by Susie Taylor
Wanda sits in a cloud of strawberry, and the smell is sweet and tempting. I’m starving too, having abandoned my toast because of the morning discussion. Hunger and the guilt about disappointing Mum are both making my stomach rumble. However much I rustle papers, when I feel a loud gurgle coming on, I know other people must be able to hear it.
My stomach lets out a particularly embarrassing and loud sound, like thunder followed by a bubble bursting. Wanda does her trademark eye roll and sticks her hand holding the half-eaten pack of gum out under my desk. I shake my head and say just audibly, “No thanks.” My mouth waters at the thought of that first burst of flavour.
Miss Blake raises her head; we’re supposed to be silent reading. I finished my book a week ago, and I’m staring at a page and picking a word and seeing what other words I can make from the letters in it. In “peninsula,” there is “in,” “pen,” “sale,” “nine,” “penis”; probably more. Wanda offers the pack again.
“Take a piece. Don’t be such a chicken.”
I take the gum this time. The flavour explodes inside my mouth, the sweetness rushing over my tongue. The first few chews release sugar and the taste of red, and fool my stomach into silence. I am careful only to chew down occasionally and mostly just to move the lump of gum around with my tongue. I’m thinking about chickens and rooster penises, and wondering exactly where the egg comes out of the chicken. I am distracted and have started carelessly working the piece of gum between my teeth. Then I hear it:
“Daisy Radcliffe, come here.”
Miss Blake points at the wastepaper basket. I let the gum fall from my mouth, still red, juicy and soft, into the garbage can.
“I’m disappointed in you, Daisy,” Miss Blake says, as she writes my name in squeaking letters up on the black board under the ever-present word DETENTION. She wrote the word on the board the first day of class and underlined it twice in blue.
I have never stayed behind for a detention before. Some kids have their name written up on the blackboard all the time for running in the classroom, talking, or passing notes. Today it is me for chewing gum, Curtis for running in the hall, Everett for talking in class, and Damon for writing on his desk.
Curtis, Everett, and I have to write out lines. I am supposed to write out, “I will not chew gum in class,” fifty times. Miss Blake has presented Damon with a rag and a spray bottle, and told him to go around the class scrubbing graffiti off the desks. I only have six of my fifty lines done, and my hand is crampy and I feel panicky.
“I’m going across the hall for two minutes. No talking! None. What-so-ever.”
As soon as Miss Blake is gone, Damon comes up to Wanda’s desk and looks at the big love heart with W.W. + A.R. that Wanda has etched into it with the point of her protractor. Damon makes no attempt to scrub off the red ink she has repeatedly applied to the groove. He watches me for a few seconds.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper my reply, although Damon is just using his normal speaking voice. I also move my sheet to cover a discretely pencilled D.R. loves D.J. written in faint and tiny letters on the corner of my desk.
“Miss Blake can’t hear you,” he whispers back to me. Then he shows me how to write the sentence on one line and just copy each word fifty times underneath. I finish my columns of I, will, not, chew, and gum just before four o’clock. Everyone else has had more practice, and they finish early and are all staring at the clock, watching each minute slip by and waiting for Miss Blake to free us.
She calls us up one by one, and I am last. I carry the page up to her desk. She makes me stand there for a few minutes while she counts the lines and looks closely for mistakes.
“Put it in the garbage, Daisy.” I throw my piece of paper in the metal bin; the smell of rotten oranges drifts up as my paper floats down, landing on top of the abandoned and wasted wad of gum I spat out earlier.
“You may go now, Daisy.”
“Thank you,” I mumble, and gather my things and get out as fast as I can.
The schoolyard is almost empty. Cathy and I were going to go to her house tonight, but she didn’t wait for me. Wanda is sitting alone on a swing in the playground, spinning and unspinning around. We are banned from this as it is supposed to weaken the chains.
“You want to come over?” she asks me.
I don’t tell Mum Wanda’s parents are both still at work when I call to tell her where I am.
“Miss Blake is such a loser. I can’t believe she gave you a detention.”
