“You,” Mr. Kiros said. “Empty your pockets.”
“Hey, he’s okay,” I said.
But Mr. Kiros didn’t let go. He thrust a hand into one of Vin’s jacket pockets and pulled out a package of the candy cigarettes that Vin had bought.
Vin swore at Mr. Kiros and pushed him away. Mr. Kiros must not have been expecting that because he staggered backward, thrusting out a hand to steady himself. He grabbed the edge of a bulk bin and toppled it. Sour keys spilled out all over the floor. Vin muttered something, then shoved open the door. The three smaller boys set down their bags and edged toward it too. As soon as they were close enough, they darted through it. Mr. Kiros charged the door to try to catch them. He’d decided that they were all thieves. But he lost his footing on all the sour keys on the floor and buckled to his knees. When he stood up again, slapping at his pants to get the dust and sugar off, he turned on me.
“That boy,” he said, “you know him?”
“Yeah,” I said. Jeez, they should have some kind of rule: if you’re going to run a candy store, you should at least have to pretend that you like kids. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“What’s his name?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but something about the question bothered me. So instead I said, “Why?”
“He stole from me.”
“No he didn’t.”
“I told him, empty your pockets, and what does he do? Talks to me with no respect—did you hear what he said to me? Then he runs away.” He held up the package of candy cigarettes he had taken from Vin. “What’s his name?”
“He didn’t steal anything,” I said. “He paid for those.”
Mr. Kiros’s eyes narrowed. “What’s his name?” he said again, only this time his voice was low, like a growl, like if I didn’t tell him, he was going to bite me or something.
“No way,” I said. “He didn’t steal anything. He paid for that candy.”
Mr. Kiros went stiff all over. His chin jutted out as he glowered at me. His face got all red. It didn’t even look like he was breathing. He reminded me of a little kid holding his breath until he got his way. He’s waiting, I realized. Waiting for me to give up my friend for something he didn’t even do. Well, forget it. I stood behind the counter where the cash register was, looking right back at him. Vin hadn’t done anything wrong. Neither had I.
Mr. Kiros must have calmed down a little because he started breathing again, big, even breaths. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as I thought. It looked as if he might be willing to listen to what I was saying.
“You’re fired,” he said.
“What?”
“Empty your pockets,” Mr. Kiros said.
“Now you think I’m stealing from you?” I couldn’t believe it. I had been working for Mr. Kiros for nearly a month. I always showed up on time. I always stayed later than I was supposed to. And now he was accusing me of being a thief?
“You kids,” Mr. Kiros said. “You all think you’re smarter than everyone else. You think I don’t check things? You think I don’t know that there’s a discrepancy between inventory and the cash you take in? How many of your friends come in here?”
He was accusing me of stealing from him—or at least of helping my friends to steal.
“It’s not me,” I said. “What about that kid of yours? He comes in every day and takes a couple of dollars, worth of stuff. And what about your wife? She works here more hours than I do. Maybe she—”
Mr. Kiros could move fast for a big man. One second he was standing in front of a row of bins. The next second he was in my face, grabbing me by the arm, dragging me out from behind the counter, his hands plunging into the pockets of my jacket, then grabbing at my backpack and unzipping it and dumping everything out, spilling out my binder and pens and some homework notes. He pawed through everything while I stood there, too stunned to do anything except watch. When he didn’t find anything, he shoved all of my stuff back in the backpack and thrust it at me. He didn’t say he was sorry for accusing me of something I hadn’t done—not that I would have accepted an apology.
I zipped up my backpack and shouldered it. My legs were shaking as I made my way to the door. I passed a display of lollipops. I imagined sweeping the whole bunch of them to the floor. My arm twitched at the thought. But I didn’t do it. No way was I going to give Mr. Kiros the satisfaction of having a genuine grievance against me. I left the store without saying a word, without looking back.
