Three

After I get home from my piano lesson each week, I like to close myself into my bedroom. Just for an hour or two before supper. The others – Mom, Dad, Sophie, and Wes – think that I’m doing my homework. But I’m not.

Sometimes I’m playing cassettes that Sister Maria has lent to me, recordings of piano concertos played by big orchestras and famous concert pianists. Or I’m flipping through the music magazines that Sister Maria subscribes to, old issues that she has already read, and then passed along to me. I’m learning about all kinds of music, not just the songs for my piano exams, but other songs, and the history behind them. At the end of every lesson, Sister Maria always pulls out something for me to borrow. Video recordings of operas, music history textbooks. Every once in a while, she gives me something to keep – a dog-eared copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier, sheet music for “Malaguena,” an old metronome that she’s long since replaced.

More often than not, though, after my lessons, I lie on my bed and I think about Sister Maria. I think that she must be lonely. She’s not like the other nuns. Lots of them are so old they can hardly walk. For the most part, the convent is deathly quiet. Except, of course, when Sister Maria is giving lessons. She’s too lively for the convent, too loud. She doesn’t fit in.

The truth is, I don’t really know much about Sister Maria. I think that she’s Ukrainian, or has some connection to Ukraine, but I don’t know for sure. She’s never given me the whole story. I think that when she isn’t teaching, she’s transcribing the works of Ukrainian composers so that they won’t be forgotten. But I don’t know where she finds the music in the first place.

I imagine that someone in Europe sends material to her because her desk is covered with envelopes from foreign countries. I imagine that she receives scratchy recordings, old scraps of manuscript paper. The occasional booklet of printed music, and maybe diaries or journals with the odd bit of musical notation. I imagine that she sorts through everything that is sent to her, making sense of it the best she can. And when she thinks that she’s pieced together an entire song, then she transcribes it. At least that’s how I imagine it. Sister Maria has never explained it to me.

I’m learning to play from some of her transcriptions, which seems to make her happy, but I can never really predict how she’ll act at my lessons. What kind of a mood she’ll be in.

After my first lesson, I spent hours at home trying to work out the song that she’d played for me, the sad song in the minor key. She didn’t lend me the music, but I’m good at playing things by ear. I had the melody in my head – most of it anyway – so I made up my own version of it to play for her at my next lesson. Only she didn’t like it. Not one bit. She said that I’d gotten it all wrong. I made it sound simple and cheap, like a folk song. And then she pulled out her sheet music to show me the real thing.

Sometimes, before I learn a new song by a Ukrainian composer, she tells me about the composer’s life, and that’s when she looks the saddest. Artemii Vedel, spent most of his life in prison for political reasons. Vasyl Barvinsky, sentenced to ten years in a Soviet concentration camp. Maksym Berezovsky, committed suicide in the eighteenth century. So many of their deaths were violent and ugly. She talks about composers who were gunned down, murdered, assassinated – composers who starved to death, or froze to death. They all suffered and died because they were Ukrainian, because they wanted to stay Ukrainian when other countries invaded Ukraine. I never know what to say after Sister Maria tells me their stories. I wonder if Sister Maria was like them. If she suffered, too, because of what she believed in.

I’ve given up trying to predict when Sister Maria will talk about her own work. Every once in a while, out of the blue, she’ll mention it, and talk and talk, bringing out sheet music and playing excerpts. Once she held me over, cutting into the next student’s lesson while she explained her latest piece. But when I ask straight out about her progress, she doesn’t answer.

I have so many questions. I want to ask about the person who sends her the material. For all I know, it might be more than one person. Are they other nuns? Priests, maybe, or monks. Family members, old friends? Anything is possible. I want to ask how she knows these people, and how they come across this material, and why they send the music to her and not to somebody else. I want to know what she plans to do with her transcriptions once they’re all finished. I want to know exactly why she does them in the first place.

More than anything, I want to talk to somebody else about Sister Maria – like Sophie. Sophie would be fascinated, like me. I know she would. I wish that I could tell Sophie everything I know about Sister Maria’s music room, her work with the Ukrainian music. Everything about her seems so romantic, so mysterious. My guess is that she’s seventy or seventy-five. Which means that she was born before the First World War, and lived through both World Wars – maybe in Russia, maybe in France, probably in both.

