Until I Find You
Page 16
"Sweet Jesus, it's a boy!" one of the big girls said.
"I'll say it is, and he's caught his miserable thing in his zipper," the other replied.
"When do they start playing with their things?" the first girl asked. "Stop screaming!" she said sharply to Jack. "You haven't cut it off, have you?"
"Let me do that," the second girl said, kneeling beside Jack. "I have a little brother--I know how to handle this."
"You have to handle it?" the first girl asked. She knelt beside Jack, too.
"Let me see it--get your hands off the thing!" the girl with the little brother told Jack.
"It hurts!" Jack cried.
"You've just pinched some skin--it's not even bleeding." The girl was at least seventeen or eighteen--maybe nineteen.
"When does it get big?" the first girl asked.
"It doesn't feel like getting big when it's stuck in a zipper, Meredith."
"It gets big when it feels like it?" Meredith asked.
The grade-thirteen girl held Jack's penis in her hand; with the thumb and index finger of her other hand, she gently tugged at his zipper.
"Ow!"
"Well, what do you want me to do?" the girl who'd come to his assistance asked. "Wait for you to grow up?"
"You've got lady-killer eyelashes," Meredith told Jack. "When you're old enough, you're going to get your penis stuck in all kinds of places."
"Ow!"
"Now it's bleeding," the second girl said. Jack was unstuck, but she went on holding his penis in her hand.
"What are you doing, Amanda?" Meredith asked.
"Just watch," Amanda said. She didn't mean for Jack to watch. Without looking, he could feel his penis getting big--or at least a little bigger.
"What's your name?" Meredith asked him.
"Jack."
"Feeling better, eh, Jack?" Amanda asked.
"Sweet Jesus, look at that thing!" Meredith said.
"That's nothing," Amanda said. "You can get bigger than that, can't you, Jack?" He was as big as he'd ever been before. He was afraid that if he got any bigger, he would burst.
"It's beginning to hurt again," he said.
"That's a different kind of pain, Jack." Amanda gave him a friendly squeeze before she let him go.
"Better not catch that whopper in your zipper, Jack," Meredith warned him. She stood up and ruffled his hair.
"Maybe you'll dream about us, Jack," Amanda said.
The cut on Jack's penis healed in a couple of days, but those dreams didn't go away.
Miss Sinclair, Jack's kindergarten teacher, echoed Alice's conviction that Jack would be safe with the girls. This illusion was further advanced by the participation of the grade-six girls in the kindergartners' nap time. Emma Oastler was a volunteer, along with two other grade-six girls--Emma's good friends Charlotte Barford and Wendy Holton. They were Miss Sinclair's nap-time helpers. These older girls were supposed to assist five-year-olds in falling asleep; that they kept the kindergartners awake was closer to the truth.
Miss Sinclair was distinguished in Jack's memory for her habit of condemning him to nap with three grade-six girls. What he remembered best about Miss Sinclair was her absence.
The naps began with what Emma Oastler called "a sleepy-time story." Emma was always the storyteller, an early indication of her future calling. While Wendy and Charlotte circulated among the children, making sure that their rubber mats were comfortably rolled out, their blankets snugly wrapped around them, and their shoes off, Emma began her story in the semidark room.
"You've had a bad day, and you're very tired," Emma's stories always began. For stories intended to induce sleep, they had the opposite effect--the kindergartners were too terrified to nap. In an oft-repeated classic among Emma Oastler's nap-time tales, Miss Sinclair lost the entire kindergarten class in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. In reality, Jack's first school trip to the Royal Ontario Museum was led by his grade-three teacher, Miss Caroline Wurtz.
Miss Wurtz was the teacher Jack would remember most fondly, and not only for her fragile beauty; she was an important mentor for him in his early mastery of stage presence, another area in which she excelled. Miss Wurtz was a maven in the dramatic arts; in the innumerable school plays in which Jack performed at St. Hilda's, she was usually his director. However, her talents as a classroom teacher were lacking in comparison to her theatrical gifts; control of the grade-three class eluded her. Offstage, out of the fixed glare of the footlights--either in her undisciplined classroom or in the marginally more lawless outside world--Miss Caroline Wurtz was an easily confused creature, bereft of confidence and without an iota of managerial skill.
