Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  School itself gave unexpected respite. Public education can always be counted on for depressing bits of coloured cardboard and sagging crepe paper bunting. The plastic tree was duly propped up in the hall outside the school office and trimmed with last year’s tinsel. The old fringed foil runners were tossed over air ducts, and paper snowflakes were stapled to anything that stood still long enough. There were Mrs. Maxwell’s home ec stars knitting socks for soldiers, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas” tinkling morosely from car radios and guitars. There were poorly conceived green and red mashed potatoes in the cafeteria that nobody ate, and a pancake breakfast with Mr. Galpin in droopy red flannel pyjamas, trying his best to smile under his cotton-batting beard.

  The shining glory was the Christmas assembly, when they unveiled blown-up yearbook photos of the boys from Reagan High who’d died in Vietnam that year. They smiled out at us from their art class easels at the front of the auditorium stage as the senior class president read their names along with the captions that had run under their graduation photos in their final yearbooks. Too-short lives reduced even further to a hundred words or less, nicknames and inside jokes and remember-whens that none of us remembered. After the ceremony, the photos would be hung outside the office along with the others, where they could smile at us for all eternity. Saint Steven. Saint Eddie. Saint Bobby. Saint Mike.

  I sat at the back of the auditorium with the dazed and musky stoners, none of whom seemed to understand what was happening on stage. Melanie sat three rows up, beside Joyce Peyton, engraving letters into her inner arm with a ballpoint pen. It was where she tattooed all her crushes so her mother wouldn’t see. I imagined the tall, bending J, the long, slender F. Jamie Finley was sitting near the front with the freshmen. He’d become a rare sight at Reagan that fall. When Troy and his gang of crewcuts held court in the parking lot at lunch, Jamie wasn’t with them anymore. I’d heard that he’d quit the swim team, but nobody knew why. Surrounded now by weeping girls, he stared up at the dead boys on their easels, his head and shoulders as still as theirs.

  I didn’t know where Troy was, and for the first time since the fire I didn’t care.

  Once the senior class president was finished, Carol took the stage. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the assembly, but this didn’t surprise me. Carol was always popping up in places she didn’t belong. When the school band held a bake sale to raise money for new sweaters, Carol had her own bake sale for Russian orphans. “New sweaters?” she called out to kids stuffing themselves at the other tables. “These orphans don’t even have old sweaters. They don’t have anything. Some are so hungry they eat their poop!” It probably goes without saying that she couldn’t give those cupcakes away.

  Carol stood neatly at the podium, her little white Bible clutched in both hands, while Mr. Galpin lowered the microphone for her. Anticipatory snickering rippled softly through the audience. The microphone was still too low by a few inches, but Carol was used to these small indignities. She placed a sheet of paper on the lectern and slowly, delicately, lifted her chin. “The Lord is my shepherd,” she began. “I shall not want.” Dear God, I thought. Anything but that. Somebody cracked a joke about lying down in green pastures. Joyce Peyton said something to Melanie about virgin births. Carol lifted her chin even higher and kept reading. She was used to these indignities too.

  Someone booed. Then another. They were timid at first, seeing what they could get away with. As more kids joined in, they grew bolder. Carol’s voice struggled to rise over them, hitting a pitch that made my eardrums itch. It was Moody Miller’s job to run the spotlight at assemblies—nobody else had the patience to sit still for an entire hour—and as he trained it on Carol I could see her hands trembling, struggling to hold on to that piece of paper and keep it from flying away. I couldn’t hear her anymore, but her lips were moving. One way or another, she was finishing that prayer.

