by Darren Greer
Pavel walks me back to my car and stands with me at the driver’s side door. We speak for a time, while I fiddle with my keys. And then suddenly he does it. He leans over and kisses me. I am not expecting it, and it is not a slow graceful advance as you see on tv. It is fast, and precise. As swift and as calculated as a cheetah taking down a gazelle. My heart thumps with fear and desire. Pavel pulls away and smiles at me. I can’t remember the last time I was kissed.
“You’ll call me?” says Pavel.
“Yes,” I say, still disconcerted. “I will.”
“If you don’t, I will call you. Deanny gave me your number.”
We say our final goodbyes and then I drive out of the city to Advocate. I don’t know what to expect, or to think. Pavel has kissed me. He clearly likes me. I clearly like him. I curse the complication. It would be easier for everyone if my grandmother died peacefully, I went to the funeral, and returned to Toronto. But I can tell Deanny and Pavel will not give up.
When I get home, my mother asks me about the visit.
I shrug. “We didn’t do much.”
“Was it just you and Deanny?”
“It was,” I lie. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” my mother says. “I’m glad you had a good time.”
When Jeanette comes home she asks me the same questions. I begin to wonder if she and my mother and Deanny are not in on this Pavel thing together. I decide I won’t give them the satisfaction.
I am a lone ranger. I pride myself on this. I learned early you cannot rely on others. The only exceptions are Deanny, my mother, and Jeanette.
Pavel is a blip, an indicator that I could perhaps have something more if I want it.
I’m not sure I want it.
3
when deanny and I went to the theatre to see Cujo, we went an hour early. We bought our tickets from Hilda and went to the concession stand for popcorn and soda. Then we navigated the short hallway to the theatre proper, drew aside the worn but heavy maroon velvet curtains, and stepped into the fray. There was never a way to sneak in unnoticed. This was a hushed moment for me, because it was always so full, stuffed with potential danger. The hallway deposited us at the front of the theatre, where we had to turn and face the kids sitting in their seats staring up at the screen.
Whether it was the lighting, or the reflection of the white screen on their faces, everyone looked anemic, their pale faces floating over popcorn boxes. They were staring at us as we entered.
There were always catcalls and, for some, hellos. Not the latter for Deanny and me. They called us names and blocked the aisle and made it as uncomfortable for us as they could, until we found seats somewhere near the middle with too few kids to keep us from taking them. We settled down and waited for the hubbub to subside. The teasing and the name calling was no worse than for Cameron and me, but I felt a queasiness in my gut, as I knew the seats around me would fill up and it was anyone’s guess who would sit there. Someone mild-mannered, or at least indifferent. We had many minutes left to go before the movie started. I ate my popcorn nervously while Deanny scanned the room for potential enemies. She wore her most aggressive expression — eyes narrowed, lips pursed, cheeks puffed. No one cared to take her dare, or they forgot about us. We talked infrequently.
Deanny said she hoped the movie would be good, though if it was it would be lost on these losers. She said this loudly, trying to provoke, but no one took the bait. Groups in the front hollered questions and comments to groups in the back. Waves of laughter broke against the screen. Words like “fuck” and “shit” rose up from the jumble of conversation and stood out in stark verbal contrast. There was not a single adult. No wonder I was always terrified, and it is amazing to me now that I stayed.
But this was the world I lived in.
If I wanted to venture out of my house I had to tolerate such things. And besides, I had Deanny. Up until then she’d kept the monsters off me. They were scared of her. She looked mean, and they didn’t know her. They might have justified themselves by saying she was just a girl, and they didn’t beat up girls. They were taught better. But it was their fear of her that kept them away. Right up until that day, Deanny made certain no one touched me. They continued to call me names, and her too. But they never laid a finger on me. That was more than I could say for when Cameron and I were together. Several times they had driven us from the theatre altogether and we had to walk home without seeing the film. I was grateful for Deanny, and if I still didn’t feel entirely safe, I could at least be certain we would make it through the movie together.
We sat through most of the hour before the film without anyone sitting in the seats around us. I was hopeful no one would, and the lights would go down and we would be safe, but a group of seven came in at the last minute. Three boys and four girls. I knew all of them from my school. Two of the girls were in my grade and the others were older. Immensely popular, from good families and with nice clothes and fashionably cut hair, they stood at the bottom of the theatre waving and shouting at people they knew, with two of the girls scanning for seats.
I scanned too. I was hoping there would be others, but I could see there weren’t. The only place these kids could sit together was with us.
I counted their number.
Then I counted two seats on the other side of Deanny and three on the other side of me to the aisle.
I knew what was going to happen before Deanny did. She was busy glaring at some boy in the row below who had whispered “Deanny Dirt-Digger.”
The seven kids from below started to make their way up the aisle. They stopped in a little group and looked at us.
I knew all their names.
I knew all their families.
One of them, George, lived on the street behind my grandmother. He had never touched me. In fact, he had never spoken to me. He was two years older, and played basketball. He wore the red and white of the Junior School basketball team. He always wore it. Deanny called guys like George “Varsity Dicks.” She said it should be the name of the team.
