by Darlene Ryan
Mom is bent over her desk, the heels of her hands pressed to her temples. “Mom,” I say softly from the door. I need money.
She drops one hand and looks over her shoulder at me. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she says.
“How was your meeting?”
She shrugs. “We made a couple of decisions, so I guess it was productive.”
Mom is a computer programmer. Mostly she works on programs that do things for doctors and hospitals.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” I say. “I...uh...I need some money. I need new running shoes for gym and I have to pay the rest of my lab fees.” Lab fees were paid in September, and I don’t plan on ever going back to gym class. But movies aren’t cheap, even in the middle of the day, and I can’t exactly tell her what I’ve been doing. Besides, I like having money in my pocket. It makes me feel like I could go anywhere I want to, do anything I want to.
She reaches for her purse under the desk and counts out four fifty-dollar bills. I jam the money in my back pocket.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Mom says as she drops her wallet back into her bag. “Sit down for a minute.”
“Okay.” I pull out one of the dining room chairs and sit, curling my legs under me.
Mom straightens, shrugs her shoulders a couple of times. “I’ve been thinking about Christmas, D’Arcy.”
My dad loved Christmas. I never knew who’d be at the table Christmas Eve when we sat down to supper. He’d invite everyone he’d met all day. “The more the merrier,” he’d tell my mom. He’d be cooking in the kitchen and singing Christmas carols. Last year he even got the idea to have a snow angel competition between supper and dessert.
Mom presses her lips together, and I pull my mind back from drifting. “You’re almost an adult now,” she says. “So I thought I’d just give you money this year.”
How much money? I wonder.
“I wouldn’t have any idea what to get you. This way you can get whatever you want. And I don’t want you spending a lot of money on me. We’ll just have a quiet Christmas this year.”
It’s been decided. It’s not like I even want a pile of presents, but she didn’t talk to me, she talked at me. “All right,” I say. “Whatever you want.” Because I don’t want to celebrate Christmas anyway.
“Good. I’m glad it’s settled.” She turns back to her papers.
I grab my coat and slip out the kitchen door. I start walking without any direction in mind. I end up down by the rowing club. Out on the river there’s one lone kayaker, slicing through the churning water in an orange shell.
I walk out onto the wooden lookout over the rocks, put my arms up on the railing and look down at the water rushing by, dark and cold, so icy blue that I can’t see the bottom. For a moment I wonder what it would be like to climb over the railing, drop down into the cold blue-blackness and let it swirl over my head, to be surrounded by nothing but the rushing sound of the water.
Suddenly I hear voices behind me. Two girls in black spandex pants and nylon jackets are lifting a scull off the rack at the side of the rowing club. I turn from the railing and cut across the grass, up to the sidewalk. I walk along the narrow streets until my legs ache and my ears hurt from the cold. And then I go home.
Part Two
Winter
seventeen
10...9...8...
We’re all around the television at Marissa’s, watching as the last seconds of the year count down. Brendan leans against me, his chest against my back and his arms folded over mine, our fingers laced. It’s too warm in here.
2...1.
“Happy New Year!” everyone shouts.
Brendan leans over and kisses me just below my ear. “Happy New Year, D’Arcy,” he says with a smile, his dark eyes sparkling.
I shrug out of his arms and turn around. “Happy New Year,” I say.
On TV someone is singing “Auld Lang Syne.” All around me people are kissing and touching.
Brendan moves in to kiss me. Just before his mouth is on mine, I close my eyes and swallow. “We’re gonna have a great year,” he whispers.
I don’t say anything at all.
I sit on the window ledge with my hands pulled up inside the sleeves of my sweater, trying to warm up my fingers. Behind me the window is hazy with frost.
Marissa pushes in beside me. “God, it’s cold! Why do we have school anyway? Why don’t they stick some kind of computer chip in our brain that has everything we need to know?”
I shrug.
“You ready for this?” she asks—we’re having a history test—combing the long nails of her right hand through her hair.
I watch a few strands get loose and escape down the heat vent into whatever dark place there is below. Marissa is looking at me. Right. She’s waiting for my answer. “I suppose,” I say.
“Yeah, well how hard can it be? It’s just a lot of boring dates and battles and dead people.”
The bell rings. Marissa slides off the radiator and climbs over my desk to her own. I slip into my seat. Mr. Bailey already has the test papers coming down the rows. I take one and pass the rest back.
I read it all over quickly and then start the first essay without really taking any of it in. I haven’t read most of the chapters. I haven’t been to the library. I only have half a page of notes in my binder. But my hand is writing, making words, making sentences, filling the page.
I’m walking up Prince Street, my breath freezing in front of me. There still isn’t any snow but the air is pinching cold. Maybe I should start wearing a heavier coat and a scarf or something.
I’m getting muscles in the back of my legs from all this walking. On the weekends I walk for hours, all over the city. At first I’d tell Mom I was going to Marissa’s or to the library, but most of the time now, she doesn’t even ask.
