THE SWEETEST THING
YOU CAN SING
THE SWEETEST THING
YOU CAN SING
C.K. Kelly Martin
Copyright © 2014 Carolyn Martin
This edition copyright © 2014 Cormorant Books Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Martin, C. K. Kelly, author
The sweetest thing you can sing / C.K. Kelly Martin.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77086-411-5 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-77086-412-2 (html)
I. Title.
PS8626.A76922S94 2014 JC813’.6 C2014-905116-6 C2014-905117-4
Cover photo and design: Angel Guerra/Archetype
Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, Soul Oasis Networking
eBook development: WildElement.ca
Printer: Trigraphik LBF
Printed and bound in Canada.
The interior of this book is printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.
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Rage on
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
~
EVERYONE DISAPPOINTS YOU EVENTUALLY; it just comes as a bigger surprise when your favourite people do it. My brother Devin taught me that.
It was my other brother, Morgan, who showed me the power of second-hand stardust. The minute he appeared as a reality TV contestant on one of those claustrophobic shows that lock a group of pretty people into a house together, the popular tier at school started smiling at me and saying hi, as though my chubbiness was suddenly okay.
Don’t think I overlooked the difference between ninth and tenth grade. It would be hard for me to miss how invisible my freshman self was first semester, except to my old middle school friends, Marguerite and Izzy. Then Morgan became a TV hit, making such a splash that mere days after his elimination, MuchMusic phoned him up and asked him to be their newest VJ.
At first the attention made me feel like maybe it didn’t matter how much I weighed, but it turned out that most of the guys I was interested in still weren’t interested back. They’d tell me about their weekends and kid around with me during class, but I can count on two fingers the times I made out with one of them at a party. The first guy pretended it’d never happened and bragged about the hot lifeguard girl he’d hooked up with at the community centre pool (which sounded more like a daydream he’d had while thumbing through Maxim than reality). The second guy apologized to me before math class, explaining that he was so plastered the night it’d happened that he’d fallen asleep over the toilet in between puke attacks.
Marguerite and Izzy told me I’d just chosen the wrong guys, but how could I choose the right guy when no one with a Y chromosome (except old creeps who leered from moving cars) looked at me with lust in their eyes? The truth is that no high school guy ever likes you for yourself. Being thin is prerequisite number one for being sexy. Other prerequisites include having skin that doesn’t look like a biblical punishment, laughing at stuff guys say even when they’re not as funny as they seem to think they are, and not acting like a complete loser (by doing things like wearing loser clothes, stuttering, or walking around like there’s a “kick me” sign attached to your spine).
I had most of the prerequisites covered. I wasn’t very good at approaching people I didn’t know, but I could speak to them in a way that assured them I wasn’t an absolute geek when they came up to me. Being Morgan LeBlanc’s sister awarded me bonus cool points (and I already had clear skin), but unfortunately not even those could magically make me skinny.
One day last spring Izzy and I stayed at school late to talk over a geography assignment with Mrs. McClaren, and Izzy bumped into a guy from the junior basketball team as he was coming out of the gym. Two of his friends were with him, and as they were sauntering off we overheard one of them say, “Man, this year’s freshman crop has been sad.”
Izzy and I frowned at each other. Then the guy who’d collided with her seconds before added, “Isn’t Serena supposed to be a hot girl’s name?”
I frowned deeper and looked at my shoes. “They don’t even know my name,” Izzy said, like that was supposed to make me feel better. “Anyway, everyone knows the junior basketball team sucks.”
She was right. The team did suck. Except for hotshot point guard Jacob Westermark, my current (and only) boyfriend, whom I acquired after shedding twenty-nine pounds of chunk. I convinced myself months ago that Jacob’s presence in the hallway that day didn’t matter because he’d been the innocent by virtue of his silence third guy.
Having such asshole friends should’ve been enough to reveal the asshole within and warn me that he’d let me down in a big way. It definitely shouldn’t have come to this — Aya Yamamoto, sweaty from grinding with Wyatt and Orlando, one of her hands clasped on my knee, blinking at me like her eyelashes are butterfly’s wings as Chaz howls in the background and Jacob urges me to, “Kiss her, Serena. Damn, you two are so hot right now. Give us some girl on girl action.”
Aya’s clammy hand smoothes over my kneecap. Slinky. Skanky. The same way she’d touch a guy to get his attention. Normally there’d be more people crowded around watching, but Wyatt caught major parental interference for the property damages from his last party and only invited a select few of us over to celebrate his birthday with him. As it is, all the guys in the room are ogling Aya and me like we’ve already pulled out our boobs and are seconds away from getting it on full-scale. A couple of the girls are watching too, and my heart’s beating in a sickening, scary movie kind of way. My legs fuse to the couch fabric and my throat constricts, making it hard to breathe, when what I really want to do is knee Jacob, Wyatt, and Chaz in the balls and then make their noses bleed.
