Chapter 1
My first jailbreak began when a coarse-toothed mechanic’s file crashed through the window of the Deeper Harbour Police Station at two in the morning. The file bounced three or four times before clattering to a halt among a scatter of shattered glass. The file spun a little and came to rest, like a compass needle pointing somewhere far off the edge of the map. Looking back from right here and right now I believe I would like to start this story right then—three days after I had just turned fourteen—spending my birthday in jail.
My name is Roland Diefenbaker McTavish. I don’t know what Dad was thinking when he gave me the middle name Diefenbaker, but I bet you he was giggling when he did it. That’s how it goes when you’re a kid. You really don’t have much say in what happens to you, and your parents usually laugh at you if you think you do.
As for the file flying through the window—well, I guess it was time to wake up.
“Hsssst,” a voice whispered from outside the broken window.
I shook the pillow feathers out of my ear-holes and squoodged the sleep-sand out of my eyeballs with the sides of my fists.
“Hsssst.”
What was that noise?
“Hsssst.”
Either my ears had sprung a long, slow leak or I was about to be broken out of jail by the world’s largest boa constrictor.
“Hsssst.”
“If you’re trying to whistle, take the soda crackers out of your mouth,” I suggested, “because all of this hssssting is beginning to royally hsssst me off.”
“Roland, it’s me,” Dulsie whispered.
I knew it was her. Who else was going to wake me up from a sound sleep to break me out of my jail cell if it wasn’t Dulsie Jane Boudreau?
“Are you awake?” Dulsie asked.
“I am now.”
I swung my feet off of my cot and the rest of me followed. I was wearing a pair of jeans that stank and stood up with me as if I’d been wearing them for three days straight—which I had.
Dad wasn’t all that big on doing laundry.
“Hurry up,” Dulsie said. “I don’t want your dad to catch us.”
“Dad’s on patrol,” I said, which meant he’d gone down the street and opened the back door to Nora’s Diner to make himself a deep-fried grilled cheese sandwich, his favourite midnight snack. Dad had eaten a lot of sandwiches in the two years since he and Mom had decided that getting almost-divorced was the best way to stay sort-of friendly. “He won’t be back for a while.”
There wasn’t exactly what you’d call a criminal element here in Deeper Harbour. In fact, the last big crime wave had involved a dropped potato chip bag, an unlicensed Labrador retriever, and somebody spitting bubblegum onto the sidewalk.
“Did you have to break the window?” I asked.
“It wasn’t my idea,” Dulsie said. “Blame your granddad.”
Dulsie didn’t need to be afraid of what Dad would do about the broken window. That was strictly my problem. Even if I had a video of Dulsie flinging that file through the window, along with her fingerprints and enough DNA to spell the word “and” about ten thousand times or so, I’d still wind up being blamed.
That’s just how things roll here in Deeper Harbour.
“I broke the window,” Granddad Angus confessed from the shadows. “Now stand back. I’m going to kick down this door.”
That figured. Aside from Dulsie, my granddad was the most likely person to be staging my first ever jailbreak. The two of them were my very best friends and they drove me crazy as only best friends can.
“Don’t break the door,” I said. “I’ll be in enough trouble for the window.”
I pulled on my t-shirt, which was a little cleaner than my jeans—but not much. I stepped into my running shoes and worked my feet down through the double knots before making my getaway—meaning, I opened the cell door, which Dad never locked. The jail cell was where I slept on nights when I wasn’t at home with Mom. Dad’s idea of divorce gave a whole new meaning to the word “custody.”
As far as I could remember I was the only person who’d spent a night in the cell in years, which should tell you something about Deeper Harbour.
“Did you really have to break the window?” I asked Granddad Angus. “You could have just tapped on the door and I’d have opened it. I’m sure Dad keeps a key under the doormat.”
“Breaking the window was much more dramatic,” Granddad Angus explained. “You can’t live the story of your life properly without the occasional addition of a little sudden drama.”
Granddad Angus had a theory. He believed that life was nothing more than a story we told ourselves. A story that would not reveal its ending until we finally got there and found out just what we had been trying to tell ourselves all along.
“Hurry up,” Granddad Angus said. “The last thing I need is to be yelled at by Police Chief McTavish.”
Let me see if I can hack down the family tree so that you can have a better look at each knothole and twig.
Police Chief McTavish is my dad. That makes me his son, which is what he usually calls me. Granddad Angus is my dad’s dad, and I’m the one at the end—mostly stuck in the middle.
Have you got that straight?