Sophie would help me fill in the details, come up with possible explanations for how Sister Maria wound up in Canada, because Sophie is studying the ussr in her grade eleven Social Studies class. Together, we could make timelines, and sketch out maps of Europe, and trace out Sister Maria’s life story – potential versions of it, at least. We could bounce ideas off one another, like a couple of detectives. If Sister Maria is Ukrainian, then maybe she came to Canada, via France let’s say, to flee from the Communists. Or else she was running from the Nazis. Or Stalin? Stalin is a possibility, too. Of course, I could do the investigation on my own. It just wouldn’t be as much fun.

But I don’t dare talk to Sophie about Sister Maria because Sophie hasn’t forgotten that I’m the lucky one who got to continue with piano lessons, and she won’t let me forget it either.

“How’s our Little Prodigy?” she says, after my lessons. “How’s the Musical Genius?”

How’s the Gifted One, the Golden Child, Our Very Own Virtuoso?

I can’t talk to Sophie about the mystery of Sister Maria. She’d laugh in my face. “You’re the Girl Wonder,” she’d say. “Figure it out for yourself.”

So I keep Sister Maria a secret, hoping that one day she’ll tell me her story.

•••

Maybe I spend too much time daydreaming about Sister Maria, making up tragic versions of her past. Maybe I’m too preoccupied about her composers and how they were persecuted just for being Ukrainian. But when I hear the rumours that the school board is canceling Ukrainian classes in our school, I can’t help thinking that Sister Maria will understand my plight because it’s the same thing, history repeating itself. Persecution all over again.

I hear the news from my best friends Kirsten Paulichuk and Tanya Yuzko, who hear it from Carla Senko, who says that my mom is being fired because she’s a bad teacher. Actually, Carla says that I’m to blame, too. She says the principal found out that Mom has been favouring me – showing me exams at home, giving me marks that I don’t deserve. So he’s cutting the whole Ukrainian program, just like that.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. They’re canceling Ukrainian because the enrolment is so far down. Because of students like Carla Senko who switched from Ukrainian to French. Mom explains this to me one night over supper during the Christmas holidays. The numbers in her Ukrainian classes have been dropping for the past two years and now there simply aren’t enough students to justify paying a Ukrainian teacher. But Mom isn’t going to be fired. That’s a lie, too. They’re reassigning her to grade three.

After Christmas, according to Mom, when we go back to school, everything will be different. The last remaining Ukrainian students are going to be integrated into French classes. There are only four of us left in grade nine Ukrainian anyway, and not many more in each of the lower grades. To help us along, Miss Maximchuk, the French teacher, will give us extra French tutorials after school. Until we’re all caught up. And Mom will have a new classroom in the elementary wing of the school.

My mother, I can tell, is relieved. She finally gets to teach normal kids in a normal classroom. No more homemade readers and workbooks, no more bingo games and flashcards.

I, on the other hand, am devastated.

Miss Maximchuk is the problem. While the rest of the family talks at the supper table, about how wonderful it is that Mom will be able to teach grade three, and about how useful it is to learn French in this day and age, I pick at my food and think about Miss Maximchuk and fume. Everything was fine until she showed up and took over the French program from Mr. Poirier. Mr. Poirier was old and strict. But once Miss Maximchuk came along – with her pink miniskirts and her snug, see-through blouses – French class turned into a big party. French crossword puzzles, French fold-out board games, French hangman. She gets her students to move their desks into a circle and read glossy magazines from Quebec. In the wintertime, they make cabane à sucre. They learn how to jig.

Jigging. That’s the main attraction. Miss Maximchuk has enormous breasts, and when she demonstrates the jigging, her breasts bounce and jiggle under her blouse. Most of the guys switched out of Ukrainian because of her boobs. Everyone knows that. They couldn’t care less about French. My mom isn’t full-breasted at all. How could she compete?

