“I’m not playing fucking tennis. I have shit to do.” He puts the glass down. He’s clutching a clementine in his fist. “Don’t you have a kiddie party to get ready for?”
“Whatever. My friends are lame.”
“Cute and lame.” He has a dumb smile on his face that feels like an elbow in my chest.
“I actually just came around to get the provisions,” I say.
He looks at me like I’m not making any sense.
“At the pharmacy you said . . . ”
He nods, understanding. “I only have mushrooms here.”
“We probably can’t afford the other stuff, so . . . ” I’m standing up now, talking fast. The window shows how boring I look: jeans, T-shirt, lumber jacket. My hair is in a dull brown ponytail. No one would go out of their way to tell me my hair’s awesome.
Lee sinks his thumbnail into the clementine skin. “Just tell me where you and your friend will be. I’ll hook it up, my treat.”
“The mushrooms are good. I don’t want anything else.”
“Whatever you say.”
I follow Lee to the kitchen. Immediately he finds his shirt and tugs it on. He opens the freezer door and digs out a sandwich bag of squiggly brown mushrooms and tosses it on the counter. “They’re old.”
I have no idea how to take mushrooms, but I don’t ask. It’s like we’re both mad.
Lee leans against the fridge, crosses his arms, and taps his heel like he just wants me to go. For some reason, I keep staying. After a while he says, “How’s your mom?”
“Good, I guess.”
He twists his hair back with a vegetable elastic from off the counter. “You don’t have to act like it’s no big deal.”
I make a face like my mom’s none of his business, which she isn’t.
“She’s still dying right?”
“Yeah.”
He rips off a piece of clementine and shakes his head. “Crazy.” For some reason, it annoys me when he says it.
“Not really. People die all the time,” I say. “It’s a pretty basic thing about being alive.”
Lee looks at me with squinted eyes. “That doesn’t make it, like, a neutral occurrence.”
I shrug and look out the kitchen window at the backyard which is a mat of wet brown leaves. “Did you ever figure out what’s happening with that ranch?”
Clementine juice hits my chin. “Give it up, Ketchum.”
I look back at him, a loud rushing sound in my ears.
“Seriously,” he says, swallowing. “Your mom’s going to die. She’s never going to have to think about her shitty son again. Jed has to live with being shitty.” He eats while he talks. “You don’t want to spend your life feeling like an asshole, too.”
“Why am I an asshole now?”
“Maybe because you wasted your mom’s last months on earth obsessed with Jed and not with her?”
I look at the calendar on his kitchen wall. It’s still flipped to March. My voice is dry and empty. “No, I haven’t.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“She wants me to have a life, OK?”
“OK,” Lee says. “So then have one. Why are you here all the fucking time?” He chucks the peel into the sink.
I stare down at Lee’s socks. A sharp, sucking feeling in my chest makes it hurt to breathe. All those times I charged up his front steps with videos, thinking we both liked this stupid secret, thinking we were friends. My throat aches, and I’m so close to crying that it’s better not to speak, but still I say, “You should rake your fucking lawn,” before picking the mushrooms up off the counter and letting myself out the back door.
At home, in the shower, the piss smell of the hair dye stings my nostrils and scalp. Thin streams of red dye roll down my chest and thighs and swirl down the drain.
My hair comes out a dark purple-red, staining the white bath towels, but I feel like I’m starting to look like someone else, someone older and maybe French. I go to Mom’s room looking for something to wear. Her clothes are just hanging in the closet exactly the way she left them, a few blouses and skirts still in their clingy plastic dry cleaning bags. The cool smell of lavender potpourri is everywhere. It feels wrong to touch or move anything.
The one thing I do take is a pair of green pumps from the Goodwill box on her closet floor, shoes I remember seeing exactly once. I was on my way home from a school trip to the planetarium, and I saw her out the bus window on the street, walking with some tall guy and looking all breezy and important, like someone from that movie Working Girl. She looked way cooler than she ever did at home, way cooler than the shorthaired juice-box moms on the bus. I liked seeing her in those secret shoes, not boring loafers or Keds. I never told Mom I saw her. I could tell her now, but it’s not even a story. It doesn’t have a point, but I feel suddenly afraid that if I hadn’t seen the shoes in the closet just now, the whole memory of that afternoon would have disappeared.
