The Sweetest One

by Melanie Mah

  Kay and I come back to school through the north door. She goes left, to the washroom, while I go right, by the chicken-wire office windows, see Mrs. Blackburn at the copy machine, and walk in like an object coming down a conveyor belt. She says hi to me.

  “Hey, Mrs. B.,” I say. Then it occurs to me. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure. Now good?”

  I have class, but I tell her I have a spare. We go into her office. She sits across from me, an expectant look on her face.

  “I don’t even know where to start, to be honest,” I say.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me what happened?”

  Will she judge? “Okay, so, uhh, I’ve been hanging out with this guy for a while, and yesterday we kissed.”

  “I can give you condoms, information on —”

  “No. I won’t need that.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  “I’m scared.”

  She tilts her head.

  “He seems to really like me,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  “He’s really nice. I’ve never been in a relationship. I’ve spent my life liking guys who didn’t like me back.”

  “Okay, so you’re scared because you don’t know how you should act?”

  “Maybe?”

  “It’s normal to be scared. It’s scary if you like him because the kiss means more, and it’s scary when you kiss your friend because everything could potentially change. If it doesn’t work out, you might not be able to go back to being friends. You might be better as friends. You have to keep asking yourself how it feels. And know that if it doesn’t feel good, you can always stop it.”

  “If I do that, he won’t like me.”

  “Chris, being liked isn’t the most important thing.” It’s easy for her to say. “Most important is feeling good. Also, liking him now doesn’t mean you’ll have to like him forever. You’re smart enough to know if something isn’t working out.”

  Am I? During the next period and at home I think about it some more, weigh the things I like about him against the way he was in the car, those things he said to me, his eyes closed and he’s groping at me like a blind baby animal for milk. My conclusion? I have to let him down. I practise breakup faces in the mirror, sad wheezing in the middle of saying variations of it was a mistake. Can you even break up with someone you’re not technically dating? He might never want to talk to me again.

  A few days later, he calls. I tell it to him straight, I have to. I say I think I like him but that I’m scared and that I’m sorry about how shit went down in the car. He says that it was weird what I did, but that he understands, and that we can go slow, that we don’t even have to do anything if I don’t want to.

  On Sunday we hang out. His mom and stepdad are out of town for some Christian conference. He surprises me with takeout from Edmonton: Korean, Japanese, Indian, vegetarian Chinese, this thin spongy pancake with stuff on top that he says is Ethiopian. Lemon cream pie from his favourite place. It smells funny but nice, all those different foods together. He did that for me, broke the bank, says he got so much because he didn’t know what I’d like. I like it all. I didn’t know you could eat this way and still be vegetarian. I eat and eat till I’m sick. I think of him going all that way for food — a five-hour round trip — and knowing what to order in every place.

  After lunch, he puts in this movie, Harold and Maude, about this weird guy who falls in love with an eccentric old lady. A good movie, sweet and sad. After that, we watch a New Order video, live concert footage from 1984, four years after we were born. Epic synths, bass, drums, and guitars. I’ve never seen it. Conrad says the tape is rare. He had to order it from Europe. I sing along — can’t stop myself — and he doesn’t mind.

  We move the couch closer to the tv. I look over from time to time to see his reaction to stuff in the video, and some of those times, he’s looking back. Whoa. We get closer on the couch, closer, it’s innocent at first, like when you’re sharing a chair with your friend and your legs are touching. Then he reaches up, touches my arm — my whole brain in those inches of skin — and I tell myself not to freak out. He puts his arm around me. Nerves. I seize up and he tells me it’s okay. I stand up and so does he. I feel drunk. We hold hands and go to his room while the video’s still playing, “Confusion.” We kiss and kiss some more. It feels better than it did last time, and after, we just lie there talking. I keep looking away, but something always brings me back. Those eyes, they’re huge. His face, I like to look at it.

  ANOTHER LETTER FROM Trina comes and I barely care. She says the Anchorage festivals were fun and there’s more to do there than she originally thought, but she’s running out of money so she’s going to have to stay a while. She’s still with Billy. They want to take a ferry somewhere. She’s amazed by the amount of choice there is — how can she choose? Each route so breathtaking and remote, yadda yadda.

  Glad to know you’re still alive, Trina, good to know that the North is your oyster and that you’re still having fun, etc. etc., Trina. Whatever.

  CONRAD COMES TO the store, even though I told him not to. I’m serving a customer — telling this guy with a flat ass that the jeans he’s trying on look good on him — when I notice him in the gloves. I finish with the customer, then go off and do some freight. Don’t think of him. Don’t think of him. Don’t look at him don’t think of him. I fold jeans, check things off on the invoice, count out tags, calculate retail price on the adding machine.

  A breath in my ear. “Hey.”

  He’s right behind me, the heat of his body, his hand sweeping down my back — my whole body tingling, I close my eyes, oh — under the band of my underwear then out and he’s gone.

  Dinner is scrambled eggs. I eat slow, hoping my parents didn’t see. I’ve never fought with my dad over a guy before. It isn’t that hard to imagine — the tone of his voice and the volume, the things he’d say, how it’d make me feel.

