Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  Kipling purred and pressed her bony head against my face, waking me. She flopped down on the duvet beside me, rolling seductively on her back. Look at me, I’m adorable. My heart struggled inside my ribcage, trapped, fighting to get out.

  & Sixth grade, I’d come to realize, was a precarious age, an age at which a new influx of hormones put children off balance — twenty-seven little drunks trying to fumble through social interactions with their classmates, classmates who they began to whisper about, to fight over. Erica Adair and Landrie Anderson had stopped speaking after they’d discovered that Brody Hindmarsh had told them both they were his “girlfriend.”

  I hadn’t even slow danced until the ninth grade, and even then, only at arm’s length. Teachers at the school dances had chaperoned carefully, stepping in if students danced too closely, reminding us to “leave room for the Holy Spirit.”

  On Halloween afternoon, my class squirmed in their seats, antsy for the night’s sugar buzz and the chance for sanctioned deception. I squirmed in my own desk, marking vocabulary tests, while they completed art projects, their fingers and clothes smudged with pastel. An audible ripple in my stomach made a few glance up from their projects. Had I eaten breakfast? Karissa Zakary had defined “unanimous” as “when you really hate animals.”

  Then Celina was beside my desk, or, almost behind my desk, with her back to the wall.

  “What do you need?” I whispered.

  Her face washed pale. She gestured for my pen, and I passed it to her across the desk, asking, “Are you okay?”

  She cupped her hand and scribbled into her palm, then turned it open so I could see.

  my period

  She closed her hand around the message, making a fist.

  I stood up. “Keep working on your art projects. I’ll be right back.” I moved towards the door, and Celina slid along beside me. Once in the hall, I bent down to her level. “Do you feel sick?”

  She nodded, and whispered, “It’s my first time. There’s blood on my jeans.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s normal. It’s nothing to be scared about. I’m sure I have a pad in my purse.”

  She sniffed. “I really want to call my mom.”

  “Sure,” I said. “We can do that.”

  “My mom’s at the hospital.” She rubbed her eyes. “My sister had an asthma attack last night.”

  “Okay. Does she have a cell phone?”

  Celina wrapped her arms around herself and squatted down to the floor, curling into a ball.

  “Hold on,” I told her. I scanned the empty hallway, then ducked into Andrew’s classroom. He stood at the chalkboard, copying math problems.

  “Gimme a second, guys,” Andrew said to his students. At the door, he whispered, “What’s up?”

  “One of my students is having a crisis,” I explained. “Do you know where Conor is?”

  “Uh, not really. Everything okay?” He leaned out into the hallway, glancing over to where Celina crouched.

  “Can you watch my class for a bit?” I asked.

  “We’re in the middle of a math lecture.”

  “Please.”

  “All right, I’ll bring them in here. You going to be a while?”

  “I don’t know. Thanks.”

  I helped Celina to her feet. “Let’s go to the office and talk, okay?” I slid my cardigan off and tied it around her waist. It hung too big on her small frame, the long sleeves trailing on the ground.

  “My stomach hurts.” She held the sleeves of my sweater up. “I want to go home. It hurts really bad.”

  In the office, I asked the secretary to see if she could track down Mrs. Janik and took Celina with me into the nurse’s room.

  I got my first period at fourteen, the last of all my friends, in keeping with my tendency to be a late bloomer. Carly’s periods started at twelve, and she’d called me at my new apartment to tell me the news, thrilled with herself. But, after one month, she bemoaned her period, insisted her cramps were terrible. She had monstrous mood swings, once throwing a bottle of Advil at my head when she couldn’t disarm the childproof cap. It whacked me just above my temple.

  I found a pad in the nurse’s office and handed it to Celina, ushering her into the staff bathroom, aware of my inadequacy, her yearning for her mother, for her father, for anyone, really. Only after she’d shut the door did I think I probably should have shown her how to use it.

  My mother hadn’t shown me how to use sanitary pads, either. Papi had proven a great substitute parent, but the workings of a teenage girl’s menstrual cycle were out of his range. When I’d told my mother I’d gotten my period, she said, “And?”