I can’t believe that no one else in my family sees the injustice. Our language is being taken from us, and nobody seems to care. Nobody wants to fight it. Mom and Dad talk about French like it’s a good thing, like it’s the only language that counts because anyone who speaks French can get a good government job. They say that, if I want to keep learning Ukrainian, we can speak it at home. But that will never happen. We’ve tried it before – Ukrainian-only meals to practice our Ukrainian. None of us kids said a word.

Over the Christmas holidays, I try to convince Sophie and Wes that we need to protest. I want to get them on my side. I tell them that it’s an outrage – having to join students who have been taking French for years. We’ll look stupid. How will we ever catch up? But Wes doesn’t care much. He’s in grade seven, which means that he’s only been in Ukrainian for three and a half years. It won’t be as hard for him to catch up in French class. And Sophie isn’t affected at all. She’s in grade eleven, and she’s finished all of her second-language requirements. In fact, she says that she wishes she’d learned French all these years instead of Ukrainian. She says that Wes and me are luckier than she was.

“It’s not the end of the world,” says Sophie. “It won’t be so bad. And don’t forget, you’ve had Ukrainian for almost six years. You should be thankful. Think about all of the kids in St. Paul who aren’t French or Ukrainian and who never even had one year, not one single year, not one single class, in their languages. Now that isn’t fair, is it? Yet we don’t hear a peep from all of the Norwegian kids, the Germans, the Polish kids, the Italians.”

For the first time in my life, I raise my voice to Sophie.

“Easy for you to talk, all high and mighty, in grade eleven. You were never oppressed, your language was never taken from you.”

I storm into the bedroom, slam the door.

“And there are no Italians in this town!”

•••

Secretly, I want Sister Maria to come to my rescue. I’m not sure how she would help me exactly, but it would make a big difference if I knew that she were on my side. No one else seems to understand.

Before we go back to school, after the Christmas holidays, I call the other three students in my Ukrainian class who are being persecuted, Tanya Yuzko, Kirsten Paulichuk, and Henry Popowich. I figure if we band together, we can make our voices heard and keep Ukrainian after all.

“We’re victims,” I say. “Our rights are being taken away. We have to speak out.”

But the other three victims don’t seem to mind. Henry Popowich speaks Ukrainian at home, so it doesn’t matter to him if Ukrainian classes are cancelled. He’ll keep on speaking Ukrainian at home. Tanya’s mother is French, and she already knows lots of French words, so she’s perfectly happy to take French. And Kirsten has been completely brainwashed. There’s no other explanation. She can’t possibly believe the things that she says. That we need French to get a good job; that French is easier anyway; that there are no Ukrainian classes in high school and we’ll all have to switch sooner or later. I tell Kirsten not to include me in her we. I tell all three of them, Henry, Tanya, and Kirsten, that they’re traitors: traitors, double-crossers, and turncoats. They’re selling us out, selling us right down the river.

Kirsten says, “What’s a turncoat?”

My piano lessons are cancelled for the Christmas holidays, but I’m desperate to talk to Sister Maria about the cancellation of Ukrainian. So I visit her on New Year’s Day. When Mom and Dad ask me why I need a ride to town, I tell them that I need to pick up some music from the convent. Actually, I’m going to ask Sister Maria for advice.

“What would you do,” I say, “if something terrible were happening, something unjust? And you were sure that you couldn’t stand by and let it happen? But you were sort of powerless, and you couldn’t do anything all by yourself?”

I’m hoping that Sister Maria will ask for details. Then I will tell her about the Ukrainian program.

She shrugs her shoulders. “Depends,” she says, as she plugs in the kettle to make us tea.

I glance at her stack of transcriptions, all of her yellowed and dog-eared scraps of manuscript paper. The brown envelopes with foreign stamps and funny, foreign handwriting.

“What if,” I continue, “your language were being taken from you? Your language and your whole culture?”

It’s not exactly true that my whole culture is being taken away from me. It’s really just that I won’t be able to take Ukrainian anymore. I need to get across to her the gravity of the situation, though.

Sister Maria frowns. “This is about –?” She doesn’t finish her question.

