UNLIKE THE WEEK before, the weather now was bitingly cold. Winter was making its presence known more forcefully. Windows across the community were covered with frost. Trees creaked when they swayed in the wind. Playing outside was not as much fun as it used to be, except for the diehards. And hot, sticky, mosquito-infested summer months were now being remembered with a fair amount of fondness.
In front of the Thomas house, William and Ralph were in the midst of a snowball fight, with William throwing the bigger and harder snowballs with far more lethal potential. All snowball professionals know it’s difficult to force snow into sufficiently lethal projectiles when the temperature dips. The snow has to be packed very hard before it forms a ball, sticking together properly so that it doesn’t fly apart when thrown. At one point, Mr. Georges, a science teacher, had tried to explain that adding more pressure raises the melting point of snow. This makes the snow damp and therefore easier to pack together, thus rendering the snowball able to overcome the centrifugal force resulting from being thrown. Somehow it related to the fact that water can be boiled at something like sixty or seventy degrees Celsius on Mount Everest instead of the usual one hundred on the reserve. The point was, Mr. Georges was putting way too much science into something as basic as a good, old-fashioned game of snowball wars.
Ralph did his best to dodge William’s projectiles, but was soon overcome with snowy assaults and fell back into the ditch, scrambling and laughing. Not giving any quarter, William advanced, throwing still more snowballs, making them faster and faster, with just two or three strong pats of his hands before throwing them as hard as he could. Ralph kept rolling and twisting as he tried to avoid the rain of frozen water projectiles, but with little luck. For all his faults, William was indeed a fearsome warrior, even capable of throwing left-handed when pressured.
Exiting through the porch door, Shelley saw the juvenile war happening in front of her house and rolled her eyes. Not bothering to acknowledge the two boys and their foolishness, she walked right through the barrage and onto the road, determined to make her way to Julia’s house without her brother and It embarrassing her.
Seeing Shelley cross the path of fire, William briefly debated making her a civilian casualty of the war, but the potentially painful repercussions of a carefully thrown snowball in her direction made him change targets. Shelley walked on, and William continued to throw his snowballs at Ralph, who managed to stand up, enabling him to maintain a zigzag pattern as he struggled to evade the frozen mortar shells.
Across the street, behind a reasonably tall snowbank left by a snowplough’s recent attempt to clear the street, sat Danielle Gaadaw, watching everything. She smiled as Ralph successfully evaded a snowball and quickly tossed off one of his own, missing William by a mile. She saw Shelley disappear around a corner and wished with all her might that she could run up to her and join the pretty girl wherever she was headed. Instead, she hunched down lower, making sure the two boys couldn’t see her, and continued to watch them play. The only sign of her existence was the occasional trail of breath vapour that came out of her mouth, a by-product of such a frigid morning. Luckily, the vapour was the same colour as the snow.
Unaware of the cold and her cramped legs, she watched for a long time, smiling at Ralph and William’s antics. Eventually, the boys got tired and hungry; they negotiated a truce, deciding wisely that lunch was much better than war. Inside the house, Liz served them grilled cheese sandwiches. At least that’s what Danielle thought they were, seeing only a bit of what was going on through the kitchen window. It had been so long since she’d had a grilled cheese sandwich. Her mouth watered at the thought, even though she could barely remember what they tasted like.
The afternoon passed as most winter afternoons pass. Danielle watched the Thomas house for a while, all the while imagining herself on the other side of the glass in the curtained window. Huddled up into a ball in an unconscious attempt to retain as much body heat as possible, she observed the house. Tye came out, got in the truck, and drove away, returning ten minutes later with a carton of milk. If she tried hard enough, Danielle could almost see her father — what she remembered of the man — in Tye. She was certain they almost had the same walk, though she had to admit to herself it could just be her imagination. But she took comfort from her observation just the same.
A short time later, Danielle spotted Shelley returning home. She looked so confident and not shy. “Not shy” was the only way Danielle could think of to describe her. From the top of her cloudy brown hair to the tip of her freezing toes, the younger girl hero-worshipped the older Shelley.
