by Lori Weber
Praise for If You Live Like Me
“Weber writes with a light touch and a keen ear for teen dialogue and concerns.”
CM Magazine
“An entertaining story.”
Kirkus Review
“The interplay between exterior and interior, as well as inclusion and exclusion, are deftly described by Lori Weber in this memorable novel about people and place.”
CCBC, University of Wisconsin–Madison
If You Live Like Me
LORI WEBER
Chapter One
The Rock
THE ROCK. IT’S DOWN there somewhere, and this plane we’re on is speeding us toward it, descending in bumpy stages, as if we’re going down some stairs. My father’s voice is blabbing in my ear. “Wow, Cher, look. It’s an iceberg. An authentic iceberg. Look! Look!” He’s pointing out the window, so excited he’s practically drooling, but I absolutely refuse to look. I promised myself I’d stay detached for the entire trip, and so far, so good. It’s pretty easy to ignore what my father’s saying anyway, since my ears have completely plugged up, the way they always do on planes. His voice is small, as though he’s speaking to me from far away at the end of a long tunnel, like one they might build one day under the Atlantic Ocean to connect North America and Europe.
I shrug and point to my ears to let him know I’m tuned out.
The plane is vibrating like a washing machine on spin cycle. The hinges on the wings are creaking, making a metallic sound that manages to seep into my blocked ear canals. I’ve never been on a such a rough ride, even though I’ve taken lots of planes. Maybe I should have paid attention to the safety video they show before takeoff. With these conditions, there’s a good possibility we’re in for a crash landing. Maybe we’ll all have to slide down the inflatable exit ramp they show in the emergency folder. Except, if we did that here, we’d land squat in the ice-cold water of the north Atlantic, where hypothermia would kill us anyway.
Now my mother, who’s sitting on the other side of me (my parents insisted I sit between them—as if I’m still five years old), is leaning over me, poking her elbow in my ribs. She’s trying to see the iceberg, too, following my father’s finger into oblivion. I swear if we had a mild crash and landed in the water, my parents would just make the best of it, swimming around the iceberg like two playful seals.
“Wow, it’s amazing. So beautiful,” I hear my mom say in an even smaller voice than my father’s.
Maybe I should stop chewing gum—I’ve stuffed a whole package into my mouth—and simply let myself go deaf. That way, I’ll be spared entering my fourth school since finishing Grade Six in Montreal three years ago. My parents think attending so many new schools should make the whole experience easier, but it doesn’t. It just gets harder each time. With each school, there’s a new batch of faces staring at me, a new set of rules, new teachers, new food in the cafeteria, and a new social scene to try to fit into—or watch from the sidelines, which I’ve learned to do pretty well. I’d like to see my parents bounce back two decades in time and cope with it all. Both of them went to the same high school all the way through, but they say that was boring and that my experience is much more challenging. As if I care.
The plane is now shaking so hard my cheeks are vibrating. “It’s the Arctic air currents,” my father calls over my head to my mother, as if she needs reassuring. I peek sideways. She does look kind of green. Ahead of us, the flight attendants are strapped into their backward seats, their hands clutching the armrests fiercely, trying their best to look comforting by plastering Stepford smiles to their faces.
My father tugs my sleeve, pointing out the window again. “You’ll regret it if you don’t look, Cher.” Oh, whatever! I might as well look and get it over with or he’ll never leave me alone. I lean over him and glance outside. It takes me a while to see the iceberg because it’s really just a small white spot in the vast grey ocean that’s rippling and rolling, like a tossed sheet of metal. When I do find it, it reminds me of the last blob of bubbles that floats in a bath, before swirling down the drain. Now, there’s a thought. If the Atlantic had a drain, I could pull the plug and we’d lose our purpose for being here. No water, no fishing. No fishing, no fishing culture to study. No fishing culture to study, no reason for my anthropologist father to be taking up another temporary position to study another dying way of life, this time in Newfoundland. Maybe he’d even get a real job, like a dentist or a butcher, something that involves staying put. Something that wouldn’t be so hard to explain. Whenever people ask why we moved somewhere, I tell them it’s for my dad’s job. Then they want to know what he does. If I tell them the truth—that he’s here to study people to see how all their bad luck is screwing up their lives—it makes everyone really uncomfortable, including me. So, usually, I just say he teaches at the university and leave it at that. I can’t help it if they discover they’re being spied on, but I sure hope they never do.
