The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  We turn to our independent study project, a multi-part assignment to be completed in stages, involving a proposal and a presentation and graphs and reports—the assignment guidelines alone are seven pages.

  I pass her the notes I’ve been writing. “Does this sound okay?”

  “Do you ever think teachers give us these crazy long assignments just to reduce their own workloads?” Amy asks. “Think about it, how many class periods has Mr. A given us to ‘work on our projects’ or ‘visit the library for research.’ ” She mimes air quotes. “And what does he do during that time? I bet he’s jerking off in the equipment room.”

  “Should we add a flare component to our presentation?” I continue, though I’d like to snap my fingers in front of her face. “Like a Bristol board or music? I feel like educational raps have become unexpectedly popular.”

  “What professional adult wears tie-dyed T-shirts to work? He just wears them to seem as though he’s a nice guy when he’s secretly a fascist asshole.”

  I haven’t formed an opinion on Mr. A. He’s the breed of teacher that minimizes interactions with students outside of the classroom. I want to tell Amy there is still time for her to boost her grade enough to pass the course—she just needs to show up and make an effort—but I don’t want to sound like her dad. Or like our calculus teacher, who advised my parents that if I wanted to get accepted to a decent university I’d have to “sweat and bleed” calculus. My dad has since adopted the expression, though he sometimes uses it in the wrong context on purpose, like telling my mom to sweat and bleed the onions.

  Amy’s leg shakes so hard it rattles the table. This is unusual for her, because she smokes a ton of weed—to the extent that she keeps a one-hitter in the pocket of her backpack and smokes it before the morning bell rings. She smokes before gym because she says it makes her legs feel bionic. She smokes before Calculus because math gives her a migraine. As a result, she’s developed a persistent dry cough, for which she blames the yet-to-be-removed asbestos in the school walls.

  But I love Amy when she’s high. She’s serene and huggy, and because she’s always wearing black hoodies, her hugs have a soothing weight, like an X-ray blanket.

  “Nina, I have to get going.” She gathers up her things without waiting for an answer. She reaches across the table for her pencil case, and when she leans closer I notice her makeup is patchy, unblended, as though she put it on in a hurry with a compact mirror. Her lips look like she’s been biting off the skin.

  “We have to present this on Monday,” I remind her.

  “Yeah, but it’s just the proposal. You can handle that part, right?” She chews her cuticles and waits for me to agree.

  “No way, sit down.”

  “I really have to go.”

  “Amy…Okay. Take these.” I hand her the notes. “They’re nearly finished. You do the rest, and we can meet Monday morning to go over them.”

  She gives me an apologetic glance and stuffs the notes in her backpack. She loops her violet hair into a quick bun, revealing the blonde roots. “I really do have to go.”

  The shoelace on one of her boots is untied, and I think about stepping on it, as though that could hold her in place.

  * * *

  I don’t know where Amy goes when she isn’t with me or at her house, but I know she goes somewhere. It’s wherever she gets her weed from, wherever she meets the people whose names I don’t recognize when she mentions them, barking a laugh about some joke that doesn’t seem funny. I’m surprised there are places in Halifax that I don’t know about. Wherever it is, she found it in the fall, during the brief period when we took a break from each other. Her dad didn’t want us to hang out anymore. The nineties were ending, and I thought maybe our friendship was, too.

  “What’s he going to do, install cameras in the school?” Amy asked.

  But to me, what he had said mattered. It was as if I carried his disapproval inside my body, and it changed my frequency. I couldn’t relax.

  Before the break, Amy’s presence in my life was so overwhelming I never even noticed I had no other friends. And then all of a sudden there was nobody to sit with on the concrete block outside the school during lunch, nobody to go to Tim Hortons with after school. When I sang along to *NSYNC, there was nobody there to mock me. Did people notice that I always had an empty seat beside me? I fantasized about picking up an extracurricular with weekly meetings where I could slip into a pre-existing social group. Choir? Trivia Team? I attended one meeting of the Multicultural Society, the least intimidating of all clubs. But when I showed up, there were only three people, all recent immigrants, and I realized I had been mistaken in my assumption that my skin gave me automatic membership. One guy asked, “Why are you here?” Grade 11 is too late to make new friends.

  Almost inevitably, our friendship repaired itself after only a few weeks. We had always arranged our schedules to match. In History, our classmate Fergus said something wildly inaccurate about Caligula, and when I glanced up from my desk, I saw Amy spying me from her end of the row. She passed me a note, and when I opened it up it said, I bet he learned that from the porno version. I caught her eye again and, in the same instant, we both started cracking up, on opposite sides of the room.

  Before that, though, we had moved through the school like two same-charged magnets. And even when we were together again, some of that charge remained.

  * * *

  On Monday, I go to school early with a bouquet of garish plastic flowers I bought from the dollar store. As a joke, I stick them in the soil all around the tomato seedling that we’ve been treating kindly, hoping Amy will find this amusing. Some girl walks up and says, “Ooh, those are pretty. Where did they come from?” For a second, I wonder if she believes the flowers are real.

