Best Friends Through Eternity

by Sylvia McNicoll

  “Being adopted is a way better deal,” Max says.

  “So you don’t think I should head to China to find them?” I ask his father.

  “There are more than a billion people in China. Probably a million or so have your surname.”

  Again that seems like a no, which is a relief, in a way. If I can’t change fate, there isn’t enough time to get a passport, let alone fly to China, and to tell the truth, I still balk at the idea of visiting a country that hates girls so much.

  “Was I right about ‘fortune’? Does her name have something to do with good luck?”

  “Fortune in the arts,” his father says. “Are you artistically inclined, by any chance?”

  “No.” My heart sinks. I’m not the person my parents thought I would be. “I’m more your cliché Chinese girl, interested in the sciences.” I try to smile.

  “Paige is a nice name,” Max suggests brightly.

  “For a writer,” I answer.

  “What’s in a name?” Mr. Liu says, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Romeo and Juliet,” I say.

  “Act two, scene two,” Max adds.

  Max’s dad smiles broadly. “Do I look like a Victor? That’s my first name.”

  He does look like a winner, although the name has an old-fashioned ring to it. I shrug. “Thanks for translating.” I wave the slice I’m eating. “And the pizza.”

  “No problem. Nice to meet you.” He has to excuse himself to help out in the kitchen.

  Afterward, I watch Max differently as he wipes his chin. His wide nose, lips and the shape of his jawline resemble his dad’s, and you can see that when he grows taller and styles his hair, he will be handsome, too. It would be very interesting to be his friend, grow up alongside him and watch the transformation. Only I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see it.

  RETAKE:

  Wednesday Afternoon

  We step off the bus in front of the school just as the bell rings. At least one team member should spot us from a classroom window. By now the volleyball team must know that I’m not Cameron’s chosen one. Me hanging with Max should be a big clue. But that doesn’t mean they let up on me. By the time I walk into French class on the third floor, I must be a total of five minutes late.

  Madame Potvin chooses not to notice, but Kierstead speaks up to point it out. “Shouldn’t Paige get a late slip?”

  “En français, s’il vous plaît,” Madame P answers.

  Kierstead rolls her big brown eyes. She opens her pouty mouth and tries, “Est-ce que Paige…,” then huffs in frustration. “Oh, never mind.”

  I smile. The joy of acting stupid to be cool. Kierstead doesn’t come off too great today.

  Madame Potvin looks directly at me. “Pas encore, Paige.” My warning.

  “D’accord,” I agree. “Je m’excuse.” Being late isn’t a habit of mine, anyway.

  “Teacher’s pet,” Kierstead grumbles.

  I shrug. I like learning a new language and speaking French. The grammar rules seem way more logical than in English. More logical than people, too. Let’s face it, Kierstead is trying to get even with me over the Cameron/Vanessa breakup, when she is just itching to go out with Cameron herself.

  Later Madame P wants someone to conjugate the verb être with en retard, so she calls on me, her idea of showing the class that she hasn’t entirely let me off the hook for slipping in after the bell. I am late, you are late (singular informal), he/she is late, you are late (plural formal), we are late, they are late, I rhyme them all off perfectly in French.

  Better late than dead, I think to myself ruefully. If I’d left later on Monday, I would still be alive and living through next week instead of trying to improve on this last one.

  Next break, Morgan and Laura march toward me in the hall, only parting slightly to knock me hard from either side.

  “Ow!” I squawk.

  “Excuse us,” Laura calls.

  “You all right?” Max rushes to me. He’s sweet. Last time they bulldozed me, too, but no one was around to sympathize. No Max, and Jazz was busy with Cameron. “What’s with them, anyway?”

  “Dunno. They might think I’m going out with Cameron.” Although last time they knocked me, it was just because I was friends with the person going out with him.

  “Well, that’s ridiculous.” Max slips his arm around me. “You’re going out with me,” he says loudly.