  My dad asks me why I’m not eating. Aren’t I hungry? I wolf down my food after that, and my dad makes some worried remark about how not eating meat has given me an irregular appetite. I’ll have to eat more eggs now that I don’t eat meat, he says. Yes, Ba. Is it religion? No, Ba. He hates religion, except for ancestor worship, which, for some reason, doesn’t count. Sometimes he says, “Of course you’re hungry, you don’t eat any meat,” or, “You make it really hard for me to cook for you,” as if he still did.

  After dinner, I help with dishes, the whole time picturing a series of complex looks on my mom’s face — rare for her — expressing surprise, shame, nosiness, embarrassment, criticism, disappointment, and false authority. Too playfully, too eagerly, and also reluctantly, she would say that she saw me with Conrad. Don’t have sex, okay? she would say with a bit of embarrassed laughter. She wouldn’t want to know anything about him. She’d assume he was bad news. She’s not the kind for a birds-and-bees talk — maybe only had sex five times in her life — and believe me, I don’t want one. Don’t even really want to have sex, but that wouldn’t stop her from talking. She puts dirty dishes into the rinse water. Normally, I’d give them back to her so she could do them again. This time, no. I think, please, please, please, please, please. She says nothing.

  After dishes, I do homework, take breaks to show my parents I’m still around, then sneak out. It’s dark and the town is almost beautiful. I walk up the street and meet Conrad by the old iga.

  “So you’re coming by the store now,” I say.

  “I just wanted to see you, you know, at work. Like, ‘How does she look when I’m not there?’”

  “You know I could have gotten in shit, though, right? I spent the last hour and a half waiting for my dad to start throwing things at me.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know what could happen to me if they knew?”

  “No,” he says, accepting blame. “I don’t know.”

  “See, it’s easy if you don’t know.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I just wa
nted to see you.”

  We end up at Ridgemore School Park. He keeps trying to apologize. At first, I let him. Later on, it hurts. I don’t want him to apologize so much, not like this, not for something I liked. So when he asks if he can give me a piggyback ride, I say okay. We go around the playground like two kids in one big guy’s trenchcoat. He carries me like it takes no effort. I’m gripping hard so I don’t fall off. It’s nice being so close to him.

  I bend down and kiss him on the cheek. He says, “You keep that up I’m gonna lose balance.” I kiss him some more. He wanted to see me. I get off. He backs me up against the school and it’s spring, things are melting. Our jackets make shush shush sounds. His soft stomach, his hip bone, the hollow. I put my hand in and push it into his pants. He starts whispering. I don’t know what he says. Nonsense, prayer, a command. Cars go by, shoes on gravel. Someone’s coming. Conrad doesn’t want to stop. I don’t want to, either. We stand there listening, but whoever was there is gone.

  We go to his house, the basement spare room. His mom and Bob bumping around upstairs, talking with the tv on. A solid relationship. We have books on the bed in case someone walks in. We kiss each other wherever we can. Mostly on the mouth, but he kisses my nose, my neck. He touches me on the back and it makes me jerk like a fish on land. It’s embarrassing. “I like that,” he says, and keeps doing it. We start rocking and rubbing against each other — instinct rearing its ugly head. You’ll make a baby if you’re not careful, if you only listen to instinct. It feels good, a little weird. He wants to take my pants off but I don’t let him, then I worry he won’t like me if I don’t do it. I don’t normally have this effect on guys.

  Just past ten-thirty, I think of my parents at home, about to sleep and unaware I’m lying in bed with a white boy. I imagine Conrad and me ten years from now. I’m still at the store. What does he do? Work the rig? No. Does he live somewhere else? Yes, and he can only visit on weekends, which isn’t enough.

  I tell him I have to go. I can never be seen in public with him. Maybe he should find someone else. Love is wanting what’s best for the other person, after all.

  He says, “They find out about us, what’s the worst they can do?”

  “Disown me, yell at me, hit me.”

  “You know there’s laws against that.”

  I look at him like, You think I don’t know?

  “Well, you’re gonna make your folks mad at some point,” he says.

  A FEW WEEKS later, we’re on his living room floor, a Trivial Pursuit board open between us.

  “So one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I say.

  “Arts and Literature? Sports and Leisure? History?”

  “You could be with anyone.”

  “You’re great. Do you need me to list off reasons?”

  I shrug.

  He says: “You care. You’re sensitive. You’re, like, this totally unique person. You say random shit sometimes, and I’m a sucker for random shit, and what you say is funny and cool. You’re smart — like really smart. You’re like a walking encyclopedia.” He points at our little game pieces. I’m two pie slices up on him.

  “Total fluke,” I say. “There’s tons of things I don’t know.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, also you’re strong. You don’t think so, but you are.” He looks at me, shy, above his thoughts. “And you’re pretty.”

  I’m not the pretty one in the family. I’m not the pretty girl at school.

  “No one’s said it to me before.”

  “You’re pretty,” he says, leaning across the board, disrupting the pieces to kiss me and I accept it. “I can’t believe no one’s ever said that. You’re so pretty.” He wraps me in a squeeze. “Your hair is nice, I like the way you dress, you’ve got really pretty eyes and nice hands and I like your smile. Holy shit, do I like your smile.”

