There was this old white guy. Academic. You know the type: highly revered, widely read. I’d never read his stuff myself, mind, but I had come across a summary of one of his essays once. And from what I read, the guy has a pretty interesting view of the world.
See, according to him, people were either tourists or vagabonds. You know, it’s all about privilege. Some people can pick up and go anywhere they want, make a home anywhere, buy out any plot of land in any continent and damn whoever’s bones may be buried deep beneath their newly built six-bedroom flat. Others are forced out of their homes. They go only where they’re wanted, and stay only as long as they can before the mob comes and chases them out. “Take your strange gods and alien words! We don’t want you!” the mob would say.
Vagabonds. They wander, looking, but never finding, a home to call their own.
I had always called Canada my home. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I was born here. My Nigerian parents immigrated here in the nineties, having me in Kapuskasing, and spending a few years in that rural haven of lumberjacks before moving southward to Toronto where we were no longer one of two black families in the city. We’d moved voluntarily. We weren’t rich, but we’d still been able to make a home in Toronto. In Canada. And I had always called Canada my home.
It must have been the sight of my dad’s tooth sailing in the air that made me reconsider. As I cowered in the chill of night behind a vacant bus stop booth watching two of Toronto’s finest pull my dad out of the driver’s seat of his own car and work him over, the word vagabond crawled out of my memories and settled into my consciousness, like some fat slob with a can of beer, pay-per-view, and hours of free time to kill.
It was all a coincidence. I was walking home from the convenience store at the same time my dad was coming back, probably from the mechanic. Before I knew it, I was hiding, watching and crying. I reached into my phone to call the police, only to realize that they were the police. They were the police, beating my dad in the middle of the empty street a block away from our rundown apartment on Finch.
That was when I realized: I had no home. The truth of it ground my bones to dust.
One punch. Another. Canada fell out of me in layers, first the dust, then the flesh, the organs, the heart. It all fell away until only my skin remained, dark umber bright under the street lamps, blazing like a neon sign: “I’m black too! Come kill me!”
I didn’t dare announce myself and the cops didn’t notice. My hands shook against the glass of the booth. Even when I tore my eyes away from the wet stains on the front of his pants, I could still hear my dad begging: “It’s—it’s my car! I swear! Please!”
We weren’t anything. I should have known. The stench of death surrounded us and I should have known.
Help us. . . . I forced my hands to do the sign of the cross, then clasped them together, squeezing my eyes shut. God . . . Someone. Anyone. Help . . .
It was sudden. The warmth leached out of my body as if someone had sucked it clean from my blood. Maybe that was why the air now felt heavy and damp, hot against my skin, while my insides were cold as a cemetery. And the smell . . . I’d smelt it before, though I couldn’t quite place it. It reminded me of the smell of that church in Nigeria where we’d placed my grandmother’s white casket. The rustic spices and petroleum and bodies. I could hear the talking drums they’d played then too, frantic rhythms rising in the still swamp of air.
Death. I was surrounded by the stench of death . . . was that it? Was this some kind of death premonition?
“God, what—”
If that one doesn’t help you, maybe I can, sha.
The voice echoed in the chambers of my mind. Male. Deep baritone. Yoruba accent.
A business card dropped unceremoniously next to my feet. I bent low and picked it up.
“Fumi’s . . . Eatery . . .” I read the words numbly. The cops had hopped into their getaway cars and were already half-way down the road.
Crying and crying in the street. The man’s voice in my head carried a hint of mockery, each syllable a new round of laughter at my expense. Has your situation not already gone out of hand? Tell me, what is your wish, child?
Wish . . .
My back straightened up. Revenge.
My eyes trained on my dad breathing, bloody, at the foot of his car. Then, when I looked back down at the business card, I noticed a word scratched very sloppily into the bottom left-hand corner as if with a long pointed nail: ‘basement.’
Then find me, Monisola. When you are ready, I will make that road for you.
Monisola. My name. “How do you know my name?” —he—and then I knew. He was behind me.
I whipped around and saw his skull-face first, his stretched grin the pearl gates to a graveyard. Skin, dark as coal. I only just caught a glimpse of his straw hat before he stepped back and disappeared into the night as if whisked away by the frenzied drumbeat.
I was screaming, my hands tightened around the business card.
I think my dad and I lost consciousness at the same time.
“In the Name of Jesus!”
