Under the Moon

by Deborah Kerbel

  Age of majority? Remainder of assets? Disposal of remains? I rise to my feet slowly, praying my wobbly knees will keep me up. “Um, hello? Can you guys please stop talking about me as if I’m not here and tell me what’s going on?”

  Dad reaches for my hand and pulls me back down into my chair. “Sweetness, it means that you’re pretty much Aunt Su’s sole heir. She’s left all her stuff to you. Including her ashes.”

  My pulse is starting to throb in my ears. Aunt Su left everything she had to me?

  Before I can say another word, Mom’s on her feet, one hand on her bony hip and the other wagging a long, beet-coloured fingernail at the lawyer. “This is insanity! Did you have a hand in drafting this document? Su has always been a questionable influence on a young, impressionable girl. How could she possibly have thought this was a good idea? What does a fifteen-year-old need with a rundown cabin, a stash of marijuana, and a stack of smutty books?”

  “Calm down now, Lisa,” Dad says. “Mr. Duffy here is just following Su’s instructions.”

  “Instructions? From a lunatic? Please! There should be a law against this kind of thing!”

  Everything? Aunt Su left everything she had to me?

  The room is suddenly unbearably small. Smaller than a darkroom. Smaller than a pomegranate jar. Smaller than a blink of a dream. Too small to do anything but drop my head into my hands and bite back another wave of tears while my parents fight over Aunt Su’s last words.

  As for me, I don’t want any of her bequeathing stuff.

  I just want my aunt back.

  THREE

  Fact #1: The stucco ceiling in my bedroom has nineteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two tiny bumps of paint sticking out of it.

  Fact #2: Only a pathologically bored individual would know something like this.

  Fact #3: Lately, I absolutely hate being me.

  Sorry, did I mention that last one already?

  With a sigh verging on a scream, I flip my pillow over onto the cool side and stare out my open window. The night breeze blowing on my face smells sweet — like dying roses and wet grass. A pale sliver of a new moon shines above a grey bank of clouds. So thin, it looks like a strong wind could snap it in half. It’s just a hint of a moon — but it’s enough. Like a tease of something bigger and better on the way.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, bringing swirls of colours and shapes rising up behind my lids. And then I force myself to breathe really slowly, like people in movies do when they sleep.

  Long breath in … long breath out … long breath in … long breath out …

  But after a few minutes that just feels dumb. Flipping myself over the other way, I squeeze my eyes harder and conjure up a virtual barnyard of imaginary animals. Sheep, pigs, cows, horses … you get the picture. And then I start counting. But by the time I hit a thousand, I know it’s hopeless. Sleep! Sleep now! I silently command my body, doing a near-perfect impersonation of General MacArthur. But of course, my body, doing its best imitation of General MacArthur’s stubborn daughter, doesn’t listen.

  Zut!

  I must be the only person on the planet to have elaborate and recurring narcoleptic fantasies.

  Damn it! What’s wrong with me? Opening my eyes again, I roll over and snap on my bedside lamp.

  3:09 a.m.

  If you’ve ever been awake at this time, you would know that it’s the ugliest, loneliest time on the clock. It always comes just after the moment when you feel like your brain is going to crack open from boredom. This is the time when all the most heinous parts of your life get replayed through your head in high def. The time when each and every moment of self-doubt is magnified through a super-power optical zoom lens. The time when loneliness starts to tip towards insanity and you begin to believe what you want most in the world is to fall asleep and never wake up again. This time of night is the absolute bottomless black hole of the clock.

  But of course, you wouldn’t know that, because you’re normal enough to always sleep through it. Well, not me. As a nocturnal mutant, I get sucked straight into the black hole night after night after night.

  In books and movies, it’s pretty obvious that the only characters who don’t sleep are freaks of nature like vampires or monsters, or superheroes who can only fight crime under the cover of darkness to keep their true identities a secret. Sometimes, to keep myself from tipping over that edge, I try to think of myself as a freak without a movie deal. It doesn’t usually work. Lately, I’ve been wondering if it would help to reach out to other freaks of nature around the world and bond over our common crap-sucking plight. I mean, there have to be other sleepless freaks out there like me. I know about albinos and giants and hairy-faced people. But I’ve never heard of anyone else who doesn’t need sleep. So I Googled it this afternoon after we got home from Mr. Duffy’s office to find out a bit more, but that turned out to be a major mistake. Because guess what I learned?