  And?

  What, exactly, had I wanted her to say? What, exactly, did I need her for?

  “You know where the pads are,” she snapped, and then, “Great, now I have to buy double. Thanks, Darce.”

  When Celina emerged from the bathroom, her eyes looked bloodshot, her eyelids heavy. My sweater hung, still knotted, around her waist.

  “My stomach hurts,” she repeated. “I want to go home.”

  “Do you want to lie down in the nurse’s office while we track down your mom?” I suggested.

  Celina rubbed the back of her hand across her face, smearing a few tears. “Okay.” The secretary nodded, still on the phone, as I guided Celina to the nurse’s office and shut the door.

  The secretary hung up. “I’m getting voicemail on Mom’s cell. Look, Celina will be fine. Girls get their period. Give her a few minutes to calm down and then take her back to class.”

  &Halloween night I just wanted to sleep. About twenty minutes after I’d arrived home, just as I’d decided to take a shower, Patrick came to the door carrying three hefty grocery bags. After the kiss, he’d called, but hadn’t come over for three weeks. I piled the bed with extra stuffing — spare sheets, pillows, blankets, and a couple of towels. With my futon pulled into couch position, the sleeping portion was half its possible size, and with the extra mass it felt a little like someone else was laying beside me. I distracted myself to sleep, alternately counting happy memories of Carly and Patrick, along with the tiled black-white-black-white ceiling pattern above my bed.

  One. Carly, just learning to crawl, grasping my Cabbage Patch Kid doll by the neck in her teeth, the way a mother wolf would carry a pup.

  Two. Patrick, at the driving range, super serious in a pressed polo, adjusting his golf stance, fine-tuning the placement of his hands on the club.

  Three. Carly, hanging upside down off the edge of her bed, scrubbing at her wet hair with furious fingers, telling me, “If I do this for an hour every night, my hair will grow an extra inch.”

  It often took me into the twenties to fall asleep. But after a week without Patrick, memory seven turned into a memory of my mother; she’d slept clutching one of her pillows, the way Carly clutched her tattered raccoon. In Toronto, after dark, I’d seen raccoons slip between the garbage cans on the streets near our apartment on more than one occasion. Carly had said she’d like to take one home and raise it as a pet.

  “If you touch one of those filthy animals I’ll slap you on the mouth,” our mother had told her. “Do you want rabies? Huh?”

  I’d taken a stack of blank CDs from Carly’s apartment when Aubrey and I cleaned it out. Carly had filled them with songs — happy, upbeat pop music, with lyrics about falling in love, about partying all night. She’d drawn Mickey Mouse’s face in purple permanent marker on one, and when I pressed play, out blasted the Disney theme “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She’d dressed as a different Disney princess for Halloween three years in a row. In Patrick’s absence, I’d played Carly’s CDs, one after another, on an old Discman — plugged in my headphones and turned up the volume.

  I’d lived without Patrick before. I could do it again.

  Twenty-one days, exactly. Then he’d started coming back. Less frequently than before, but enough. He hadn’t kissed me since my birthday. Hadn’t talked about it. That Halloween night, h
is birthday, he descended the basement stairs, bags in hand, smiling.

  “Happy birthday,” I said, and yawned.

  “Trick or treat,” he said, grinning. “I brought candy.”

  He spilled the contents out onto the counter. Twizzlers, peanut butter cups, candy corn, Tootsie Rolls. He’d even brought my favourite, foil-covered chocolate coins, and when I bit into one, I tasted the crispy rice centre. They had skulls and crossbones printed on them, faces with hollow eyes and ossified teeth. He’d brought way too much.