Pretty soon Shelley had entered her house, where, Danielle was certain, she would be greeted with a freshly made and warm grilled cheese sandwich too. A couple of cars and trucks drove by the hidden girl, kicking up clods of snow in their wake, but Danielle didn’t notice them. She was focused on the house and the people in it. Her house had been like that once, she remembered, but not anymore. From her pocket she dug out an almost empty package of Saltines and munched on them as she watched the house and imagined what Shelley and Ralph and William and Liz were saying and doing. She wished very much that she was in that kitchen right then, eating a hot and gooey cheese sandwich, smiling at Ralph’s jokes and making girl plans with Shelley. Even William would be tolerated. And a hug from Liz Thomas would be so welcome. These were the thoughts of Danielle Gaadaw as she squatted in the cold snow, across the road from the Thomas house that winter afternoon.
INSIDE THE HOUSE, other thoughts were being expressed. “Think she’s any good at drawing anything else? I mean, a horse is easy.” William then gave his best “I don’t care” shrug.
“So is criticizing. Let’s see you draw a horse, then?” dared Shelley, smiling at William’s glare. She even reached over, grabbed the box of chalk, and placed it directly in front of him.
The young man backed away, as if the multicoloured sticks might bite him. “I would if I wanted to.” William bit into the remaining half of his sandwich. “I just don’t want to.” He avoided eye contact with Shelley, sitting to his left.
Behind them was the Everything Wall, with the Horse standing proud and very present in the kitchen. As had been the case the day before, few other images dotted its surface. Shelley noticed her mother standing beside the Wall, a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich in her hand, a concerned expression growing across her features.
“What’s up, Mom?”
Liz took a short breath before answering. “Nobody else has really contributed to the Everything Wall. I mean, other than Danielle’s Horse and those three drawings by Jennifer, Mark, and Keith, nobody has taken chalk to the Wall this week. Last week the place was hopping. Don’t tell me your friends are all bored already. I knew it would happen eventually, but seriously, after week two?”
Ralph shook his head, trying to swallow his mouthful of cheese and bread before answering. “It’s not that, Mom. It’s just, what’s the point in putting anything up there when the Horse is right there? It’s embarrassing. I mean, everybody loves the Horse, but …”
William finished Ralph’s thought “… but what’s the point?”
Liz knew that unless the Horse was no more, a thought that saddened her, the Everything Wall was in danger of becoming obsolete. She was conflicted by her choices. On one hand, she had come up with the idea for the Everything Wall to encourage her own children as well as some of the local kids to draw, to participate, to create. She still felt that urge and wanted to see it continue in the next generation. It had been a success the first week. Was the drawing of the Horse so powerful that it kept her own and the neighbourhood children from making drawings of their own?
But to banish the Horse — and by doing that it would mean she was telling Danielle that she could no longer draw her glorious creature — made her very uncomfortable. That solution, if it could be called that, seemed worse. Liz was concerned her words would devastate the young girl, not to mention her own growing interest in an animal that up to now she had barely taken for granted.
Last night, as she’d lain in bed, Liz had gone through a number of options in her mind. Maybe there could be two Everything Walls, one for all the kids and one especially for Danielle Gaadaw. But it was an idea that, when she examined it closely, fell apart. There would still be the problem of intimidation. Nobody wanted to ride their bicycle to a motorcycle rally.
Since the young girl seemed interested in only drawing the creature, maybe Liz could let Danielle draw her Horse and then immediately erase it from the Wall. That was a possibility, but not a very practical one. Liz was afraid to admit it; she didn’t know what to do. Her husband had been of little help. Tye had been oddly reticent about discussing the drawing when he came to bed last night. In fact, he’d outright refused to discuss it.
It wasn’t just the intimidation factor that worried Liz. She was concerned with the obvious problem that it was quite apparent that once again Danielle was going to win the contest. It didn’t help matters that there were so few participants. No one was giving Danielle a run for her money. But it wouldn’t have mattered if there’d been two or three times as many drawings this week as the first week. It was doubtful anything could have come close to what she had created the first time around and then improved significantly the second time. Was it possible that she would continue to create something more and more spectacular, week after week? This meant that this week’s problem would repeat into the future, more of the same. Liz couldn’t keep awarding the prize to Danielle. It wouldn’t be fair to the other kids. She had to think of something to do. But for this week … there was nothing to do but give Danielle the prize.
“Ralph, could you give this to Danielle? It’s her present for winning again this week.”
“No surprise there,” said Shelley. “What is it?”
Liz pulled it out of her large purse and placed it on the table in front of them. It was a modest-sized but inexpensive plaster cast of a tan-coloured horse with a dark brown, irregular spot covering its left shoulder and a neatly combed mane.
“Nice,” commented Ralph. “She’ll like that.”
