I didn’t sleep well. Coupled with having to wake up extra early so I could walk the dog before heading out to fix the flat tire, my Friday morning started with all the bang of a wet firecracker. I picked Nell up and headed to school.
“Here.” She handed me Jackie-O sunglasses.
I glanced at her then at back at the road. “What are these for?”
“Because I know you and know that behind that brave front you’re totally mortified. You can hide the circles under your eyes so no one knows you lost sleep over that jackass.”
I snorted. “That’s just going to draw attention to…everything.”
“C’mon.” She jiggled them at me. “I brought them especially for you—they looked fine on me. They’ll look fine on you.”
We crested a hill and came to a stoplight. I turned and looked at her. “Of course they look fine on you. You’re all blond and dewy.” I turned my head and gave her my profile. “See this?” I pointed by my ear. “Side burns, okay? I’m dark and ethnic and I’m pretty sure if I don’t get these under control, I’ll be able to go as Blackbeard the pirate for Halloween.”
Her response was the irritated sound she always made when she thought I was being difficult. “You’re built like a model.”
I snorted. “Model. For what? The latest two-by-fours? I’m not going to hide behind anything. Last night was more about Serge’s character than mine.” Hallmark and after-school-special words that did nothing but empty my lungs.
She reached out and squeezed my hand. “We’re early. Let’s grab a Timmy’s.”
I took a left at the lights and headed to the Tim Hortons by the gas station. A large double-double for me, a bagel for her—both Nell’s treats. We sat in the crowded parking lot, the scent of coffee and cream cheese intertwining with the toasted heat coming from the car vents. Too soon, the food was gone and I had no choice but to head to school. I tried to take my time and go slow, but sooner rather than later I was pulling into a spot in the student parking lot.
“Well,” I shut off the engine and glanced at the too-curious faces looking back at me. “We’re here.”
Nell checked her lipstick and flipped the visor up. “I don’t know why you’re worried. If I could do what you do, I’d walk in there like a queen bee.”
“You already walk around the school like a queen bee,” I said wryly.
She grinned. “You should own it, rock it. It’s a great talent—”
She could say that; she’d never been confronted by the ghost of a woman hanged for being a witch. and had to listen to the torture she’d endured.
“—you just worry too much.”
I raised my right eyebrow. “I’ve been in Dead Falls for four years and it’s the first place I can remotely claim as friendly. I don’t want to lose anything.”
She shrugged. “That’s you. I think the best defense is a good offense.”
Of course she thought so. Nell was the resident genius and head cheerleader with a pixie face, small body, naturally curly hair, and an hourglass figure that would get her the centerfold spread in any magazine. She’d never be on the defensive and the only thing she offended was my sense of fair play because God had decided to give her a double share of boobs.
“Hurry up!” She was out the door and waiting, the wind making her blond hair sweep across her face.
I sighed but followed. The smell of school—stale cigarette smoke and the despair unique to the teenage life—turned the air grey. We walked towards the main entrance. I tried to project a “don’t care” attitude, but last night had permanently undone any hope that I would ever be kissed before I was eighty. My shoulders slumped and my head seemed in a permanent downward dog position.
We got inside just as first bell rang. Usually, between the banging of locker doors and the yelling of kids and teachers, it was hard to hear anything in the hallways. But this morning, the voices dropped as we walked by.
No one would say anything to my face, but that was the shadow Serge cast: few kids wanted to look like they were choosing my side.
I went to my locker then headed to visual arts class. Tammy and Ben, two of the exceptions to the don’t-question-Serge rule, were there.
“I saw,” said Ben. “Want me to try and drown him during practice?”
I smiled. “Thanks, but he’s not worth the prison time.”
“I was thinking about it last night. Maybe”—Tammy tentatively reached out—“he likes you and doesn’t know how to express it.”
That’s Tammy. What she doesn’t have in academics, she makes up for with optimism and a belief in happy endings so devout, she makes Walt Disney look like a fatalist.
“He’s not secretly crushing,” I said.
“Are you sure? I saw a movie last night—”
Trademark Tammy. Life according to romantic comedies. I glanced at Ben.
He shrugged.
Telling Tammy the hard facts of life is like telling a four-year-old there’s no Santa Claus. “Trust me on this.”
Serge came into the room, his girlfriend Amber Sinclair on his arm.