  Give up?

  You’re thinking that sleepless people turn into cranky, red-eyed Nyquil addicts, right? Not the worst kind of fate, comparatively speaking. But no, I learned from my Google search that human beings positively, inevitably, without exception die without sleep. In fact, from what I read on something called the National Sleep Research Project, it seems like the absolute longest anyone has ever gone without sleep has been eighteen days, twenty-one hours, and forty minutes.

  Eighteen days!

  Which pretty much explains why there are no other sleepless freaks like me to search out and bond with. They’re all dead. And, apparently, pretty soon I will be too. I’m going on ten completely sleepless days now. So at this rate, I have just over a week left to save myself from an untimely demise.

  I know what you’re thinking: you’re wondering why I don’t just quit the complaining and take some Nyquil already. Right? Well, I tried that once. A few years back, Aunt Su took pity on me and sliced one of her sleeping pills in half and let me have it. But in the end, that little half pill didn’t help me sleep. It just made me feel really jittery and sick.

  Still, I know if Aunt Su were here, she could help me. She always did, you know. Well, except for the sleeping pill thing. I swear, she was the only person on the planet who could keep me from feeling like a Darwinian case study. She used to tell me that I was just an average, everyday, regular kid with a body that didn’t like to follow the rules. “I’ve never been a fan of toeing the line myself, Lil,” she used to say. “You’re just taking after your aunt.”

  Man, I miss her. The pomegranate jar-of-death is sitting on my desk, awaiting its fate. According to Dad, I’m supposed to take some time and think of just the right place to scatter the ashes. Whatever that means. “You knew Su better than anyone else, Lily,” he said on our way out of Mr. Duffy’s office. “That’s why she asked you to do it. Think of the things in life that made Aunt Su happy and then try to imagine where she’d want to spend the rest of her days.”

  Great, not much pressure there!

  “But, Dad, what if I choose the wrong place?”

  “There is no wrong place, Sweetness. Whatever you decide will be right.”

  “I don’t get it,” I moaned. “Why didn’t she just tell me where she wanted to be scattered in the will?”

  He just shrugged. “Guess she wanted you to figure it out for yourself.”

  Ugh. Don’t you just hate it when old people talk like that? Suddenly, there’s a panicky feeling of restlessness sneaking over my skin. I kick the sheet off my legs and pull myself out of bed. A soft breeze blows over my bare shoulders, sending an army of delicious goosebumps marching up my back. Overripe roses must be the sweetest smell the universe has ever produced. I’m telling you, if somebody could figure out how to bottle that smell, they could spray it through the air vents in office buildings and save tons of cash on corporate-sponsored anger management sessions. I breathe in a double lungful and hold it tightly inside, waiting for the calm to come over me. But I’m still feeling so wound up by what happened at the lawyer’s of
fice earlier this afternoon that not even the sweet summer night air can soothe away my stress. Aunt Su’s last words have been running through my mind all day like the skipping chorus from a scratched up CD.

  I do hereby bequeath the remainder of my worldly possessions to my niece …

  Worldly possessions. What on earth am I going to do with a closetful of funny clothes, a rusty moped, and a container of ashes? Of course, I’m interested in that collection of racy novels. Not being a total naïf, I think I have a pretty good idea of what I might find inside. But still, it would be cool to flip through the pages and see just what Mom’s been keeping me away from all these years. Problem is that Mom has the only key to the cottage. And she’s forbidden me from going over there until she’s had a chance to sort through Aunt Su’s stuff. I know she’s none too thrilled about the kinds of things I’ve just inherited. And it probably doesn’t help that those things all happen to be located next to the lake. Mom’s always been nervous around water. She has this totally irrational fear of drowning. When she was little, she knew someone who drowned in the lake not too far from the Docks. Because of that one accident, she freaks out whenever I go anywhere near the water. I really think she’d make me wear a life preserver in the bathtub if she could. Truly. Just add it to the long list of reasons why she tries so hard to keep me away from Aunt Su’s lakeside cabin.