Another cold rush of water hit my skin as my mother prayed, dumping half the bucket on my naked body. “Monisola, say amen!”
“Amen,” I responded, shivering in the bathtub despite the lukewarm faucet water pooling around my dark feet.
Pushing the shower curtains further to the side with a swish, my mom prayed again. “In the Name of Jesus, I wash away the dirt of reproach. From now, all eyes that look upon Monisola will see the Glory of God. Say ‘amen’!”
“Amen!”
I screamed loud enough for the walls to shake because that was just what you did. The others in our apartment building wouldn’t care either way because everyone kept to themselves here. They wouldn’t even yell curses at me. Some ‘community.’
We were all dutifully following the twenty-one day prayer and fasting program that our pastor had given my mom. It was the last day and I was the only one in the family who hadn’t finished. My heart wasn’t really it in, though. If you’d watched your dad get beaten by police only to then go through almost three weeks of legal stalling and pointless deadlocks from a police and justice department that had no real desire to punish their boys in blue, you’d find it hard to prayer-up too.
When we finished, mom dragged in the bag of dirt she’d bought from Home Depot and sprinkling some of the water she’d prayed on into the bag. She said, “I bless this soil in the Name of Jesus. The land of Canada will not reject us.”
And then she began praying in Yoruba. That I couldn’t understand, so I mentally checked out like always, suppressing that dull sense of loss that always threatened to swallow me each time I heard the indecipherable language.
The land of Canada. Kapuskasing. Toronto. Each border my family crossed was meant to bring us to a new home, but there was no such thing. The borders I thought could be bribed by loyalty, optimism, kinship, hard work or cold hard cash were just as insurmountable as they always would be for people like us. I knew that as surely as I watched my mother desperately praying for the truth not to be true.
As I left the tiny bathroom, I caught a quick glimpse of my dumpy black face in the mirror and quickly looked away. Instead of hope and faith, it was hatred that swelled in me as I joined my big sister, Mopelola, in our bedroom. She didn’t bother to wear headphones so I could clearly hear the Nollywood movie she watched on her laptop. A cheated-on wife had gone to a babalawo and the ritual they’d done had finally taken effect, zapping her unfaithful husband dead with a technicoloured lightning bolt right in his living room. Well, hell hath no fury.
But I was furious, furious as I put on my pyjamas and checked my phone, furious as I saw the troll messages from bullies spamming the Facebook page I’d made last month: The Vagabonds of Trudeau High, meant as an outlet for kids like me drowning in this racist-ass school in this racist-ass town in this racist-ass country. I was furious every time I saw my dad walk around the apartment like a ghost.
Furious because I now realized that my Facebook page was nothing but a web version of mother’s prayers.
I stared at my sister’s skinny frame enviously, self-conscious of the dark gut rolling over my underwear. “So, from what I can gather, the husband’s dead?”
Lola shrugged. “Juju is nothing if not effective.”
“Don’t let mom hear you say that.”
“Trust me, I feel dirty saying it. That shit’s evil. I’d never touch it.” She swept the long, straight black hair of her wig across her shoulder. “Hey, Moni, you wanna watch the rest of this? There are English subtitles.”
The gracious hand she extended stung like the prick of a rose-thorn. She could understand what the movie was saying because she understood Yoruba. She was born in Nigeria. When my parents came to Canada, they’d had this sudden fear that I’d get all mixed up if I heard English and Yoruba at the same time so they exclusively spoke English to give me a proper leg up in the country of my birth. The fat lot of good that did me.
“Maybe next time.” As I gathered my coarse hair into a bun at the top of my head, I saw the card on drawer. Fumi’s Eatery. Untouched for days.
She shrugged and went back to her movie.
“But Lola.” My eyes settled on the scratchy scribbles in the corner of the card. “Evil or not . . . wouldn’t you do whatever you had to if you had to? Know what I mean?”
Lola looked at me. “No.”
I couldn’t even be sure it hadn’t been a dream. Or a nightmare. A mystery man, impossibly tall, giggling like the Pied Piper had as he dragged the village children into hell.
But I’d kept the card.
Revenge.
Sickly sweet, the word melted into the hatred already quietly seething in me. I thought of the cops beating my dad and wondered.
“Make sure you wear your contacts when you go to school tomorrow,” Lola reminded me. “You’ll look cute, promise.”
“Sure, whatever.”
