Surge. Here. Running toward me. Surging toward me. And I suddenly realize his name isn’t Surge, but Serge, a traditional French name, not a goofy boy’s nickname. I say it out loud: “Serge.”
He plants a kiss on my lips. This is a crazy world, where church girls attend banned dances and boys who live way north of Edmonton appear in the middle of Calgary. And my best friend Sita doesn’t know two things about this person I’m kissing and even less about the person I wish I could be kissing.
Jayne.
When I pull back from Serge’s lips, I don’t see her any more. Literally pushing past his lips, I leave him to fend for himself.
“Sorry ... I’m sorry,” I say, but aim my words at the spot where Jayne stood. I feel terrible that Serge has come here, for me, and I’m running away from him. But I have to find Jayne right now; I’ll come back and deal with this mess after I catch up with Jayne and try to deal with that mess first.
Sita tells me later that Serge is the one who got my text (when I wrote that apology message, I missed by one letter under “S”). He texted back umpteen times, but Mom had my phone locked up by then. When I didn’t answer, he decided a grand gesture was called for. Serge skipped school so he could hop a bus to Edmonton and then another bus to Calgary. Took him over six hours. On the way, he sent me a swack of texts, telling me he knew my school had a Hallowe’en dance that day, and I should definitely go because there’d be a surprise there for me.
As Sita said, “Thank Shiva your mom didn’t sneak peeks at your messages.” Although if she had, getting grounded would have been so much less terrible than everything else that happened. Once on the bus, Serge worried that he’d run out of the house without a costume. So he drew a cheesy moustache-beard combo on his face and coloured in a patch over his eye with a black marker. Then he wound a pink cloth napkin around his head that he swiped from a truck stop in Red Deer. And a binder ring he’d clipped to his left ear.
By the time Sita told me all these details, it was way too late to call him, to thank him for making the trip down, just for me. And way too late to apologize. Serge took the red-eye bus back and must have arrived home around five in the morning.
But at the dance, Sita saw a boy kiss me, saw me withdraw from the boy’s arms and run past him, and did the math. As I ran for the doors, she pulled Serge in the other direction. She dragged him out into the goblin-filled night, and then he let her walk him back to the bus depot. Sita shoved him toward the bathroom to wash his face and got in line for him. She bought his ticket, she bought him a sandwich at the kiosk, she bought him a motorcycle magazine to read on the bus. We’d been friends again for less than an hour, yet Sita took charge of my mess of a love life and fixed up as much of it as she could. Which means she missed everything that happened next:
Jayne running through the parking lot, and me spotting her as I burst out the double doors, even though it’s lightly snowing. How did she get to the dance, what lie did she have to tell her family to get here? Maybe she convinced James to drive her, “just for a minute, just for a second,” just to “straighten Keira out,” or maybe she simply sneaked out of the house to be with me at the dance.
Then I see his car. James gets out and waves Jayne over. He starts toward her.
Without thinking, I call out, “No, he kissed me! Please, Jayne, I didn’t kiss him!” My feet think they’re on skates; I’ve somehow tricked them into thinking we’re already at tomorrow’s competition, so they glide me across the snowy asphalt in record time. My breathing comes out in shards, and what’s left of my heart pounds into my ribs, but my legs get me there.
I call out again, “Jayne, wait! Jayne, I’m sorry!” but either she doesn’t hear me or sorry isn’t enough.
I don’t blame her. Until today, I was too petrified to hold her hand in public, but I’ll apparently kiss any old boy in front of every student in the school.
James’s arm around Jayne’s shoulders, they walk away from me. I should be the one with my arm around her shoulders, not the one who makes her need an arm there.
“I wasn’t kissing him, Jayne!” I sob. “Please, stop!”
When they get to the car, James hugs her, calms her down. He’s being the protective big brother, protecting Jayne from awful me. When I reach them, I try to see if she’s crying or devastated or just angry, but Jayne keeps her face turned away from me. My breath is so jagged, it seems to fill the parking lot. James opens the back door, and I think she’s going to crawl in without even talking to me, but she hesitates, and both James and I notice. Every molecule in my body lifts when Jayne doesn’t just disappear into that car.
