The thing is, between my skating and part-time work and Sita’s parents actually expecting her to not only pass but achieve excellent grades, we won’t get much time to hang out together. Hence the absolute need for a coinciding lunch schedule. J.J. Backstrom High is so big that there are two rotations for lunch. Which sounds reasonable, but absolutely isn’t. For one thing, a lot of the clubs meet over the lunch hour, and with this schedule, kids either can’t meet all at the same time, or they have to choose a club based not on their interests but on what time they eat their club sandwich. (Get it? I really crack me up!) So, yeah, I feel for the yearbook kids. I may not be into photography and making every freaking school moment a memento mori (google it), but if I had to choose between eating and skating, my life would be a mess. Truly. My body needs constant feeding in order to have the energy to power-skate through sleep time.
When Sita has lunch, I’m in Biology. The only other grade ten Biology class takes place late on Thursdays when I have to boot it to the city bus. Dentists’ offices close early, and the Thursday job doesn’t come with a key. The dental hygienist stays till 3:35 to let me in, and the door locks behind me. By 3:40, she’s out of there. I don’t blame her (he never stays an extra five minutes), but I have to have a free period last class that day, just for the privilege of cleaning crusted spit off miniature sinks.
Without Sita, I end up having lunch with Amanda Forsythe, Joline Tamineau, and Joline’s two minions. Amanda, who loves all shades of green and today wears a loose shamrock T over lime shorts, has always been nice to me. Maybe she’s grateful. In grade two, she peed her pants and when I saw, I raised my hand to go to the bathroom, then slipped her wads and wads of toilet paper upon my return. Amanda and I play nice when we have time, but my schedule is chock-full, and she’s usually trying to hang out at the jock table or the goth table or the chess-players table, or ... you get the picture. We’re friends, but not each other’s main lifeline.
Joline and I have known each other for years and years and years, but not really as friends, not since a long time ago. We know each other because our moms know each other. They used to be incredibly close friends, and so we hung around in our underpants back when friendship wasn’t a choice as much as a parental accessory. But even when our mothers stopped visiting regularly, they still expected us to be friends. Parents are ridic that way. Just because you’re around the same age, you should hang out together? Is this how it works for them? Is this how it’s ever worked for anyone older than about four?
Once, when I was seven and Joline Tamineau was six, we stuck our tongues together and tried to walk around without letting them untouch. Perhaps some tame version of playing doctor. (Come to think of it, we did start out with tongue depressors in the sandbox.)
Our backyard is the size of a balcony porch, a landing strip for a toy airplane. So when Joline and I crab-walked, tongues attached, around the yard, we hit the fence, tripped over the pots that held my dad’s tomatoes, and fell into the sandbox—our tongues cemented together with saliva. Tyler swooped in on his bicycle and didn’t even wait for the image to register before he burned right out again, his tires grumbling over the gravel. No big deal. Tyler—when he wasn’t hiding my shoes or stuffing my pillow case with licorice jelly beans (yes, I’m allergic to black licorice. Not get-to-the-hospital-or-die allergic, just bad asthma and eczema break-out allergic)—was pretty good at plain old ignoring me.
No, wait: that’s wrong.
“Only fags like to lick other fags,” he snarled at us as he rode his bike around from the frontyard to the back, trying to balance on his knees on the banana seat, and not letting me get past. “Joe-ly and Key-rah sitting in a tree,” he said as his bike pedal swiped my calf, “k-i-s-s-i-n-g!”
Joline slapped his banana seat, and his bike teetered. He kicked me as he rode past us, then zoomed out of the yard.
“You two are sick!” he yelled back. “Diseased! Lezzie-infected!” Being a fag didn’t sound like a good thing, so Joline and I unstuck our tongues and played sandbox until her mother scooped her up to go.
Not long after that, our mothers stopped visiting with each other. So Joline and I stopped visiting with each other, too. And Tyler caught me supergluing pink football stickers onto his helmet and a whole new temper frenzy ensued.
Since then, Joline has been a bit of a thorn in my kidney region. She tripped me in a mall once, and called me “Key-her-in-the-ear-a!” in a movie theatre one time.