Revenge was what I dreamt of that night. And the tall man’s mocking promises.
The next day at school, my head was so filled with thoughts of that skull-faced man I almost didn’t hear Mr. Patterson explain the speech-writing assignment at the end of English.
“The three students with the best grades will get to recite their speech for the Alumni Event one month from today in May. They’ll also be entered in a province-wide contest with other eleventh graders to give their speech at the Canada Day event in Ottawa.”
Daisy Danders reminded me of a daffodil swaying in the breeze as she lifted her pretty blonde head up from the notes she was scribbling. I hated her. I couldn’t articulate why, I just did. She lifted her annoying hand up to ask a follow-up question, like we all knew she would. “Mr. Patterson, you said the theme of the speech is ‘What it means to be Canadian.’ Are there any parameters in terms of content?”
“Nothing vulgar, nothing plagiarized. Aside from that, I’ll leave it to you.”
Being Canadian. I was boiling, the hatred in me singing as Perfect Little Daisy chattered about how excited she was, as Mr. Patterson’s face brightened with validation from his Aryan princess. Being Canadian. In my throat, millions of voices screamed in agony, begging for release, but I kept my lips shut against them. I didn’t speak. My back gave a coward’s slump in my seat.
When I turned my head Geoffrey Hale was staring at me, his beautiful jaw-line set as he looked me up and down with his deep blue eyes. My heart started to race just as the bell rang.
“Hey.” Monica Minich poked me in the shoulder with her pen and when I got up, she gave me a friendly smile. We weren’t best friends or anything, but we liked each other because we were both Monis and not white, and we both needed to lay off the cafeteria chicken burgers but couldn’t and wouldn’t. “You coming for Club after school? The Band Practice Room?”
Before I could answer, Geoffrey and his friends walked by the two of us. Geoffrey flicked his head in my direction and said, “From this angle, Moni looks so different without her glasses, doesn’t she?” He meant me. I stiffened.
“Yeah,” answered the taller red-head, Tom, as they made for the door. “Still ugly though. Dark as shit.”
Geoffrey laughed and agreed.
“Don’t listen to them . . .” Monica said as I deflated.
That sweet hatred forever humming in my veins promptly sharpened and turned into a weapon I pointed at myself. “Yeah,” I muttered. “I think I need the Club, right about now.”
And so The Misfit Club met after school. At least that’s what I lovingly called us in my head. We met in the Band Practice Room like we’d planned earlier this week via private-messaging after discovering on the Vagabonds Facebook page that the six of us were all equally angry. The members: Monica Minich, Stephen Yoon, Omar Massoud, Augusta Kendall and, of course, Nell Hotchkins, who rather suddenly took the reins of the meeting the moment she entered the room. Big and brawny, Nell set the chairs up in the band room in a tight circle.
“Since this is our first meeting, I think we set up like this. A circle.” She swept her hand over her buzz-cut. “Because a circle signifies equality rather than the violent hierarchy inherited from settler-colonial society. And this is a safe space.”
“Kind of like King Arthur’s Round Table,” I said, taking my seat next to Monica.
Nell’s lips curled into a snarl. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. One problem, though.” She was staring daggers at me. “I don’t need to steal ideas from straight, cis-gendered white men whose ideas were all originally ripped from the hands of the colonized.”
I blinked, sitting back in my chair. “O-okay . . .”
The vibe died. We sat in a circle in silence, staring at each other, awkward and nervous because though we’d seen each other in hallways and shared some classes, we’d never actually talked before except online through Vagabonds.
“I kind of love this,” Stephen said, breaking the silence after a bit, brimming with a shy sort of excitement. “We’re like the marginalized Breakfast Club.”
Nell took someone else talking as her cue to clear her throat and direct everyone’s attention back to herself. “Before we start this meeting, I’d like to first acknowledge this land on which Trudeau High operates.” She spoke as if memorizing a speech. “For thousands of years, it’s been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Senaca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River, and it is still home to many Indigenous across Turtle Island . . .”
While Stephen scrunched his face up in bewilderment, as she spoke, I was pretty impressed. Acknowledging the lands. Vagabonds was meant for people like us after all—people who’d felt the scourge of a racist society that denied us community. Maybe now, finally, we would have a proper one.