  Mr. Galpin hurried up the stage steps, yelling so hard his face was as red as those pyjamas. The way he held up his hands, you couldn’t tell whether he was pissed off, giving himself up, or trying to conduct the chorus to its crescendo. As if in answer, the voices swelled. The sound became a wave, a tsunami. Down in the front, Jamie Finley was unmoved. He sat as motionless as the boys on their easels, smiling out at us beneath their hair-creamed cowlicks, in their Sunday suits and their fathers’ ties. I shrunk lower in my seat. I dug a foxhole inside that back row. It was only a matter of time, I was sure, before they remembered there were two parts to this freak show now. In seconds, that swarm of hissing vipers would turn their tongues on me. The dead boys kept smiling. Those smiles ripped my heart out. It’s not like I’m really her friend, I explained to them. It’s not like this is even my life.

  And then the worst thing that could happen happened. I glanced up and saw Carol looking right at me, mouth open but mute, chin quivering dangerously. Her cheeks were shiny. Was she crying? It had to be Moody’s spotlight. She was sweating under it maybe. Carol Closter ranted. She raged. She walked into a hailstorm of garbage, singing the national anthem. What she didn’t do was cry. So I did the only thing I could do. I jumped up from my foxhole, stepped on a dozen dirty Converse sneakers, and slunk out of there like the traitor I was.

  —

  It was official. I wasn’t just the world’s worst friend, I was possibly the world’s worst person. As punishment, I stayed inside for the whole holiday break and helped Mom ruin Christmas. Christmas Eve, she always made me watch It’s a Wonderful Life with her, but not that year. Instead, she watched soldiers gum it up for the TV cameras while backup singers in sequined dresses swayed their hips to “Jingle Bell Rock.” “It would be funny if it didn’t make me want to tear my hair out,” she said.

  I went to my room and tried not to think about my lighter. I’d only had this one a week and it was almost empty. To make myself feel worse, I flipped through the small, white Bible Carol had given me. “It can’t be easy for you this time of year,” she’d said at my locker. “Just remember, you’re never alone if you have Jesus.” I had bristled at Carol Closter thinking of me as lonely, made worse for being true. The Bible was just like hers, except for my name written in purple on the first page. It weighed almost nothing in my hand. It didn’t seem right that something men went to war over could weigh so little. A Bible should be a thousand pounds, I thought. It should be written on stone tablets. The pages were so thin and flimsy I could almost see through them. When I started imagining those pages floating through the air on a current of heat, I threw the Bible in my closet and slammed the door.

  A minute later Mom stood in my doorway, dropping ash on my carpet. “Everything okay in here?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “It’s a regular winter wonderland.”

  “I guess I haven’t made this the nicest holiday for you, huh?”

  “You were the one who liked all that stuff,” I said.

  “Tell you what. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” As if I had an option.

  She came home an hour later with bags of groceries. “I found a Jewish deli!” she said, jiggling her keys like bells. “What do you think of your old mom now?”

  I unpacked a bag of day-old dinner rolls, a box of mashed potato flakes, a can of Cool Whip, and the tiniest turkey I’d ever seen.

  “There’s something wrong with this turkey,” I said.

  “It’s a chicken.”

  “We can’t eat chicken for Christmas dinner.”

  “Sure we can. We can have whatever we want. We can have ham. We can have goose. I felt like chicken. What do we need with some big bird?” She flapped her arms and bobbed her head. I didn’t laugh. A thunderbolt was probably going to crash through our roof any minute now and kill me, and this was my last meal—this chicken?

  “Can’t we just order Chinese food?” I said.

  “You’ll change your mind when you smell it!” she sang.

  It’s a Wonderful Life was on television again. Channel 3 was playing it non-stop. I sat on t
he couch and watched for a while. It was at the part where Jimmy Stewart realizes he’s dead when I realized I hadn’t heard so much as a lid rattle in the kitchen. My stomach grumbled. I got up to see how dinner was coming. Chicken wouldn’t really be so bad.

  The bird lay headless and naked in a roasting pan in the middle of the table. Mom sat in a chair, staring at it. This went on for a while, the two of them gawking at each other.

  “Do you ever get the feeling,” she said, “that your life is happening, but you’re not in it?”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll eat the stupid thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Should I turn the oven on?”