I follow the sidewalk where it turns right at the bottom of the old hospital. Up ahead of me some guy is running. He’s wearing faded black sweatpants and an orange toque. His feet kind of swing out to the side as he runs, and the laces on his right-hand running shoe are loose. One of them whips against the pavement as he runs. Snap, snap, snap, but the rhythm is a little bit off. Sort of like his running. I imagine going up to him and counting out a beat—one, two, three, one, two three.
At the corner, the walk light is flashing its warning red hand. The guy runs in place, watching the traffic come down the hill and whip around the corner, watching—I’m guessing—for a chance to dart across between the cars. As I come up behind him, I realize it’s Seth.
I touch his arm. “Seth?”
He turns and smiles when he sees it’s me. “Hey, D’Arcy, hi.”
“Hi. I...didn’t know you were a runner.”
“I’m not exactly. I’m training. I’m trying out for the track team.”
The walk light comes on then and we cross, Seth jogging slowly beside me. “You’re trying out for track?” I kind of make a face. I can’t help it. “Why?”
“What? You don’t think I can make the team?” His face is mottled from the cold. Or maybe it’s the running.
“No, it’s not that,” I say. “It’s just that you don’t seem anything like the guys on the team—at least not the ones I know.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Well for one thing, whenever they see each other in the halls they make grunting noises and butt each other with their stomachs. They’re like those mountain goats you always see on nature shows, except the goats bang their heads together.”
Seth gives a big, fake sigh. “Okay, okay, no grunting in the halls.”
“And they all have buzzed heads.” I look over at the dark hair sticking out from under Seth’s hat and curling over his collar. “Tell me you aren’t going to cut off all your hair,” I blurt. “I love your hair.”
“You do?” He shoots me a sideways glance.
I feel my face getting hot and I know it’s probably redder than my hat. “Umm, yeah,” I mumble.
“I do.”
“All right. No buzz cuts either.”
I step behind Seth to let a couple of women pass on their way down the hill. Seth pulls at the sleeves of his sweatshirt. “I better let you start running again,” I say.
“Yeah, I’ve still got a couple more miles to do.” He shrugs his shoulders a couple of times and swings his arms back and forth. “So I’ll see you in math class.”
I nod and he starts up the hill. His shoelace starts snapping on the sidewalk again. And then I remember. “Hey, Seth, I can do it,” I call after him.
He slows and turns so he’s running backwards now. “Do what?”
I mime the actions. “One hand to the other. Eyes closed.” I’ve spent hours at night, practicing.
“I told you,” he shouts, swerving at the last second to miss a garbage can someone hasn’t dragged in yet. “You’re ready for the next lesson. Meet me tomorrow before school, down by the bottom door.”
“I don’t think I can do two.”
“You said that about one.” He turns back around and starts to run faster as the hill levels off and takes another turn. “Tomorrow,” he calls over his shoulder.
Tomorrow, I tell myself.
“I’ll see you at lunch,” I say to Brendan. The phone is jammed between my cheek and my shoulder. I’m flipping through my biology book. What the heck were we supposed to read anyway?
“Can’t. I’ve got practice,” he says. “So I’ll pick you up.”
“No. I told you I have to go early.” There it is—the little piece of paper I stuck between two pages. Now I remember. We’re supposed to read chapter 23.
“So, do whatever that math stuff is that you have to do at lunch.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Jeez, D’Arcy, you’re going to turn into one of those math geeks who can’t even go to the can without a computer.”
I don’t say anything.
Finally Brendan sighs. “I’m sorry. It’s just...I miss you.”
What do I have to say so I can get off the phone? “I miss you too.” I count pages. How long is chapter 23 anyway?
“So...I’ll pick you up.”
“I have to go early. Really. But we could do something Friday. After your game.” Does he have a game Friday? I can’t remember. I push the biology book off my lap onto the bed.
“Mmmm. What kind of ‘something’ did you have in mind?” Brendan asks.
“Umm, it depends on whether you win or not.”
“Oh, we’re gonna win. So be ready to celebrate.” I hear noise in the background. “I gotta go,” Brendan says. “Later.”
I put the phone back in the base to charge the battery and turn off the ringer. Then I drop on the bed again, grab my bio book and scan through chapter 23, reading a paragraph here and there, just enough so I can fake it if I have to. I’m getting pretty good at that. I’m not getting all As anymore, but I’m passing everything. And nobody else seems to care, so why should I?
Enough. I shove the book in my backpack.
It’s after eleven o’clock. It’s funny how I don’t seem to need to sleep anymore. Or at least not as much. I have so much energy. Too much to toss the beanbag from one hand to the other or lie around on my bed. I could call Marissa. She said I could call her any time, but I bet she’d be pissed if I woke her up. Anyway, I don’t want to talk to her.
I ease my way downstairs. I open every kitchen cupboard, looking for something quiet to eat. I settle on peanut butter and crackers. The peanut butter should make the crackers crunch less.
Why are there so many infomercials on TV late at night? Who’s watching them? Okay, I am, but I’m not so stupid that I’d believe that brown goop is really going to look like hair when some bald guy spreads it on his head.
