Survived dinner, Jared texted Crashpad, who texted back immediately: Dad says need a ride to the bus depot?
I’ll bet he did, Jared thought. Momz driving me. thanx 2 yr dad.
Dude u shud stay. We conquer Van 2GETHER. BCIT can wait!!!!
When you go 2 film school next year u wont have 2 look 4 a place. U can park with me.
Still sux.
Tired of being the king of couchsurfing.
New show filmed in Van called Continuum. Therez this cop from da future & she gets sent back in time by a terrorist explosion. Theyre filming a block from ur hostel! Check it out! Send me pix!
Jared tried not to be annoyed, tried to remember that the dude had never, not once in his life, had to worry about where he was going to sleep or how he was going to eat. Gonna b busy finding a place before school starts, Jared finally texted. Sorry.
The copz hot, Crashpad texted back. 1 signed headshot & I owe u 4ever.
Kk.
Downstairs, the music suddenly cranked up to a crushing jet-engine rumble, and he could hear his mom laughing overtop of it. Jared moved his dresser against the door. He scrolled through his phone, catching up. From his ex’s Instagram posts, Sarah was still in the women’s wellness centre on Vancouver Island, mocking the morning yoga sessions, the attempt to cure depression with cultural appropriation. Her Twitter feed was dominated by her flame war with some dude arguing about the effectiveness of Canada adopting the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights. The subtweets went on forever.
Not that he was creeping Sarah’s feeds. Not much anyways. Just…checking up.
They hadn’t seen each other in a year. She was his first real girlfriend and his first real breakup. She’d lived next door for a few months with her grandparents, the Jakses. They’d mostly started dating because of proximity. She hated Normcore clothes and dressed like she was living in a perpetual Halloween. She’d mocked him relentlessly for his choice in music, specifically Nickelback. She’d have a field day if she ever found out he listened to “Someday” when he was missing her more than usual. He hadn’t expected to feel this shitty about her for this long. Mostly he hid it, worried he was some defective loser, the pathetic kind of person who couldn’t move on, who played mopey emo music when they knew no one was watching and hated themselves for almost crying every time. It didn’t seem to matter that he was the one who broke up with Sarah, after the craziness they created together got out of hand and Sarah had ended up nearly bleeding out on her grandparents’ kitchen floor. They both came from magical families, but Sarah was pro-magic and Jared wasn’t anti-magic so much as he wanted to avoid the batshit-craziness-that-will-likely-result-in-your-death.
A woman murmured in the bathroom next to his bedroom, her voice amplified by the acoustics. A man’s voice mumbled something and then Jared heard zippers coming undone. The wet smacks of the hookup lasted about two minutes. The bathroom door slammed and he heard them stumble down the hallway.
Someone tried his door. He watched the knob turning back and forth, and then the door shook with a hard couple of shoves.
“Occupied!” Jared shouted.
“Sorry,” a dude mumbled. “Is there another bathroom?”
“Next door.”
“Thanks.”
His mom was right. He probably could have planned his exit better. He was mostly winging it, figuring things out on the fly. A part of him was already gone, but a part of him didn’t want to leave. Cold feet. Staring down his future, Jared knew he had rotten luck and nothing backing him up but snark.
Jared woke when his dresser squealed across the floor as it slid with an invisible push to the wall. His mom crossed the room and dropped a shoebox of confetti on him. The street light shining through the window turned all the paper orange. He switched on the lamp. She swayed, nothing but her Metallica T-shirt draped over her thin frame, and shook like it was winter. Her eyes were black, fully dilated, none of the light-brown irises showing at all.
“Mom?” he said, brushing the confetti off. He recognized Granny Nita’s handwriting on the torn-up bits of letter.
“Did you start writing her or did she write you?” his mom said. “How did you start this little conversation with the woman who tried to kill you with a blood curse? You do remember that, don’t you?”
“I wanted her to know I’m not a Trickster,” Jared said. “That’s all. That’s it. We weren’t planning on writing each other—”
“Lying to me.”