The closer we get to the iceberg, the more interesting its shape becomes. It’s a large circle at the base, with two peaks that spiral upwards, twisting as they reach for the sky, like soft ice cream. Even from this height, I can see that it’s shining, as though the whole interior is lit by a high-powered light bulb. It is amazing, but there’s no way I’m going to admit it. “What do you think?” my father shouts.
I shrug, then stick my head back in my Archie comic. I only read these to annoy my parents, who have always surrounded me with good books that might broaden my mind. Right now, Archie is broadening my mind. It’s reminding me that, somewhere in North America, everyday teenagers are worrying about what clothes to wear to the mall, or ordering burgers and fries at the local McDonald’s, which is exactly what I’d be doing if I still lived in Montreal. And it’s probably what my old friends are doing right now. It’s been three years since I’ve seen them. Three of the “crucial years,” as my parents like to call adolescence, years when my ideas about life are supposedly forming. This cross-country tour will make me some kind of Canadian teen culture expert, according to my father, who obviously sees me as a mini-him, taking notes and using them when I, too, become an anthropologist one day. That’s what I used to tell him I wanted to be, when I was ten, before this marathon began. And before I caught on that field work involves hiding the truth from people.
The plane is now so low to the water, it looks like we’ll be floating in it any second. A minute later, the water vanishes and we touch down, skidding and hopping along the runway. The entire plane full of people starts clapping, but I let just out a sigh. We’re here, we’re really here. There’s nothing to do but follow my parents to their new house. I have no choice. My body has to go where they tell it to. But that doesn’t mean the rest of me has to follow.
•
THE TAXI RIDE to the new house takes us past a few strip malls that look like every other strip mall I’ve ever seen, with the same big chain stores. At least there’s more here than the last place we lived, in the middle of nowhere on the prairies of Saskatchewan, bread basket of the country. The whole place was like a flat slice of white bread, although my parents wouldn’t agree. A dying way of life is always fascinating to them. Besides, they manage to find something positive in every situation. In Saskatchewan, where my dad was studying the loss of farming traditions, it was the night skies, where the orange and purple stripes would go on for miles, like a large overhead canvas. And every night was just as amazing as the last for them. Their enthusiasm was as endless as the prairies themselves, but mine wore thin after the first couple of sunsets, especially since sundown meant bedtime, which led to another school morning. Kids from that area were bussed to a school twenty-five miles away. They had been sharing a bus since kindergarten and were a pretty close-knit gro
up. Walking onto that bus for the first time was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Now I completely understand the expression “could’ve heard a pin drop,” only in my case, you could have heard a skin cell drop. Mine—shedding all the way down the aisle. The taxi driver is talking non-stop. He wants to know where we’re from, how long we’re staying, if we’ve ever been to Newfoundland before. He’s got a thick accent, and he keeps punctuating the ends of his sentences with “la” as though he’s asking a question, even when he’s just telling us something. Like, “If you gets the weather, she’s some lovely, la?” I decide to stop listening, which isn’t hard since my ears are still blocked and sore. Instead, I concentrate on memorizing the route from the airport to the new house. I take a mental snapshot of the street we’re on—Portugal Cove. Whenever we come to a big intersection—well, one with lights—I take another shot: Elizabeth, Empire, Bonaventure. I’ll need to know them for when I find a way to get out of here and back to Montreal. There is absolutely no way I’m going to do Grade Ten in St. John’s, Newfoundland, even if I have to become an official high school dropout—my parents’ worst fear—to avoid it. It’ll be their fault, not mine. The high school I would’ve attended, if we’d stayed in Montreal, was practically behind our house. My friends and I would go to plays and concerts in its auditorium every year in elementary school, and we’d memorize the layout and even play a game where we’d choose what group of lockers we were going to monopolize one day.
