You put deodorant on?
Nod.
You brush your teeth?
Nod.
You put lip gloss on?
Nod.
Hmm.
Eloise isn’t convinced. She never is. But Kara thinks she looks fine. Her look, almost prepubescent, is perfect, she thinks. No cars will slow down for her, no church ladies will whisper “slack” when they see her dress, because it reaches her ankles and doesn’t stop mid-thigh.
Eloise gets up from the couch and takes a few steps toward Kara so that she’s standing a few inches from her face.
If you see someone we know, make sure to call her ma’am.
I will.
And if you see someone from our family, don’t talk our business.
I won’t.
If your fast friends start talking to some boys, leave and meet them somewhere when they’re done.
Of course.
And bring me back something to eat. Jerk chicken and rice.
Yes, Mom.
Kara heads for the door and feels Eloise’s eyes watching her, searching her body for an imperfection to catch and correct. Kara knows that Eloise is running through a list in her head, making sure she hasn’t missed any instruction or overlooked any direction, making sure she won’t get a phone call later in the afternoon about her daughter’s raggedy appearance or unruly behaviour. Kara turns around and tells her she knows the protocol, that she’s been listening for the past two hours, for the past fourteen years. She tells Eloise that it’s all in her head.
* * *
12:40 p.m.
Ready.
Brandon & Sheila
Our neighbour was a drug dealer. Or at least I thought he was a dealer; my mother just thought he was Brandon, a spoiled twenty-year-old white boy with spoiled twenty-year-old white boy problems. She said it was the way he fidgeted beneath his baggy clothes, the way he twisted his mouth to put on an accent — those things exposed him. He’d run away to Wilson and Bathurst, she said, hiding out in the apartment across from ours as a way to rebel against Mommy and Daddy.
“Both things can be true,” I’d say.
My mother would shake her head. “Doesn’t look like he has the stomach for it.”
“Oh sure he does — listen.” My hands would start moving to help me make my point. “He needs to make a living somehow and he doesn’t have the stamina for manual labour.”
“Or maybe he is getting money from his parents,” I’d revise, “but just enough to pay for rent and groceries. They probably think he’s in the city for school or something.”
We’d make up stories like these whenever we heard a disturbance coming from his side of the hall, which was all of the time. The walls in this building were thinner than the ones in our old duplex on Belgravia Avenue and definitely thinner than the ones in Nana’s house. Even if we hadn’t been fascinated with Brandon’s life, we wouldn’t have been able to escape its drama.
Whenever I got to our apartment and could hear that my mother had arrived home before me, I’d stand outside our door and brace myself for the cross over the threshold, steadying my breath as I went over a list in my mind, a list of potential wrongdoings that would trigger an argument. Sometimes I counted to ten in my head, and then sometimes, mid-count, two or three gaunt-faced men would arrive and bang on Brandon’s door until he opened it and then they’d push their way inside. Immediately after, nineties dancehall would start blasting so it was nearly all we could hear next door. It was the only time Brandon bothered with music to mask his interactions. But even then, when there was yelling we could still hear snippets of the arguments, and it was Brandon’s voice we heard the most.
“Nah, fuck that, man. He’s lying, bro. I fucking swear he’s lying. Y’all are my bredren, right? My homies? I wouldn’t fucking do that, I swear everything is criss as shit!”
“This is why he’s a dealer,” I’d say to my mother. “Maybe one who is over his head, but still, a dealer.”
My mother only conceded that he was probably a user. He was definitely a partier. The night he moved in he knocked on our door and politely told us that he’d be having a few people over to his place. My mother thanked him for letting us know. After that, dusk-till-dawn ragers were regular occurrences, and our living room stank of the weed they’d smoke. I asked her once why she didn’t threaten to set the landlord on them like she’d done in the other apartments we’d lived in. She looked at me, her eyes somehow weary and sharp at the same time, and sighed.
“Because I’m tired, Kara.”
Tonight, Brandon was arguing with Sheila. She hadn’t been around for a while. The love Brandon had for Sheila was kind of scary, and the love she had for him was kind of psychotic. He kicked guests out of his apartment for touching her knee, threw what had to be lamps or vases or glass ashtrays across the room. Sob. Howl. Then they’d fuck. He’d kick her out after. She’d smash a window and break back in, threaten to “fuck up” any new girlfriend he might find, scream that she loved him when he said he couldn’t believe she slapped girls just for saying “hi.” The first time I saw her, the same night Brandon moved in, she looked quiet, subdued. Short. Blonde. A pink streak in her hair. White, like translucent white, like she’d never been in daylight. I couldn’t picture her hysterical with rage. But we heard it every night. Maybe Brandon just did that to her.
Keeping track of Brandon’s relationship with Sheila became a sort of game my mother and I were all too eager to play. We’d turn down our TV to hear their fights better and come up with all kinds of drama for them to scream at each other about. But tonight, it was different. I didn’t want to guess their crisis; I wanted to listen.
“You fucking asshole, Brandon! You’re a goddamn fucking asshole!”
“Sheila, shut up! There’s a fourteen-year-old girl next door!”
