Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  The guy in it was saving thousands of people. Thousands. Even though we didn’t get too far into it before the bell rang, it didn’t look like he was going to get much out of saving them either. He was probably going to end up dead.

  If I wanted to do something that mattered, then I was definitely living in the wrong place and the wrong time. Nobody cared here. Nobody cared now. The last people to really care about anything important were the draft dodgers, who moved here from America so they didn’t get sent to die, in Vietnam I think, and that was more than forty years ago. They didn’t exactly do anything heroic either. They just came here to hide out and raise hippie babies out in the woods.

  Still, watching that movie made me kind of wish that there was something I cared about; that I could make a difference with – even if it was fighting for a place for bears to live.

  As I left the class, I thought about how if I died tomorrow, it wouldn’t make one difference to the world. You know the thought that comes next, don’t you? The cliché I wish it were me with cancer, and not Emma. I didn’t exactly wish that. Let’s be honest, who really means it when they say that? But I kind of thought the universe would be just that little bit fairer if it were the case.

  The universe wasn’t fair though. It was just a giant hat with names thrown into it – for the bad stuff and the good. That boy Farley was deluded if he thought otherwise.

  I made it through three classes before bailing. I actually might have made it a whole day, because I really didn’t want to see Emma or my mother; Mom for the obvious reason that she couldn’t even remember my birthday and Emma for more couldn’t-put-my-finger-on-it reasons. Sure, I’d been horrible to her the other day, but generally Emma didn’t hold a grudge. It was more a feeling that that I had, and didn’t like. Her chemo being stopped. Mom coming home for the night and then going back to the hospital so early. It all made me a bit jumpy. Something was up and I didn’t want to know about it.

  In the end I wanted to see Tracey less though. I hated disappointing her, but I also just couldn’t face hanging out with her either. I put it down to the jumpiness thing. It made sense, right? So I sent her a text as soon as I was out of third class, saying that I had to go to the hospital. I didn’t expand on it. I didn’t need to; she sent me back a long-winded text saying that she understood and hoped I was okay and that she was there for me whenever I needed her. She always did that to me. It was bad enough that I lied to her and avoided her – and I didn’t even know why – without her totally forgiving me and still being there for me without fail.

  The weather wasn’t so bad, so I thought I’d walk down to the park to have a nose around, see if anything had been left behind by the protesters. It was something to do and now that I was thinking about it, I wasn’t exactly sure what the tent city had all been about. Maybe there would be some left over flyers or something.

  I was four blocks away from the park when the universe threw me a massive curveball. Four blocks from the park was the bus stop, where the bus departed from Kendal to Red River. And the bus was parked there.

  That obviously isn’t the curveball. I knew the bus stopped there. I caught the bus to Red River there probably three or four days a week. The curveball was that Farley, yes THAT Farley, was walking toward the bus. It isn’t like I could have mistaken him for anyone else. Impossible.

  What should have happened was that I kept walking. This wasn’t the bus I ever took. I always waited for at least the next one. I wasn’t even sure whether it was the direct bus, or the ‘milk run’ as it was called – don’t ask me why, maybe milk used to be delivered by bus, I just know that the milk run goes everywhere, zig zagging through every little side village. It takes forever to get to Red River on it.

  And I had a plan for the day. A plan that did not involve getting on the 12.20 bus. In any case, no matter how many classes I went to or didn’t go to in a day, I NEVER took the 12.20 bus to Red River. NEVER. That was a personal rule.

  Guess what I did? It was that kind of day. Like a lamb to the slaughter (like I know what that means) I followed Mr Disco Hair right on to the bus. As if I regularly boarded the 12.20pm bus from Kendal to Red River.

  There was something about him that made me want to see him more – literally just look at him. He definitely stood out, but in this really quiet, fluid way. He walked like he had all of the time in the world, some sort of black case slung over his shoulder. You know how some people seem to ooze ‘look at me!’? This guy didn’t seem like that at all. More like he couldn’t help standing out.

  As soon as I was up the stairs, taking out my student transport card to show the driver, I wanted to turn around and get off. When I faced the rows of passengers, everyone was looking at me. Okay, there were only five people on the bus, but they were all looking at me. They weren’t just looking at me, they were frowning at me. There was probably some sort of rule about taking the 12.20 – like it was a members only run, the same people every day, where they held a secret meeting, because nobody would suspect a meeting on a bus. I was going to ruin it.

  Except that Farley was on the bus too, and he couldn’t be part of the secret club. He was passenger number six, and yesterday he had not been on the 12.20 bus, because he had been talking to me at the café after that time. Plus, he wasn’t staring at me, which was oddly calming considering I had essentially just followed him on to the bus, expecting that he would immediately do just that.

  Maybe it was because he wasn’t looking at me that I just took a big breath and walked past him, past all of the secret club members, to the third row from the back, and sat down, slouching as low as I could. What was the big deal about getting on an earlier bus anyway? Red River was at least a bigger town – I could follow my ten-minute-each-store browsing rule and be sure to waste enough time before I could go to the hospital.

  I was only getting on the bus because it happened to be there just as I was passing. Definitely.

