One day, when I mentioned my essay topic, a girl in the training class asked, “Figure skating, or do you mean skateboarding?” And when I confirmed that, yes, I ice skate on a rink in competitions, she was jerk enough to declare, “Wow, how gay.” Hardee-har. When I went to Sita’s oldest sister Amila’s wedding a year ago, their first cousin waved his hands at all the ornate decorations then shout-whispered into his date’s ear—loud enough so that everyone in the dance hall could hear—“Weddings are so gay!” Gay as in “awful,” “unbearable,” or—my all-time-favourite putdown—“lame.” Because the only thing worse than being homosexual is being disabled, apparently. What I should have said was, “Yeah, well, you’re here, so now it really is.” Or, “Better gay and happy than you and, well, you.” But I didn’t.
Anyway, I aced the Junior Ranger test. They took us out along the David Thompson Highway, west of Rocky Mountain House to Nordegg. There were different kids there from towns around the province. I didn’t see anyone from the Calgary bunch again until the bus trip home on the last day of summer because we got divvied up among the campgrounds. I didn’t know anyone, and nobody knew me. How great is that?!
They stationed two of us kids between two provincial parks to do non-native plant control at Ram Falls and work at expanding the Amerada trail at Crimson Lake. That’s how Dianne, our group leader (definitely, definitely more on her, later), put it: stationed. Like we really were rangers. I know I’m a dork and that I supposedly signed up for this gig to get away from home, but it turns out I got way turned on by doing something real. We couldn’t arrest people or anything, but we checked out campgrounds, advised people who wanted to fish on which lakes were best, reassured kids about the leech situation, and found lost dogs. Total blast.
And every Sunday just after eight at night (because, given our clientele, weekends were heavy work days), Dianne held a cook-out for us—veggie hot dogs roasted over a campfire (properly set up and doused at the end of the night), burnt marshmallows, sarsaparilla drinks (which, okay, is just root beer, but sounded exotic in Dianne’s Australian accent), and grownup talk between ranger Dianne, ranger Ping, me, and the other junior ranger, Surge (absolutely more on him, later).
Thing is, I know what I’m doing on the ice. I may not ace what Tyler calls “real” sports, but skating turns on my on-switch. Not for me the loneliness of team work. I’m the opposite of Tyler: not mind-blowingly good at many sports, but good enough at this one thing to win trophies. I mean, what self-respecting kid—who has only a slim hope of ending up on the ultimate podium—would choose to get up at 5:45 every morning to practice her figures or to waltz while wearing blades?
Yep, I’m a sports geek. But it’s not like I brag about getting into Barbie-slut costumes and leaping into the air with skidoos tied to my ankles. No one in junior high cared. But Sita says that high school is all about reputation—not who you are but who people think you are. So I’m a skating dweeb. I compete in both the singles (yes, the “ladies” category) and the ice dancing categories. Ice dancing is not at all like the pairs skating you see on TV, where a buff guy is constantly tossing a thin yet definitely muscular woman high into the air. Nope, ice dancing is the one where a boy and a girl (or, at the city-level competitions, usually two girls) squirm their hips together and dance around the rink in sync. Sweet, eh? Don’t get Sita started.
Sita cannot fathom—“not even with a gigantic helping of mind-meld,” she has informed me—why I’d dance around with another chick holding onto my ass. “And don’t tell me it’s your hips, not your ass,” she’d cut me off. “There you are, a budding young flower, throwing whatever chance you have of hooking up with a popular guy into the Chinook winds.” Sita flips her left hand over when she wants to discard a thought. She does her hand-flip, and my entire skating career (career—ha!) gets tossed away. Sometimes I think Sita’s going to be a high school guidance counsellor when she grows up. And sometimes I think that and I’m not even joking.
When I’m skating by myself, I can whip around the hockey rink (make no mistake: judges, organizers, even parents think hockey is more important than figure skating—why else would we only get the ice at hours when most teenage boys never see the light of day?) as fast as stink. I can twirl, I can hop, I can hold onto the bottom of my blade and spin so fast you’d puke just imagining it. I used to puke way back when, till my coach taught me about catching one spot on the boards with my eyes, letting go fast, catching, letting go. Helps your balance, and looks cool, too, like your head and body have separated, but somehow don’t detach from each other. Like your body can move bi-directionally, get it? (I so crack me up.)
