Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  Vaughn looks unconscious and it occurs to me he might be dead from all that tree-related sorrow so I say, ‘Yo, Vaughn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just checking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you’re dead.’ Immediately I regret saying this with his friend being dead and all that.

  ‘I’ll keep you posted,’ he says.

  It’s pretty obvious he has no time for plebs who aren’t sitting in trees and I can respect that. I’m thinking maybe Lillian, after the big disillusionment, could become a tree sitter. After she blows up the bank.

  11

  Old Blecher asks me if I think I’m doing what God put me here to do.

  ‘He didn’t put me here.’

  Personally I think we’d be a whole lot better off if we dropped the God concept. Without the God concept, we’d be equals. Nobody could make deals. Old Swails was telling us about Martin Luther figuring out that the Catholic church was all about making money. Priests would show up in villages and say, ‘Buy this bit of parchment with Latin scribbled on it and your granddaddy will not burn in Eternal Damnation.’ The people were dirt-poor so buying religious junk meant no bread for their children. Martin Luther said, ‘Forget all the junk, I’ll translate the Bible for you and you can practice your faith without worrying about what the old cardinal has to say about it.’ Was the Vatican ever pissed. Old Swails was jumping around pretending to be the cardinal, shouting in an Italian accent. ‘Thisa heretic MUSTA BE BURNED!’

  ‘Let me put it differently,’ Blecher says. ‘Do you find purpose and meaning in your daily life?’

  She’s giddy because she just got certified as a Life and Career Coach by the Institute of Life Purpose. She thinks people are going to pay her to ask them profound questions like ‘Do you have clear goals and direction?’

  She pulls the lid off a yogourt and licks it. ‘Do you feel that you’re making a positive contribution to others?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Do you feel good about yourself?’

  ‘Negative.’

  She digs around in the yogourt with a plastic spoon. ‘You know what I think? I think you’re holding yourself back from living your life’s purpose.’

  Last week in Sociology Mrs. Freeman was talking about the Underground Railroad. She asked if anybody knew what it was. Kirsten said it was a railway that went underground. Nicole said it was a series of secret pathways. Mrs. Freeman went gospel as she bellowed that it wasn’t like that at all, that it was the slaves just following the gourd. Then she started singing ‘Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.’ One of Drew’s Extraordinary Women books is about Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who went back to the south hundreds of times to rescue more slaves even though she’d been beaten and raped by her masters since she was seven years old. She’d decided she’d rather die than live in slavery. She ran barefoot through woods and swamps with bloodhounds and shotguns chasing her. Big rewards were offered for her capture. She made it though, and soon after started risking her life on a regular basis heading back south to lead more slaves to freedom. Hearing about Harriet Tubman exhausted me. I had a stash of mini-marshmallows in my backpack. I kept eating them to keep my strength up.

  Harriet Tubman was someone with a life purpose.

  ‘What if you have no life purpose?’ I ask.

  Blecher spoons yogourt into her yob. She’s acting a little aloof because I caught her reading a Double Digest Archie comic hidden inside a National Geographic.

  ‘I mean,’ I clarify, ‘don’t you think it’s possible that some people don’t have a life purpose?’

  Harriet Tubman lived to be ninety-two. No way do I want to live to be ninety-two.

  ‘Your life purpose reflects your deepest values,’ Blecher says.

  I can’t even think of my shallowest values, never mind my deepest ones.

  ‘Living your life purpose,’ Blecher says, ‘requires being clear and aligning yourself with your spiritual nature, moving past your inner blocks.’

  I listen for the lunch bell. I only came here to get away from Bonehead and company who have taken to calling me a bull dyke and braying in my direction.

  ‘Inner blocks can defeat us all,’ Blecher says. She taps her temple and her gut in case I don’t know the meaning of inner blocks. ‘You are your own worst enemy,’ she adds.

  ‘Can you give me some examples of people with life purposes?’ I ask, stalling for time. ‘I mean, I can only think of dead ones.’

