I couldn’t stop thinking about Hakim. He was like a wild horse to me. Untamed, he hit girls at random and laughed in the face of guilt, preferring to be sent to the office than to apologize. He had no fear crossing the street without holding an adult’s hand. And now, he was kissing all the girls on the playground. He lacked modesty in language and body and was unknowing of the bible, something that I with my Christian sensibility was surprised to adore. His kissing frenzy was the talk of the schoolyard and was fuelling my new fantasies.
“He’s so gross!” said Clara, that Twinkie kid, the only girl in school who managed to have a hand-me-down free wardrobe. She was fancy, rich, and white. Of course, Hakim would want to kiss her.
What a liar! I thought to myself but would never say out loud. I know she likes it. She should be so lucky. I often imagined the texture of his chapped lips against mine. What it would be like to linger at the bottom of the slide, just the two of us, a puppy pile of budding love. Sharing lunches. Trading carrot sticks for dried mango. Passing notes to each other in class. Dinner tonight? Yes? No? Maybe?
Right beside Rouge Hill Public School is a community centre and hockey arena. Every day after school, families with lighter skin and two whole parents with two whole jobs drive to the ice rink for hockey lessons. Out of the minivans, their back windows illustrated with those family stickers: the largest stick figure, a father; the medium-sized one in a skirt, the mother; and so on to show everyone their three healthy children, their cat, their dog, emerge these perfect families, hockey gear and all, their ice skates clinking as they rush inside.
We, the brown kids with one and one-half parents, with siblings from different dads we see only in photos; we who call our grandmothers Mom; we who touch our father’s hands through Plexiglas; we wait for their fanfare to be over. We wait through the weekends of extracurricular activity for Mondays, when the Zamboni resurfaces the rink and leaves a pile of chemical-ridden “snow” outside.
This mountain-high remnant of the nuclear family was what we delighted in, mid-winter, climbing to the top in our second-hand sneakers and sliding down on garbage bags. This shadow of the outlines we would never live up to is what we took in handfuls, to throw at each other in fits of laughter and joy.
On one particular Monday, a freezing rainstorm transformed the pile into an icy castle. It took a whopping ten minutes just to ascend the massive thing, what with no grip on our shoes, and only seconds to descend into the chain-link fence. I decided to burrow holes instead, deep into the depths of the snow mountain. I used my gloves, too short to protect my red frostbitten wrists, to dig caverns big enough to fit my chubby body.
It was meditative, creating a space in which I could hear myself breathe. Above me, I could hear the hooligans sliding on the surface as I continued my earnest work below. I turned to find Hakim on his knees, doing the same thing; his burrow had connected with mine.
In this space, we could hear only our breathing, the fabric of our snow pants silent. He looked directly at me. My heart began to pound so hard I could feel it in my earlobes.
He looked up at the low ceiling of snow above our heads. “Did you know that if there are enough people tobogganing above us, this cave will collapse?” We looked at each other. “They won’t even hear us scream. They’ll just keep tobogganing until sunset. And by then, we’ll already be frozen to death.” The fog of my breath mixed with his fog. I gulped.
Hakim, still on his knees, crept forward. His wet mittens grabbed hold of my hood, and he kissed me. His cheeks were cold. His nose was snotty. But it was like a movie kiss, with his head turning side to side, his tongue twisting here and there. I was motionless, burning inside, not wanting it to end. Then he pulled away from me suddenly and returned to digging.
I was too busy hearing music in my head to wonder at the hardness under my snow pants. I almost died in the arms of the boy I love, I thought to myself. We almost died doing what was dangerous, forbidden. I didn’t need to be a saint any longer. I was a secret-keeper from now on.