In singles, I get to glide and spin and jump and crash down onto the back outside edge of one blade and pull off a tremendous landing. My hair feels like ten million arrows all pointing up, and my shoulders feel like they’re scraping the sky. I get to be amazing at all the rough, dangerous, impossible jumps and spins, but I love ice dancing too. So two mornings a week, I also practice skating in perfect alignment with my partner. The skating world is all-inclusive and all that gab, but when the winter Olympics played in Vancouver, a sports station joked that one of the male skaters should get a gender test and maybe compete in the women’s competition. Hardee-har. Yep, there are gay and even transgender skaters, but just like other athletes, most stay in the chilled closet till they no longer compete. Also, who’d want to partner up with me if they believed I did the dance routines just to feel them up?
There are usually three couples (sorry: pairs) practicing at that point. It’s not a problem sharing the rink because ice dancing isn’t as rigorous. We go through the routine, we adjust to each other’s bodies, we add a turn, we delete a glide.
Around seven a.m., Winnie comes back from her coffee run, and the couples pairs split up into singles. Individually, we get a small portion of the rink to practice our routines and ten minutes each with the entire space. As the competitions loom, each of us will get the full arena for half an hour. Or we can get up at 4:30, convince a community adult to supervise (who must then also get up at 4:30 to make it to the rink by 5:30), and have the whole place to ourselves for an hour. I’m dedicated, but not that dedicated. And no mother is that dedicated, not unless the Olympics are involved.
LESBO ALERT: SHE EXPERIENCES A HEADY PLEASURE FROM WALTZING ON SKATES—WITH GIRLS.
HET-GIRL ALERT: SHE NEVER SKATES IN “THE BOY” POSITION DURING WALTZES. SHE’S ALWAYS “THE GIRL.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I miss kissing Surge. When I think about him, I think about how his lips tasted—sweet tea and vanilla. For all I know, his lips were a different flavour every day, but I never had a chance to find out. We only had that one evening and one morning.
We’d stayed up for most of that last night. Dianne and Ping were cool about it as long as we didn’t head over to each other’s dorm area. We sat by the dwindling campfire and necked and necked and necked.
“Where have you been all my summer?” Surge asked in an excellent movie voice, purring his lips against my neck.
I couldn’t tell him I’d been living in Fantasy-Girl land, with Dianne as my protagonist (huh, why wasn’t I the protagonist, with Dianne my supporting best?). I shivered at his touch and held onto his upper arms, which were not nearly as scrawny as they looked.
“Yeah, where’s the summer when we need it?” How could this be the last day? I’d never kissed anyone before, and I wanted to keep doing it. All night, all night.
The sun set, and Dianne let us stay out by the campfire until she brought me back to the girls’ dorm before she herself turned in. While I didn’t sleep, the sky changed from golden to pink to crimson to black cherry. Dianne woke me up—musta been a few minutes later. Breakfast and then packing. Summer movie fades to nothing.
At the very end of the very last minute of the very last day, Surge and I exchanged numbers. I told him about the no phone calls rule. He nodded, like zigzagging around parental restrictions was an obvious obstacle cours
e. Two more kisses during the cellphone conversation. Then a really long hug and more kissing without breaking out of the hug. Ping separated us with the hockey stick they use to prop open the warden’s door on sweltering days.
And then the two of us got on two separate buses, one going north, one south. But I found seven texts from him when I pulled out my phone just past Red Deer. And in addition to the texts, he’d left two voice mail messages by the time my bus reached Airdrie. The sunburned fields rolled by as our van zoomed down Highway 2. I texted him back; I thanked him for leaving his voice. I apologized again that we couldn’t talk live. Not even voicemail, I reminded him. And I promised him words waiting on his pillow when he woke up. Total: five texts. Was I ever loving this whole slushy-gushy phase!