Jared felt the curse in the air, a building charge like thunder grumbling through the clouds before a lightning strike. His arm hair stood up and, suddenly, he shared what his mom was thinking, felt the weight of his betrayal like a stone in his gut. He wanted her out of his head. Out. He wanted his own thoughts, his own feelings. But he felt her soured love, raw like road rash after a spectacular fall. Cold rage over everything. Her fingers twitched. She knew the words that would have him vomiting his guts out by the end of the day. She wasn’t ready to say them, but she wanted him to know that she could.
2
Shortly after dawn that Tuesday, Jared stuffed some of his things into his backpack and picked his way through the debris from the party and around the passed-out partiers, then walked to the highway. Even if his mom came down from whatever she was taking, he didn’t want her driving him to the bus station. Not after that. His head ached. He didn’t want to think about why it ached; he just wanted to get out of there. Walking helped. Stopped the shaking. He didn’t know what his mom was taking that made her that sloppy. The mind-melding thing had only happened with Wee’git. Jared had been pissed when he found out that the Trickster was his biological father and also the snarky voice in his head, a mental peeping Tom who hadn’t actually helped Jared in any meaningful way, except that once. He usually knew what his mom was thinking because she was a no-bullshit kind of person, but he’d never done brain sharesies with her and he didn’t want to do it again. It was next-level messed up. She must have been more enraged than normal. Granny Nita was a big trigger for his mom, which is why he hadn’t told her about the letters. He’d meant to tell her. But there hadn’t been a moment when she wasn’t pissed at him or high or both.
He expected to be holding his thumb out forever, but within a few minutes a guy in a red Dodge Ram pulled over. Jared jogged to the truck. Some death metal band Jared wasn’t familiar with blasted out of the speakers, the subwoofers vibrating the windows. Jared hopped in. The guy had forearm tattoos in black, Gothic ink that read Spawn on the right one, and Die on the left. The whole forty-five-minute ride to Terrace, the guy shouted fishing stories at Jared, bragging about all the sockeye he’d caught. The dude dropped him off at the bus depot an hour before it opened at 7:30 a.m.
Jared sat on one of the concrete dividers in the rain, wishing he’d brought an umbrella. He could sit here until the A&W restaurant next door opened and then drink coffee and wait until the noon bus showed. Or he could visit Phil, who thought Jared and his mom were delusional for believing all the Trickster stuff. Jared considered the next twenty-two hours—a milk run that stopped at every small town between here and Vancouver. He knew his dad would be up, because he didn’t sleep much. Maybe he had breakfast going.
The townhouse wasn’t far away. Jared knocked. He heard his dad shuffling to the door. When he opened it, he was in pyjama bottoms and an untied bathrobe.
“Hey, kiddo. Are you leaving for school already?”
“Hi, Dad. Yup.”
“I got coffee on.”
“Cool.”
His dad had been a big guy before he’d got hurt in an accident at work. Now he was on disability and his back had started to curve. He’d gotten himself off Oxy, but he wasn’t going to physio. No point, he’d told Jared. His new wife, Shirley, was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t like Jared and he wasn’t a big fan of hers. He liked her daughter, though, his stepsister, who was now dating a welder from Prince Edward Island who wanted to take her and her son back home when his contract was up. She
was thinking about it.
After his dad made them a vat of oatmeal, he broke out the cribbage board and they played a few games. Then they watched the morning news. The townhouse had even less furniture than the last time Jared had visited. Phil told him the rent was going up and the landlord was making noises about renovating. Jared tried to remain detached and let other people handle their own problems. They shot the shit until Jared noticed the time.
“I should head ’er,” he said.
“I’ll walk you there,” his dad said.
“No, that’s okay.”
“When am I going to see you again, huh? Gotta squeeze in all my Jared time.”
His dad put on sneakers with a sole that flopped when he walked and a dusty, cracked windbreaker that looked like it would leak in the rain. He put on a cheery smile, swinging his arms hard in an unconvincing show of vigour. At the last crosswalk before the bus depot, he took too long to cross the street and cars honked at them. His dad touched the brim of his trucker’s cap to the honkers. The bus was already parked in a covered area at the depot. Passengers smoked or ate from A&W takeout bags as they waited for the driver.