  Five minutes into Bio, Amy still hasn’t shown up. Up at the chalkboard, Mr. Abernathy is explaining something, probably about science, while the kid in the seat in front of me fidgets with a flint lighter under his desk. It makes a rasping sound, sending out occasional flickers.

  “Okay folks, project proposals should take up the first half of class, and then we’ll do a lab. Volunteers to go first?”

  A pair of girls at the front raise their hands. They alternate speaking parts—one says a sentence, the other says the next sentence—cutesy and synchronized and irritating, like twins on the Disney Channel. A couple goes next, the girl in a slouchy maroon toque and the guy dangling keys from his wide-legged jeans. They’ve been romantically involved for about two weeks, so I question their decision to work together on a semester-long project. Their presentation is good, though. It features both a skit and a Bristol board display. The third presentation is by the other Indian kid in the class, who has self-segregated with the only Asian kid in the class. Anshu immigrated here with her family about a year ago. When she pronounces eukaryotic incorrectly, Mr. Abernathy interrupts from a desk at the side of the room, where he is seated like an adjudicator. “It’s eukaryotic,” he says. “Not eye-car-otic.”

  “Eye-karyotic,” Anshu tries again.

  “EUkaryotic,” repeats Mr. A with an exasperated sigh. He jots something in his gradebook.

  “Eukaryotic,” Anshu whispers.

  “Nina and Amy,” calls Mr. A. “You’re up.”

  “Amy isn’t here,” I tell him.

  “What’s that?” He peers at me over his glasses, mid-grimace.

  “Amy isn’t here today.”

  “Well, where is she?”

  “I don’t know.” The class turns to watch me, twitchy and alert as bunnies on a public lawn, waiting to see if I’ll get in trouble.

  “Okay, well, there are no extensions. You can either give the presentation yourself or take a zero.”

  “We did the work. It’s just that Amy has all our presentation notes,” I say.

  “No excuses, extensions, or exceptions. I suppose you’ll be t
aking the zero.” He opens his gradebook, the room so quiet I can hear his pencil scratching.

  * * *

  Amy’s dad calls my house that afternoon to ask if I’ve seen her. “Where could she have gone?” he asks, with the tone and timbre of a child. I haven’t heard his voice in months, though he doesn’t seem to realize this.

  I’m not afraid yet. In my head I hear the theme song from Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and think about the odd choice of naming the character after a city—was that meant to be a clue? I search Amy’s usual haunts, and it’s as though I’m touring the set of a movie I watched a long time ago: Here is the Value Village where we both bought everything we own. Here is the Tim Hortons parking lot where she drank infinite Iced Capps and flirted mercilessly with strangers from other high schools, as I stood like an art installation next to her, trying to look cool. Here is the stretch of the Halifax Waterfront where we sprinted up the side of the wave sculpture at dusk to sit at the top, legs cold against the concrete, the ocean turning deep blue, then black, as the light disappeared.

  Later that evening, her dad comes to our door. “What is this?” he asks, standing on our front porch and shaking an empty lightbulb in my face.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him, stepping back to see what he’s holding up.

  But he doesn’t believe me. “What do you mean you don’t know?” He keeps holding the glass object in the air and shaking it, his expression a hurricane, his eyes looking past me, into me.

  My dad appears behind me and gently shoos me away. He puts his hands on Amy’s dad’s shoulders and walks him into our living room. He sits him down.

  I listen from the upstairs landing. “I’ve called the police,” her dad says. He has also called her mother’s sister in Toronto, since nobody knows where Amy’s mother is. He searched Amy’s room and found drawers haphazardly emptied. At the back of one drawer he found the lightbulb with the insides removed and the outside glass burned black.

  They speak for nearly an hour, her dad’s voice lifting in panic and collapsing into sporadic sobs, my dad’s patient and calming—I picture a pure sine wave rising from his mouth.

  * * *

  School without Amy is like a sitcom where the actor playing the main character suddenly dies and the writers are forced to rework the show around it: there’s a negative space, a subtraction in the universe where Amy should be. In the mornings, I snooze my alarm ten minutes and then another ten minutes. When I wake, my stomach is roiling with dread. I’m afraid now, the fear so deep it tangles through my intestines and spills up like bile. I check my email obsessively, but Amy doesn’t contact me. I smoke a joint in the grass by our two tomato plants, invalidating the experiment by saying cruel things to them both. “I hope you both die,” I tell them, tapping ash onto their heads and imagining their cells recoiling and withering. I hope I die, too. I go to class high and wonder if this is what it feels like to be Amy, half here and half there. My parents begin to avoid me, unsure of how to handle this sullen animal. At night, when he thinks I’m asleep, my dad prays at my bedroom doorway, at a safe distance. My sadness makes them shy; it pours into them like second-hand smoke.

  * * *

  In Grade 7, between Social Studies and recess, our teacher challenged us to draw a map of Canada from memory. All of our maps were terrible. Some were lazy sets of ovals; others aimed too hard for accuracy and left the coasts half-finished. Mine was tentative, with an upside-down rabbit shape in the middle (Hudson Bay) and some wiggly trapezoids up by Greenland. Afterwards, the teacher tasked me with Scotch-taping the maps to the wall beside the blackboard, around an actual map of Canada. The intent may simply have been to humiliate us.