The next day, my first day at J.J. Backstrom High, he left three more texts, each one with fewer exclamation points:
“i miss u ! ! ! !”
“i miss u ! !”
“miss u.”
In the past, Sita drilled it into me not to come off as too eager, but boy, was I eager! Once school started, I’d send him a text in the morning, usually while waiting for the adult supervisor to unlock the rink at 6:29 a.m., and then again just before bed. Surge texted me at odd times during the day, and even left a phone message though I’d reminded him to text only.
“u deep in 1st wk? im kul w/skul.”
Or: “c wat sum gud kssg leeds 2?”
Or: “i b misng u.”
Don’t judge; my messages back aren’t any more academically brilliant than Surge’s shorthand. I have a secret lover, a great-kissing secret lover.
I definitely can’t talk to my parents, and I’m apparently too much of a jellyfish to broach the bisexual subject with Sita. I mean, I haven’t even told her about Surge yet. Truth be true, I’ve barely broached the subject with myself. To help, I decide to google “lesbian/straight/bi/confused/horny” and see what the internet gods recommend. Problem is, we only have one computer. For the entire family! And the Mom Police keeps it in the dining room where absolutely everyone can see the screen from the kitchen. Trust issues much?!
Plus, Tyler probably knows how to trace my browser sites, even if I erased my web history. And Tyler would not be understanding or kind about any secret I’d try to keep. Same story with the computer labs at school. They’re almost never free, and even when they are, someone’s bound to walk in just as my careful search produces an explicit dyke porn site. Yikes.
So when Sita’s in Drama Club (yeah, and I’m the dork?), I head for the public library. No one I know goes there. I have to pay to update my library card, but then I can use whatever computer I want. And it helps. Sort of.
I get a list of about nine billion sites and check out the first fourteen. Sites like “How To Find Your Inner Lesbian,” “Bi in Denial,” and “Straight Girls who Love Lesbian Porn.” A lot of kids write to various sites confessing that they’re “bi-curious.” Which means I’m not alone. Nice to know, but doesn’t help me figure things out. “You’re lying to yourself,” too many of them tell me. But, “Don’t put a label on yourself,” is another piece of advice. That doesn’t help at all, just makes me long more for a label in giant neon floodlights. I walk home from the library as diminished as the fading light outside. Who do you talk to when you can’t even figure the questions out? Maybe Friday, with Sita ...
Seven hundred kids in this new high school. Last year, Sita and I decided to get all sophisticated as part of the graduating class of junior high. We’d spend afternoons slurping double mochaccinos, window shopping, and talking about who we’d kiss on the rugby team. Yup, that’s our social life in a nutshell: sugar and boys.
This year, though, we’ll only have Friday afternoons. I’ll be at different dentists’ offices Tuesdays and Thursdays. And Sita’s Drama Club meets Mondays and Wednesdays right after school. So every Friday after last bell, we plan to meet at Sita’s locker and swing out toward the second-closest coffee shop. The closest café doesn’t provide enough of a post-school buffer—too many teachers will head there if they have a sport to coach or an activities club to sponsor or if they’re in charge of Detention that day. On Fridays, Mr Grier is the regular jailer. He seems mostly okay, except for a bad case of high expectations, but who wants to run into any teacher outside of school?
Meanwhile: the joy of Frosh Week. Despite having an older brother who goes to J. J. Backstrom, Tyler never plays big brother, except to torment me. In fact, if I run into him in the halls this first week, I will totally have to suffer through an old-fashioned froshing, like being pelted with condoms filled with ketchup and mayo. Although one of my brother’s goons will probably do his dirty work. Thank the Sibling Gods I have Sam.
The way normal people do it, kids come along every couple of years, right? Speaking of “normal,” and how my parents aren’t, take Sam. Not literally, I like her just where she is, thanks! (Oh, I crack me up!) She’s eight years younger than me, ten years younger than Tyler. And since my parents were so eager to get married and have kids and join the grownup workforce when they were in their teens, I’m pretty sure Tyler and I are part of the package they pre-ordered without reading the fine print. Sam, on the other hand, was probably a birth-control accident. In an age when every kid out there knows how to use a condom, my parents managed to get knocked-up long after they thought they’d finished having kids.
