~
“WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED to be?” Carlie’s out the window smoking a cigarette. All I can see is her bum, but I can tell from her tone she thinks my costume is stupid.
“A corpse bride,” I say, threading a needle to stitch feathers to the hem of one of Mom’s white nightgowns.
“Aren’t you a little old to dress up for Halloween?” Carlie says to the oak trees out the window.
“Aren’t you a little old to still be living at home?”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” Carlie leans back into the room and gives me an uncertain once-over. “Hm.”
“What?”
“You need a veil. I think I was ten the last time I wore a costume.”
“Do I look like I care?” I say under my breath, concentrating on getting my stitches evenly spaced.
“Shit,” Carlie says as Dad clomps up the stairs. She butts out her cigarette and grabs perfume, spritzing it around the room. I wave my arms in front of my face, saying, “Quit it.” The door swings open.
“Dad,” Carlie shouts. “Remember knocking?” He wrinkles his nose at the perfume, stepping back into the hallway and closing the door behind him before knocking. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Carlie says, zipping up her boots and grabbing her purse.
“Do you ghouls still need a ride?” Dad yells through the door.
“Let’s go,” Carlie says, flinging open the door and checking herself in the mirror one last time. She pops a piece of gum into her mouth and I hold open my hand for some, but she walks right by me. “What are you supposed to be?” Dad asks me, peering around the doorframe as Carlie stomps past him down the stairs.
“A corpse bride,” I say, annoyed. I put the last feather on the slip and throw on my hoodie.
“Dad, let’s go,” Carlie shouts from downstairs.
The doorbell rings and I hear a bunch of little kids pushing each other around on the porch. “Trick or treat.”
“Mom, where’s the candy?” Carlie screams.
Dad asks me if I’m coming, but I tell him I’d rather walk and I follow him down the stairs as Carlie opens the door and Mom brings a big bowl of treats from the kitchen. I squeeze past all the kids with their hands out. “You hoo, Frankenstein’s Bride,” Mom says, holding out a candy bar for me. I ignore her and make my way across the street. I can hear her behind me, saying, “Just one, now. Everyone gets one.”
THE STREETS ARE SMOKY; bottle rocket squeals shriek across the night sky and the cul-de-sacs feel like war zones. I hurry along the sidewalks and cut through the park to stay off the roads, which burst with hot firecracker colours. Kids from another school are hanging out on the jungle gym. A girl with long blond hair smokes while she hangs upside down on the monkey bars, the tips of her hair brushing the dead leaves on the ground. There’s a group sitting in a concrete tube in the middle of the sandbox, smoking weed. I can’t see them, but I can smell the smoke and hear their voices echo out of the hollow cylinder and into the park. Someone’s boots hang out one end and some guy’s saying, “Can you see me? Can you see me?” Everyone’s laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard, but it doesn’t sound like the guy is joking. Someone jumps out one end of the tube and stalks off through the park. “Fuck it. You guys are fucking fucks.” From inside the tube a girl says, “Relax.” The guy walks off to a car and sits in the front seat for a minute blaring metal and then comes back carrying something behind his back. A lighter flicks and he throws the thing gently into the tube. There’s machinegun pandemonium as everyone shoots out the opposite end, whooping and screaming, holy shit. Loud pops and hot green light go firing through the tunnel and I leave the park and cross to the far side of the street. The guy who lit off the brick of firecrackers jumps onto the concrete tube and yells, “I’m the army, yeah! Fuck, yeah.” One of the other guys pulls him down and they start fighting. Across from the park, little kids in fuzzy bear costumes and pirates dragging their swords knock on the neighbourhood doors, their voices sweeter than candy.
At the house party I don’t recognize any of the kids sitting on the front stairs, so I duck through the hedges on the side of the house and go around the back. Kate and I were at a party here once. A bunch of guys built a bike jump in the backyard and they all smoked dope and fell off it all night. Kate got drunk on Slippery Nipples and puked in the bushes by my front porch. My mom thought it was the neighbour’s golden retriever when she found the vomit the next morning.
Elgin’s with friends in the kitchen, sitting on the counter beside a sink full of beer cans and a dinner plate overflowing with cigarette butts. He’s dressed normally, but he has a cardboard sign around his neck that reads serial killer. “Good costume,” I say, hopping up beside him. When I look around I realize most of the people at the party are out of high school and almost no one is wearing costumes. “What are you supposed to be?” Elgin says.
I take a sip of his beer, pretending not to hear him. “Where have you been? You haven’t been at school all week.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Elgin smirks and his buddies laugh. While he talks with his friends about the new skate ramps they’re planning to build, I pluck the feathers off my slip, letting them drift down to the kitchen floor. When I ask Elgin to follow me, he comes reluctantly, his fingers laced limply in mine while his friends make blah blah gestures at my back.
Outside, kids lie on their backs in a circle in the yard, their heads almost touching and their feet fanned out like the rays of a sun. Elgin leans against the side of the house lighting a cigarette and watches them. “By the way, I’m suspended,” he says.
“What?” The kids are making weird movements with their hands in front of each other’s faces — starbursts, elephants, waves. “For how long?”