  “Sure, terrific, I’ll stick my head in it.”

  Mom lit a cigarette and poured herself a glass of wine. I pulled on a sweater and got my bike out of the garage. In Golden the gas stations never closed and there was Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket.

  The guy behind the counter grumbled when he saw my Canadian dollar. He pushed it back across the counter along with a chocolate Santa wrapped in foil. “Happy Hanukkah,” he said, waving me away.

  I stepped back outside, bouncing the full lighter in my palm. I’d chosen a red one this time. Mom could ogle poultry until New Year’s Eve if she wanted, but I was getting into the spirit of things. Under the electric hum of the gas station sign I heard a radio-cracked version of “Silver Bells.” The pumps were draped with coloured lights. They blinked in the settling dusk. I flicked the Bic on and off, keeping time.

  “What are you, crazy?” the attendant shouted at me through his little window. “You can’t do that here.”

  There was a newly vacant lot across the street where a patio furniture store used to be. As I pushed my bike out of the gas station lights and toward the dark, a flame sparked up ahead. Jamie Finley came into focus, ghostly behind the fizzing end of a match. He had salvaged two folding chairs from the pile of rubble and pointed them at the gas station like it was a fireplace. He sat in one.

  “Haven’t you heard that smoking causes cancer?” he said. I let go of the Bic’s tongue and stuffed it in my pocket. Jamie lit another match. He was wearing a red sweater with a snowman on it. His hair fell into his eyes.

  “And what are you doing out here?” I said. “Working on your tan?”

  The second match sputtered and died.

  “I needed some air,” he said.

  “Me too,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. I could hear the squeak of the folding chair, the jiggle of Jamie’s long, skinny leg. The gas station attendant came outside, lit a cigarette with his own Bic, and smoked it leaning against one of the gas pumps.

  “This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  Jamie chuckled, and I heard the scrape of metal in dirt as he pushed the other chair toward me. He lit a match so I’d know where to sit. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me.

  As I hooked my foot under my kickstand, a car pulled into the gas station. Doors swung open and kids tumbled out, waving their hands at the dust they’d made. Reagan kids. Melanie and Joyce. Troy Gainer’s red Mustang rolled up to a pump beside them.

  Troy got out and somebody put a beer in his hand. Melanie and Joyce arranged themselves on the top of the convertible’s back seat. Melanie said something that made Troy laugh. He walked over and handed her the brown bottle, nodded approvingly as she chugged it back. She wiped her mouth to hide her huge smile. A breeze pricked my face and neck like ground glass. My whole body shivered. It wasn’t a J she’d been carving into her arm at the assembly. I clutched my handlebars so I wouldn’t fall over.

  I could feel Jamie looking at me in the dark. “Shouldn’t you be in one of those cars?” I said sharply.

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  Tanks finally filled, car engines started. Troy held his passenger door open, waited while Melanie reapplied her lip gloss in his side mirror. As the Mustang peeled out, its horn roared in my ears like a stuck game show buzzer. Wrooonnnggg. And then they were gone, swallowed by the night, nothing left but gas fumes and dust.

  Jamie lit another match. This time he let it march toward his fingers. He lit another and did it again. The air was sour with sulphur. He had half a pack left.

  “You know that movie with Jimmy Stewart?” he said.

  “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

  “Yeah, that one. I hate that movie. Fucking bullshit.” Another match flared. This time he held it up to his face. The flame carved his cheeks with shadows and hooded his eyes. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but suddenly I wanted to go home and make sure the oven wasn’t on.

  Before I did, I dug in my pocket for the chocolate Santa. Saint Nicholas, patron of sailors, pawnbrokers, thieves, and children. I gave him to Jamie. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure.” Jamie lit another match and flung it into the air. We watched the orange tip arc, fall, and die in the dirt. I heard foil unwrapping. “Merry whatever,” he said.

