by William Bell
also by
WILLIAM BELL
Crabbe
Absolutely Invincible
Five Days of the Ghost
Forbidden City
No Signature
Speak to the Earth
Zack
picture books
The Golden Disk
River, My Friend
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Three
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Author’s note
Acknowledgments
Copyright
In memoriam
IRENE and DING
part ONE
chapter
It was Ms. Clare who first noticed something was wrong with me. Three times a week she would come into our grade four class and teach us French. She was a short, blonde, overly energetic woman who reminded me of an elf.
After the first day or so, I tuned her out completely. It wasn’t anything political; I didn’t hate French culture or cooking or the tattered posters of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower that Ms. Clare had tacked onto the bulletin board beside the display of “Fish of the Great Lakes.” It was the repetition and the monotonous chanting. Bonjour. Comment vous appellez-vous? Je m’appelle Garnet, and so on. And on and on.
Ms. Clare, in her chirpy new-teacher voice, would lead the recitations, occasionally throwing out a question in French that left us blank-faced and confused, and I would look out the window or draw pictures in my notebook or rest my cheek on my palm and doze. If she spoke to me, I’d ignore her.
One day late in September, Mom and Dad got a letter from the school. Dad tore it open at the kitchen table.
“It says Garnet is hard of hearing,” he read. “Or in their words, ‘Auditorily differently enabled.’ They want to move him to the front of the room and bring in a consultant to test his hearing.”
My mother took a sip of her wine. “What’s wrong with those people, anyway? Garnet, have you been giving your teacher a hard time?”
I gave her what I hoped was a charming grin and cupped one ear with my hand. “Pardon?” I said.
2
In grade five there was Mr. Whitney, a thin middle-aged man with a face like a horse, who always smelled of cigarettes and cheap aftershave. He would have been happier in the army. He liked to have us line up for this and line up for that, to hand in our notebooks in alphabetical order while he stood at the front of the room tapping a meter stick against the side of his shoe.
In his class, I developed a wander. Right in the middle of a reading session or a science lesson I’d slide out of my chair — a crime equal to murder in Whitney’s class — and stand looking out the window or slouch over to the bookshelf where he kept stacks of out-of-date geographic magazines. Whitney would turn pink with rage and order me, “Sit down in your seat and stay there.” I always obeyed the first part, but sooner or later I’d be on the move again.
The second letter home of my school career was opened by my mother. She and Dad and I were out on the back porch enjoying a mid-October sunny afternoon.
“It says here that Garnet has ADD,” Mom said, squinting at the page in the bright sunlight.
“Which is?” Dad asked, not looking up from the newspaper.
“Which is Attention Deficit Disorder.”
“Ah. Which means?”
“Which means, you ignoramus, that he —” here Mom read from the letter, “‘can’t concentrate or stay on task.’”
“Is this the same boy who can sit in the boat for hours fishing, and not say a word?” Dad asked. “The guy who can while away half a Saturday morning drawing?”
“He’s disruptive, according to Mr. Whitney. And disobedient.”
Dad cast a critical glance at me. “Well?”
I had been polishing my pocket watch, a present from my parents a couple of years before.
“Disruptive, definitely not. Disobedient, maybe,” I said. “What am I supposed to do when he gives us stupid orders?”
“Don’t use that word. It’s disrespectful.”
“Oh, heavens,” I said, rolling my eyes dramatically. “A third D.”
“And don’t be a smart-aleck,” Mom put in, not too seriously. “You know what your father means. Mr. Whitney may not be your favorite person —”
“You can say that again.”
“— but you have to show respect.”
About a week later I was hauled up in front of the principal, who held in his hand a wrinkled piece of paper.
“I take it you drew this,” he began.
“Um, possibly.”
“It might have been smarter not to sign it,” he said sarcastically.
“Does this mean a letter home?”
This one was opened by Dad, and this time we were in the family room. Dad had built a fire, collected the mail and newspaper from the front door, and collapsed onto the sofa, prepared to read for a while. Mom was working on an article for a magazine, tapping away at the computer by the window. Dad read the letter, glanced at the piece of paper that came with it, got up and handed it to Mom.
She started to giggle.
“Now, Annie, how can we discipline this boy if you’re not going to be serious?”
The caricature, which I had drawn hastily while Whitney had his back to us writing “Rules for the Field Trip” on the board, showed him sitting on the toilet, boxer shorts around his ankles and a strained look on his face. The caption said, “Maybe you should try working it out with a pencil.” It was pretty juvenile, I had to admit.
The cartoon earned me another label: non-compliant.
3
Strangely enough, I graduated, with a diploma signed by the area superintendent and a fairly negative attitude toward my school experience. It hadn’t been all bad, but I had never been able, for some reason, to work up the kind of enthusiasm or “school spirit” that a lot of other kids did.
