She rolled her eyes, shook her head. Little smug smile. “You’re from Scarborough or Mississauga or someplace like that, right? Come downtown for a bit of the rough tonight?”
“Eglinton West, actually.” I wanted to slap the smile off her face. Bit of the rough . . . ?
She shrugged. “Same thing. So, how old are you? Fifteen?”
Whoops. I tried to act all haughty. And old. “What d’you mean? I’m nineteen!”
She gave a sarcastic little laugh, shook her head. “Doubt it.” She gestured at my face. “The makeup gives you away. You’re trying too hard. Got it caked on like icing.”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “Please. You think I should look all mannish like you?” I mean, I liked her hair and all, but yikes.
She looked down at her knees, but it didn’t quite hide her bashful smile. “Naw. I kinda like how you look. I just mean you don’t have to work to make yourself pretty.” She took a breath. “Please tell me you’re at least seventeen.”
Her eyes met mine again, and I felt my face flush. Great. I had a big old dyke stepping to me. Or wheeling to me. As if. “Uh—”
Richard scraped his chair back, threw himself into it. “I suck,” he said. He put his head in his hands.
“Naw, bruh,” said Tafari, sitting beside him. “It wasn’t that bad.”
He was lying through his teeth, and we all knew it.
“You don’t suck, you know,” said Punum. Didn’t even give me a chance to talk to my own brother. “You just need a little more experience up there onstage.”
Rich turned his head just enough so he could see her. “Yeah, right. You don’t have to be nice to me. I’m not gonna get any better that way.”
She smiled. “See? You got some stones. You’re already talking about doing that again. That’s the kinda balls you need to get up in front of a crowd night after night and tell them things they don’t wanna hear. Now you just need more experience in front of the mike, more of the courage of your convictions.”
“I dunno . . .” But he was sitting up, paying attention to her, not hiding his face.
She leaned a little closer to him. “Next time,” she said, “don’t announce the name of the piece. Not unless it’s really cool, you know? Not unless it’s almost a line of poetry itself.”
“What, then?”
“Just get right into it, dude! Come strong!”
Huh. That’s what I needed to do with that dance move I kept missing. Never mind all that bloody counting. It was messing me up. Just hit the stage hard with my left foot, one! Leap right in. I grinned.
The Horseless Head Man was back, floating a little above our table. It was staring into my glass of ginger ale. I saw its nostrils flare. Was it smelling my drink? Euw. “Shoo,” I told it.
“Fly in your drink?” asked Rich.
There was another one, sitting on Punum’s head. I half-stood, went to brush it away. Bloody things were everywhere now: floating in the air; perched on people’s shoulders. One materialized in front of my face, grinning its goofy grin. I stood up the whole way. “Get out of here,” I whispered. “Leave me alone.” And here it was. That psychotic break my mum was always on about. I was totally losing my shit right here, in public. I was going full-on crazy.
Punum, Rich, and Tafari were all staring at me. At least, I think Tafari was. There was a Horseless Head Man blocking my view of him. Could I brazen my way through this? “Oh, nothing’s wrong,” I said, casually trying to wave the Horseless Head Man away. But it was like trying to wave my hand through thick honey; it slowed my swing down. “Yuck!” I cried out. The others looked at me like I was nuts, and who could blame them?
Now there was an iridescence in the corner of my vision. It was coming from under the stage. I pointed at it. “What’s that?” Shit. Shouldn’t have done that. What if no one else saw that, either? It looked like a gigantic bubble, lit from within, all rainbow colors. But kinda smoky. I couldn’t see through it.
“The hell?” said Tafari.
I asked him, “You see it, too? Like a big balloon?”
He nodded, staring at the bubble. Other people were noticing now. They were standing and pointing, because the bubble was growing. It bulged and swelled out from under the stage. The bouncy girl MC leapt off the other side of the stage. I heard her thunk down onto the floor. Horseless Head Men were gathered in the air all around the bubble. They all had the same happy, goofy grin on their weird unicorn faces, like that dumb dragon in that never-ending movie.
The bubble swelled really quickly. It was almost touching distance from our table before I knew it. I heard the scrape of chairs across the floor as the others stood up and backed away. Richard grabbed my hand. “Scotch, get out of the way!”