“I just want you to know, Monica, that I’m grateful for your peoples’ sacrifice and the opportunity to live and work on this land,” Nell finished, nodding at Monica who shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
“Um . . . you’re . . . welcome . . .” Monica never talked about her heritage. She scratched her head through her drape of flat brown hair. “I’m from Vancouver though . . .”
Nell didn’t look like she appreciated being corrected. She cracked her big chestnut arms peeking through the T-shirt she wore and sat down without a word. “Like we discussed, we created this club as a support group. Hopefully, as we get some activities going, we might actually gain some more members and some legitimacy at school. Augusta and I have already been brainstorming activities.”
The mousy tanned girl sitting next to Nell bobbed her head the moment her girlfriend looked her way, but she stayed curiously silent. She looked uncomfortable.
“One activity is the speech-writing assignment for our English class. This is the perfect opportunity for us to stand up to the white supremacist structures of this school.”
“What are you thinking?” Omar said in that cool, careful manner I never could help but notice. In each of the classes we shared, he always sat in the back row, never talking, just listening. He was lean and ridiculously handsome, muscles covered by the thin veil of a black shirt. Despite his looks, though, my masochistic mind was already set on Geoffrey’s white ass as if by habit. I hadn’t even thought of liking anyone else. Omar’s dark eyes scanned Nell as if trying to read her mind.
“Protest speeches. The assignment is about Canada, right?”
I nodded. “They probably want us to wax poetic about Canadian multiculturalism or something. Of course, Daisy Danders, Princess of White Girls, is all over it.”
“This is our chance to do some damage,” Nell said. “They won’t silence us. Not again.”
Nell was quietly fuming and I could only guess that she was thinking of her article about racism in Toronto schools that got pulled from the online school journal by Mr. Patterson. I guess the board didn’t like being called terrorists. Mr. Patterson, who had a history of helping the school to block student protest activities, was only happy to oblige.
As I thought back to my father bleeding on the street, I knew I wanted to do it. I wanted to write a speech that would set the country ablaze. But once again, my lips were shut tight against the millions of voices clamouring for release in my throat.
It was fear that inevitably pried them open. “I don’t know,” I said in an apprehensive whisper. “My family had a really tough few weeks and I don’t want to cause any trouble . . .”
Lowering my head, I thought of my mom praying and crying over the bag of dirt, my fingers curling in hopeless fury. But when I looked up, Nell’s glare wasted no time in stabbing me dead.
“Moni Adeola, right?” I shrunk back at the sound of my surname derisive in her mouth. “I mean, that is the name of your African ancestors.” She hit the word like gavel on wood. “So let me just get this straight. You’re willing to let this white supremacist step on your neck . . . for a good grade?”
“That’s not what she said—” Augusta tried, but Nell shushed her and that was the end of that.
“Do you know how many students in this school want to be brave enough to be sitting right here with us, but are too scared?” Nell continued. “If we make a statement, we can show them they’re not alone. It won’t work if one of us wants to be an opportunist.”
The way she looked at me reminded me of the laughing disgust in Geoffrey and Tom’s eyes as they flattened me and left me for dead in the classroom. “I’m not an opportunist! I just . . .” I thought of the cops and shuddered. “I just don’t want to get into any trouble.”
“So you’re a self-hating coward.”
I almost jumped out of my seat. “No!”
Nell sighed. “Ever read bell hooks’s Black Looks? You know the part where she said that black people can be seduced by the promises of a colonizing whiteness so powerful it lures us out of our own minds, bodies and self-worth?”
“She’s read the whole book a billion times,” Augusta added before falling silent again.
“Obviously skipped the third chapter, though,” Omar muttered. More audibly, he said, “We’re the marginalized Breakfast Club, yeah. But we’re not a monolith and this isn’t a dictatorship. You can’t just force your ideas and your desires and your will onto everyone here. Isn’t that also a form of violence? If this is a safe space, then who’s it safe for?”
Monica leaned over to me and whispered, “When he’s dropping knowledge and looking daddy as fuck at the same time.”
My cheeks burned and I nudged her. Nell didn’t look like she was used to that kind of challenge. Furiously, she turned back to me, the malicious judgement written in scrolls across her face. “After what the cops did to your dad, I was sure you’d see things my way.”
My body stiffened as the group hushed. Some people at school knew, some didn’t. My dad had been on the news, but it wasn’t long before his story had been swept under a tidal wave of publicized stories of U.S. police brutality. Nobody had ever talked about it to my face, but now Nell was brandishing my painful past against me like a sword.