I find a show that’s already started, dip crackers into the peanut butter jar and try to figure out what’s going on. After a while I get it. The guy with perfect hair and too-white teeth killed his wife for her money. She had figured out what a scuzzbag he was and was going to divorce him to marry her real true love, who she should have married in the first place, but Shiny-teeth had come along and swept her off her feet. True-love knew she had made a new will leaving nothing to the no-good husband. And he knew it had to be hidden somewhere in her house, which had a gazillion rooms. He kept trying to sneak in and find it, plus prove Shiny-teeth was a murderer.
What I don’t get is why she hid the new will in the house. She didn’t have enough time to get a safety deposit box at the bank, but she had enough time to find a really good hiding place at home? Of course, if she’d been smarter, she wouldn’t have married such a jerk in the first place and she wouldn’t have ended up dead, which wouldn’t make much of a TV show.
Just before the commercials, they flash back to the murder. The husband had made it look like a car accident, like she’d lost control of the car and gone over an embankment. Into the river.
I turn off the TV. It’s a stupid show.
There’s a wineglass on a square cork coaster on the coffee table by my feet. I don’t know why, but I reach over and pick it up. The glass is about half full of white wine.
I don’t drink. Brendan does—well, beer sometimes. I hate the smell of beer—it smells like a horse barn. And the taste is like hay and Ovaltine mixed together.
But the wine smells almost...woodsy. I make it swirl around the glass like they do on those snobby cooking shows. And then, without really thinking about it, I take a drink. It burns a little, and I cough as it goes down. But after a moment, warmth begins to spread out from my stomach.
There’s another glass, with a little wine left in it, on the side table next to the lamp. Mark, my dad’s friend, was here earlier, talking about money and stuff with my mom.
I finish that glass.
The wine bottle is on the kitchen counter with a couple of inches left inside. I drink it too. The warmth spreads through my chest and up into my head.
Warm. All I feel is warm.
And I don’t feel anything else.
Seth is waiting for me by the bottom door of the school, just like he said.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I tell him. “I already told you I’m not coordinated, and besides, my hands are cold.”
He slides down off the wall. “At least give it a shot before you give me your excuses.” He’s wearing a striped knit hat pulled all the way down to his eyebrows, and the collar of his jacket is up over his chin, so all I can really see are his eyes and nose.
I pull the beanbags out of my coat pocket. “Okay, show me again. What do I do?”
Seth takes both bags, and I jam my hands in my pockets again because I really am cold.
“Toss the first one up,” he says. “Then just as it goes over the top, toss the second one.” It really does look easy when he does it, but I remember from before when he showed me that it isn’t. “Here. Now you try.”
I throw the first bag up but...argh...it’s too late. I end up with two bags in one hand. “I told you I can’t do it,” I say. Even though it’s freezing, all of a sudden my hands are sweaty. I rub them on my jeans.
“You didn’t drop anything,” Seth says. His eyes kind of smile at me from under the edge of his hat.
I try it again. This time I manage to throw the second bag, but it flies off at a weird angle and lands on the sidewalk at Seth’s feet. “At least you got both bags airborne this time,” he says, bending down to pick it up. “Just keep practicing. Everyone sucks at the beginning. You just need to find your rhythm.”
“Wait a minute. I need rhythm to do this? Forget it then.”
Seth smiles. “Everyone has rhythm, D’Arcy.”
“Not me,” I say. “Remember that hokey square-dancing stuff back in sixth grade?”
“Uh-huh.”
I look down at my boots because it’s still a bit embarrassing. “I flunked.”
Seth leans over until he can see my face. “You can’t flunk square dancing.”
“Yeah
, you can.”
He shakes his head. “That doesn’t count. Square dancing is really just follow the leader to cow music. You can dance dance, right?”
I shrug.
“Sure you can. Look, like this.”
He starts to do some freakazoid dance right there on the sidewalk, kind of hopping from one foot to the other, punching his arms up in the air and bopping his head from side to side with his eyes closed.
“That’s not dancing,” I say, hunching my shoulders against the cold. “You’re being a spaz on purpose.”
He ignores me.
“And there’s no music.”
“It’s in my head,” he says without opening his eyes. “But for you I’ll turn up the volume.” He starts singing, “Oooh baby, oooh.” He’s trying to sing off-key, but the truth is his voice is good, deeper than I would have guessed.
I can’t help laughing. “Stop.” I grab his arm.
He opens his eyes and grins at me. Then he drops his arms. “I bet you can dance better than that.”
“Yeah. I have Mr. Keating for homeroom and he can dance better than that.”
Seth pulls off his hat and runs a hand through his hair. “So you can dance, which means you do have rhythm, which means you can learn to juggle.”
I hold up my hands like I’m going to surrender. “You win,” I say. “I’ll practice.”
He hands the other beanbag back to me. “Remember, up and over,” he says.
I glance down the sidewalk. Three guys from the basketball team are coming toward us. I could make an excuse and go inside or just head up and hang around the upper door. But I don’t. Because I don’t want to.
Seth is telling me how he’s going to have me juggling flaming torches one of these days. The guys pass us. Jaron, Matthew and Adam. They take up the whole sidewalk. Seth and I have to move to let them by.
“Hi, D’Arcy,” Jaron says. He looks at me and then at Seth and then at me again.