I shook his hand off. What was it with him and Tafari, trying to shove me around all the time? The bubble was only inches away from me. It was maybe twice my height, a glowing, opaque white. Soft colors inside it. Some of them colors without names. And the smell coming from it! Almost too faint to detect over the odor of stale beer coming off the barroom floor, but it was there. Like the memory of how last summer’s lilacs smelled. Like a Jamaican beef patty, hot from the oven. The kind with more meat in it than cornstarch thickener. Like your dad’s cologne the last time he hugged you. I reached my hand out toward it.
Punum was beside me. She slapped my hand away. “Are you mad? Stop that!” God, people were so bloody handsy tonight! But she didn’t move away from the bubble, either. She stared at it. It swelled a little more, and got longer, like, a pseudopod, or something. A big, fat, wiggly arm, only with no hand, no fingers. Or bones. We moved back.
I glanced to my other side. Richard was still beside me, Tafari only a little farther away. I craved to touch the arm of the thing the way I’d longed for the boots I was wearing, going to Marcus Shoes in the mall every day at lunch break for a month and just staring at them in the shop window. Standing in front of that thing was like staring in that shop window, and knowing that to have it, you would give up something you couldn’t afford to give up. “Dare you to touch it, Rich,” I said.
He stepped a little closer to me, to the bubble. “What is it?”
“You not going to find out by just standing there looking at it.”
“Why you don’t touch it, then?” His eyes never left the bubble.
God, I wanted to. Wanted to get to that thing I knew I could never really have. Because the truth was, I’d wasted my chance at moving out of our parents’ place and I was going to lose Rich’s trust, too, when he found out about the boots. I put my hand on his shoulder. Had to reach up to do it. “You touch it,” I replied. “You’re the one who wants to know what it is.”
Punum swore. Tafari muttered, low, as though the bubble might hear him, “Don’t do it, Rich. Let’s go, man.”
I didn’t think he’d actually do it. Rich was the sensible one. Saved his money, looked before he crossed the street. Always giving me shade for one thing or another. I didn’t think he’d listen to me! But he flashed me that big, rare grin of his, said, “Tag; you’re it!” and slapped his hand up against the bubble, just as it swelled toward us. A painful buzzing zipped from my hand on his shoulder, up my arm, zapped the rest of me.
And then, the weirdest thing; the picture window lit up. From outside it, the world flashed for a second. That’s the only way I can describe it. Like the whole earth became a lightning strike, only without the lightning. It made my back teeth sing with pain. I looked out the window just in time to see a cone of blackness even blacker than the surrounding night shoot up from the surface of Lake Ontario. A red fireball shot out the top of it, with the loudest bang I’d ever heard. My hand flopped from where Rich’s shoulder had been. It hung, jangling, at my side. People were screaming, chairs scraping back. I kinda went weak with the surprise of it all. And dumb. I just stood there while that thing reached out toward me, Punum, and Tafari. At least Punum hadn’t lost her mind. She took hold of my useless arm—her touch made the pins-and-needles feeli
ng almost unbearable—and pulled me out of the thing’s way. I stumbled, grabbed on to the table for balance, but it was dancing across the shifting floor; the ground was shaking. As the table skidded, I lost my balance and fell onto Punum’s chair. It tipped and we fell off, her half on top of me. I heard the whuf of the wind being knocked out of her. Through our clothes, her breasts mashed against my own. Her face bounced against mine. Her breath was sweetish from the beer, her eyes surprised. I’d never been this close to another female, not unless you count my mom nursing me when I was a baby, I guess. With only one working arm, I struggled to sit up. Punum used her arms to pull herself off me. “You okay?” I asked her.
“I think so.”
Rich and the bubble were both gone. I couldn’t believe it. “Rich!” I yelled. “Where are you?”
The old chandeliers were swaying. One of the ugly fluorescent bulbs broke free with a crack, crashed down onto a table and exploded, spraying broken glass. The people at that table screamed and jumped out of the way.
“Rich!” I yelled. I couldn’t see him anywhere in the bar. The Horseless Head Men were buzzing, darting about everywhere, like flies on shit.