  Padding across the room, I sit down on the narrow ledge beneath my window. Outside, the silver moon is slicing its way through the dark sky. Like a random cut from a sharpened blade. I have a massive urge to go outside and get a better look at it, talk to it, ask it for directions.

  Excuse me, sorry to bother, but I couldn’t help noticing how perfect your view is from up there. You wouldn’t happen to have seen any other Big Benders who’re awake like me, would you?

  All these sleepless nights are obviously starting to mess with my head. Yeah, I have to get out of here or I’m going to lose it completely. Normally, I do everything humanly possible to avoid the company of people. My social skills are embarrassingly deficient, and I always seem to say the wrong thing, no matter how hard I try. So usually I just don’t try. But when the Reaper’s knocking at your door, you get a little desperate. And truthfully, the idea of dying alone in my room is majorly depressing. My eyes flick over to the clock.

  3:16. I need to find someone else in this village who’s awake like me. Or I’ll go insane.

  Oops, did I just say “village”? See what happened? You wrestled it out of me. Okay, so, technically we’re a village, not a town. Big Benders don’t like to fess up to that little fact, so don’t tell them you heard it from me. They like to dream big around here. Especially the young ones. For most kids my age, this place is like Alcatraz: a remote prison they’ve been planning their escape from since the moment they could walk. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, New York — these cities are the ultimate goals. And if they could just make it across the frozen, shark-infested waters, they’d be free.

  Me? I have no problem with village life. In fact, I kind of like it. The great thing about living in a village is that you have a lot of space. Everything’s big. Big houses, big properties, big sky, big spaces, big dreams. The bad thing about living in a village is that not much happens in those big spaces and most everyone’s big dreams eventually dry up and turn to dust. But since I’m probably the only teenager in this place who dreams of staying put, that last part isn’t much of a problem for me.

  It only takes me a couple of seconds to pull on a hoodie and a pair of sneakers. Jumping down from the second floor isn’t nearly as hard as you’d think. There’s a soft, thick patch of overgrown grass right below my window that helps break my fall. Good thing I haven’t surrendered to my mother’s command that I get off my butt and mow the lawn before the neighbours start complaining. Quel joke! As if any of our neighbours would care about a thing like that. General MacArthur is the only one around here who gives a rat’s ass about having a manicured lawn.

  It feels good to be outside. The air is warm and thick and damp and soft on my skin — like walking through a bowl of mushroom soup. I pull off my hoodie so I can let my bare arms soak up the night air and scamper around the house up to the main road. Ever take a walk by yourself at night? The sounds are totally different than what you hear during the day. No traffic, no people, no birds singing. Just night noises. I can hear the leaves swishing above me in the trees. The crumply crunch of the gravel under my shoes — like I’m walking across a big plate of cereal.

  Grape-Nuts, I think.

  Invisible crickets chirping from every direction. An owl hooting from a nearby tree. The flap of wings over my head and then a flurry of small, dark shapes against the darker sky.

  Bats. Awesome.

  I can’t see much as I walk along the road, but to tell you the truth I don’t really have to. When you’ve walked the same road every day for fifteen years, you commit every turn and bend to memory. Believe you me. After about twenty minutes of walking, I hear a rustling noise beside me. My heart pauses. A moment later, a large, round raccoon ambles out in front of my path. Its giant, glowing eyes find mine. I suck back a deep, calming breath and wait for it to pass.

  Just a raccoon, Lily. Don’t get so scared over nothing!

  As soon as my heart starts up again, I keep walking. There just has to be somebody else awake. Doesn’t there?

  After a couple more kilometres, I start to pass some buildings. The first one is Big Bend’s Women’s Hockey Association — the brown, boxy arena where every little girl in our village dreams of becoming the next Hayley Wickenheiser. Then there’s the Goodwill store and the Salvation Army store — crouched over the sidewalks and facing each other off across the main road like a pair of fat, old sumo wrestlers. Then the infamous Derry’s Taxidermy and Cheese Shoppe — during peak season, the massive stuffed moose outside always draws a steady crowd of camera-toting, cheddar-loving cottagers. Even the local villagers can’t resist that thing. If you grew up in Big Bend, your parents have a picture stuffed in an album somewhere in their basement of you (with siblings, if you’ve got ’em) riding Derry’s humungous dead moose. Guaranteed.