  It was after eight when I got back, but Mom was still sitting at the kitchen table. So was the chicken.

  “I’ve decided to go back to school,” she said.

  “Cooking school?” I said. My stomach was gnawing a hole in itself.

  “Har har. College. I’m going to finish my degree. I can take classes part-time. If I buckle down, I could graduate at the same time as you.”

  “Great,” I said. We were never getting to Minneapolis at this rate.

  “I have to do something with my life, honey.”

  “You’re doing something. You’re my mom.”

  “And then you’ll grow up and what will I have?”

  That chicken, for one thing.

  The phone rang. I answered it in the living room. Anything to get away from that bird. “Hello-ho-ho,” I said dryly.

  “Hey,” Jamie said. He didn’t say his name and he didn’t need to.

  “Hey,” I said back.

  “So I was thinking about those kids who died,” he said. “That’s what I was doing out there. I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I can’t stop, actually.”

  “It’s really sad,” I said.

  “No, that’s not it. I mean, it is sad, really fucking sad, but also, I don’t know, I keep thinking about how lucky they are.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Everybody loves them now, right? They can’t ever screw up or let anyone down, you know? Nobody cares if they quit the swim team or failed trig or whatever.”

  “Why did you quit the swim team?”

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean. Nobody remembers the stupid stuff those kids did or didn’t do. They just remember that they went to war and fought for our country. So they’re heroes forever. Well, anyway, that’s what I was doing out there.”

  “Jamie?”

  “Yeah?”

  I fumbled for the right words. I needed to explain that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I wasn’t really the world’s worst person. I needed him to know that I was Carol Closter’s friend, that I liked her, actually. I also needed him to know that there were times when I hated her a little too. Not for being a freak, not even for having a perfect family, but for going from someone I once pitied to someone I almost envied. I hated her sometimes because nothing and nobody was the way they were supposed to be. Most of all, I needed him to understand that I hated myself for feeling this way. I didn’t know why Jamie Finley was the one I had to say all this to, except that he was on the other end of the line and I wanted these things out of me. But I couldn’t tell him. My lungs were filling up with all the things that needed saying—I was drowning in them, and it’s hard to talk when you’re drowning.

  “So, okay,” Jamie said after a while. “I just wanted to tell you that. That and Merry Christmas.”

  I put the phone down and stared at it for a minute, hand resting lightly on the receiver. I could dial the operator and ask for the number of ever
y Finley in the phone book. If I didn’t do it soon, I’d lose my nerve. While I debated, the phone rang under my hand, and for a second I believed in Christmas miracles, if no other kind.

  “I’m sorry!” I said.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  My chest emptied, but I didn’t feel any better. “Carol?” I said. “You what?”

  “I forgive you. I’ve been thinking all week about how you probably felt really bad about it, but you shouldn’t, Robin. Do you know why? Because being my best friend is the best present you could ever give me. Plus, my pastor says I need to be more forgiving. So there—I forgive you.”

  Carol waited, but I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t even understand what conversation we were having. After what felt like an hour, she tried again. “I said I forgive you, Robin. For not getting me a present?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Sorry.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Right. Okay. Well, thanks then, I guess.”

  “You’re welcome! Anywho, see you next week. 1972—can you believe it? Okay, bye!”

  Mom was smoking at the sink. A dishtowel covered the bird. “How about Chinese food?” she said. “It’s a Wonderful Life is on. We can eat in front of the TV, if you want.”

  “It’s a great idea, Mom. Really, I mean it. College—wow.”

  She was quiet for a moment, as if waiting for the punchline. When one didn’t come, she smiled widely, grabbed me by the shoulders, and kissed my cheek with a smack. She flipped through the Yellow Pages, looking for Chinese restaurants. “What do you have without chicken?” Mom barked into the phone. “Beef and broccoli! Wonderful! Let’s do the biggest order of beef and broccoli you’ve got! Let’s do a double order! We want beef and broccoli coming out the ying-yang!”