I could almost taste the red candy she was sucking on. Cherry.
The rest of my exams, after that, were a bit of a blur.
Linguistics was multiple choice; that is, the choice between a bunch of things I didn’t recognize (so not much of a choice, really). Thankfully the Cultural Studies exam had an option to write about the one movie I’d managed to attend. Social Problems was an essay on a specific social problem; I chose sex. Shar finished her essay in fifteen minutes. I ended up sitting next to Jonathon, who was still there when I left. It looked like he was writing a novel.
The night before students left for Christmas break, each floor in the whole dorm had a secret holiday elf gift exchange. A stack of presents sat by the elevator in a cardboard box, cryptically labelled.
I’d gotten Carly, so I bought her a little magnet that looked like a Super 8 camera. Someone got me a giant chocolate A. Shar got a massive bottle of bubble bath.
“Because I take soooooo many baths,” she drawled.
Shar was supposed to get a gift for Rattles, but when she walked down the hall she noticed a huge pile of presents with Rattles’s name on them in the box.
“Fuck that,” Shar said.
So we snuck into the St. Joseph’s Debate Society Karaoke, which had made the mistake of stuffing a flyer into Shar’s mailbox, and drank what would have been Rattles’s present instead.
Shar said the last thing Rattles needed was more sympathy, let alone a bottle of Amaretto.
The karaoke night was a RETRO SPECIAL. We stayed for three versions of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” an extremely shrill rendition of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry,” Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” one too many interpretations of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” and four rounds of Heart’s “Barracuda.”
“JeSUS we just HEARD this song,” Shar would scream after every encore. “YOU GUYS SUCK!”
Every three songs we went up to the MC and requested the Rolling Stones until the DJ refused to talk to us anymore.
When we got back to residence, someone had giftwrapped Rattles’s door in pink paper and bows. Shar tore a ribbon off and stuck it on my head.
“Merryeconds later">OH Christmas, Sonny.”
Later, sitting on her bed watching Jaws, Shar held my arm in her lap and drew fifty tiny x’s around my wrist.
Shar’s train home left at nine the next morning.
I walked her to the station through the first few flakes of snow as they drifted down like tiny paper airplanes. The station was a cloud of white noise and bustling bodies, like Grand Central, like you see in the movies.
As soon as we got in line to pick up her ticket, Shar changed. I kept waiting for her to say something shitty about all the slacker students in their track pants waiting in line. Shar hated track pants. But she just stood there, holding her coffee, looking off in the distance.
“You should go back and pacdrink we were
NINE
Break and split
Going home felt like a humongous waste of time.
I had basically no desire to see my parents (that sounds harsh but it’s true). It wasn’t as if I’d spent any time at St. Joseph’s missing my home or my neighbourhood or high school. If anything, I’d just started feeling like I’d managed to escape that stuff.
Like, you know, thank GOD.
Of course, the first thing my mom noticed at the train station was the scratch Shar had left on my burn Halloween night. Dance Yourself to Death ",
By dinner she was picking and poking at me, pulling on my shirt to expose the borders of old wounds.
She was all over me to go to the doctor. Like, immediately. Like let’s all overreact and call an ambulance why don’t we?
“It doesn’t really look like you’re looking after it.”
“Mom! It’s nothing! I had this HUGE scab and now I have this teeny tiny sore bit—”
“It is sore then,” my dad noted.
For fuck’s sake.
“Dad. It’s a BURN. It doesn’t TICKLE.”
Overall, my parents noticed that I looked way paler than I did when I left. My dad said I had dark circles under my eyes, which he guessed was from partying.
“You know, there was this kid in my school who got scurvy when he was a freshman because he only ate beer and mac ’n’ cheese,” he noted.
“I don’t have scurvy, Dad.”
Halfway through dinner Shar called and I ran up to my room to take it.
Shar’s mom lived on the west coast and her dad lived in England.