Punum pointed. “Holy shit.” The stage was gone, too. And with it, the whole wall of the bar to which it had been attached. The bar was open to the outside. Lake Shore Boulevard was covered in fog so thick you could only see the glow of streetlights and lit signs. Cool air blew into my face. There was a neat, scooped-out hole in the ground where the stage—and my brother—had been. Its edge was a hair away from my foot.
I got down on my knees and peered into the hole. It was dark down there. Is that where Rich was? “Rich!”
No answer. Tafari pulled me to my feet. “What the fuck’d you make Rich do that for!” he yelled. “Why were you even here, anyway?”
Punum said, “Leave her alone. It’s not like she forced him to touch it. And will someone please help me up, already?” Taf and I each took an arm and helped her back into her chair.
Commotion all around us. People streaming out the door. Others punching at the keys on their cell phones. Cells weren’t working, apparently. A big old guy with an apron on came hurtling out from the back of the bar. “Terrorists!” He shouted. “Everybody downstairs! Go!” People started barreling over each other to get to the basement stairs. The guy whose friends had laughed at me went rushing by, his face blank with panic.
Tafari pulled me by the hand. “Let’s go! It’s not safe here!”
I yanked the other way, threw the full strength of my thighs into it. “Rich is down there!” I yelled into the hole, “Rich!”
Then, from somewhere far away, there was another bang as loud as the whole, wide world. The whole building shifted to one side, then back again. People lost their balance. Chairs and tables fell over. Bottles and glasses tumbled to the floor. I saw a girl get hit in the small of the back by another table skidding across the floor. There must have been more screaming, but it was as though someone had stuffed cotton wool into my ears. Punum was shouting something at me. I couldn’t hear her. She was struggling to stand, using her hand on my shoulder for leverage.
And just like that, I was away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It felt like I was in a subway train. I was sitting in something that was rushing forward really quickly. That is, I think it was forward. I felt really not right, like my limbs were hung on in the wrong order. Which part of me was the front? For all I knew, I could have been sitting on my ear. And my eyes appeared to be in my elbow. Both of them in one elbow, except I could see just fine.
There were other people, also seated in rows of seats. If you could call them “people.” A few looked human, except for the bandicoot heads. And the arms made of smoke. And the fact that you could see through their chests and they each had three hearts beating inside. And the jointed metal legs. Okay, they didn’t look like people at all. But way more so than the ones that looked like a cross between a melty, burning wax candle and the color three, or the ones that tasted like yesterday and whistled like empty brains. It smelled weird in there. Lilac-y, if lilacs were to be nightmares soaked in regrets. Where were we headed? What in the world had just happened? Had I hit my head back in the bar? Maybe this was a concussion or something. Maybe I was dying. I should have been way more freaked than I was, but my stomach was all twisted up inside with worry about Rich. Had it been a bomb, back there in the bar? Had Rich maybe gotten on someone’s wrong side while he’d been in jail? Maybe somebody’d showed up at the reading to blow him up, or something? But then, what was that thing we’d seen outside the window before I’d gone away? Shooting up into the sky? That hadn’t been in the bar. That hadn’t even been on land. It’d looked as though it were out in the lake.
The walls of the train thingie were wet and flexing. My perverse brain immediately thought of intestinal smooth muscle, and I felt even more weirded out than I already was. Damn that surprise bio quiz that Mr. Butler had sprung on us today. I didn’t even know what smooth intestinal muscle looked liked for real, though I could draw a diagram of it.
Something else about me felt wrong. Yeah, I know; understatement. I looked down at my legs. “Oh, God,” I whimpered.
My seatmate, a purple triangle with an elephant’s trunk, twitched. “Scotch?” it said. “Holy crap, is that you?”
“Punum?”
“Am I in a coma?” the triangle replied. She sounded miserable. “Am I dying?”
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” I said. “What was that thing coming out of the lake? Did you see that?”
“Yeah. It exploded. That was freaky.”
“No, that was just weird,” I replied. “This right here is freaky. Where are we?”
She was all outlined in gold. Me, I was . . . I stared down at my legs, all eleven of them. Or maybe only nine, since two of them seemed to be Punum’s as well. “Wait; are you holding my hand?”
“I grabbed your wrist when shit started to go weird. Now, I don’t know what part of you I’m holding. Feels like your ankle. Both ankles.”
