FOURTEEN
Sunday afternoon, London decides to borrow Nana’s car to take into town. She feels kind of weird about it, especially since she only has her learner’s permit, but it’s not like the cops are really going to stop her, and as long as Nana’s in the hospital she’s not going to be driving, so what’s the point of just letting it sit there? As she gets into the Volvo, she promises herself she’ll stop by the hospital later. It’s true what she told Aunt F – she hasn’t visited Nana yet, mostly because she’s been busy trying to figure out how she’s going to get to Duluth, but also because she doesn’t know what she’s going to say to her. What do you say to a person who’s in a coma? Can they even hear you? Or do they just, like, pick up on your vibes? London doesn’t know, and it’s not like anyone is going to explain it to her. No one will tell her anything about what is going on. Her mother just slams stuff around the kitchen and Hamish hides in the shed, just like usual. She has barely even seen Uncle Shawn, and Aunt Katriina kind of scares her. And Aunt F, well, she used to be cool, London supposes. But then she left. So fuck her, she thinks as she turns the key in the ignition. London might as well not even have a family. She might as well be an orphan.
Angrily, she throws the Volvo into reverse and smashes into something behind her. “Shit!” she says, slamming her hands on the wheel. She looks in the rear-view mirror and sees the back end of the Volvo embedded into the side of Uncle Shawn’s Jeep. She puts the car in drive and lurches forward. The Volvo seems unscathed, so she makes a split-second decision and before anyone comes out to see what the noise was, she drives away.
At the bus station she waits in line behind a strung-out couple arguing about whether there is caffeine in Mountain Dew. “I can’t drink it if there’s caffeine in it,” the woman says as she absently twirls a cigarette in her fingers. “It’s bad for the baby.”
“There’s no fucking caffeine in it,” the man says. “Just drink it. You need to stay hydrated.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Hydrated. Like with water and shit.”
“That’s not water, it’s Mountain Dew.”
“Same thing.”
London finally makes it up to the counter. The bored ticket lady, who is probably around Nana’s age, has crunchy dyed blond curls and glasses with pink frames, and is wearing a T-shirt with a photograph of a kitten screen-printed on the front. She has her head bent over a piece of paper and is studying it intently while she chews her gum with her mouth open. London tries not to gag as she watches her, but other people’s saliva is just, like, so gross.
“How much is a one-way ticket to Duluth?” London asks.
“Eighty,” she says, without looking up.
London fumbles in her purse and counts out a wad of damp fives and tens. That would take up basically all of her savings. She hoped Adam wasn’t joking when he said he could take care of everything once she got there. “Um, what time does it leave?”
“Noon.”
London glances at the clock. It’s two thirty. Crap. Another day wasted. “Um, I guess…can I buy a ticket for tomorrow, then?” she says, smoothing the money out along the counter, more to calm her shaking hands than anything else.
The ticket lady finally raises her head. She eyes London up and down, slowly chomping on her gum. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” says London.
“Let me see your ID.”
“Sixteen.”
“Uh-huh,” says the ticket lady. She bows her head back over her paper, and London can now see that it is covered with concentric circles, the ink so deeply etched that the paper is ripped in some places.
“But I’m a mature sixteen,” says London.
“Sorry,” the ticket lady says, not sounding sorry at all. “Bring along a parent or guardian and then we can talk.”
“I don’t have a parent or guardian,” says London, stuffing the money back in her purse angrily. “I’m an orphan. I’m just trying to find my way in this mad, mad world.”
“Aren’t we all,” the ticket lady says. “Next, please!”
The universe is against her. London knows this is what all teenagers always say, but in her case, it’s actually true. The universe has never been more against anyone than it is against her at this moment. She might as well just go home and lock herself in her room for the rest of eternity. She might as well have gone over Kakabeka Falls herself.