I tell her the whole story, from beginning to end. Everything. Not just about the low enrolment in my mom’s classes, and the competition between Ukrainian and French, and the school board’s decision to cut the Ukrainian program. I go way back to Dauphin, and tell her how the Ukrainian kids keep their dancing a secret at school; how we’re embarrassed to talk about all the Ukrainian things we do. I tell her about Dean and Diana’s wedding, and how there was nothing Ukrainian about their reception. My story gets a bit confused in parts – when I try to explain why I quit Ukrainian dancing after the festival, and why I stopped singing Ukrainian songs, and why I hated listening to Father Zubritsky’s lecture about being Ukrainian at the wedding ceremony. But eventually I come back to my main point.

“And now, my parents are forcing me to join Miss Maximchuk’s French class, even though I don’t want to do it.”

For a moment, Sister Maria says nothing. She takes a sip of her tea, and plays with the rosary around her neck.

“Isn’t it the same as the composers in Ukraine?” I ask her. “Isn’t it?”

Sister Maria drop her rosary. “No,” she says, quietly. “It’s not the same.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not the same,” she repeats.

“Just because no one is trying to kill me or put me in a gulag or –”

“Stay quiet,” says Sister Maria, “about things you know nothing about. Think before you speak.”

I can feel my face turning red.

Sister Maria leans over the table to touch my hand.

“It’s not the same because you don’t know what you want.”

“I want to keep taking Ukrainian.”

“But you don’t want to listen to this Father Zubritsky when he tells you to speak your language.”

My face is as red as a tomato, I’m sure.

“And you don’t want to sing these songs your mother taught you, or do this secret dancing you just told me about.”

I can’t respond. I don’t know what to say.

“No one is stopping you from being who you are, Colleen,” says Sister Maria. “Except you.”

•••

I think about my conversation with Sister Maria for a day or two, and I decide that she doesn’t really understand my situation. I mean, she’s right about a few things. I probably shouldn’t have quit dancing. When Mom wanted to teach me “Chaban,” maybe I should have let her. Much as I hate to admit it, Father Zubritsky was partly right when he talked about Ukrainians who don’t speak Ukrainian. But I know injustice when I see it. It’s not my fault that the school board is cancelling Ukrainian. And it’s definitely not fair.

After school starts again, while the school administration phases out the Ukrainian program, I start a letter-writing campaign. I do it in the school library, which is where the ex-Ukrainian students are supposed to sit together, working through the beginner French textbooks for a few weeks before they officially join the French classes. It’s humiliating, if you ask me, being forced to do grade four exercises. I refuse to participate. It makes me sick to my stomach watching Tanya, Kirsten, and Henry throw themselves into this new language, as though they can’t wait to forget everything they learned in Ukrainian.

I write one letter to the principal, one to the school board, and one to the St. Paul Journal, protesting our forced migration into the French classroom. My parents think I’m being melodramatic. Sophie and Wes think it’s a big joke.

The St. Paul Journal doesn’t print my letter to the editor, but I do hear back from the principal and the school board. The news isn’t good. Two copies of the same letter arrive in separate envelopes with a different signature at the bottom of each copy.

We regret to inform you that your request to have Ukainian reinstated has been denied. Please consider entering Miss Maximchuk’s French program. Alternatively, we are pleased to offer you any one of the following options, designed specifically for our Young Ladies in the junior high school:

1. Introductory Typing

2. Introductory Food Preparation

3. Introductory Beauty Culture

It’s hard to imagine what would be worse: sitting, ignorant and confused and mute, in a classroom with students who have taken French for five and a half years, who are practically fluent, or sitting through a course for Young Ladies.

Mrs. Heatherington plays records during her typing classes, old country and western 45s of Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Mel Tellis, Conway Twitty, and her students type their exercises in time with the music. She doesn’t care what they type – most of the girls, I’ve heard, write notes to exchange with one another after class – so long as their fingers never stop and they keep to the beat. Food Prep is like home eeconomics without the sewing. I’m not sure what they learn in Beauty Culture. How to cut hair, I suppose, and give perms, and maybe how to wax facial hair.