I’d been planning to go to Pape Library when I finished work. It was the closest. But I was so angry about what had just happened that instead of turning south when I got to Pape, I just kept walking, crossing Carlaw and Logan, passing Chester, heading for the viaduct. I was waiting for the light at Broadview when I saw her go by. Jen. She was sitting in the front seat of her father’s BMW. Her dad was driving.
Jen.
Used to be her green eyes would sparkle at me and I would think of emeralds. Imagine that—jeez, me, a guy, and I’d look into those eyes and all of a sudden I’d be thinking of lame stuff like emeralds.
Used to be she would wrap her arms around me and lay her head against my shoulder and I’d inhale the flower-and-freshness smell of her long blond hair and feel it tickle my arms.
Used to be I’d see her down a hallway at school or across the street in the neighborhood and she’d see me and, like someone had thrown a switch, a smile would light up her face.
Used to be.
She didn’t even turn her head now. I saw her framed in profile in the Beemer’s front passenger-side window. Then she was gone.
The light changed. I couldn’t move. Jen still had that effect on me. I’d see her and it would hit me again, hard, like a hook to the belly—she wasn’t mine anymore. She had been and then, I wasn’t even sure how I’d managed it, I had lost her. I knew she was gone. I knew there was no hope of getting her back. I knew it. But knowing didn’t stop the ache I felt every time I saw her. It didn’t keep her face from appearing in my room at night when I’d just got into bed—the worst time of the day, the time when I realized I wasn’t in my own house anymore, Billy wasn’t downstairs anymore, nothing was the same anymore. That’s when I’d see her. And I’d think, If only … Then I’d think maybe there was something I could do, some way I could show her that I’d changed.
I’d been so close. I’d had a chance less than a week ago. Had it and let it slip through my fingers. I’d come out of an arcade on Yonge Street, blinking in the afternoon sun, and I’d seen a vision. At least, I’d been pretty sure at the time that it was a vision. It happened sometimes. Happened to everyone.
Once when I was twelve, I was down on Queen Street East in the Beach with Billy. Billy went into a store to get a coffee. It was a Sunday in the summer, so Queen Street was crowded with tourists and shoppers from all over. They were coming both ways on the sidewalk, wave after wave of them, heads bobbing, faces distorted by the heat that was rising in ripples from the black asphalt and the dark sidewalk. And there, right in the middle of a wave, almost knocking me off my feet with her smile, was my mother. Somewhere deep in my brain I knew it wasn’t possible, she couldn’t really be there. But I saw her. She was smiling at me and coming right at me. I started toward her. One of my feet actually left the sidewalk—I’d been going to rush into her arms. Then the world shifted or came into focus or the bubble popped or I woke up from my dream—whatever it was, disappointment and bitterness swelled through me, and I knew it wasn’t her at all. I blinked and peered at the woman coming toward me and wondered why I had ever thought it was Mom. The woman, who was getting closer and closer and then who passed me, oblivious to me, didn’t look anything like my mother.
I thought I’d seen Billy once too. I’d been walking home from school and had taken a detour up the street where Billy and I used to live. I was just coming up to the corner when I spotted him, a slight guy in jeans and a T-shirt, shaggy blond hair hanging in his eyes. My heart had started to hammer in my chest. Billy. It was Billy!<
br />
Except it wasn’t.
It was just some guy I’d never seen before. A guy with brown eyes instead of blue eyes, with a narrow face instead of Billy’s rectangular face, with a hookish nose instead of Billy’s bent and crushed nose.
So when I came out of the arcade on Yonge Street almost a week ago and blinked in the sun and thought I saw Jen, looking down the street, not noticing me, I thought I was seeing things again.
Then she turned—pirouetted—and in that movement, fluid from all those years of ballet lessons she had taken, I knew I wasn’t seeing things. It was really her. She pirouetted, pushed off, and then all I saw was her long blond hair swaying in sync with her hips.
I could have called her name: “Hey, Jen!”
Before, if I’d done that she would have flashed me a smile, would even have thrown herself into my arms if her mood was right and I hadn’t done anything stupid lately. But now? Now I wasn’t sure how she’d react. What if she was on her way to meet some of her rich drive-their-own-cars private school friends?
