Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “But that’s when I noticed it,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  Jordan was only about five foot four, but Freddy could have sworn his indignation helped him spontaneously grow a foot right then and there so that he towered over Cuerva Lachance as he shouted, “I don’t know who you think you are, but you have no right to disturb the neighbourhood like this!”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Freddy caught movement from Roland, and she turned a bit towards him. He was gently backing away from Jordan, looking ashamed. He couldn’t have seen what Jordan was saying, but Mel had been translating for him again. For a fraction of a second, Freddy felt sorry for Roland. It was never fun when parents drew attention to themselves in public.

  That fraction of a second was all it took for Mum to join in. “You don’t have the sense that God gave a grasshopper,” Mum said drily to Cuerva Lachance. Mum was wearing a flannel nightgown with teddy bears on it. “Hasn’t anyone ever taught you manners?”

  “No,” said Josiah from behind Cuerva Lachance. “So terribly sorry. Won’t happen again. No idea how she managed to get into the room and lock the door and brace various pieces of furniture against it so w—so I couldn’t break it down.”

  “I taught him manners,” Cuerva Lachance explained. “I’m Cuerva Lachance. It’s very nice to meet you.”

  Jordan and Mum stood on the porch and gaped at Cuerva Lachance. “Mum,” said Mel, “she’s not going to do it again. Let’s go home.”

  “You’re damn right she’s not going to do it again,” said Jordan. “Do you hear that, Ms. Lachance? I forbid you to play that organ ever again.”

  “Dad…” said Roland.

  “Not at night, at least, please,” said Mum, who did have a certain amount of common sense.

  Cuerva Lachance was pretty obviously not taking any of this in. She beamed at Freddy. “I’ve always wanted a pipe organ next to my bedroom. It’s very convenient. Have a good night!”

  Jordan evidently couldn’t think of anything satisfying to reply to this. He spluttered for a bit, then turned tightly on the spot and marched back out into the lane, Mum and Roland close behind him.

  It was all getting a little bit too weird. Freddy moved as slowly as she could down the walk towards the back gate. When she heard Josiah start up with, “So now you’ve gone and alienated the ducklings’ parents, and we’re going to have the cops here, and see if I bail you out this time,” she softly ducked behind the rhododendron halfway between the door and the gate.

  Mel was already there. Their eyes met, and Mel nodded. “I heard voices behind Josiah,” she whispered.

  “Josiah almost said ‘we’ when he talked about breaking down the door,” Freddy whispered back.

  Her sister could be a pain sometimes, but one thing Freddy had always appreciated about Mel was that it was rarely necessary to explain things to her. The two girls crouched behind the rhododendron. It wasn’t a great eavesdropping spot. Though Josiah and Cuerva Lachance hadn’t closed the door yet, they were at least twenty feet away and not speaking particularly loudly. Freddy had always wondered how characters in books and movies ended up hiding coincidentally in convenient nooks and crannies while people held long expository conversations nearby. It never seemed to work out that way for her. Most of what she could hear now was incomprehensible.

  “But Josie,” said Cuerva Lachance at one point. Then her voice sank again. A bit later, Josiah said, “… intimidate their parents. You know we have to find out…” The rest of the sentence was lost.

  “… which one it is,” Freddy eventually heard from Cuerva Lachance, and then, “… don’t really fit. It’s very exciting.”

  They missed a large chunk of the discussion as Josiah’s voice sank to an angry murmur. Freddy thought she caught the word “organ” and maybe also “complete moron,” but nothing else came through clearly until Cuerva Lachance said, “… after September twenty-seventh, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” said Josiah, “but there’s no guarantee. Why did you have to…?”

  The rest was whispers, with the occasional growl from Josiah. A minute or so later, the door closed, and the voices died away. Freddy and Mel crouched in the damp grass and looked at each other. Are they investigating us? thought Freddy. It seemed unlikely. Why would anyone want to? And what was going to happen on September twenty-seventh? From the expression on Mel’s face, she was just as baffled as Freddy. The light went out in the house on Grosvenor Street, and Mel melted to shadow. Freddy had known eavesdropping was useless, but she hadn’t realised it would leave her so much more confused than before.

