Beckoners

by Carrie Mac

  “Just say them,” Zoe pleaded. “They’re just words.”

  “Dog smells like shit,” April mumbled.

  “I didn’t quite hear you.” Beck cupped her hand to her ear. “Again. Loud enough for the whole class to hear.”

  They’d all heard her the first time. It was so quiet they could hear Mrs. Henley coming up the stairs, her high heels click-clicking. “You’re running out of time, bitch.”

  “So are you.” April lifted her chin. She looked Beck right in the eye. “Rebecca Alexandra Wilson smells like shit.”

  Beck balled her fist. She lifted it just as Mrs. Henley pushed open the door.

  “Good Monday morning to you all.”

  Mrs. Henley assessed the silence that followed. She lowered her glasses to evaluate the scene in front of her. She glared pointedly at Lindsay and Beck.

  “Sit.”

  Lindsay looked at Beck.

  “Now,” Mrs. Henley said. She shifted her eyes to April. “April?”

  April swallowed. She shook her head and sat down, back ramrod straight.

  When class ended, April raced out of the room before Beck had even put her pen down.

  “Whatever.” Beck winked at Lindsay. “She can’t hide forever.”

  That was Zoe’s plan, to hide forever. First step: steer clear of the smoke hole. At lunch she headed for the ravine, hoping Simon and Teo might be there. She took the long way around the back of the gym, down a trail she’d only been on once before. Halfway down, the rain splattering on the canopy of trees, she saw Jazz sitting on the bench at the bottom. She didn’t have a jacket on, and her shirt was soaked right through to her bra. She’d undone her black braid. Her hair was plastered down her back like a long ink stain.

  “Jazz?” Zoe sat on the bench beside her. “Are you okay?”

  She looked up, her brow furrowed in anger. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Where’s your jacket?”

  “In my locker.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing it?”

  “Because I don’t want to. Is that a crime?”

  “No.” Zoe’s heart pounded. She studied her zipper, trying to calm herself. She decided to take a leap. She had to say something. “So, did you have a good time at the party?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “It just sucked.”

  “But why? Did something happen? Do you want to tell me anything? You can, you know. Tell me anything, I mean. You can trust me.”

  “Trust you.” Jazz stared at her.

  “Yeah. You can trust me.”

  Rain fell between the girls, filling the silence with its white noise.

  Jazz pulled her hair over her shoulder and braided it again, slender fingers deftly twisting. She snapped an elastic on the end.

  “Nothing happened, Zoe. Understand?”

  “But you can tell me if—”

  “If nothing.” She pushed herself off the bench. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Jazz, I—”

  “Leave me alone, Zoe!”

  Jazz ran up the steep hill, her tiny figure disappearing in the gray light at the top. Zoe stayed where she was, wishing the day were over with. Hell, she’d just as soon the week, the year, this life was over with.

  When she went up later, Zoe could not resist the urge to see if Jazz had joined the others at the smoke hole. She had. Zoe watched her from behind a tree, ignoring the rain running down her jacket and soaking her thighs. Jazz was laughing with the Beckoners as if nothing bad had ever happened to her in her whole life. She’d changed into her gym gear and was wearing her jacket. She glanced over her shoulder, across the steaming hut, and caught sight of Zoe before she could duck out of sight behind the tree. Or maybe Zoe wanted her to see her. She held Zoe’s gaze for a long, loaded second, and then looked past her like Zoe had suddenly vanished, or had never existed in the first place.

  That afternoon, when Zoe told Simon that she wasn’t a Beckoner anymore, he laughed so hard he got the hiccups. They were in Blouise, driving across town to the college library to research a science project.

  “Zoe, you’re talking about the Beckoners, not the freakin’ Girl Scouts of America. It’s not like you have any choice in the matter.” Simon rolled his eyes at Teo. “Do you believe this girl?”

  Teo nodded. “Some people resort to delusion as a way of avoiding shit.”