“Sad,” she said. “I thought you were better than this. But I guess you’re just another black girl sellout.”
The illusion of community crumbled in pieces onto the practice room floor. Aching with betrayal, I left our meeting that day, dragging my feet down the halls. That familiar hatred, its seductive song the sound of beating drums, whispered to me like an old friend, begging for release.
Dark as shit, Tom repeated in my head.
I don’t know what it was about seeing Geoffrey Hale in a dark corner kissing light-skinned Lisa Gifford that finally made me crack. As he ran his hands down the long twisted brown curls I’d always wanted, I ran in the other direction, eyes hot with tears, hating my skin, my body, my club, my school, my city, and my country. None of them would ever be a home for me.
Fumi’s Eatery was so small there was only standing room for a few people in front of the counter with two tables off the side where two men ate pounded yam and egusi soup. I rang the bell on the counter, promptly bringing Fumi out of the kitchen. She was sweating from the steam of hot frying oil. She greeted me, but when I showed her the card, her smile disappeared. After scanning the room and drying her palms on her apron, she told me to come around the counter.
I followed her into the kitchen, which I had only ever seen before through the little window in the wall. In the back, a door opened to a steep flight of stairs.
Basement. The narrow stairwell was dark but for the semi-busted light bulbs overhead. The chill made the hairs on my arm stand on end. The deeper we descended into this strange rabbit hole, the louder came the sound of drums and chanting.
This was deeper shit than I anticipated. I knew it the moment I reached the basement and saw the burning candles on a small altar and the chanters in green robes and head wraps made of simple white, red, and gold cloth. Ritual shit.
There were at least a dozen people present. Most I didn’t know, though some I recognized from around the area. A couple from church. They were begging for their supplications to be heard. Well, I guess if asking God didn’t work . . .
“Take off your clothes and put these on.” Fumi pointed at the corner of the room where there were white robes piled on top of a chair.
Undress in front of shady strangers? No way. My mom’d freak. If she knew I was here in the first place, she’d have told me to run straight to our church pastor, except our church pastor and his wife were right here among the men and women telling me to step closer to the wicker basket at the foot of the altar.
I didn’t.
Not at first.
“It’s okay. Come as you are, child. It was I who sent for you that night.”
It was a large woman who’d spoken in a voice too deep and thunderous to be hers. She stood behind the altar in a silver dress, in front of the red and gold drapes covering the wall. Her eyelids flickered as fast as the candle flames as she motioned me forward.
She looked possessed. She was possessed. I knew it as surely as I could see the whites of her rolled-back eyes. There was someone inside her using her lips to grin at me as she swayed back and forth. Some chanters didn’t look like they much appreciated the spotlight being on me and my problems. But nobody argued.
“Did you not forget that night I came to you?”
Her grin turned wicked and he flashed in my memories: the tall skull-faced man who’d disappeared into the night as swift as the rhythm of a talking drum.
This couldn’t be happening. This stuff wasn’t supposed to be literal.
One man in a red hat yelled out a series of incantations and pressed his palm against my forehead. An electric shock surged down my body and I screamed. I had to get out of here.
That’s when the woman spoke again.
My heart stopped. I understood her. I . . . understood her. Her words were in Yoruba, and I understood her.
The legs beneath me began to quiver. For the first time the words were no longer mocking me from a distant land behind the insurmountable wall my parents had erected, thinking it was for my own good. For the first time, I could catch more than just the familiar crackling cadence of the words that came out of Nigerian mouths in indecipherable streams. I was no longer a stranger. I could understand.
This is what she’d said: I who stand at the crossroads go where I will. I who dwell at the gates break rules as I wish. I will offer you freedom too. Kneel. And I will give you your desire.
With plodding feet and tears in my eyes, I stepped in front of the wicker basket.
“Go in front,” the woman said in Yoruba as the men and women chanted. “Don’t go behind me. Kneel.”
I let my knees buckle. The contents of the basket were a mixture of honey and jam, but it smelled of chili, too, and whisky. One man dipped two fingers into the goop and smeared it onto my tongue. I grimaced and clutched my hands against my stomach.
My mother could never know I did this.
“I’ll ask you again,” the woman said, still in Yoruba, though I knew it was not her speaking to me. “What is that your wish, child?”
To be rooted. Placed. To have a community that needed me. A home of my own.
