by Hadley Dyer
“Okay.” He smiled, sort of. “We’ll talk on the weekend.”
“Did the medal ceremony go alright yesterday?”
“It was nice. I met the brass. I’ll show you the, you know.”
“The medal?”
“Yes, the medal.”
“Constable McAdams?”
“Frances George?”
“What’s going on?”
His foot stopped twitching. “Let’s not talk here.”
I knew our love was precarious, every moment as dangerous and delicate as raising the mast of a ship in a bottle, but I’d had this strange confidence that the only thing that could end us before next fall would be getting caught. It hadn’t occurred to me that we could break it off voluntarily, not after we’d said we loved each other. I’d never considered that it would be just like Francis to change his mind.
“Are you . . . not wanting to do this anymore?”
“George—”
“Don’t make me worry about it for days.”
He looked over at Mr. Humphreys, who had appeared on the steps near Natalie and Doug, then met my eyes and said, “I think I have to make a decision, yes.”
He sounded so sober and grown-up.
“I thought you had.”
“Let’s talk about it on Saturday. I’ll come by the lighthouse in the afternoon.”
I turned to walk away.
“Don’t . . . don’t go slamming your bedroom door.”
“Slamming my bedroom door?”
“Storming off like a kid.”
“I’m just leaving,” I said. “I didn’t know there was a wrong way to do it.”
Mr. Humphreys’s big arms were folded across his chest. “Problem, Warren?” he said.
“No, sir. Forgot something in my locker.”
“You were talking to the RCMP officer.”
“Yeah, I work for him. Sort of.”
“Gone over to the other side, have we?”
“Gone over . . . Oh no, I’m not some druggie snitch.” I followed his eyes to Doug, who was standing up to leave. He and Nat weren’t quite out of hearing range. “Of course you aren’t,” he said.
“No, really, I clean his house. Do the laundry, make dinner. Feed the pig.”
“Feed the pig.” He rocked back on his heels, then began slowly trailing Doug down the steps. “I like that,” he said over his shoulder. “Feed the pig.”
Twenty-Five
Lisa got dumped once. Dumped hard.
It happened at a shack party in tenth grade. Lisa and Whatshisname disappeared soon after we got there, and the rest of us ended up hanging out with the skateboarders. (Who doesn’t love a skateboarder? They’re like the cheerfully demented love children of the Goths and the jocks.) The next morning, my mother said, “I think you’d better check the machine.”
Lisa: “Hi. Uh. Sorry. I . . .”
And then she lost it. It was the saddest, most wretched thing I’d heard in my life. It made me burst into tears all thirty-two times I heard it—thirty of them because I was testing a theory that I couldn’t not cry while listening to it—until my father yanked the plug from the wall, picked up the machine, and walked out of the house with it. We never saw it again.
When I let myself into Lisa’s bedroom, she was sobbing into her pillow. Every now and then, she would lift her head and move her mouth as though she was trying to form the word sorry, but her face would contort as the heaves welled up and she’d be down for the count again. Her mum came in and put a glass of water on the bedside table. “What do I do?” I whispered.
“Just make sure she doesn’t get dehydrated.”
As bad as I felt for Lisa, part of me—the bit that lived in that dark chamber of my heart—wasn’t totally buying it. Like when you see ladies in labor on TV and they’re wailing and clutching their husbands so hard the men fall to their knees. It seems like if someone has it in them to be that dramatic, it couldn’t really hurt-hurt, right?
Losing Francis hurt.
Watching my friends’ relationships bust up, even breaking up with Lisa, hadn’t prepared me for this. I had no idea how exhausting it would be. All the not-eating, imaginary confrontations, darting out of stores when the wrong songs came over the speakers. I’d always had a superimmunity against ballads, but now the first three bars of “Against All Odds” left me completely unhinged. I couldn’t get through the breakup scene in The Godfather Part III, which I put on the VCR to soothe an honest-to-goodness pining for Sid, who was always pretty good at making a person laugh when the going got rough. When Andy Garcia said, “Love somebody else,” I cried so hard that Dad made me turn it off before I could see Sofia Coppola get shot.
I couldn’t believe that Bill had gotten back together with Tracy so many times only to go through this all over again, and felt awful that we’d all told him he was better off without her. Who cared about “better off” when that person had decided that they were better off without you? Someone collects information on you for weeks or months or years, and after studying all the data, they drop you into a bin to become someone else’s sloppy seconds.
Something I learned about myself that week: I do not enjoy a wallow. If you like a wallow, no judgment, but I didn’t want to lie on the floor listening to Kate Bush and examining the nature of my pain. There were things to do: study, help my dear sainted mother, spend quality time with Bill. A large karmic deposit was due for all the times I’d said I was doing those things and was actually pressed up against the barn wall, fumbling under Francis’s winter clothes to find bare skin.
