September
Her name was Sam. She sat in her uncle Ray’s kitchen, waiting for the trauma worker to take her to her first day at her new school. She looked down into her lap, at one hand clenched over the other, where, at the centre of the inside hand, lay Morganne’s little sketchbook. The one Morganne’s parents had given her after Becky died. After Becky killed herself. After Morganne basically disappeared from her life. After all the shit had come down on three of them and only two of them had made it out alive.
You could see so much of Morganne in her artwork. Even in the tiny doodles in this little sketchbook. And Sam did not dare open the pages now, that would be too much. But she squeezed the little book until she felt the corner at the centre of her palm would break the skin. She brought the book to her lips as though in prayer.
“We got this,” she whispered into its black cover. On the back of the hand that squeezed the sketchbook, right at the base of the thumb, there was the oval scar of her own teethmarks, where she’d bitten herself in agony and grief. And inside that oval, a stick-and-poke tattoo done by Morganne’s cousin MacKenzie from the Running Brook First Nation. The tattoo was a miniature version of one of Morganne’s doodles. A girl with spirals for eyes and a triangular swirl for a dress. The girl was leaning over to smell a flower half her size. “We got this,” Sam told the girl in the tattoo.
“Finish that up, now, Patricia,” Uncle Ray was saying. He had his back turned to her, fussing over something on the stove. Uncle Ray was not going to call her Sam. She had reckoned with that from the start. He knew her as Patricia. It was her original name, after all, though her mom had always called her Patty or Pattycakes, and to the kids at school she’d always been Trisha, until the very end, when people had turned ugly on her and they’d given her ugly names to make themselves feel better about the fact that they were such shitty people themselves.
Uncle Ray was not exactly her uncle. He was her mom’s uncle, her mom’s father’s younger brother. Uncle Ray meant no harm by using a name she herself no longer favoured. And even if he did, she would not have felt comfortable arguing about it, at least not at this early stage. Uncle Ray’s kitchen was still unfamiliar to her. She’d been living in his house for less than a week. He’d said to think of the place as her home, and she did, except…maybe not completely.
She’d managed to eat almost half of her omelet today, the most she’d ever done. But Uncle Ray was not pleased.
Ray had unmovable ideas about things. For one, he was convinced that breakfast meant bacon and eggs and orange juice and coffee. Every day since she’d been with him, he’d made her something called a bacon weave omelet, an enormous contraption that included, but was not limited to, many slices of bacon (she’d never been able to get an accurate count) woven into a single, human-hand-sized mini-blanket. Uncle Ray, up and about long before she got out of bed, had always already eaten, so if he himself ever ate a bacon-weave omelet, Sam had never witnessed the feat.
Ray had a girlfriend, a hookup, whatever old people called it, named Lynne, a super-chill lady from Cape Breton who Sam had met in the Valley during the terrible summer, and had seen again since coming to Uncle Ray’s. And Sam was sure she heard Lynne, in her quiet and understated way, say the word “bomb-let” once with a smirk on her face that Sam thought she immediately understood.
The sound of popping gravel under tires broke the mild tension on the issue of finishing breakfast. Uncle Ray launched himself to his feet and nosed a quick glance out at the driveway before lurching to the back door.
“We were starting to think you weren’t coming,” he said, stepping to the side of the doorway.
The trauma worker’s name was Maureen. She held out her left forearm, where a large black and grey Timex sports watch, a man’s watch that did not look at all out of place on her strong, thick-wristed arm, was strapped in place by a black resin band.
“I said I’d be here at 8:15. It is now 8:12. a.m. Atlantic Daylight Time.” She announced the exact time without looking at her watch, but held out her wrist a moment longer in case Ray wanted to double-check.
Maureen’s job was over a two-hour drive away, back in the Valley, where Sam used to live. Coming to Hubtown today, coming all this way to help Sam get settled into her new school, was not something Maureen was required to do. In fact, several other professional people on Sam’s case—doctors, nurses—made sure Sam understood that Maureen was going out of her way to help Sam like this, as if Sam could not figure that out on her own.
Since they’d met, Maureen had refrained from commenting on Sam’s appearance. Even at first, when Sam was still in the hospital, swollen and bruised from the assault. Maureen had gently taken her hand, looked her directly in the eyes, and held her hand a long time in both of hers.
So when Maureen looked Sam up and down in Ray’s sunlit kitchen on the morning of her first day in a whole new school, a whole new life, Sam understood she meant it when she said kindly but still somehow matter-of-factly: “Gosh, don’t you look sweet!”