  At the start of recess, the teacher left to find coffee and the rest of the class went outside. I lingered, to finish posting the maps. Under the wall of maps was a cabinet where our teacher kept our class files. There was a manila folder for each of us. I don’t know why the cabinet wasn’t locked.

  My file chronicled my boring pursuits—an English award, a copy of my (rejected) Legislative Page application. It was Amy’s file that had pulled me to the cabinet with the force of a first crush. I opened the folder under the shield of the cabinet and found homework assignments and self-evaluations where she’d given herself all Bs. There were notes our teacher had made of her meeting with Amy’s father. He’d said that Amy needed to be “taken down a few pegs.” The teacher had put the phrase in quotes and underlined it. It was the kind of statement my own parents would never have made. Sometimes, after that, when I looked at Amy, I pictured her hanging from a pegboard like the one her dad had in the garage. It held all the sharpest tools: drill, file, handsaw.

  * * *

  Weeks after Amy disappears, she sends an email to her dad confirming that she has left home for good. She’s sixteen, legally able to move out, to drop out; it is impossible to compel her to come back. I’ve been picturing her either dead or far away: speaking hobbling French in a Montreal youth shelter; under a Toronto overpass, grasping a squeegee; panhandling in some greyer, grittier city. Isn’t that where you go when you run away? But it turns out she’s less than two hours from here, staying on the couch of a friend in New Glasgow.

  “She left school?” asks my mom in disbelief, as though I’ve told her that Amy left Earth for Mars. “But where will she go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My parents and I are having dinner, but I can’t eat. I remember the time Amy came over and my mom made masala dosas. Amy, mid-craving, ate three of them. My mom was so pleased she told all her friends. That was before Amy stopped eating real food. She was healthy, and then she wasn’t. I thought it was a fad diet. Nobody I knew used actual drugs, but every girl in our school was on an experimental eating plan. At the start of the semester, she was the thinnest girl there.

  “Don’t you ever do that. Quit school,” my mom tells me.

  “Obviously.”

  My dad is quiet, the tines of his fork scraping against the stainless-steel plate.

  “What ‘obviously’?” says my mom. “I knew she was not a good friend for you. It should have been obvious to her, no? That she just threw her life away?”

  My dad sets down his fork. He wipes his mouth, and says, “We don’t know what happens in another person’s house.”

  * * *

  I immerse myself in the independent study—now truly independent—even though I know the experiment is pointless. We’re not real scientists. It’s not as though the results will have any impact on the world. I keep thinking of the jokes Amy would want to add into the report, and how I would have to remind her that the assignment guidelines state we should adhere to a formal style. I check the spelling. I trim the extra commas. I print out the final version, leaving space between sections to ink in illustrations of plants in various stages of life. My report looks like the castle from Sleeping Beauty, grown over during a hundred years of sleep.

  Days after I hand in my finished project, Mr. Abernathy asks to speak to me after class. He’s wearing a cardigan over his tie-dye. My report is open in front of him. I had it bound at my mom’s office, but he’s pressed open the plastic cover, leaving a permanent crease.

  He clears his throat. “Did you really write this?” It takes me a second to understand that his tone is accusatory. He seems to take my pause as an admission of guilt. “This isn’t your work.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He has a small smile on his face but doesn’t say anything. I wait.

  “Okay.” It’s evident from his tone that he doesn’t believe me, though he hasn’t read my writing before. All he’s seen are my test answers, mostly formulas, facts, numbers. “Look,” he tells me, “I know in other areas of the world, copying is more acceptable. It’s part of the culture.”

  I’m from Halifax, I want to argue. Amy was right about him being an asshole. Instead I say, “I wrote it.” I try not to show my
contempt.

  “Well, it’s clear this isn’t your writing. Did your partner write it before she left?”

  “No,” I insist. “I wrote it myself.”

  “Okay, all right. Whatever you say. I don’t have the physical evidence to take this case forward, but consider this a serious warning.”

  He hands me back the assignment. On the front page he’s written a perfect grade and, next to it, a big red question mark.

  On the library computer I look up Emoto’s experiment to see if there’s something out there that resembles my report. The only result is on a Grade 4 science teacher’s class webpage. It has, verbatim, the same info Mr. Abernathy gave us back in the first week of class, plus some commentary by the Grade 4 teacher. She points out that the human body is 60 per cent water. I picture extracting water molecules from my body, from Amy’s, freezing them and examining them under microscope. In the teacher’s highly subjective conclusion, she writes: “Only things originating from a kind heart can survive.” Is this true? What counts as survival?

  I use the library’s paper cutter to shred the assignment into a zillion ribbons, then let them drift into the recycling bin. There’s a poster on the wall in front of me that claims You can do anything. Another hypothesis that will go unproven.

  * * *

  After walking around the track that lunch hour, Amy and I had stood in the back field for the last few minutes, waiting, as always, for the bell to ring. She leaned against the metal side of a portable classroom, her hands twisting a young dandelion. Brooding. She hadn’t eaten anything.