by Shawn Syms
“Hey there, little man!”
“Hi, Karen,” he said with his usual reserve.
“Did you hear the one about Star Trek and toilet paper, Roddy?”
“You told me yesterday. They circle Uranus, looking for Klingons.”
The light changed and she led him across Hampton Heath Road. The schoolyard was three short blocks away on Croydon Road. Roddy had no books to carry—he’d finished all his homework in class before the bell rang.
Roddy ignored Karen’s wave and kept going up the street, his steps unhurried in the cool spring morning. A girl with blonde ringlets and a green dress had crossed the street at the same time. With each slow step he took, the gap between them widened. Roddy counted the number of steps it took to reach the schoolyard. The less time to kill in the playground before the morning bell rang, the better. The screech of nearby brakes startled Roddy and he stopped counting.
He glanced over at the car as it lurched forward again; it was a red Volkswagen driven by a man with slick black hair and a moustache. There were three little girls in the back seat. One of them picked her nose with gusto, staring out the window at Roddy. The smallest wore a bathing suit.
Elizabeth Gardens Public School was an unremarkable shoebox of faded yellow brick, just like Roddy’s last school. As he turned the corner onto Croydon and it came into view, a turbulent splash of noise became more specific schoolyard sounds with each step forward. A young girl screamed in defeat as another got dangerously close in a game of tag. The thud of a basketball smacked the tarmac. A little kid bawled after falling off the roundabout. Roddy heard the whizzing hiss of skipping ropes. Passing the jumping girls, he entered the schoolyard.
Roddy heard the jangle of the morning bell and made his way to the back door where the grade threes and fours lined up next to Mrs Krevaziuk. The redheaded recess monitor wore a long navy-blue dress. He measured his pace so he would blend into the middle of the queue. The tougher kids usually gathered at the end of the line. Taking his place, he glanced back but didn’t see Mike Martell.
Once the lineup was orderly enough to satisfy the teacher, students began to file inside and ascend the staircase to the second floor. Roddy had gotten used to the pushing and shoving and knew not to take it personally. At the top of the stairs, he veered left and marched across the cardboard-coloured carpet toward Mrs Giroux’s pod.
Elizabeth Gardens didn’t have separate rooms for each class; it had vast, open-concept floors divided into “pods.” They didn’t have lockers; they had rubber tubs in which to store their books between classes. This school had some quirks compared to Roddy’s old one back in St. Catharines. Instead of “O Canada” every morning, they sang “God Save the Queen.” And they recited a version of the Lord’s Prayer with three extra lines added to the end.
Roddy made his way to his seat near the front as Mrs Giroux thumbed the attendance list. Her blonde hair was pulled tightly up into a little round ball at the top of her head and the brown dress she was wearing had a pattern of black clubs and diamonds. It made Roddy think of a deck of cards that had fallen into a jar of peanut butter.
Roddy glanced around and saw that Mike’s seat at the back was empty. Mrs Giroux reminded the class about the swim trip that afternoon for all grade fours and fives. Roddy didn’t know how to swim well, and thoughts of the Olympic-sized pool at the Centennial Aquatic Centre up the street made him anxious. Still, his trunks were in his tub, and his mom had signed the consent form. There was no way out of it.
Roddy tuned out Mrs Giroux’s announcements. He realized that Bettina Inck, who was in grade five, would be attending the swim trip. He still had no idea how to ask a girl for her underwear.
The bell rang after fifteen minutes and it was time to move from homeroom to Mr Rozinski’s pod for science. The pods were separated by mobile green chalkboards. Between them was a large gap, through which a river of pupils streamed from one class to the other. Roddy walked over to the storage tubs, grabbed his science books, and headed to class.
Mike Martell stood in the gap between the pods, wearing the same dirty vest as he had in Roddy’s dream. He wore it most days, actually. Roddy veered far to the right and kept walking as if nothing were wrong, though his pace was unnaturally brisk. A buffer of one or two kids separated him from Mike.