  5

  “Oh my God,” said Cathy. “What’s your boyfriend doing now?”

  They were in math class. The situation had deteriorated. She should have known it would.

  The first week of school, after the initial terrible Tuesday with Josiah popping up everywhere and dragging her into his world, Freddy had hoped Josiah would calm down and settle in. The second week, she’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t. Now it was Thursday of the third week, and “pretty sure” had tipped over into “absolutely certain.”

  There had been the presentation in science class. Freddy figured Ms. Treadwell had seen plenty of bad presentations in the past, but even so, the teacher had had a hard time finding anything nice to say about Josiah’s, which had involved him rolling a marble down the slopes of three broken toys and declaring he had proven gravity existed. The closest she’d managed to get was, “That was a very creative use of materials, Josiah.”

  There had been the incident in drama. Josiah hadn’t started out the year in Freddy’s drama class, but he’d been kicked out of shop after threatening another student with a soldering iron. He was probably about to be kicked out of drama as well. She did have to admit it was bad luck that had led Mr. Singh to walk into the classroom when Josiah was in the middle of a spirited imitation of him, though she thought the fact that Josiah had then kept going was likely his own fault.

  There had been the problem in English. It hadn’t started as a problem; it had started as poetry. Mr. Dillon had been trying to teach them about iambic pentameter. Freddy, who thanks to her mother had known what iambic pentameter was since she was eight, had happily blocked him out, right up until the point where Josiah had said, “Fun poetry fact: Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote ‘Kubla Khan’ while strung out on opium. I vote we follow his example and see how many great poems we produce.” Mr. Dillon had made matters worse by getting drawn into a debate about how drugs could be bad if they were seen as the direct cause of poems.

  There had been band, with the trombone players in open revolt against Josiah’s tendency to distract them constantly with sarcastic comments. There had been PE and the painful five minutes involving the volleyball and the handful of thumbtacks. There had been the time Josiah carried a pigeon into the cafeteria and set it loose right next to the table occupied by grade twelve jocks. Now there was math class. It was a little sad. Math was the last class Josiah hadn’t propelled into disorder.

  Ms. Liu was staring at the proof he had written on the whiteboard, her mouth opening and closing with shock. Freddy knew it was a proof because she had seen proofs in films, plus occasionally doodled on scrap paper by Mel. She didn’t know what it was for. It didn’t look much like the geometry problem Josiah had been set.

  All through his campaign of terror and destruction, Josiah had kept his word and left Freddy out of it. He hadn’t brought up her name or even looked at her while he was spreading amusing anarchy through the school. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she was having to struggle so ferociously against the impulse to join in.

  I’m not like him, she told herself. And she wasn’t. But she had the strangest feeling that despite the black eyes and the fact that nobody liked him, Josiah was having much more fun in school than she ever had.

  Ms. Liu said, “But that’s unsolvable. It’s existed since 1978!”

  “Oopsy,” said Josiah, sounding bored.

  Most o
f the class was giggling. Freddy knew that Josiah had just added “math nerd” to the long, long list of things that were wrong with him. She wanted to shake him. She also wanted him to show her how he had done the proof. Asking him about the proof would have been social suicide. Her life was giving her a headache.

  Roland stood up. When Roland stood up, everyone noticed. Every head in the room except Ms. Liu’s swung towards him. Distractedly, Freddy saw he had somehow managed to make a math textbook and three sheets of loose-leaf paper look like a hopeless mess.

  “Sit down,” said Roland to Josiah. “Why do you have to make such a big deal of everything?”

  Freddy found she was watching through her fingers. Now half the class was laughing at Josiah and half at Roland.

  Josiah signed, Why do you care? You didn’t have to say anything.

  I didn’t understand that, thought Freddy, but it was just a reflex. She felt her hands drop from her face. Josiah signed? Since when did Josiah sign? He’d never indicated before that he knew American Sign Language. Roland didn’t seem surprised, either. Josiah had signed to him before, then, when Freddy hadn’t been there.