  As a kid, Halloween had always overshadowed Patrick’s birthday, and his mother had never let him go to houses that she didn’t trust, fearing that her only child would come home with razor blades hidden in his Oh Henry!s. Patrick compensated by taking the leftovers out of his own family’s dish, he’d told me, but thirty of the same chocolate bars got sickening after awhile. When his classmates compared candy in the lunch room the following day, Patrick would sit alone with his Ziploc container of leftover birthday cake. Over the years, his mother’s paranoia made Patrick wonder if sinister strangers really did inject poison into children’s treats. “It turned me off candy,” he confessed when we first started dating.

  And yet, he’d already started to sort through the pile on the counter. He split open a bag of licorice and put one end of a sugary string in his mouth.

  “Kids trick or treat at the front door, not the basement apartment,” I said. “Let’s shut the light off and go to bed. I had a rough day.”

  He picked up a bag of M&Ms and split it open, poured a few into his open palm. “What happened?”

  “Crisis with a girl in my class. There’s stuff going on in her family — awful day.”

  “Poor girl,” he said.

  Poor girl.

  I could have taken her into the staff room, made her a hot chocolate, told her about my first period. I could have let her stay in the nurse’s office, kept trying to reach her mom. Instead, when her mom didn’t answer our calls, I’d just told Celina to buck up, to go back to class. I couldn’t even comfort a twelve-year-old. No wonder I couldn’t comfort myself.

  &Carly fidgeted before falling asleep, changing positions, wriggling around. Usually, Carly went to bed first, and I would change into my pyjamas, do my homework out in the living room, and then sneak in and climb up to my top bunk when I felt tired. But she’d demanded that night that I stay in for story time, and my mother had, surprisingly, actually read to her, so I’d agreed. My mother read stories fast, skipping sections as though trying to get them over with so she could go do whatever she needed to do. Carly had chosen The Mitten, a story about a boy who drops his mitten and one by one, a series of animals, including a bear, sneak inside it to stay warm, stretching the mitten out. I stared up at the ceiling, irritated by this obviously implausible sequence of events. The bear sneezed and all the animals tumbled out of the mitten into the snow.

  I could hear it raining heavily, the steady spill against the windows. At first, the drops fell far enough apart that it sounded like horses galloping outside our window. Then they got closer together, sounding more like trains rumbling by. I kept interrupting the story to point out these details, until my mother snapped, “Let me finish the goddamn story.” The rain began to pour so hard and fast that it blended into one long stream.

  “You know what I think it sounds like?” Carly interjected. “I kinda think it sounds like angels, peeing.”

  &On November 1st, Conor’s phone rang in the tiny office off of the gym where he worked, since he didn’t have a classroom. He perched on his desk. “Hey, how’s it going?” he said, into the phone, and then, to me, he mouthed, “It’s Joel.”

  Conor had come to me earlier in the week and asked for help organizing his office. He had large stacks of paper in various places throughout the room, though the content of the piles didn’t seem related. I flipped through a workbook on puberty.

  It’s normal to start to be interested in members of the opposite sex.

  The opposite sex. Thinking about Conor talking about this with his students made me groan internally. Within a Catholic framework, no allowances were made for mentioning anything to the students about starting to have feelings for members of the same sex. When Conor told me he was gay, I’d asked why he’d applied to the Catholic school board.

  “Not a lot of openings at the time,” he admitted. “But I wanted to work at a Catholic school. I’m still Catholic. The Catholic church is against homosexuality, but I’m pretty sure God still loves me.”

  From his perch on his desk, Conor held out his phone. “Joel wants to talk to you.”

  I took it. “Hi.”

  “Hey, Darcy. I hope this isn’t weird. Listen, I finally finished some of the renovations on my place, so I’m going to have some people over on Saturday. Really low-key. Conor said he might be bringing someone. You should come.”

  I stalled. “This Saturday? Or next Saturday?”

  “This Saturday. The third. Sorry, I know it’s kind of late notice. You probably have plans.”

  “I’m not sure yet. Can I let you know?”

  “Sure. Just give me a call. Get Conor to write down my number for you.”

  When I hung up, Conor slid off the desk and took the phone back. “Are you going to come to the party?”

  “I told him I’d think about it.”