This cafeteria consists of rows of long tables shoved together, short edge to short edge, with kids cramming to sit in clumps with their friends. The special on Tuesdays is mushy spaghetti, and no grade ten student with any sense would order that dish, first week of school. Apparently, being a slob in grade eleven is totally acceptable. All around me, I smell garlic and butter on the cusp of being rancid, and underneath that, heavy fumes of deep-fried sugar. Mom makes me pack a home-made lunch, which today I’m grateful for. I choose a dessert in the bustling Backstrom buffet (okay, okay, Mr Grier, I get it) and sit with Amanda when Joline Tamineau and her two robot girls walk up to our mostly empty table. Joline somehow looks exactly like she did when she was eight, but way, way tougher.
When I see Joline, I assume it’s to steal a doughnut off my plate. But her mother must have said something because here she is politely loitering at my table. Joline is being so courteous, I’m getting worried. She does slap my arm, but I think it’s supposed to be friendly.
“Make room, losers,” Joline barks out. I’m kinda relieved, in a weird way.
“Joline, this is Amanda.”
“Hey. These are The Two.” Joline plonks herself down at the table with us, and the robots follow her every move. I can’t tell if this is a nickname they figured was way-suave years ago and are now stuck with or if they hate it, but Joline calls the shots. I discover, as she scarfs down a tofu wrap that one of the robots dutifully hands to her, that Joline skipped grade seven: her teachers bumped her from elementary school to the middle of junior high, and she’s hung out with The Two ever since. Why don’t they just call each other The Three, then? Where’s Sita when you need a really snippy comment?
Oh, right, Sita has Language Arts during my lunch period. But not any Language Arts class. She has Mr Munson, whose students read one Shakespeare (because, really, you can’t escape Macbeth in a grade ten lit class) and one existentialist novel a year (usually Camus’ The Outsider, probably because it’s short), and that’s it. By the end of the second day, every grade ten kid already knows the back-story gossip on Munson.
He was originally a Spanish teacher, but the school board cut all second languages except French about a decade ago. Munson got shuffled over to English Lit because, apparently, language is language, right? And right around the same time as the shuffle, he got engaged to the principal, who dumped him before the year was up and then transferred herself to another high school. So he was stuck with a class he didn’t sign up to teach and an existential heart. Grim, right? Yeah, except everybody knows, even us newbies, that Munson doesn’t care about Shakespeare at all and gives absolutely anyone a B-plus if they don’t make trouble and hand in an essay detailing the bleakness of regular existence. A boring class but an easy one.
So by the third day of lunch period, I’m getting used to eating lunch without Sita. I pass Joline the salt when she asks for it and watch grimly as she proceeds to salt everyone’s fries, not just her own. I’d harrumph, but who else can I eat lunch with?
“So, I switched to Language Arts with Grier,” Sita announces as she plunks down at our table during lunch period, my lunch period. It’s the mid-lunch frenzy. The din has reached World Cup sudden-death overtime level. What?! No way Sita voluntarily switched to a harder English Lit class just to hang out. Just to hang out with me.
“Scoot over,” she demands, because apparently even my ass doesn’t believe Sita is really here. Amanda scoots over, not looking as thrilled as I feel. Guess she doesn’t love third place on the friendship whee
l. I’ll have to think about that. Later.
As my ass recovers, so does my mouth: “Woo hoo!” I shout. “What? How? With Grier?”
Sita just shrugs. “I read anyway. May as well be for homework.”
And that’s that. We magically gain an extra hour, Monday to Friday. And while Amanda may be angling for lunchtimes with just her and me, I don’t feel especially shitty, because I remember from junior high that whenever Amanda gets around to seeing a boy, I eat alone.
No one wants to eat alone. And it’s not that I have no other friends, but, well, with skating every free minute, plus working after school ... I don’t exactly have a lot of friends. And no matter what boy Sita slobbers over during Calculus, she never abandons me to eat with him—unless he eats with us. Sita would never join the guy at his table. Unless my being not-just-boy-crazy scares her away, my best friend would never abandon me.
LESBO ALERT: SHE PREFERS LUNCH WITH GIRLS, SIPPING LATTES WITH GIRLS, TALKING/CHATTING/GABBING WITH GIRLS.