“You got enough money for the trip down?” his dad said.
“I’m good.”
“Got enough for your ol’ dad?” He tried to smile, but it was shaky. The corners of his mouth twitched.
“I got enough for a week,” Jared said.
“Even a five’ll do,” his dad said, looking at the ground.
Jared gave him a twenty.
“Thanks. Thanks, Jared.”
His dad stayed by him all the way to the door. Once Jared was on the bus, Phil stood under the covered area and waved. Jared waved back. Watching his dad, a still, wet figure in the jumble of departing cars, Jared felt something twist in his gut. He couldn’t name it and it took a while to stop.
The rain clouds disappeared as they moved away from the coast, giving way to blue skies and relentless sunshine. The bus driver droned the name of each town as they approached it. An old woman in the back yelled at the driver to put on the air conditioner. People got on. People got off. Jared drowsed against the window, cold air gusting on his face.
At Fraser Lake, where Mrs. Jaks now lived with her brother, the bus pulled into a Petro-Can gas station. Jared looked around hopefully. He’d called Mrs. Jaks right after he booked his ticket, saying he’d be on this bus at this time and if she happened to be around, and didn’t have anything better to do, they’d have a short layover and he could buy her a coffee or something. She said she’d try, but she didn’t have a lot of energy these days. She’d beaten her leukemia into remission, but it had taken a toll. The driver got out and loaded luggage for a couple of guys. The parking spaces were empty. Jared craned his neck to peek through the window on the other side of the bus, but no one was on the street. No one came out of the gas station.
When he was a kid, Mrs. Jaks used to watch him when his mom went haywire, under the guise of asking him for help with her chores. When she’d gotten sick last year, she’d had to sell her house and move away. Jared missed her. He even missed her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s. Still, it had been awkward between him and Mrs. Jaks after her granddaughter, Sarah, had tried to do magic herself and ended up bleeding all over the kitchen. Even after she’d almost died, she still wanted to do spells with him and he couldn’t go there, so he’d broken up with her. Mrs. Jaks had given Jared her new phone number and address, but she hadn’t answered his calls in the last couple of days, so he guessed he wasn’t really surprised she hadn’t showed.
The bus chugged on. He had a three-hour layover in Prince George. The evening light hung in the air with the familiar tang of rotten eggs from the nearby pulp mills. The sweet smell of money, his dad liked to say. Jared took a walk to stretch his legs, heading to the Superstore, where he bought a two-litre of no-name root beer and bulk nachos. Then he went back and sat outside the bus depot near the smokers, whose stiff body language and refusal to meet anyone’s eyes warned of their lack of interest in socializing. Jared yawned. He munched his nachos slowly and sipped his root beer from the bottle, counting down the hours until he could board the bus and be on his way. He was dreading messages from his mom, but the lone text wasn’t from her number.
Is Mags wit u? the unknown number had texted.
Death? Jared texted back.
No response.
When the time came to board the bus, Jared wandered to his seat near the back, tucked his pack under his knees and pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes. In the seat behind him, a middle-aged woman was loudly explaining into her Bluetooth headset how she’d trained her dogs to shit in her neighbour’s yard.
* * *
—
Dawn was the grey of old socks. Jared made a sticky bathroom wash-up at the breakfast stop. He’d slept on the bus in fits, waking each time they stopped and the lights came on. His reflection looked rough, like he’d been on a weekend bender and wasn’t totally sober yet.
The bus had half-emptied and then refilled with new faces. The driver wandered down the aisle taking a head count. Jared thumbed through his text messages. Crashpad had included Jared in some threads. His old friends were organizing a bush party in the old quarry back in Kitimat this Saturday. Nothing made him feel like a friendless loner like seeing a former buddy’s excited party plans that didn’t include him. He scrolled through the chain of back-and-forth texts anyway. Was it masochism? Nostalgia? Plain old nosiness? Didn’t matter, he decided. He was leaving it all behind him in the most literal way possible.
His cellphone buzzed.
C’est moi. Still need a place? Death Threat texted.
Ya, Jared texted back.
Txt me yr address. Back tomorrow or next day. Txt u l8r wit deets.
