TWENTY-EIGHT

Anastasia sits in her kitchen, watching the video of London’s grandmother going over the falls in slow motion on her laptop. The video, the one that has been on everyone’s feed since Friday, is of very poor quality, and was probably filmed by some skid named Terrance from Murillo on a cracked-screen iPhone 4. If it had been Anastasia’s footage, she would have run it through some editing software, or at least applied an Instagram filter, added some background music, some swelling strings – Mozart, or maybe Lana Del Rey.

Terrance had been standing on the first platform on the eastern side of the Kam River, the one where everyone goes to have their pictures taken with the pretty view of the falls in the background when they can’t be bothered to walk farther than twenty feet from their car. And janky-ass Terry, there with a woman who Anastasia can only assume is both his wife and also his sister, just happened to end up right in the optimum spot to watch Granny’s big plunge. Had a current come along and pushed Granny over to the other side of the falls, Terrance would have been SOL, too far away from the action to get any kind of shot. But her man T has some kind of horseshoe up his ass. Granny’s barrel stayed on course, and she plunged over the eastern flume towards her destiny of broken bones and internet fame. And T-Bone, the fortuitous hillbilly, the chosen one, got the ultimate money shot.

The drop. The bang. The flip.

“Holy shit,” says Terrance, giving censors all around the world a heart attack. “That was a lady in a motherfucking barrel.”

Anastasia replays the video. At first, as the barrel is floating down the river, London’s grandmother is facing the other direction, and so all you can see is the blob of white that is the back of her head. But then, like some kind of miracle, God sent His angels down from heaven above to flap their ethereal wings and gently turn the barrel on the current so her face comes into view just moments before she plunges over the precipice. Anastasia pauses the video a split second before the drop, and then scrolls through it frame by frame, looking for some evidence, some tiny, minuscule trace of fear. But London’s grandmother’s expression is as blank as the slate cliffs around her. It’s absolutely fucking outstanding.

Anastasia has watched the video at least two hundred times since she found out that the woman in the barrel was, in fact, London’s grandmother. London’s ever-loving batshit-crazy fucking grandmother. Anastasia has done everything she can to ensure that everyone in their high school also knows who the woman in the barrel is. It’s not the kind of thing that anyone could legitimately expect her to keep to herself, that would just be ludicrous. Not to mention, it would be un-civic-minded. Her father has always taught her that her first duty is to her community because she is a natural-born leader and people are going to continually look to her for guidance, whether she wants them to or not. It is a heavy burden to carry, but when you are born with a gift, that is the price you have to pay. She owed it to people to let them know what had happened to one of their classmate’s family. A tragedy of this magnitude needed to be openly shared with others so they could come together and heal as a community.

“Holy shit. That was a lady in a motherfucking barrel.” Anastasia giggles. She can’t help it, it gets her every time.

When she finally gets bored of the video, she opens a folder called AP and scrolls through the files, which are all saved IM histories, looking for the most recent one.

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

PONYO: Did you watch the video?

PONYO: Adam? Did you watch it?

PONYO: Adam, are you still there?

PONYO: Adam?

PONYO:…

Was it too abrupt? Anastasia wonders. She had known that her fun would be coming to an end sooner or later. As soon as she had seen online that Adam Pelley was going to be in Duluth, she suddenly understood the path she was meant to take, what her true mission was, what her endgame should be. Finding out about London’s grandmother was a happy accident that just happened to have an immediate applicable use. There was no point in continuing – why expend energy on a project that had already produced better results than you had originally hoped for? But now she can’t help thinking that she may have been too hasty, and in her impatience to move on actually done herself a disservice. London, for all her faults, is a smart girl, and has developed a shrewdness since her arrest that Anastasia would never have imagined. Had she figured it out?

No. That’s crazy. Just because Adam Pelley had stopped communicating with London after she sent him the video did not mean that London had assumed he had stopped communicating with her forever. She is on her way down there to meet him, everything has played out according to plan. So why does Anastasia have this nagging feeling in the back of her mind that something has gone wrong?

She decides to forget about it. What’s done is done, she thinks. She closes her laptop and goes to the fridge, pulling out four cans of coconut water. Then she pops them open and dumps out half of each, topping them off with the last of a bottle of Grey Goose. It’s important, in this heat, to stay hydrated. She takes a sip of her drink and makes a face. Too much coconut water. She finishes it off, then, rummaging through a bag on the counter, she finds another bottle and opens it up. The bottle, like everything else in the bag, was something she and Andy had stolen from the mall that morning. It’s easy to steal when you’re well dressed, clever, and confident. Everyone else just assumes that they are the ones who have made the mistake.

