X in Flight

by Karen Rivers

  It’s just not you.

  You open your laptop and wait while the word processing program opens.

  Hey, says Courtney. Don’t do homework, we want to talk.

  You hate dances, because let’s face it. No one ever wants to dance with you.

  I’m not going to the dance, you say, scraping the last of the raspberry stuff from the bottom of the container into your mouth. Typing into your computer with the screen angled away from them. You type, I’m not going to the dance.

  You have to go, says Courtney. It’s going to be fun.

  I hate dances, you say. And then you type it.

  No, you don’t, she says. No one does. What are you writing?

  I’m doing my homework, you lie. You type, I’m doing my homework.

  Yeah, Joanne chimes in. It will probably suck but it might be fun. What would you rather do? Stay home and watch TV?

  She laughs, so you join in.

  No, you say, I guess not. Joey Ticcato, you type. Then you delete it quickly, blushing.

  What you’d really like to do is go to the dance with Joey like a normal couple. Like two people who can be seen together out in public. The fact that he’s too embarrassed to do anything like that makes you feel funny inside, like you’ve been caught out doing something humiliating when really his issues are nothing to do with you. He’s shorter than you, and a druggie. What do you care? You lean forward. okay, you say, I guess I can go.

  Of course, you can, says Courtney. Let’s go shopping this weekend. Bring your dad’s credit card. We can get some stuff to wear.

  Sure, you say.

  Your dad gave you a credit card on your sixteenth birthday, shiny, gold. It’s like something you don’t want to touch. I trust you, he said. You’d never take advantage of it.

  In the last year, you've probably spent less than $500 on the card. You’ve bought sensible things like school supplies. You’ve used it to pay for his dry-cleaning when he asks you to pick it up. You’ve bought Chinese take-out and pizza and green curry from that Thai place downtown. You’ve never once used it for anything crazy. Never once bought something you thought he’d disapprove of.

  You roll your head around until your neck cracks definitively. Drag yourself back to the conversation.

  Blah blah blah dance blah blah blah.

  Courtney has drawn a butterfly on the back of her left hand with a red Sharpie. It looks like the distended rear-end of a monkey in season, which you saw in a biology film two weeks ago. You laugh out loud, covering your mouth. Turning it into a choking fit, which becomes real, your windpipe closing, forgetting how to get the next breath until you remember again.

  She shoots you a funny look, but doesn’t stop talking. She talks like an AK-47, ratatatatatat.

  You nod at her, then type: I think my father is in love with Cassidy and I think she wishes I didn’t exist. When she looks at me, she looks like she’s assessing an enemy. I think I feel jealous because he has time for her, and not for me. I think she feels jealous that he writes about me and spends his days talking about me all about me me me, but not with me. There’s nothing to be jealous of with that.

  Hey, says Joanne. You writing a book?

  Huh? You say, slamming the computer shut. Nothing, you say. What?

  Earth to Ruby, says Courtney. Come in, Ruby.

  I’m listening, you say. I just had to write something for History before I forgot. Nothing personal.

  Courtney leans over and whispers something in Joanne’s ear and they both laugh. You pretend not to care. You let your eyes drift around the room, unfocussed, like the cluster of people might blur into the shape of a sailboat or a car if you relax your muscles just enough, like those pictures that look like dots until you cross your eyes.

  Everyone’s eating or shouting or both. It’s so loud. Sometimes it’s so noisy in the cafeteria, you think you could probably shout obscenities at people and no one would notice or hear you for that matter. Drift, drift.

  For a second, your gaze locks with X’s. He’s sitting at the next table over. He’s staring in your direction. You turn to look behind you, to see who or what he is looking at like that.

  You.

  He’s definitely looking at you. There is nothing behind you to see, unless he’s staring at the brick wall.

  He smiles. You frown. Look down and away, don’t let your eyes attach to his gaze. It feels like a trap. His smile wigs you out for some reason. There’s something about him that is unsettling. You don’t know what it is. He looks at you the way Mr. Beardsley looks at Cat. Maybe that’s it. Like he wants you in a way that you don’t feel like you want to be wanted.