Up until now my mother had been sitting quietly in the armchair. I’d chosen to do my homework at the breakfast table across the room in the kitchen, which was really a couple of cupboards, an oven, and a tiny counter. The small space between us was full of what we could cram into this studio: a sofa bed and coffee table, our cherry-wood TV cabinet. Even from across the apartment, I could tell that her eyes were fixed on me.
“How does he know you’re fourteen?”
“Mom, I’m not fourteen. I’m sixteen.”
She hadn’t forgotten. She just wanted to catch me in a lie. It was what she’d do when I was younger — say something, anything, and see how I’d respond to it. As a kid I’d made the mistake of offering up overly complicated explanations, thinking that the more detailed I was, the more her doubt would ebb. Those explanations usually ended up revealing some kind of secret I wasn’t even aware I was keeping from her. Now I knew to say as little as possible.
She’d been suspicious of me since I’d come home, watching me, scanning my movements. I knew she was filing away my every gesture to pick apart and replay before going to bed. Most of our fights happened moments after we turned off the lights. That was when everything was clear, when she knew what she really wanted to argue about, and she couldn’t fall asleep with unanswered questions crowding her mind. Or at least that was what she told me. But we hadn’t had a fight in almost two weeks, which was the longest we’d ever gone without her yelling at me. I didn’t want the fact that she was fishing for a confession about a boy — Terrence — to ruin our delicate peace.
But I couldn’t tell her about the kiss.
* * *
Earlier that day, after school, Terrence Peters had shoved his tongue down my throat. First he’d asked if he should do it — just to see if everyone was right about us and we really were secretly in love with each other, he said. Terrence was the only other black kid in my grade ten English class, and we were always put together when Ms. Garrison broke us into pairs for exercises. The other students migrated to one another, leaving us as the on
ly possible partners for the other, and since it kept happening, we’d just decided to become friends. We didn’t realize the entire school would assume we were dating.
When the bell had ended the last period, he’d found me by the library and took me by the wrist. Wordlessly, he led me up the stairwell no one really used, the one that led to the fifth floor of the school, dedicated to a now-abandoned art room.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He was quiet for a bit and then he started talking, avoiding my gaze and shrugging his shoulders a lot. “Haven’t you ever thought about it?” he asked. “Maybe we should just kiss.”
Terrence didn’t date much, but when he did he picked girls who made me question if I was at least average. All flowy blonde hair, big-breasted and perky. Nothing I aspired to, but a brand of pretty that turned guys into idiots, which was something I couldn’t help but notice. I’d grumble at seeing Terrence’s dumb, slackened face after he’d kissed one of those girls. He’d lost his virginity to one of them, and when he’d told me about it in morning period, I hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the day.
I looked at him, slanted there against the railing. He was tall and curly-haired. He had skin smooth and dark like molasses. Cute. Even my mother had said so when I’d introduced him to her at parent-teacher night a few months ago; but her tone was accusatory. She’d sent me here for high school because of the high university-acceptance rates, but the kids who went here worried her. Their parents thought they were entitled to a freedom that led to sex and mouthing off and sex and bad manners and more sex, she said, and she reminded me whenever she could that I had no such liberties under her roof. The way her eyebrow cocked at Terrence that night had let me know that those reminders were going to become even more frequent.
I told him he could kiss me, and then he inched forward and meshed his lips with mine; they would’ve been soft if he’d remembered to rub on some Vaseline after gym, but they were chapped and dry, rough to feel. My own lips were still puckered when he started to open his mouth. He pressed the tip of his tongue against my teeth until I unclenched them and allowed him access. I couldn’t figure him out. He opened his mouth when I closed mine; I thought he’d tilt his head one way, but then we’d bend our necks at the same angle and our lips would rub uselessly together. The sound of our smacking invaded my ears but he didn’t seem to mind it; maybe I was wrong to be so aware. He slipped his hands around my waist, and I tried to reciprocate his enthusiasm somehow, remembering the rich moaning I’d sometimes hear coming from Brandon’s apartment, but I couldn’t bring myself to make that noise. I hunched my shoulders instead, trying to show eagerness, and twirled my tongue around his, but he got excited and shoved his tongue so far down my throat I gagged. I pulled away.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Good, huh?”
I wondered if I had teeth marks above and below my lips. “Yeah,” I said.
He smiled at me roguishly and I indulged him with what I hoped looked like a satisfied grin.
The day Chris kissed my friend Rochelle, they were behind the 7-Eleven at Eglinton and Locksley. He’d grabbed her Mountain Dew Slurpee and taken a sip from her straw, she told me. She teased him about germs, saying it was like they were kissing, and he’d leaned in, slipping his tongue over hers and whispering in her ear, “Nah. That’s like kissing.”
Anthony and Anita’s first kiss had been on a train heading to Yorkdale Mall. She’d been standing next to his seat when the train stopped short, making her fall into Anthony’s lap. After a moment’s hesitation he pushed his lips against hers.
“It was cool,” she’d told us with a shrug and a crack of her bubble gum.
