by Lori Weber
Joe pulls firmly, sliding the elastic the length of my ponytail. A few hairs catch in the rubber and tug my scalp, then my limp hair falls to my shoulders.
“You should never wear your hair up,” Joe says. “It doesn’t suit you.” Then he scrapes back his chair and runs over to the dance floor. I watch him tuck himself in between his cousins.
The shell around me cracks.
I stand alone beside the tables, two rows of dirty dishes stretching toward the window and then beyond it, their reflection floating outside in the dark. I’m there too, standing like a ghost on the other side of the glass.
I don’t hesitate.
I bend down to retrieve my elastic from the floor. Several of my mousy brown hairs are still clinging to it. I pull them free and release them over Joe’s plate, grinning as they sink into a puddle of gravy. I let another one fall into his glass of water, in case he’s thirsty when he returns.
I feel my cellphone in my back pocket. If I call my mother, she’ll come get me, but she’ll hiss at me the whole way home.
So I decide to walk. I know the way and I’m not afraid of the dark. I’ll pretend I’m Jane Eyre, wandering over the moors, breathing the night air deeply into my lungs.
I’ll tie my hair back up as I go.
THE GIRL IN THE PURPLE PANTS
Ijust handed in my composition. I’ve been sitting in class all afternoon, clutching it tightly between my fingers, trying to decide whether I’d actually do it or not, but just two seconds ago, the teacher pulled it out of my hand. I’ll be in trouble now. Teen suicide is a hot topic these days. The school is always parading in experts to lecture us about it. They all say the same thing — to keep the lines of communication open. As if life is that easy. As if there is a permanent two-way conversation going on and all you have to do is keep the signal strong, without interference.
Anyway, it’s done and I don’t care. It already seems like ages ago that I wrote it, curled up in my private corner in the library. The words just fell out of me, as though I were a tree and they were my apples, ripe and ready to eat. I hope the teacher chokes on them. She’s always saying, “Wake up, Steph. You’re on the moon.” And then she’ll roll her eyes and add, “Oh, whatever!” and wave me away. As if that’s doing anything to keep the lines of communication open. My composition is peppered with mournful lines, like The dark sleep of perpetual night will pull its shade over my soul and The cold and lonely nights will be my only companions. I know they’re corny, but they’ll have an effect.
The topic was “Our Wish for the Future.” Our teacher is expecting lots of science fiction stories about personal transport jets, computers small enough to fit onto rings, teleportation, those sorts of things. But the subject of my story is a pink pill, as tiny as a grain of sand, but powerful enough to make me disappear — not forever, but for the next few years, until I’m old enough to move out of my house and start an independent life.
“So, what ’ya write about?” Kayla, my best friend, asks me on the way out of class.
“I don’t know, whatever,” I answer, shrugging her off. I don’t ask what she wrote because I know that it’ll be something lovely and inspiring, like peace and goodwill for all mankind. That kind of thing.
“Want to come over?” she asks.
“No, I can’t. I have too much homework,” I lie. “Thanks, though.”
When I see my geography teacher approaching, I duck into the washroom. She has asked me to stay after school twice this year. Both times she just sat beside me, staring, asking me if everything was all right. She said she could see so much going on behind my eyes in class, when I stared at the board or daydreamed out the window. I wondered if my eyes were like a map to her and in them she saw lakes and rivers of tears, mountains of strength, and valleys of despair — all that poetic stuff. But I gave her nothing. I just kept insisting that everything was fine, until eventually she had to let me go.
Out in the school yard I automatically look for the girl in the purple pants. She came to our school two months ago and she’s impossible to miss. I’ve never seen anyone wear pants that color to school before, and I don’t understand how she gets away with it. We all have to wear uniforms: plain navy skirts with white blouses for the girls, navy pants and white shirts for the boys. The purple of her pants is the color of lilacs, the darker kind. It’s also the same purple as the beautiful satin halter-top dress my mother gave my sister last summer, before my sister turned bad.
The girl with the purple pants never sits still. She’s constantly spinning and twirling. Just now, she’s bouncing out from the middle of a ball game. I watch her pirouette over to where the boys huddle, screaming, “You can’t catch me.” Then she takes off like a gazelle, lifting off the ground with a simple bend of the knees that sends her soaring. She is the freest person I’ve ever seen and I can’t take my eyes off her.
As I walk home, I think of the questions the school counselor will ask me once my teacher hands over the composition. She’ll pick and probe at me, like a lab rat. But the thing is this: if you’ve never experienced what it’s like to walk into a house where everything feels wrong, where the only sound in the absolute quiet is the sound of your mother crying, then I can’t explain it to you.