I got one more label before I left Hillcrest Public School.
“It says here he’s gifted,” Mom read from what I hoped was the final letter home.
Dad yawned. “Really?”
“Yes. They tested him.”
“Gifted, eh?”
“Yup.”
“Gee, it only took them eight years to find out.”
4
High school, which I had naively expected to be exciting, turned out to be anything but. After a terrified year as a niner, which I seemed to spend trying not to get lost in the convoluted halls at Orillia District Collegiate, and keeping out of the way of older students who treated me with contempt, I sailed across an endless sea of homework questions, tests, projects, and unfocused resentment. I earned a nickname, Lex, in grade ten by asking Ronny Stratton to hand me the lexicon during an English vocabulary exercise.
“What does that mean?” Ronny asked with some irritation.<
br />
“Look it up in the lexicon,” I said. It had been a joke but Ronny took it as a put-down.
“Oh, yeah. We Earthlings use a dictionary but Garnet uses a lexicon.”
But the nickname didn’t last. You have to be a member of a clique for a nickname to hold. Soon I was Garnet again.
For some reason I had a kind of photographic memory, and I liked to know the origin of words — a strange affliction that I kept to myself. The “gift” my elementary school identified was really a curse. I had learned a long time ago that, if you’re really talented at something, most of the teachers seem to want to find a way of showing you you’re not as good as you think you are. Not all of them, but most. Mom had told me that was because the teachers felt threatened. The kids would sneer at my high marks, saying I was just sucking up to the teachers.
I could have put up with all that, I guess, if there had been anything going on at school that made it worthwhile, but there wasn’t. I stopped being a problem student by grade eleven. From then on, I kept my head down and drifted through the days marking time, waiting to leave.
chapter
The high point in my love life occurred when I was in grade one, about five seconds before Evvie McFadden fell into the Christmas tree.
Evvie had a wild swirl of red hair, a button nose sprinkled with freckles and a dimple in the plump flesh above each knee, and I had a crush on her the size of an apartment building. Mrs. Bowles had insisted we all dress up for the Christmas party, so I had on a white shirt and tie, my good pants and real leather shoes with real leather soles. Evvie, in a green dress that beautifully set off her fiery hair, was the prettiest girl in the class.
I watched, my heart aching, as she helped herself to a double-wide piece of chocolate frosted cake and moved near the Christmas tree, where she joined a covey of giggling, whispering girls. Desperate that she notice me for once, I walked over to her, held my breath and, unable to think of anything to say, kicked her in the left shin. The hard edge of my real leather sole went thunk as it struck the delicate white skin of her leg.
Evvie’s face turned scarlet as her paper plate dropped to the floor and she threw back her head, bawling with gale force, gripping her raised shin with both hands as she hopped in a circle on one foot. The moment I heard that enraged bellow, I fell out of love with her. How could such an ear-splitting howl come from my beautiful, refined Evvie? How could that awkward, thumping, twirling, red-faced creature be thought graceful? The last trace of romance left me when Evvie, still hopping, landed with full force on her own immodestly large piece of cake, slid and collapsed spread-eagle on the Scotch pine, the two of them crashing to the floor in a confusion of glass balls, candy canes, Santa Clauses, angels and tinsel.
After that, my love life went pretty much downhill.
2
It wasn’t that I didn’t like girls or couldn’t get along with them — Rosie Tulipano was one of my best friends until she moved away. It was just that I could never figure out what they wanted. I dated once in a while, but nothing long-lasting came of it. I envied guys who smirked casually in the presence of adoring females, confident in their attractiveness, who moved with easy grace and cracked jokes at will.
There was that one time when I was in grade ten, when I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Candy Rowe accepted me as her boyfriend. I couldn’t understand why she picked me, but I wasn’t going to ask any questions. Candy — yeah, that was her name — was curvy and always smelled of make-up and mints. She spoke with breathy exaggeration, flipping her long hair for emphasis.
She hung on me like ivy on brick, insisting that we meet in the hall between classes, where we’d lean on each other, holding hands, nuzzling and kissing, until the bell went — or until a teacher came along and lectured us on “appropriate behaviour.” It was after almost a week of this bliss that Candy dumped me. She had been using me to make her former boyfriend jealous. He was one of those jocks whose neck was wider than his head, and student council vice-president. When he came back to her she tossed me into the trash like an empty shampoo bottle.
Talk about a confidence destroyer. I guess my clouded mood was obvious even to my parents.
“What’s the matter, dear? You look kind of blue,” my mother said.
“Oh, nothing.”
“He probably got dumped,” Dad quipped.
“As a matter of fact, I did!”
“Gareth, sometimes you can be so insensitive,” Mom said.