  “Well, this particular shit is not going to avoid her. It’s like this, Zoe.” Simon grabbed the Princess Leia and Darth Vader figurines from the line of Star Wars toys stuck to Blouise’s dash. He twisted in the passenger seat. “And now, the dramatization.” He wiggled Princess Leia. “This is you.” Darth Vader bowed. “This is the Beckoners.” He set the two of them apart, facing each other.

  “Okay, bye!” he said in pure Valley Girl, waving Princess Leia’s stiff arm. “Thanks for initiating me into your vicious little girl-gang and everything, and like, I realize that hardly never ever in a million years it happens, but now I totally hate you, okay? So like, no hard feelings, right? Um, okay. Bye-eee.” As Princess Leia teetered off, he lowered his voice. “NOT SO FAST. NOW YOU MUST DIE!” Darth Vader chased Princess Leia back and forth across the top of the seat until he caught her and pinned her to the vinyl with his boot. “No, no!” Princess Leia tried to wiggle free. Darth Vader sawed at her throat with his light saber. “Take that, you traitor!”

  “You’re exaggerating, Simon. I was hardly ever a Beckoner in the first place. The scar isn’t even healed yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Zoe. Once a Beckoner, always a Beckoner. You get that scar, you owe them something.”

  “I don’t owe them anything. I changed my mind, that’s all. Why should that piss them off? I just don’t want to hang out with them. I don’t like them, and anyway, Heather hates my guts. She’ll be happy that I’m gone. That’s what she wants. That’s what she’s wanted all along.”

  “You’ll notice they’re not named after Heather.”

  “But she’s one of them. She’s practically second in command.”

  “Heather couldn’t command anything more complicated than wiping her own ass.”

  “What she thinks counts, though.” Zoe failed to hear the conviction in her own voice. “I can tell she has some say with Beck.”

  “Whatever you say.” Simon tugged one of Zoe’s braids. “It’s a shame about your hair.”

  “What about it?”

  “Two words. Five syllables. Lisa Patterson.”

  “It’s not like that.” Zoe fingered her braids.

  “Hey, Zoe?” Teo studied Zoe in the rear view mirror. “Simon and I are here for you if you need us, okay?”

  “Speak for yourself.” Simon turned to the front. “I’m on Beck’s good side, remember?”

  “Gee, thanks, Simon.”

  “Yeah, well, you make your own bed, now you lie in it, blah, blah, blah.”

  Teo looked at Simon.

  “What?”

  Teo said nothing. Simon looked out the window. After a couple blocks, he turned and looked at Zoe again.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Zoe said, although she did not feel that way in the least. Her life felt the least okay ever.

  “I wonder about Lisa Patterson every now and again.” Simon said into another silence. “She disappeared before the ink wore off. She was really pretty, in a kind of gymnast sort of way. Really little and compact, but pretty. But it’s hard to remember what she normally looked like. I always picture her with the ink all over her, and her shaved head, like some kind of freak from the future. That’d be a good way to mark prisoners, come to think of it. You know, in Russia, in the prisons, they’ve made up their own language of tattoos. A whole language made out of pictures on their bodies.” Simon put his hand to Teo’s Gemini tattoo at the back of his neck. “I wonder what—”

  “I’d rather not wonder about Russian prisons at all,” Teo
said.

  In the back seat, Zoe had tuned out everything except the name Lisa Patterson. Lisa Patterson, Lisa Patterson. Would her name join the legend? Lisa Patterson and Zoe Anderson. There was a certain, disturbing, lyrical ring to it.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you Simon?”

  “What?”

  “That I was a Beckoner?”

  “Most people know, Zoe.”

  “Central is huge. Not everybody knows.” Zoe put her hands on his shoulders. “Promise not to tell? And don’t tell Beck what I think of them either. Promise?”

  Simon patted her hands. “I promise.”

  Zoe looked at him imploringly.

  “Zoe.” Simon gripped her hands in his. “I promise, okay?”

  on the roof

  Zoe told the Beckoners that she had to spend lunch hours in the library working on her science project as well as looking after Cassy after school every day. That amounted to a couple of days in the clear. It could only last so long, though. On Friday, in English class, Beck slapped a flyer for a rave on her desk.