“She hates me. I think she likes Mr. Dean. She was in his class for half of Detention.”
“He always wears track pants, and you can see his thing.”
“That’s so gross.”
“I swear I’ve seen him with a hard-on.”
“Wanda!”
“Oh, come on. Like you haven’t noticed. Murray had one the other day in class. I could tell because he put his ball cap on his lap to cover it up.”
“What happens if a boy gets one in front of the class? Or at a funeral or something?”
“I guess they just hope no one notices?” says Wanda. She takes a pencil and sticks it at her crotch and starts moving it up and down. She makes sound effects, a long bloop that rises in tone when the pencil goes up and descends when it goes down. Laughter takes over. When I catch my breath, I let out a tiny bloop, and we start laughing again.
Wanda’s mom comes home and feeds us chips and cans of Pepsi. She says I have beautiful eyes and offers to “do something” with my hair.
“So who’s the best-looking boy in your class, Daisy? Wanda won’t tell me anything!”
“Mom, please. There are no good-looking boys in my class. I’ve told you this a hundred times.” Wanda sighs.
“Come on, give your mom a hug.”
Wanda sighs again, but drapes her arms around her seated mother’s shoulders and pecks her on the cheek. Wanda makes a random downwards bloop sound, and we both start giggling.
“You girls are cracked,” her mom says.
Dad is at the house when I get home from Wanda’s. He is picking up socks and his good suit. Mum is ironing a shirt for him to take with him. He gives me a pen from the North American Rat Conference and a pack of complimentary airplane peanuts. I hide in my room and put my ear against the heating vent, but all I can hear from them is a sad murmuring.
four
Miss Blake gets us to write our names down on little pieces of paper and puts them in an empty fishbowl. Sonny and Cher, the goldfish she brought in to be our class pets, died the first week of school, and she didn’t replace them.
Technically you can opt out of the gift exchange for religious or other (your family is too poor) reasons, but no one does. She calls each student up, and we each pull a name out of the glass bowl, a waterline stain still around its edge. Miss Blake writes the names down, so no one can cheat and pretend they didn’t pick out the name of a kid they hate. I don’t care who I get, as long as it isn’t Candice. I pull Murray’s name from the hat. We’re supposed to keep the whole thing secret, but by the next day, most of us know who our Secret Santa is.
Mum tries to get me to buy a packet of marzipan fruit from the German deli for Murray.
“No way.”
“Why not, Daisy? It’s cute. Look at the little banana. And you love marzipan.”
“It’s for a boy. It can’t be cute. And marzipan is weird.”
“I don’t see what’s weird about marzipan. And we’re here, and it will save us time.”
“No. I can’t.”
Mum and I are shopping for things to send belatedly to her parents in England. The deli is busy with the Saturday crowd and women ordering huge amounts of cheese and cold cuts for upcoming parties. I look around the store. There are chocolate apples, different kinds of black licorice candies, and more marzipan—this time pigs. I consider the pig, then I remember that I am buying this for fat Murray. I convince Mum to buy us a small Christmas tree in a pot of dry
brown dirt with Styrofoam glitter balls twist-tied to its limbs, hoping this will cheer us both up.
In the Italian Market, Mum sees the pyramid of festively decorated panettone boxes, puts down her half-full shopping basket, and leaves the store. She walks past Mrs. Davis from church, who is calling out her name, and crosses the parking lot only pausing for the slightest moment to look for oncoming cars. I hurry after her, giving a brief nod and smile at Mrs. Davis.
When I reach Mum, she is sitting in the car with her head resting on the steering wheel. “Your father always bought panettone at Christmas. He’d eat exactly one piece and wouldn’t let me throw it out until it started turning green.”
“Panettone tastes like sawdust,” I say.
“What’s wrong with me, Daisy? Why did he leave me?” I rub her back and pass her the tissues I find in the glove compartment.
Mum sends me to the pharmacy with a list of things we need. I pick out a box of chocolates for Murray. It’s the cheap kind in a big fancy box, the ones that look good but taste like sweetened candle wax. It’s better than nothing. And it’s not like I can give Murray the unopened pack of fruit-flavoured bubble bath I got from Secret Santa last year.