Despite Maureen’s sincerity, Sam was not at all confident that she looked sweet, and in fact sweet was not ever going to be a look she was going for. But Maureen was only being kind. And if anything would have caused Maureen to respond the way she did, it would have been raw contrast. Maureen had seen her almost dead, and here she was alive.
As she and Maureen drove toward her new school, the streets that had been so empty just days before now seemed alarmingly filled with high-school-aged kids. They kicked along on skateboards, stood waiting for green lights at intersections. They crossed crosswalks, walked down sidewalks, and sat in cars with their friends and family, windows rolled down, snippets of conversation audible through the open windows of Maureen’s car. People looked happy and light, glowing with a first day of school shine.
Maureen parked against the brick wall of the main building and led the way from the car to the door near the student services office. Sam had her bookbag over her shoulder and held onto the straps as though getting ready for a parachute jump. Maureen was carrying Sam’s guitar, but she was not used to the bulk of the case, and it bounced off her leg with every step, sounding a clop that Sam cringed at each time, certain it was drawing attention.
This school was almost ten times the size of her old school. The number of people just in this corner of the parking lot seemed impossible. In the midst of the noisy pack of humanity that encircled the building she felt her heart begin to race. She scanned the mass of faces, looking for someone familiar. They were like masks. The emotions they expressed seemed impossible. Impossible to read. Impossible to understand. Then all at once they turned angry and bitter. Jeering disrespectfully. The day suddenly became overwhelmingly bright. She closed her eyes to keep from going blind and everything came to a standstill. A coldness dropped through her body and there was silence.
“Sam.” It was Maureen’s quiet, reassuring voice in her ear. She could feel the woman’s gentle arm around her shoulders. “Sam,” she said. “We’re at your new school. Take a moment to come back and when you’re ready, open your eyes. You’re going to be fine. You’re safe here.”
When she opened her eyes, she and Maureen were at the entrance to the building. They’d made it across the parking lot before she had frozen. With the brick and glass entrance of the new school before her, Sam turned slowly in a standing circle to see who had witnessed her losing it. There were kids at a distance, presumably off school property, smoking cigarettes, blowing clouds of vape smoke, grabbing hats off each other’s heads. Six girls nearby were gathered around another girl’s phone, thumbing through pictures. One girl giggled harshly and a jolt of panic ran down Sam’s spine like a drop of ice water.
“Oh my gosh! He’s so cute!” said another girl. “And you look stunning in that dress!”
“That was the day of my cousin’s wedding,” the girl with the phone said.
The building was old, and even though it was well kept up—the floors and walls not only clean, but relatively recently tiled and painted—the hallways were narrow and cut off almost completely from natural light.
A vice principal, a lady even larger and sturdier in appearance than Maureen, met them halfway across the front foyer. She said her name, but Sam immediately forgot. She took them on a quick tour through several hallways to show Sam where the two classes on her morning schedule would be.
Down a hallway and around a corner from the student services office there was a quiet room with two couches and a big, soft-looking armchair. “Any time you feel overwhelmed. Any time your anxiety gets bad enough that you don’t think you can make it through class. You come down here and just sit. There might be one other person in here. There might not be. But this is a quiet space. It’s meant to be peaceful and comfortable and non-threatening.”
The furniture in the chill-out room was upholstered in dark brown fake leather. The walls were grey and institutional, but soothing prints were hung there. Watercoloury. Abstract. Just two prints, on opposite walls. On another wall there was a framed sign that said Respect People. Plain black letters on white paper behind glass.
Maureen told the vice principal that Sam might sometimes communicate by writing things down instead of speaking. And the vice principal had not batted an eye.
“We can accommodate multiple strategies,” the lady had said, as though half the students in the school wrote their thoughts on a notepad instead of speaking out loud. “I can make a note of that in PowerSchool and send an email to teachers making sure they read that note. We call that a First Day Notice.” By this time, they were in the vice principal’s office, and she swivelled sideways in her chair and said, “I’ll do that right now.” She began clicking away at her keyboard.
On the desk in front of the vice principal were framed portraits of two young adults: a man and a woman. Their broad faces and square hairlines at the top of their foreheads made clear that they were the vice principal’s children. There were two certificates in frames on the wall behind her. Between them, off-centre in a much smaller frame, were the words It is what it is printed in black, like the Respect People sign in the room with the fake leather furniture.