It’s not that she can’t afford this stuff – it’s just fun to see what they can get away with. People in this city are not exactly the big-picture types. They are short-term planners, paycheque-to-paycheque survivors; they fight and scrape for everything they have and wake each new day to a battlefield of obstacles to overcome before going to sleep and waking up to another battlefield. But Anastasia is a visionary. Every decision she makes is another nail, another screw, another beam in her dream house; every house a new development in her city, every city a new pinpoint on the map of her world. She is a builder’s daughter – she doesn’t just see materials; she sees what they can become. This, more than anything, is what separates her from the rest of the good, honest, hard-working down-home northern folk she has grown up with, who she goes to school with, and who will eventually work for her. She knows that being good and honest and hard-working is just running on a hamster wheel. She would prefer to expend her energy in more productive ways.

She pours more vodka into the remaining three cans, then heads outside to the pool, handing one to Andy and one to Ryan. “Sorry,” she says to Dylan, taking a sip of the third. “There were only three left.” Dylan glares at her but doesn’t say anything.

“Were you watching that stupid video again?” asks Andy, climbing onto her chair and straddling her. Andy, he is not a visionary. But he is a useful sidekick. He is smart enough to know that is where his strengths lie. He also looks really good in a pair of swim trunks.

“I just find it so fascinating,” she says. “Although I think it missed the mark a bit, cinematographically. It could have been so much more.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt whoever filmed it was thinking about artistic camera angles.”

She wraps her hand around the back of Andy’s neck and pulls him down, kissing him hard, letting go when she’s had enough. “You’re right,” she says, wiping her mouth. “It’s all function over form. It’s just kind of tragic to see all that missed potential.” She wiggles her hips, signalling for Andy to get off her. He bounds over to the pool like a puppy and cannonballs past Ryan’s head, spraying the pool deck with water.

“Speaking of missed potential,” Ryan says, brushing the water off. “How come you didn’t tell London’s aunt about Adam Pelley?”

Anastasia rolls her eyes. “Really, Ryan? Didn’t you feel like she would figure it out for herself?”

Ryan shrugs. “She wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist.”

“Yeah, but I don’t exactly think that London has been discreet about everything.” She pulls out her phone, reverses the camera, and begins to reapply her lipstick. “It’s way more fun to see how things unravel, don’t you think?”

Dylan giggles. “Imagine the look on London’s face when she tracks him down in Duluth.”

Anastasia shakes her head sadly. “I take no joy in this, Dylan. London used to be my friend. But she needs to understand the consequences of her actions.” She finishes with her lipstick and snaps a quick selfie, for posterity. She considers texting it to London, along with a pertinent quote about karma from Deepak Chopra, or maybe Rihanna. But she decides against it. She is not a monster. She has her limits.

—

The thing she finds most strange about this whole situation is that London doesn’t understand why Anastasia does the things she does to her. The day London was arrested, she looked at her with such an expression of betrayal on her face as the cops dragged her out of the school in handcuffs that Anastasia almost laughed. There are a lot of things you could call Anastasia, but fake is not one of them. Duplicitous, maybe. Sneaky, conniving, unfeeling, certainly. But she will never pretend to be someone she isn’t. As one of her oldest friends, London had seen the things Anastasia had done to other people, and yet somehow she had expected to be exempt from all of that. She had expected Anastasia to care, and was shocked to discover that she didn’t.

In the months following her arrest, London kept begging Anastasia for an explanation: What had she done to make Anastasia hate her? But Anastasia didn’t hate her – not then, and not now. She actually thinks London is an interesting person, intelligent and sharp, although with an overinflated sense of moral superiority that often tends to flip over into righteous indignation, which Anastasia finds tedious. She believed London had potential until she saw the way she behaved after her arrest – claiming the drugs weren’t hers, that Anastasia had been the one selling them, that she had planted them on London because she knew that the police were about to come down on her. Anastasia had been floored. Like, talk about betrayal! She had obviously seen something in London that wasn’t there, a bond of loyalty that she assumed would never break, no matter what the circumstances.

Still, Anastasia forgave her. In fact, she feels she behaved quite magnanimously towards London after the whole debacle. It wasn’t her fault that London continued to blame her for what had happened, or that she decided to launch a campaign of hatred against Anastasia in the following months – badmouthing her to everyone at school, ratting her out to their teachers every time she cheated, trying to derail her bake sale – starting a war that she had not the slightest chance in hell of winning.