  Okay, well this is a predicament. Being his friend is more fun than I thought. It’s a little embarrassing to have this short boy’s arm around my waist, though. I can feel my skin turn red. Or is that orange, I wonder, when you add pink to yellow?

  He kisses my cheek.

  I squawk again.

  “Too much?” he asks. He speaks softly, “I just thought it would make them leave you alone.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyhow, it felt nice,” he adds.

  Strangely, it did. My cheek still tingles, but I find I can’t admit this so I just punch his shoulder and grin.

  He takes my hand and walks me to science class. It feels weird, but I don’t shake him off. “Sit with me on the bus tomorrow?” Max asks before we go in.

  “What? Oh, you mean for the trip to Body Worlds!”

  Max smiles, taking the return of my memory as a yes. “It’s going to be great. My doctor said it was the finest form of mummification. The organs are really well preserved.”

  I so looked forward to that, last time. But sitting alone on the bus, with the big space beside me advertising loser, hadn’t been that much fun. Wandering the exhibit alone hadn’t been great, either. Abbi tripped me and after, as I lay sprawled on the floor, Kierstead stepped on my legs. Mr. Brewster saw what happened and lectured them about running in the museum.

  They apologized—what could I say to their mumbled-under-the-breath “sorry”? “Whatever”—then they snickered into their hands when Mr. Brewster headed to another exhibit.

  Will it be better walking around with Max? Are you any more of a nerd if you group yourself with another brainiac? Stupid haircut, hooded brown eyes, short, a bit squat even, a nice guy destined to become good-looking. His smile isn’t dazzling, but it’s pleasant. This time around I want company and, if I can admit it to myself, Max’s company. I don’t care what anyone thinks.

  “Yeah, let’s sit together, Max.”

  At the end of the day, I don’t know whether his handholding thing works at all because someone took a marker to my locker. Browner. Geek. Banana. Ho.

  And my personal favorite: You’re dead!

  By the time Jazz finally returns from her mall wanderings with Cameron, I’ve borrowed some paint remover from one of the cleaning ladies. The letters are barely visible.

  “I had such a great time!” Jazz hugs me. “Thank you for covering. We’ve finally decided to make it official and go public.”

  “But what about your parents?” I ask.

  “Never! Public at school, not at home.” She tucks her arm in mine and we head out of the building.

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  This Wednesday’s weather seems different than last Wednesday’s, though. Drearier? The air still feels as cold and damp as it did this morning, but the fog has cleared. The gray snow slops against my feet. I can feel the wet seeping in. “I mean, I’ve already had the leg bashing. Do you want that?”

  “Cameron will protect me.” She smiles, all moony.

  “Well, then, he’s got to start walking you home, Jazz.” I don’t look at her to see if she’s still smiling.

  “But for that I have you.”

  I sigh. “I’ll do my best.” It all feels so hopeless to me. I can’t change how Jazz feels about anything. Can’t talk her into not going out with him. Can’t even make her hide it anymore. The only thing I can do is stand alongside her against ten girls on Monday. It’s like watching Romeo and Juliet again.

  So I change the subject. “What Punjabi specialty do you have to learn tonight?”


  “Oh, don’t get me started!” Jazz complains. But apparently I already have. The rest of the way, she talks about making bread from scratch, roti and naan, chapati, paratha … so many. “They’re shoving their way of life down my throat. I mean, who needs that many carbs!”

  The rest of the way, she also manages to make me envious that she knows her background and culture. That she lives with her “real” family. When I leave her, I decide I will talk to my mother. If anyone knows how to track down my biological family, she’s the one. After all, isn’t she the parent stubbornly holding the hand of my comatose body on some other plane of existence?

  I say good-bye to Jasmine and hurry home.

  Usually my parents take turns spelling each other off at the store, Dad coming home always around four. ’Course that day both are late, so I defrost some eggplant balls and start some pasta.

  When Mom comes in, she comments on how good it smells and hugs me. I try to hug back and then launch into The Conversation.

  “Jasmine is talking a lot about her trip to India. She’s worried about the marriage thing, of course. But she got me thinking. She has grandparents, aunts and uncles and even cousins there.”