William did not look overly impressed. “I just wonder if she can draw anything else. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t you wonder that?” William finished off the last of his sandwich, getting no answer from his two companions. Both brother and sister had wondered that question themselves but would not admit it to William. In the end, it didn’t really matter.
“I guess we’ll never know,” said Ralph, dipping his grilled cheese sandwich in ketchup.
William did not respond.
THAT MONDAY AT school, the morning progressed as mornings usually do in First Nations communities, as well as many other schools across the country.
When recess came, Danielle opted to stay in the classroom while the other kids ran off their pent-up energy outside. Though she could see them through the window to her left, she preferred to lose herself in the book of horses Liz Thomas had given her the previous week. She turned each page carefully after drinking in each picture. An Appaloosa running through the scrub brush of the American southwest. An Arabian posing at the top of a barren cliff. A quarter horse in a corral, appearing to look at the camera intently. A Clydesdale in a pasture, one leg partially raised. They all appealed to Danielle, and although this was the third time she had looked through the book, she wasn’t tired of looking at them. She knew the order of the pictures and had memorized everything printed in the book about those horses practically verbatim. The familiarity of reading and rereading those pages was like the feeling she got when she climbed into a warm bed. This was the only book she owned.
On the other side of the window, William was watching her. Around him, the other students were throwing snowballs, trying to surf through the snow, or standing around talking in groups, but he only had eyes for the little girl sitting at the desk near the back of the classroom. He noticed nobody else was in the room. Danielle was alone. The teacher was off doing teacher things.
Danielle turned the next page of her book. There was a picture of a Shetland pony, so cute and tiny. In the background was some kind of festival. Danielle smiled to herself, wishing she could pet it.
“Hey, Danielle.”
The voice startled her, causing her to tear a page. Looking up anxiously, she saw it was that big rough boy, the one Ralph and Shelley called William. She didn’t say anything. Fumbling with the book, she straightened the tear and then closed it carefully, hoping that somehow the torn page wouldn’t be torn when she looked at it the next time. Her fingers were becoming sweaty.
“Looking at your prize, huh?”
Danielle didn’t respond, looking down, clutching the book close to her chest. She wanted desperately to leave the room, to be safely away in some other place, but the husky boy stood in the only doorway, watching her. He had a mean smile that she recognized; it was similar to one her mother’s boyfriend often showed, especially when he was annoyed or mad.
“Hey, Danielle, I got a question. We were talking about this yesterday. We were wondering …” He closed the door behind him.
OUTSIDE ON THE playground, Ralph was looking for William. They were in different homerooms, but they usually met up almost immediately after the recess bell went. He quickly surveyed the playground’s inhabitants, trying to find his friend’s stocky figure among the three hundred kids, but with no luck. This puzzled Ralph. Ralph had a few other friends, but it was usually William who waited for him. William’s absence from the playground was strange.
Seeing his sister near the corner of the school building, he ran up to her. “Hey, have you seen William? I can’t find him.”
Her conversation with Julia and Vanessa interrupted, Shelley looked over her shoulder and gave her brother a glare colder than the snow he stood on.
“No. Go away.”
“But —”
“No ‘but.’ No nothing. Go away! Leave us alone.” She turned back to her friends, rolling her eyes. “Brothers!”
Confused but not quite worried, Ralph wandered along the wall of the school, wondering where his friend might be. He had been kind of moody when he’d left their place last night. William hadn’t said much, but Ralph knew it had something to do with the Horse, or Danielle, but more probably both. His buddy could sure be grumpy sometimes. But that was the cost of being William’s friend.
He passed classroom window after classroom window on his right as he walked along the wall of the school, looking into them and continuing to scan the school population on his left.
On another matter, he wished his sister wasn’t so mean. Watching her interact with William sometimes made him happy she disliked his friend more than him, but it still hurt him when his sister was so rude and dismissive. To the best of his knowledge, he’d never done anything to earn such meanness. But something his father had once told him provided him with some solace, though it conjured up more unsolvable questions. “Sometimes sisters are just like that. I know. I had three. Just keep your head down and hope for the best. And if worse comes to worst, you can always outrun them.” His father’s sister Aunt Rachel had moved away a long time ago, but aunts Carol and Claudia seemed okay to Ralph. They even gave him lots of homemade butter tarts. Now that he thought about it in this context, he had difficulty imagining his sister growing up to be so nice. At least to him.