The gift exchange takes place the last day of classes, four days before Christmas. Everyone is talking about their holiday plans. “Okay, class,” Miss Blake says, and everyone ignores her. Miss Blake slams a metre stick down on her desk to get our attention.
“You all need to sit down and be quiet, or we’re not going to do this.”
Peony hands out the gifts. We have to wait until everyone has theirs, then we get to open them. There is an awkward moment when Kevin Taylor’s gift appears to be missing, but Everett remembers it’s still in his backpack. My gift is tiny, wrapped carefully in gold paper and tied with red ribbon that has been curled into a mass that is larger than the actual gift. Wanda fidgets beside me as it gets placed on my desk. I recognize her handwriting on the tiny folded piece of wrapping paper that acts as a card.
It’s half a heart pendant. Wanda kept the other half for herself; it says Be Fri and my half says st ends. It is one of the best gifts at the exchange. These pendants are popular; you can only get them from the Consumers Distributing catalogue. Candice has one that she shares with her big sister that says rite ter.
When I get home from school, the Christmas tree and its pot are missing. There is a trail of pine needles heading out of the house towards the garbage bin.
Mum is wrapping the gifts she bought to send to England. “I don’t know why I’m bothering. They won’t make it until practically Easter.”
She is using masking tape, and it must be old because it keeps unsticking.
“Look what Wanda got me.” Mum eyes the pendant.
“Wanda isn’t really your best friend, is she? You just met her. You don’t want to hurt Cathy’s feelings.”
It turns my skin kind of green after the first couple of days, and Mum notices. “You’ll get a rash if you keep wearing that, Daisy.”
I keep wearing it. I take the pendant off the thin chain it came on and wear it on a leather cord around my wrist.
On Christmas Eve, I light cranberry-scented candles and even put on the album of the King’s College choir singing in saintly voices to try and festive things up. Mum makes me take the album off, claiming it makes her too emotional. Elizabeth puts on an old Beatles record, but this makes Mum weepy too. We eat our Christmas Eve dinner of smoked salmon in moody silence.
On Christmas Day, Donald comes first thing at 9 a.m. before he and the Rat drive to a resort in the Muskokas to spend the holidays. He comes in for a quick cup of tea and a Marks & Spencer minced pie, as none of us have done any baking. It is very awful having him here. He gives each of us a card with a cheque inside: me, Elizabeth, and Mum. It’s like receiving a Christmas bonus. Mum gives him a Gordon Lightfoot CD and looks meaningfully at him when she hands it over. Elizabeth and I jointly give him an Old Spice soap-on-a-rope. When he leaves, Elizabeth and I each enact a fast and obligatory hug, and slink away from the door and back into the kitchen. He and Mum stay in the hall saying goodbye for an uncomfortably long period of time.
Then we go to church.
It’s what we do every year, even though none of us enjoy it. We sit at the back, and halfway through Mum starts crying. The tears just roll down, and of course people notice. She doesn’t go up for communion, so we all just stay kneeling and waiting for this to be over. At the end of the service, as everyone else bustles out to get the turkey on, we wait. Elizabeth and I give stony stares to any unwelcome well-wishers, and then we leave by a side door, avoiding happy holiday families and the deacon dressed up as Santa.
five
Greensborough High School is the academic school. There are two other high schools in town; one is the technical school where they teach hairdressing and auto shop, and the other is the school with the swimming pool that the athletic kids go to. It’s close enough to our school that the group of us planning to attend Greensborough are sent to walk there without adult supervision. The other kids get bussed off for tours of their future high schools.