  I close my eyes then, my hand over my grinning mouth like it’s a secret.

  Later he says, “I got some responses.” From universities, he means. u of a, u of t, ubc, Hunter College, a few others. Some scholarship offers, too.

  “Which one are you going to take?”

  “Thought I’d wait and see. We could go together. You should apply.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you are going to university, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. He laughs. I don’t.

  Something drops in his face. “Are you serious?”

  I shrug.

  “I’m just, what, some guy you make out with sometimes?”

  “Yeah, it’s why I’m spending all my time with you. I don’t know what we’ll do. We don’t have to think about this now,” I say.

  He says we do.

  “My family, everything I know, is here.”

  “But if you stay, will you be happy? Don’t you ever think how things could be? About how you might change if you left? Think of the books you’d read or classes you’d take or people you could meet. We’ll go to school together, start an adventure tour operation when we’re done, make money, grow old. I can see it. You got a walker, I’ve got a cane. You’re old and smart and beautiful.”

  “That’s romantic. I’ve known you six months, and you’re already picturing me old. I turn eighteen next month, you know.”

  “I know,” he says, “and I planned you something good.”

  No one outside my family has ever planned my birthday. “You know what happens when I turn eighteen.”

  “You can drink legally and vote. I know what you think’s gonna happen.”

  “What if it does? Say I die. You’ll be stuck in, like, Buttfuck, Ontario or something.” Like Peggy McInnes. Her mom came in the store recently, said Peggy was still in Michigan.

  “Just apply to some places,” he says. “You got calendars for fun. Why not apply for fun? See who accepts you.”

  “I don’t even know what I’d take.”

  “So make a list.”

  He gets a pen and paper. I start writing, he looks over my shoulder. Sociology, English, Anthropology, Astronomy, Botany, Ornithology, Mammology.

  “Someone likes Biology,” he says.

  “I love it. But I wanna study other stuff, too, maybe do a double major. Do most schools offer these subjects?”

  “Most decent-sized schools.”

  “So why don’t you decide?”

  “We can go by city.”

  The next day I bring over application forms. He guides me through it as I fill them out, and follows me to the mailbox to make sure I drop them in. I never thought about it before, but mail is a lot like hope, isn’t it, like little prayers you send out into the world, announcements of your existence. It takes a lot of effort to send a piece of mail. It takes thought, intention, physicality, your words like a thread sewing you to the piece of paper. Out through your hand, in through your eyes, again and again and again. Backtracking if you said it wrong, or wrote it wrong, it’s a painstaking venture, and sometimes it actually hurts to hope that hard. You request an audience, acknowledgment, a response — a favourable one. You go down to the corner, pull out the wide screeching handle of the box, and put your letters in, you say one last prayer before the door bangs shut and your letters fall back to a place where you can’t reach them. Then the real anxiety starts, moments where you think, Did I write the right address? Did I say the right thing? Should I have sent it at all? It’s a stupid old saying, but it’s true sometimes: be careful what you wish for. Someone in Vancouver, Toronto, or New York might open the envelope, take the letter out, read it, then what? Throw it away? You want someone to want you. What if no one does? What if someone does? What then? Do you really want what you say you want? Are you ready to get it, to embrace that kind of change? At what point are you unable to turn back, stop the flow of change, withdraw your neck from risk?

  Conrad pats me on the head.

  “All done,” I say. It’s a hazy day. The sun is shining, sick and yellow.

  “It’ll be great,” he says. “You�
�ll see.”

  I walk him back to his house, then I go back to mine.

  20

  *

  LATE AT NIGHT on October 16, 1995, we got a call.

  Trina answered the phone. It was just past one and she was falling asleep after a late night out with Kirk and their friends. She didn’t want to answer it at first. Who calls at one a.m.? She thought that if she ignored it, the person would give up. But the phone kept ringing.

  It was someone from the hospital with news about Gene. He’d shot himself in the head in a barn. It belonged to Jim Mendel, a farmer who came into the store sometimes to buy dubbin and leather laces. Could be Gene knew where Jim’s guns were from that blabbermouth Mendel kid. They weren’t even friends, just in the same grade.

  Trina woke us all in hysterics and we drove the two hours down to Foothills Hospital in Calgary still wearing our pyjamas. I sat in the back, head between my knees, as my dad asked my mom about the details. He asked why Gene would do some-thing like that. When my mom said nothing, he said, “I told you this would happen.”

  When we showed up, Gene was in surgery, and they didn’t let us see him till he was out. He was unconscious, then — on life support. Most of his head and face was bandaged up, and what wasn’t was badly bruised. I hoped it wasn’t him, I know it was a dumb thing to think. The doctor came by and said his brain was bleeding and the pressure in his head was high by the time they got to him. He could heal on his own — that happens sometimes — but there was a chance that he wouldn’t, and we had to prepare ourselves for that.

  We waited hours. They carted him away a few times for tests and procedures to relieve the pressure, but in the end he took a turn for the worse. The doctor came back and said brain function tests came back negative and that machines were keeping him alive. She gave us a choice, but it wasn’t a choice.