  Only – telling myself all of this didn’t make me forget that Mr Disco-hair was in a seat not so far ahead of me. I was probably just blowing it all out of proportion though – that whole the universe has sent you to me stuff. It wasn’t as if he had even noticed when I got on the bus. He likely didn’t even remember me. He probably had random talks like that with everyone he ran into.

  I pulled out one of my binders and didn’t even pretend to myself that I was going to catch up on any of my assignments. I needed to draw instead. First, the old man just ahead of me across the aisle. He had these little wisps of hair on the top of his head that reminded me of baby bird feathers. They kind of fluttered when he moved his head, which he did a lot because he kept almost falling asleep and then he’d catch himself and snap his head up. But then he must have felt me watching him and he looked back to give me a glare that didn’t match his cute, baby-bird hair at all. I tried to glare back, but I’m not very good at being angry at people I don’t even know, so I waved hello instead and turned my page over in case he looked.

  So then I just doodled, the frost patterns from the bus window the other day duplicating themselves on my page. Thoughts stopped as the intricate swirls and shards of frost covered the page. Jack Frost emerged in the corner, casting the patterns from his fingers, a mass of curly hair to match the frost fronds. Unruly, like my mind.

  ‘Is that supposed to be me?’

  My hand shot across the page, leaving Jack Frost with one massive, single strand of hair, the only one a straightener had touched. I looked up to find Farley’s face peering over the seat at me. If my heart had begun to calm down, and that was doubtful, it was definitely doing double time again.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I struggled to find some sort of words that would put him in his place and make me feel in control again.

  ‘I highly doubt it is of anyone else around here.’ Farley pointed over the seat at my Jack Frost that I had to admit, though I didn’t mean it to, had hair not dissimilar to Farley’s. ‘Mind if I sit beside you?’

  He didn’t wait
for me to answer, sliding into the seat beside me, before I could protest. Would I have protested? It isn’t exactly like I was being very successful pretending to myself that I was trying to avoid him. Though there didn’t seem to be any good reason why I shouldn’t be avoiding him.

  ‘Let me see that?’ He took the binder from my hands, and brought it right up to his face. ‘Before you comment, because I’m reasonably sure I feel a comment forming in your pretty head, yes, I am practically blind without my contact lenses, a new pair of which I am awaiting in the mail, and no, I’m far too vain to even consider wearing my glasses.’

  ‘The comment I was forming, for your information, was that it’s slightly presumptuous to think I want to spend an hour in your company.’ I knew that sounded ridiculous before I opened my mouth. I wanted to take my binder back, with its doodle. I felt weirdly exposed with it in his hands.

  ‘A moment.’ He raised a finger, and brought the book even closer to his face.

  ‘It isn’t you. Don’t you recognise Jack Frost when you see him?’ I tried to salvage some bit of pride and privacy.

  ‘Funny thing about that, I’ve never met the mythical man.’ But he didn’t laugh at me; his expression remained dead serious as he studied my squiggles.

  So I shut up, for once in my life. It was a weird kind of scared I felt while I studied Farley study my doodling. Kind of like there was an electric wire just in reach, and all I had to do was grab it to have a massive jolt of electricity run through my body. I didn’t know what would happen next. I always knew what would happen next – even when I hated what would happen next. Even when what happened next was basically nothing, which was most of the time.

  I just shut up and studied Farley instead. He was odd looking – no doubt about that. Obviously there was that hair. It took up the width of his seat, and sprung onto the back of mine as well. But maybe his hair just seemed so big because it was too wild for his slight, flawless face. And his eyes were so big in his fine face. Every surface was smooth, except for tiny lines from the corner of his eyes. Laugh lines. Did that make him older? He seemed older. But he couldn’t be that old. Not more than twenty, that was certain.

  Or maybe he just seemed not familiar, like I couldn’t quite place him in any of the boxes I was used to putting people in. It wasn’t just his colour either; there were plenty of shades represented around here, even if few were as deep brown as Farley’s shade. It was more that not all of him went in any one box. I wanted to take my notebook back, to draw him, to see if I could figure him out that way.

  ‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ he said, as he finally handed my book back to me. ‘What else have you got?’

  ‘What do you mean? You want to see my English notes next? Don’t you have your own homework to do?’ I wasn’t sure that he did, but there had been all of those books on the table at the café. Though they weren’t books on our school curriculum. I don’t know why it bothered me so much that I couldn’t figure him out, not even his age. Why did I care if he was sixteen or twenty?

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at me in that way he had the day before. Not in a look me up and down sort of way, more like he was trying to see through me, or through something anyway.

  ‘This is going to take a while isn’t it?’ he said finally.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘It’s going to take a while to chip away this ice exterior of yours.’

  ‘Do you not know how to properly introduce yourself?’ I was getting a bit tired of this cryptic talk. ‘I am supposed to somehow be fated to meet you, but so far all you have done is make a bunch of bullshit statements, without telling me one thing about yourself.’

  ‘Okay, fair enough. I am going to give you the abridged version of my life. After that, if you don’t think I am too much of a psycho, maybe you can show me a little more of your art. Does that seem reasonable?’