“The fact that I’m spending my Christmas NOT in England with my dad should tell you something about my parents’ shitty power struggle,” she’d explained a week before going.
On the phone she sounded tinny and thin.
“Well, Allison, I actually don’t even have anything to say to you. Weird. Are you having fun?”
“Fun?”
“Clearly it’s a stupid question, Allison. My mom is downstairs and I don’t feel like dealing with her. So, make some small talk with me so I have something to do before I go out.”
“You’re going out?”
“Well I’m not staying here, am I?”
“Um. Okay. My parents think I’m not looking after myself. Whatever. I don’t even feel like talking to them.”
I don’t know why I was being so pissy about my parents. Kind of a stereotype when you think about it.
“Where’s your sister?” I asked.
“What?”
“Your sister. Is she at your mom’s too?”
There was a pause and a thump on the other end of the phone. The sound of a door clicking closed.
“No. She’s with my dad.”
“In England.”
“Right. Whatever. Let’s stop talking about our stupid families, shall we? What else are you doing over there?”
“Nothing mostly, I guess.” I tried to visualize myself doing things in the one day I’d been home. All I could see was myself sitting on the couch. Boring. “Watching TV. Eating my parents’ food. You know.”
“Right. Okay. Well. That’s pretty fucking boring surrounded by , c, Allison.”
I searched my brain for something interesting to say that would keep Shar on the line.
“I’m supposed to make a Christmas list.”
“Oh yeah? What are you going to ask for?”
“I dunno. Books I guess. Maybe a gift certificate?”
“Jesus, Allison. What are you, some high school nerd? Forget it.” Shar suddenly sounded remotely chipper. “I’ll email you your list tonight.”
“What am I getting?”
“Well I don’t know, Sonny, I guess you’re just going to have to wait and see.”
The list arrived the next day, attached to an empty email. I handed it over to my mom without even really looking at it.
Most of the stuff ended up being things that looked to me like Shar things. Fancy skinny-leg jeans, a black sweater with a big open neck, a scarf that reminded me of one of Shar’s I still had stored in my pocket. There was perfume and some fancy kit for trimming your eyebrows and a book about this artist guy who staged car crashes.
My mom was kind of happy about it Christmas morning, watching me open all these cool gifts that to her suggested, I don’t know, the possibility that I wouldn’t be dressing like a slob anymore. “Well you look lovely!” she cooed. “I didn’t even know you liked these kinds of jeans. Does this mean I can throw out those ugly old sweatshirts too?”
“NO.”
The pants were a little tight, but they at least made me look like I had some sort of shape. I looked older. Standing in front of my mom’s full-length mirror, I pictured me standing next to Shar, watching people go by. The two of us in our black outfits, me watching people from under my newly groomed eyebrows.
Two days later, when my mom asked about going on a shopping trip to buy more nice clothes, I let it slip about Shar and the list. This, for some reason, totally pissed my mom off. It turned on pisse
d-off like a switch or something. She was cooking and she kind of slammed the spoon she was using down on the counter.
“What do you mean, ‘Shar wrote the list’?”
“What I said. Like, WROTE it.”
“Shar. This is your new friend, Shar. Shar wrote your Christmas present list.”
“YES. So what?”
“So what? Allison! So what that someone else wrote out the list of things you’d be getting for Christmas?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Allison.” Towelling off her hands, my mom took a long look at me. “It’s strange. Aren’t you your own person?”
“What? Of COURSE I am! FUCK!”
“Don’t say ‘FUCK’ to me, young lady.”
“Okay. Geez. I’m so sorry I let a friend pick out MY presents.”
My mom sighed.
I stormed off.
Although I guess I wasn’t planning on talking to Shar a lot while I was home, and walked out the doorDB0 it was weird that I heard from her as little as I did. After the first phone call, she mostly only texted and not every day. She sounded busy, like she was being absorbed into another really amazing life, which was probably more interesting, I thought, than hanging out with me in her dorm room all day.
