Hannah and Justin, two people I hang out with in drama class, don’t understand my secrecy at all.
“Kara, you’re seventeen. At seventeen you can drive,” said Justin. “You can move out of your mother’s house, you can bartend —”
“That’s nineteen,” Hannah said.
“Actually, you can bartend at eighteen but the legal drinking age is nineteen,” I said. “Ms. Janssen went over that in class.”
“Whatever.” Justin threw his hands in the air. “The point is, Kara, you’re an adult. You’re allowed to have a boyfriend.”
I focus now on a knot at the end of my hair. It’s my boyfriend. Maybe if I say it casually, like I expect her to be calm and not respond with homicidal rage. No, it won’t work. That nonchalance is too Canadian. Too much like the kids I go to school with. Too white.
“It’s a new friend,” I say. “Rochelle’s cousin.”
That much is true. It’s best to tell as much of the truth as I can.
“A cousin who’s a boy.” It’s not a question.
“He was at Rochelle’s birthday party a few months ago.”
My mother picks up the comb and slices its tooth through my braid to uncoil it. “What did you two talk about?”
“Movies.”
She combs through a knot, pulling apart the strands so that I gasp. “You’ve seen him since?” she asks.
“He lives in Brampton.”
He told me once he didn’t always have to be the one to come down to where I lived, that I could visit him too. Take the GO bus. We’d be at his house and I wouldn’t spend so much time scanning streets and restaurants in fear of seeing someone my mother knew. I don’t know if I’m too scared to take up that offer or if I don’t think the risk is worth it.
“So you don’t see him, then,” says my mother.
“We usually just message each other,” I say.
My mother doesn’t say anything, and I’m quick to fill the silence with my own voice. “So remember that I have work tomorrow. I have morning shifts on Saturdays.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“It’s okay,” I say carefully. “I can get there myself.”
* * *
Work is at the HMV in Yorkdale Mall. I applied to be a stock associate but they made me a cashier instead. When we moved downtown, management offered to transfer me to their Eaton Centre location but I enjoyed the commute, enjoyed the time I had to myself on the train, and I just told my mother there were no openings in stores closer to us.
I’m quick at scanning and bagging but I never badger the customers to take surveys, so I’m the first shift to be cut during a slow Saturday morning. It’s eleven thirty and it’ll take me half an hour to get back downtown, but there’s no need to hurry home yet. My time is accounted for, and my mother won’t call me for another five hours. I have the freedom of a full day.
The boyfriend lives an hour and a half away from the city — calling him down here seems like a waste of my time since we’d only get to spend about an hour together. I take out my phone to look at my contacts. I could reach out to Hannah and Justin — both of them can leave their houses easily — but I never talk to them outside of school; we aren’t weekend kind of friends. I’m not too far away from the old neighbourhood. I can call Rochelle or Jordan, who’ll text Anita and Aishani, and we can all go to Randy’s for some patties or stop at the Wing Machine for a pound of Buffalo wings. But only if they answer their phones.
I default to the food court. It’s not noon yet so I find a seat in the centre, beneath the domed ceiling, pretty quickly. Five bites into my pizza, I hear them. Natasha and Lisa, two girls who were hired with me from the group interview. I can see them out of the corner of my eye, only about two tables down from me, Lisa’s purple braids clashing against her red shirt and Natasha’s big gold hoop earrings tugging on her earlobes.
“Maybe we should ask her to sit with us,” Natasha is saying.
“Why? It’s not like she says anything more than ‘hi’ to us anyway.”
“Maybe she’s just quiet.”
“Or maybe she’s stush. Thinks she’s too good to talk to us.”
“Why you gotta be so loud? She’ll hear you.”
“So? You realize we know nothing about her, right? It’s been, what, six months since we started working and we don’t even know what school she goes to?”
My pizza is only half finished but I put the slice back into the paper bag and get up from my table, shouldering my green cross-body bag.
“See, she heard you!” Natasha whispered furiously. “Your mouth too loud!”
“I nuh care! I don’t trust people who are that quiet. They’re the ones who snap and shoot people up.”
“If that’s true,” I say loudly, picking up my used napkins, “wouldn’t the best course of action be to be nice to me so you don’t become a target?”
It’s the most I’ve ever said to them. I probably should have just ignored Lisa — she’s like Anita, always has to be the loudest one in the room — and left quietly to eat my pizza on the train while I thought of something to do other than go back to the apartment. But I wanted to stun them into silence, let them see a side of me I wanted them to see. On my way to the escalator I can hear Lisa shouting, “See? She’s a fucking psycho!”
One time the boyfriend told me he didn’t really know me. Each time we see a movie, we stay in the theatre even after the credits finish rolling, cushioned in our seats until the cleanup crew kicks us out. That night they didn’t come for a while, so we were able to stay longer than usual, and the boyfriend reached over the armrest to stroke a strand of hair away from my face.
“We can go somewhere after this,” he said. “Tell your mom the subway’s down or something, give us some more time.”
“Go somewhere and do what?”