Now, all my old friends are there without me. I’ve lost touch with everyone, except Janna, my best friend and neighbour since kindergarten. My parents want me to invite her out to Newfoundland for a visit. I tried that when we were in British Columbia, but it didn’t work out, and I didn’t dare invite her to Saskatchewan. What would we have done? Watch the wheat grow?
Apparently we can now see Cabot Tower in the distance, off to the left somewhere. “Remember we told you about Cabot Tower, Cherie? The place where Marconi received the first radio signal?” my father asks. I don’t respond. Actually, I remember everything. It happened in 1902. I have a really good memory, which is too bad for me, since there are lots of things that have happened to me in the last three years that I’d rather forget.
I should remind my dad not to call me Cherie. Cher is bad enough. I really hate my name, in all its forms. It’s too cheery and sweet, like maraschino cherries. “I can swing youse up there for no extra cost, if you likes, la,” the taxi driver says.
My mother and father look at each other and smile. “That’s awfully kind, but I think we just want to get to where we’re going,” my mother replies.
“Suit yourselves,” he answers. Then he starts whistling. God, I hope everyone here isn’t this cheerful. I thought that was just a stereotype, the kind you see on TV whenever they show Newfoundland—the happy fisherman, grinning while he mends his nets, the ocean crashing against the shore behind him, his face wrinkled by a thousand lines.
“This is so charming,” my mom says when we hit an older part of town. “Look at all these colours.” I can tell that she is already mapping out a new quilt in her mind. My mom designs landscape quilts.
Everywhere we’ve ever lived has been immortalized in cotton. This year, we’re renting a house from a family that has gone away on sabbatical for the year. They told us it was in the old part of town, which is just what my parents wanted. No suburbs for them. They wanted the authentic St. John’s experience. Saltbox houses, that’s what the family said the houses in this area are called. They are kind of rectangular, but it’s as though the saltbox is turned sideways so that it’s the narrow side that faces the street. Some of the houses look so thin you could open your arms and hug the whole front.
“Oh, my goodness. Look, Cher,” my mother gasps, as we turn onto Gower, the new street. “This street is amazing. Pink and yellow, blue and green. It really is just like in the pictures. Don’t you love all that colour?” She stares straight into my eyes when she says the last bit. I know this is a jab at me because I’m dressed all in black, with bits of metal showing, like on my belt and around my neck. I started doing this last year, just before we moved to Saskatchewan. At that point we were living in British Columbia, in Canada’s only desert—Osoyoos. It’s not that much was dying there, except the vegetation, but it was an excuse to spend a year in a dry climate for my mother’s rheumatism.
She made a dozen Rocky Mountain quilts that year, capturing their white peaks and colourful wildflower slopes. My father taught at the Okanagan College and researched the local First Nations people, the Nk’Mip, on the side.
That was a pretty hard year. I tried to fit in, at first, maybe more than I had tried the previous year in Murdochville, a tiny copper town in the Gaspé area of Quebec. I even joined the school band, on flute, but it didn’t help much. And, once I knew I’d be leaving soon, there didn’t seem to be any point. It’s hard in a small town anyway. At first kids are all really excited to get to know you, because you’re new and different. But after a while, they get over it, and you just kind of become a nobody. I mean, why would someone swap a best friend that they’ve had for years for someone who just stepped off a plane?
I remember what my mom said to me when I stopped wearing anything that wasn’t black. “You’re not going to mix in if you go around all in black, especially with your dark hair. People in these small places will think you’re a witch.”
I just smiled. “Cool. That was just the effect I was going for. Thanks, Mom.”
The taxi pulls up outside the new house. It’s tall, narrow, and yellow, with red geraniums in the window boxes that are so bright they look like they’re about to explode. “Good day, now,” the taxi driver says, as he plunks the last of our suitcases on the narrow sidewalk. My parents have that excited aura they always have just before we enter a new place, like kids about to be unleashed in a toy store. My father is fishing the key out of his wallet, and my mother is practically bouncing up and down behind him. I cross my arms and stand a few feet back, staring at my black nails. I peek at the house next door and see the upstairs curtain move. A tall, dark figure steps back from the window. Big surprise—I’m being gawked at already.