As he reached the elbow in the school, where the building made a right angle along the street corner and continued down a different road, Ralph stopped walking. There wasn’t much time left in recess, and even if he did find William, there wouldn’t be much time left to do anything fun. It just wasn’t like William to not be around, wanting to do something. Ralph might have had a few other friends, but he was William’s only real friend. This absence was very un-William.
It seemed to Ralph that the world had become weird ever since Danielle and her Horse had appeared in their lives. He was sure Shelley felt the same way. And his parents. He could tell by the way his mother didn’t seem to know how to act around Danielle. And the way his father had looked at the drawing of the Horse. He knew that Danielle and her creature made them uncomfortable.
Ralph started to pace back towards his sister, still deep in thought. About friends, sisters, strange little girls, chalk horses, and how somehow, some way, they all seemed tied together. Life could be pretty strange sometimes.
Just by chance, or possibly providence, he glanced towards his left and saw his friend on the other side of the glass in the classroom window. William was pushing somebody. That somebody, Ralph realized with a gasp, was Danielle. Ralph stopped in his tracks, surprised to see them together, alone, in Danielle’s classroom. He saw William push Danielle again, harshly, towards the front of the room, making her almost fall. For the first time, Ralph could see in William’s face an obvious aggressive nature, a willingness to do anything to get his way. This was why some people had called his friend a bully, mean, and other assorted titles. He’d always shrugged it off. William’s older brother Robert was a bully. Everybody knew that. He’d been bounced out of at least two high schools. Even William didn’t like Robert. But now, on the other side of the window, he could see his buddy being mean and doing mean things to somebody who couldn’t and wouldn’t fight back. Instantly, Ralph pounded on the window desperately.
The dull thudding filled the small classroom. William looked up, right into Ralph’s face; their eyes locked, just for a moment. Then, looking away and without acknowledging his only real friend, William grabbed a piece of chalk and threw it at Danielle.
Ralph banged hard on the window three more times, his hand hurting with each impact, but William wouldn’t look at him or stop menacing the young girl. It was obvious William was upset about something; Ralph had no idea what William meant to do, but instinctively he knew it wasn’t something good.
Dodging away from the window, the younger boy raced towards the door of the school. Normally kids, under threat of detention, weren’t allowed to enter the school building during recess unless they had permission, but this was not even a consideration for Ralph. He did not have time to get permission to do the very necessary thing he had to do.
As he ran towards the door, Shelley saw him and thought he was approaching her again. She looked annoyed.
“Ralph! I thought I told you —”
Barely pausing, Ralph attempted an explanation. “William’s in one of the classrooms. With Danielle. I don’t think he’s being nice. She’s crying …” Without waiting for a response, he continued past her, aiming directly for the door. He flung open the door and raced down the deserted hall, his sloppy wet boots leaving puddles and the force of his footsteps echoing. Behind him, he heard his sister calling his name. He didn’t stop. The room he had seen Danielle and William in was directly ahead and on the left. Ms. Martel’s room.
Ralph stopped just inside the opaque classroom door. Danielle was at the chalkboard, a piece of white chalk in her trembling hand. It was scraping along the black surface. So far, there were only two shaky lines evident. William was watching her intently, standing just a few feet behind the struggling girl. Ralph could feel Shelley’s arrival right behind him. She stopped and looked over his shoulder.
Over Danielle’s gentle sobs, they heard William’s harsh voice, almost laughing. “That’s it?! That’s the best you can do?!” Danielle had stopped halfway through the third line, unable to continue. The chalk landed on the floor beside her shoe.
Ralph opened his mouth to object. But it was Shelley who spoke first, asking the obvious. “William? What are you doing in here? What are you doing to her?”
William, a triumphant smile on his face, turned to face them.
“Look at that! I told her to draw a dog. Does that look like a dog to you? It sure doesn’t to me. So she can draw a decent horse. Big deal. So what? Geez, no wonder she’s crying. I’d cry too if I drew a dog like that. I guess she ain’t so great after all, huh?” Folding his arms across his chest, he sneered at the pathetic rendering on the chalkboard.
The attempted drawing did look like it had been sketched by the left hand of a right-handed monkey. If it was indeed the beginning of a dog, there was no way of telling.
As if he’d climbed the biggest mountain and beaten the most ferocious monster in the world, William was beaming victoriously. His point, however obtuse, had been proudly made.