I’m cold and nervous as we trudge down the snowy streets. I’m wearing a pair of steel-toed combat boots that I liberated from Elizabeth’s closet, and my feet feel numb when we arrive. We’ve been told to report to the main office. In a self-conscious and terrified clump, we enter through one of the student entrances and make our way down the hall to the main office. The older kids stare at us. They look alarmingly adult. “Look how young and cute they are!” I hear a girl say as we walk by. There’s a couple making out in the semi-privacy of an open locker door, and it’s hard not to stare at them. Damon whispers, “Get a room,” as we walk past, not quite loudly enough for them to hear, but loudly enough that I hold my breath in case there are ramifications for his comment. When we get to the office, the secretary points at some chairs and says, “Wait.” We wait.
A tall boy in a school jacket comes into the office, and the boys go off with him. The girls wait longer, and the secretary shoots us dirty looks like it’s our fault no one has come to collect us. Eventually, when the wait is becoming unbearable, my vision sweeps in. It’s Damon’s sister, my future self, with her glorious hair, black leather jacket, and blood-red lips.
“Children, children, gather round,” she says, ignoring the secretary’s glare.
I follow blindly as she streaks ahead of us down the hall. She shows us the cafeteria, takes us to a Drama class, interrupts a Band class. We walk right past the science rooms and the gym. She knocks on the door of an English class and introduces us to a teacher by his first name, Gerry. He sits on top of his desk, wearing jeans, and no one raises their hand, they just speak when they have something to say. We leave Gerry’s class and troop out to the smoking section, where the girl lights up and gets us to introduce ourselves. When I croak out my name, “Daisy,” lisping the S, a nervous habit, she smiles.
“I know who you are,” she says, looking me up and down. “You beat up the bitch in your class. Damon’s my brother, he told me all about it.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just smile.
“She didn’t beat her up,” Cathy says.
Cora, as we have learned her name is, flicks her butt away. She looks at Cathy and says, “Did you say something?”
Then, as we stand there, a guy comes over and bums a smoke off Cora. He is good-looking. He has long hair and tight jeans, and I try hard to avoid looking at his crotch. Wanda is alert. She’s standing beside me, and it’s like a wave of electricity passes over us. This is the kind of boyfriend she has been looking for, not the preppy boys we saw in the classrooms earlier. She flicks her hair behind her ear and then pretends to be listening to something Cathy is saying about the school’s excellent music program, but we are both taking in every word Cora and the guy say.
“You hear about Weiner?”
“Oh my god. Yes. He’s lucky he didn’t get arrested.”
“Just c
autioned. He’s grounded for months.”
“He’s always doing such stupid stuff.”
“That’s Weiner for you.”
The guy is done his cigarette, and he grinds his butt into the ground.
“See you in Band, Cora.”
“He’s in Band?” It escapes Cathy’s mouth, and I can imagine an incredulous thought bubble surrounding her words.
“Second trumpet,” Cora tells her, and I briefly consider taking music.
When I get home, Elizabeth has arrived for the weekend. I can hear them up in Mum’s room.
“I got an interview,” Mum says as soon as I come in the room. All her clothes are strewn across the bed, and Elizabeth is fingering an orange-and-brown silk blouse.
“It’s all just a bit dated, that’s all, Mum. It’s not that they aren’t nice clothes, but you want to look modern.”
“Not like I haven’t worked in two decades, you mean?”
“Well,” says Elizabeth, “yes.”
The three of us stare at price tags and look through racks of clothes. Nothing is quite right. Mum is getting discouraged. Entering the sixth store of the day, Elizabeth banishes Mum from the racks and sends her to the change rooms. My job is to make sure Mum doesn’t leave without trying on whatever Elizabeth gathers.
I’m overheated in my jacket and feel like I could slump from the chair I’m sitting on to the carpet, which is alarmingly littered with loose pins and bits of thread. A sales woman tries to help and produces a purple pant suit with padded shoulders.
“Thanks,” says Mum curtly. She takes the suit into her stall, but does not try it on. It is like a miracle when Elizabeth appears holding the items she’s found, a grey boucle skirt and jacket, marked down, and a sky-blue blouse to go underneath it. Mum eyes everything, then taking in the reduced price sticker, agrees to try them on.
We leave the store triumphant. This is my moment, Elizabeth and I have discussed tactics.
“Mum.”