. There was no way Alice would’ve let her spend the night with Leaf.
Alice took her sweet time answering the door.
“You forget something?”
“I’m sorry, Mom.” Zoe tried not to sound as happy as she felt.
Alice crossed her arms and let several seconds pass. “You’re sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, come on in, then.” Alice disappeared inside. “I’ll boil a teabag for that bruise on your face.”
Zoe had felt so great when she woke up that she hadn’t noticed the purple welt announcing where Alice had ploughed her the night before. Zoe looked at her reflection in the hallway mirror. She put a fingertip to her puffy cheek, and then she pulled up her sleeve to get the whole effect: swollen eye, bruised cheek and demolished wreck of an arm. She looked awful, but she had to admit that she had never felt better in her whole life.
warm fuzzies
And they all lived happily ever after, nowhere near Whitehorse. The end.
Only not quite. The real end, if there’s ever an end to anything, began on the last day of school before the Christmas holidays. The weather nagged at Zoe like a snot-nosed kid pulling on her arm. The sky was bruised and heavy and low, and it hadn’t stopped raining for weeks. Zoe missed snow for the first time. She missed making snow angels and the way her nose hairs froze when she breathed in the cold, dry, northern air. Snow made everything clean and quiet and right. All this rain, it was as if April’s God was trying to wash away some awful stain that just would not come out.
Zoe pulled the covers over her head. Just one more day until the holidays, one more day until she could stay in her pajamas and watch movies all day if she wanted to. She trudged up to the school and headed straight for the Dungeon. Leaf wasn’t there, but the Christmas issue of the paper was, five tall stacks just outside the door, bound with flat plastic ties. Zoe cut the ties and sent the papers off via the Creative Writing geeks who had a monthly spread in the paper in exchange for delivering them around the school. She kept three papers aside, one for her, one for Leaf and one for April. She unlocked the Dungeon and put their copies on their desks, and then flopped on the couch to look through it. Usually all she looked for was layout errors, but something else stuck out that day. Page two had been rearranged to include another piece. The headline read, “What Would You Do?” As Zoe read the piece, a wave of nausea rose up in her belly.
What Would You Do?
What would you do if you saw someone being raped? This is the first question in what will become a weekly poll. Read the scenario, and then choose the answer that best applies to you. Cut out the answer ballot and drop it in the box outside the Dungeon.
We want to keep the answers confidential, so don’t put your name on it. But while you’re here, fill out our “WWYD” contest ballots. You could win two free movie passes. If you have a scenario you’d like to see in the Reporter, drop it off, in writing, to April Donnelly— assistant editor.
SCENARIO #1:
You’re at the first big party of the year, in fact, it’ your first big party ever.
After wishing the drunk birthday girl “Happy Birthday” and being embarrassed by her and her cronies in the kitchen, you go out onto the patio for a bit of fresh air. But as you walk through the yard, you hear a muffled cry come from the bushes. It’s a new friend of yours, a small, thin member of the tough in-crowd, and that’s not her boyfriend with her. It’s another girl’s boyfriend. At first you think you’ve stumbled onto some kind of love triangle, but the girl’s cries of protest make you realize that she is the victim of unconsentual sex. She’s being raped, and you’re a witness. What do you do?
a) Interrupt and take the girl to safety
b) Run and call the police
c) Go inside and get help
d) Nothing
Don’t forget to bring your ballots to the Dungeon for your chance to win!
April had read Zoe’s diary.
How could she? After everything, how could she? It had to have been the night she babysat Cassy and Connor at Zoe’s, the night Zoe lay bleeding to death in the parking lot, knifed, for god’s sake, and all the while April was rooting through her stuff and doing to Zoe the exact same thing the Beckoners had done to her.
The realization that April had read Zoe’s diary was worse than getting thirty stitches, worse than being slashed. This felt like being ripped wide open, head to toe. And here it was for everyone to see, on page two of the Christmas issue, the most widely read issue of the year—practically the only issue read all year—because of the three pages of seasonal warm fuzzies at the back. People who never picked up the paper read this issue, and there was another entire population that thought the paper only had one issue—the Christmas issue. And worse, by far the worst of all, was that all it would take would be one Beckoner to look at it and they’d know exactly what and who it was about.
Zoe put her head in her hands. She would have to stay in the Dungeon until everyone had left for the day. She’d have to wait until the janitor came by to lock up, and then maybe he could escort her home if she pleaded hard enough, if she begged for her life. She’d have to change schools now, maybe even bus to the next district.
Leaf came in then, three more copies of the paper under his arm.
“Beat me to it.” He kissed her on the cheek. “What do you think? We could use a little hype, huh? The movie pass was my idea.”
Zoe stared at the ballot, at D in particu
lar—the one she had chosen. April reading her diary, that was bad enough, but Zoe’s guilt was worse than bad. It was paralyzing. She was a big fat D. D for nothing. D for failed. D for doghouse, doomed, dead, demolished, destroyed.
“What are you trying to prove?” She forced the words through trembling lips.
“What do you mean?”
“This!” She pushed the paper onto the floor. “What the hell is this?”
“It was April’s idea.”
“I bet it was.” Zoe shook her head. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”
“Obviously not. Why don’t you tell me?”
Zoe grabbed her pack and stood up.
“Zoe, tell me what this is about.”
“I need to find April.”
Leaf grabbed her arm. “Zoe, don’t go like this.”
“Don’t touch me!” She yanked her arm away and slammed out of the Dungeon. The hallway seemed overly bright, the Christmas decorations garish and cheap, the carols piped through the PA system suddenly cloying. There was nowhere to go. There was no point in hiding. Even at a school in another district they’d find her sooner or later.
The newspaper was everywhere. Zoe made her way across the school, barely resisting the urge to rip the paper out of people’s hands as she passed. She wished she had telekinetic powers and could set the papers ablaze just by looking at them.
She finally spotted April outside the main entrance, waiting in line to pass through the security station. Zoe glared at her. When April had cleared the metal detector, she hesitated, evaluating Zoe’s expression. Zoe had no words yet, but she grabbed April’s sleeve, dragged her across the hall and into the girls’ bathroom. When she let go, April backed up against the sink and covered her face with her hands.
“I’m not going to hit you,” Zoe hissed. “But I can’t think of what I can say to you that would make you understand what you’ve done.”
April said nothing for a long second. “They won’t know how I found out.”
“They will, April. Why did you do it?”