  Blecher rips a granola bar wrapper with her teeth.

  ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe would be a good candidate,’ I say. ‘But she’s dead.’

  ‘Harriet who?’

  ‘She wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’

  ‘Haven’t read that one.’ She starts chomping the granola bar.

  ‘It was the first novel to really expose slavery in America,’ I explain, knowing she’s bored out of her mind. ‘She wrote it long before old Mark Twain figured out to write Huckleberry Finn, which is everybody’s all-time favourite novel. Personally I think the last third needs work. Everybody talks like old Mark was the first one to point the finger at slavery, but the truth is it was Harriet. You have to wonder how much longer it would have taken to get the Civil War going without Harriet blowing the whistle.’

  Blecher crumples up the granola bar wrapper and pitches it at the trash can, missing it, of course. With her mouth full of oats she can’t speak, which is a plus. She holds up a finger to indicate that she will offer words of wisdom after she gets the fibre down. Fortunately the bell goes.

  Rossi corners me at my locker. ‘I said I was sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ I say.

  ‘Doyle invited me to Kirsten’s party. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You guys aren’t going steady or anything?’

  ‘Negative.’

  She stands gnawing on a Bic. Under all that sparkly eyeliner I see the kid I used to know and I feel so sad. Because she was my best friend and we had answers and now we don’t know anything.

  ‘Everybody thinks it’s really cool that you’re writing a play.’

  ‘Who says I’m writing a play?’

  ‘Did you really kick Larry Bone in the face?’

  ‘I didn’t kick anybody.’

  ‘He says he’s going to whip your ass.’

  I walk away from her, to my biology class where I can get some sleep.

  ‘Come over later?’ she asks.

  In chemistry Doyle blows up something that singes his eyebrows. Conkwright starts yelling at him. Conkwright’s one of those Scottish types who came here at age two or something but still speak with a Scots accent. ‘Just what do ya think yarr dooin’? D’ya want to buurrrn the eyeballs oot of yarr head?’ He gets all red and starts blowing spit. Conkwright has this idea that he’s sexy. He wears shirts unbuttoned to his chest and wraparound shades even when it’s raining. The girls think he’s hysterical and call him Cockwrong.

  I finished The Mayor of Casterbridge. It ended with a wedding. Somebody had to kick off, of course. In this case it was Elizabeth-Jane’s fake father, who’d figured out he loved her even though she wasn’t his daughter. She continued to think he was her real father, but her real father showed up and the fake father told him that Elizabeth-Jane was dead. Then the Scottish guy bumped into her real father and sent for her. This caused the fake father to take off in shame with a couple of farm implements. Meanwhile the Scottish guy and Elizabeth-Jane started rutting because his wife died. The fake father returned for Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding to the Scottish guy, but chickened out when he saw how happy she was with her real father, and left a bird in a cage for her. The bird died, of course, because no one fed it. A servant told Elizabeth-Jane that her fake father had left it for her, so she ran around looking for him. She found him dead in some old barn, but didn’t sweat it because she was so happy with the wedding and her real father and all that. Happy happy happy. Meanwhile old Thomas was beating his wife
.

  Speaking of the Underground Railroad, Mrs. Freeman is descended from slaves. Her great-great-grandfather had to choose a last name when he showed up in New Brunswick so he called himself Free Man. She goes to church on Sundays and sings. She says all ancient cultures involved singing, which was why people didn’t kill each other all the time. She tried to get us to sing ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken,’ which has a nice melody. I enjoyed singing it, especially the part about there’s a better home a-waiting in the sky, Lord, in the sky. Which is pretty outrageous considering I don’t believe in heaven and all that. I was just about the only one singing. Me and an Italian guy called Rudi who’s auditioned for Canadian Idol about five thousand times.