“Hey McNeil,” George said. “Give us your seats.”
I would have done so in a heartbeat, if I had been alone. Cameron and I would have got up and sat separately and we would have counted ourselves lucky not to be pounded into the ground. I actually started to move, when Deanny laid her hand on my arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
For a moment, it was as if Deanny was the bully. It was such a stark, threatening question. I froze.
George looked at her and repeated his request. I actually thought he was being quite reasonable for the Saturday Matinee. He could have just as easily plucked us out of the seats and tossed us down the aisle and kids would have cheered. There were no grown-ups in the room, and Milo the projectionist couldn’t see. Even if he could, he had a rule not to interfere in the matinee drama, unless property was being damaged.
“There’s seven of us,” George said, “and two of you. “You’ve got seven seats between you. Find someplace else to sit.”
Deanny held me in place. “Not likely, dickhead,” she said. “You find someplace else.”
“What a mouth,” said one of the girls.
“You wanna make something of it, Barbie Doll?”
The girls made faces, like they couldn’t be bothered with the likes of Bernadette McLeod. But I noticed no one took her up on her offer.
“I know you,” George said. “You’re that kid from Meadow Pond Lane. Not a pot to piss in and already you think you own the town. Well, you don’t own this town, bitch. I don’t care if you are a girl. If you don’t give us those seats, we’ll take them. Simple as that.”
I could hear, and feel, how quiet everything had become. Every eye in the theatre was turned towards us. It was not just a matter of two kids being ousted from their seats. That happened all the time. It was something else. The tension that had been building around my uncle over the stories these kids had been hearing at home was about to break.
It had gone unspoken, and now it was coming out.
Deanny sensed it too. She stood up and tried to take a step across my legs, to get closer to George. The girls stepped back. George did not. I grabbed Deanny’s leg. “It’s okay,” I said. “Let’s just move.”
“Like fuck,” said Deanny. She sounded so grown-up, so adult. She made her way over me and stood in the aisle in front of George. He was a step below her, but still taller. She would get clobbered.
A chant started in the room, soft but quickly gaining in strength. “Fight, Fight, Fight, Fight.”
“I’m not gonna hit you,” George said. “You’d probably run to your momma, and have me thrown in jail.”
“I fight my own battles,” said Deanny.
The chant was louder now, almost overwhelming. And then, with seemingly great power, George held up his hand and the chanting stopped. Deanny stood fuming. The other kids stood watching. George put his hand down and turned away from Deanny. He looked at me.
“aids fucker,” he said.
He repeated it, louder this time. Then began to chant it. He beckoned for the crowd to follow. They did. Soon everyone in the theatre was shouting it. “aids fucker! aids fucker! aids fucker!”
Deanny took a swing. George casually blocked her. The crowd did not stop chanting. Another kid grabbed me and wrestled me out of my seat. By this time the entire theatre was in a lather, calling for George to “beat the living shit out of us.”
It was really no contest. George easily overpowered Deanny. He called her a “fucking bitch” and slapped her once curtly on the side of her head, then wrapped his arms around her and lifted her. Deanny screamed, shouting every epithet she could think of, until George eventually put a hand over her mouth. The kids continued to shout as Deanny and I were escorted outside. She tried to scream through George’s clasped hand and I went placidly. Even in the lobby we could hear the chants from inside. They had not abated. Hilda stepped out of the ticket booth and asked what the hell was going on.
George, still covering Deanny’s mouth and fighting her to keep still, told Hilda we tried to fight someone and Milo told them to throw us out of the theatre. Hilda looked at Deanny, who pleaded with her eyes, and at me, my mouth not covered but saying nothing, and nodded uncertainly. “If Milo told you,” she said. “Though I don’t like the methods.”
The boys opened the doors, deposited us unceremoniously on the sidewalk, and shut the glass doors behind us.
The chanting stopped — that or we could no longer hear it. Tears of rage and hatred streamed down Deanny’s face. She pounded against the doors to be let back in, but Hilda had locked them, and was shaking her head.
Couldn’t Hilda hear what the kids were shouting? Didn’t she know Milo would never have asked kids to eject other kids from the theatre?
“You dumb bitch!” screamed Deanny. “You fucking whore cow!”
Those words alone ensured we were barred from the theatre for life, though we never tried to go back after that day.
When Deanny calmed down — though she was still crying — we looked for our bikes.
We couldn’t find them.
All the other bikes were leaning against the theatre wall — no one locked their bikes in Advocate in those days — but ours were not. We walked home in silence. We never did find our bikes. Whoever stole them must not have ridden them, and instead destroyed them or kept them locked away in a garage or basement. My mother offered to buy us new ones, but Deanny refused. She would walk, she said. She would find the bastard who did it and beat him to a bloody pulp.
Deanny and I were more defeated that day than Cameron and I had ever been. Neither of us ever told my mother what happened at the theatre. I wanted to, but Deanny was adamant. “Not a word,” she said. “Not a goddamned fucking word.”