I refuse to give up. If the principal and the school board won’t take me seriously, maybe the government will. I write several more letters: to my mla, the Minister of Education, and the Premier. Not one of them responds. Not even to tell me that they disagree with my point of view. I’m sure that when the Edmonton Journal publishes my letter to their editor the whole ugly truth of it will come out – Blatant Discrimination in St. Paul School, Politicians Turn Blind Eye to Social Wrong. Official invitations will follow, invitations to Ukrainian bilingual schools in Edmonton or Calgary or both. But the Edmonton Journal doesn’t publish my letter either.

In the end, my letter-writing campaign fails. It fails miserably. The conspiracy is bigger than I originally imagined. As far as I’m concerned, the entire universe is against me. Colleen Lutzak versus the Whole World. My parents are in on it. They say that my campaign is nonsense, and they’re forcing me to sit in Miss Maximchuk’s classroom four hours a week. My brother and my friends are in on it, trying to convince me that French is fun. And Miss Maximchuk is definitely in on it, more than anyone else. She’s Ukrainian. Why is she teaching French in the first place?

As for Sister Maria – I can’t be sure. Maybe she’s on my side after all.

Out of the blue, at the end of one of my lessons, in the middle of February, she asks me how my French is coming along.

I tell her that it’s coming along fine. That’s all I say, nothing more.

While I’m putting on my coat in the foyer of the convent, she says, “You’re a very smart girl, Colleen.”

I stop zipping my coat, and turn to face her.

“You’re smart about music, of course,” she says, waving her hand. “I don’t need to tell you. I’ve never had a more gifted pupil. You have enormous talent, and you match it with hard work.”

I resume zipping.

“But you’re getting smart about life, too, no? You’re learning that sometimes we have to do unpleasant things. Sometimes we have no choice. So we do these things. We do them on the outside, yes? So that everyone around us believes we have given up.”

Sister Maria puts her arm around me, and squeezes.

“On the inside, though, we never forget – who we are, what we believe in. No, we never forget these things. It isn’t easy. Of course it isn’t easy. Sometimes we feel very lonely. But we survive, you see. We do what we must to survive.”

As Sister Maria talks, I get goosebumps. I’m glad that she understands. I’m relieved. I get the feeling, though, that she isn’t only talking about my problems at school.

Just what else is she talking about?

•••

Learning French, in fact, isn’t that hard. Not nearly as hard as Ukrainian. And once I accept my fate, I’m determined to be the best. To out-French the Frenchest students in my class. From the time I get home from school until the time I go to bed, I work through my French textbooks and cahiers, conjugating verbs, memorizing vocabulary and numbers.

French is easy because there’s no new alphabet to learn, and a lot of English words are the same in French – especially long words. When I write compositions in French, I use a lot of big English words that end in “ance” and “tude.” After two months, I can hardly believe that Miss Maximchuk hasn’t caught on. I’ve used insouciance, délivrance, and solitude in every French composition I’ve written. Fifteen compositions, fifteen insouciances, délivrances, and solitudes, for a grand total of forty-five red circles. Miss Maximchuk circles each of my big words in red pen and writes, Ton vocabulaire est bon! in the margin.

By the middle of April, I’m right where I want to be: at the top of the class. I’ve worked hard, and it’s paid off.

What’s harder, though – harder than learning French – is fighting the feeling that I’ve been carrying with me since I started Miss Maximchuk’s class. The feeling that I’m floating and bobbing in a pool of water and that pieces of me are floating and bobbing away. When I lie in bed at night, I make mental lists of the new French words I’ve learned and I try to match each French word with its Ukrainian equivalent, to keep my Ukrainian memory fresh and strong. I even put my Ukrainian-English dictionary beside my bed.

At first, the exercise is easy. Je – {. Pomme – {bluko. Numbers, the days of the week. Grenouille – ?aba. But we go through chapters quickly in French class – thirty new nouns per week, five new verbs – and I can’t find words like insouciance, deliverance, and solitude in the Ukrainian-English dictionary. I’m losing words now, daily.