  Mom heads me off. “You have cousins and aunts and uncles, right here.”

  “Yes, but they’re not blood related. I don’t have any real family history. Kim is about as close as I got.”

  Mom stares at me, fish-mouthed for a moment. Then she speaks. “Okay, we can book our trip to China this summer. I’ve always planned for us to go. We can see the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square.…”

  “Those are landmarks, not family.”

  Mom chews at her lip. “That’s true. But you can get to know your culture, the history of your people, the language. You can feel closer to your roots that way.”

  “Mom, I don’t want culture. I don’t want to go to China, either. Can’t we look for my real family? E-mail the orphanage for records?”

  Mom smiles. “Honey, we don’t even have so much as a scrap of clothing left from your biological family. We don’t even know your name.”

  “Oh yeah?” I produce the folded-up Certificate of Abandonment from my pocket. “Isn’t my Chinese name He Fuyi?”

  “So you were in my bedroom yesterday.” Mom frowns and shakes her head. Her pale skin turns pink.

  “Yes, not stealing anything or shooting up.” I pause for a heartbeat and continue. “My friend’s dad translated. ‘Fuyi’ means lucky in art or something like that.”

  Mom’s mouth straightens. “Yes, well, the orphanage just made that one up. They needed to call you something while you lived there. And put something on the papers.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. If your parents had left a name, they might as well have come forward and formally put you up for adoption, instead of …” She flounders for a moment.

  “Abandoning me by a lamppost at the back door of the nursery?” I finish for her. It’s a punch in the gut. Even this name that doesn’t suit me doesn’t come from my real parents. It feels as if I have nothing of my own.

  “Oh, honey. It’s just the best they could do under impossible circumstances. They knew you’d be found there. If they had come forward, they would have been fined.”

  “So they’d get some kind of ticket for putting me up for adoption?”

  “For having you in the first place!” my mother says. “A fine would have broken a poor family. We can’t imagine it. We’re never even hungry, never mind starving.”

  She’s right. I can’t imagine it. How is it possible for people on one side of the world to be so poor that they throw their children away? I can’t let myself feel sad or I will be swallowed. Instead, I tuck myself behind a shell. I straighten my shoulders, hold my mouth in a neutral line and breathe deeply.

  “Paige, Paige, don’t hate her.” Mom rushes to hug me again. “I only wish I could contact your mother to thank her for what she’s done for us. Because of her sacrifice, we have you.” Mom’s crying.

  From behind my shell, it’s hard to reach around her and hug back. Finally, I speak again. “Why did you call me Paige?” A silly question, the answer can’t solve anything.

  “We just thought the name sounded pretty.”

  “You didn’t hope I’d be a writer?” I ask her.

  “Heavens, no.” She smiles. “If anything, I knew bringing you home was turning a wonderful page in our life.” She hugs me so tightly that I can smell the salt of her tears. “But it’s the wrong spelling, in any case.”

  “What’s in a name?” I repeat Juliet’s and Max’s dad’s words and shrug, relieved I haven’t disappointed her in how I turned out.

  “We should go to China together. You need to be astounded and amazed, and then you won’t hate your birth country and family so much.”

  I shake my head. “I just can’t.” I want to feel something besides this rockiness in my chest. With only five days left, there isn’t enough time to visit my homeland, even if I can stomach it. No time, unless I somehow shift occurrences enough … but won’t Kim and her elders have to reel me back to that beach in the sky if I change things that drastically? Have I changed anything based on knowledge gained from my previous week? How can I not have caused different things to happen? I’m behaving differently, and yet I’m still here. There has to be hope.

  RETAKE:

  Thursday’s Field Trip

  Next morning, we’re off to the science center for our field trip. Fifty-four kids fit on a bus, which means both our grade nine classes squeeze together in that enclosed area. Windows are shut and frosted over, so we can’t even see outside. The smell of wet coats and cherry bubble gum overwhelms me, and because there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to look, my eyes drift to the new official couple.