  “Surely Cinderella must get a day off, right?” Her voice was tight, challenging. “We’ll pick you up around midnight tomorrow.”

  “I’m going to Chilliwack,” Zoe blurted. “For the weekend. With Cassy. To visit our grandparents. We made plans ages ago.”

  “You don’t get out much, do you?” Beck snatched the flyer back. “How about you call me when you can come out and play.”

  At dinner that evening, Alice announced she was an alcoholic again. Zoe hated it when her mother did that. Alice went through long self-righteous phases of not drinking at all, and then she’d get to a place where she was damned sure she could handle a beer or two, and then a beer or two became a two-four, with a major two- or three-day binge to follow shortly. The binges were guaranteed to end in tears, and one time in lock-up with a Driving Under the Influence charge. Then she’d get all fresh and clear and determined to stop again. Which meant she’d spend as many of her waking hours as possible at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, leaving Zoe to babysit Cassy for free. However, Alice got way grumpy whenever she quit drinking, so at least she was grumpy somewhere other than home.

  This time, oddly enough, Alice was bypassing the binge stage altogether. She plotted her AA route around town, mapping out how she’d keep herself at meetings until midnight in the same way she might’ve planned a night of barhopping before. Zoe changed into her pj’s just before Alice left for her first meeting on Friday night and was still wearing them when she put Cassy to bed Saturday night. They were baby blue flannel bottoms, with white sheep with little black numbers on their bums, and an old Mountain Film Festival T-shirt stained with chicken soup and hot chocolate, the bottoms mucked with ketchup from Cassy getting her mac and cheese hands all over them at lunch. Alice was out for night two of meeting hopping, and there was nothing on the two channels they got except stockcar racing and newsmagazine shows. Cable was one of those items on the when-we’ve-got-a-little-extra-money list.

  Zoe flopped on her bed and listened to the radio until a hockey game came on, then she fiddled with the dial, looking for something else to listen to, anything but hockey. She stopped when she heard the familiar haunting theme song of “Suspense,” the mystery radio play from the forties, come through the static like an old favorite song she’d forgotten she loved. She used to listen to “Suspense” in Prince George, on Tuesday nights, when Alice was at Bingo and there wasn’t anything on the one fuzzy channel they got up there.

  The reception came in clear for a moment, but then it got choppy. It was a little better once she set the radio on the window ledge, but it was still crackly. She climbed out the window with the radio, careful not to knock the cracked glass with her knee. The reception was nearly perfect out there on the carport roof. Zoe kicked aside the garbage and sat under her window with the radio in her lap, antenna pointed west, towards Vancouver. Then she heard a voice.

  “I thought I recognized you the other day.” Leaf Morrison, editor of the school paper, object of Zoe’s assured straightness, was sitting on the roof next door. “We’re neighbors.”

  “You startled me.” Zoe turned the radio down, only to find he was listening to it too.

  “The best reception is out here,” he said.

  “Yours sounds better than mine.”

  “Then come over.” Leaf pulled a plank of wood to the edge of the roof and bridged the gap.

  “I’m looking after my little sister.” The one time it was true and Zoe wished it wasn’t.

  “You can hear her from over here just as easy. Trust me, I know.”

  “Is that safe?” Zoe pointed at the plank.

  “Tried, tested and true. I used to babysit Dean. He had your room. We’d come and go across it all the time. He thought it was great, like we were lost boys in Peter Pan. If a four year old can do it, so can you.” Leaf held out his hand.

  Without looking down at the one-story drop, Zoe set one foot on the plank, then the other in front of it. The board wasn’t wide enough to stand with her feet together, not that she would’ve wanted to; she would’ve toppled over if she did. But she didn’t. She made her way over like a tightrope artist, arms outstretched, eyes forward.

  Leaf took her hand when she was within reach. That was the first time in the history of Zoe that she’d held a boy’s hand, not including square dancing in gym class or recess lineup in kindergarten. He let go once she got her footing. Zoe lowered her hand slowly, looking at it as if it was suddenly new and improved and strangely unfamiliar.