On school trips, Miss Wurtz could have been a star in one of Emma Oastler's sleepy-time stories--she was that inept. When she lost control of herself in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, most of the grade-three kids were already suffering from total recall of Emma's classic horror tale. (That they were then eight-year-olds, not five-year-olds, hardly mattered; the real-life circumstances were frighteningly familiar to the former kindergartners who'd first heard of the bat cave from Emma's fiction.)
When the announcement on the museum loudspeaker informed them that some of the mammal displays were experiencing a temporary loss of electrical power, the children knew this was only the first chapter. "Don't panic," the voice on the loudspeaker said, while Miss Wurtz dissolved into sobs. "The power will be restored in no time." The ultraviolet lights in the bat habitat were still on; in fact, they were the only lights that were on, which was exactly the case in Emma's story.
In Emma's version, inexplicably, the defenseless children had no recourse but to crawl into the bat cave and sleep with the bats. Emma advised them to be aware of a crucial difference between the alleged "sucking habits" of the vampire bat and those of the giant fruit bat. The kids had to keep their eyes tightly closed at all times, or the ultraviolet light would somehow blind them; and while they slept, or only pretended to sleep, the children were told to pay close attention to the exact location of the hot, moist breath they would certainly feel before long.
If they felt the breath against their throats, that indicated the vampire; the kids were instructed to swat the bat away and protect their throats with both hands. (In Emma's own words: "Just go nuts.") If, however, the aforementioned hot, moist breath was detected in the area of their navels--well, that was the area of interest of the despicable giant fruit bat. It would heat the children's stomachs with its breath before licking the salt out of their belly buttons with its raspy tongue; while this sensation might be unpleasant, the children's injuries would be slight. In the case of a fruit bat, the kids were to lie still. In the first place, the giant fruit bat was too big to swat away--and, according to Emma, fruit bats only became truly dangerous when they were startled.
"But what would a startled fruit bat do?" Jack remembered Jimmy Bacon asking.
"Better not tell him, Emma," Charlotte Barford said.
The conclusion to Emma's tale of the kindergartners' abandonment in the bat habitat was nerve-wracking. When you consider that most of the children were too frightened to fall asleep, they surely knew that Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were breathing on them--not the bats. Nevertheless, the kids responded as instructed. The kindergartners having their navels breathed on kept still. In the many retellings of the tale, Jack learned to distinguish the not-so-subtle differences between Charlotte's and Wendy's and Emma's tongues. Their tongues were not raspy; indeed, discounting future nightmares, the children's injuries were slight. And they responded with appropriate zeal to the neck-breathing tactics of the vampire bat--in short, the kids went nuts, covering their throats and screaming while they swatted away.
"Time to wake up, Jack," Emma (or Charlotte or Wendy) always said. But he never went to sleep.
Charlotte Barford was a big girl, a grade-six virtual woman in the mold of Emma Oastler. Wendy Holton, on the other hand, was a feral-looking waif. If you ove
rlooked the evidence of puberty-related troubles in the dark circles under Wendy's eyes--and her swollen, bitten lips--she could have passed for nine. Her smaller size and childlike physique didn't diminish Wendy's navel-licking capacity; her fruit-bat imitation was more aggressive than Emma's, more invasive than Charlotte's. (In keeping with her melon-size knees, Charlotte Barford's tongue was too broad and thick to fit in Jack's navel--even the tip.)
Did Miss Sinclair ever return to her kindergarten class and find the children refreshed from their naps? Did she mistake how alert they looked for their being well rested? The kids were relieved, of course, and no doubt looked it; that they'd survived another of Emma Oastler's sleepy-time tales, both the not-falling-asleep part and the always creative manner in which they were woken up, gave them thankful expressions.
Another classic among Emma's nap-time stories, and a close rival to her tale of the kindergartners' abandonment in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, was her saga of the squeezed child. It was a tale with three different endings, but it began, as Emma's stories always did: "You've had a bad day, and you're very tired."