“Revenge,” I said. One word. Hammer against steel. “I want revenge.”
The woman’s Cheshire grin made me wonder if I’d chosen wrong or if wrong was right. I didn’t know. My mother had always told me that this stuff was evil, while social justice blogs said everything Afrocentric was good and perfect, and to think otherwise was to be slave to colonialism. Between the two of them, I didn’t know who or what to believe, or if it even mattered. All I knew was who I wanted to see suffer.
“Eh-heh, now,” the woman said slyly and I felt as if I were Elmer Fudd being tricked by Bugs Bunny into running off a cliff.
I had no idea what I’d just got myself into, but I could already feel a surge of power inside my belly where the honey-concoction was rotting.
“Okay. I will give you thirteen bullets to useless the life of your enemy.”
I clutched my shirt. I knew exactly what she meant. Spiritual bullets could twist someone’s destiny. I couldn’t see them, but I felt each one drop into the palm of my right hand, sending a shudder through my bones.
“Aim them at your enemy, and they will suffer according to your desire. If you want more, come back to me. I will give you. The choice is yours to use them as you will,” and she smiled. “To whatever end. And whatever cost.”
Cost. Well, duh. When you deal with devils, the price tag is obviously your soul. Whether they were the devils, or I was probably didn’t matter. I’d already made my decision.
It was time to try this out.
I targeted Geoffrey first. I hid behind a brick wall watching him stick his tongue down Lisa’s throat, next to the bleachers. I didn’t care about Lisa, nor did I begrudge her exotic status, but whatever Geoffrey’s tastes were, and however perfectly those tastes fit into Eurocentric ideals of beauty, he didn’t have to degrade me in class. He didn’t have to strip away my dark skin and wave it in the air like a pair of soiled underwear.
I looked around to make sure no one was looking. Then, I lifted my palm so it was perpendicular to my chin.
And blew.
A quick, hot breath. The invisible bullet flew and hit its target. Geoffrey clutched his stomach but didn’t quite collapse, not until Lisa grimaced.
“God, what is that smell?” She yelled, backing away from him. “Why do you smell? You . . . you smell like shit!”
He did. Like dark shit. It was so bad, my nose shrieked from here. He ran off the field in humiliation.
I laughed and laughed. I couldn’t stop. The giggles gurgled bloody from my lips like a vulture’s cry. The laughter wouldn’t stop. I was freaking out.
I flattened my back against the brick wall, my throat closing, my chest heaving. Was what I did to Geoffrey permanent? I couldn’t live with that burden, I couldn’t . . .
But then . . .
But then again . . .
Some people always seemed to do as they pleased, didn’t they? Throwing away the rules of morality the rest of us had been coerced into following. Some people twisted destinies as they saw fit. They were all over my school, all over my city. They surrounded me, a faceless mob of infinite bodies with their pitchforks telling me to get out with my strange gods and alien words. We don’t want you.
“Take this dirt,” my mother said that night after finishing her prayers. “And bury it outside. Take some with you to school and bury it there. And when you do, say: ‘I possess this land of Canada. This land will not reject me in Jesus’s Name.’”
But I was going to take care of these assholes for good. For all of us. My own way.
And I knew just how to do it.
First, I set up a new website. The Vagabond of Trudeau High. Vagabond. No plural. I was in this thing alone. I gave it a simple layout, dark and creepy with the school crest beneath the title. There was a single white box for anonymous messages visible only to me, the administrator. Above the box:
I am the Vagabond of Trudeau High. Tell me your grievances. Enter your target. I will take care of your ills.
See? I wasn’t some selfish creep. Helping the helpless. Giving voice to their pain. It was what the Facebook page was for, so after I finished making the new website, I left a link on the page anonymously with a quick advertisement and waited. I would help others while helping myself. Maybe that was the way to keep me from feeling tainted. And if I needed more power, I’d just go back to the basement. I could do this.
Days past with nothing but troll posts.
Dear Vagabond, can you please make my penis bigger?
Are you Satan?
Michelle Randal has herpes!
Wow, that, I didn’t know. Sigh.
A week later, it happened without me needing to think twice. Mr. Patterson was at the blackboard. I lifted my hand as if to scratch my nose. Then, quick as a thief, I blew him a kiss. His back shuddered, the chalk dropping from his hand. He lurched for a second too long. Did I kill him? Did I go too far?