I thought of calling when I found out my marks. Mostly because it seemed like kind of amazing news; by some miracle, I’d passed everything but East Asian History, which was a year-long course. I did well in Social Problems (B–) and okay in Cultural Studies (C–), which was, I’m sure, mostly because of Carly’s notes. I got a D– in Linguistics, which was not so surprising.
When I texted Shar to tell her I passed (Cheers for Not Failing First Semester!!!!) I got this:
Wow aren’t you special
The same day, Carly emailed to see how I’d done in Cultural Studies, attaching a photo of her skiing with her family at Whistler. Her entire family was the same size and shape. It was kind of hilarious.
I sent her a message saying that I’d passed and that her family looked like a set of Barbie dolls. She sent me back another picture of them looking even more blond, all standing in a row in front of a chalet in matching blue and yellow ski scarves and mittens.
We’re the Swedish Ski team!!!! Too Funny!
The day before I went back to school my parents finally dragged me to Dr. Zygiel, who kind of poked at the skin on my neck for a half hour.
“Well,” he said, tapping on my burn with a gloved finger, “it looks like someone needs to be a little more careful.”
Shar’s scratch was infected, requiring a new round of antibiotic cream.
“Here’s the rule, kiddo: if it hurts, don’t ignore it. Pain is a message.”
“Right.”
“Can I get you anything else while you’re here? How is your anxiety these days? Still having attacks?”
“Uh. No.”
The only other thing I can say about Christmas break, which as you can tell was oh so interesting and illuminating, is that the second-to-weirdest part involved the conversation I had on the train ride back to school with the top hat guy, Jonathon. Who wasn’t wearing his top hat, incidentally.
Which is maybe why, at first, I didn’t realize who he was. I just noticed a guy reading this book from our Social Problems class, Discipline and Punish. It’s not a dirty book, in case you were wondering. From what I’d managed to read first term, it was kind of interesting but kind of hard to understand.
Five minutes after the train left the station, Jonathon dropped his book and burst into a big smile. “Well, greetings! Allison, correct?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Seems a bit serendipitous we keep running into each other like this.”
“I guess.”
Or we just live in the same city, I grumbled mentally. particular, c
“Well,” Jonathon chuckled, cracking the spine of his book a little, “if you akin yourself to those sorts of notions of the order of the universe. Either that or we live in the same town and just happen to go to the same school.”
“Sure.”
It was funny to see someone so seemingly overjoyed to bump into you. It made me wonder just how unpopular Jonathon was.
I mean, top hat, bad skin, talks like a weirdo, reads books even after the class is done.
Odds were, not that popular.
When he noticed me eyeing his book, he held open a page and pointed at a Post-it. “My JIs.”
“What?”
“JI. Jonathon’s Insights. My moments of revelation, as it were. Points of interest for the scholar and generally curious folk.”
“Oh.”
He talked my ear off for almost an hour, mostly about Social Problems, which, apparently, he LOVED. “A fascinating lecture series, I thought. Not your typical 101 drivel with its survey and overarching considerations of the human experience. Some real ‘aha’ moments from the great Professor Jawari. The old gal has a wicked sense of humour. Did you know she studied serial killers in Canada for a spell?”
A spell?
“Fascinating.”
Looking at Jonathon’s skin up close, it was hard not to stare. Like, you think I’m exaggerating when I say how bad it was. I’m not. His face looked like the bottom of a deep fryer. Plus he had this crazy unibrow that looked like a face hedge. As a side note, sitting this close to him I noticed that his breath smelled like hot cinnamon gum with an undertone of sour cream and onion.
My dazed stare was interrupted by the sudden thought that it was entirely possible people who talked to ME were looking at the gross skin on MY neck and thinking something like the same fricking thing.
Across the aisle I could see a couple watching us. It occurred to me, I guess, that from a close distance we were this weird-looking couple, with collectively horrible skin.
“Uh, Jonathon. I think I’m going to put my headphones on. If that’s cool.”