Still rasping air, I touch Jayne’s arm so I don’t have to apologize to the back of her head. She turns, and I see her eyes are red. She’s hurting. Because of me. I can fix this. I’m so going to fix this.
James reaches down, grabs something from the backseat. Then he takes a step toward me, his face an earthquake, an eruption of bile. In a flash, he shoots out his hand as if to shake mine. No alert, no alarm, just his fist moving too fast, blazing bright, shimmering in the light from the open car door—
—and then all I feel is a tremendous anguish in my belly, like James has punched me. Like my heart’s been broken and stomped on, but my heart’s in the wrong place. A very, very wrong place. Jayne makes a funny noise—not funny like laughing, but like the gulping sound our fridge sometimes makes—when James stabs me.
And then nothing.
CHAPTER: THE END
I wake up and the first thing I feel is the all-encompassing damage that I used to call my body. One eyelid, then the other. I’m alone in a hospital room.
I try to figure out what’s going on: I have bandages on my belly and up the back of my right leg. I’m attached to an IV. I don’t remember getting hit in the leg, but then, once James’s hand congealed into a knife, I just felt absolute agony and passed out.
Which means that at some point James stopped stabbing me and someone called an ambulance. Oh yeah, I remember waking up in the ambulance and twice more on a gurney in the middle of the hospital hallway. Each time, a voice asked me my name and each time, a sharp, horrific pain ripped through me. And each time, I passed out again.
This time, when I wake up, I can’t locate the pain in any one specific place. So I try to sit up, and feel that same rip of anguish in my stomach, as if to let me know that whatever happened really happened.
“Keira!” Mom rushes in. “Don’t move, baby, you just keep lying there.” Behind my mom, Tyler, poking his head into the room. His mouth contorts and he tosses a box of chocolates onto the bed. Tyler leans his head past the doorway, but his feet stay out. In a moment, even his head disappears.
Mom pulls a chair right up to the bed’s edge and rests one hand on the metal frame. She rests her other hand on my forehead, like having a fever might be the worst of my problems. She doesn’t speak. Beeps come from a nearby room, a plane flies directly above the hospital, I can hear someone pacing the hall. Maybe nurses. Maybe Tyler. If Tyler’s here, I must be dying.
The doctor comes in and informs me that James’s knife went into my abdomen, but not very far. Didn’t even cut through my stomach, just hurt like a skate blade in my gut, pick first. All I have to do now is wait for the stitches to do their work, lie around a lot, and I’ll be fine. Those are the doctor’s exact words: “You’re fine, there’s little wrong with you that time won’t heal.”
Turns out I have a bandage on my right leg because—after I went down from the gut thrust—James bent down to hamstring me, but he missed. Still, the knife tore through my calf tissue, leaving me with a serious avulsion injury (Winnie’s worst fear). How messed up do you have to be to attack another person, like, surgically?
Once home, I’ll be confined to my bed for two weeks, then I’ll hobble for three or four weeks on crutches, and then limp for months after that. Maybe longer. My right leg feels weird, sore and awkward and detached from the rest of me. Maybe I’ll limp right into grade eleven, or
even graduation. For right now, I need a nurse just to get to the bathroom. Mostly, I pass out a lot.
When I wake up again, Mom’s still by my bed. At some point, she’ll demand to know what I did to deserve being stabbed. Do I have an answer?
Instead, I stick to a safe topic. “Where’s Dad?” I ask. Mom reaches for my hand, but doesn’t answer. “Is he at work? Wait, what time is it?” The pale light drifting through the window feels like evening. Is it tomorrow night? Who’s taking care of Sam?
Mom smooths the hospital sheets that I’ve bunched in my fist. My head hurts just from trying to figure out what time of day it is, and I didn’t even get stabbed in the head. Holy shit! Did he cut my head? My hands jolt to my skull to check for scarring, and I nearly puke from the pain.