That day, I tiptoed up the fourteen stairs to find my mother curled in a ball in the corner of my sister’s room, holding one hand very tenderly in the palm of the other. As I approached, I saw that the skin on her index finger was ripped open. A white bone poked through, curving up above her hand like a hook. Behind her, my sister’s desk lamp lay on the floor, its coiled neck curved inward, its plastic head shattered. My sister, who had probably thrown it, was nowhere to be seen.
“Call an ambulance,” my mother whimpered.
It was the very next day that the girl with the purple pants showed up, as if she’d been sent to divert me. Every time I saw the purple, I forgot the fact that my mother was still in the hospital. It had nothing to do with the finger. That was no big deal — a reset and a cast had fixed that. It was her head that needed healing.
And then the dumb composition. Well, I wrote what I wrote and I don’t care. Let them call me in and question me. I’ll tell them nothing. I’ll roll my eyes and look at the ceiling the way I do at home to drive my mother crazy, now that she’s so into discussing her feelings. On the road to recovery, the social worker calls it. I do it when my mother tries to get me to talk about how I feel about the fact that my sister no longer lives with us. She was taken away and put into something called a group home. The social worker who comes to visit gives us progress reports. And she tells my mother to encourage me to express my feelings.
“Don’t let her bottle them up,” I heard her say. “She needs to express herself or she may have problems later on.”
Problems are one thing my parents can do without, now that the problem of my sister and her wild behavior has been taken care of. When the social worker refers to my sister’s progress it makes me think of her as some sort of project, the type I used to do in elementary school, like a pioneer winter scene or teepee or igloo. My sister, the Styrofoam girl, with popsicle stick limbs, and cotton ball hair.
WHEN I GET home from school, my mother tells me that the social worker is coming over tonight to discuss my sister’s situation. It seems that the group home she’s in is what is called a transition house — it’s a stepping stone on the way to somewhere more permanent. One of the options would be for her to come home.
“Do you love your sister?” the social worker, who wears too much perfume, asked me on her last visit. We were all assembled in the living room for a family therapy session. My mother and I sat on the sofa, the social worker on the armchair, with the round coffee table in between us. On it sat a plate of tea biscuits, but my mother had forgotten to make the tea. My father sat on a hard chair beside the door, twirling his tennis racket the whole time, as if he’d jump up any minute and run out to find a court.
We all turned beet red when she said t
he word “love” out loud. It seemed to hover in the air like a sudden dark cloud that appears from nowhere and threatens to drown a picnic. I could feel my parents and myself sitting with our breath sucked in, afraid to release it in case we made a sound by mistake.
I wanted to say yes, but the dead silence in the room prevented me. For a terrible second I thought, what if she’s carrying a tape recorder in her fancy leather purse? What if her intention is to record this session to play back to my sister, to prove to her that she is loved, that we want her back?
All she would hear now was our embarrassed silence.
THERE’S NO WAY I’m going to stick around for tonight’s session. I’ll sneak out before Miss Mazda comes. I call the social worker that because that’s the type of car she drives, a bright red one. There’s nothing discrete about her visits. She might as well hang a sign on our balcony that says, “screwed up family.”
“Can’t stay, Mom. Kayla and I have to finish our group project for tomorrow.”
She frowns, but I know she believes me. I find this odd because chronic lying was one of my sister’s talents. You’d think my mother would be more careful with me.
I watch the red Mazda pull up. As the social worker gets out, I step behind a bush to hide. If she sees me she’ll want to wave me over and rescue me. Maybe she has a lasso hidden in her purse, ready to haul in needy teenagers.
I have about an hour to kill so I decide to just roam the neighborhood. It’s seven o’clock and already dusky. In an hour it’ll be pitch-black. I walk north, to a part of the neighborhood that borders the train tracks across from some clothing factories. It’s a run-down area of chockablock apartment buildings with rusted, sagging balconies. The sidewalks are all cracked, with weeds sprouting up between them.
Just as I’m about to turn home, a door up the street flies open and three screaming kids run out onto the sidewalk, the two smallest in bare feet and pajamas. They run toward me then stop, huddling together, their arms linked around one another like a chain. A few seconds later a woman runs toward them, her arms flapping like wings. The children open the circle to let her in and she draws them to her protectively, pulling their heads toward her chest. She’s crying, and in the light cast by a street lamp I can see that her face is very red and swollen, as though it has been beaten.
A few seconds later a police car pulls up and two officers disappear inside the building. A second car arrives and two more officers rush out to meet the mother and her children on the sidewalk. In what seems like no time at all, the door of the apartment building reopens and the first two officers emerge, supporting a man between them. His head is hung low, as though he’s try-ing to bury it in his neck. The mother and her children instinctively huddle closer when he passes behind them. I can almost feel their arms grasp tighter. The police officers throw the man into the back of their car and drive off while the officers who are sheltering the group begin to lead them slowly back toward their apartment.