“Talk. Whatever.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I thought boys didn’t like girls who talked too much.”
The boyfriend laughed. “You don’t talk at all, love. Not about, I don’t know, real things.”
“That’s specific.”
“Don’t do that,” he said. When I opened my mouth he shook his head. “And don’t pretend like you don’t know you’re doing it.”
“I don’t know what you mean by real things. Be specific.”
He shrugged his shoulders and scratched the little stubble he had on his chin. “School. Parent stuff. I don’t know, things. The things I tell you.”
I held up my index finger. “One, school’s hard.” Then my middle finger, so I was making the peace sign. “Two, my mom is . . . she’s my mom.” My fourth finger. “Three, was there a number three?”
“What about your dad?” he asked.
“What about him?”
“He isn’t around, right?”
I stared at the black screen. Two guys with brooms and dustpans ambled into the theatre. One of them shouted, “Movie’s over, guys!”
“Yeah, movie’s over,” said the other. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here!”
The boyfriend got up first and dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the floor, his way of refusing my payment for the movie tickets. I picked it up without a word because I’d already stuffed a twenty-dollar bill in his gym bag when he went to the washroom, anticipating this move.
* * *
I met the boyfriend at Rochelle’s eighteenth birthday. The party started at seven, and my mother was going to pick me up at ten even though no one else would even show up until at least eight thirty. When I got to Rochelle’s, her mother, Ms. B, was still bustling around the kitchen, cooking what smelled like jerk chicken, and Rochelle was hanging up streamers in the basement, standing on top of the ripped leather couch to reach the ceiling. She wasn’t even dressed yet, wearing grey lounge shorts and a tattered shirt with the Jamaican flag splayed across the ches
t.
“Hold the other side nuh,” she said.
I climbed onto the sofa and balanced myself on the frame, taping the other end of the streamer against the wall. Rochelle suddenly got irritated.
“Ay, are you going to set up the stereo or just stare at my friend’s batty all day?”
“Damn, Chelle, why you gotta be like that?”
I hadn’t noticed there was someone else in the basement with us. The boyfriend was crouched in a corner by the entrance, bent in front of a large speaker. I glanced away as soon as I spotted him. I couldn’t stare at cute boys for too long.
“That’s just my Brampton cousin,” Rochelle told me. “He’s a Star Wars geek.”
“Chelle!”
“Oh.” I stepped off the couch and followed Rochelle back upstairs. “I like Lord of the Rings better.”
At eight o’clock another three people showed up: a guy in a du-rag and two girls in jersey dresses, one of them sporting the Lakers and the other one the Sixers. Anita, Aishani, and Jordan probably wouldn’t come until my mom picked me up at ten; they always tried to be the latest ones to anything. We stayed upstairs — there weren’t enough people for the basement to become the place to be yet. Rochelle and the other girls skipped to her bedroom to find her something to wear, and I sat down in the living room since I wouldn’t be of any help. I’d come in basics: blue jeans and a fitted camouflage shirt. I never spent more than ten minutes deciding what to wear.
Ms. B had finished most of the cooking, and the dining table was crowded with aluminum trays stuffed with rice and peas, jerk chicken, potato salad, curry goat. We weren’t supposed to start eating until at least another ten people showed up, but the boyfriend crept around the kitchen and snatched a couple of fried dumplings from a pan on the stove, keeping a lookout for Ms. B, who’d gone to the bathroom. He handed me a dumpling as he sat next to me on the floral living room sofa.
Du-rag watched us from the armchair. “Wow, you couldn’t get me any?”
“I only got two hands, don’t I?”
“Oh I see,” he said, grinning. “This is one of your moves, right? Being all chivalrous and shit.”
“Whatever.”
I stared at the dumpling. “Thanks.” The truth is, I don’t like fried dumplings. I prefer them boiled and mixed in stew with yams and chicken, a preference that everyone tells me is weird.
“You’re wrong, you know,” said the boyfriend. “About Star Wars.”
“You heard that?”
He grinned. “Yeah, I heard that.”
The house started getting packed around eight forty-five, and there was an unspoken system to the party: take your shoes off at the door, pack your paper plate with food, thank Ms. B, and then beeline to the basement where the music was, where the dance floor was, where Rochelle was. Even downstairs, I sat on the tattered couch and watched the party ebb and flow in front of me. Rochelle danced in the centre of the basement, the gold belly chain circled around her midriff glinting in the dark and hypnotizing the guys posted up against the wall. The boyfriend found me and sat next to me again — even though when he’d sat next to me upstairs, we’d just talked about movies; even though for each group of girls that passed by us, one of them would ask him to dance.
“Look, I don’t dance,” I said. “So if you want to try to catch a bubble or something, feel free to talk to one of those girls.”
“Don’t worry, love,” he said. “I don’t dance either.”
It was a lie, a corny one, and it almost made me smile.
The next day Rochelle messaged me to tell me he’d asked for my number and she’d given it to him.
He likes u. Deal wit it.