  The giggling had stopped. Freddy knew why. The hearing kids and the Deaf kids didn’t mix. Oh, they had some classes together, and there were a few friendships that crossed the invisible boundary, but Freddy didn’t think she had ever seen a hearing kid who wasn’t related to a Deaf kid use fluent and unthinking sign language in school.

  Ms. Liu should have been doing something. She was still staring at the proof. Freddy thought maybe she should do something herself. She stayed where she was.

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are,” said Roland.

  Not funny, signed Josiah. Bored.

  “Go be bored somewhere else,” said Roland.

  The bell rang. Freddy stayed in her seat, slowly packing up, as the other students headed for the door. With luck, Josiah and Roland would be swept up by the crowd, and she wouldn’t have to deal with either of them on the way out.

  She had miscalculated as usual. When she started for the classroom’s one doorway, up near the front of the room, Josiah and Roland were still standing by the whiteboard, having a furious argument in sign language. She caught glimpses of it as she tried to edge past them:… None of your business … What’s wrong with you?… After I saw … That was a mistake … Through the wall … Very thin wall … Don’t talk to her!

  The last was from Roland, with a vicious stab of his finger towards Freddy for the “her.” As she reached the boys, sidling around Ms. Liu, who seemed paralysed by whatever Josiah had written on the board, Josiah turned to her and said, “Goodness gracious, look at the time. We’d better get to band. I like band. Let me carry your books and pretend to be friends with you just to make this idiot mad. How do you live with him? I shall get my useless things, and we shall stop the pointless argument.” He threw Roland a scathing glance, then headed back to his seat to pick up his books.

  Freddy was left being loomed over by Roland. “You need to stay away from that guy,” he said in a bullying tone that immediately made Freddy want to become Josiah’s best friend.

  “You keep saying,” Freddy told him, “but you don’t say why. Am I supposed to stay away from everyone you don’t like? I’ll have to start avoiding myself.”

  He wrapped his hand around her arm and, ignoring his interpreter’s meaningful gestures towards his books, towed Freddy out into the hallway. “I don’t have to like you to try to stop you from doing something stupid,” said Roland. “He’s dangerous. They’re dangerous.”

  He sounded so serious about it that Freddy bit back a snarl and simply said, “Why?”

  “If you don’t know, it’s better,” said Roland. “Make sure it stays that way. And stop letting Mel play detective. I’ve seen her snooping around that house. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into.”

  It was true that Mel had been lurking in the lane a lot lately, not very subtly. Freddy thought Mel had more faith in the power of eavesdropping than she did. “Maybe she would if you told her,” said Freddy, “since you seem to know so much.”

  Kids were arriving for the next math class now. From the looks of them, they were in grade eleven or twelve, big, rangy almost-adults who stared with annoyance at the stupid grade nines blocking their way. “You need to get your books,” said Freddy, “and I need to go to band. Let me go.”

  “Stay away from the house on Grosvenor Street,” said Roland. “And stay away from Josiah.”

  It was only when she was halfway to the band room that she realised Josiah had stayed in the room throughout the confrontation. She wondered if he had been lurking just out of sight, listening.

  * * *

  He caught up with her on the walk home. He usually did. Freddy, glancing covertly at him, felt almost guilty about it. Well, she hadn’t promised Roland, and besides, where did he get off telling her what to do? There was some mystery about Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, but they weren’t dangerous unless very loud organ music and a tendency to collect chairs posed some terrible, undefinable threat.

  “What was all that with Roland?” she said. “I didn’t think you guys’d ever said two words to each other.”

  Josiah rolled his eyes so dramatically that for a moment, the irises almost completely vanished. “I don’t pretend to understand how that boy’s brain works. I’m not sure it does work. I saw his math homework on the way past his desk. He was drawing swords on it.”

  “Well, he’s not stupid,” said Freddy grudgingly, “but he doesn’t try.” It was something she’d noticed about Roland. He called her brainless sometimes, and she called him dense, but she suspected that if they had ever taken an IQ test together, they would have more or less tied.

  “Swords,” said Josiah. “On homework sheets.”

