The Home for Wayward Parrots

by Wehm, Darusha;

  It was strange to watch them change, from a distance but also up close. We never had a big falling out. We all still saw each other on the bus in and out every day. The conversations diminished and after a while were more often than not just brief nods before disappearing into books or Walkmans.

  Johnny had finally filled out his big body with a personality to match. Sometime in the tenth grade he picked up a scary sense of humour and a voice that could have easily come from one of Blair’s cousins. In the eleventh grade he was getting all the character parts in the drama productions and had even taken up singing. I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty sure he was the first of us to lose his virginity, too. Girls love those drama guys, I guess.

  Angela was still wild, but not in the way high school girls usually run amok. She wasn’t dating university boys like Blair’s sister did, or even ripping off designer jeans from the Bay. Angela, true to form, had her own style of craziness.

  Blair watched Angela. He ran track, played lacrosse and in a weird turn of events had a shockingly great year as captain of the debate team, but what I noticed the most was him pining for Angela from a distance. Some things never change.

  As for me? I discovered the internet.

  WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, if people had told me that before I was thirty years old I would carry a device in my pocket that would let me talk to anyone on the planet, read the newspaper, do a crossword and take photos, all while being the greatest mix tape the world has ever seen, I would never have believed them. Who would have? We were only just getting email and the internet back then; you needed a landline phone connected to a home PC, and even that was like magic.

  But fast-forward only a decade and a half, and you’ll find me casually reading the X-Campus online on the john, Rogue and Magneto flipping past under my fingers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. So when the familiar jangle of the theme to the British comedy The IT Crowd broke my concentration, I was somehow unprepared for the shock of finally talking to my mother.

  The caller ID was unfamiliar, but I was never one to screen my calls. In hindsight, sitting on the can was probably the exact situation for which voice mail was invented, but without thinking I swiped my finger over the screen, obliterating the X-Men to the interstitial space where photons and IP packets live while they wait for some device to render them sensible to human eyes.

  “Brian Guillemot,” I answered with my name, not knowing who was calling. It was a habit I’d picked up from work, especially helpful since pretty much no one in this part of the country could pronounce my last name. I always found it strange, since most people still took French in school, but you’d never believe the bizarre variations I’d heard, even after I’d corrected them. Ghee-moh. It’s not that hard.

  She must have paid attention when I said it, though, because she got it right. First try.

  3

  BREAK AND ENTER

  AS IT IS FOR EVERYONE, high school was a tough time for me. No longer having the buffer of being part of a group, I was forced to navigate the dangerous sea that is adolescence alone. It could have been worse: I wasn’t one of the outcasts who act as the negative to everyone else’s idea of a positive self-image. No one stuffed me in a locker, beat me up or stole my gym shoes. Instead, I was pretty much universally ignored.

  The old gang had split up and I knew better than to try and insinuate myself into their new circles. I’d rather have died than try out for drama club, so Johnny’s pals were out. I had no chance of ever being a jock. All my life Mom had periodically tried to interest me in a game of catch or Frisbee, but I was like Dad. Kind of clumsy and entirely mystified by sports in general. I went to a few of Blair’s lacrosse games, but I never figured out exactly what they were doing. The only thing I understood was a ball in the net was a goal, which was good.

  And then there was Angela. She never really had a group as such, that I can recall. She’d hang out with anyone who was doing something interesting, and she somehow always managed to pull it off. The few times I tried to talk to someone who didn’t already have me on their approved list of acquaintances, it was made pretty clear with various degrees of politeness that I should please fuck off. That never seemed to happen to Angela. I think it was because everyone realized, without ever admitting it out loud, that she was the most interesting person in school.

  She first got noticed a few months into tenth grade. The summer between middle school and high school she’d decided to take up rock climbing. That probably would never have led to anything except that after she’d gotten bored of the wall at the local climbing gym, she climbed the school. It was a Saturday, so she might never have gotten caught, but there was a football practice that day so the entire football team, including Coach Martinson, saw her scaling the west wall of the school.

  The school was brick and had lots of sticking-out bits for her grab onto. She’d brought all her gear and supposedly was all set up with the lines and everything. They say that the coach was so impressed with her that he let her make it all the way to the roof before he started yelling at her. I don’t know for sure what happened after that, but the story that went around was that she took her time rappelling down the wall, taking her gear out slowly and carefully. When she got to the bottom, Martinson was hollering at her in his booming voice but she hardly paid him any attention. She packed up her gear and stood quietly waiting for him to shut up. Supposedly when he finally stopped for breath, she said, “The rules say we can’t go into the school after hours. There’s nothing about going onto the school,” and then just walked away.

  I don’t know if most people believe the story, but I think it went down pretty much like that. Angela always had balls.

  I COULD HAVE BORROWED SOME OF ANGELA’S COURAGE in high school. As the invisible man, I didn’t have a lot of friends. By eleventh grade I mostly just hung out with John Park, this guy who was deep into computers. He had his own machine, which was hooked up to the internet, and he used to spend hours surfing Yahoo! for interesting stuff. By interesting stuff, I mean hideous personal webpages made by other guys just like John, full of starry sky backgrounds and animated gifs. At the time, it was awesome.