  “You should. You need to get out more, be around people. Stop hiding in Andrew’s basement. You’re becoming a hobbit.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Conor scrawled his brother’s phone number down on a scrap of paper and folded it into halves. “Seriously. Even if you don’t want to right now. Just do it.”

  &Carly had the same eighth-grade teacher as I’d had: Mrs.

  Wong, who had taught the gym self-defence unit and had previously taught ESL and Special Ed. When Mrs. Wong called the house to talk to Mom about Carly, she often asked to say hello to me, too, remembering details from when I was her student years earlier. She’d provided notes for Carly, who had messy scrawl and couldn’t seem to copy from the board at the same rate as her classmates. I didn’t need to worry about Carly with Mrs. Wong. High school, however, was different.

  I’d promised Carly an ice cream get-together after her first day of high school, and when she arrived, forty-five minutes late, she announced, “What a shit show!” She dragged a backpack already marked with purple pen doodles and removed some course outlines, already tattered and stained with purple fingerprints, not yet organized into binders.

  A month into the school year, the few close girlfriends who had gone to the same high school had fit nicely into a clique of ninth-grade girls. Carly began coming more frequently to my apartment under the guise of doing homework, but she chattered rather than studied, distracting me from my own assignments. She began borrowing my clothes in an effort to look more sophisticated, returning them wrinkled and dirty.

  She wiped her runny nose with the long sleeve of her sweatshirt. “They want to phase me out.”

  “Who?”

  She’d borrowed her friend Chelsea’s math notebook because she’d lost a worksheet, and rooted out a note tucked into one of the pockets. In the note, one of the new girls wrote:

  Why R U even friends with Carly? She’s so crazy! Hello drama queen!

  Chelsea’s response: I know. Maybe we should just phaze her out?

  Totally! The new girl had written back.

  “What’d you do?” I asked.

  “Nothing! I mean, God! You don’t say anything to these girls. They do what they want.”

  “Sometimes girls are just mean. . .maybe you should focus your energy on some of your other friends. If Chelsea’s going to be a bitch like that to get attention, she doesn’t deserve to be friends with you.”

  Carly picked at her cuticle. “Yeah, right.”

  The next time she came over to my apartment, I lectured her on the main themes in Romeo and Juliet. When I paused to ask her a question, I noticed that she had stopp
ed listening. Instead, she’d doodled a giant caricature of a heart, broken in half, crying tears of blood. She stopped socializing with her friends after school, and began falling asleep when she got home, then waking up, eating dinner late, and doing her homework until dawn. She gained ten pounds, started tying her hair into greasy ponytails instead of washing it.

  “Yesterday, at dinner — ” She stopped and yawned. “Yesterday at dinner, Richard said, You know, guys don’t date chubby girls.” I suggested she come to my apartment directly from school, made promises to help her with her assignments. She stopped talking about Chelsea’s new boyfriend, or about Mom and Dickhead, brushing me off, wanting to talk about my life instead: how hot were the guys at U of T? What was the best part of having my own apartment? Was it weird to go to a big school where I barely knew anyone? Did I wish Aubrey was in more of my classes? What did I want for Christmas?

  Sleepily, one evening, she dribbled spaghetti sauce on the cuffs of her sweatshirt and pushed her sleeves up so that they wouldn’t get in the way. Small scars cross-hatched the insides of her left wrist, a teeny, tiny Tic-Tac-Toe board. Red and inflamed.

  I snatched her by the wrist and lifted her arm up off the table, in front of her face. “What the hell?”

  She pulled away from me, crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Nothing.”

  “You’re cutting yourself!”

  She glared at me, “So?”

  “So?! When did things get this bad?”

  “You don’t get it,” she said. “You didn’t have trouble in high school. You always got good grades. Aubrey didn’t go behind your back.”

  “You know what I was doing in high school?” I put my elbows on the table, laced my fingers. “I was raising you! You think it was easy to study for tests with you chattering away to Elemeno P.? Or having to rescue you from Dickhead all the time? Or how about — ”