“You know I don’t like girls like that,” I tell Jacob in a scratchy voice. “It’s like asking you to kiss Wyatt.”
Jacob grimaces and tosses his head back. “That’s not the same. Everyone likes watching girls together. It’s hot.”
“She’ll never do it, bro,” Wyatt yells from across the room. His crooked smile bites into his cheekbones. “She’s more uptight than the state of Kentucky.”
Aya herself says nothing, her hand still on my knee. We’re all so bottomed-out drunk right now that it’s not supposed to matter what we do, but it still does, at least to me.
Chaz starts howling again in the background, and the music’s giving me what my brother Devin would call a superturbo headache — the kind he used to be hit with if he went too long without coffee. “It’s just a kiss,” Jacob says in the pleading, sexy voice he always uses to get me to do something I’m not sure about. “C’mon, for me. Just this once. Live a little, Serena.” He sits forward on the couch so he can get a better look at Aya on my other side. “Look at those lips. Damn. If you don’t do it I might have to take a shot myself.”
Aya’s stinky beer breath is in my face, and let me tell you, there’s nothing appealing about it. Her butterfly blinks are growing longer and longer and I’m thinking that she could pass out cold any second now and probably not remember a thing. “What’d I tell you?” Wyatt shouts, pointing at me with a condescending look. “She’s a good girl to the core.”
My heart’s racing worse and I hate how everyone’s staring at me like no matter what I do it will be wrong. I can’t win. Being fat or thin, being nobody or soaking up hand-me-down limelight, none of it makes any difference because people will only let you down in the end. That’s what they do.
I push Aya’s hand off my knee, and her unfocused eyes hang on me for a few seconds. Her newly freed hand races up to her mouth as she gags. Then the beer smell’s worse, like a preview of its appearance on the couch and the plush beige carpet. I shoot up, edge my way past Jacob and away from the couch, my feet tangling up in each other momentarily along the way. The music’s pounding inside my skull so I can’t hear Aya puking, but everyone’s looking over in her direction, either grossed out or choking up drunken laughs. Izzy and Marguerite would be horrified by the amount of stupidity inside this room right now, but of course they’re not around.
Did they downgrade our friendship when I started going out with Jacob, or did I do that myself? Hard to say. Up till now I’ve been paying too much attention to my oh so fabulous boyfriend to really notice what’s been going on with anyone else.
I’m not crying, that would just be dumb and dramatic, but my eyes hurt and I’m moving like there’s a “kick me” sign permanently engraved on my back. It doesn’t matter that it’s invisible, I can sense it all the same, and so would everyone else if only they were looking at me.
Nobody follows me out into the hall where I wrestle my wool coat from the closet. Nobody sees me slip out the front door and into a dark November night. I don’t really matter to anyone at this party, certainly not Jacob. Between that thought and the cold, I’m dead sober again.
With my short skirt and bare legs I’ll be lucky if I don’t transform into a human popsicle before I get home. Devin once told me that if I ever have to walk alone at night I should project the air of a girl who would claw a guy’s eyes out if he tried anything. It’s hard to do that when you’re feeling disappointed, but I’m mad too and I concentrate on that as I stalk along the sidewalk, ready to shoot a lethal look at the first creep who dares to pull up next to me.
No one so much as honks at me the whole way home, but I don’t doubt a castrating stare would protect me. If Devin said it, it must be true. Morgan might be the one everyone likes — the one who can make losing look like winning and challenges seem like fun — but Devin’s the one who usually knows the right thing to say to me. Usually did know the right thing to say to me. Not anymore.
Didn’t I say that everyone lets you down? Why should there be any exceptions to the rule?
CHAPTER TWO
~
IT TOOK ME A while to realize I wasn’t chubby Serena anymore. If I’d tried to slim down it never would’ve worked. I like to eat. I mean, I was never all-out enormous, but I like second helpings, cupcakes at lunch, and soft drinks with real sugar. My brother Devin was the same way, and my parents never made us feel bad about our imperfect frames, but sometimes I could hear the silent comparisons with Morgan leak out from other people’s minds.
My extended family, my parents’ friends, even strangers like shop assistants or waiters — they were all charmed by Morgan. He was virtually perfect — friendly, funny, and nearly as good-looking as the guys you see in magazine ads for designer jeans. Whenever I was next to Morgan I noticed the way people beamed at him. They even beamed at me when I was beside him; I gained goodwill by association. You had to be a seriously hard case to steel yourself against Morgan. Confirmed homophobes even seemed to soften their antigay attitudes around him, usually unwilling to make an enemy of Morgan over something they’d label unnatural in someone else.