HET-GIRL ALERT: SHE’D RATHER EAT LUNCH WITH A GIRL SHE DOESN’T MUCH LIKE THAN SIT BY HERSELF IN A MEATBALL MALODOROUS CAFETERIA.
CHAPTER FIVE
So, high school problem number one: solved. For this entire semester, Sita and I share lunch period. And Social Studies (though we don’t get to sit anywhere near each other, thanks to Rumpled, I mean Mr Rempel). And English Lit thrice weekly (are you impressed, Mr Grier? I used an old-timey British word). Mornings, we walk to school together, then we have fifty-five minutes during lunch to catch up on the morning scandals and a wave or two in the afternoons as we each rush by toward Math or Chemistry or Gym. And Friday afternoons.
Which means, really, that I don’t have any excuse to keep avoiding “the conversation,” the “what I did on my summer vacation” chat. The “bi” chat. Sita will be thrilled to hear about Surge, right? But then there’s my crush on Dianne, who spent days pointing out hazelnut bushes and Saskatoon berries to us. I don’t want to damage my friendship with Sita, but I also can’t tell her only part of this story. It would mean telling her about only part of myself, and I need Sita to embrace all of me. (Not literally, of course. What do you think I am, a homo?)
We also have Saturday nights, if Sita can sweet-talk her parents into letting her party with me. That’s how she puts it to them, that the two of us deserve to “party” together. And she doesn’t do the hand-wave when she talks to her parents. “We’ll hang out at the mall, stay at the coffee shop till closing, no adults, no other kids.” And I need to make sure to get her home by ten. “For goddess’ sake, it’s not like we ever give our parents epic trouble,” Sita points out. As long as her homework is done, her parents are A-okay with us going out on Saturday nights. Sita actually says, “A-okay.”
My parents have the same rule, but only in principle. It’s a given that my homework has to be done and gone over by the Mom Police and pressed into perfect sandwich bags before Sunday. Sunday is for chores and skating and one dentist’s office and a family meal as final punctuation. So if I haven’t gotten my homework done and done well by late Saturday afternoon, it’s unlikely it will get done at all. One week into school, and they’re already unhappy about Sita and me “hanging” at the mall every Saturday night.
“We don’t hang at the mall,” I explain, as I’m helping Mom cut up carrots for an after-school snack (good thing I had doughnuts again for lunch). “Well, we might, or we might walk over to the skateboard park, or just sit around her basement watching Angel reruns” (vampire with a soul—cracks me up!).
“Even when I was a teenager, walking around stores never seemed a very satisfying weekend activity.” My mother. She’s unloading groceries, piling stuff for supper on one counter and a midnight meal for Dad when he’s at work on another.
I’m getting good at dodging her flying sentences, but then my dad joins in. “Isn’t the skateboard park where all the drug deals go down?” Dad usually lets me alone, though he doesn’t trust the world he lives in once the sun sets. Still, he leaves the rules and regulations mostly to Mom. But when he does come down hard about homework or tidying our rooms, we all scurry.
Once, when Dad was giving me driving lessons, he told me all about T-intersections, how people think drivers going straight ahead on the T have the right of way, but they don’t. “So,” he lectured, “if the intersection has no stop sign, then whichever driver is on the right has the right-of-way. Same as a regular intersection. Got it?” I nodded.
“Ha! You may have the right of way, but being right doesn’t do you much good if you’re crushed under a two-ton. Always stop. Always proceed cautiously.” I nodded again. He’s right (that’s what they taught us in Drivers Ed, too), but he’s only right about here because whenever we drive down to Montana, the rules change. With Dad, you just have to go along, which is easier than an unending argument. He just doesn’t adjust. As long as I play the devoted daughter and let Dad be bossy about things that don’t matter, we get along fine.
My parents are waaaay more suspicious than Sita’s about where we go and how long we’ll go for. As long as she’s with me, Sita’s parents give us a trusting leash. The hilarious thing is that my mother thinks Sita is a good influence on me. We should swap mothers. They’d be happier with their daughters, and we’d get so much less hassle. I duck behind the couch as if to pick up some playing cards that dropped there, but really I text Sita that the parents are getting to me: “PLS trade? my mom luvs u!”