“Oh of course! I will make sure as not to disturb your slumber. I’m just going to be here reading. Don’t you mind me.”
“Great.”
For the rest of the ride, every time I looked up to check on Jonathon he was looking down at me. Eventually I just squeezed my eyes shut and pretended I was in some sort of non-anaesthetized surgery.
At the station, Jonathon followed me out of the train and then asked if we could share a cab. I lied and said I was walking.
“Okay, well. I’ll see you in class I presume? That is, depending on what you have planned for yourself for this semester.” Jonathon’s bag was one of those old-man suitcases: all brown vinyl with a big buckle holding everything together. He’d tied a string to it and kept twisting it around his wrist. Twisting and untwisting. Nervously.
“Uh. Yep. Okay. Bye.” particular, c
“Adieu.”
I don’t know why I felt I couldn’t get away from him fast enough, but I couldn’t. I practically bolted to the street to catch a cab, the wheels of my suitcase clicking furiously.
When I got back to dorm Shar was waiting, leaned up against my door with her headphones on; I caught sight of her shape before I saw her face. Then of course I saw her face and totally spazzed out.
“WHAT HAPPENED?”
Shar smiled, a flat, lips-together smile, and the massive split that dissected her bottom lip in two gaped purple. Like a blueberry. A blueberry on a vanilla sundae.
“Dump your bags, Allison. We’re going out.”
We ended up at Funxion, an aging punk rockers’ bar covered in rusted spikes and peeling red paint. Inside it was lukewarm: lukewarm music murmuring through a set of fuzzy speakers hanging from the ceiling, lukewarm beer smell wafting through the air. The tables were all covered in red plastic tarps that stuck to my arms like fly tape. Mostly the place was full of really old-looking punks, sitting alone in their black T-shirts with their beers. We took a seat by the window. Shar cupped her hands around the glass candle on the table and pulled the light under her chin, illuminating the cut on her lip and making her skin glow yellow.
The bartender squinted at my ID, then tossed it back on the table.
“What can I get you … Jennifer?”
“Two—”
“Rum and Cokes,” Shar interrupted.
When someone doesn’t want to talk to you they look up or they look down, at the floor, at the ceiling, at the placemat, at the sky. Sometimes they look at a non-existent person standing behind and to the left of you. Shar looked at the flickering light of the candle cupped in her hands. At the sputtering speakers.
I looked at Shar. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, I told her about Jonathon and the ride up on the train.
Shar nodded. “Oh yeah. I know Jonathon.”
“You know Jonathon?” Disbelief burped out of me like the casing of a sunflower seed.
“Allison. Hello? We’re in the same class.”
“Right. Just. You talked to him?”
“Of course. Once or twice. His face is totally disgusting.”
I tried to picture a moment where I’d seen Shar talking to anyone.
“Whatever, Allison,” she sneered. “It’s not like we’re attached at the hip and you’re with me every minute. I think I talked to him once at the beginning of term.”
Shar used a straw to sip her rum and Coke, served in a sticky beer stein, careful to avoid the centre of her lip.
I got this sudden vibe like I was the last person she wanted to talk to.
This was not how I’d pictured my first hangout with Shar after Christmas. Although, I guess the obvious question would be, What did I expect Shar to be like? That she’d be all bubbly? Or notice that I was wearing the outfit she’d pretty much ordered for me for Christmas? things I needed to be doingll ccky
In the interest of both changing what was feeling like a weird subject and addressing a subject I was genuinely curious about, I pointed at my lip and raised my eyebrows.
Shar continued to sip.
“So. So what happened?” I asked.
“What always happens,” she shrugged, “when I get together with my stupid ex who I should learn to just avoid because he’s a plague.”
“He HIT you?”
Shar paused and sipped. Then, finally, she looked up at the ceiling, sighed, and said, “I’m not nice to him, Allison. Whatever. We’re not nice to each other. We’ve been through too much shit and now just, like, being in the same room with him is bad news.”
(You) Set Me on Fire Page 9