I opened the outside door. The first thing I saw was Granddad Angus, wearing his kilt and his backwards fanny pack, a faded blue t-shirt that read, “Bagpipes Blow, Big Time,” a pair of floppy, red plaid running shoes, and his magic fishing vest of many pockets. All of that and a grin so big and so wide he looked as if he was getting set to tell the entire known universe the single greatest knock-knock joke in history.
I should tell you a little about Granddad Angus’s magic fishing vest of many pockets. I don’t think the vest is actually magical, but it sure seemed that way. It was battered and old with pockets sewn onto pockets and a few more pockets hidden under pockets that you couldn’t see. The vest was a sort of warm, soft toolbox with armholes, and Granddad Angus had worn it since I could remember. Truthfully, I think Granddad Angus was born wearing it.
As far as I could tell, Granddad Angus’s magic fishing vest of many pockets had nearly everything in it you could dream of and a lot more that you couldn’t. I had seen Granddad Angus pull a jackknife, a twist of twine, a stick of chewing gum, postage stamps, silver dollars, a pocket watch, and a screwdriver out of it. Dad told me that one Christmas Granddad Angus pulled an entire electric train set out of those vest pockets—one car and one piece of track at a time—and I believed it.
Dulsie was different. Different was the best word I could ever use to describe her. She was wearing black jeans with Hello Kitty patches sewn on each of the legs, a baseball hat with a picture of Happy Bunny on it, and a black t-shirt that read “CATS” underneath a pair of bright yellow cat eyes. She’d painted a mask on her face with greasepaint and streaked a set of whiskers on both sides of her nose.
“So what are you supposed to be today?” I asked, because I knew she wanted to be asked.
Dulsie wanted a real tattoo real bad, only she couldn’t afford one. Also, there wasn’t a tattoo shop in town. Also, her dad wouldn’t let her get a for-real tattoo over his for-real dead body—and so far he looked pretty healthy to me.
So Dulsie invented the today tattoo.
Every morning she painted a new design on her face or her arms or anywhere else she decided. Every night she washed it off in the shower and most likely lay awake half the night dreaming up her next today tattoo just in time for tomorrow.
“I’m a cat burglar. Get it?” she said.
I got it, and I thought she looked a little goofy and way too kiddish in her cat burglar makeup and too-big t-shirt, but I told her she looked pretty cool—which is a word that nobody but my dad ever says anymore. I caught that word from Dad like you might catch a case of the measles.
I lied to Dulsie about being cool because she was my best friend. Dulsie hugged me thanks. Being fourteen, I usually hated being hugged by girls, but lately Dulsie’s hugs hadn’t felt quite as bad. I knew that her whiskers and mask were probably smearing off on my shirt, but like I said, my shirt was dirty to begin with.
“We’re breaking you out of jail whether you like it or not,” Dulsie told me.
Dulsie was Deeper Harbour’s first and only punk-goth-freakazoid. At least, that’s what she called herself. I didn’t know exactly what a punk-goth-freakazoid was, but whatever it was, Dulsie was definitely one of them. She dressed in denim and leather and bike chains, her hair usually looked as if she had washed it in a box of crayons, and every morning brought a new today tattoo.
I wouldn’t tell her this, but I think Dulsie liked her paint more than she would a for-real tattoo. You see, you can change paint and you can’t change a tattoo, and change was absolutely unpredictable—just like Dulsie.
“I don’t see why you’re going to all this trouble anyway,” I said.
“You’ve been moping,” Granddad Angus said.
“I have not.”
Dulsie nodded, agreeing with Granddad Angus. Didn’t I hate it when my two best friends ganged up on me like this—which they usually did.
“You have been moping. I recognize a case of mid-summer mope. It’s utterly unmistakable and the best cure for a mope is to get up and do something,” Dulsie said. “So come on, let’s get busy and get doing. Your granddad has a plan.”
There was no point in arguing. The window was broken and so was my sleep. Besides, they were right. I had been moping. I stepped over the broken window glass, which crunched like a carpet of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I told myself not to worry about the window.
What was the worst thing Dad could do?
Lock me in jail?
“Better grab that file,” Dulsie said. “I wouldn’t want your dad CSI-ing that for evidence.”
Now I didn’t think Dad could spell CSI if you wrote it out for him in big, loud, capital letters, but I was too tired to argue. I hadn’t looked at the alarm clock, but I knew by now it said two-thirty in the morning.
Time is funny like that.
It’ll run out and run over and run away on you whether you’re looking at it or not.
Towns are built that way, too.
Sometimes, so are people.