  I’m not ready for you, you telescope to him with your eyes, then you blush. What kind of thing is that to think? What’s wrong with you?

  Maybe you just don’t like being stared at like you’re a meal and he’s hungry. You shiver, pull your sweater closer around yourself. It seems lately that you’re always cold. A lump forms in your throat.

  You cold? asks Joanne.

  I guess, you say. Look, I’ve got some stuff to do for my next class. I should go do it.

  Before they can stop you, you stuff your laptop into your bag and push past them and grab your books from your locker and go sit in the library. Instead of doing any work, you doodle on the page. Stupid stuff. Hearts. Your last name with Joey’s. Then you scribble that part out hard with thick black pen that smells like something that shouldn’t be legal, something that could make you high. You hold your breath.

  You start over, staring at the math problems that you really don’t have to do until tomorrow. If a plane going 150 miles an hour, blah blah blah.

  You don’t know what’s wrong with you lately, you just can’t concentrate. You put your head down and close your eyes just for a minute. Just long enough for the fire dream to start. Just long enough that you wake with a start when the bell goes, sweat trickling down your forehead. It’s stupidly unsettling to have your home nightmare out of context like that. It’s like your nightmare has followed you to school, like some kind of stray dog. But it’s all wrong and in the wrong place and time and it makes you feel dizzy and sad.

  You decide not to go to class. Instead, you walk through the empty corridor, your sneakers squeaking on the floor. You eavesdrop on the classes through the closed doors, standing and listening here or there. Through the glass windows, you can see students slumped disinterestedly in their seats. It must be the weather, you think. Everyone is bummed. Dragged out. Sleepy. You keep walking until you get to the door that goes to the basement. You don’t know why, but you go down there. It’s warm and bright, not like what you would imagine. There are a bunch of boxes down there. You don’t know what’s in them. There are racks of clothes that the drama department uses for costumes. You go over and start flipping through them. A bunny costume. An Alice dress. A maid’s outfit. It looks like a porn shop, you think, and then you laugh. Your laugh sounds too loud in the empty room, like a rooster. It startles you. You put your bag down and crouch down, like suddenly someone might see you. You might get caught. But caught doing what? Your heart is beating hard, like you’re doing something really seriously wrong, not just cutting class. You’re in an area that’s off limits, too. You’re looking at things you shouldn’t see. You close your eyes.

  There, you say. There.

  After a few minutes, you get up and go back to the costumes. A king and queen outfit. Something that you think is supposed to be an oyster. A bunch of gypsy dresses. Upstairs, you can hear the bell go again and the sound of thundering footsteps in the hallway, a cacophony of raised voices. A door slams.

  The door to the basement.

  Shit, you think, shit shit shit. You grab your bag and hide behind a bunch of boxes. You can hear voices. One of them is Joey’s.

  I don’t know, Tic, you hear Cat say. I broke his fucking arm. He hates me.

  He doesn’t hate you, says Joey.

  Yeah, he does, says Cat.

  You feel stu
pid hiding from them, but you can’t let them know that you’re here now. It’s too late to pop up, act surprised, act casual. You hold your breath so they don’t hear you breathing. You make yourself disappear.

  No, he doesn’t, says Joey. You just broke his arm and it hurts. He’s in a pissy mood. Don’t worry about it.

  You hear the sound of matches striking and the sound of cigarettes being smoked. You smell it. You hope it doesn’t trip the fire alarm or anything. Then you’d get caught for sure.

  I’m breaking up with him anyway, says Cat.

  So you keep saying, says Joey.

  Yeah, says Cat.

  You close your eyes and will them to leave. Leave, leave, leave, you repeat to yourself. Go already. They are quiet for a while and you are just about to think that maybe they have left, when you hear Cat say, so, do you like me?

  And you hear Joey say, Yeah.

  You hear the sloppy sound of tongues and lips. Horrible, too loud, awkward. You don’t want to know it, to hear it, to feel the sinking in your chest like it’s collapsing.