London is outside the bus station searching for her car keys in her purse when a bright red Mustang convertible pulls into the parking spot next to her. London doesn’t have to see the personalized licence plate to know that it’s Anastasia Peters, with her brain-dead boyfriend, Andy, in the passenger seat. Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, London calls them – not to their faces of course. She has too much invested in her own face. She doesn’t have any secret nicknames for their two creepy androgynous sidekicks, Ryan and Dylan, who are sitting in the back, dressed in black and nearly indistinguishable from each other.
“Heeeeey, London,” Anastasia says. She is also dressed all in black with a black and white headband in her black hair, and is simultaneously smoking a cigarette and drinking pop out of one of those ginormous McDonald’s cups that London is pretty sure is illegal in parts of the world. “What’s up, buttercup?” Anastasia’s voice is throaty and low, and if she keeps smoking the way she does it will probably turn into one of those gross old lady voices before she’s even twenty.
London takes out her keys and positions them in her hand like a weapon. “What are you doing, stalking me?”
“We were just in the neighbourhood and we saw your Nana’s car.” Anastasia pauses, sucking back some pop from the straw. “That is the same car I saw her driving around the track at school, right? Looks a little banged up. I hope she didn’t get in an accident.”
Around the track. Nana swore to London afterward that she wasn’t crazy – she just wanted to see “what it would be like to be a race car driver.” But it didn’t matter what her intentions were. Intentions mean nothing to teenaged girls.
“What do you want, Anastasia?” she asks.
“We thought maybe you’d want to go to Merla Mae with us and get some ice cream?” She finishes her cigarette and flicks it to the ground. “Or do they not give out food stamps for that?”
“Ha ha, good one, a poverty joke.” London leans against her car and crosses her arms. She’s not afraid of Anastasia, even though most people are. Not really. “Why don’t you go drown yourself in your swimming pool, you classist bitch.”
“Sounds like someone misses being invited over for pool parties,” Dylan says.
“She was never invited to any pool parties,” Anastasia says. “Not any good ones, anyway.”
“None of them were good ones,” says London. It’s a lame dig, but it’s all she’s got.
Anastasia lights another cigarette and hoists herself up in her seat until she is sitting on the top. She swings her bare legs in front of her and rests her high-heeled feet on the steering wheel. “What are you doing at the bus station, anyway?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“You’re not running away from home, are you? I’m not going to turn on the news tomorrow and see your missing person report?” She leans over to flick some stray ash off the toe of her shoe. “That would be tragic. I’d have to testify that I saw you here and I didn’t even try to stop you.”
If Anastasia Peters were an animal, she would be a black mamba snake – highly aggressive, very fast, and prone to attacking without provocation. Anastasia is one of those girls who knows how to game you. She games teachers into believing she’s a good student, she games her parents into thinking she is a good daughter, she games her friends’ parents into thinking she is someone they want their kids to hang around with. But she is a criminal, plain and simple. Her father runs a construction firm that everyone knows is connected to the Mob, so maybe it runs in the family, maybe it’s, like, embedded in her genetic code. London has seen Anastasia blackmail people; has seen her commit assault, fraud, theft, and vandalism; has seen her perjure herself on the stand, possess with intent to sell, and impersonate a police officer, even.
Anastasia gamed London for years. She pretended to be her friend, linking arms with her in the hallway, letting her eat lunch at her table, inviting her to her house after school to hang out in her enormous rec room and play Guitar Hero and eat nachos. She made London trust her – and then she got London arrested. London and Anastasia have known each other since kindergarten, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that London discovered who she truly was. That’s a long game. The longest game in the universe, maybe.
“Fuck off and die, Anastasia” London says, getting into her Nana’s car. As she drives away, the last thing she sees is Anastasia’s arm above her head, waving goodbye.
PONYO: It didn’t work.
PONYO: They wouldn’t let me buy a ticket cause I’m only 16.
SHARKBOY: That’s bullshit.
PONYO: I know.
PONYO: I don’t know what else to do.
SHARKBOY: I still don’t get why your grandma can’t take you.