So when I select my topic for the French final project, it’s a matter of survival, just like Sister Maria said. The ninth grade French projects – Les Thèmes et Les Variations – are infamous in our school; they are Miss Maximchuk’s raison d’être. Each year, she chooses a thème – this year’s is Canada, Le Pays Multiculturel – then she asks her senior French students to pair up and work on variations of the thème. The presentation of Les Thèmes et Les Variations in June is a gala event, like the school Christmas concert, with parents, teachers, and school board members in attendance.

Peter Eliuk and Greg Pederson are doing Mexican Canadians. There is talk that they’ll make real papier mâché piñatas. Sarah H. and Sarah M. decide on Italian Canadians, and they’re bringing tortellini for the audience to sample. Torn between the Scots and the Irish in Canada, Laurie-Anne and Jessie compromise – they choose the British. Carla Senko and Michael Holowaychuk pick French Canadians. They’re a couple now, boyfriend and girlfriend.

I plan to work alone, sans partner. I won’t even ask Miss Maximchuk for assistance. My project will be mine all mine. I plan to make maps, models, diagrams, and charts. I might even bring in my guitar and sing, or wear my old Ukrainian costume and dance. The title of my project is Je Me Souviens Aussi: Les Ukrainiens au Canada. My coup de grâce.

I make three huge maps – one of Canada, one of Alberta, one of the rough triangular area between Vegreville, Smoky Lake, and St. Paul – which show the demographic distribution of Ukrainians settlers in Canada and Alberta. Plus Ukraine, of course. I also make a giant map of Ukraine which shows the cities and the villages from which most of the Ukrainian settlers originally came. My written report is twenty-two pages long; in it, I describe the path that my family followed to Alberta. From Bukovyna to Frankfurt by train, to Halifax by boat, to Winnipeg again by train, and, finally, to Szypenitz on foot. I include recipes and real embroidery patterns. Some discussion of Ukrainian folk music and religion. Photos of Ukrainian dance costumes.

As the presentation day approaches, I decide to sing “Tsyhanochka” with my guitar – my first performance since Dauphin. I’m also going to bring several pysanky. I will need a table for my pysanky and also for my 3-d miniature replica of a traditional Ukrainian village, with its miniature corrals around its miniature chickens and pigs, its thatch-roofed and white washed miniature house. Around me, I will hang the maps and a poster on which I have printed an excerpt of the Taras Shevchenko poem “The Testament.” Translated from Ukrainian into English, of course, and then into French.

I translate almost everything into French, except the names of people, like Clifford Sifton, Ivan Pylypow, Wasyl Eleniak, and Taras Shevchenko, and the names of Ukrainian dishes that I can’t bring myself to translate. Les petites crêpes au fromage doesn’t work. Nalysnyky are nalysnyky. Pysanky, too, remain pysanky, not les oeufs de Pâques or les oeufs colorés. For each Ukrainian word, I write two transcriptions, one in the Roman alphabet and one in the Cyrillic. Pysanky, Pisanki.

Three nights before Les Thèmes et Les Variations, the telephone rings, and my mother talks quietly into the receiver for a long time before she calls me to the phone. I’m in the bathroom, putting the finishing touches on the three new pysanky I’ve made for my presentation. They’ve already been varnished. Now, one at a time, I hold the eggs over the sink and poke two small holes in each one. When I blow into one hole, my breath pushes the egg yolk and egg white through the other hole, until the insides of the three eggs are one long clot slipping down the drain.

Mom yells, “Collee-een, pho-one. It’s Miss Maximchuk.”

Miss Maximchuk is on the phone?

“Carla Senko is in a bind,” says Miss Maximchuk.

I can feel the blood drain from my face.

“Earlier this evening, Carla caught Michael Holowaychuk behind the Red Rooster with a girl from the Catholic school. You can imagine that Carla is very distressed. She’s been at my house with me for the last hour. This was totally unexpected, completely unforeseen. Carla’s heart is positively broken. She feels, well, humiliated, frankly, and vulnerable. Right now she needs our encouragement and our support.”

“Help, too, don’t forget help!”

I can hear Carla’s voice in the background.

Across the room, I see my mother shaking her head.