“Now,” the woman stopped typing and turned back to Sam and Maureen, “tell me what your teachers need to know…” There was a pause while the woman selected her words. “…about…trauma.”
Sam felt her body tighten. She was tired of talking about what had happened to her. Tired of saying the same things over and over again. Tired of what her body went through, the cold shock that squeezed the air out of her lungs.
Maureen put a hand on Sam’s forearm, waited a calming moment, and said: “It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about anything right now.”
“Say: ‘Has recently experienced trauma,’” Maureen told the vice principal. She scribbled something on the back of one of her business cards. “Provide this link. It explains what teachers need to know about students who have had trauma.”
When it was just about time for her first class to begin, Sam looked at the clock above the door of the vice principal’s office, where the threshold gave onto a corner of the front foyer.
“I don’t want to be late for my first class.”
“You don’t want to be late for your first class.”
Sam and Maureen spoke at the same time.
“Jinx,” Maureen said, and laughed a slightly uncharacteristic laugh. Sam did not understand what Maureen meant by exclaiming jinx, but she took comfort from Maureen’s laugh. A small tremor of hope took up fluttering residence in her chest.
Sam was going to hold off visiting that comfortable little room, the one with the plush brown furniture, as long as she could. She did not want to miss class time. Getting behind in school work was only going to worsen her anxiety. And despite the encouragement of the vice principal, she decided not to write down words to communicate unless the alternative was pretty much death. That would only draw attention to her. It would make her a freak in the eyes of the other students. She did not feel the need for any social contact whatsoever. She did not want to make new friends, but making herself stand out as the girl who spoke by writing notes would make her a target. And however minor a target she might be for scribbling in a notepad, she did not need any such attention.
Anything she did that attracted curiosity, as a new face in the school, as someone people were wondering about, might lead to online snooping, people creeping social media to figure out who she was. She had deleted her Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. She’d even gone back and deleted all the old accounts she had not used in a long time: Tumblr, ask.fm. She’d got rid of it all. But she knew that pictures of her were still in circulation. You could protest and notify social media sites when they popped up. And you could mostly count on them being taken down. But people still had them on their phones or their hard drives. Though the terrible pics were grainy and blurred, you could tell it was her in them. Her and Morganne and Becky. She looked different now, in full light, in real life, her hair cropped short. But still. She existed online, or some hateful version of her did. She’d already had to get Facebook to delete abusive accounts in her name. Three times.
This school was only a few hundred kilometres from her old school. How long before the people here figured out who she was, what she was, how low she was? How deserving of hatred and scorn? She’d never wanted another cellphone in her life, but her mother had insisted. She’d bought her a Samsung Galaxy and paid for a Telus plan with unlimited texting that she could also make a few calls a month on. Her mom and Uncle Ray were the only two people who ever texted. She kept it on silent mode, zipped into a side pocket of her floral bookbag, and even though it was turned off, she could almost feel it vibrating through the floral fabric.
Her best friend Morganne’s mom had been given the number, too, though Sam had yet to hear from Morganne since moving. She planned to check the phone every day after school. She could see the shape of it, its rounded corners, through the fabric of the bag. It was like some horrible succubus that had latched onto her. She felt like hitting it with a stick and killing it.
Uncle Ray told her this school would be more anonymous than her old one. And it only took her until lunch on the first day to realize exactly what that meant. The school was so big that most of the teachers did not know most of the students’ names on the first day. And because this school went from grade ten to grade twelve, a third of all students, all the grade tens, were as new to the building as she was.
She’d sat in class with her eyes lowered, steeling herself for the negative attention she thought was inevitable. A sneering face. A sarcastic comment made under the breath. But so far none had come. She felt herself lowering her emotional guard a little.
She kept Morganne’s sketchbook in the front pocket of her jeans. The pocket was small, but so was the book. When she sat down, a corner of the book sometimes dug painfully into the flesh at the top of her thigh.
Now that Becky was gone, taken from the face of the earth, and now that Morganne was gone from Sam’s life, the little sketchbook felt like a benevolent horcrux to her. A piece of some collective soul she’d shared with her two closest friends. When she placed a hand over its hard little rectangle, she could look down and see the tattoo at the heel of her thumb, the lopsided girl and the flower that was almost as big as the girl.