“Let go of me,” I said. “You’re not my type.”
“I can’t,” wailed the purple triangle. “I’m stuck.”
“Oh, goody.” My ear stung. I knew that was bad for some reason. Nine legs or eleven, all of my legs looked like half-melted black rubber. They were some busy legs, too. I was sharing two of them with some mouthy punk chick I didn’t like, and two more of them were intertwined with each other, with puffy-looking bulges where they touched. Where had I seen something like that before? Oh, crap. Earthworms. In that video we saw in bio class. Were my legs trying to mate with each other? Probably explained why I’d been feeling this tickling sensation, well, in places I didn’t want to think about right then. Could give Punum the wrong idea.
“Whatever I’m tripping on,” said Punum, “I don’t like it.”
I didn’t answer her, though, because right then, one of the puffy places on my mating legs bulged a little more—it felt as though my leg was yawning—and spat out a tiny version of the floppy-legged thing I’d become. “Holy shit!” I said. I managed to catch the baby before it rolled off me onto the floor of the train, or whatever we were in. It immediately wound sticky legs around the place on my wrist where that weird patch of skin had appeared the last time.
Some of the other beings in there with us started clapping; those that had hands, that is.
Punum the purple triangle looked at the baby; don’t ask me how I could tell she was looking. Not like she had eyes, or anything. She went all jangly around her gold-lined edges. “Jesus. What is that thing?”
“I think I just gave myself a baby.” The kid kind of had my face, only with a beak. The irises of its eyes were yellow, shading inward to bright green pupils. It stared calmly at me with them. It only had nine floppy little legs. I guess the two mating ones came in when it got its first period, or had its first wet dream, or both, or something. It’d need to be a hermaphrodite to fertilize itself,
right? I think maybe. Its legs weren’t as sticky as mine. And not black, either. Kind of a tortoiseshell brown, almost see-through.
The baby whipped some of its scary legs toward my face. I yelped and ducked my head, but I was too slow. The baby didn’t hurt me, though. It just started tapping on my chin.
“What’s it doing that for?” asked Punum.
I felt like I was going to upchuck. I felt like I was supposed to upchuck. “I think it’s hungry,” I said. And I was supposed to feed it my own stomach contents, like birds did. But there was no way I was going to hurl in public, even if this was really a coma, with people—well, things—watching me, much less spit it all into a baby’s mouth. But the feeling was getting stronger, moving upward into my chest. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. It could starve for all I cared, or learn to drink formula. I clamped my mouth tightly shut and held my breath, willing the upchuck feeling to go away. It didn’t work, and I was going to spit up any second. In panic, I reached deep inside myself and pushed. That’s the only way I could describe it.
We began to fade out. Thank heaven. Anywhere but here. But as we were leaving the dream, I heard, in a really big voice but weak and from far away, “Scotch! Oh, God, you gotta help me! It hurts so bad!”
Richard! He was here! I didn’t dare open my mouth to answer, for fear of spewing. Instead I tried to, I dunno, unfade us back into the dream. Richard!
. . . but Punum and I were sprawled on the ground on Lake Shore Boulevard now, outside Bar None with its torn-open front. Punum’s chair was on its side. Its wheels were spinning, as though it’d only just fallen over. Her crutches were lying nearby. We were in a puddle. “You okay?” I asked her.
Her face was blank with confusion, but she replied, “Yeah. Damn, I get tired of people asking me that. Fix my chair, would you?”
I did. She pulled herself over to it and clambered into it. “Hey,” I said, “were we in . . . Did we just . . . Was I out just now? How’d we get outside? How come it’s light out?”
It wasn’t all that light. More like early morning. Kinda dark, and the world was a mess. Buildings with smashed windows. An ambulance careening the wrong way up the street, its siren blaring. People standing outside buildings, clutching injured arms and legs. People crying. Shit lying in the road; desks, a smashed-up refrigerator that looked as though it’d fallen from an upper story. Power lines torn loose and lying on the sidewalk and the road. Way too many people huddled at the nearest streetcar stop, like the streetcar hadn’t shown up in ages. Punum took it all in, then turned to me. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “That was seriously weird. Do you remember anything at all?”
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