When Mom let me work one afternoon a week in junior high, the very first purchase I made was phone minutes. Sita had an extra cell from her cousin who visited and just left it behind when he flew back to Vancouver. He pretended to lose it because he wanted an upgrade. It works fine, and here’s the genius of my teen buying power: I never use the phone as a phone. Never.
Mom would’ve flipped if I’d “waltzed in” with a cellphone after my first paycheque. Instead, I “inherited” the phone from Sita, bought into a plan that had few call minutes and lengthy texting, and I was set. Though I did almost use up all my texting in the first week. Seriously. Nowadays, I can pump out two or three texts in about seven seconds flat. I got that phone just in time, cuz being gone all August, I needed to be able to text with Sita.
Tyler has plans for a big kegger this weekend, and the parental units will let him go, no question. Because he’s older? Or because he’s a boy? Tyler has a one a.m. curfew on Saturdays. Not only do I have to be back by ten, but my parents have a special no-bend-statute that says if I arrive even one minute past the hour (kitchen clock rules), my curfew goes down by a half hour the next week. And so on.
My parents think they know kids. They think they have a special key that opens the teen-lingo danger-code. They don’t trust malls or skateboard parks. They think we’re going to sneak off to a party and make out with boys. Truth be true, we’re going to sneak off to a party and ... make out with boys. Well, only Sita will do the second part. Sita says we have to stop being the goody-good girls (like that’s our nickname or something) and crash a few parties.
“What do you mean by ‘crash’?” I ask her, sounding suspiciously like my suspicious parents. It’s Friday—the end of our first week at Backstrom. We’ve survived Frosh Week. We decide to walk and walk and walk. A good time to start my confession? As soon as I think this, my neck gets hot and my feet feel clunky. If I tell Sita, will she expect me to cruise girls at this party? I nearly trip as we head down a steep hill towards the Bow River. For now, I keep my tongue safely stored behind my teeth.
“Find out where the weekend parties are, pick the best one, and show up.” She does the little hand-wave. “Easy-peasy.” Sita has a squadron of older sisters who actually talk to her, so she knows all about parties and older boys and which teachers to avoid at Backstrom. Or at least thinks she does. We’ve reached the river and follow it downtown.
“That part, yes,” I concede. “Very easy to follow the gossip trail to find out about the party, but.” But we’re still not invited. But o
ur parents still won’t let us go.
“They don’t check your invitations at the door, Ms Watches Too Much TV from the Last Century.” The hand-wave again. Sita heads for the bicycle path that snakes its way beside the river, running from one end of town to the other. She ignores the angry grunts from serious cyclists who don’t want to slow down for meanderers. “Yeah, yeah, I know, the nineties really crack you up, but this is now. You just show up at the door and, voilà, party.”
That’s not my point. “Okay, yeah, um, I was thinking more about how we’d get out.” I wait for the sarcasm.
“Oh, right.” Another hand-wave. “That’s exactly what we need our invitations for—the huge bouncers who won’t let you leave.” She makes this announcement at the ginormous wooden staircase. We’ve reached the bottom of the Crescent Heights cliff. From the top there’s a spectacular view of downtown and the river and even the mountains, way to the west. But first you have to climb about a billion steps. We climb with our backs to the view, counting steps as we march up and up and up.
“Look, I know it’s not about invitations.” What kind of a double-dork does she think I am? I may not be a make-out expert, but I’m not hopeless. “But you and I don’t just have to get into the party, we have to leave the party when, let’s face it, the party is probably just getting started.” I underline the point: “We make all the effort of busting into one of the cool-kid parties, and then leave before ten? Forget being known as goody-goods, we’ll be Cinderellas. Or worse” (trust me, there’s always a worse nickname to be had), “because at least Cinderella got to stay out till the witching hour.”
We plunk down on a wooden landing half-way up, where the stairs zigzag, wrapping our legs around the wooden poles, chins resting on the bottom rung of the handrails, pretending we’re enamoured with the view and we just have to stop and gaze, right that minute. People jog these steps every day, up and down, more than once. If I hadn’t just taken a month off my daily skating practice, would I be able to run up and down these steep steps, too? I start sweating just thinking about what Winnie will say if I don’t qualify in the Regionals. Winnie dreams about Olympic rings and podiums, but am I up for all that?
Rough Patch Page 4