But what if she wasn’t? What if she was just heading to HMV or the Eaton Centre or any one of a hundred stores? What if she was on her way to the subway? What if she was about to go home? If she was, and if I let her get away one more time, I’d never have a chance to talk to her. Her mother was like a jailer or a gatekeeper—or a Rottweiler or a pit bull. To get at her, you had to go through Mrs. Hayes. Jen had a cell phone, but she must have changed the number because when I tried it, I always got a message that said No Service. I’d screwed up enough courage to ask Jen’s friend, Voula, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. Her answer, delivered in that snotty tone some girls have nailed down: “If she’d wanted you to have the number, she would have given it to you.”
But now there she was, Jen, for the first time in over a month. All alone, no girlfriends around. No boyfriends, either.
I went after her.
Down Yonge Street. Across Dundas. Into the Eaton Centre. It was easier to track her in there. The place was crowded with shoppers, and I could always turn away and pretend to be studying a jacket in the window of Gap or Old Navy if she started to turn.
She walked straight through the north mall, down the main mall, through the food court, out the other end, and down the short escalator into the subway station. Then she surprised me. She stopped, boom, like she’d run into a wall. She looked right, then left. Then she ducked into a pay phone. Why a pay phone when she had her own cell phone?
There were two phones set almost back-to-back into slots in the wall. Jen was in one of them, her back to the opening. I ducked into the other. I lifted the receiver and pretended to be using it when, really, I was eavesdropping.
I missed the beginning of her phone call and had to strain to catch what she was saying.
Midnight. I definitely heard her say midnight. She sounded surprised, even a little nervous. Midnight, sure, she could do that. I strained to hear every sweet word she said, to hear her voice that lilted musically even though I could tell she was nervous, maybe even upset, about something. Then, faintly, a thunk, followed by silence.
I froze. I kept the phone pressed to my ear and my back turned to the opening in case she doubled back the way she had come. Seconds slipped by. When I had counted out enough of them to make a minute, I turned. There was no sign of Jen. I dropped the receiver into its cradle and stepped out of the slot. She was gone.
She was always gone.
As I walked across the viaduct now, I had a picture of her in my mind—Jen, framed in profile in the front passenger-side window of her dad’s BMW. Jen staring straight ahead, not smiling.
Jen with something serious on her mind.
Just like me.
CHAPTER FOUR
“What goes on in your head, Mike?” Riel said. He was at the door when I pushed it open and he started in on me right away with his questions: Do you have any idea what time it is? Did you forget that you’re supposed to be grounded? You were supposed to go to work, go to the library, then come right home and do your chores—does that ring a bell, Mike? And now this: “What goes on in your head, Mike?”
The same stuff as goes on in anyone else’s head—jeez, what did he think? Why did adults even bother asking questions like that? Probably because they always came off looking superior. Because questions like that were impossible to answer. Questions like that left kids with nothing to do but shrug and look stupid.
“Did you think you could just breeze in here any old time and there’d be no consequences?” Riel said. He was angry. I could see that by the pinched look around his eyes and by how tight his lips were, even when he was shooting off question after question. But he wasn’t yelling. With Riel, the angrier he got, the quieter he talked.
“I got fired,” I said.
His eyes widened a little. He hadn’t been expecting that, and it was always nice to see Riel—a smart guy who knew he was a smart guy—get caught off guard and have to rethink things a little. Which was part of the reason I said it. I also said it because maybe Riel would think getting fired was the reason I’d been gone so long and because maybe if he calmed down enough to hear the whole story, he’d cut me a little slack. I said it, too, because I still couldn’t believe it. And I said it so I’d have something else to think about besides that picture of Jen, framed in the window of her dad’s Beemer. Something besides that whole thing with Jen.
“Fired?” Riel said. His lips weren’t so tight anymore either. “What happened?”
What happened? Not, What did you do? Or, How did you manage to screw up again? Just when you thought you had him figured out—Mr. Rigid, Mr. Model Foster Parent, Mr. Strict Disciplinarian—Riel could still hand you a surprise.
