Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

‘Hal. You have to see this. Come on, Heez.’ Toad reached for Heezer, and she jumped backwards, pulling her backpack over her shoulders.

  ‘I’m outta here!’ she announced, grinning wildly, taking another step back, and Toad lunged at her, grabbing her arms, twisting them behind her back.

  ‘You savage!’ Heezer writhed, crimson-faced, giggling manically. ‘You heinous fuck!’

  ‘Get the zipper, Hal!’ Toad bit her bottom lip as she danced, mirroring Heezer’s steps. Hal reached casually for the zipper and yanked. Heezer went still, chin dropping to her chest in defeat. There, across her chest, blazed the unmistakable orange lettering.

  ‘What does it say?’ Pelly said, squinting. ‘Hal’s in the way.’

  ‘It says Hooters,’ I told her.

  Boz gasped and then began to laugh, a long, slow chuckle.

  ‘But, you don’t really – ’Toad stuttered, grinning.

  ‘Toad, who cares?’ Heezer jutted her chin.

  ‘Come. On.’ Hal said, glaring.

  ‘Listen, I’ve got big guns – may as well use ’em. And, anyways, it’s just a job. Chill out.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Hal faced Heezer, arms stiff at her sides, and they stared at each other, a showdown.

  ‘Big guns? Have they seen your other guns?’ Toad asked.

  ‘You guys, I gotta run. It’s Wing Night.’ Heezer backed toward the door.

  ‘Looks like Breast Night to me,’ Tillsy called from the deserted South.

  Pelly snorted at me. ‘Breast Night.’

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Hal said.

  ‘Already done.’ Heezer, at the door, quickly slipped off her sweatshirt. Back to the crowd, head bowed, she flexed. ‘You mean these guns, Toad?’ she said and slapped a bicep. Muscle bulged above the neck of the tank top, shoulders popping. Delightfully tacky yet unrefined in orange letters on her back. Thrilled laughter. She swaggered out of the room.

  ‘That’s too classic,’ Boz said.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s doing this.’ Hal shook her head.

  ‘You can’t?’ Boz said. ‘It’s so Heezer.’

  ‘It’s sick and wrong.’

  ‘Wings anyone?’ Toad chirped.

  Heezer kicked open the swinging door of the kitchen, frowning at the yellow baskets of wings stacked up one arm. She steadied them with her other hand, the Hooters tank top on display now, dipping low in front to reveal cleavage sculpted by the pink pushup bra, her hair still in the messy, damp nest at the nape of her neck. A pair of orange spandex shorts – not shorts so much as underwear – completed the uniform. She wore flesh-coloured tights underneath, and they had a strangely luminescent sheen, like the tights old women wear for circulation, so it looked as though her legs were plastic. Hard plastic juts of muscle giving her away as a jock.

  ‘Hoots! Hoots! Hoots!’ Toad chanted and hit the table with a fist. Others joined. The baskets trembled as Heezer looked up. A look of panic flickered on her face.

  ‘You didn’t.’ She fought a smile, baskets swaying. ‘Oh my God.’ She shrugged the wings off her arm onto the neighbouring table, where two men gulped beer from pint glasses that were dripping water onto their ties.

  ‘Cheers to our good friend Hoots. May she find continued success in her new career,’ Toad offered solemnly, lifting her glass of water.

  ‘Cheers! To Hoots!’

  Heezer shook her head, her back to us, the line on the back of the tank top, Delightfully tacky yet unrefined, shouting its bald irony in orange capitals like a neon sign. All of them wore this sentence, the whole team of Hooters servers, and it seemed to suggest they were acting out an elaborate satire, all in on a joke parodying other women who might look like that, act that way, but who were ignorant of the comic masterpiece in cleavage and flesh they were creating, the fetish incarnate. I looked around at the other servers and saw that this had backfired. They were only performing a parody of themselves, unaware. Men were staring, people were laughing all over the place. From my seat, I couldn’t separate the looks from the laughter. Heezer pushed the baskets across the table toward the men.

  ‘Hey, Hoots, strong work. Strong wing delivery there. Keep it up, buddy, we’re all watching with bated breath,’ Toad called. Heezer shook her head and held a middle finger against her back.

  ‘Better not dump those, babe,’ one of the suit guys said. ‘I been dreamin’ about them all day.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Hal muttered. ‘Fulfilling life.’ She crossed her arms and leaned back, balancing the chair on its rear two legs.