* * *
My mother’s having one of her restless nights, where she needs to be free of our studio or else ends up in a sour mood, yelling about the size of the apartment and her shitty boss, about my failing math grade, about life. She asks me to keep her company when she goes driving, choosing to take the highway to the Woodbridge suburbs, and while she’s concentrating on passing a slow-moving Prius I ask her how she met my dad.
“What?”
I’ve only asked her this once before, when I was thirteen, and she pretended not to hear me.
Her hands grip the steering wheel. “Why are you asking about that?”
“I don’t know,” I say, because it’s true.
“There are no letters, you know,” she says. “No emails I’ve deleted or messages I’ve kept from you. He asks about you if I ever have to call and beg him for the child support he was supposed to pay years ago and I tell you when he does. Minimal effort, Kara.”
She’s getting angry.
“I was just curious, Mom,” I say.
“For no reason whatsoever?”
I press my lips together.
“Well?”
“You two meeting, it’s kind of like my origin story, that’s all.”
“Your ‘origin story’?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
There’s a beat before my mother speaks again. “My friend liked him,” she says. “She asked me to tell him that and he told me he liked me instead. I should’ve known from then.”
“And then what happened?”
She shrugs. “We dated.”
I wait, but she doesn’t say anything else. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“But —”
“You asked me how we met and I told you, end of story. If you’re that interested, why don’t you call him and ask him yourself?”
I’m not going to do that and she knows it too. I have no resentments I need him to hear or explanations I need him to give. I don’t carry him with me like she does, and she’s always felt like I’ve betrayed her because of it.
“I was just curious,” I say again.
“Yeah, well,” my mother switches on her turning signal and glides into the next lane. “Didn’t curiosity kill the cat?”
* * *
The boyfriend’s house is nice. He’s polite and gives me a tour of the living room with its old-fashioned fireplace and of the kitchen with its granite countertops. It’s the kind of house my mother would like. Framed family photos nailed to the wall guide us up the stairs to the second floor and there, the boyfriend invites me into his bedroom. It’s messy but not a mess. An empty white hamper. A pile of clothes on a swivel chair. A cedar wood desk and translucent blue iMac. He has a tube TV on top of his dresser, hooked up to a portable DVD player and Xbox.
It took me a month to finally make it here, to want to see where he lives.
We sit on his twin bed to watch The Chamber of Secrets, and the boyfriend’s mouth is on mine even before the flying Ford Anglia appears. He holds nothing back and shifts to lay me down, brushing my tank top upward. I feel the mechanics of his touch, of his hands on my skin, on my waist, on my breasts, all the things that are supposed to make me ache. Wet splotches smack against my neck, and I’m reminded of my first kiss with the first boy I ever made out with. Terrence Peters. I didn’t feel much of anything then, either. I wonder if I can, if I ever will. The TV is still visible from my position, and I catch Uncle Vernon falling into the rosebushes as Harry escapes.
The boyfriend whispers in my ear. “I have condoms.”
“Okay.”
I’m not nervous. Or scared. I just want to know. I want to know if I can feel anything, if he can discover me, open me up. He said he wanted to know me; maybe he meant that I never give anything of myself over to him. He kisses me again, and I push myself to react, to wrap my arms around him and crush him to me.
When it’s over, I’m still looking at the tubed screen. Harry can’t use Floo Powder properly and ends up in Knockturn Alley. The boyfriend’s lying on his front, his face buried in a pillow, and he puts his arm across my middle, half-awake and half-asleep. “You okay, love?
” He turns his head to look at me. “How do you feel?”
Unchanged and unmoved. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing and I just keep watching the movie.
“Fine,” I say. “I feel fine.”
Faith Community
We’d been parked in the sun for over an hour when Nana strutted out of the entrance of Faith Community Baptist Church with the other churchgoers. My grandfather was at her back, walking as if he were being pulled along by an invisible string. His arms swung lazily at his sides as he followed Nana’s quick steps across the church’s parking lot to the sidewalk.
We were in a private lot across the street. I nudged my mother awake, took my feet off of the glove compartment and put them back into my buckle-up sandals. My mother eased the driver’s seat into its original position and pulled out her messy ponytail. She wiped her forehead as she gathered her hair in her palms, but the sweat had already begun to naturalize the strands: she could only manage to put her hair up in a puffy bun. I looked out the window. With every two steps, Nana stopped to grab hands with her Brothers and Sisters, and to, I was sure, Bless them with God’s Good Fortune. My grandfather stayed behind her like always, his closed-lip smile failing to prevent interaction and in fact encouraging it. Bible-holding men in brown suits and women in loud purple, blue, or red dresses huddled around him like seagulls. Quiet and distant, my grandfather was a challenge — and so naturally attracted the meddlesome interest of the flock.
He and Nana started walking across the street toward us, and I could hear them out of the rolled-down windows, Nana’s voice snapping the air like a firecracker.
“I canna believe how yuh embarrass me, suh! Canna even wear a suit! Canna even talk to the people them, canna even —”
Frying Plantain Page 10