On the last period of the day, Sam walked into music class nervous and disoriented. The class was down a dark hallway and around a corner, right at the heart of the building, far from a window and from any natural light. She was carrying a big, awkward guitar case, which she had not yet figured out how to do comfortably. The size and hulking press of the guitar against her body as she carried it, the audible clop it made when her arm got tired and she had to set it on the floor, or when she strayed too close to a wall or a door casing, these violated her wish to be smaller, quieter, less conspicuous.
And the music classroom was not really a classroom like the others. There were chairs, but no desks. It was not immediately obvious, upon entering, what a student of Instrumental Strings was supposed to do. The class ahead of hers, it seemed, was much more advanced. Students were scampering about the room as Sam’s class came in, folding up impossibly difficult-looking sheet music. They were putting away instruments Sam thought she knew to name—a trumpet, a trombone, a saxophone—along with some others she was not sure of.
The main pieces of furniture were the chairs the previous class had been sitting in, each of which had a black music stand with the name of the school stencilled in white.
One of the kids from the previous class was wiping down a trumpet and putting it in its case. He was directly in front of the chair Sam had chosen as the one she would sit in if she could gather the courage to sit.
The trumpet player had a long, triangular face, and a ball of frizzed-out light brown hair that grew slightly back and away from where gravity suggested it might naturally go. He wore a black T-shirt with the words Shut Up hand-painted across the front in white.
The room was well lit, despite the lack of windows. The floor was covered by a dull, slate-coloured carpet that was probably the source of the musty smell. At the lowest point of the classroom, against the wall, there was an old-school blackboard, five separate panels, each trimmed with gouged, pen-scarred wood. Two of the panels had permanently-drawn music lines, some of which were chalked over with what looked like mini-lessons on one musical point or another. There was a yellow chalk arrow that pointed at a circled section that had been dotted with musical notes. At the far end of the arrow, the words You need to know this! This was underlined three times.
The man at the front of the room, with his back turned, scribbling away in yellow chalk at the centre panel of the blackboard, was young for a teacher. He wore black pants, a black belt, and a charcoal short-sleeved button-up shirt. His shoes too were black, polished, long and narrow and sort of funky-looking without making too bold of a statement.
Mr. J. Foley, said the chalk message the teacher was writing on the board. Please take a seat, quietly take your instrument from its case. Place a music stand in front of you. Place your notebook or binder on the music stand. Please do not play or sound notes from your instrument until invited to do so. (This includes tuning!)
Students were still settling in and getting out their instruments when the bell rang. Mr. Foley went over to his desk, sat down at the clunky-looking desktop computer there, and started taking attendance.
Sam felt her anxiety level rising as the teacher made his way through the list. Would he call her Sam or Patricia? The vice principal had said they would put her preferred name in the computer and that teachers would know to call her that. Even though no one had made a mistake yet, Sam was tired at the end of a full day. And the mere thought of being called the wrong name had her close to tears.
Her hands felt light and jittery. How would she ever steady them on the guitar’s strings? Tension was building in her chest, strangling her voice further. The urge to spring to her feet and run almost overtook her. She knew, in the back of her mind, that she could use slow, deep breaths to calm herself, but she was high up and exposed in her seat at the back of the class.
She put her left hand flat against the centre of her chest and felt the heart there, racing against her ribs. Before Mr. Foley got to her name, there was a quick double-knock at the classroom door.
A brief expression passed across Mr. Foley’s face: unchecked annoyance.
There was a long, narrow window in the top half of the classroom door. An impassive male face looked in from the hallway.
Immediately a stir went through the room. Robot, she thought she heard people say. Mr. Foley hesitated at his desk, computer mouse still in hand as he took attendance. But when he climbed up the few tiers from the front to the back of the classroom and stepped into the hall to talk to the student who had come late, the voices of student exclamations got louder, clearer. “Holy fuck,” a kid two rows in front of her said. He was leaning over close to the ear of the guy beside him, but making no apparent attempt to hush his voice. The teacher was in the hallway now, talking to the late student, snippets of their conversation coming through the open door.
“This is not your class,” the teacher said.
“Yes it is,” the kid said.
“Instrumental Strings is introductory. You’re way beyond this.”
“Does that mean you’re letting me into Music 12? It was full when I registered.”
The teacher shook his head. “There’s a hard cap at thirty-two.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means Music 12 is full.”
“Well. Check your list. I’m in this class.”
“He’s out of jail? Already?” the other kid in front of her said.