Mike stood still. He didn’t shake his fist. He didn’t say a thing. But he stared directly at Roddy from the second he came into view until the moment he took his seat in science class. Roddy pretended not to see him, though out of the corner of his eye, it looked as if the boy’s lip was swollen. But Roddy couldn’t imagine anyone in school crazy enough to take Mike on in a fight.
The lesson was about the growth stages of a butterfly, complete with a slide presentation on goatweed larva. They looked like hairy, stretched-out moles that throbbed. Roddy felt a spitball hit the back of his head during the slide show. He ignored it. He knew it was Aamir, who sat three seats behind him. Aamir used to get picked on by Mike and the others because of his Pakistani accent. Attention was drawn away from him when the new kid arrived, and he wanted to keep things that way. But Aamir wasn’t a very dedicated harasser. With someone like that, Roddy had learned it was best not to give them any kind of reaction. After three spitballs, including one Roddy suspected was still stuck in his hair, the onslaught ended.
The combination of the gross larva visuals and someone nearby farting a bunch of times made Roddy feel sick to his stomach. The class ended and he headed back to homeroom to drop off his book, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell.
He stood by the tubs and felt a set of fingers press down hard and pinch his shoulder. Mike’s lips were an inch away from his ear. His breath was funny. Roddy thought the odour was a cigarette, though he found that hard to believe.
“Got the fucking underwear yet?”
Roddy shook his head.
“Get them for me. I don’t care if you have to rip them off her.”
Roddy’s shoulder twitched under the pressure. Mike squeezed harder and Roddy winced.
“Got it?”
He nodded. Mike shoved him to the floor and walked away. Other kids stepped around his body.
Time for recess. At the edge of Mrs Krevaziuk’s class, Roddy turned right instead of left. He headed for the farthest set of stairs. Exiting the building from the grade-two doors meant he could avoid Mike and Eddie if they were waiting for him outside the normal door.
Bettina sat in the playground by the fence reading. Roddy took a deep breath and walked toward her mass of black curls.
Bettina wore round-rimmed glasses with large frames and a simple maroon-coloured dress that looked like it hadn’t been bought in a store. Roddy wondered if her mother had sewn it herself—or maybe even her grandmother. Then he remembered the rumours. Bettina’s mother had taken her own life when the girl was five years old. She lived alone with her dad in a small house, in the poor neighbourhood a dozen blocks east of his own family’s rented townhouse on Lakeshore.
As he approached, he saw her book was illustrated with colour pictures of flags of the world. He’d signed the same one out of the school library in St. Catharines the year before. She was studying the book in silence. Roddy leaned over.
“That’s Martinique,” he said, looking at the periwinkle flag on the page in front of her. It looked like the flag of Quebec except, instead of fleurs-de-lys, it featured the white outline of a coiled snake in each of the four corners.
“It’s not an official national flag,” she replied without looking up. “Martinique is considered a part of France.”
Roddy nodded, impressed. Bettina gestured for him to sit. He crouched beside her, bolstering himself with one hand on the chain-link fence. The book was organized by region. Bettina turned several pages without saying a word, moving from the Caribbean over to Asia. She leafed past the page for Nepal—whose unusually shaped flag was Roddy’s favourite—but stopped at the sight of the flag of Bhutan. A white dragon straddled a diagonal l
ine along the centre of the banner, demarcating a yellow triangle above it and an orange one below.
“It looks like it’s swimming between a sea of pee and an ocean of diarrhea.”
“Um,” Roddy replied. Actually, the colours had something to do with the Buddhist religion, but he didn’t remember the details. Maybe it wouldn’t be hard to ask her after all. Bettina was smart—but also pretty weird.
“Are you going to the Aquatic Centre after lunch?”
Bettina flinched. “Yes. But I hate swimming. I hate that place.”
Roddy swallowed. “Are you wearing underwear?”
Bettina closed the book and looked at him.
“Will you lend them to me?”
Bettina continued to stare. Her face was placid, her eyes empty pools of blue.
“If I don’t give them to Mike Martell, he says he’ll beat the crap out of me.”