  Oh no, oh no, oh no.

  After what feels like forever, they finally leave. Laughing and talking like nothing happened. You bitch, you’re thinking. Not Joey. You have X. And Mr. B. And whoever you want. Not Joey.

  You hate her. It takes you a while to stop crying, but when you do, you just want to get out of there, so you do. You just walk out of the school and get on the next bus dumping handfuls of change – probably too much – into the bin. Hurtling yourself onto the last seat and slumping down so low you can’t see out the window even if you wanted to look back. You never want to look back. You straighten up as the bus turns the corner and the school vanishes. You exhale on the window and draw a heart with your initials on it and then you rub it out.

  You head home, stepping over homeless people in the doorway. Avoiding eye contact. Push open the front door, into the elevator, finally home. You can breathe now. You can sleep.

  But no.

  Cassidy is there. By herself. She is wearing your father’s dressing gown. Drinking coffee and reading the paper.

  What are you doing home? she asks you as you are saying, What are you doing here?

  Forget it, you say. You can’t even summon the energy to try. You slam into your room and shut the door. Lock it. Throw yourself onto your bed, too feathery quilt around your face, suffocating. And you think, Now what?

  X.

  Chapter 13

  Every night after work, on days that I work, I fly home. Low to the ground at first, but I’m getting braver. I think that if someone sees me, they’ll think they couldn’t have seen what they think they saw, that I’m just walking fast or running smooth. I think their disbelief protects me somehow from getting caught. But “getting caught” sounds wrong. I’m not committing a crime. I’m just being different. Being different is not wrong.

  But it is. That’s the kind of fucked up world we live in. Who am I kidding? It’s totally wrong.

  There’s a building across the street from yours. It’s grey, concrete, empty. There’s a broken window on the third floor where the smashed in glass is the exact shape of someone’s head in profile. It’s the kind of building that has to be haunted, the ghosts stuck in there like prisoners serving a life sentence for something they didn’t do, or don’t remember.

  I land on the roof there and from there I can see into your apartment, lights all on. It’s the tidiest place I’ve ever seen. It’s like a model of an apartment, like a kid would imagine a fancy apartment to look like if he’d never seen one. There’s nothing extra anywhere, no sloppy art or clothes heaped up on the floor. It’s scary clean, like a display case at the museum.

  I want all of this to not sound as messed up as it does. I’m not watching you. Not really. This is just the only abandoned building in town. This isn’t a city where buildings are left to fall over, you know that. There must be a story behind this one, I just don’t know what it is. I’ve been exploring a bit. It’s an old old place. I wish I could say that I found, like, treasure maps or some shit. Ghosts or old diaries. But what I mostly found was drug paraphanalia. Needles and smashed bottles.

  Depressing.

  Up on the top floor though, there’s a bathroom with the most incredible mosaic tile on the wall. I wish you could see it. Well, maybe you have. I don’t know. It’s like your neighbour, although I doubt you do much crawling around in empty crack houses.

  Sometimes I glimpse you through the window. It’s not even like I really mean to, not like I’m looking, but just kind of like I’m saying ‘hi’ in my own fucked up way.

  I’m so going about this the wrong way, I know it.

  Yeah, I’m sure I don’t have the gift of flight so that I can spy on people. But I can’t see that far, anyway, not far enough to actually catch a see any details of your life. I just like to see your lights on. Shit. You must think I’m really awful. I feel awful, yet I can’t stop. It’s like I’m hungry and there’s no food, so I keep trying.

  Or maybe I’m just an asshole.

  Yeah, I think we’re clear on that at this point.

  I fly so close to your window, it’s crazy. What am I doing? It’s like I want you to look up and see me. You are looking hard at yourself in the mirror, close. Then I see what you’re doing, you’re flossing your teeth. So intently, like you can’t stand the feeling of whatever is stuck between your teeth. Right away, seeing that, I feel sick and monstrous and awful. It wasn’t anything. I mean, it’s not like you were naked or anything like that. But I don’t know. I saw something I shouldn’t. That was your privacy and I shouldn’t have been there. I hated myself for a second. Pointed my feet and went straight down, past all the windows, not caring who else saw me.