I drove out to the bay after school that Friday, after telling Rupert that I was too sick with a cold to go out to the farm. The wind was bitter through my jeans as I sat on Abe’s cooling hood and looked across the water at a distant island whose name escaped me. This was the horizon that I couldn’t see from the lighthouse. Maybe Francis had taken this route into town, hugging the shoreline en route to what he thought would be a simpler life. I put my hand in my pocket for a tissue and felt the lake stone he’d given me that first night at Long Fellows, which I carried around like a good-luck charm.
You could sink a ship with all the lies I’d told lately. The biggest were the ones I’d told myself. Like, the only reason I’d taken the job at Rupert’s was to make some extra cash. That good people sometimes do bad things. That I kept forgetting to take the stone out of my pocket.
I peeled off my mitten and rubbed the smooth, shimmery pink surface. Then I hopped down from the hood, picked my way across the rocky beach, and threw it into the water.
Two things happened next: number one, I felt immediate and profound regret before the stone even broke the surface; and number two, I’d just become the kind of girl who would dramatically throw a love symbol into the ocean.
If we were ending, Francis and me, it shouldn’t be like this, with half a conversation in a parking lot and a ploink into the bay. Not our love. Not us. But I didn’t know what to do about it, and there was no one I could ask how a person was supposed to get her head out of her brown dot.
So I decided to do what I did best: shake it off at a shack party.
When Bill and I arrived, I slipped out of my coat and tossed it onto the pile in the corner of the bedroom with the grace of someone who knows they look good. I’d lost the weight that had been bothering me in the fall and then some, despite having given up running over the winter. After the last time Francis and I had slept together, he’d touched my hip bone and said, “Where did this come from? Did you always have this?”
“I think it’s meant to keep my lower part from collapsing in on itself.”
“Don’t disappear, my love.”
I grabbed the bottle of Screech that Bill had set on the windowsill, and checked myself out in a cracked mirror. My hair was falling just so, and I was glad I had chosen the vintage ballet sweater that crisscrossed my front and tied around my waist. Behind me, Bill was staring.
“Dude,” I said.
“You’r
e wearing something that makes guys think about how to get it on and off.”
I spied Lisa’s hot-pink feather key chain on the floor and instinctively reached down, but before I got my hand on it, Bill said, “Alright, that’s enough.” He closed the door. “Stand up. Put your ass away.”
“Why did you close the door?”
“I like you, but you’re not going to seduce me.”
“Uh, no, I’m not. Also, who says seduce?”
“Not that I haven’t thought about it. You have a good rack, you do. There’s a nice curvature on the left one there in particular. But Sid and I swore a pact that we’d never get together with any of you girls, even if you begged us.”
“Even if we begged you?”
“It’s been pretty obvious. You’re always ‘finding my binder’—”
“You’re always leaving it somewhere—”
“Making sure I get to class on time. Remember when you brought me cake?”
“You were just complaining about me bailing on you.”
I looked down at the key chain on the floor. Maybe there was more to it. Probably wasn’t a coincidence that Bill and I got closer after Sid left and Lisa and I broke up. Like those nicotine patches that Dad’s doctor couldn’t convince him to try, we helped each other kick our best-friend habits. And he was also sometimes my Francis patch, holding me over when we couldn’t be together.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry that I’ve been doing too much for you, and I’m sorry that I haven’t always been around to do more for you. Does that cover it?”
“Yes. Are you going to get emotional because I don’t want to have sex with you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
And that, right there, was the best thing about being friends with a boy. Wasn’t a lot you couldn’t work out in two minutes or less.
“Gotta whiz,” Bill said.
I tossed his jacket to him. “I saw a couple of Elevens go into the bathroom together. Think they’ll be a while.”
He was partway out of the room when he turned around. “Lisa’s here.”
“And?”
He fiddled with the door latch. “She had a bad week. The play is . . .”
“She needs to fire half the actors.”
“I tried to tell her that, but then she looked like she was going to cry.” He shuddered. “She said she wished she could talk to you about it.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Okay, she said you’d know how to do it, which is basically the same thing.”
“What do you want me to do? Start firing people for her?”
“I’m just saying that if you think you might want to start talking again, this might be a good night to do it.”
The party was at someone’s uncle’s oversized lake cabin on the far side of the south mountain. The music was loud, and practically everyone was already messed up. “How’s it goin’?” Doug asked. He’d sank deep into a gigantic armchair, his hat tipped over his eyes.
“Comme ci, comme ça. You?”
He peered at me from under the hat brim. “Nat’s avoiding me.”
“I can’t figure you two out,” I said, perching on the arm of the chair. “Are you dating?”
“Naw.”
“Do you want to go out with her?”
“Uh, yaw.”
“Enough to stop smoking this?”
Doug gazed down at the joint in his hand like I’d told him it was a terminal puppy.
“Oh, give me some of that,” I said. “We can be pathetic together.”
Just as my fingers wrapped around the joint, a third hand came out of nowhere and knocked it onto Doug’s lap.
That was the fastest I’d seen Doug move since—ever.
Lisa was standing in the doorway by the chair, straddling the line between slushy and surprised. I had a feeling she’d punted the joint without thinking. Maybe she’d developed a muscle memory after years of trying to keep me away from the stuff.
She half smiled. “No one wants to see you high.”