Bettina frowned at the mention of the bully’s name. “Mike lives next door to me. I don’t like him.” The recess bell rang and she stood up.
“Will you lend them to me?” Roddy repeated, desperation creeping in.
“You can keep them.” She turned toward the school doors. “After lunch,” she added, walking toward the building while other kids around her ran in the same direction.
Roddy walked back to school after lunch enjoying the residual taste of fried Spam and Velveeta sandwiches.
Grandma and Papa had arrived at the townhouse. Grandma played cards with Roddy’s mom while Olive spun a plastic plate on the linoleum floor. They talked about where to go for dinner that night, and Roddy picked Arby’s. He liked roast-beef sandwiches, as long as they made him one without mustard.
His grandfather napped on the living room couch, a wrestling match blaring on the TV a few feet away. Mom gave Roddy a special cupcake with tiny silver candied balls sprinkled all over the vanilla icing. Then it was time to go back to school.
Karen the crossing guard tried to tell him another joke—something about a priest, a phone booth, and a cantaloupe—but Roddy just nodded politely. The bus was already waiting in front of the school. Roddy went inside to get the bag containing his swim trunks. He stopped in the boys’ room on the way back outside to take a pee. The empty bathroom had three floor-length urinals and a large round fountain-style wash basin with a foot pedal, designed to allow multiple boys to stand around it and wash their hands at the same time. Roddy entered a stall and locked it behind him.
As he was finishing, he heard the washroom door open. He hoped it wasn’t strange old Mr Hyder. The rotund Hungarian janitor once came into the room and heard Roddy urinating into the toilet. He banged on the door and told the boy he needed to use a urinal “to do that.” He hadn’t tried to peek or anything, and had left the room once he was satisfied Roddy was peeing the right way for a boy. But still, the experience unnerved Roddy. Maybe it was outside of Mr Hyder’s sense of the order of things, but Roddy liked a bit more privacy.
He heard footsteps and recognized a pair of unwelcome voices. One of them was high and sounded like a whiny girl.
“Ya think he’s gonna do it?” said Eddie.
Roddy heard the sound of flies unzipping, followed by noisy streams of urine. He quietly shifted his feet so his shoes wouldn’t be visible in the gap under the stall door.
“He better.” Mike’s reply was low and gruff. He added, “If I don’t bring them home tonight, my dad’s gonna give me a lot more than a fat lip.”
Roddy held his breath.
“We’ll scare him. Then he’ll do whatever we say. If he was here right now, I’d flush his head down the toilet!” One of the boys let out an ugly hyena laugh.
“Why bother? We’ll just tell him that’s what we’re going to do. That should be enough. Besides, he could just hold his breath while the toilet flushed. Getting your head flushed isn’t really that scary.”
Neither boy washed his hands. Roddy listened to the slow squeak of the door closing.
The swimming pool was the size of a car lot. Roddy felt small. His eyes stung from chlorine in the overheated, steamy air. He wiped sweat from his forehead and turned toward the man approaching him and the other kids.
He didn’t look that old to Roddy—maybe the same age as his own dad—but the swim coach had wrinkled skin that was crosshatched like a meat pie. Roddy wondered if that’s what happened if you lived underwater.
The coach wore a bright red Polo shirt and shorts the colour of a brown-paper bag. A large silver whistle dangled around his neck on a white cord. He shook the hand of the group’s hairy chaperone, burly Mr Rozinski, and then turned to face them.
“My name,” he pronounced slowly in accented English, “is Sergei Hamatov. Under my tutelage, you can become a championship swimmer.” The coach intoned at length about his glory days coaching championship swimmers decades ago.
Roddy stopped listening. He’d been embarrassed to undress in the change room in front of the others. A boy named Scott had wrapped his towel around his waist and then changed into his swim trunks underneath the towel. Relieved, Roddy did the same. Mike and then Eddie had taken all their clothes off, Mike loudly proclaiming, “We’re all men here.” Roddy had looked away.