  She rounded on him. “You can talk. What was that thing you wrote on the board?”

  “That?” said Josiah with contempt. “An unsolvable problem. It was written to be unsolvable. There’s a mistake in my solution. Ms. Spineless will find it eventually. She was a math genius in university, you know, but she had a breakdown in her third year and settled for education.”

  She didn’t ask him how he knew this. She wasn’t in the mood for shameless lies. “And you sign.”

  “What? Of course I sign. Why wouldn’t I?”

  Freddy said, “Why would you?”

  “Long, dreary experience of the world. I picked it up somewhere along the way.”

  They started across the park. “You always talk as if you’re ninety,” said Freddy.

  “It seems that way sometimes,” said Josiah. “I keep telling you that you need to take most of what I say as a metaphor.”

  She was trying to think of something cruel to say in reply when the strains of “It’s a Small World (After All),” mixed with a little bit of “Shenandoah,” began to ring out over the park. Freddy saw the heads of the kids on the swing set turn towards the house on Grosvenor Street.

  “Damn it,” said Josiah. “Is your stepdad home?”

  “Is my stepdad ever home?” said Freddy, but Josiah was already running, making little yelps of irritated indignation as he went. Freddy raced after him. Cuerva Lachance had been finding it difficult to stay away from the organ. Mel said she’d heard that the neighbours had filed several complaints with the police, but as far as Freddy could tell, nothing had come of them.

  Freddy was on Josiah’s heels as he crossed the street. She could see Mel standing on the sidewalk next to their side gate, one hand on the latch as she stared at Josiah. Josiah tried to run past her, but she grabbed him by the arm.

  “What are you doing there?” Mel shouted over the music. “I just saw you over there!”

  Josiah screamed, “No, you didn’t. Let me go; I’ve got to stop—”

  “I had a whole conversation with you!” she bellowed. “You told me things about frogs!”

  “You’re dreaming,” shouted Freddy. “We were walking home from s
chool.”

  Josiah gave an impatient squirm and tore himself from Mel’s grasp. The girls moved out onto the sidewalk and watched him sprinting for the house, shrieking, “Cuerva Lachance! Cuerva Lachance!” He wrenched open the door. The music got briefly louder, though not by much. The door slammed shut.

  It took him nearly two minutes to get into the organ room and shut Cuerva Lachance up. There was a moment of discord, as if someone’s hands had been wrenched from the console, and blissful silence descended.

  Mel turned to her sister. “I know what I saw, Freddy. I was talking to him five minutes ago.”

  “You couldn’t have been,” said Freddy. “We were just starting across the park five minutes ago.”

  “Then Josiah can be in two places at once,” said Mel.

  The girls gazed at each other thoughtfully. Mel had a good imagination, and she didn’t always tell the truth, but she was a terrible liar, and she wasn’t lying now. She had been talking to Josiah, or she thought she had.

  Mel was looking at the house. “Who’s that?”

  “Where?” Freddy turned, following Mel’s gaze. She thought she caught a flicker of movement at one of the gable windows, but when she looked more closely, there was no one there.

  “There was a girl,” said Mel. “Or a woman. With long hair, anyway. Not Cuerva Lachance. She was looking out one of the second-floor windows.”

  “We know there’s someone else living there,” said Freddy. “We just don’t know who.”

  “Maybe they’re keeping a madwoman in the attic,” said Mel. “We’ll only find out for sure when she sets the house on fire and jumps off the roof.”

  This sounded like an allusion to something, a common hazard of talking to Mel. Freddy ignored it. “Roland warned me off Josiah again.”

  “He’s been going at me, too,” said Mel. “I think something happened with him and Cuerva Lachance.”

  Freddy said, “He says they’re dangerous.” As she thought about it, her usual fizzing anger was starting up again. Okay, maybe Roland had been serious, but why did he have to be so … so belligerent about it? What was wrong with, “Freddy, please stay away from the house on Grosvenor Street. I’m worried about you guys. Let me tell you what happened to me last week”? Instead, he tried to force her into doing what he wanted, and he didn’t even bother to explain why.