Which means they were fornicating in their forties. Okay, okay, Sam’s seven, which means that the parents had only reached their late thirties when they conceived her, but I’m a sucker for alliteration. I’m addicted to the almighty alliterative axiom. I’m revved up for the repeats. Or as Mr Grier, my English Lit teacher. says, I’m no good at “real” poetry (sucky quotation marks his and, yes, he makes finger curls as he speaks) so I make do with pathetic word tricks rather than doing the work of coming up with a strong image. Or a convincing word.
“You are addicted to alliterative phrases,” he corrects me. It’s only my second English class of the year, and the teacher’s already on my back. “Axiom is not the word you’re looking for, but like all lazy poets, you choose the word for its convenience, rather than for where it can take you in the next line.”
Yes, he really talks like that. In junior high, my language arts teachers divided up the semester so that we spent an entire unit on grammar, a unit on the short story, a unit on the novel, one on Canadian literature, half a unit on the persuasive essay, and the other half on the analytical essay, and then we somehow ran out of time when it was supposed to be the poetry unit, three days before the final exam.
Not Mr Grier. He’s such a hard-ass that he thinks we should all be able to write essays that might get published some day. Published! Like who besides a die-hard teacher cares what high school students think about Romeo falling in love with the wrong rich girl? The course syllabus shows the entire first month taken up with poets. By the end of next week, we’re to have covered bpNichol, dionne brand, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Separate assignments and a quiz for each one. After that, he has two Shakespeare plays planned, four novels, and then he wants to return to poetry!
On the very last day of class, we’ll each have to recite a poem—“with succinct analysis”—in front of the entire class. And not just any poem, but one we write ourselves. No rhymes, unless you want a big fat F. And no alliteration.
“That last rule’s just for Keira,” Grier adds.
So, if anyone else in the class wants to pair “almighty” with “axiom,” it’s apparently A-okay with Mr Grier.
The school has strict rules against older kids picking on newbies, but Frosh Week is a hard tradition to erase completely. Mostly it’s water balloons and wedgies, but a couple of kids get pushed down staircases, and one gets locked in the utility closet for six hours. For days now, everyone’s been yelling at that kid to “come out of the closet!” Hardee-har. Right now, I just want to map out each day without forgetting my locker combo or walking into Social Studies five minutes late. The tea
cher, Mr Rempel, always bellows out a “You’re late!”
When Max Bledsoe scuttles in late on the third day, he grins like getting to class late is a fun activity.
“You’re late!” Mr Rempel predictably bellows, pointing to a desk right at his elbow.
“No, sir!” Max bellows back. “I’m extremely early for tomorrow’s class!”
We all crack up, and Max earns the distinction of being the only grade ten kid slammed into detention during Frosh Week. For making a joke, for cripes’ sake. Welcome to high school.
My locker’s on the opposite side of the school from my homeroom. None of my classes take place on the same floor as the next class. Cafeteria line-ups wind so long through the hallway that first week that you get your food just as the bell goes for next class, and I am not the kind of girl who misses a meal. Ever. Students are to sign up for clubs and sports and any other extra-curricular activities by the end of the very first Friday. I can’t even find all my classrooms, and I’m supposed to know which team sport might attract me?
On Wednesday, I get lost between Period Two and Period Three. I cannot find my next class to save my life. I dash out as soon as the Period Two bell rings and search every hallway for my next class. There are hordes of kids banging lockers and tripping younger kids and racing off to smoke during a free period. All the hallways look the same, and the numbering system makes no sense. In defeat, I finally head to the front office. And this secretary who helps me is so nice that I feel worse than humiliated. Turns out, I have back-to-back math classes in the same room. I think about claiming cramps and asking to go to the nurse’s office, but with my luck: A) Somehow a bulletin will go out that I’m on the rag, and B) I won’t be able to find the nurse’s office. When I finally (fifteen mins late!) make my way back to my math class, Ms Temmie doesn’t even look up. I guess she figured I needed a bathroom break between sessions.
Rough Patch Page 3