▪ ▪ ▪
everything changed after that day in the theatre. Deanny became interested in what exactly my uncle had, and why everyone, even the assholes in the theatre, knew more about it than we did. Their families, it seemed, weren’t afraid of saying the word. Why was mine?
She said we should study it.
“You mean go to the library?” I said.
“Where else do you study crap, idgit?” she asked me. “Besides the john.”
Deanny suggesting we go to the library was unusual, to say the least. I had only known her since the beginning of the summer. Then she was all daredevil, mud and adventure. I had yet to see her in school where, despite her reputation, she was studious and diligent.
She knew asking my mother or her parents would be useless. They would tell us nothing. “If we want to know about it, we have to learn ourselves.”
There were two problems.
First, I had been banned from the library, so Deanny had to go alone.
The second was that the library had nothing about aids.
It was 1984.
A library in a big city would have had little about it. Our little broom closet, with just under two thousand volumes, over half of them encyclopedias and National Geographics, had nothing. Most of the written work published on aids was in medical journals, to which the library did not subscribe. Even if it had, they would have been over Deanny’s head.
We tried the encyclopedia. The most contemporary was the 1983 Britannica.
Not a mention. In between aid — a medieval tax — and Aidan, the King of Dalriada, there was no entry.
Although we didn’t realize it then, that was likely the last encyclopedia or dictionary in the world that would not have that word. That’s how big a deal it would become. We were living in a seminal era, one that would be defined by a single crisis. But we couldn’t know that.
After a half-hour fruitless search — with the young, pretty but incredibly nosy second librarian Mrs. Goddard constantly asking what she was looking for — Deanny gave up. Outside on Main Street, she met up with me and said we would just have to go to the horse’s mouth.
“My uncle?” I said.
“Hardly,” said Deanny. “No one in your house tells us anything. We’ll go see Dr. Fred.”
I suspected Deanny was right: it was no use asking my mother and Jeanette. Forthright in all other matters, they’d been frustratingly close-mouthed when it came to my uncle and his illness. If we wanted to know anything we would have to go elsewhere. But it seemed a hare-brained scheme to me, this attempt to extract information from my uncle’s physician. “He won’t tell us,” I said. “He has to protect Uncle David’s confidentiality.”
“We won’t ask him about your uncle, dummy,” said Deanny. “We’ll just ask about the disease.”
“Why do you want to know, Deanny?”
She shrugged. “Everyone else seems to know something about it. I don’t have a goddamned clue.”
“What if he won’t tell us?”
“He’ll tell us,” Deanny said. “He has to. He’s a doctor, isn’t he? Aren’t doctors supposed to educate people?”
This argument seemed specious to me. Doctors were supposed to heal people. Teachers were supposed to educate. I thought we might have a better chance with Mrs. Simms, the biology teacher at the high school.
“You mean the same Mrs. Simms who won’t let her son play with you?”
She had me there, I had to admit.
The thing was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know exactly what aids was. My uncle had it. Of that I was certain. And there were fears it was contagious. That I also knew. Beyond that, my understanding was nebulous — deliberately so, it occurs to me now. If I knew too much, perhaps I wouldn’t want to live in my own house. Perhaps I would be the one chanting “aids fucker” along with my peers. I went along with Deanny, because I went along with her in everything, and I trusted her. But I did so with trepidation.
When she went ahead and made the appointment with Dr. Fred, she told his secretary she had chronic tendonitis.
“An eleven-year-old?” the secretary had said. “Shouldn’t your mother be making this appointment?”
&nb
sp; “My mother has chronic assholinitis,” Deanny shot back. “In the form of my father. Please make the appointment.”
And so the appointment was made, for August 4 — the Tuesday before the week, my mother said later, everything really went to hell.
▪ ▪ ▪
on the day we were to go visit Dr. Fred, my mother got me out of bed early and said she had a favour to ask me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Your aunt and I have to go into town for a little while and your grandmother’s visiting Father Orlis. I was wondering if you could stay home for a few hours in case your Uncle David needs anything.”
“Okay.”
What my mother didn’t tell me was that she and Jeanette were going to the unemployment office in town to put in a claim. A few days before she and Jeanette had suddenly and mysteriously been laid off from the diner. Mr. Byrd, who was a timid man and had always liked my mother and Jeanette — and gave them the run of the place when they were on shift — didn’t tell them the truth at first. He said the diner wasn’t busy enough this summer for all the help he hired.
“Doesn’t it make sense then,” Jeanette asked him, “to lay off the summer people rather than full-time staff?”
“I didn’t think … I mean I don’t know …,” said Mr. Byrd.
It didn’t take long, with my mother and Jeanette working on him in tandem, for Mr. Byrd to admit the truth. A number of people in town had approached him about my mother and aunt handling food in the diner.
“They thought they might get sick,” said Byrd. “I told them I didn’t think so, but they threatened to have the diner shut down if I didn’t let you go. It’s only for a time, a few weeks at most, until this all blows over. In the fall you can come back again.”