It was the first time she’d spoken to me in months.
“Well, that’s true,” I admitted, “but it’s been kind of a shitty week.”
“Mine sucked too.”
“Yeah?”
“Big-time.”
“So let’s have some of this. Drugs solve everything, right, Doug?”
“Won’t make it worse,” he said.
Christina called from the sofa, “Couldn’t possibly make her sluttier.”
A few nervous laughs. Joshua looked uncomfortable beside Christina. Nat was tucked in the corner behind Skateboarder Brad, pretending to be absorbed in peeling the label off a beer bottle. Doug pulled his hat down so it covered his face entirely and sank deeper into the chair. Lisa just stood there.
The funny thing is, I think the other people in the room wanted me to slam Christina, or at least make her flinch. It would give them something to talk about on Monday. But as I sat there considering my options, hoping I gave the impression of deliberately taking my time, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Because I didn’t care. Real life was out there, beyond this cabin, after high school. This was nothing but a holding pen, and suddenly I didn’t give a damn about anyone in it—except Bill, out peeing in the snow. Certainly not Lisa and Nat, who were letting Christina bait me.
“This is . . .” I was going to say boring, but didn’t bother finishing the sentence.
Back in the coatroom, my foot decided Lisa’s key chain wanted to live under the radiator.
Bill was doing his thing at the side of the house. I stomped over a snowbank and prodded him in the back. “My privates are hanging out!” he said.
“Just how long have you been peeing?”
“It took me a while to find a place.” He shook and zipped.
“I want to go home, buddy. I’m sorry. I should have driven myself.”
“You’re bailing? Seriously?”
“Seriously, it’s getting mean in there.”
“Who’s picking on you?”
“Christina.”
“Fuck that ferret.”
The sudden flashing lights of a cop car sent us skittering around the back of the shed. It was something I’d always avoided in the past, getting busted at a shack party, thanks to my early curfew. Usually, the noise complaints didn’t roll in until well after midnight, and the cops couldn’t be bothered to break up parties before they got out of control, especially out in the boonies. But this cop didn’t always follow the unwritten rules.
“Young guy,” Bill said. “Do you know him?”
“He’s the constable who boards with Rupert.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Bad. Very bad.”
“Maybe you can get him onside.”
“Of everyone here, whose father is he mostly likely to call?”
Within minutes, the party was out in the snow. Francis was taking names, sending some kids on their way, making the less sober types stay back.
Christina looked terrified. She was inching behind Nat, who hid under the hood of a giant man’s parka that she’d managed to nick from someone.
“If I get grounded,” Lisa said, “I won’t be able to work on the play.”
I didn’t catch what Nat said from under her hood, but Lisa had tears in her eyes.
Bill gave me a shove, harder than I think he meant to, and I knocked into the woodpile, sending a couple of logs tumbling.
“Just taking a leak,” I said as Francis turned in our direction.
I yanked Bill out into the open with me.
Francis could not have seemed less interested. “Miss Warren. What would your father think about you being out here at this party?”
I felt about twelve years old. Christina and Lisa were both crying now. Joshua was off to the side, stomping his feet sulkily, and Keith was giving me the stink eye, like this was somehow my fault.
My pride smarted. I was not like them. I woul
dn’t let him treat me like them.
“He’d make a big frigging deal of it, but you don’t have to. It’s just kids having fun.” I pointed to Christina. “This one has literally nothing else to live for.”
Prodding the bull, as my father would say.
“I mean, if you need to arrest someone to make your night, arrest me. Maybe they’ll give you another medal.”
He wouldn’t. I had too much on him. Mutually assured destruction. But no one else knew that, and I realized that I appeared to be going down on purpose, taking one for the team. People were sneaking off while Francis’s attention was focused on me. You could hear the clinking of bottles being tossed into the woods.
“Welcome back, Enforcer,” Bill said under his breath.
“Get in the car,” Francis said, his voice tight. “We can discuss this further with your parents.”
He pointed to Lisa, Keith, and Christina. “And you three. Let’s go.”
Twenty-Six
I was in the front seat, the others in the back. If Lisa and Keith said anything, I couldn’t hear it over Christina’s bawling.
Lisa was sitting in the middle. She leaned forward and tapped Francis’s shoulder. “Sorry. She’s pretty upset.”
“You don’t need to apologize for her.”
“It’s just, it might look like her family’s well off because she lives in a nice house, but she comes from very humble roots. Rough childhood, you know? Some people would say that mine was rough, but honestly, not like hers.”
Rough childhoods, my arse. Christina came from one of the few old-money families in that part of the valley. As for Lisa, her father was an insurance agent and her mother was a dentist, and they were those lovey-dovey parents who put their hands up the back of each other’s sweaters in front of their kids’ friends and said things like, I was telling Dave in the bath last night . . .
Not that Francis was going to fall for that, but since I was the only one in the car who wasn’t about to get in huge trouble, I said: “Sure, rough. You probably heard the rumor about mountain men marrying their daughters.”
“Shut up, George!” Christina screeched.
“Easy,” Francis said.