Shelley forced her way past Ralph, nudging him roughly into the door frame as she did. She walked directly to Danielle, who was leaning against the far end of the board, her forehead leaning against the wall, her long, wispy hair hiding her face. Her tiny body trembled with what appeared to be silent sobs. The moment Shelley’s hand touched her back, she flinched until she realized it was Shelley, who was gently pulling her into her arms. Though there was only a little more than two years’ difference between the girls, Danielle seemed to disappear into the older girl’s coat.
“You stupid …” Try as she might, Shelley could not utter any profanity, especially while comforting the little girl. “I could just kick you. What were you thinking?!” Shelley glared at William, furious and intense.
Ralph was scared by his sister’s words and her tone of voice, and Shelley’s was not a look that made William entirely comfortable.
“What?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Look what you did to her!” Shelley was angry.
“What?! I didn’t do anything. I barely touched her.”
The smile of success gone from his face, William was experiencing some difficulty understanding why Shelley was so mad at him. He was used to her angry dismissals of him, but this outburst seemed different. More focused and strong. Even Ralph was looking at him weirdly. It was like they didn’t understand the laws of the schoolyard. Danielle was just a peculiar little girl, that’s all. So what was the problem?
Suddenly, William felt Ralph’s hands on his arm, pushing him away from the girls at the chalkboard.
“So uncool, William. So uncool.” Ralph found himself for the first time in a long time angry at his friend. Not mildly angry, but really angry. Though William had thrown snowballs at him point-blank, or taken the larger portion of chocolate bars they’d bought together, or pushed Ralph off the dock so he would suddenly find himself standing knee-deep in the lake, this was of a different order. Normally he was just being William. This was different, and all of them knew it.
William stumbled against two desks, unprepared for the act of physical violence from his good friend and frequent victim. Under normal circumstances he would have pushed back, harder. But, as was becoming obvious, they were not living in normal circumstances these days.
Trying to regain his composure, William gave Shelley and Ralph his best argument, which seemed incredibly simple and true to him. “What?! I never hit her or anything. I just wanted to see if she could draw anything else. That’s all. I don’t know why she’s crying. Geez.” The tone of William’s voice changed as he spoke; it became unsure and defensive, like he was trying to defend himself but was losing confidence in his own argument as he spoke. This was unfamiliar territory for him.
“No, you wouldn’t, would you? ’Cause you’re too stupid.” Shelley started to gently steer Danielle towards the door. “It’s okay,” she said to the little girl with her arms wrapped around her. “We’ll take you home. Ralph, can you get her coat and backpack?”
Nodding, Ralph went to the coat hooks at the back of the room and found Danielle’s familiar worn, white-turning-into-grey coat with the two rips. He noticed there was another tear, this time underneath the right armpit. He grabbed it and her bag quickly, giving his friend — if they still were friends — a piercing glare. He followed his sister out the door.
Alone in the classroom stood a bewildered and now clearly awkward William.
“Geez. You guys gonna make a big deal out of this?” he yelled after them.
There was no response. His friend and his friend’s sister didn’t respond.
Alone, William felt odd. It seemed the point he had tried to make had been completely overlooked. He looked at the board, at what he’d made Danielle draw, the squiggles and random lines, a very poor attempt at art. How could those lines be a dog?
“Like I said, it doesn’t look like a dog. See, I was right. I don’t get it….” Oddly enough, he no longer felt so exultant. For a very brief second, an unsettling thought rolled across the young boy’s mind. Was it possible he, William Williams, was the bad guy here?
“William? Do you have permission to be in here?” asked Ms. Martel, standing at the door.
Great. He was now in real trouble for being in the wrong classroom and at recess.
QUICKLY GRABBING THEIR backpacks and bundling up, Ralph and Shelley took Danielle out of the school and past the schoolyard. Several kids, including Julia and Vanessa, gave the trio peculiar looks, especially when the bell went off, sounding the end of recess. All but three re-entered the school. Both Thomas children knew they might get in trouble for cutting the last part of school, but any discipline that might come their way mattered to neither one. When they told their mother their reason for leaving school, both felt sure she would absolve them of the sin of truancy. Sometimes there were more important things than knowing the difference between coniferous and deciduous trees.
“What a stupid, stupid idiot!” grumbled Shelley. Danielle looked up at the taller girl, tears forming in her eyes. At first, Shelley assumed Danielle’s crying was the result of William’s meanness, but then she put all the pieces together and understood. “No, no. Not you, Danielle. William. I mean William. Not you. You’re okay. Honest.”