“Mr. Patterson?” Daisy stood from her seat, craning her neck. “What happened?”
With a bit of effort, he straightened up. “Don’t worry students,” he assured us, pale-faced. “It was . . . it was nothing.”
A few days later, he came to class with a mad hangover. Word spread at lunch time: the essay he’d been writing for a University of Toronto Press collection—yet another essay championing zero tolerance policies in Toronto public schools—was cancelled last minute. So was his job as the assistant editor.
The Vagabond has collected one injustice.
I posted it anonymously on the Facebook page with links to the gossip about Patterson. But I knew nobody would take me seriously. I needed to make a believer out of someone. Someone who wouldn’t be able to resist making a believer out of others.
I stood quiet in a corner watching Monica hover like a ghost outside a clique of East Asian kids, their backs turned to her as she tried to make her presence known. Without even a glance her way, they stalked down the halls before her chubby legs could follow.
“Hey, Monica,” I said, sidling up to her. “You heard about that new website? Vagabond?”
Still smarting from the rejection, she scrunched her face. “That stupid website? What about it?”
“It’s not some prank, you know. It’s real. I heard that Vagabond guy took care of Patterson. And you know Geoffrey’s current B.O. problem?” I nodded. “Vagabond.”
“You sound like an idiot,” she said flatly.
“Maybe. Don’t tell me you’re not curious though?”
It was a gamble, but a week later, the Vagabond received a post.
Suzy Kim’s the ring leader. She’s the reason the other kids don’t even look my way no matter how hard I try to be friends with them.
I didn’t know why Monica tried so hard to hang out with them. Maybe because she was so into Asian stuff. Or maybe it was because they looked so much alike, ethnically, though Suzy would boil if you so much as suggested she shared any similarity with someone darker and fatter than her. Monica, on the other hand, used to say the only thing separating them was the splitting of Pangea.
Take care of her. —M.
So Wednesday morning at school, I waited for Suzy to break away from her clique for a drink from the water fountain. The bullet flew. The next day, Suzy came to class so burnt her colourist friends called her a Filipino, as if that were an insult. Well, to Suzy it was. And no amount of whitening cream could save her as she became darker and darker with each passing day. Her new nickname among her fair-skinned clique was Black Pearl.
I’d won.
Monica was a believer, and she made others believe. By the end of the month, requests were pouring in, but I only answered those from the people I felt truly deserved justice. The marginalized. At Stephen Yoon’s request, I shriveled Tom’s dick after Tom fooled around with him and threatened to kill him if he told anyone. At Marcy Blake’s request, I made the white girl who’d called her nappy-headed bitch lose her hair.
Each time I collected an injustice, it lifted my spirits and split apart my soul. The misery of my victims climbed in to bed with me at night, whispering terrible nothings. But I’d also helped people. I was getting even. That’s what made it just.
Just.
Yes.
In getting revenge for the weak, I was becoming Justice itself.
“What do you think of Trudeau High’s very own folk hero?” I asked Omar one day after Geometry. He was growing a bit of stubble that accentuated his high cheekbones. Quietly enjoying the fluttering of his long dark lashes, I waited for his answer.
“The Vagabond? Kind of a psycho, isn’t he?”
I blanched. “He’s helping people,” I insisted. “He’s helping us get even!”
Omar just looked at me and shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t see how making some girl go bald is going stop systemic oppression. And I don’t know how he can hurt others without hurting himself.”
I hated his answer so I pushed him out of my mind. A new request came in.
I’m scared of my girlfriend. She controls me, belittles me. She thinks she knows it all. She needs to be humbled, but I’m too scared to do it myself. Please take her down. —Augusta
If Augusta hadn’t accidentally spilled her name, I wouldn’t have known she was talking about Nell.
Beautiful. The painful memory of my humiliation and degradation at that hands of that self-righteous asshole in what was supposed to be a space for me was more than enough motivation.
I waited for the perfect moment: the Alumni Event. All the eleventh grade students had to come to the school auditorium in support of the three who’d been chosen to speak in front of Alumni and faculty. Nell had already told us her plan: bait and switch. The speech she’d planned for the assembly was not the Canada lovefest she’d won her spot with.
“Heads are going to roll,” she’d told us Misfits, and she was right. I would make them roll. I deserved a home. And if no one would give me one, then I was going to take it.
One body at a time.
But that night at the assembly, the man I saw as I took my seat next to Monica obliterated my planned revenge on Nell.