Both times had been two years ago. Anita and Rochelle had made a show of casual retelling, but as they spoke their eyes had watched mine for a flicker of amazement. I knew from how they’d tried not to grin that the way the kisses had happened was just as important as the actual kissing. So I planned to tell them that Terrence had pressed me up against a locker and then made his move. That it was spontaneous and smooth all at once. Really we were on a stairwell landing, no lockers in sight, but Anita and Rochelle wouldn’t know that. My mother had chosen to send me to high school on Mount Pleasant, and they were friends from my old neighbourhood — they’d never come down here to scope out my school. And they were both so much further along than me now — Anita was having sex, and Rochelle had let her newest boyfriend touch her over the panties. My first kiss had to have a certain level of sexy.
“A teacher could come up here or something,” I said. “I have to get home anyway.”
Terrence took my hand as we headed out of the school and I wondered if this meant I’d signed some kind of non-verbal contract, indebting me to something. I didn’t ask. Really, I wanted to grab him by the front of his jacket and thrust my face into his, try to make myself moan like Sheila; but maybe that would intensify the terms of our possible contract. Maybe it implied sex: giving myself over to him in a way that made my heart thud.
Outside, he squeezed my knuckles with his fingers and I loosened my own grip on his hand, suddenly aware that we were out in the open where anyone could see us. No one really knew my family around here, but I could never snuff out the fear that my mother would be around the next corner, that a church friend of Nana’s would randomly pass by. It had been months since my mother and I had spoken to my grandmother, but a friend telling her she saw me with a boy would be enough for her to call my mother’s cell, for her to get over the pride of her silence.
I pretended I needed to stretch and put my hands in my coat pockets.
“Cold,” I said.
“Okay.” Terrence nodded.
I glanced at his hand. Now that I had let go of it, I wanted nothing more than to take it again. Whenever my mother caught me checking out a storefront boy, she’d put her hands on my shoulders and push me to move faster, set her jaw like she wanted to hit me or shake me, her eyes panicked, almost afraid, afraid that I wanted something that could ruin me, break me like it had tried to break her. Terrence wasn’t a storefront boy, but I was doing with him the things I sometimes imagined doing with one of them. A sourness burned in my gut and I opened my mouth to breathe better, trying not to betray the guilt and the curiosity I was feeling toward Terrence. I knew my mother could straighten me out if I told her about the kiss, untangle me, clarify things somehow, but not before the yelling, yelling that could split the cordial silence between us, and I didn’t want to give up the quiet.
* * *
• • •
But the moment I’d walked into the apartment that evening, my mother could tell that something was wrong.
She was sitting in the armchair, using one hand to underline sections of her doctoral research with red pen and the other to rub the left temple of her forehead.
“You look different,” she said.
“No, I’m fine.” I unlaced my boots and walked over to the breakfast table, moving the takeout bags to the other side so I could put my textbooks down. “How was your day?”
“You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I’m fine.”
“You fail a math test or something?”
“I said I’m fine.”
“Are you using a tone with me?”
“No, Mummy.”
She looked at me a bit, tapping the pen against her chin. “Because if there was anything wrong with you, you’d tell me.”
“Yeah. Of course,” I said.
“Yeah. Of course,” she repeated.
The rest of the evening was spent in silence — until Brandon got home, Sheila in tow. Soon he was throwing things because Sheila had slept with somebody named Trevor, either his brother or his friend, I couldn’t tell. She wouldn’t answer his questions of, “Did you? Well did you? You bitch, you did didn’t you?” but only kep
t yelling, “I saw you with that skank Tessa-fucking-Miller, Brandon.” They cared so much about each other I was sure they’d kill one another before separating for good. I didn’t know if I wanted something that powerful, if I could even have it with someone, what it would require. Terrence and I had said nothing to each other as he’d walked me to the bus stop from school. I didn’t know if he’d resolved what he needed to when he kissed me, or if he’d need me to figure things out again. I didn’t know if I wanted to be needed. It didn’t seem too far off from being used.
Sheila bellowed. “STOP IT!”
It sounded like Brandon was ramming his fist into a wall. I’d stopped trying to concentrate on biology a while ago and was now only holding my pen for show.
“Do you think she did it?” said my mother. The sharpness of her tone startled me and I flinched.
“What?” I asked.
She looked up from her papers to stare at me, the corners of her mouth tightened.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Pardon?”
“Do you think Sheila cheated with Trevon?”
“I thought it was Trevor.”
“The name isn’t the point. Do you think she cheated?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t think it mattered. If it wasn’t Trevor or Trevon it’d just be something or someone else. “Sure,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
My mother scoffed. “You’re quiet tonight.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, my breathing settled.
“I always find out, Kara,” she said. “Just something to consider.”
* * *
We decided to try again the next day during lunch period. The burnouts usually claimed the stairwell for that hour but for some reason we had it to ourselves. Terrence was good with them, like how he was good with every clique, the one black guy the entire school seemed to love. I had to wonder if he’d arranged it so they wouldn’t be here, if he’d told them he needed the privacy to get lucky.
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