Ralph saw Danielle snuggle closer to his sister, who kept a protective arm around her.
“Don’t you worry about that nasty William. He’s just a big, stupid kid. He needs to be kicked in the head. And he’s ugly too.” From beneath her arm she was sure she felt what appeared to be a giggle. That was a good sign. Glancing at her brother, she added disparagingly, “And he’s your friend!”
“I’m so sorry, Danielle.” It was the first time Ralph had spoken since they’d left the school. All this time he’d been listening to Shelley calm and soothe the little girl who clung to his sister. It seemed she had a knack for that kind of thing. She was a natural. He felt sad for a number of reasons, primarily because it was his friend who had humiliated her. He was used to William’s rough ways. Maybe everybody was right. Maybe William was indeed a bully. He remembered reading somewhere that, legally, boxers were only allowed to fight other boxers. Otherwise, if they got into fights on the playground or in the cafeteria with everyday people, they’d get into a lot trouble. The same should hold true for people like William, he suddenly thought. Bullies should only pick on other bullies. But that defeated the purpose of being a bully, he supposed. There would have to be a severe readjustment of their relationship when all this particular dust settled.
Danielle didn’t react to Ralph’s apology. Shelley had run out of kindnesses to share with the little girl. As they walked, there was only the silence of the snow-covered community to keep them company. The three of them turned on to Twin Pine Lane, an oddly named street since both the pines that had generated the name had died a decade ago and were no longer in evidence. This was where most of the dozen or so trailers on the reserve were located.
Danielle, still snugly attached to Shelley, suddenly stopped moving. She stopped so suddenly that Shelley almost knocked her over.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
It took Ralph a moment to realize that this was Shelley’s voice and not the voice of their mother.
Crawling out from underneath the layers of coats — hers and Shelley’s — Danielle emerged into the winter afternoon air. The glare of the sun off the snow made her blink a few times, and then she wiped away the remaining wetness around her eyes. Though she’d stopped crying some time ago, her eyes were still red. She sniffled and looked around, recognizing the area. Then she spoke.
“Thank you.”
Ralph remembered that in their few actual moments together, that was all Danielle ever seemed to say. That seemed to be seventy-five percent of her vocabulary. Just, “Thank you.” Unsure how to respond, he simply smiled at her and looked at his sister uncomfortably.
Also smiling, Shelley looked down Twin Pine Lane to the row of trailers near the end. “Danielle doesn’t have to thank us, does she, Ralph?”
Again, Ralph could hear his mother’s voice.
“No, not at all. Sorry we couldn’t do more.”
“See? And don’t you worry about William. When I get a hold of him, he’ll be more afraid of you than you should ever be of him.” Shelley nodded her head once solidly to punctuate her assurance. “You live down here, don’t you? We’re almost there. Come on, let’s get you home first and then we can …”
Danielle shook her head, clearly afraid, and stepped back from the Thomas kids. Her demeanour changed completely. There was a panicked look on her face. Whatever had caused it had been triggered by Shelley’s offer.
Shelley took another stab at getting the young girl home. Stepping forward, she said, “It’s okay, Danielle. We just want to make sure …”
No such luck. Danielle took another step back, now clearly looking over her shoulder. “No. Thank you, but no. You really shouldn’t. Momma doesn’t like people visiting. She’ll get mad. I’m okay, really.” She faked a poor smile to add emphasis.
“Under the circumstances, I don’t think she would …” Shelley could see that she was about to be unsuccessful in her attempts to deliver the little girl home personally.
Danielle took another step further down Twin Pine Lane, backing away more.
Ralph felt sure she would bolt any second. He reached out and grabbed Shelley’s arm, knowing she would keep trying, regardless of how Danielle felt.
“Danielle, before you go …” he said.
Her eyes darted to him, but she still looked on the edge of running down the lane.
“We forgot to give you your present.”
“What present?”
Ralph nudged Shelley, who quickly dug around in her backpack. Everything of importance to Shelley existed in that backpack. She was seldom without it, especially at school. After some rummaging around, she pulled out a small package wrapped in newspaper. Handing it to Danielle, she peeled back a layer, revealing the head of the plaster horse. “You won the Everything Wall contest.”
“Again!” added Ralph with a smile.
“So this is your prize.”
Danielle couldn’t take her eyes off the present. She reached out and gently pulled back more of the newspaper, exposing the entire miniature horse.