Jack napped between Gordon and Caroline French, brother-and-sister twins who had to be separated because they despised each other. Another set of twins in Miss Sinclair's kindergarten class, Heather and Patsy Booth, were identical girls who couldn't bear to be separated. When one of them was sick, the other one stayed home to grieve--or perhaps to wait her turn to be sick as well. When the Booth twins napped, they overlapped their rubber mats and wrapped themselves in the same blanket--possibly to simulate their former occupancy of the same uterus.
Both sets of twins became agitated, but in different ways, during the telling of the squeezed-child tale. The identical Booth girls sucked their shared blanket; they emitted a wet humming sound, which in turn upset Jimmy Bacon, who commenced to moan. The agitation of Gordon and Caroline French, the boy-girl twins on either side of Jack, was more physical in nature and came in unexpected bursts of frenzied, seemingly pointless activity. Under their separate blankets, the French twins thumped their heels on their rubber mats, their stiff legs drumming out of sync; as startling as this was, it was more disturbing when they stopped. The French twins stopped kicking so abruptly, it was as if they'd died of a shared disease--in spite of their enforced separation from each other.
The three possible conclusions to Emma Oastler's squeezed-child story had the kindergartners enthralled. "For three of you," Emma always said, "your bad day just got worse." Sudden heel-thumping from the French twins, which was quickly followed by their as-sudden deaths; identical blanket-sucking sounds intermingled with humming from the Booth twins; dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon. "One of you is spending the night with your divorced dad," Emma went on. "He has just passed out from too much sex." (Jack hated this part.)
Maureen Yap, a nervous girl whose father was Chinese, once interrupted Emma by asking: "What is too much sex?"
"Nothing you'll ever have," Emma answered dismissively.
Another time, when Jack asked Emma the same question, Emma said: "You'll know soon enough, Jack."
Jack shuddered under his blanket. He was relying on his flawed understanding of his mom's conversation in Amsterdam with Saskia and Els. If you looked sexy, Els had said, men thought you could give them good advice. Sex, therefore, was related to advice-giving; like advice, Jack guessed, sex could be good or bad. If the divorced dad in Emma Oastler's story had passed out from too much sex, Jack suspected this was the worst kind.
"Your dad has had bad girlfriends before," Emma continued, "but this one is just a kid. A skinny, tough kid," Emma added. "She's as tough as a stick, her fists are as hard as stones, and she hates you. You get in her way. She could have even more sex with your dad if you weren't around. After your dad passes out, she grinds her fists against your temples--you think she's going to crush your head!"
The French twins were flutter-kicking, as if on cue; more blanket-sucking, humming, and moaning. "Meanwhile," Emma always said, "one of you has a single mother who's passed out, too." (Jack really hated this part.)
"Too much sex again!" Maureen Yap usually cried.
"Bad sex?" Jack sometimes asked.
"A bad boyfriend," Emma informed the kindergartners. "One of the biggest bad boyfriends in the world. When your mother passes out, he comes and lies on top of you--he covers your face with his bare stomach."
"How do you breathe?" Grant Porter, a moron, always asked.
"That's the problem," Emma usually answered. "Maybe you can't." Unprecedented, out-of-sync heel-drumming from the French twins; soggy-blanket noises from the Booth twins; moans, approximating suffocation, from Jimmy Bacon.
"But what about your mother who has a girlfriend?" Emma asked. (Jack hated this part most of all.) "She has bigger breasts than all your mothers. She has harder breasts than all your dads' youngest girlfriends. She has bionic breasts," Emma said. "Like they have bones inside them--they're that big and hard." The very idea of breasts with bones inside them would, years later, still wake Jack Burns from a sound sleep--not that any of the kindergartners slept a wink during the squeezed-child saga. "Which of these poor kids are you?" Emma asked every time.
"I don't wanna be anybody!" Maureen Yap predictably cried.
"I especially don't want to be trying to breathe with the bad boyfriend's big belly on my face," Grant Porter usually made a point of saying.
"Not the breasts with bones!" James Turner, another moron, always yelled.
Sometimes Jack mustered the courage to say: "I think I like the tough, skinny girlfriend's fists of stone the least." But Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford had already made their selections. With his eyes tightly closed, Jack could nonetheless sense them moving into their chosen positions.