“Yes, and our help,” says Miss Maximchuk. “I think that Carla needs our help most of all. We girls need to stick together!”

While Miss Maximchuk chirps through the phone line, I see Carla Senko, nine years old, pulling a cinnamon bun apart with her hands. It’s the biggest cinnamon bun I’ve ever seen – bigger than both her hands put together – and when she unrolls it, raisins drop out and onto her desk. I have six poppyseed pampushky in my lunch. I offer to trade all six for her cinnamon bun. I will trade anything for a taste of her cinnamon bun. She takes my pampushky and gives me half of the cinnamon bun. Later, toward the end of the day, as I’m tossing away some pencil shavings, I see my pampushky squashed at the bottom of the garbage pail.

I see Carla Senko when she is eleven years old, in her gym clothes. Both she and I have been selected as the team captains in Mrs. Zalinsky’s gym class. It’s the end of volleyball season and we’re having a mock championship. Each team captain must come up with a team name. Carla takes the Panthers. The panther is our school mascot. Most of the people she chooses for her team are members of the Junior High Volleyball team, so they have matching Panther uniforms; their team cheer is the Panthers roar. All in all, I don’t think it’s very original. I call my team the Volleyball Vultures. I like the alliteration. Plus it’s fresh and innovative. “Vultures” says what we’re about as a team: winning. More than winning, devouring. More than devouring even, our name declares that our opponents are dead and defeated before we even start. We’re simply cleaning up the scraps.

I hear Carla teasing me, and her teammates laughing at me to impress her. Some of the Panthers caw like crows, others gobble like turkeys. None makes the sound of a real vulture, whatever that sound may be, but it doesn’t matter. All my teammates mutiny halfway through the mock championship. All except Joe Jr., one of the kids in our class from the reserve, who walks off the court to speak with Mrs. Zalinsky.

After a few minutes, I hear Joe Jr. saying, “What’re you teaching in this class anyways. Help her out already.”

I think he means me; help me out.

Joe Jr. gets himself kicked out of class for being disrespectful and Carla tells everyone that he’s my boyfriend. That I’ve gone Indian, and that we’re going to have half-breed babies. She says we should rename our team the Redskins.

I see Carla Senko at six, at seven, at eight years of age – I see her at twelve and thirteen. I see her telling boys that I stuff my bra with Kleenex, and that I sleep in the same bed as my brother. I see her saying mean and cruel things, horrible things that aren’t true. I see Carla, in the second row of the school auditorium, laughing while I play the guitar for the first time in the annual talent show. I see her glare when I accept the award for highest average in grade six, grade seven, grade eight. I see her lips peel back and her jaw snap – spitting and hissing my new names, Four-Eyes, Book Worm, Goody-Goody.

But I can’t see Carla in a bind, distressed or broken-hearted. If I could, I think that I would watch and smile.

“Michael will present the French Canadians by himself,” says Miss Maximchuk, “and Carla will present the Ukrainians with you. This way, Carla can still be actively involved in the presentation of Les Thèmes et Les Variations. Of course, she won’t be graded on the work you’ve put into your project. It’s just that – well. She can’t bear to stand beside Michael, you see. It would be too much for her, you understand. It’s just for the presentation, just for the evening, so that she doesn’t feel left out. I’m sure you can appreciate where she’s coming from. You don’t have a partner anyway.”

Carla will present the Ukrainians with me.

Carla will present the Ukrainians with me.

I can’t believe that this is happening. I try to argue with Miss Maximchuk but she won’t take no for an answer.

Carla will present the Ukrainians with me.

One hour to showtime, the night of Les Thèmes et Les Variations, I’m dressed in my full Poltavsky costume, headpiece and boots included. Sophie has French-braided my hair and slicked back the bangs from my forehead with gel, as she would if this were a dance performance. I’ve rouged my cheeks, brushed blue on my eyelids, painted my lips dark red. Backstage in the school auditorium, I double-check that my maps and posters are firmly tacked to the display boards.