SHARKBOY: I thought you said she was excited about the idea?
PONYO: She just can’t.
SHARKBOY: Did something happen?
PONYO: No.
PONYO: I don’t want to talk about it.
SHARKBOY: London, if we’re going to be together there can’t be any secrets between us.
SHARKBOY: Don’t you trust me?
SHARKBOY: London?
PONYO: Yes, I trust you.
SHARKBOY: Well?
PONYO: You promise you won’t tell anyone?
SHARKBOY: Of course not.
SHARKBOY: Besides, who would I tell?
PONYO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HffbME_B7JGGHSTN
A few months ago, London saw a cougar. She was walking Bruno along the high side of the Kam River and suddenly this thing came out of the trees and sat down and began licking its paw and London looked at it and thought, “That’s a big cat.” A second later she thought, “Oh,” and crossed the street to turn around and head home. Then the cougar crossed the street, too, and Bruno started whining and London walked very fast until she was back at Victor Street.
“I just saw a cougar,” she told her mother.
“No, you didn’t,” her mother said. She was busy doing something else, like she always was. London went and found Hamish, who was in the backyard testing samples of his whisky, which he made in these big barrels in the woodshed.
“I just saw a cougar,” she said.
“Rawr,” Hamish said, tipping some amber liquid into a beaker. “What was she wearing?”
“Gross,” said London. Inside, her sisters were playing with Ross, trying to get him to eat disgusting things off the floor, like a Cheerio they found under a cushion or a rotten raisin they found behind the TV. But she didn’t even want to talk to them. They were young and stupid and only talked to each other. If Uncle Shawn was there, she would have told him, and maybe he would have told her a story about a time when he lived in the woods and he wrestled a cougar for a sandwich or something like that, Uncle Shawn had all these really great stories. But Uncle Shawn wasn’t there. And Papa was away, like Papa always was. She even thought about texting Aunt F, but she was probably super busy with her awesome new life in Toronto and wouldn’t care about something so stupid as seeing a cougar in dumb boring Thunder Bay. So London went into Nana’s room.
London had been avoiding her grandmother ever since the Around the Track incident. Besides, Nana was just so different now, like she couldn’t always focus her eyes on you anymore, or maybe her mind was just far away. London missed the old Nana, who knew secret things about the world, like why there was a trap door in the basement or what would have happened if London had been born a boy. But everyone else was busy, or stupid, and so London went and found her grandmother, who was in bed already, doing a crossword on a little folding table that opened over her lap, a cup of tea on the nightstand, a Magic Bag hanging around her neck.
“Nana, I saw a cougar!”
“Oh, dear,” Nana said, wrinkling her forehead. “What’s a cougar? It sounds familiar.”
“I can show you,” said London. She came back with her laptop and sat beside her grandmother on her bed and they read about cougars together on Wikipedia. They read about how cougars are more closely related to house cats than actual lions, about how they are stalk-and-ambush hunters, about how they have been excessively hunted and are practically extinct in the eastern part of North America.
“It says that there are only 850 cougars left in all of Ontario,” Nana said, frowning. “That’s not very many.”
“Poor cougars,” London said, trying not to cry even though reading about the cougar was incredibly sad.
“It also says that they are reclusive and usually avoid people.” Nana ran her finger over the picture on the screen. “I’d say you were very lucky indeed to have seen one of these beautiful creatures.”
London, who up to that point was just relieved to not have been eaten by one of those beautiful creatures, looked at her grandmother and wondered if maybe she was actually still secretly super wise and it was just that no one understood her.
Now whenever London thinks about her grandmother, she tries to remember that moment: a still point in the chaos of their lives, when she knew without a doubt that her grandmother was her grandmother, and she didn’t feel quite so alone in the world.
PONYO: Did you watch the video?
PONYO: Adam? Did you watch it?
PONYO: Adam, are you still there?
PONYO: Adam?
PONYO:…