  John showed me how to access some genealogy pages and I was hooked. I knew that this was the thing I’d been waiting for my whole life, that this World Wide Web was the key to me finding my real parents. I just had to figure out how to do it.

  I’d already learned that the Ministry of Children and Family Development was the government department in charge of adoptions. I’d found the paperwork in my mom’s filing cabinet in her office one night when she and Dad were both working. I knew that the cabinet was Off Limits. Years before, Mom had made it very clear that police business was not for my prying eyes.

  “I have official files in that office, Brian,” she told me in her Do you have any idea how fast you were going, sir? voice. “I’m bound by the Privacy Act to ensure those files are kept secure. If I find out that anyone has been in those files, it exposes not only that person but me as well to criminal charges.” I was probably rolling my eyes at this. The whole cop thing ceased to be cool once I got into middle school.

  “Brian Harlan Guillemot.” She raised her voice without yelling. Even at age twelve it was still scary as hell. “Do you understand what I am saying here?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I sulked back at her, refusing to admit that she was freaking me out. “Don’t go into the filing cabinet. I get it, okay?”

  “Good,” she said and smiled. “This isn’t like trying to find the Christmas presents,” she added. I felt my face get hot. I didn’t know that she knew I’d found her stash a couple of years before and had been sneaking peeks ever since. “It’s serious and I need to know you will respect this.”

  “Jeez, Mom,” I said, desperate for this conversation to be over. “I said I get it, okay. I won’t go into the filing cabinet. Promise.” She didn’t look convinced, but then again, she never did. Cop.

  I kept that promise f
or four years.

  The lock on the filing cabinet was pretty pathetic. As I was jimmying it open with a bent paperclip, I had to wonder about the Saanich Police Department’s budget. If this was the best they could do for such sensitive files, how secure was the local jail? When the lock popped open and I rolled out the top drawer, I realized that I’d been had. I’d already figured out that Mom wasn’t above dissembling a little to make her points. It was frustrating as hell, since I got the book if my parents caught me out in a lie. But Mom’s filing cabinet didn’t hold a single sensitive police document. It was stuffed with boring crap like birth certificates, the passports we’d gotten for a trip to Mexico, the deed to the house. And my adoption papers. The gold mine I’d been hoping for when I embarked on this B&E spree.

  My hands were shaking when I realized what I held. I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find — names, addresses, photographs even? I was so nervous that I forgot to be embarrassed when I started to cry after reading over the papers and finding nothing but a registration number and some legalese. I felt like I was going to throw up. There was nothing there. I stared at the papers for a long time, then finally came to when I heard a car outside. I snapped to attention and stuffed everything back in the filing cabinet. I shut the drawer and made a vain attempt to relock the cabinet with the paperclip.

  I barely made it back to my room before my dad came home.

  I HAVE TO GIVE MY MOM CREDIT FOR ONE THING: she didn’t get mad at me when she found the filing cabinet with its broken lock. I was so stunned by the lack of information on the documents that it took me days to realize there was no way I was going to get away with my little episode of domestic espionage. She had been in her office a bunch of times and must have seen the filing cabinet. At the time I thought she was just embarrassed about being caught in a lie about the police documents. I sometimes forgot that my mom had feelings just like the rest of us.

  She never did say anything directly about the filing cabinet. It was maybe a month later, when we were out shopping at the big-box stores on the edge of town. I had been asking for a computer of my own for months and we were on what Mom called a “fact-finding mission” to the computer shops. She’d asked a bunch of questions as if she were interrogating the sales clerk, and made the face that I knew meant she thought they all cost too much, so we left to go to the office supply place. I was sulking in the pens aisle when Mom came over with one of those accordion file boxes.

  “What do you think of this?” she asked. I just shrugged and turned back to the mechanical pencils. “It’s time you had your own files, Brian,” she said. “You should have your passport and birth certificate and stuff. Your Social Insurance card and the adoption papers. You’re going to need those things soon and you’ll need somewhere to keep them.”

  I stopped breathing for a second, carefully not looking at her. After I regained control of myself, I picked up one of the fancy pencils with the metal casing. “Can I get this, too?” I asked. She took it from me and didn’t even look at the price.

  “Sure,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “Why not?”

  IT’S NOT LIKE WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT THE FACT that I was adopted. We just never talked about my real parents. It’s like with other kids: they never talk about the fact that their parents had sex. You all know that’s what happened, but you pretend it’s not because it’s just too embarrassing. With us, I think it was that Mom and Dad were afraid I was fantasizing about my real parents being so much better than they were. And of course, that’s exactly what I was doing. Hell, even kids who aren’t adopted have that fantasy. Why shouldn’t I?