“It’s yours. Go ahead. Take it.” With that, Shelley put the plaster cast of a horse into the little girl’s hands.
Around them, the trees creaked in the winter wind, but Danielle had senses for only what she held in her hands.
“For me?”
“For you. We know it’s not much, but …”
“It’s beautiful.”
Frequently something being “not much” was a relative term. To Danielle, this prize, this present was indeed something “much.” For Danielle, this knick-knack was worth more than the six dollars and ninety-nine cents Liz had paid for it. Terrified of breaking the delicate legs on the cast, Danielle very carefully wrapped her fingers around the trunk of the animal and tucked it inside her worn jacket, close to her chest. “I want to keep him warm,” she said. “You’re so nice to me.” With a look of contentment Shelley and Ralph had not seen before on her face, she turned to walk down Twin Pine Lane.
“Thank you.” Between the dozen or so metres separating them and the sound of the wind, they barely heard her parting words. Brother and sister watched her walk down the lane, a sad and forlorn figure momentarily happy.
“Well, that was strange,” said Ralph. “What now?”
Her eyes still on the retreating Danielle, Shelley took a deep breath of winter air. “Well, we could go beat up that friend of yours. He deserves it.”
Though he doubted they would actually do it, Ralph found that this time he couldn’t argue with his sister.
THAT AFTERNOON AFTER school, William didn’t make his way over to Ralph’s house. Instead, he went home to where his large family lived. He put up with his brothers’ and sister’s taunts, and the perplexed looks his parents gave him when they understood that he wasn’t over at the Thomas home. For the rest of the evening, he sulked in his room. Looking out the window at various cars driving by, William felt kind of bad, though he would never admit it. After all, why should he feel bad? He hadn’t done anything wrong. For some reason he couldn’t explain, something about Danielle bothered him. It made him angry and uncomfortable. With such a big and boisterous family, he was used to feeling angry and uncomfortable, but this was in a way he wasn’t used to. So he’d done what he always did when he was angry and uncomfortable: he’d lashed out. It was something he’d picked up from his older brothers. It’s a commonly held belief that bullying is passed down the generations, but very seldom is it encoded in the DNA. A definite case of nurture over nature. But William knew none of these things. When something bothers you, you bother it back. It’s nature.
For obvious reasons, because of his very nature, William had no friends other than Ralph. While he was frequently rough and physical with his friend, he seldom abused their relationship. He was sure Ralph appreciated the boyish companionship. They made good buddies. Hanging with William was better for Ralph than hanging around with his sister. Still, William had to put up with that sister’s obvious dislike of him, though he didn’t quite understand it. William didn’t think he was as bad as Shelley implied. He thought of himself as quite charming and interesting. Maybe he did horse around a little too much and was rude occasionally, but who wasn’t? Girls! he frequently thought.
In the messy room he shared with Jimmy, the brother closest in age to him, who was playing hockey in town, William leafed through a handful of comic books that belonged to his brother. Jimmy never let his younger brother read or touch any of his things, but since Jimmy was seldom home, it afforded the younger Williams boy some limited reading opportunities. Luckily for William, this sibling absenteeism helped him avoid many brotherly beatings.
Alone and quiet in his room, William wondered what Ralph was doing; was he playing some game with Shelley or eating a late-afternoon snack their mother had whipped up for them? While the Thomas family was fed and fed well, in the Williams house, with such a big family, there was seldom anything left in the refrigerator to snack on. William had already checked the fridge. Essentially, there were only condiments and pickles at the moment. Not even the good kind of pickles — bread and butter — but dill. Dill was not a flavour William enjoyed.
William was bored. None of his brothers actually played with him, unless the older ones wanted to torment their younger and smaller sibling. His sister had a life of her own with other girls, just like Shelley did. Floyd and Justine Williams, parents to the rowdiest group of relations in the village, weren’t usually home. There was work and family responsibilities outside these four walls. Though it was a busy and bustling house, today it was just William, alone in his shared room. That was one of the major reasons why he spent so much time over at the Thomas house.
There was, of course, homework to do, and even though he hated both the thought and practice of math, doing it would have to be better than being bored and lonely. Almost reluctantly, William picked up his school book and casually noticed all the drawing he had done on the cover. The bottom half looked like petroglyphs and pictographs. His history teacher had done a couple classes on them, and they had briefly fascinated the young boy. He had reproduced facsimiles of Indigenous images from all across the country on his math book. Above them was the logo for the rock band Guns N’ Roses. And beside it was a sketch of a horse. It startled William for a moment. He had forgotten that he’d drawn it, almost immediately after Danielle had first drawn hers. While better than most ten-year-olds could attempt, it still paled in comparison to hers. And he had tried very hard.