  They come out in a big way: beautiful and in a world of their own, like actors in a perfume commercial. Jazz leans her head full of shiny black hair on Cameron’s shoulder. He strokes it, strokes her face and kisses her. Their love doesn’t seem like a game he’s playing to make Vanessa jealous. Something temporary. It looks gentle and sweet, a real feeling that’s growing bigger.

  Doesn’t everyone want to experience love like that? Certainly I do. Instead, I sit next to Max, the round-faced boy with the square bangs. That feels easy and comfortable, like sitting on a blanket on the beach. Not that beach where Kim is waiting for me, though.

  In the seat ahead of us, Vanessa sits alone with her forehead pressed against the frozen window. She hasn’t even rubbed a looking hole out of the white. I can smell her burnt-tire anger, like a car accident when the driver desperately brakes.

  Max chatters at me about the things he found out about the exhibit, when he searched for it on the Internet last night. Apparently Gunther von Hagens is the one who devised the plastination method to preserve the entire body from the inside out. “The idea came to him at the butcher. He decided to try the same meat slicer on a human liver. Which made it way easier to cut it all up and saturate it with polymer.”

  Vanessa turns around. “You’re making me sick; why don’t you just shut up?”

  My mouth drops open—I can’t help but gape. She looks pale and she isn’t wearing any makeup. What’s up with her? Does she think she can entice Cameron back with her white eyelashes and faded eyes?

  She snaps around in her seat again to sulk at the pane full of frost.

  Max stops talking and wags his eyebrows at me to make fun of Vanessa. Still, he clams up as she commanded, and really, what could she do to make him? Somehow he knows enough not to cross her. I wish he had the courage to stand up to her. Then I would know I can count on him. Besides, I really want to know more about von Hagens’s procedure.

  It takes about forty-five minutes to get to the science center. When the bus rolls to a stop by the student entrance, we file out. Seat by seat. Vanessa, Abbi, Kierstead and a couple of other volleyball girls hang together.

  We stay clear of them as we stroll through the grand hall to the Body Worlds
exhibit. Max continues his explanation about how von Hagens devised ways to suck out all the fat and water from a body. And how he experimented with combinations of rubber, epoxy and polyester, injecting them in to preserve not just one organ but entire corpses. “After he fills them with the plastic, he just positions the body however he wants it and lets it harden. The whole process takes about fifteen hundred hours.”

  We arrive at the entrance to the exhibition, where there’s a large sign warning that photography is strictly forbidden. Around the corner sits a man, head leaning against his hand, as though he’s thinking. Only he has no skin or hair. His eyeballs look weird, bulging, and his irises are blue, contrasting sharply with the red of his plastinated flesh. According to the write-up on the wall next to him, the eyeballs are the only artificial things about any of the displays. Herr von Hagens can’t find a way to preserve them.

  Vanessa hangs back, but Mr. Brewster catches her. “Do I have to go in? I’m not feeling good,” she tells him.

  You can see he’s torn. He has to think for a moment.

  “I can stay with her,” Kierstead offers, twirling a strand of hair around her finger.

  “Me, too,” Abbi says.

  Too many girls surround him; he backs away. “No, you can’t all miss this exhibit. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He takes Vanessa by the elbow. “Come inside the room at least. You don’t have to look at the bodies, but I need to know what you’re doing.”

  I shake my head at Max as we brush past them. Ahead of us the royal couple stands admiring the first display, a body riding a stallion. The skinned horse rears up on its hind legs, and its front legs claw at the air with a lot of attitude. For a dead horse, that is.

  Jasmine points to the stallion’s flank, where a missing slice of flesh reveals the stomach and intestines. Cameron gestures to the riding crop clenched in the bony fingers of the rider. He’s split into two halves for us all to view his insides. Jazz and Cameron look happy and cozy holding hands as they gaze in wonder at the cadavers.

  Both as one, they murmur, “Cool, eh?” to Max and me as we scoot ahead of them.