Dad’s face fell. He held his hands out, palms up. “Sorry, Garnet. I was only kidding. I didn’t — Um, maybe I’ll just go see what’s on TV tonight,” he said lamely, leaving the room.
Mom shot him a disapproving look as he passed. I stirred my tea some more.
“So, what happened?” Mom asked gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I did get dumped. Again.”
“I see.”
“I just wish that I was attractive,” I said, “like some of the other guys.”
Mom took a sip of her tea. She seemed to be thinking something over. Then she said, “You don’t know, do you? You really don’t.”
“Know what?”
“You are attractive. No, no, don’t give me that look,” she said quickly. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘This is the part where Mom comes along and boosts my flattened ego by telling me I look like a movie star.’ But it’s the truth. You’re not a movie star, but you’re a good-looking young man. You’re tall, you have a nice face, and you have a cute butt.”
“Mom! For —”
“Okay, okay. Sorry. It’s the truth, though,” she added. The corners of her mouth rose in a devilish smile.
“You’re prejudiced. You’re my mom — you have to say that. If you’re right, I wouldn’t be such a loser with girls.”
“You want the truth, Garnet? There’s more to it than looks. You are attractive, and you’re a nice person, but you’re kind of shy. You hold back. And girls, well, most of them, the ones your age, are drawn to boys who are, or seem, confident and self-assured. Girls mistake that quality for inner strength. Confidence and strength are sexy.”
The conversation was a little embarrassing, but I thought over what she had said for a few minutes. It seemed to fit. Most girls at school went after the jocks, the jokers, the rebels — the ones who seemed to know what they were doing. I had never thought about how I must appear to other people, never looked at myself from someone else’s point of view. Who was this guy, Garnet Havelock, and what was he like? I wasn’t too happy about the answers that came to mind.
Although I had been a problem student for my first three years, I wasn’t a rebel, a guy who got busted for smoking up in the washroom, for fighting or stealing someone’s wallet from the locker room. I wasn’t an athlete, that was for sure. And, although school was pretty much a joke to me, I wasn’t a joker. Why would anyone be attracted to me? I was like a shadow.
“I guess I’m kind of a nice guy, but a goof, like Dad,” I said, meaning nothing negative.
“Don’t kid yourself, Garnet. Your dad is one sexy man.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, your Dad. Haven’t you noticed the way women — well, stupid question, of course you haven’t. But women find your father very attractive, for all kinds of reasons, believe me. And you have a lot of his qualities.”
I laughed. “Including a cute butt?”
“Now you’re getting it. Listen, Garnet. Try not to be discouraged. Don’t chase after empty-headed females who get all twittery when a football player walks by. You’ll do okay. Just try to be patient.”
3
After Candy, I guess I became cynical, in spite of Mom’s attempt to buck me up. I didn’t trust girls, or my own feelings for that matter. And the more I thought about it, the less I believed in love. At least, that was what I told myself. The relationships on TV and in the movies always seemed brief and intense and entirely physical, a kind of mutual exploitation. The people “loved” each other — for a
while, anyway — but they didn’t seem to like each other. Their idea of commitment was “as long as it works for me.” And at school it was “as long as you make me look good.”
The whole thing was too confusing.
So I wasn’t exactly thrilled when Mr. Paulsen, our English teacher, announced the weekly Great Debate topic. Resolved: that love at first sight is a hoax.
“What does hoax mean?” someone shouted.
Paulsen was a nice guy but not too good at controlling a class.
“Ask Garnet,” someone else said, getting a laugh.
“A con, a scam, a deception,” I said.
Ordinarily I didn’t care what the resolution of the debate was. I barely paid attention during those times, preferring to doodle in my notebook or draw furniture designs or read a novel. But this time I was to be one of the speakers. It was my turn. And I needed the marks.
“Garnet, you and Randy are pro,” Paulsen shouted over the noise.
Well, it could have been worse. I had to prove that love at first sight was phoney. I could have ended up con, trying to argue that love at first sight was real, and I was probably the last person in the universe to believe that.
4
Love at first sight — what a crock. The whole notion had probably been dreamed up by some tenth-rate dramatist back in the old days, some loser with a quill pen who needed to move the story along quickly and was too lazy or unimaginative to develop a believable love affair between his characters. So he wrote a scene where the man and woman catch sight of each other across a busy street or a crowded drawing room and BANG, they’re in love. Sure.
There were all kinds of things wrong with the scenario. First, how could you love someone you didn’t know? You’d be completely ignorant of their personality. Maybe you just fell head over heels for a total bore, a real snooze-monger whose idea of excitement was reading the fine print on an insurance policy. Or maybe you were dazzled by a serial killer — how would you have known? — with the smell of his latest kill in his nostrils and blood on his hands. Or you were all hot to give your heart to this stranger but nobody told you she liked the same gender you did.