Back in my own room, I put on a short black skirt that I bought last month with Ash at a store in Kensington Market and a pair of pink star earrings that look good but turn my ear holes green if I accidentally keep them in overnight. While I wait for Ash and Lacey to come over, I try dialling my old phone number, picturing the beige Touch-Tone phone that was mounted to our kitchen wall. It rings once and then picks up for the first time: The number you are calling is out of service. Please hang up and try your call again. I try again, but same thing. Why does the operator have to sound so angry?
When Ash and Lacey show up, the first thing Ash says is, “Are we calling Lee?” She doesn’t even say anything about my shoes or hair. I tell her I already got the stuff and point to the defrosted baggie on the kitchen table.
Ash scratches her neck. “I thought he was coming though.” She has this way of looking right at you, like she can see all your deceit right through your skin.
“I was passing his house anyway.”
Ash pulls her cigarettes out of her fun-fur purse and just lights up. She would freak out if I did that at her house, but I let it go.
We eat the limp mushrooms on saltines in the living room, sharing one of Dad’s beers. For a long time nothing happens. Ash pouts and smokes, Lacey does her hair, and I just sit thinking about Lee and whether I’ll ever talk to him again, whether I even want to. He never helped with anything, anyway.
I turn on the TV to a TLC music video. I’m the only one watching at first, but after a while I guess we’re bored of ignoring each other because we get in position, copying T-Boz and Left Eye and the pretty one. It’s totally clear that we’ve all watched the video before, though we’re supposed to be way cooler than TLC. It feels like we’re friends again: a trio. The three of us work on Lacey’s hair, weaving tinsel between her braids and chucking it around the room like an indoor rainstorm. We put glitter on our faces and drink a few more of Dad’s beers.
Eventually Ash tells me she loves my red hair. I want to kiss her. I love my hair, too. The colour makes my eyes bright blue, like the ink in Lee’s brother’s sketches, like my eyes have been scribbled in. I turn to Ash, “Do my eyes look scribbled in?”
Ash looks at me with mean slits. “What are you talking about?”
I turn to Lacey. “What color are my eyes?” Lacey just looks back at Ash.
When I go back to my room to get my purse, I scream when I see the bloody towels on the floor. Did I kill my brother? Is that why he disappeared? Ash and Lacey scream back from the living room. I lean against the closet frame, my heart beating at four hundred miles an hour. “It’s nothing!” I yell.
Ash has her hands on her hips when I get back. “Was that a joke?”
“Kind of.”
Ash rolls her eyes. “Normal.”
“Are you OK?” Lacey says. “Your face is, like, extremely green.”
“As green as that wack footwear,” Ash says, looking down at my feet. “Uh, 1983 called. They want their shoes back.”
“Are you wearing those for serious?” Lacey
asks.
“Maybe.” I look down, too.
“Just come on,” Ash says.
As we’re leaving, I tap the door a few times after locking it, my nerves still shrieking under my skin.
“Do you have a thing,” Lacey says, “where you need to touch the doors a million times?”
“I just wanted to make sure it was closed.”
“You do it all the time,” Ash says. She looks at Lacey. “It’s part of her psycho routine.” I pretend to laugh, like it’s all a dumb joke, but they don’t laugh back. Ash gives Lacey a look like, See, she’s even more brutal than we discussed.
On the ride downtown, people on the subway stare at the three of us. I’m nervous and sweaty like I’ve had too much coffee. As we roar past the ravine, I swear that I can see Mom’s face in the window. Turning to grab Lacey’s arm, my heart pinging against my throat, I realize that it’s just another woman standing behind us. A tired looking woman in a long raincoat, even though it’s dry and warm out for the early fall.
We follow Ash’s instructions to a line of kids, curled into a damp alleyway. Everyone puffs on cigarettes, talks too loud. People are all wearing glitter and shiny stuff, but I’m the only one in high heels. We stand against the back of a building, breathing leaky garbage bags and feeling the thump of music straight up through our feet.
“These mushrooms aren’t working,” Ash says.
“I think they are,” Lacey says. “Just look at that light for five seconds. It kind of goes out of focus then . . . ”
“Lee should have come over.”