  After a couple more minutes, I arrive at the main strip. But of course,withpeakseasonpast,allthe businessesalong hereare dark. After Labour Day, Beachside Books closes at four. Beachy Keen closes at six. Dixie Lee’s Ice Cream and Beer Shoppe (yes, we villagers love to use the word “shoppe”) closes at nine. Henry’s Variety Store shuts down at eleven. The gas station locks up the pumps at midnight. The Spotted Dick (a damp, creaky old British pub) shuts its doors at one. And, yeah, that’s pretty much it for our main strip. Told you we’re small. But definitely not without charm.

  And then I see something up the road that makes my heart skip with hope. I stop in my tracks and stare.

  Why didn’t I think of it before? Really, it’s so obvious. The only place in town where somebody else is guaranteed to be awake like me.

  The big, bright orange sign perched on top of our town’s shiny new drive-thru burns up the night sky like a flaming piece of cheese (thankfully, with no stuffed dead animals alongside).

  McCool Fries.

  I aim my sneakers toward it and start jogging.

  FOUR

  Last April, just before the start of the summer season, our village decided to announce to the world that it was ready to join the big leagues of Canadian tourist destinations. How did it do that, you ask? Elementary, my dear Einstein. By building our very own concrete symbol of modern industry and consumerism, of course.

  Yes, I’m talking about a drive-thru snack stand.

  And not just a regular old drive-thru: the mayor of Big Bend commissioned a twenty-four-hour drive-thru complete with neon signs, digital menus, and a billboard on Highway 8. Before she died, Aunt Su bet me how long it would take for the drive-thru to go out of business after the tourists and cottagers left for the season. She gave it six months. I gave it four.

  Guess no matter what happens now, I win b
y default.

  So here I stand in front of the shiny silver drive-thru speaker, feeling like more of a freak than ever before.

  Walking through a drive-thru at the ugliest hour of the night. Why does everything about me have to be so wrong?

  I clear my throat and lean close to the microphone. “Um, hello?”

  Silence.

  I try again, a little louder. “Hello? Anyone there?”

  After a couple of seconds, there’s a scratchy reply — a voice that sounds like it’s crawling out of a yawn.

  “Yeah, thanks for choosing McCool Fries. Can I take your order?” Whoever owns the voice sounds surprised and a bit annoyed. Crap, is there a camera on me? Can he see that I don’t have a car? My eyes jump around in the darkness, looking for a hidden lens. Yeah, this is probably a serious violation of the drive-thru bylaws. Maybe I should leave.

  “Hey, are you going to order something or not?” demands the voice.

  My stomach growls painfully as the smell of french fries blows under my nose.

  “Um, yeah, okay, I’ll have a large fries and a small Coke.”

  I swear I hear the sound of an exasperated sigh through the static of the speaker.

  “That’ll be four twenty-five. First window.”

  Suddenly, I’m regretting this decision. Is this guy going to give me trouble because I woke him up and I don’t even have a car? Digging some coins out of my jeans pocket, I walk forward to pay. My palms are sticky with nerves.

  The guy slides the window open just over halfway. I can’t help myself — I have to stare. He’s got the oddest set of features I’ve ever seen grouped together on one face. His eyes are set widely apart; his nose is long and angular; he’s got a birthmark on his cheek, a dimple on his chin, and a top lip that’s slightly fuller than the bottom one; and his head is covered with a shaggy mop of brown curls. Strangely enough, the result is a face so good looking that it almost hurts my eyes to look at him. I can hear his music playing softly from behind him — vintage Oasis. He stares at me through narrowed lids. It kind of looks like he’s just woken up from a deep sleep and the lights are giving him pain. He must be close to my age, but I don’t remember ever seeing him in school, which is really bizarre because it’s one of those small schools where everybody knows everybody else. His sleepy eyes travel down to my feet and then slowly back up to my face.