“I don’t know,” Elgin shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What did your mom say?” I try to grab his hand, but he’s stuffed it into his pocket.
“What do you think she said?” He slides down the side of the house and crouches on the walk.
“What happened?” I sit cross-legged on the cement in front of him so he has to look at me.
“What happened?” He raises his eyebrows and laughs. “Paul’s what happened. You know anything about that?”
“Why would I know something?”
“Did you talk to him about me?”
“No,” I say, unable to hide the hurt in my voice.
“You know people say you’re sleeping with him, right?” He flicks his half-smoked cigarette into the bushes and watches my face closely, but before I can utter a word he laughs it off. “It’s a joke,” he says.
“What kind of joke is that?” I say, pushing myself up from the ground. I consider joining the circle of kids in the grass.
A door opens beside us and Rana stumbles out, bee-lining for me. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says, grabbing my arm. “You have to come with me.”
“Not now,” I say, trying to shake her from my elbow.
“Trust me,” Rana says close to my ear. “You want to see this.”
We all go back into the house through the basement, where kids are packed wall to wall, but when I turn to look behind me Elgin is gone. Rana leads me down a dark hallway, the noise from the party growing dimmer, and I can hear someone humming. At the end of the hallway, she shoves me gently toward a door that’s partially ajar and I push it wide open. An older guy is sitting on the bathroom floor, his head against the wall and his eyes closed, tapping the beat he’s humming on the tub. Kate’s lying beside him on the linoleum. She’s passed out beside the toilet bowl, an arm wrapped around its base, her cheek pressed to the floor as the guy strokes her pale face absentmindedly. Her jeans are unbuttoned. The guy opens his eyes. “Do you know her?” he asks.
I shut the door and walk quickly down the hallway with Rana trailing behind me. I look in every room in the house, but Elgin
is gone. Outside the kids are still lying in the grass. One of Elgin’s friends pushes up the driveway on his skateboard. “Do you know where Elgin is?” I ask as he flips his board and goes back down the driveway. “Left,” he says, gliding past me with a smile.
“Where’d he go?” I say. Rana grabs my hand and squeezes it.
“Didn’t say?” He circles me on the board. “I’ve got weed. Wanna go somewhere?”
Before I can say anything, Rana’s pushing me across the lawn, telling the skater to get a life. There’s a bad feeling everywhere, around the house, in the sky, climbing the walls of my stomach. The skater follows us on his board to the end of the road until Rana starts screaming bloody murder.
RANA IS STILL HOLDING my hand in the elevator on our way to her condo. She tells me she’s too stoned and asks me if I will stay with her awhile. My heart is in my throat, but I say sure, why not. The weed was laced, she tells me, with something bad — crack, arsenic, Drano, rat poison. Before she opens the front door, she clutches my hoodie and tells me if I wake up her mother she’ll kill me. I say sure, no problemo, I’ll be a mute.
We take off our shoes in the hallway and slipper-foot over the condo’s thick carpets into the dark living room with its view of the city stretching out on the other side of the inlet. “I’d rather be somewhere else,” I say, pressing myself right up against the floor-to-ceiling windows, the way I always do when I visit Rana.
“Thanks, asshole,” she says, rubbing my greasy nose marks off the glass with her shirt sleeve.
“You know what I mean,” I say. “Do you have any food?”
We lie on the carpet because her mother’s furniture is uncomfortable — all carved wood and expensive upholstery — and eat honeyed pastries, licking our fingers. Rana takes me out on the patio and we throw all of her carved pumpkins over the side of the building. We lean over the railing, laughing as they bust apart in the parking lot, fifteen floors below. “Imagine that was my head,” Rana says. The cold night air creeps under my nightgown, making it billow around me, but we stay out there jumping up and down until we can’t feel our fingers. Back inside we make up dance routines in front of the windows that look out at other darkened apartments. It’s like everyone in the city is sleeping except for kids. It would be easier to synchronize our routines with music, but Rana always likes it this way, quiet so she can concentrate. She thrusts her hips from side to side and glides her hands over her body, over her breasts and her stomach and the insides of her thighs. My phone blinks on the couch and when I check it, it’s a text from Elgin to meet him at Ambleside Beach. I tell Rana I have to go, but she barely looks at me. Her hands are in the air, and to her feet, and in the air again, and I leave her to dance alone.
WEST VANCOUVER IS DEAD at night. Even on Halloween the streets are empty, the windows of multi-million-dollar homes lit up with blue television glow. I zip up my hoodie and cross the train tracks, making my way down to the beach. Waves hit the shore hard and ahead of me Stanley Park looms, a darker shadow in the night, while the Lions Gate Bridge looks almost cheerful with its twinkling arcs of light. I walk down to the far end of the beach before finding Elgin sitting with his back up against a log. Instead of staring out at the ocean, he’s looking at the bridge and smoking. I plop down beside him in the cold, damp sand and Elgin leans over, kissing me lightly on the lips. “I didn’t want to be at that party anymore,” he says.
“Me neither.” I lean back on the log, looking up at the clear October sky. The waves roll in a few inches from our sneakers.