  By the time I actually found my birth mother, I knew better. No one who is rich or famous gives up a kid for adoption to a couple from Saanich. My real parents weren’t circus performers, astronauts or rock stars. They weren’t even really my parents. They were just the people who screwed each other and got knocked up and didn’t get an abortion. Cynical as I was by then, though, I was glad I was already sitting down when I heard her voice tentatively say, “Brian? Oh, how nice it is to finally hear your voice. This is Kim. Kim Heinz. We talked by email a few weeks back, I don’t know if you remember. I’m your ... ah, well ...”

  “I know who you are,” I said.

  4

  QUESTION AUTHORITY

  AFTER MY PARENTS HANDED OVER my adoption papers, it was like I was living in a dream. Not the kind of dream that is so awesome you never want to wake up. More like the kind of dream where everything is in slow motion and you feel like you could almost figure out what was going on if you could just turn around fast enough, but then you never do. I was sure that I would be able to find my real parents any second now that I had the paperwork, but nothing seemed to happen.

  Of course, there was no identifying information on the adoption order itself. It was just a legal document showing that S. Holmes and D. Guillemot were now the legal parents of Brian Harlan Guillemot born April 17, 1981. I spent hours over at John Park’s, surfing the web for sites geared toward kids looking for their birth parents, but they were all sob stories and no data. The government had a program to help, but you had to be over nineteen to apply. It was maddening.

  When I wasn’t looking over John Park’s shoulder at his terminal, I was doing okay at school and watching my old friends from a distance. Johnny was almost unrecognizable in his new uniform of black jeans and black tee shirts. He still liked to eat and was no skinny emo boy, but the weight looked good on him now. He had no shortage of girls hanging around, that was for sure.

  One time he invited me to one of the cast parties for the show he was in. I’d been helping him in chemistry and I think he thought it would be only fair. After the show I got a ride with him and a brace of his drama friends to this girl’s house out at the edge of the city. I didn’t even know whose house it was, but it seemed like half the school was there. I don’t know where her parents were, but I never saw them. I did see bottles of beer and wine and vodka, plus several joints, being passed around.

  I had a couple of tokes, but knew better than to try anything else. My mom had a nose for booze like you’d never imagine and I knew that the pot smell would fade well before I got home. Besides, I’d caught my dad with a joint the summer before, so I figured I could get away with the occasional hoot.

  The party was strange. The people who’d been in the play were unbelievably hyper. One guy took off all his clothes and ran around the yard reciting his lines from the show. The female lead got so drunk that she spent an hour passed out in the bathroom; when she came out she started to sing show tunes. It was kind of surreal. I talked to a bunch of the people there. No one knew who I was, but when I said I was Johnny’s friend, they were so nice it was like we’d been friends forever. It was probably just the beer and the pot, because when Monday rolled around they ignored me as usual.

  Still, it was fun to hang out with the cool kids for a change. I was in the kitchen, drinking water and eating Cheetos, listening to a bunch of girls talking. It took a long time to realize that they were talking about Angela.

  “She was in the mall downtown,” a girl who wore about a pound of black eyeliner was saying. “You know, on the bottom floor, where the checkerboard is?” Her friend nodded. “And she just sits down on the floor, like there’s nothing strange going on. She takes this thing out of her bag, you know those stands you use to paint a picture ...”

  “An easel,” her other friend said, passing around a bottle of cheap red wine.

  “Yeah, a portable easel,” Eyeliner said after taking a healthy slug from the bottle. “Anyway, she sets this thing up in front of her, calm as can be, then puts a canvas on there. Then she starts to paint, some kind of abstract thing, I think. I mean, she’s not painting a picture of the mall. There’s no reason she has to be there: she just acts like no one can stop her. She sits there for like an hour, just painting her weird picture.”

  “What about Security?” one of the girls asked.

  “
They didn’t do anything!” the storyteller said, incredulously. “I mean, can you imagine getting away with that? But I don’t think she even thought it was weird to be sitting on the floor of the mall painting a picture. I mean, she’s just like that. She just does whatever she wants and doesn’t even realize how bizarre it is.”

  “I think she’s awesome,” someone said.

  “Yeah,” the girl telling the story said after a pause to stare at the wine bottle. “Angela’s authentic. A real authentic life.” There was no small hint of envy in her voice. We’d been reading the existentialists in English class and everyone was desperate for authenticity that term.

  “Angela’s always been that way,” I heard myself say, and the group turned to look at me. I’m not sure they even knew I was there until I spoke.

  “You know her?” Eyeliner asked, disbelief all over her face. I just shrugged.

  “She’s my neighbour,” I said. “We used to ride bikes when we were kids.”

  “Cool,” one of the girls said. “What’s she like?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “She’s just Angela.”

  “Yeah,” someone said, like I’d just said something profound. “She is Angela. Like, really is, you know?”

  “Totally,” someone else said and passed the wine bottle my way.

  I shook my head and said, “See ya,” then walked out of the kitchen. It was getting late and the last bus back out to the boonies was going to leave soon. I found Johnny in the basement with a bunch of other people, playing spin the bottle by the look of things.