•
MY PARENTS HAVE gone to pick up the car we’ll be leasing and some groceries. I’m upstairs, hanging out in my new room. I can tell it was a boy’s room because there are still some basketball and hockey pictures tacked up in the cupboard. Whoever he was, he had the good sense to pull down whatever was up on his actual walls, probably posters of Kevin Durant and Sidney Crosby. Or worse, Kiss, or the latest pop music queen.
It only takes me twenty minutes to unpack. That’s because my entire wardrobe fits into two drawers and two inches of cupboard space. I left most of my clothes behind in Montreal, hanging in the cupboard, along with the rest of my life. I’d have outgrown most stuff by now, and I don’t buy many new clothes’cause I know I’ll be packing up at the end of a year.
Luckily, the new room has a CD player, even though it’s a crappy one, the kind a twelve-year-old would own, with a powder blue cover and two puny speakers. I put on my favourite Marilyn Manson CD and sing along. This song is perfect for the moment because Marilyn is singing about heavy winds blowing and snowing and people wondering which way they’re going—like me.
My parents can’t stand his music, or him. They keep telling me that he named himself after a brutal killer, Charles Manson, a monster who killed a woman who was seven months pregnant. But I always remind them that he also named himself after one of their favourites, Marilyn Monroe. My mom says that Marilyn was chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine, just because she had a great body, but lacked confidence in her intelligence and couldn’t fight back. So, it’s symbolic, I’ve tried to tell them. The soft and vulnerable along with the hard and menacing, the two sides of human nature, yin and yang and all that. But they don’t buy it.
I haven’t had the nerve to sit on the bed yet. It’s a boy bed, captain-style, with three drawers under
neath, which I don’t dare open. They’re probably full of underwear and old socks. How would that help me forget that I have to sleep in the bed of some strange guy who’s probably a pimply geek? Even the desk beside the bed is one of those tacky boy ones, with a map of the world printed into the wood. I can tell it’s old because Yugoslavia is still one long green country, and the Soviet Union stretches across the top in a big yellow blob. I find Newfoundland, in the upper right-hand corner of North America, and trace the route I’ll be taking home with my finger. It seems so close on the map, just a short hop over the ocean to Nova Scotia and then two inches to the left, down the St. Lawrence River to Montreal. Now, if only I really had to travel five inches instead of hundreds of miles. Wouldn’t that save me a lot of trouble? Here I am, stuck in a totally foreign place, which is bad enough. But it would have to be somewhere that is completely cut off from the rest of the world by an ocean. No land bridge or close spot to row a boat across, except up near Labrador, and how the hell would I get there?
I place my thumb over the pink dot of this island and press hard, twisting, the way you would to crush a mosquito.
The sound of barking cuts into the music, drawing me to the window. I look down to see a guy setting out from the house next door with a huge black dog on a leash. The dog is pulling so hard, the guy’s arm is stretched out in front of him, completely horizontal. They walk down a ways and then suddenly vanish, as though they’ve been sucked into a black hole. I keep watching to see if they’ll reappear, but they don’t. Pretty strange!
Next, I spend some time trying to make the room my own. You have to do that if you live like me, even if you’re only going to be staying a short while. It’s too creepy being surrounded by someone else’s things, like being permanently stuck in a bed-and-breakfast.
I open up my bag of room stuff. It’s a pretty cool assortment of weird things. First, there’s my scarf collection, purchased at secondhand stores, like the Salvation Army and Goodwill. They’ve got crazy things on them, like poodles and skeletons. I tape them up on the walls and drape them over lamp shades, adding a bit of ambiance. Then there’s my costume jewellery collection—necklaces with gaudy pink and orange beads the size of fruit, and brooches with bursting flowers—that I hang from whatever nails are sticking out of the walls. My Hollywood postcards are all stuck together, but I manage to separate them and stick them up around my bed. I have old movie stars like Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, and Bette Davis. Last but not least are my Japanese fans. These I spread out and tack to the wall above my dresser. The kimonoed women look pretty content, with their delicate white faces and serene smiles, but that’s because they don’t know they’re on some middle-of-nowhere island in the north Atlantic.