  Anyway, Mrs. Freeman actually gives me decent marks so I don’t mind helping her out once in a while by singing or answering questions. Today she’s talking about the Holocaust, a subject on which I’m an expert. ‘Did you know,’ I ask, ‘that the Nazis ordered all the Jewish boys in Berlin to change their name to Israel and all the Jewish girls to change their name to Sara?’ Mrs. Freeman looks as though she doesn’t know, which surprises me since she’s the teacher. ‘Also,’ I elaborate, ‘after they banned Jewish kids from school, they killed their pets. Nazis showed up and took the kids’ pets from them and killed them.’

  This gets a reaction from the simpletons, which is unusual. Normally it takes the sound of gunshot to get their attention. Even Kirsten stops painting her nails. ‘No way,’ she says.

  ‘You mean like,’ Nicole clarifies, ‘Nazis just showed up and like, took their pets?’

  ‘Before they took their parents,’ I say. ‘And before they took them. Just about every Jew in Berlin ended up in death camps. There were about fifty thousand of them.’

  The bedlamites’ eyes glaze over again at the mention of death camps. They’re not too interested in dead Jews, just their pets.

  ‘What have we learned from the Holocaust?’ Mrs. Freeman sings out.

  Nobody’s got an answer for that one. Most of them go back to gaming on their cells. Somebody’s blares Beyoncé.

  ‘Turn that thing off!’ Mrs. Freeman bellows.

  ‘We learned that hatred is taught,’ I say. ‘Little Aryan boys and girls didn’t hate Jews. They were taught to hate them in school. They had these picture books about poisonous mushrooms, how you could tell the poisonous ones from the edible ones. The poisonous ones were supposed to be Jews. They showed creepy illustrations of Jews with stringy hair and big noses.’

  Mrs. Freeman has a worried look about her. I don’t know if she’s fretting about the Jews or me. I keep talking because I think it’s important that people know this. ‘Somebody drew those pictures for those schoolbooks,’ I explain. ‘Some rat-brained artist was paid to pollute those little kids’ minds about Jews. I mean, how could you live with yourself after that? And why wasn’t that artist put on trial? When you think “evil Nazi” you think of Goebbels or Mengele or Goering but what about the guy who drew the poisonous Jewish mushrooms?’

  No response from the scratch and moaners. Bonehead belches. The bell goes. I jet out of there.

  12

  After Zippy stiffed me on a second hamster she bought me two guppies. I stared into the tank for hours trying to bond with the fish. I didn’t know their genders but decided to call them Caesar and Cleopatra. I went to bed determined to be happy about the guppies. They weren’t furry and you couldn’t hold them but at least you didn’t have to clean the cage. First thing in the morning I got up to feed the guppies and do more bonding. One of them had jumped out of the tank and was dead on the floor. I dropped to my knees and howled because already I’d been imagining the good times my guppies and I would have, how they would be special guppies, how I’d train them to chase a floatie or something. Zippy bustled out in her fluffy bathrobe. ‘What in God’s name … ?’

  ‘Cleopatra killed herself!’ I wailed. ‘She didn’t want to be stuck in the tank with Caesar. She’d rather be dead than be with Caesar!’

  Zippy sat on her pouffe feeling, I’m sure, that she’d failed me again. ‘We’ll get another one,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want another one! I don’t want this one. This one’s a murderer!’ The killer fish was glob-globbing at me.

  Zippy gave the guppy to a neighbour. Their cat ate it.

  So I’m planning to put the guppy suicide in the play. Because Lillian’s under the illusion that she’s getting her life together by going into debt buying all this stuff to fix up her place. She wants it to look like a beach house she saw on the Decorating Channel. She’s hanging up Mexican blankets. The guppy suicide would definitely add conflict. Lillian would feel responsible. Your guppies don’t just suddenly jump out of the tank for no reason.

  ‘Limone,’ Mr. Biggs says, ‘h’what can you tell us about the human genome?’ He’s one of those types who puts an h before wh so what sounds like h’what. He’s not even Spanish.