Okay, Dad usually sleeps in, in the morning, but ... I can’t figure it out. Too many questions, most of which I’m not about to ask Mom. Like: should I call Serge or will I only make him feel worse? “So, am I trapped in here, am I on some kind of danger alert? Or are they gonna let me out with a warning?” I’m trying to come off as adorable, as brave and funny. Every muscle hurts, but I don’t pass out. “And Sam? You guys didn’t tell—”
“Samantha’s at a play date,” Mom informs me. “Tyler will pick her up in a few hours.”
“So Dad’s working early ...?” My tongue stumbles: “Or he—
Mom cuts in, “Keira.” Full stop. Tyler’s left shoulder leans against the door jam. I hear the ping of an elevator and other droning hallway noises. Mom tries her own deep breath trick. “Your dad and I ... we disagree. About what ... about you.”
My heart sinks, slithers.
“He ... he doesn’t want you to come home.” Before my heart can take another blow, she jumps in: “He’s upset, he’s just blaring and buzzing.” Mom’s palm against my face stroking and bolstering my deteriorating centre. “Your home is your home, of course, and you belong at home.” Now it’s her tongue that doesn’t work properly.
My whole body blubbers.
“Oh, Keira. Oh, baby.” A few of her own tears peek out. “Tyler and I told him he can’t”—she swallows—“keep you from your home. For now, he’s staying at the hotel where he works in the bar. He’ll cool off.”
“Dad doesn’t want me ... doesn’t want me home?” I ask. All the skating falls I’ve ever experienced have never made me hurt like this. My funny-brave mask cracks open, and I can’t think of a single cute response. I am over-the-top sob-heaving when Mom scoots over and gently pulls my head into her arms. She holds me like I’m her baby, and then we’re bawling together.
I could have spent the rest of my high school years as a het-girl. I could have saved the gay pride parade for after I’m past the parental grip. That’s how Jayne planned to do it.
But I would do it all again. Most of it. The kissing a girl part, the still liking (some) boys. Jayne’s wrong about me; I do know who I am, I just don’t have a dictionary definition. My body’s a mess, my brain’s jumbled, but I’m not confused, not any more. I try to hold onto that, that I know who I am. I try to clutch that thought permanently between my fingers and squeeze. When I do, Mom just sees me clenching the sheets.
Mom has barely left my room since our Big Cry. Tyler brings Sam—who loves racing up and down hospital ramps, and adores that she and I wheelchair it to the visiting lounge together—and he takes her home at night. When he’s around, Tyler’s expression zips around like a rollercoaster, though he mostly just stays away. But when Mom gets up to pee, he leans into the room and tosses a key onto the bed.
“Mom told Dad we changed the locks,” he explains, as if that clears everything up. And in a way, it does. I can’t imagine Dad knocking on the door to his own house, but I can’t picture him trying to bust in, either.
The greatest casualty is that I can’t skate. Not in the finals, not in any upcoming competition, not even for fun. Technically, I can skate, but the doctor explains that my right leg can’t bear to land.
I ask about the competition. Mom says that Zoë Bandicoff came in first, perfectly primed for the Provincials in January. I ask the doctor how long I’ll have to be away from skating practice. If I could manage four weeks over the summer, I can get back into form after six weeks off my feet, right?
“No skating,” the doctor tells me, and heads out to finish rounds. I slump down in my bed. My legs slump with me. “No skating” is also what the physio tells me when she comes round to explain my exercises. What Mom repeatedly tells me, what all the nurses tell me. Mom admits that Winnie pulled my name from the application roster for the Provincials as soon as Mom called her. No more ice for Keira. By the time my leg recovers, if it recovers, the competitions will have left me behind. No more skating—sounds like a sentence out of a science-fiction novel, to me. No lights, no music, no trophy. No fun. Every time my throbbing leg wakes me up, I cry. How can I lose skating too? Truth be true, this loss hurts more than losing Jayne. When I fall asleep, I dream I’m in the Finals, executing a perfect triple Lutz, but when I land my blade collapses, my toe smashes through the ice, and my leg disappears underneath me.
The one thing I was good at, really good at, and James took that from me, too.
BI ALERT: WITHIN MINUTES—KISSES A BOY, DECLARES LOVE TO A GIRL, DUMPS THE BOY, REUNITES WITH HER BFF.