Under the guidance of Miss Maximchuk, who has made a full-time job of consoling the lovelorn Carla, as though Carla is her friend and not her student, Carla and I have rehearsed our parts. We’ve decided to take turns delivering the presentation, and we’ve both decided to wear Ukrainian costumes from Ukrainian dancing. My velvet vest is burgundy, hers is green.

But at the last minute, Carla tells Miss Maximchuk and me that she doesn’t want to wear the velvet vest. It makes her look fat. She takes off the vest and gives it to Miss Maximchuk, who folds it into a square and stuffs it into her purse.

Then Carla decides that she hates her blouse. She claims that the sleeves are too puffy.

I tell Carla that she’s just a little nervous.

“You look great,” I say.

Plus she’s Ukrainian danced all her life. She knows perfectly well that the sleeves are supposed to be puffy.

“What do you know?” says Carla. “Michael is going to be in the audience. You can afford to look all bloated and fat, but I can’t.”

I take a deep breath.

“And this headpiece is retarded,” she says. “It’s stupid. I’m not wearing it. It makes me look like I’ve got horns growing out of my head. Forget it.”

Carla pulls off the headpiece. I’ve rarely seen anybody wear the Poltovsky costume without a headpiece. Carla looks half-nude to me.

Miss Maximchuk takes the headpiece from Carla and tosses it onto the floor. I pick it up, hissing under my breath that this headpiece cost almost two hundred dollars. Miss Maximchuk ignores me.

“Let’s pin the sleeves down,” she says, “so that they look more tapered.”

“The sleeves of Poltovsky blouses,” I say, “aren’t supposed to be tapered, they’re supposed to be billowy. The billowier the better. Right, Carla?”

From her purse, Miss Maximchuk pulls a pincushion and, turning her back to me, she starts pinning Carla’s sleeves.

I want to rip the costume off Carla’s body, and leave her stark naked backstage. Miss Maximchuk would try to intervene, of course, so I’d have to knock her out first. I suppose I could choke her with the ribbons of the headpiece Carla refuses to wear – just enough to make her faint. With Miss Maximchuk out of the way, I’d stuff a pysanka in Carla’s mouth to stop her from crying out. I’d hear the sweet sound of Carla crunching the eggshell and gagging and spitting. I’d bring my knee down on her chest. With one arm, I’d pin her hands down; with the other, I’d untie the apron and the skirt, and I’d rip down the slip. I’d yank the beads from her neck, sending them rolling above her head. There would be pins still in her sleeves and she’d yelp because the pins would poke her as I pulled the blouse over her head. Poor stupid Carla. Lying naked for all the world to see. She’d sob but I wouldn’t care. I’d slap her face. “Shut up, Carla!” I’d say. Then I’d slap her face again.

Carla walks onstage first, no velvet vest, no headpiece, sleeves pinned tightly around her arms. I can’t follow her. I can’t stand next to her onstage. I can’t move. There is a lump in my throat and I’m afraid that if I open my mouth I’ll cry.

Miss Maximchuk tells me to get going.

“Let’s go, Colleen! You’re on!”

I shake my head.

“I’m not going.”

“You have to go,” says Miss Maximchuk, pushing me hard toward the stage.

I won’t budge.

“What’s wrong with you? Your final grade depends on this presentation, Colleen. There are more than a hundred people out there waiting for you.”

Carla runs offstage.

“Do something!” she says to Miss Maximchuk.

“You do something, Carla. Get back out there and do the presentation alone, by yourself. Colleen has stage fright.”

When Miss Maximchuk says that I have stage fright, something snaps inside me. I’ve never had stage fright in my life, and I won’t have anyone accusing me of chickening out. I was born for the stage. I’m a natural performer.

So I grab Carla by the arm and drag her back out into the spotlight. And then I grit my teeth while we deliver the presentation like we planned. The performance goes off without a hitch. It’s perfect. Absolutely flawless.

Afterward, as the audience claps, and as Carla bows, grinning smugly as though she’s actually earned their applause, I think about Sister Maria. I think about the things she told me about not giving up. “We survive,” she said. “We do what we must to survive.”

Standing next to Carla on the stage, I just can’t help feeling that something inside me has died.

Because I let it.