Hot since the subway, I peel off my lumber jacket. There’s sweat on my forearms and clavicle. “I thought you wanted drugs. I got them for us.”
Ash looks at Lacey. “That wasn’t really the point.” Her voice sounds far away.
“It wasn’t,” Lacey says. “Ash has liked Jesus for a long time and you’re hoarding him just because he knows your brother.”
“His name’s not Jesus. And he doesn’t even like me.” My throat catches on that last part. I could tell her about the whole last month and really piss her off, but it wouldn’t be worth anything because Lee’s probably done hanging out with me. He’d probably say this was the most boring month in his whole life.
Ash turns away so that she’s only talking to Lacey, her voice getting more and more distant. I reach out to touch her arm, just to make sure she’s still there. She yanks it back. “Don’t touch me, psycho!”
A remixed ABBA song drifts into the alley, one that Mom and Dad used to play when we lived on Mowers. I don’t think I’ve heard either of them play ABBA separately. I move my body a little to the music and pretend I don’t care that I don’t have any friends. I think it would be cool if every time you heard a song, you could travel back to the first time you ever heard it. That tender spot opens up between my ribs again. Where would I go if I could go anywhere back in time? Maybe the Halloween from Mom’s bedside table wouldn’t be so bad: Mom, Jed, and me, an actual family trio. I wonder where Mom would choose to go. I hope she’d still go out in the rainstorm.
As we move closer to the warehouse door, a zitty guy in a ponytail starts frisking the front of the line. “No drugs, no weapons.”
I look at the guy straight in the face. “Dodge, Kansas,” I say. “Leave your guns at the door.”
He looks at me. “Pardon, sweet tits?”
“She hasn’t made any sense,” Ash says. “For a really long time.”
But everything makes total sense, and I tell Ash and Lacey I have to go. Suddenly I’m running toward the subway station, my fists balled and my heels rubbing hard inside Mom’s shoes. As I bust through the turnstiles, I feel powerful, like I’m strutting into a western saloon with an important message. Everyone stares at the sound of my heels.
Lee hears me coming up the steps; I don’t even need to knock. The door opens and he says, “Cara?” It’s the first time he looks surprised to see me. The first time I’ve heard him actually say my first name.
“Jed’s ranch is in Kansas!” I blurt this through chattering teeth, before he even lets me in. “Jed’s in Dodge City, isn’t he?”
I realize the second I’m done how stupid this sounds.
Lee tells me to just come in. I take off Mom’s shoes and cross to the centre of the living room, trying not to look at his brother’s eye sketch and trying not to cry from humiliation. There is blood at the backs of my heels. He brings me a glass of water and a towel that he drapes over my shoulders like a blanket. “You’re freezing.”
“I’m actually hot.”
“You’re coming down.”
“I like ABBA,” I tell him. “ABBA is my favourite music.”
He lights a cigarette and offers me a drag. “Nice hair, Sketch.”
My whole body rattles under the towel. Lee puts the cigarette down and rubs my arms. “Get warm.”
We stand for a long time with him behind me. Every few seconds, it feels like he moves in a little closer. Or maybe I push back. It goes that way for a while, until I start to feel his heartbeat in my spine. His voice itches my ear tunnel when he asks if I want to go upstairs and lie down. I nod yes, but I’m afraid to look right at his face. I’m not sure what face I’m supposed to make. I’ve never been upstairs in Lee’s house before.
Lee’s bedroom turns out to be small with a slanted ceiling. The bed is rammed up against the window, held open a third of the way with a beer bottle. He kneels on the mattress, the streetlight hitting him square on his crotch. I go and kneel across from him, and for a second it’s like we’re two little kids in front of a campfire or something, waiting for the excitement to happen. He pulls the elastic out of his ponytail and shakes out his hair. Then he hooks his hands around my jaw and pulls my face into his. His lips are warm and chapped.
When Lee takes off his shirt, the smell of wet dishrag lifts from his chest. He presses me down against the bed, and I feel something like a tube of Rolos in his front pocket. Everything around us seems to be vibrating. My skirt zipper snags the soft skin below my ribs. After my clothes are gone, he crosses the room and picks Fever gently off his desk. He searches a drawer, and I watch the bending vertebrae in his thin, white back.