The first fifteen minutes were spent dividing the class into two groups based on ability. Since Roddy only knew how to dog-paddle, he ended up in the Tadpole group. He didn’t know any of them, but they all got along, happy to be in the shallowest part of the pool. Olga, the coach’s assistant, had severe features but a gentle voice. She told the half-dozen boys and girls in Roddy’s group that their simple goal was to get over their fear of the water.
“Let your worries wash away,” she said in accented English. “Water is your friend.”
Roddy closed his eyes and allowed himself to float in the pool. He tuned out the splashes and noisy shouts from the deep end, where advanced swimmers received diving instructions from Sergei.
Then he felt a hand cover his face and another grab his chest, pulling him underwater. Panicked, he thrashed around to free himself, but the grip on his chest was too tight. A fat belly pressed up against his back. His trunks were yanked down, and he felt a spasm of pain as someone in front of him kneed him in the crotch. His bare testicles ached, and a yell filled his mouth with water. He tried to open his eyes, but the chlorine stung too much.
As soon as it started, it was over. All the hands let go, and he splashed to the surface, coughing and gasping for air. Roddy opened his eyes, pulling his trunks back up. Olga stood at the other end of the pool talking to Sergei. A few feet away, Eddie Wallace snickered. Mike Martell hovered right in front of him, leering. Without thinking, Roddy reached forward and launched his fist at Mike’s face. Mike shook from the blow but didn’t make a sound. He looked surprised. The other Tadpoles stared and blinked.
Roddy adjusted his trunks and dog-paddled to the nearest ladder out of the pool. He looked at the round clock on the wall; the swim class was almost over. With rubbery legs, he headed for the change room. As he approached the door, he noticed Bettina leave the pool as well.
In the empty change room, Roddy didn’t bother hiding his nakedness under a towel as he changed back into his shorts and T-shirt. He’d never hit anyone before, except for slapping Olive once when they were younger.
As Roddy left the change room, Bettina stood outside. She too had changed quickly, replacing a flowered bathing suit with the plain maroon dress she had on earlier.
She grabbed his hand and led him to the right.
“We’d better be quick,” she said, leading him to an unmarked door in between the boys and girls change rooms. She turned the brass knob and opened the door. Roddy hesitated for a second, and she gave him a gentle push, urging him inward.
“We don’t have much time.”
They were in a small storage closet with a cement floor, blue-tiled walls, and a light bulb over their heads. It reeked of soap, evoking the feeling of getting your mouth washed out for doing something wrong. Roddy felt a queasy sensa
tion in his belly like he was still in the pool.
Wooden shelves held gallon bottles of pink industrial liquid soap and dozens of stacked rolls of toilet paper sealed individually in wax paper. Near the door, there was a padlock and a rusty outsized key ring. Roddy saw the door had a latch for the padlock. On one wall, a poster labelled “Playboy: Miss April” featured a nude blonde woman. The hair where her legs met was a different colour from that on her head.
Roddy looked away. He’d never seen an adult undressed before except once, when he saw his dad in the bathroom shower by accident. He’d never seen a naked girl.
There was barely enough room for the two of them in the closet; only a few inches separated them. Roddy was nervous, but Bettina spoke plainly.
“I’ll need to wear your underwear if I give you mine.”
They both turned away from one another. Roddy unbuttoned rapidly and took off his shorts, removed his green Hanes, and pulled his shorts back up. He stared at his grey running shoes the whole time. Her dress-clad bum brushed against his for a quick moment as she bent down to take her panties off. Roddy shook with nerves and shame. His blush deepened, and he stepped aside an inch to give her more room.
“How did you know to come here?” Roddy asked, still facing the wall.
“I’ve been in here before.”
They turned to face one another, and Bettina held her plain white panties out to him. Roddy picked them up by the waistband. It didn’t feel right to touch a girl’s underwear. He wanted to get the panties out of sight. He began to stuff them into his back pocket when the door opened from outside.
There stood Sergei Hamatov. Behind him were all the kids from class, dressed, in their shoes, plastic bags or knapsacks in hand, ready to board the bus back to school.