SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: How long have you and Kneecap been friends?
QUINN: Ever since she moved to our neighbourhood. We’re in the same year at school and we used to sit together on the bus.
And of course, we started the UHL together.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: The UHL?
QUINN: Last year at school, Kneecap made this amazing discovery. She kicked a quarter across the floor of the boys’ washroom, and it ricocheted off the rounded lip where the floor meets the wall and flew into the air. Somehow she got the angle just right and the quarter landed right in the urinal! It was a perfect goal. And that’s how urinal hockey was born.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: So UHL stands for …
QUINN: The Urinal Hockey League. We had eight teams — The Whiz Kids, The Main Vein Drainers, The Double Flushers … We even had an anthem for the league.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Someone wrote a song about urinal hockey?
QUINN: I did! We used to sing it before all the games. It goes to the tune of “God Save the Queen.”
God save our humble can,
Smelly and pee-stained can,
God save our can!
Lead us victorious,
Yellow and glorious,
Please don’t flatulate over us,
God save our can!
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: That’s very … creative!
QUINN: We had twenty games in the regular season, then the playoffs after that. We played two on two, with 5-minute periods. Whenever someone scored, the losing goalie would have to pick the quarter out of the urinal with his fingers.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Sounds … um … disgusting.
QUINN: Everyone washed their hands right after. I also invented the “fresh flush” rule.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: And Kneecap was involved in this? Even though the games were played in the boys’ washroom?
QUINN: Kneecap never had any problem with that. None of the boys minded either, since she was one of our best players.
The trouble began when Kneecap started bringing other girls into the league. I’m all for equality, but it wasn’t smart, sneaking ten girls into the boys’ washroom every lunch hour.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: The teachers caught on, I gather?
QUINN: Yeah. Kneecap got suspended for a week. I thought I was going to get nailed too, but I didn’t.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Why not? Did Kneecap protect you?
QUINN: She must have. She’s pretty loyal.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: I’ve got a crazy question for you, Quinn Scheurmann.
QUINN: What?
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Remember how Kneecap called you a fun vampire? I’m curious … When’s the last time you had some fun?
QUINN: I don’t know. Maybe at last year’s Hallowe’en dance? Actually, no. That wasn’t fun at all.
I didn’t see Kneecap until the end of the night. I don’t like dancing very much, especially when I’m wearing a lame Hallowe’en costume, so I spent most of the evening in the cafeteria, playing cards.
At eight-thirty I wandered down to the gym. Kneecap ran over from her group of friends and grabbed my hand.
“Where have you been hiding?” she asked.
“Nowhere,” I said.
Her body was encased in a bunch of cardboard cubes. She’d painted them red, green, blue and yellow. Her head poked out of a yellow cube on top.
“What are you?” I asked.
“A game of Tetris, dummy!” she said.
She looked like a giant letter L, perched on two skinny legs wrapped in black leggings. She was wearing red Converse sneakers with Tetris-themed shoelaces. It looked like she’d painted the Tetris shapes herself.
“What are you?” she asked me. “A doctor?”
“A killer doctor,” I said, showing off the fake blood on my hands.
Kneecap nodded, unimpressed. “Didn’t you wear those scrubs last year?”
“That was two years ago,” I said. “I was a marathon runner last year.”
“Of course. How could I forget?” Kneecap put her hands on her hips, which were a metre wide with all those cubes. She was wearing a little bit of makeup, I noticed, which she didn’t usually do.
“Come on,” she said, pulling me toward the dance floor. Her hand felt soft, like the grips on my handlebars. Her friends were watching us from the corner of the gym.
“You can actually dance in that costume?” I said.
“Of course! I’ve been dancing all night.”
To prove this, she did a little twirl and accidentally hit a grade-seven boy dressed as Thor.
“Sorry, Thor!” Kneecap said.
“He’s the Hammer God, he can take it,” I said.
Kneecap kept dancing. “Come on, Q-Tip! Show me what you’ve got!”
“I’m not a very good dancer,” I said.
“Who cares?” she said. “This isn’t Dancing With the Stars.”
“But I don’t really like this song,” I muttered.