Lee kneels back on the bed and tears the condom with his teeth. I read somewhere that people shouldn’t do that, that it could make holes, but I don’t say anything, just watch him turn away to put it on. The first few jabs don’t go in. I slide up to meet him, bend my knees back farther and jam my eyes shut against whatever’s coming. I’m thinking of the sketches in the Grossmans’ Joy of Sex, the woman’s legs curled up like a roast chicken. When it doesn’t seem to be working, I reach down there myself and stuff him inside. It feels like cutting. I grab the edge of his mattress and turn my face away from Lee’s curtain of smoky hair. Part of the slanted ceiling is stickered with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. I concentrate on the yellow-green constellations, trying to breathe quietly without whimpering.
Afterwards, Lee and I lay shoulder to shoulder, my arm crossed over my chest. I’ve never been completely naked in front of anyone. Not even a girl.
“Do you need to go home?” Lee’s voice is hoarse.
“My Dad’s at his girlfriend’s.”
He turns onto his shoulder and tucks his hair behind his ears. “We can do it again then. If you want to.”
“Maybe later.”
“Sure. You want to sleep here?”
“Peut-être.”
He squints at me. He hasn’t learned any French at all.
“I may be going to Montreal, too,” I say. I touch a few strands of his hair and then withdraw my hand because it just feels uncool.
“Non sequitur.” He flips onto his back. “Why? What for?” I wish he didn’t sound annoyed.
“Exchange. I have an 88 in French.” I find my underwear and then pull the thin comforter up to my chin.
Falling asleep, I try to stay on my side of the bed by the wall, but his body is so much warmer and when I wake up, I
notice that I’ve sucked myself right up against the heat from his crotch. The clock radio says 5:21 a.m. Carefully, I climb over Lee’s hot, snoring body and find my clothes on the floor.
My lips look like one big red smear in the bathroom mirror, and my chin is scratched and scaly. I turn the butterflies gently at the back of my earrings and feel an itchy, crunchy feeling.
It burns when I pee, but there’s hardly any blood. I wet a mound of toilet paper and pat gently at the swollen place between my legs. Downstairs, I wrap Lee’s towel around my shoulders and take his cigarettes before leaving through the kitchen door with Mom’s shoes in my hand. Fever brushes his head up against my ankles, and I reach down to pet him under the chin.
Lee’s block is mainly dark under the cover of trees, but as I walk toward what used to be our part of the neighbourhood, pale banners of yellow and orange light are spreading up into the sky. I light a cigarette and the jogger headed toward me crosses the street. I’m not a kid anymore: it doesn’t alarm adults to see me smoking or walking around at dawn on my own. Maybe I make them a little on edge. I walk faster, finishing the cigarette and then lighting another right off it.
When I reach our old street, even the sidewalk feels familiar under my feet; I wonder if the cement recognizes the pressure of my footsteps in the same way I remember its slants and cracks. The houses look like they always did, but some of the cars are different. Our old house pokes out from its usual spot, two in from the end of the block, with its same exact face: wide-set windows for eyes, frowning red door, black awning moustache. The house belonged to us, to me. I could just walk right in and put my fingers on everything. I could climb onto the roof from the back fence. We have garden tools in a knotted plastic bag at home, still crusted with the yard’s dirt. But today I’m not allowed any closer than the sidewalk. This house is a stranger now.
A light flicks on in the kitchen of the house next door. I know it’s the kitchen because the Costa family lived there once, though now a red pickup is in the driveway with a bumper sticker that says, “I’d hit you but shit splatters!” Mrs. Costa went to church all the time, so it seems pretty likely that they’ve moved, too. Elena Costa used to paint my nails when she babysat. Now she’s probably twenty-five or more. Maybe married. I saw her at the Body Shop last Christmas and was too embarrassed to say hi. When I was a little kid, I watched her and her boyfriend washing a blue sports car in their jean shorts and sunglasses on the driveway. I wanted so bad to be a teenager, to finally be pretty and cool. It’s hard to believe that I’m already seventeen. And the truth is, Lee would never wash a car with me, not like that.
Catch My Drift Page 27