  I made myself walk home. It took an hour.

  I guess that a part of me thinks that if I do get caught, at least you’ll be forced to notice me. But not like that. I don’t want you to notice me noticing you doing something personal, you know? I don’t want it to be rude.

  I saw you today in the cafeteria. I was staring at you, I guess, thinking about something else. But when your eyes caught mine, you flinched so hard you must have got whiplash and you looked away. I know I’m ugly, okay? Do I scare you or something?

  I just can’t help looking at you. I try to stop, but I can’t. Sick.

  I’m sort of observing you, the way Cat observes stuff she thinks is ugly pretty, like old beer cans smashed in the gutter reflecting light in some certain way, water beading off them. Not that you’re like an old beer can, but you know what I mean. I’m not saying you’re ugly-pretty. You’re just… pretty.

  I think you get it anyway, don’t you? I don’t know why I think that. Like you’re going to save me or something. Somehow.

  I heard you talking to Joanne and what’s-her-name about the dance and for a second, I was … I don’t know. Excited, I guess. I got this idea that maybe we could dance together. Dumb. It’s like I’m twelve or something and just got hormones and we’re off to the sock hop. My friends would laugh their asses off to hear me say shit like this, that’s for sure.

  Everything’s so crazy lately, it hardly seems to matter. It’s like I’m thinking in poetry while my life is more like a WWF wrestling match. All glitter, all crap.

  Mutt was drawing on my cast this morning with crayons while I tried to sleep in. That smell of crayons. Crazy. It always makes me think of kindergarten. Think of all that kid stuff that one day you just stop doing, you know?

  Mutt wakes up every morning at five o’clock. It’s still dark outside when he thump thump thumps out of bed, runs around the room, looks at stuff. I was still so tired that I let him keep drawing. He’s drawn a bunch of bright coloured scribbles and some things that might be people. They have orange heads and purple bodies. There are some blobs at the bottom near my wrist that look like eggs.

  Deer is worried. I guess so. I mean, I know I’m going to miss this big tournament this weekend. Obviously. I can’t play with one
arm. And she’s pissed or hurt – same thing – that I broke the Big Bertha. I am, too. It was my club. I’m the one who won’t ever be able to afford another one. Secretly I wonder if I need another one. Is golf really going to be my life?

  Golfing for a living means leaving. Leaving Deer. Leaving Mutt. What would Mutt do without me? I mean, I’m older than him enough that I’m almost like a dad, right?

  Whenever I’m at home in that trailer with them, I think about how much space my leaving would leave behind. And it’s too much.

  But I think I know I can’t stay there forever or for much longer. It’s too small, anyway. Like literally too crowded.

  Cat’s plan is to run away. Not that it’s actually “running away” after you’ve graduated. It is before, but not after. After, it’s just “leaving”. When she told me, her voice had that dangerous laugh behind it. She said it like it was true and I think maybe it is. She’s going to go – or she thinks she’s going to go – to New York. Become a rock star or a photographer or a god-knows-what. I wish I was brave like that, but the truth is that I’m not.

  I’m just not.

  You probably have a plan. You look like someone who has it together, who really knows stuff. Not like me. Not like Cat. Not like anyone else I know.

  This morning, while I was eating, Deer said, I guess this means you’re giving up, right?

  I’ve never seen her so sad. I don’t want to make her sad. How can I make her dreams come true and still figure out what my own are?

  Of course not, I told her.

  I wish you wouldn’t hang around with that Cat, she said. She’s bad news. I’ve got a bad feeling about her.

  No kidding, I said. She’s a bad-feeling kind of person.

  Cat’s still sick, days later. I can’t believe it. She must have been drunker than I thought. Must have had alcohol poisoning to still be feeling the effects. How drunk was she and how could it have happened? Wasn’t it just beer?