  My mouth watered as the sharp, vinegar-edged smell of the wings clouded over our table. I opened a menu. ‘What are you going to have?’ I asked Pelly.

  ‘Wings, I guess,’ Pelly said. She shrugged. ‘Beer, probably.’

  ‘You like Cajun?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yeah.’ Shrugged again.

  ‘You wanna share?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  A cheer swelled from the room’s bass hum, tinny oldies playing in the background. With a motion that resembled the back crawl, a football player danced in the end zone on a TV screen above. Eyes raised, a group of men at a table across the aisle sucked on their fingertips and smiled, baskets climbing high around them.

  Heezer came over and leaned across the table, her elbows on one of Toad’s shoulders, one of Hal’s.

  ‘Three or more of them, they’re here for the guys,’ Heezer said in a low voice, gesturing with her head toward the two men at the next table. ‘Two of them, they’re here for the girls.’

  ‘Oh boy! Now, where did I put my dance card.’ Toad pretended to fumble in the pockets of her jeans.

  ‘But, Toady, you’re not really a girl. Let’s be honest. Mama’s talkin’ real girls.’ Heezer shimmied her breasts quickly in Toad’s face and then spun off again to visit her tables.

  ‘I’m gonna pop that bra and then what’ll she do?’ Toad said, an exaggerated shrug. ‘She’ll be fired – they’re like raisins rattling around inside helium balloons. It’s all the bra. An optical illusion.’

  ‘Heinous,’ Hal said.

  Two servers crossed paths next to our table, and the brunette server slapped the blond’s butt. The blond shrieked – a high-pitched squeal like a young girl and as the brunette twisted around to smile over her shoulder, her tank top rode up and a meaty rhinestone in her bellybutton caught the light, a quick flash across her stomach, which was a contrived shade of orange-brown. It happened right behind Hal’s shoulder and, in that split-second of sparkle across the server’s thin, sharp body, colour all over her – orange shorts, brown skin, glossed-pink lips, sunset highlights in her hair – I saw the sudden paleness of Hal’s skin, the monotone grey of the team sweatshirt, the disorder of her coarse hair, the bareness of her face. It was as close as I’d come to feeling sorry for her. But everyone at the table wore team clothing – jackets, hoodies, sweatpants, T-shirts. We were all overdressed, we were all bare.

  I watched Hal. Her eyes flitted darkly around the room.

  ‘Totsis,’ she muttered.

  ‘Speak up, son.’ Toad leaned toward her, cupping a hand behind her ear.

  ‘Totsi hell,’ Hal said, louder.

  ‘Correct,’ Toad said. She shifted into a mangled Australian accent, whispering loudly. ‘We have the thrilling opportunity here tonight, mates, of observing a pack of rare, purebred totsis in their natural habitat!’

  Hal laughed. Pelly twisted around in her seat, looking around the room as though for the first time.

  ‘What’s a totsi?’ I asked her. Pelly turned and stared blankly at me for a moment, chewing on her lip, braces a-gleam.

  ‘Hey, Toad. Toad. Corinne!’ she barked across the table. Toad, now in a downstream conversation with Tillsy, looked over, irritated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Iz wants to know what a totsi is,’ Pelly said.

  ‘Just look around,’ Toad said with distaste.

  ‘The fingerpainters,’ Tillsy piped up.

  Pelly leaned toward me and translate
d. ‘That’s the figure skaters. The ones with ice time after us.’

  I nodded. Heezer bounded by with empty beer bottles in both hands and cracked Toad lightly over the head with one before flying through the kitchen door. Toad touched her head and looked after Heezer.

  ‘Rude,’ she said dryly.

  ‘Does that mean Heezer’s one?’ Pelly asked.

  ‘A totsi? Oh fuck, would that ever be a crime. We lose the strongest farter on the team to the dark side. I suppose we have to be objective about this, though,’ Toad sighed.

  ‘Look at her – she’s wearing hot pants. Of course she’s a totsi.’ Hal jutted her chin toward Toad.

  ‘I don’t think that makes her a totsi,’ Tillsy argued. ‘This is work, it isn’t who she is.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Hal said dismissively. ‘Flashing her boobs around like that. You’re right, she’s the anti-totsi.’