I told him the whole story. He flinched when I mentioned Vin’s name. Riel didn’t have the highest opinion of Vin, mainly because the biggest trouble I ever got in, I’d got in because of Vin. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t interrupt while I explained that Vin hadn’t done anything, that, as far as I could tell, none of the kids had done anything until after Mr. Kiros started in on them.
“So, basically,” Riel said when I finished, “he fired you because he was mad at some other kids, because Vin is your friend, and because he thought you were stealing from him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Basically.”
Riel nodded. He chewed over the information some more. “Well,” he said, “it sounds to me as if he was totally unjustified in what he did. If you want to, you can try to fight him on it. Try to get your job back.”
Having a job was important to Riel. So was standing up for yourself. I knew that. But Mr. Kiros was pretty hard to take at the best of times. Forcing him to give me back my job wasn’t going to improve the situation.
“Maybe I should just get another job,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. My resume is still on the computer. I can hand it out tomorrow after school.” I hesitated. “I guess I won’t be able to use Mr. Kiros’s name, though.” I’d been hoping for a good reference from the candy store job—if there was one thing I needed, it was a good reference. But it didn’t look like that was going to happen.
“Guess not,” Riel said. “Sorry it turned out that way, Mike.” He glanced at his watch. “You still have time to clean your bathroom before supper,” he said. “You can do the kitchen floor tomorrow.”
Right, I thought. Along with all the other stuff.
“Looks like the cops caught a break,” Riel said Monday morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table, freshly showered, his hair still damp, drinking coffee. He smiled up at me like he hadn’t turned me into Cinderella for the weekend—scrub the floor, clean out the garage, bag the garbage—like maybe we were even best friends.
“What do you mean?” I said. I was at the fridge, trying to decide between no-sugar-added orange juice and organic milk.
“The Robbie Ducharme case,” Riel said.
I finally chose the orange juice. I reached
for a glass from the cupboard.
“You mean, they know who did it?”
Riel shook his head. “Doesn’t say. But someone—a girl, apparently—went by the park that night. She saw kids coming out of the park.”
Somehow I lost my grip on the juice jug. It hit the floor and bounced up again, slopping orange juice everywhere. Riel looked at it, then at me, and started to get up.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get it.” After all, it wasn’t like I didn’t know where the mop was. Besides, I needed the distraction. While I mopped, I said, “Kids? You mean this girl doesn’t know them?”
“Paper doesn’t say. It just says she saw kids.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a break,” I said.
“It’s progress. It’s been nearly a week, and all that time, no one saw anything. Now we have someone who definitely saw kids.”
We? Riel had quit being a cop a few years ago, but he still got all wound up when there were articles in the paper about cops or about major cases. Sometimes, if you ask me, it seemed that maybe Riel regretted his decision. But if he did, he sure wasn’t sharing that information with me.
“You should have something to eat,” Riel said. “Have some cereal.”
By cereal, Riel didn’t mean Cocoa Puffs or Count Chocula. He meant health-food-store granola. Served with yogurt. Nonfat yogurt.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not hungry.” Which was true, for a whole lot of reasons.
I found Sal at my locker at lunchtime, spinning the dial of my combination lock, yanking on the lock, looking confused when the lock didn’t give.
“Hey,” I said. “I reformed, remember?”
In the good old days, the pre-Riel days, half the school had my locker combination. I didn’t care. Heck, I gave it out. If people went in my locker, books went missing. Notes went missing. Assignments went missing. People took stuff. Took my stuff. Which made me a victim, right? And you never, ever blame the victim, right? In the pre-Riel days, I didn’t care much about school. Billy didn’t care either. Sure, he pushed me to show up. But that was because “If you don’t show, I get blamed, Mikey. That makes me look like I can’t take care of you. And the minute they think that, I’m history. They’ll take you away. You don’t want to end up in foster care, do you, Mikey?”
Truth and Lies Page 5