People loved Morgan no matter what he did, just because he was Morgan. Devin and I used to complain about it to each other, but Devin had his own exceptionalities going for him. Morgan was the popular one, but Devin was the one who’d qualified for Mensa at fourteen and had been doing my parents’ taxes ever since. He was the one who’d won a full university scholarship and was always first in his class. Before last spring he’d never failed anything in his life.
That was then, before Devin turned every day into a twenty-fourhour exercise in tension when Dad dragged him home from university in March. He wasn’t well, as my parents liked to call it. The results of Devin’s unwellness were unpredictable, and whenever I was around the house I was too edgy to be hungry (you never knew what would happen next). You’d think getting rid of the source of that stress would help, but when Devin went AWOL in June my appetite curled up and died completely.
For months everyone in my family was too preoccupied to notice my dwindling waistline much, me included. No one except Izzy even mentioned it, and that was only once.
So I didn’t really know I was thin until August 22. Devin was gone and the three of us still living at home weren’t doing a fabulous job of dealing with his absence. Dad didn’t talk about him or it if he could avoid the topic, but he didn’t smile much anymore either. Mom was away from the museum with migraines so often — lying in the dark with her white noise machine amped up to maximum — that they’d hired her a full-time assistant.
That night in August Mom was supposed to take me back to school shopping because nothing fit anymore; all my clothes hung on me like an exaggerated “after” image in a weight loss commercial. The funny thing about shopping with my mom was how she’d turn into a teenage girl while doing it, laughing at stuff she wouldn’t ordinarily find funny and asking me things about Izzy and Marguerite, as though the four of us were all friends. Then we’d stop for lattes and whisper silly things about passersby. Occasionally she’d try on things decades too young for her, just kidding around. It was embarrassing and comical at the same time. I’d be smiling while wishing for the power of invisibility.
This past August I didn’t have to make that wish, and there were no lattes or laughing either. Mom complained that she had a crippling headache and handed me her ATM card. Dad was the one who taxied me over to the Glenashton mall, instructing me to call when I needed picking up.
But I never made that call. Instead I bumped into Jacob Westermark, who surprised me by flirting with me in the food court line, his dark blue eyes zooming in on my pupils like I was someone else. We sat and talked for a long time, him listening almost as much as he spoke. Then he drove me home and kissed me in his car. Jacob with his sexy basketball player arms and a T-shirt that fit so well it made me wonder if I was staring.
He was precisely the kind of guy Devin woul
d’ve torn to pieces under his breath in a funny voice the minute Jacob walked away. Athletic. Popular. Cocky enough to believe his own hype. But he was also sweet that night, and when I finally stepped inside my front door various bits of me were purring shamelessly from the things we’d done in his front seat.
Jacob didn’t pretend we’d never kissed. He didn’t apologize for it either. We kissed a lot from then on. In Jacob’s bedroom, the baseball diamond bleachers five minutes from my house, Chaz’s basement, around the back of the school portables, at a booth in Pizza Hut where we both sat on the same side and the middle-aged waitress called us cute. For a while he made me believe I’d found the thing, the person, that would make me stand out from all the other average, nearly invisible kids I went to school with. No Mensa or MuchMusic for me. His name was Jacob Westermark.
CHAPTER THREE
~
WHEN I WAKE UP, the back of my throat tastes like musty fall leaves and a thick strand of my hair is curled around my neck, a sweat mixture forming on my skin. I smell like last night’s beer, which reminds me of Aya Yamamoto’s hand on my knee and all the guys wanting to turn us into a live demonstration of Girls Gone Wild.
Jacob Westermark is a sleazy little asshole that I won’t let myself miss. He should’ve stood up for me and told the rest of them to go fuck themselves. I’m embarrassed that I slunk off into the night like a woman shamed. I should’ve slapped Jacob across the face or dumped a drink over his head like a girl in a movie would. His friends would’ve laughed at him instead of howling at me. I’d feel so much better right now if I’d done that instead of running off.
I untangle myself from my death grip hair and drag myself into the bathroom. Surprisingly, I don’t look as bad as I feel. I brush my teeth, gargle the stale grossness out of my throat with citrus mouthwash, and drag myself down to the kitchen for something to eat that won’t make me feel like the icky insides of a recycle bin. The milk tastes sour, and the cola and orange juice burn on first contact. I settle for ice water and two pieces of plain toast, and my dad strides in searching for his keys while I’m chewing. “How was the party last night?” he asks absently.
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