  The blond server arrived with pitchers of beer and began to throw glasses around the table. The conversation halted awkwardly as she hovered over our shoulders. When she’d jogged off, ponytail swinging across her back like a metronome, Boz reached over and rubbed Hal’s arm. ‘Okay, babes, enough of the totsi philosophy. They are who they are,’ she said.

  ‘But who they are isn’t right.’ Toad leaned forward. ‘The thing with being a totsi is that it’s so boring, so predictable. I mean, where’s your sense of irony? You know, like if you’re going to wear hot pants and have blond hair, at least throw on a Harvard Debating Club cardigan too, or something.’ She held up a pitcher, then began to pour.

  ‘Oh no, hon, I’m good.’ Boz reached for her glass. ‘I have to study tonight.’

  ‘Boz, we’re at Hooters,’ Toad said. ‘It’s Wing Night at Hooters. We’re here to support our good friend Heezer, who works at Hooters. Exams come and go, but this evening – this opportunity – will never come your way again. It’s Thursday. It’s been a long week. You’re young. Be gentle to yourself. Carpe diem.’ Toad held her glass up to Boz in a toast.

  Pelly turned to me. ‘That’s totsi,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I think I got it.’

  On the ice, we saw numbers. We called each other’s names and shifted and joined into shapes that broke and reformed and broke again. Coming together, falling away, trying again. Away from the ice, though, away from the familiar rooms of Sam Hall, they didn’t have to be together. But they chose each other. At Hooters, in that room sprayed with testosterone and totsis, I watched them grow together into one giant girl, getting to her feet, spreading her arms, filling the room with her huge voice. Spotlight on.

  Toad discovered Newfies. She wandered off to the bathroom and came back trailing a line of guys in baseball caps with goofy, boozedup smiles.

  ‘Newfies,’ she said incredulously. ‘Newfies. I go to the can and look what I find. I fucking love Newfies.’ She elbowed the round, freckle-faced guy next to her. ‘Say something.’

  The guy raised his pitcher of beer to his clan and yelled, ‘Ayyyyyyyyy!’ To which they responded, ‘Ayyyyyyyy!’ and Toad, Tillsy and Pelly joined in. Everyone pushing their glasses toward the mouth of the pitcher like hungry baby birds. Toad grabbing a pitcher from our table and snapping her fingers at Heezer.

  ‘Garçon! Garçon! Sweetheart, honey, darling – could you be so kind as to bring a lady a straw?’

  Heezer flipped her the finger from across the room. Toad shrugged and grasped the pitcher’s middle and hoisted it up over her face, throat moving in slow pulses as though her heart were trapped in there. The Newfies going all bug-eyed and cheering Toad on like they were at a wrestling match. As a finishing move, she dabbed daintily at the corners of her mouth with a napkin, shaking her head modestly at the whoops and applause of the Newfies.

  ‘Where have you been all my life, girls?’ one of the Newfies said with rapture.

  Toad hugged him. ‘The feeling’s mutual.’

  The Newfies scattered to hunt and gather chairs from other tables and Toad sat back down.

  ‘What a find,’ she said, belching.

  ‘Toad, you’re a shit show,’ Hal laughed. ‘You’re bush league.’ She shook her head.

  Toad scooped her keys from the table. ‘Barbie, you boozing?’ she said. ‘Yes? No? No, right?’

  I wanted to say yes, to turn her assumption upside down. I shook my head.

  Toad threw the keys at me in a jangling arc. ‘DD. I’ll owe ya one.’

  I caught them against my chest. ‘Yeah, no problem,’ I said, feigning coolness. I didn’t understand Toad’s logistics – what I would do with the car at the end of the night, if I’d have to drive everyone home, how late this all would go, how much worse it would get. But the keychain held a healthy handful of keys and its weight in my hand leaked a sense of purpose.

  ‘Yeah right,’ Pelly said, snorting. ‘Like you ever drive, Toad.’

  Toad thought about this for a moment and spread her palms as the Newfies began to descend, carrying chairs above their heads and raining them down around the table, still in their crooked smiles. Heezer arrived with three more pitchers.

  ‘I’m a professional, sport,’ Toad said. ‘Somebody’s gotta keep the fans coming back. Everyone has their own unique role on this team. Right, Boz?’

  ‘Toady, I’m going. Seriously this time.’ Boz lifted her purse from the table.

  Toad cleared her throat loudly. ‘Gentlemen, my friend here is attempting to flee the premises in order to study. What are your opinions on this behaviour?’