Outside, they have now bypassed the coconut water and have moved on to straight Grey Goose, the bottle knotted into a pool noodle drifting back and forth between the four of them on their loungers. Anastasia has a nice buzz, and is thinking maybe it would be a good idea to call up some people and have a party. Her father and stepmother are at their camp in Lake of the Woods, and the housekeeper is off for two days – just enough time for a proper rager. But she finds she just doesn’t have the energy. All the people she would have to talk to, all of them so officious, so grateful to her. Everyone wants to be invited to Anastasia’s house, but not everybody can be. It’s just the way the world works.

As if reading her thoughts, Andy says, “We should invite Julie and Dex over. They might have some E.”

“I don’t want to do E with a bunch of dirty hipster wannabes,” she snaps. “And if you do, you probably should just go do that. Somewhere else.”

Andy drops his hand in the water and stares at her. “Maybe I will,” he says.

He tips himself out of the lounger and swims to the side of the pool. Anastasia watches him climb out, rivers of chlorinated water running down his swim trunks as he stalks off into the house. She knows he’ll be back. She lets her hand drag through the water, the Grey Goose bottle now resting on her chest, and looks over at Ryan and Dylan, smiling.

“You should go, too,” she says. “I’m sure it will be a blast.”

Ryan and Dylan glance at each other. “Just give me that bottle,” Ryan says. Anastasia hands it over. They’re not going to go anywhere. None of them are. And they know it.

—

For some reason, Anastasia finds herself thinking about the last time London was at her house. It was a night a week or so before her arrest, and it was just the two of them, eating veggie wraps from Pita Pit and working on an assignment for English class where they had to write a modern-day adaptation of Julius Caesar. Anastasia hadn’t wanted to do it – she had a great guy for English assignments – but London had said for research they could watch the Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and maybe even 10 Things I Hate About You. After the movie, London had gotten all weird and said she wanted to walk down to the lake.

When they got to the beach, London took her shoes off and waded into the water, although it was already October and Lake Superior is freezing cold even in the middle of the summer. “What are you doing?” Anastasia called from the shore. London was making her feel uncomfortable. She liked to be around calm, sane, rational people, not people who went barefoot into lakes in, like, zero degree weather.

“Are you in love with Andy?” London asked.

Anastasia sighed. Is that what this was about? “Come on, London. I expected more of you than that.”

“What?” said London, without turning around. “You expected I didn’t give a shit about being in love?”

“Yes,” said Anastasia, crossing her arms over her chest. “Love just slows you down.”

“Maybe I want to slow down,” London said. She waded out a little farther, the inky-black water rippling out around her ankles.

Briefly, Anastasia thought about following her into the lake. What would happen if she did? Would the sky open up and rain fire? Would the water rise up over them, would their skin turn to stone? She pressed the toe of her left shoe against the heel of her right, about to apply the pressure needed to pull it off.

“Or maybe love slows you down,” London added.

Anastasia planted her left foot firmly back into the sand. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Have you even met Andy?”

But London just raised her arms over her head and clasped her hands together. “Look at that moon,” she said.

“Are you high or something?” Anastasia asked. “Because if you are, that would explain a lot.” This angsty side of London’s was getting pretty tiresome. Like, what was she going to do next, dye her hair blue and get a tattoo? Run away from home for the weekend to go to the Marianas Trench concert in Winnipeg? OD on oxy in their drug dealer’s squat on Simpson Street and have to have her stomach pumped? She had thought that London had a little more originality than that.

“My grandfather knows everything about this lake, you know,” London said. “Every rock under the surface, every place where a ship went down. Did you know that there have been forty-five shipwrecks in Lake Superior?”

“Are we going to work this into Julius Caesar somehow?”

London turned her gaze slowly towards her. “You know, you’re remarkably short-sighted for someone who always talks about the big picture.” She air-quoted “the big picture,” as if it was something Anastasia just made up, and not something that was a true universal thing.

“I’ll see you inside, if you ever get over yourself,” Anastasia said. She started walking towards the house, and although she didn’t want to look back, she couldn’t help it. London had walked farther out into the lake, and with the moon in her hair and the water around her feet she looked – well, she looked like she was the main character of the story, instead of just the sidekick. Anastasia watched her for another minute, but she didn’t turn around, no matter how much Anastasia wanted her to.

Now, she thinks about that night and wants to vomit. She almost took her shoes off. In the sand. What was she even thinking? As if she could ever be the kind of person who would even stand barefoot next to a lake. Her father always says that dignity is the most important trait a leader can possess because if you don’t have dignity, how can you expect people to respect you? If you lose respect, you lose everything. And for a moment of freedom at the edge of a lake? Her skin might as well turn to stone.

Anastasia leans back in her lounger and pulls her sunglasses down over her eyes. Keep moving forward, she thinks. It’s the only thing you can do.