The divorced dad's skinny, tough girlfriend with the fists of stone--well, that was Wendy Holton. She squeezed your temples between her knees. Her knees were as small and hard as baseballs. She could give Jack a headache in less than a minute--and the view up her skirt, when he dared to look, was disappointingly dark and unclear.
The unthinkable mother's girlfriend with the bionic breasts, the breasts with bones inside them--that was Charlotte Barford with her melon-size knees. No breasts ever felt like knees--not before there were implants, anyway. As for the view up Charlotte's skirt, Jack never looked; the imagined consequences of her catching him looking were too intense.
And the mom's bad boyfriend, the one who spread his bare belly on your face and made you fight for your last breath--that was Emma Oastler, of course. Jack first located her belly button with his nose; he found a little room to breathe there. Once, when he explored her navel with his tongue, Emma said: "Boy, do you ever not know what you're doing."
It was only slightly less scary at the actual bat-cave exhibit. While Miss Caroline Wurtz was losing her mind, the grade-three children could at least rest assured that only vampire bats and giant fruit bats might approach them. No divorced dads' bad girlfriends--no single moms' bad boyfriends or girlfriends--were hanging out in the bat habitat! Compared to these sexual predators of the recently divorced, what did the kids have to fear from mere bats?
As for those grade-three children who'd not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda's, they were initially unfrightened by the power failure in some of the mammal displays at the Royal Ontario Museum; they'd had no previous experience in the bat-cave exhibit to be frightened of. But the former kindergartners among them were frightened enough that their terror was infectious.
That Miss Wurtz was also afraid was at first unsurprising--she had a history of coming unglued in the grade-three classroom. However, in the bat-cave exhibit, Miss Wurtz could not call upon The Gray Ghost for help. In the environs of the junior school, Miss Wurtz was routinely rescued by the supernaturally sudden appearances of Mrs. McQuat. Not in the Royal Ontario Museum with Jack and his fellow third graders wailing around her; that they'd instantly closed their eyes further disconcerted Miss Wurtz.
Caroline French, with her eyes firmly closed, offered the hysterical teacher some excellent advice: "Don't startle the fruit bats, Miss Wurtz--they're only dangerous if they're startled."
"Open your eyes, Caroline!" Miss Wurtz shrieked.
"If the hot, moist breath is at your throat, that's another matter," Caroline French went on.
"The what at my throat?" Miss Wurtz asked, her hands on her neck.
Jack's feelings for Miss Wurtz were deeply conflicted. He was embarrassed for her that she had no mastery of stage presence in a real-life crisis, but he believed she was beautiful. He secretly loved her. "She means a vampire bat," Jack tried to explain to Miss Wurtz, although Caroline French detested being interrupted. (Her brother interrupted her frequently.)
"You'll just frighten Miss Wurtz, Jack," Caroline said crossly. "Miss Wurtz--if the hot, moist breathing is at your throat, go nuts. Just swat it away."
"Swat what away?" Miss Wurtz wailed.
"But if you feel the breaths on your belly button, remain calm," Gordon French said, in seeming contradiction of his hostile twin sister.
"Just don't move," Jack added.
"Nothing's breathing on my belly button!" Miss Wurtz screamed.
"You see, Jack?" Caroline French said. "You've made it worse, haven't you?"
"Don't panic," the voice on the loudspeaker repeated. "The power will be restored in no time."
"I forget why we have to crawl inside the bat cave," Jimmy Bacon said. (None of them could remember that part of Emma Oastler's story.)
"Nobody's crawling inside the bat cave!" Miss Wurtz raved. "All of you open your eyes!" Jack thought of telling her that the ultraviolet lights would blind them somehow, but she seemed too upset for more bad news.
"I feel a fruit bat," Jack whispered, without moving, but it was Maureen Yap; she had dropped to her knees and was hyperventilating in close proximity to his navel.
"Stop that!" Miss Wurtz shouted. Jimmy Bacon was moaning while he rubbed his head against her hip. Miss Wurtz may not have meant to grab Jimmy by the throat, but Jimmy reacted in the vampire-bat fashion; he went nuts, screaming and swatting away. Miss Caroline Wurtz screamed, too. (And to think she believed so adamantly in "measured restraint" onstage!)