“You don’t like any normal songs,” Kneecap said.
“Sure I do,” I said. “I like Bovine Ancestry. And Troutspawn.”
“Oh, come on,” said Kneecap. “A vacuum cleaner makes better music than those guys. And it’s impossible to dance to that stuff.”
Just then, the song “Don’t Stop Believin’” came on.
“Perfect!” Kneecap squealed. “You have to dance to this one!”
Everyone was swarming onto the dance floor.
“But it’s lame,” I said. “You know that it’s lame.”
“You’re lame,” Kneecap said. “Come on, it’s late, and we need to dance.”
She dragged me to the centre of the gym while strobe lights flashed atop the stacks of speakers. She surprised me by putting her arms around my neck, even though everyone else was doing their best air guitar. I put my hands on either side of Kneecap’s cubes, and we staggered back and forth in a weird boxy shuffle. Kneecap smelled nice, like green-apple jelly beans. I was nervous, and left sweaty handprints all over her cardboard.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s a little bit awkward.”
She detached the cubes around her shoulders and arms. She also took the yellow box away from her head. “That better?” she said.
It wasn’t really, since she still had cubes around her waist. Kneecap smushed her cheek against my neck. “This is nice,” she said. “I’ve wanted to do this for a while.”
Off to our right, thirty kids swayed back and forth in a big circle. Zombies, soldiers, sexy cats. A group of grade-seven boys grinned at me from the stage. My friend Spencer was up there, laughing.
“Hey, Quinn!” he shouted. “Your girlfriend’s a square!”
I glared at him. What’s your deal? I thought.
“Something wrong?” Kneecap whispered in my ear.
“No,” I said.
But something was. I had a gross feeling in my stomach, as if I’d drunk too much pop. But I also felt happy to be dancing with Kneecap.
“Careful!” Spencer shouted. “She’s got a wide load!”
I shot Spencer my death stare. You snot rocket, I mouthed.
Kneecap didn’t seem to notice any of this, but I felt really embarrassed for some reason. So I did something really dumb. I took Kneecap’s hand from the back of my neck and stuck it straight out, like the spout of a watering can. Then I swayed Kneecap back and forth, with our hands stuck straight out, like we were a waltzing teapot or something.
“What are you doing?” Kneecap said, laughing.
“I’m not sure,” I said, tipping her forward. I wanted to get as far away from Spencer as possible.
And then I did something even stupider. The stupidest thing I possibly could have done.
I told a joke. Not just any joke. A racist joke.
I’m not sure why I did this, exactly. I only wanted to lighten the mood.
Not surprisingly, Kneecap didn’t like the joke very much. She threw away my hand like it was a dirty diaper.
“Why would you tell me that?” she asked.
“I was only making conversation!” I sputtered.
“Don’t Stop Believin’” came to an end, and the deejay launched an even slower song. The disco ball started spinning. Most of the kids broke off into pairs.
Kneecap stared at me. “Do you even know what a towel-head is?” she said. “Some jerks use it to mean Arabs — people from Saudi Arabia.”
I stared at her. I hadn’t known that.
“My mom is from Saudi Arabia, you idiot.”
She turned and stalked away, stopping to pick up her extra Tetris cubes from the floor. Then she stopped and looked back. “Throw away your weird pills, Quinn,” she said.
With that, she walked across the darkened gym, the strobe light flashing off her cardboard outfit. She suddenly looked ridiculous in that costume, and very sad, and I wanted to run over to her and cheer her up, only I couldn’t.
For a while after that, she and I didn’t talk very much. Actually, we didn’t talk at all. Kneecap never sat beside me in Science class anymore. And I didn’t sit with her on the bus, since I was running to and from school every day.
For a day or two, I was confused about what had happened. But then I thought about what I’d said. That towel-head joke. What a boneheaded thing to say.
But here’s the weird part: It was my dad who told me that joke. Did that make him a racist? Was I a racist for repeating it?
I decided that I needed to ask my dad about it. I’d do it on Sunday, the next time he Skyped. But that was the first Sunday that Dad didn’t call. And so the towel-head thing got swept under the carpet.