Thanks, Death. Hostel @ 1114 Burnaby St.
Wherz ur mom?
Still wit Richie.
Dude is Mr. Anger Issues.
Wow, Jared thought. Pot, meet Kettle. When pissed, Death shook like an excited purse pooch and would launch into a Tourette’s-like spew of profanity usually ending in fuck ya dead, ergo his name. He had a high employee turnover because not many people could stand to work for or with him for more than a single harvest, no matter how well he paid.
Ya, Jared texted.
Say hi to ur mom 4 me.
Ok, he texted, although he knew Death Threat had as much chance getting back with his mom as a turtle had of crossing a six-lane highway intact. All she wanted when it came to Death Threat was to take a dull razor and slowly shave off his skin. His mom wasn’t the kind of woman who stayed friends with her exes, especially one who left her with his drug debts when she was struggling to pay her mortgage on a part-time waitressing gig.
The closer to Vancouver they got, the more the bus went through unsecured wi-fi bubbles that let Jared check his Facebook wall. His mother had posted a picture of his mattress on their front lawn, a giant yellow stain at the bottom.
Thanks, SONNY BOY, his mother had written. I love cleaning up your messes…whatz 1 more pissy diaper?
Three likes and a handful of snide comments about some people’s lack of respect.
Rot in hell you psycho meth freak, he started typing, but the wi-fi bubble popped.
Let it go. Take your own inventory. Forgiveness not resentment, he told himself. Don’t let her rent headspace. What if his mom’s sister was like his mother dearest? No—he wanted a new start. He was definitely not calling the older Moody sister, and certainly wasn’t going to bother visiting.
Try to remember the good things about your mom, he told himself. She’d raised him and kept him safe until their family fell apart. Even when she was in the depths of her own addiction, she’d come for him when he’d been kidnapped by shape-shifting otters. She came, she cursed them and they died.
Her post was gone by the next stop. He unfriended her anyway and went through his list and deleted all the friends and relatives who still talked to her. He wished life was m
ore like Facebook. He wished there was a button that would let him delete everything.
Near noon, with the sun boiling in the centre of the sky, the Greyhound circled around behind the Vancouver terminal and then sighed into its bay. Everyone crowded the aisle. When the door opened, a slug of hot, humid air crawled into the bus. The line edged forward as people pulled their luggage down and trudged out.
When Jared exited the terminal, the sun beat down on the traffic and a SkyTrain as it whined past. He shifted his backpack on his shoulders and plodded across a dusty square with yellowed grass, feeling sweat drip down his neck. He considered not paying for a train ticket, but he didn’t have the kind of luck that would let him get away with it. He plugged the last of his change in and hauled himself up the stairs. The SkyTrain downtown was so crowded, he didn’t have anything to hold on to. He pinballed against the other passengers when the train shifted speeds or directions, earning elbows and glares.
He couldn’t face any more public transportation, so he hiked from Burrard station to his hostel, where a lineup of sweating, cranky people in the lobby glared at the two clerks. Using the hostel’s wi-fi, he texted his dad, Bianca and Crashpad: Alive & ok in Van. Big bright ball in sky. Think it is the sun. Very hot.
Will send rain asap, Bianca texted back seconds later.
Film crew shooting Supernatural near you tonight, Crashpad texted. Attaching map & bus routes. Take lots of pix.
Have you told your gran you’re in town? his dad texted.
Jared’s temple ached when he thought of Nana Sophia, Phil’s mom. Just Sophia, he reminded himself. His dad had his own reasons for getting back on his mother’s good side. Jared wanted to stay out of their relationship. That bridge was burned. The possibility of salvaging what they’d had was nil. Zero. Zippo. When she was his Nana Sophia, Jared had been the centre of her world. When she found out Jared wasn’t her blood, well, that was the end of that: unlike her son, Sophia believed in magic, and in Tricksters. She’d thought that Jared had known what he was all his life, and that he’d been playing her, but he hadn’t known. He hadn’t played her. He didn’t think she was a mark. But nothing he said was going to fix anything, and the attempt would probably just make them both feel worse.
Trickster Drift Page 2