  ‘Well,’ I begin, digging through the messy files in my brain, ‘isn’t a genome part gene and part chromosome?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  Mr. Biggs has a butt that sticks out and little ballet-dancer feet. ‘I see you’re making notes,’ he says. ‘Would they, by any chance, pertain to our class today?’

  ‘They’re for Mr. Lund, actually. Sorry.’

  ‘H’why would you be making notes for Mr. Lund in my class?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Usually if you say sorry enough times and avoid eye contact they lose interest. But Biggs is a closet case and hates girls, particularly girls who don’t act girly. He’s always making comments about my boots and ‘bag-lady attire.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t good enough,’ he says. ‘Do you have any intention of passing this course?’

  ‘Not really.’ I try to look meek. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for biology.’

  ‘Then h’why did you take the course? Can you tell me h’why?’

  ‘I thought it might be interesting,’ I say, ‘dissecting and all that. I thought we’d be doing more dissecting. Aren’t we supposed to be dissecting cats?’

  His reptile lips pucker, he who probably dreams about shoving his noodle into choir boys. ‘H’why don’t you to go down to the office and tell Ms. Brimmers that you have no intention of passing this class?’

  I remain inert, hoping he’ll get distracted by a sudden storm or something.

  ‘Leave now, please,’ he says, pointing at the door. All the goons, who have no intention of passing the class either, cackle.

  Ms. Brimmers wears carefully tailored suits in corporate beige or grey that show off her slim figure. The statement is I dress like a professional but really I’m a sex goddess. I want to ask her if she’s banged boots with Inspector Power yet. She had him cornered after his speech, kept sliding her jacket back so he could admire her sex-goddess hips.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she says, resting her tailored glutes against her desk. I spread mine on a chair that feels about to swallow me. ‘We all believe in you, Limone.’ This is a lie. They pay attention because I’m the former principal’s daughter – the principal who is supposedly on temporary leave.

  ‘You have some issues with authority,’ she tells me. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I don’t have issues with anyone.’

  ‘You’re a bright girl. Why are you jeopardizing your future?’ What future? Like yours? In little suits and pantyhose shuffling paper and beating up on teenagers? Kissing ass at the school board? What future, when a species is becoming extinct EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES? I stare at the fuzzy-leafed plant on her desk. Maybe Lillian should get a fuzzy-leafed plant. They must talk about foliage on the Decorating Channel.

  ‘You need to demonstrate a commitment to learning,’ Brimmers says, and I wonder if she fakes orgasms, oohing and aahing to make the schlemiel feel good.

  ‘Are you even listening to me?’ Brimmers asks.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You have a very poor and disrespectful attitude.
’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Saying you’re sorry isn’t good enough. How do you explain this behaviour?’

  ‘I think I’m a little depressed right now.’ Teen depression gives the stiffs pause because they figure you’re suicidal and nobody wants to be responsible.

  ‘Are you taking drugs?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘How’s the play coming? Mr. Huff and Mr. Lund are very excited about it.’

  The bell goes and I’m hoping she’s got places to go, people to see.

  ‘It’s going great,’ I say. ‘I think I’ve found my life purpose.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ She glances at the clock. One of the secretaries tells her Mr. Somebody’s on the phone. ‘I have to take this call,’ she tells me. ‘I don’t want to see you down here again. We all understand that you’re experiencing stress at home but there are limits to our patience.’ She picks up the phone. ‘I look forward to seeing the play. What’s it called?’

  ‘Truly Loved.’

  ‘A love story, how nice.’

  A toilet cubicle provides sanctuary. I lock it and stand on the seat, becoming invisible.

  Kirsten storms in and starts touching up her face. Nicole trails her. I watch them through the crack in the door.

  ‘Feel my ass,’ Kirsten says. She often commands people to feel her ass and tell her how toned she is.

  ‘There’s like, no fat,’ Nicole says.

  ‘She’s pissing me off. I’m a slow burner but when I get mad I go straight to rage.’

  ‘Doyle invited her,’ Nicole says. ‘It’s not like she’s crashing.’