For a moment, he thought of the little girl that he had persecuted in the classroom. Luckily, he hadn’t got in trouble with Ms. Martel for what had happened; she had missed all of what had transpired in her classroom that recess. He had been able to talk himself out of a detention as the bell rang in the midst of his scolding. But there was a little part of him, he was quite sure, that for some bizarre reason almost wished he had been punished. Everything was not what it once was. It bothered him. William didn’t know where things were going and how much they were going to change. It wasn’t fair.
There was something new, something different about the generally miserable way he felt. He couldn’t define it, wasn’t used to it, but it sure wasn’t good. Guilt was a new emotion to William. The boy didn’t like it. He wasn’t sure what to do about it. He turned his attention to a math problem, hoping this strange emotion might be crushed under his geometry assignment. But it was not.
ACROSS THE VILLAGE, down Twin Pine Lane, sat Danielle on her mattress, which lay on the floor at the back of her mother’s trailer. At the foot of the bed, almost lost in the worn and dirty sheets, stood a horse. Not her close and special friend that she’d drawn on the Everything Wall in the Thomases’ kitchen, but the plaster one Ralph and Shelley had given her. Danielle had put it there when she got home. She’d been staring at it ever since. It was so pretty. She heard something break outside her door, down the hall near the living room, but she ignored the sound. There was always something breaking. Instead, she focused on the horse. It was very different from her friend, but in this particular case, different wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She was sure there was no conflict between the two.
All around the little girl on the bare wall were faint but familiar echoes of images that had been scrubbed off the white, dingy paint. Bits of a tail here, and some hind leg over by the door. Near the window she could make out, if she looked hard enough, faded lines that could be a mane. Bits and pieces of her precious Horse that couldn’t be scrubbed clean. Danielle’s mother had tried many times, punishing her daughter many more times for doing something so “fucking childish” as to draw on the walls of her room. For reasons unknown, her mother took her artistic abilities as a wilful and disobedient act aimed directly at challenging her parental authority.
So Danielle didn’t call her special friend to come and visit anymore. Besides, the Horse didn’t like it here in this small, oppressive, smelly room. He didn’t like Danielle’s mother and especially didn’t like the man who also lived in that trailer, who occasionally put “the skinny child” to bed. The Horse disliked this trailer so much, got so angry with how the girl was forced to live, that Danielle no longer felt she should draw him here. Though she didn’t know how or why, she was afraid the Horse might do something very bad. She knew the Horse was meant for better places than her tiny bedroom. It liked the house that Ralph and Shelley lived in. Very much, in fact. It came so quickly and easily when she called it into the Thomases’ kitchen.
Danielle could now hear voices outside her room. Loud voices. Arguing. It was times like this she really wanted the Horse, needed him, for something she couldn’t conceptualize. Without the Horse on her walls, she looked at the small, cheap — though she thought it was the most fabulous thing in the world — reproduction of a horse. It would have to do. She picked it up and stroked its cold, hard flank. She wished it was warm and soft.
For a brief moment, she had a flashback to the school and the incident that had happened earlier in the day. William had been mean to her. He had wanted her to draw a dog. Didn’t he know she couldn’t? Only the Horse. Dogs barked loudly and bit people. She’d tried to tell him that, but that boy didn’t want to listen. He was so big and mean. It had almost hurt when she’d put the chalk on the blackboard and tried to make her hand draw something else. He didn’t understand. Part of what scared her is that when something like this happened, the Horse seemed to become angrier, darker, like it was transforming into something that was fed by all the bad things around her. Luckily Shelley and Ralph had come to her rescue and even walked her home. She liked them so much, and so did the Horse. But they were so far away, and she was here.
Still gripping the horse, she looked around her dark room, lit by a small lamp sitting in the corner on the floor, and saw the faint, washed-out remains of the Horse. Even in this semi–darkness, they seemed to glow for the girl, the light from a warm and inviting home.
In another part of the trailer, she heard her name being screamed. Danielle hoped against experience it was for something good. Maybe dinner. Putting the horse down in the corner and covering it up with a towel she’d found, the little girl exited her room.
Underneath the towel in the empty room, the horse fell over.
And later that night, Danielle Gaadaw disappeared.