  “I think I’ll go back the way everyone else does.” She just about slipped the hand into her pocket, as if to preserve its new state, but in the process caught a glimpse of her ratty, geeky pj’s and crossed her arms over her chest instead, like doing that would hide the stains. There was nothing she could do about the slippers, yellow and mint green polyester hand-knit jobbies from Fraser House. With pom-poms. Red and orange pompoms. Lovely.

  “If you’re smart and your front door is locked, you can’t go that way.”

  “Then I guess I’m smart.” Zoe did not feel particularly smart at that moment. “It’s locked.”

  “Nice slippers.” Leaf plunked himself down on a foam cushion. He patted the space beside him.

  “Thanks.” Zoe sat down, tucking her feet under her so she wouldn’t have to look at the slippers, which she’d really rather toss off the roof.

  She and Leaf were sitting very close to each other. She could hear him inhale, a little nasal sigh each time. They sat, Zoe stiffly, Leaf oblivious to her stiffness, and listened to the rest of “Suspense,” although Zoe wasn’t paying the storyline any attention.

  When it was over, Leaf turned the radio off, and slowly tuned in to the awkward silence. He looked at Zoe, waiting for her to say something. Zoe stared out at the night in front of them, the traffic going by, a couple walking their dog along the road. She waited for Leaf to say something. She went through all her mental scripts, looking for something to say that wouldn’t be stupid, or clichéd, or desperate.

  “Can you believe it’s October and it’s so warm?” Zoe wanted to groan. Clichéd and stupid, straight out of a bad TV sitcom.

  “I can.” Leaf nodded. “But then, I’m not from Prince George.”

  “How did you—?”

  “Wish told me.”

  “She’s your—?”

  “Sister.”

  “Where are your—?”

  “My parents? I keep cutting you off, sorry. My dad lives in a cabin up near Lilloet.” He paused. “My mom’s dead.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Cliché number two.

  “I don’t remember her.” Leaf looked towards the mountains. “I was Connor’s age. She hit black ice, went over a cliff in her car.”

  “Why don’t you live with your dad?”

  “Me and Wish and Lionel—he’s my dad, we moved down here after our old cabin burnt down. That was three years ago, but he’s the only one who moved bac
k. Wish got pregnant. She wanted to stay here. She figured we should go to school.”

  “You didn’t before?”

  “Nope. We were way up the valley. My dad doesn’t believe in school.”

  “What does he think about you going to school now?”

  “He’s big into free will.”

  “Oh.”

  Zoe wanted to ask him a million questions. What did he do way up in the valley all those years? What was his father like? Wish? Leaf? Did they have middle names? He was so different, so interesting, so absolutely not a Beckoner, but then a girl’s voice called up from below.

  “Leaf? Hello?”

  That would be The Girlfriend. Zoe did not want to look. She was probably tall and graceful, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, only less manic, more calm. She would be carefully made-up to look carefully not made-up at all. She would not be wearing slippers and jammies.

  “Hey, April.” Leaf looked over the edge.

  Only April? Zoe actually sighed with relief.

  “Uh...I brought the...papers?” She spoke so softly, her voice barely reached up to the roof. “You told me to bring over those... the columns I edited?”

  “Sure,” Leaf said. “Come on up. Wish’ll let you in.”

  Leaf showed April exactly how to climb out the window, move by move, but even though she tried to copy him exactly, she caught her foot on the sill and toppled onto the gravel. Zoe couldn’t help but laugh at her sprawled there on all fours. Not because it was funny, well, okay, it was funny in a thank-god-itwasn’t-me way, but also because she was nervous, and when she was nervous she tended to laugh at inappropriate moments.

  “Sorry.” Zoe helped her up.

  “I brought the columns.” April handed a folder to Leaf.

  “I’ll look at them later.” Leaf dropped the folder inside. “Have a seat, relax. Welcome to my love pad.”

  April was sitting in the square of light coming from the room. Zoe saw her blush, and then frown, trying to cover up her embarrassment.