“It’s not just a suspension,” Elgin says, after awhile. “They want to put me in the work experience program.”
“What’s that?” I say, pulling my knees up to my chest for warmth.
“It’s like decelerated learning,” Elgin says, picking up a rock and hucking it at the ocean.
“Why do you need that?”
“Paul thinks I’m a moron,” Elgin says, throwing another rock, harder this time.
“They won’t keep you there.” I stretch my arm around him and pull him toward me. He’s cold, like he’s been sitting here for hours. “They’ll see right away you don’t belong.”
“No way in hell I’m going to that program. Not even for a day,” he says, frowning at me then looking away down the beach. “My mom wants to send me to my dad’s. That’s what I was going to tell you.” My heart stops quietly like a fist hitting a feather pillow. “I don’t even know the asshole,” Elgin says, butting his cigarette out in the sand, where a small collection is accumulating. When he turns back to me his eyes are wet. “He lives in Cranbrook.”
“You’re going to go to school there?” I push Elgin’s butts further into the sand, burying them.
“I guess.” He rubs his eyes hard with the back of his hand.
“Why?” The question catches and I clear my throat. “Because of us or because you got suspended?”
“It’s a lot of things,” Elgin says, standing up. “I think I’m going to take off for a while.” He steps to the edge of the ocean, jumping back before a wave swamps his sneakers. “I wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to think I was dead or something.” He sits back down beside me and I try to catch each tear with the back of my hand before they get anywhere near my cheeks. “I’m fucked,” he says. “I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m fucked. No matter what I do.”
“Did you tell Kate?” I’m not sure why I ask the question, but for some reason I feel like she deserves to know as much as I do.
“She’ll find out soon enough. Maybe you should tell her,” he says, kissing me once more. Then he’s up, hopping on the spot, and in a bogus cheerful voice he says, “You’ll be happier when I’m gone.” He jogs up the beach and when he turns back he has this look on his face — this shiny, phony hopefulness that makes me feel sick to my stomach. “You look happier already,” he shouts, rubbing his hand under his nose. He’s close enough to see I’m crying. “Look at you.” He stands there for a second, the smile gone, his hands back in his pockets, and I know I’ll probably never see him again. I watch him disappear into the darkness and then I turn to watch the waves roll onto the shore.
I CROSS THE TRAIN TRACKS and walk up 15th Street toward Marine Drive. A grease trap behind one of the restaurants is broken and a large, rank puddle has pooled in the middle of the parking lot. The smell is nauseating, like bile spilling into the air around me. I try not to breathe, walking a little faster, but I stop when I catch a glimpse of something moving. Next to a silver car a black dog bows, lapping at the reeking pool. The smell gets in my nose and I gag involuntarily. The dog looks up and freezes. I can see the white breath around his wet muzzle, and his dark eyes follow me as I back away slowly, breathing into my hands. When I’m nearly out of sight around the corner, the dog goes back to licking.
Down the street, the neon-lit steeple of the West Vancouver United Church glows and a message on the board in front says GOD INSPIRES YOU. I walk up the steps to see if the door is open and I’m surprised to find it is. As I walk down the middle aisle, I keep thinking I hear an organ — not really music, but one long note — and whenever I shake my head the sound disappears and fills with a silence so deep it’s noisy. I walk around the large room, touching things. Nothing is old or creaky or white like I imagined. The floors are green carpet and the pews are caramel-coloured. The bibles look pretty new and I finger their crisp pages. There are no confession booths like I thought there would be. It’s nothing like Kate’s winter church, not even close. I hear a noise behind a curtain at the back of the room and walk quickly out the door. Out front I sit on the stairs and scroll through my cellphone. There’s sand in my shoes from the beach and I tilt my feet, letting it collect near my heels. The screen glows softly in my hand and I wait only a moment before dialing.
PAUL’S CAR HUMS UP the winding roads of the West Vancouver hills, past homes hidden behind tall hedges and big iron gates, past the last few
kids in costumes who should be too old for trick-or-treating. “It’s a strange night,” he says, driving by a zombie and a pink-wigged superhero. I rest my cheek against the warm leather seat and turn on the radio. I ask Paul if it’s okay and he smiles at me. When I got into the car he asked me if I wanted him to take me home, but I told him I wasn’t ready to go to my house yet. I made up some bullshit excuse about my parents fighting and my sister having a crazy boyfriend who made me afraid to sleep at night, and by the look on Paul’s face I knew I’d gone too far, but I’m tired enough I don’t care.
“Can I ask you something?” Paul says, looking over at me. He drums his thumbs on the steering wheel. “Why did you call me?” He barely holds back a grin when he asks, like someone who is expecting a compliment.
“I don’t know,” I say. “You’re the first person I thought of.”
We pull into a short, circular driveway and Paul stops the car right in front of the door. The house is modest for West Vancouver, a rancher with big windows. Inside everything looks freshly varnished and I have the urge to go skating around in my socks, but I keep my shoes on and walk around the living room while Paul hangs his coat and moves around the house turning on lights. “Your place is nice,” I say, smelling a vase of flowers and rubbing the petals between my fingers to check if they’re real.
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