My stomach clenched. That bastard was responsible for my burgeoning ulcer and if I’d weighed more than a wet rag, I would have gone up there and decked him.
He met my stare with a sneer. What I wouldn’t give for a blistering line. But I was the kind of person who thought of the great retort three days later, when no one remembered the slight but me. My mind was eagerly working a scorching one-liner that called his manhood into question and included a dirty twist on car trunks, but then Craig walked into the room, and the only thing I remembered to do was breathe.
His folks had moved to Dead Falls this year, and that meant he knew nothing about my non-reputation reputation, and I still had a chance to wow him into a relationship before I fell into the “one of the guys” or “weird” category. He was the tall and lean captain of the water polo team, with brown eyes and a smile that made me willing to undergo sixty-three days of vomiting and fat ankles if that meant one day I’d marry him and have his kids.
Craig saw me and smiled as he dropped into the seat beside me. He grabbed my hand and said, “I saw. You okay?”
I smiled weakly because his hand was warm and his fingers long, and I was embarrassingly close to swooning. The fact that I didn’t say anything made him frown. He squeezed harder and I grew weaker.
“Maggie?”
I tightened my hold on his fingers, gave myself a quick second to memorize how he felt and said, “I’m good. Honest. I’m used to it by now.”
Behind the black frames of his glasses, his eyes clouded. “You shouldn’t have to be used to any of it.”
He hadn’t let go and all I could hear was the pounding of my heart. I nodded.
“Whoa, MacGregor, holding hands with the deadhead? Always thought you were gay.” Serge pushed in between us, breaking our hold. He glanced back at me. “Always figured you were asexual—like a worm.”
I stared him down. “You really want to admit to thinking about me and sex when your girlfriend’s around?” It wasn’t much of a retort, but it was the best I had.
Serge’s jaw worked up and down. He clenched his fist.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Craig. “There’s still time to pull you from the game.”
Serge shrugged. “What do I care? I’ll just drink and bang, right?” He turned on Amber and grabbed her breast.
She slapped his hand away, her cheeks burned scarlet.
He laughed and walked off.
Amber turned to me. “I’m so sorry—I saw what he did. When he said—”
“Yo! Get over here!”
She jerked at her boyfriend’s bellow and scurried after him.
“Why does she stay with him?” Ben shook his head.
“Low self-esteem?” I offered.
“Penance for sins in a previous life,” he countered.
“Maybe—”
We looked at Tammy, waiting for an answer worthy of rainbows, talking fawns, and meeting lost loves on top of the Empire State Building. She studied Amber then shook her head. “I got nothing.”
Craig shot me a meaningful look.
The audio-visual teacher came in. He did the usual: took attendance, shushed us. Mr. Parks scanned the room as he asked for volunteers to talk about their class project. Serge’s hand shot in the air, and my heart dropped to my toes. I knew, I just knew yesterday’s fiasco would feature in his video.
He strutted to the front of the class, DVD in hand.
“Tell us about your project,” said Mr. Parks. “How did you capture the essence of life?”
“I took a different approach and did a case study of one particular life, and how this person deals with death.”
He started the video.
I watched, my jaw clenching so tight I thought I’d crack my teeth.
I didn’t dare look at Craig, but the muffled laughter of the kids made my eardrums sizzle. Even Tammy couldn’t help but laugh at the confidence in my “I know a dead body when I see it” followed by my squealing like a two-year-old when he jumped out of the car.
Mr. Parks’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked in the dark. The screen went black. Then the lights flared on. Craig didn’t look at me and I couldn’t read the meaning behind his tight, frozen posture.
Mr. Parks cleared his throat. “Good camera angles,” he said.
Yeah, thanks for sticking up for me, teach.
“But the night footage was grainy. You should have included extra light.” He looked at me. “Maggie, why don’t you go?”
Nice. The school bully pranking me didn’t elicit a word. I sighed and moved from my seat. “Um—I was at an art gallery in Edmonton once, and the artist had displayed photos of people from the morgue—”
There was an audible inhalation of disgust and shock.
“No—no, it wasn’t like he had shots of dead bodies. It was just parts of them.” Good one, Maggie, because that was way less creepy. I was too freaked to do anything but talk to my shoes. “Um, anyway, I thought it was interesting, and I thought I’d do something similar.”
“Did you get permission to for those pictures or did you just sneak into the morgue when your dad wasn’t watching?” asked Serge.
I glanced at Mr. Parks. “I have permission for all the images used.”