It was him.
Angular face, small hawk-like nose, unforgiving beady eyes. He looked like a puppet with a blond helmet on a head too small for his long neck. Officer Cleaver. And although like his name, his fists had nearly cleaved my dad’s face in two on that dark night, he and his partner hadn’t served a day in jail, hadn’t even taken a pay cut.
I was too scared to call his attention. My body seized up. My eyes followed the hands he’d used to beat my dad senseless as they pressed together in applause for Daisy, who took the stage first.
“That’s my niece!” He said proudly. “Woohoo! Daisy!”
Embarrassed, Daisy laughed and nodded in his direction.
Niece. Niece. The words repeated in my brain.
I was breathing so hard, I began sweating. But it would only get worse. As I listened to Daisy’s speech, my right palm grew heavier and heavier until I forgot about Nell entirely.
“When I was given this assignment,” Daisy started once the assembly quieted down, “I really had to think about what it meant for me to be a Canadian. Because you see, I’m not like some of the others. I’m not lucky enough to be interesting. I’m not cool, I’m not exotic. I’m just . . . Canadian. I don’t get to have a fun culture like everyone else. I don’t get to ‘come from somewhere.’ But then, in a way, I come from everywhere.”
Exotic. Fun . . .
“What the hell does that mean?” Monica whispered.
My hands were shaking.
“Every day, I walk through the neighbourhoods this fair city has to offer. Every day, I see a little bit of every culture. And every day, I take a little piece of each culture with me. A little taste here and a little nibble there. I draw them into me and they become part of me. They become me. Maybe that’s what it means to be Canadian.”
“Sounds positively vampiric,” Omar said behind me, but I could barely hear him, I was shaking so hard. Whatever had come loose was rattling noisily inside my head.
This bitch . . .
I looked from Daisy to Cleaver. This . . . I raised my right palm, my rage overflowing. This bitch . . .
Before I blew my final two bullets, I closed my eyes and saw him. The dark-skinned man, tall, impossibly tall, skull-faced. Gone was his hat made of straw, replaced by a long, dark cornucopia hat arching and stretching to his back. Gold chains hung around his neck and down his bare, muscled brown chest almost touching the plain clothes he wore for pants. His thick lips twisting into that Chesire grin, he waved his hand in front of my face and showed me my future.
I saw in an instant all the souls I would take after Daisy and Cleaver’s, after I forced the two of them to get hit by a car on one of their lovely strolls across ‘this fair city.’ Their deaths would be the start. Then I’d collect more souls that the trickster god could take with him across the gates into the spirit world.
And each time my soul would rot and die a little more. Each time, I would curse him, and he’d tell me in Yoruba that it was never his will, but my own. That I had always been given a choice. That he’d given me two roads to walk on, and which I took was my choice.
I had a choice.
I jumped to my feet and those millions of voices screaming thousands of years of pain and agony finally burst from my lips. “Daisy, your uncle, Officer Cleaver—” I pointed at him. “—beat my father almost to death because he was black and driving a nice car. It was on the news. Did you all forget that?”
A hush fell across the auditorium.
Daisy’s blue eyes narrowed in embarrassment. She couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.
“You can go anywhere you want. But my dad can’t even drive down a street a block away from his neighbourhood without being nearly killed for having black skin. Maybe that’s what it means to be Canadian.”
For the first time since that night, the words were flowing freely. They gave me more power than the bullets ever could. Omar and Monica stood up with me.
“And maybe I can’t change that today. Maybe this place will never be a home for me. But I know two things for sure. First—I’m not going to rest until you’re in jail.” My glare bore a hole into Cleaver’s beady eyes, my hatred channeled into a fierce desire for the kind of justice that wouldn’t leave me in pieces. “And second—I sure as hell don’t have to listen to this disgusting, tourist-ass speech.”
That was it. The beginning.
I marched out. Many other students followed, like the Israelites out of Egypt. Some of the alumni too, whispering in disgust.
I’d seen the edge and I’d stumbled back just in time. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to hurt Daisy and Cleaver. A part of me still wanted to see them burn. But as I walked into the warm night air with students and adults alike trailing behind me, I realized that I no longer wanted to wander.
And maybe I didn’t have to. My mom, my sister, my dad and I. We deserved a home. And if no one would give us one, then we would take it. Our way.
Just, without the bodies.