  The Newfies erupted into loud, incomprehensible expressions of outrage. One of them plunked a pitcher in front of Boz, who shook her head and smiled politely. Heezer appeared with the straw. I put the keys in the pocket of my hoodie. Sat back and watched the show.

  We made it to the Blue Moon on Campus for last call after Heezer got off work. I stood with Hal at the bar and we watched Pelly, Toad and Heezer dance to ‘Baby Got Back’ as though it were an anthem written for them, all of them shouting the words, faces intense: ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie!’

  ‘Our friends are an embarrassment,’ Hal said, but she was smiling. Tilting a beer bottle over her face, eyes gleaming a thicker kind of lacquer.

  ‘Heezer should try out for the fingerpainters,’ I said as Heezer did a pirouette and then bent over and shook her butt in the air.

  Hal snorted and touched me on the shoulder with her beer bottle. I grinned at her and then the lights came on as though we’d been acting in a play.

  ‘Hey, what’d Barbie do with my car?’ Toad slurred on the dark path to the parking lot.

  ‘She’s right behind you, fuck-eyes,’ Hal said.

  Toad pivoted messily. She looked at me and rubbed her eyes like a cartoon character.

  ‘Where ya been, bud?’ she said.

  ‘Man, Toad,’ Pelly said. She hiccupped and hit her chest with her fist.

  ‘I’ve been around,’ I said. ‘I saw all your moves on the dance floor.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Toad put her arm around me, drew a shaky line from her eyes to mine with two fingers. ‘Fucking eagle-eyes here. You should watch my moves, kid, for sure. Fo sho. I gots moves like ya never seen.’

  Then she grabbed my wrist and twirled me around once, wrapped my arm around my body and pushed me backwards against her arm into a low dip. She staggered a bit, her face bumping above mine and I shrieked, my head so close to the ground, hair dusting the cement. But she held me there, her Cheshire cat grin through the darkness, breath like an open beer bottle, and I felt a hit of gratefulness. Pulling me through the darkness into her spotlight, our teammates the audience that held us there.

  She set me on my feet and smacked my butt, then poked a finger in the air and announced, ‘Friends. I gotta whiz.’

  ‘Seconded,’ Hal said and we all moved toward the Agriculture Building where Toad whipped down her pants and crouched, slamming her back against the wall. Hal and Pelly followed suit, Heezer standing off casually to the side. My decision was made while Hal bent her k
nees. I had to go, but I hadn’t realized until then, until I saw them crouch, but it was suddenly obvious and urgent, and we were all held together by the darkness, and so I squatted too. I pulled down my pants and slouched against the wall at the end of the line beside Pelly, the dry scrape of brick on my lower back, and joined their collective privacy. I’d never.

  ‘I have stage fright,’ Pelly announced loudly.

  ‘Visualize, Pelter. A stream of flowing beer.’ Toad pointed accusingly at Heezer. ‘Hey! Where’d that beer go, Heez? From before. I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten, you stale scammer.’

  ‘Just hurry up, Toader,’ Heezer said beside the bush.

  ‘One, two.’

  ‘Poutine,’ Hal mumbled. ‘Whopper and poutine. Barbie. Make it happen.’

  I could make poutine happen, I could make anything happen in the double invincibility of darkness and the group, our line united by the trickling stream at our feet. The campus shifted then, all of its paths pouring toward us, the drunken braying of a group of guys across the street a laugh track played for us, the flat peak of Sam Hall rising darkly just beyond the Agriculture Building. Ours. The city getting to its knees, then, peering down, looking at me, saying, There you are, finally. You’ve arrived.

  The flashlight beam, when it shot at us, pinned me to that wall, to the coattails of that giant girl with her booming voice. The light sealing us together, pants around our ankles.

  ‘Uh, what are you doing?’ A man’s voice said, uncertain. I scrambled with my pants, still crouching, but trying to yank them up over the hills of my knees. Toad’s only movement was the slow rising of her hand to shield her eyes.

  ‘What’s it look like, champ?’ she said. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Uh, I’m campus security, actually.’ We could just see his silhouette around the yellow star of the flashlight, the confused tilt of his head.

  Heezer shrieked with delight. ‘The name is Corinne – that’s C-O – ’

  ‘Pull up your pants, please.’ The flashlight beam swung to the right, drawing a line of light through the trees before settling in a small pool in the grass at the guy’s feet, illuminating the cuffs of his safari uniform pants.