honed, bane, done, heed, debone, need, dean, hen
ON SUNDAY, WE walked all the way to Granville Island along the waterfront. It was overcast, but it wasn’t raining.
I like Granville Island, even though technically it isn’t an island at all since a road runs right to it. It’s a happy place. Mom and I bought apples fresh from the Okanagan at the market and some pizza buns from our favorite bakery. We ate them by the water’s edge while we watched the aquabuses – funny-looking little boats that take foot passengers across False Creek to downtown.
That’s when the conversation started up again.
‘You don’t seem to have much luck in the regular school system,’ Mom said.
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘It’s not a criticism. Just an observation. A lot of famous people didn’t do well in the regular school system.’
‘Oh, yeah? Like who?’
‘Like the Brontë sisters.’ I rolled my eyes. Only my mom would call the Brontë sisters famous.
‘And Einstein,’ she continued. ‘He had to stand in the corner with a dunce cap on his head.’
‘You’re making that up.’
She smiled. ‘And Nelson Mandela got the strap every week. And Gandhi got lots of detentions.’
Now, I was laughing. I fed a bit of my bun to a bunch of squawking seagulls.
‘I met with Principal Acheson yesterday,’ she said.
‘You did? When?’
‘When you were helping Mr Economopoulos clean out his garage.’ I helped Mr E on the weekends sometimes, cutting his grass with a push mower or doing other odd jobs for a bit of pocket money. ‘We talked through the options, and he suggested correspondence schooling.’
‘Correspondence schooling? What’s that?’
‘Basically, you get all of your work from the district correspondence school and you do the work at home.’
‘With no one to teach me?’
‘Well, I would supervise you. And you’d have a teacher you could access on-line.’
‘But we don’t have a computer.’ Mom doesn’t believe in computers, especially in the Internet. She says it’s a haven for pornographers and paedophiles. But that’s a bit hypocritical if you ask me, because she has access to a computer at the university any time she wants.
‘Mr Acheson says that he can arrange to get you some computer time since Cypress is a community access school. I’ll have to be with you because if you’re not a student at the school, they can’t let you be on your own. Liability issues, apparently.’
‘How can you do that? You teach during the day.’
‘The department needs a sessional to teach in the evenings, too. Five nights a week, from six to ten. I talked to the dean, and he says I can make the switch.’
‘And you’ll leave me home alone?’
‘I’m not thrilled about that part. We’ll have to have some rules, and I’m going to ask Mrs Economopoulos to keep an eye on you.’ Her voice cracked a little, and I looked at her and saw that she was trying not to cry.
‘Mom, don’t … I’ll go back to Cypress, seriously. I don’t want to mess things up for you.’
‘Oh, Ambrose,’ she said, and pulled me close. ‘You don’t mess things up for me. Don’t ever think that.’ She blew her nose on an old Kleenex she’d found in the pocket of her jeans. ‘So what do you say? Shall we give correspondence school a try?’
‘I guess,’ I said. And as we sat there watching the boats on the water, I started to make a mental list of the pros and cons:
THE PROS
a) no more Three Stooges
b) no more fag jokes
c) no more impatient teachers who get annoyed when I ask too many questions, or when I squeal because the Three Stooges have flushed my lunch down the toilet
d) no more schedules
e) no more gym class, where they make you change into dorky shorts in front of all the other guys (one day I forgot to wear underwear and it was the worst day of my life, even worse than the day I almost died)
THE CONS
a) no more sneaking peeks at Ms Martin’s boobs in music class when she props them up on top of her guitar and they’re big and they move a little and you can see the edge of her bra (but this one is also a pro because I once got a boner watching those boobs and had to sit with my sheet music over my lap for the rest of the lesson).
That was the only con I could come up with. I felt a little flutter of excitement in my stomach.
Correspondence school was going to be great.