  I just nodded, because if I was going to be on the bus with him for another fifty minutes I at least wanted to know something about him. I didn’t mention that I didn’t have any art in the first place, just scribbles in the margins of my copy books.

  ‘So you know my name obviously. My full handle is Farley Johnston. We’ll work backwards, yeah? So, I’ve been back in the area for twenty-three days now. I guess you could say I came back on a bit of a quest.’ He stopped there. ‘This is the part where you ask me ‘what kind of a quest?’’ he said, ‘If we are going to go through the motions of proper social etiquette, then you have to play along too.’

  ‘Fine. What kind of a quest, Farley Johnston?’

  ‘A quest to find out who my mother was. I guess to find out who I might be.’

  ‘Not to burst your bubble, but in my estimation, knowing your mother doesn’t exactly tell you much about yourself.’ I was curious though; this wasn’t your average what-is-happening-Saturday-night conversation. ‘But how come you don’t know her?’

  ‘Dead. Dead for seventeen years – since I was one.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry, I guess?’ Well that answered my question of how old he was anyway.

  ‘It’s kind of old news by now, but thanks for the sentiment. Well done on the appropriate social skills, by the way. Asking questions, appearing interested. How am I doing myself?’

  ‘Hmmm. A little heavy on the personal details, a little light on complaining about the latest tax increases. I’ll forgive you that though. Small talk bores me.’

  ‘See, I could tell you and I were soul mates. Meaningless verbal exchanges should be banned.’

  ‘Hold on to your pants, Farley. A few minutes of talking is hardly enough to judge whether we are soul mates. You might find I have no soul. Tell me more, so I can find out if you have one.’

  It actually felt okay talking to Farley. I didn’t have to think about what I said. He basically didn’t seem capable of being offended.

  ‘Oh, I must have a soul,’ he bantered. ‘I think it is a prerequisite for children born to hippy mothers. All of that free love stuff.’

  ‘So I was right! Were you part of that protest?’ It was only when that was out of my mouth that I realised that maybe I had been thinking of Farley, at least a little, since we’d met. Farley didn’t miss that either, a grin filling his face.

  ‘Even more hippie than that. I think my parents were the last of the actual, true Smithstown commune.’

  I knew the place. Well, I didn’t know it. I’d never been there, but it had been kind of controversial a few years before, when there had been a big court case. The land had been government land, and they had never had permission to stay there, or to build houses and stuff on it. Still, nobody had said anything about it for like thirty years. It’s not like anyone is stuck for space around here.

  But then, the commune started to cut down some of the trees and sell them. Just a few, here and there, using traditional tools and horses to pull them out.

  The problem was, each tree was worth thousands – really old growth trees, huge. They were making a killing. Just about the time there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of those old growth trees to cut down anywhere else. One of the big logging companies noticed and wanted a contract with the government to cut them down. That’s when the government tried to evict them. It was too late; squatter’s rights stood up in court.

  ‘But isn’t it still there?’ I was definitely forgetting to be dismissive. ‘You were born there?’

  ‘Technically, yes, on both accounts. It’s one of the few communes that have survived, but there is nothing communal about it—unless you count land ownership, and yes I was born there, though I don’t think you will find any records to say that.’

  ‘Kind of weird, but at least less boring than my life. Two parents, two kids, in one regular, small town.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing, where you are born, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You don’t really have a choice about it, yet it has a way of determining the rest of your life if you let it.’

  I knew exactly what he was saying.

&nbs
p; ‘But in my case, where I was born seems to have caused extra difficulty – or at least it did when my mom died. She was Canadian. Dad was, well still is I guess, American, but getting me back to America, with no birth certificate, and no mother to vouch for my birth … tricky. I think dealing with all of the bureaucracy beat any hippie notions straight out of him. He ended up going back to school to study law.’

  ‘Me too! I mean – my mom went back to school to study law.’ For once I didn’t feel the need to downplay the fact.

  ‘Jane, we are in danger of having a socially appropriate conversation now,’ Farley warned. ‘Are you sure you are prepared for all of this sharing?’

  I guess I was prepared for that because we just kept talking for a while. About stuff. Small talk I suppose, but it didn’t feel like small talk. It felt like I was filling up with real words, real contact with someone for the first time in months.

  Farley told me about coming to stay for a year with his mom’s best friend. About how he had fought with his dad about it, but how his dad had relented in the end, as long as Farley agreed to sign up for correspondence college courses and promise that he wouldn’t ‘drop out of society’ like his dad had for years.

  I told Farley about my family, about Verwood, and how nothing ever happened in it. I thought about not mentioning Dell – I don’t know why – but in the end I did tell him.

  ‘Just so we are clear on what kind of soul mates we may or may not be, I’ve already got a boyfriend,’ I said, and it didn’t feel presumptuous to say it.

  ‘Already knew that,’ he said.

  ‘How?’ There was certainly no promise ring on my finger. Dell would not have dared to even think of one of those.

  ‘You were mostly okay with me looking over your portrait of myself. If you were lusting after me, you would have burned that paper before showing it to me.’