POST-TRAUMATIC EPILOGUE SYNDROME
First day she visits, Sita tells me all about Serge and more about what everyone’s now calling “the incident.” I learn that Jayne wasn’t the one who called the ambulance. Joline called them. She came out of the school doors behind me, probably to sneak a smoke. Then she saw me go down like I was punched. She dialled 9-1-1, and yelled, “I’m calling 9-1-1! I’m calling 9-1-1!” as she flew across the parking lot. Joline, my saviour.
James got the hell out of there. “So did the other girl,” Mom adds. She still won’t leave my room, she can barely stop holding my hand. She says “the other girl,” like Jayne’s not part of what happened to me. I don’t push it, though; it’s not like I told Mom anything about Jayne before Hallowe’en. The cops arrested James the very evening of the attack—he was at home. And he’s been arraigned already. He acted ruthlessly to save his sister from evil me. Sita whispers that last part.
My hospital room fills with get-well cards and boxes and boxes of candy. The cards include: a pop-up thermometer from Marisol and Raf; a non-descript paisley card from the school principal and staff; a giant cardboard skate signed by Winnie and Zoë and all my skating pals. Joline and The Two, Marly and Kaitlyn, even sent cards. And Sita’s family’s been sending over paneer pakora snacks and raisin and nut naan bread practically every day.
Nothing from Dad, though I overheard Mom crying into the phone last night when she thought I was long asleep.
Tyler buys me a T-shirt that he leaves on my bed while I’m out of the room doing a hospital lap with Sammie. It reads: “Favourite Parent: Praying Mantis.” Tyler. Who tortured me for years, but in a sibling way. Maybe we don’t hate each other, I think, now that I’ve seen what hate really looks like. Maybe we just haven’t learned how to be regular people with each other.
“Why did she leave?” I ask Sita, when my Mom’s finally taken the hint and offers to pick Sam up from school while Tyler goes to basketball practice. Sita knows exactly what I’m asking and what the right answer should be. But after all we’ve been through, Sita isn’t going to candy-coat what happened.
“I dunno, Keira,” she says. No actual hand-flip, but it’s in her voice.
Me, I can’t let it go. “She went with James. She chose him.” Of all the things I feared, when it came to getting close to a girl, her choosing her violent brother over me wasn’t one of them. “She stood right there when the knife went in—” I choke, but I keep going. “She saw me go down. She saw my blood.”
“She probably froze,” Sita says. “She froze because it was so scary and unbelievable.” She takes a breath, and then out come all her theories, like she’s been asking herself the same
question and so can give me answers. “She froze, or she panicked. Or she’s afraid of James, who’s a crazy maniac. But the real answer—who knows? From what you say, Jayne seemed like good people, but you didn’t know her very well.”
Sita’s not blaming me, but I realize that I really didn’t know the only two people I’ve ever kissed. How bad is that?
“Okay, um, not sure how to tell you, but it gets worse,” she warns me.
I clench the sheets, as if that’ll help. “How can it get worse than being stabbed by my girlfriend’s maniac brother?”
“Her dad sent her away.”
“Away,” I repeat. “Where away? For how long?”
“For forever,” Sita answers. “The neighbour on our right goes to Jayne’s family’s church. She reported to my mother all about Jayne’s dad putting an end to her heathen life here in the big city.” Sita takes a breath and gets to the roughest patch of her story. “Jayne’s dad sent her to a religious school in the middle of nowhere, and he asked them to bump her back to grade nine. He said she needs the time to mature, but he obviously just wants her in jail for as long as possible.” Sita strokes my arm. “She’s not coming back, Keira. They’re not allowed phones or computers there. They even have a dress code.”
And that tiny detail is somehow the last straw because then I picture Jayne in a flowery print dress instead of her decorated jeans. And now I can’t see her face any more, which makes me burst into tears. Again.
“They’ll probably make her change the spelling of her name,” I sputter, like her fading into a real Plain Jane is the worst tragedy ever. I cry out a bathtub of tears, then I cry out the entire Bow River, and then the Elbow River for good measure. And when I’m done, Sita wipes my eyes with her sleeve.
Rough Patch Page 16