“Check this,” the first kid dug out his cellphone, and in a few seconds he was using his thumb to scroll down a list of videos.
“Turn the sound off,” the second guy said.
Sam squeezed her eyes shut. If the attention of almost everyone in the class had not already been on the door, she might have made a run for it.
In a burst of restless energy, she stood up quickly. When she opened her eyes, she could see a couple of people had turned toward her sudden movement. But most of the class’s attention was still on the door. There was motion on the phone screen that the two guys in front of her were watching.
“Fuck!” the first guy said. “Look at that! One punch. Down! Fuck!”
“I’ve seen this a hundred times,” the second guy said.
“Fucking Gink,” said the first guy. “Down. Dead. One punch. I didn’t even know you could kill a guy with one punch.”
“People are mortal,” the second guy said. “Sometimes you don’t even need a reason. Boom! The guy dies. Was it the poutine he was eating? Was it genetic?”
The video was on a loop. Just a few seconds long. Sam could see the repeated motion, but the image was not clear. And she would not allow her attention to rest on the screen. Someone was getting killed in the video. Someone these assholes knew. Over and over and over. And they were watching it. For what reason? Fun?
This was a fucking nightmare. This was a test. Sam looked quietly about the room, sat back down, and closed her eyes again.
“What is this?” she heard the teacher ask the guy at the door.
“It’s a ukulele,” the guy called Robot said.
“This is a guitar class,” the teacher said.
She heard Robot sigh in frustration. “Really? You’re going to do this?” Robot said. “On the first day? This class is called Instrumental Strings.”
“The course description says must have own instrument.”
“This is my instrument.”
“A ukulele is not a serious instrument. It’s a toy.”
“I used to think the same thing. Look. Just let me in. I’m sorry I’m late. I promise I won’t be late again. This ukulele is pretty legit. Give it a try. I bet you’ll agree.”
Sam’s heart slowed down as the commotion eased. The teacher had finally relented and let Robot into the room. The only free seat near the door was right next to her. And so he’d settled in there. So close she could smell the soap he’d used in the shower that morning. And he’d killed someone, apparently. And been in jail for it. And there was a video of the death. And apparently a lot of people had seen it.
As the teacher continued with attendance, he did not even pause when he got to Sam’s name. She had her eyes closed in anticipation. Sam. At the sound of the right name, most of what had been locked tightly in her chest seemed to loosen. She took a deep, slow breath and opened her eyes. Robot’s real name was Robert, apparently. The teacher made a deal out of saying tardy after he called the name.
With her cousin’s acoustic guitar pressed tightly to her ribs, Sam looked over to Robert. She let her gaze slide up, beginning at her own shoe, from his bookbag, to the ukulele in his lap, to the three-quarters profile she got of his face from this angle. He was a big guy. She got that, even though he was seated. His upper arm was enormous in the sleeve of his T-shirt. His forearm wide and beefy and freckled. His jawline square, his cheekbones square above it. Those who knew how to tune their instruments had been given permission to do so. Robert’s eyes were intensely focused on the tuning pegs of the ukulele.
Sam hugged the body of her guitar to her, both arms around the instrument’s waist. She rested a cheek on the side of the body, against a part of the guitar that, according to a labelled diagram on a chart near the chalkboard, was called the upper bout. A complicated mix of emotions went through her. Fear. Worry. Anger at the kids in front of her for not giving Robert one minute back to school before they played some shitty video he obviously had no control over.
Mostly what she felt, with a twinge of guilt for feeling it, was relief. Whatever else Robert was, whoever else he was, whatever he’d done, she understood that he was a distraction. He was a huge gravitational mass of personal and social agony. There was no way she’d catch anyone’s attention right now. Not with this killer in the same music class, this killer whose crime was apparently shareable, something anyone could watch. She’d never stand out to anyone here. Not as freakish or new or interesting in any way.
There was a cool, soothing smoothness to the side of the guitar that pressed into her left cheek. The soft sounds of the strings on Robert’s ukulele as he tuned it were soothing as well.
Just then Robert put his instrument down and turned toward her. He said something that, with her mind partially drifted off and one ear pressed against the guitar, she did not hear.
She sat up straight and looked at him. In the practiced manner of someone used to communicating through facial expression alone, she raised her eyebrows at him to say What? Pardon?
“I can tune that thing for you, if you want.” He was not smiling. But his voice was calm and, if not friendly, at least not hostile. He reached out a hand.
She hesitated a second, then passed him the guitar.