He nodded.
I slid the video in and went back to my seat. Mr. Parks shut off the lights and blessed darkness fell. For music I’d used Pachelbel’s Canon in D because everyone had it in their wedding processional. I’d wanted to put the song in a different context. I had put this together to confront the seeming creepiness of being an undertaker’s daughter, and I’d thought, “People already see me as a freak. What could it hurt?” But I sat there in the darkened room, watching the images of the dead next to the living, I realized it could hurt a lot.
The music ended and Mr. Parks flipped the lights, saying, “Very sensitive. Class? Any thoughts?”
A few kids raised their hands and said noncommittal things like good framing and nice use of contrasting colour. I took it for what it was, an olive branch offered by people too afraid to offer the tree. Short of my four friends, no one was brave enough to put themselves in Serge’s crosshairs.
Craig went after me. He did his video with the theme of life as a game and had a stadium rock soundtrack and images of sports battles and victorious players, their faces bloody, their teeth missing, but in their broken fingers, the trophy. Tammy, of course, did an ode to love as the essence of life, and Bruce had taken the project instructions literally. He’d done a five-minute video on one-celled creatures and their evolution into complex animals. A few more kids went and then class ended.
“Don’t let him get to you,” said Craig.
“Easy for you to say,” I told him.
His lips twisted to one side. “We all have embarrassing moments. If you let him get to you then you’re not the kick-butt chick I thought you were.”
My mouth went dry. He thought I was kick butt? “You thought I was—”
But he was on to other things. “Are you coming to the game?”
He was looking at the group, which dashed my hope he was subtly asking me out.
Tammy nodded. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
We dodged kids in the hallway on the way to the next class and talked loudly to be heard above the noise.
“Would you really have benched Serge?” I asked Craig.
He grimaced. “McNally’s a threat and he knows it. If we want to get to regionals he has to play.”
I nodded.
He looked over. “I’m sorry. I would if—”
“Naw.” I brushed him off. “My wounded ego isn’t bigger than the school’s need to get a trophy.” If we didn’t start placing soon, funding would be cut. And if funding was cut then I would no longer get to see Craig wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos and a smile. A bigger tragedy I couldn’t think of.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
I waited for someone else to answer him but then I looked up and realized he was talking to me. Only me. “Uh, nothing.”
“Will you come to practice?”
I blinked. “Um—”
“I think something’s wrong with my technique,” he said. “We video the practices, but I need someone who’ll watch only me and tell me what I’m doing wrong.”
Holy crap. He wanted me to stare at his mostly-naked body. Somebody in the Great Locker Room in the sky really loved me. I nodded because I was drooling too much to talk.
“Great.” He grinned and headed down the hallway. I stood, watched, and thanked every chromosome and DNA strand that made up his firm butt. Too soon, the crowd of kids milling in the hallway swallowed him.
“Keep that up and you’ll turn the hallway into a pool.” Nell came up behind me.
“I don’t care. Mr. Parks says we’re supposed to take in and appreciate all forms of beauty.”
She snorted. “I think it’s a bit more than his beauty you want to take inside you.”
“I wish.” I was too chicken to have sex. Let’s face it, I worshipped the ground Craig walked on, but he was still a seventeen-year-old boy and I don’t give them any credit for being able to put a condom on right or keeping their mouths shut. I didn’t need my virgin lovemaking moves being the top story in the locker room and I wasn’t keen to be known as the “undertaker’s pregnant teenager.”
“I’m not a big fan of Speedos,” I said, “but on that boy, I’d take a thong.”
Nell grimaced. “Thongs aren’t meant for the male anatomy. They’re barely meant for female anatomies. I always feel like an underweight sumo wrestler when I wear one.”
“But on him, wouldn’t you want to see it, just once?” My vision went blurry as my fantasies sharpened. “Something in red, or zebra print.”
Nell choked on her bottle of water.
“You’re right,” I said. “Nix the zebra print. That would just be tacky.” I paused. “Leopard.”
She looked at me, her eyebrows went up.
“I’ll be Jane. He’d be Tarzan.”
She shook her head. “And which vine would you be swinging from?”
I grinned. “His.”
“Yeah, right. You’d never do it.”
She had me there. I punched her on the arm, then turned and headed to my next class, hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with Serge for the rest of the week. Of course, knowing my luck and his immense jerk factor, I was pretty sure it was a vain hope.