It’s only after the circle breaks up that the lamp light catches the pants of the eldest child, illuminating the bright purple. Only it’s no longer the purple of lilacs. It’s the purple of a bruise, a deep dark bruise, the kind that flowers on the skin for a long time after it’s been hurt.
The girl with the purple pants turns her head toward me. Even though the street is dark, her eyes hit mine dead on. She shoots me a long, piercing look. It’s a look that tells me not just that she’s sensed my presence, but that she’s seen me watching her all these weeks. She’s seen me sitting on the school stairs, following her wonderful freedom and lightness, her gazelle-like run and ballerina turns. And she has seen the envy in my eyes. Now, she’s inviting me to see her again, to see her for real for the first time.
As her eyes hold mine on the near dark street I think that this is the clearest moment of communication I’ve ever experienced in my life. There’s not a single drop of static on the line between us.
Next week, in English class, I receive a note from the counselor ordering me to see her immediately. I don’t go to her office reluctantly. I don’t have any master plan. I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know. I’ll tell her my sister is moving back home and I’m scared because I don’t know what this means. There may be more fighting, more late-night shouting, more crying. All the way down the hall, I carry in my mind the picture of the new girl walking off on the dark street, her legs heavy as lead. Walking off to wherever. She never returned to school. Now I know she wouldn’t have had time to buy the school uniform anyway. Her purple pants were her uniform. They gave her the illusion of lightness and freedom, because they were the color of wild flowers.
I turn the handle of the counselor’s door and hear her phony, sweet voice call out, “Come on in, Steph.”
The purple explodes in my mind like a bouquet.
CAPTIVITY
Miranda is sitting on a chair in Mitchell’s living room, waiting for him. He said they were going to the beach, but for the last hour he’s been sprawled out on the floor, watching reruns of The Dukes of Hazard. The small plastic table beside her is covered in junk. Miranda pushes an ashtray out of the way to make room for her towel and it falls, spilling butts and ashes at her feet. She sighs and leans back, hitting her head on the gold Buddha thermometer. The mercury in Buddha’s belly has already risen to eighty degrees. Back home, in Toronto, spring would just be blooming, the crocuses in her parents’ garden opening their lilac faces and the bushes that rim the stone-fronted house sprouting green buds. In a few weeks, the cherry tree would explode with pink blossoms. Miranda used to love that tree, even though the blossoms fell off after a week.
Mitchell’s younger sister, Tillie, is rollerblading up and down the bare wood floors, lifting her arms over her head like a ballerina. She smashes into the coffee table, sending a stack of National Enquirers to the floor. Miranda can hear her mother exclaim that that is where such trash belongs. Her parents’ bookshelves are filled with beautifully bound classics, like Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, and Huckleberry Finn. All orphans, Miranda thinks, kind of like herself, except she has parents. She’s just chosen not to live with them anymore. She now lives with Mitchell, his parents, Tillie and her twin brother Tyler, in Florida more than a thousand miles from home.
“Hey, get outta the way,” Mitchell yells at Tillie, who’s skating in front of the television, blocking the shot of Bo and Daisy. Before coming here, that old show had been Miranda’s only exposure to the American south. She and her sister, Cordelia, used to mimic the sing-songy drawl of the characters.
“Gimme a haul,” Tillie says, swiping Mitchell’s cigarette from his hand.
“You little bitch,” he calls after her. Tillie is thirteen, the same age as Cordelia. Miranda can’t imagine her sister smoking, especially at home. Her parents would have a fit.
The smell of burned toast drifts down the hall and the wail of a country singer is drowned out by yells of “git lost, it’s mine,” along with the banging of cupboard doors. Miranda imagines the calm of the breakfast table back home, the glass jam dish with its wooden spoon being passed around, coffee percolating in its pot.
Tillie skates over Miranda’s toes, snapping her painfully out of her daydream. “Ouch! Mitchell, I can’t take this anymore.” She marches outside and into Mitchell’s old car. She can feel a headache coming on, and it isn’t helped by the way Mitchell is now banging on the windshield.
“Hey, Miranda, come on, open up. I’m sorry, honey, lemme in,” he shouts through the glass. She hates the way he calls her “honey.” It makes her feel like something sticky in a jar.
Mitchell’s parents are watching them from the screened porch. His father is wearing army shorts, rolled up on his bony thighs, and a white undershirt, and his mother is in red shorts and a flowered T-shirt, looking like a fat rose bush. Miranda can’t get over the way she’s always calm and smiling, no matter what’s going on around her. Not like Miranda’s mother, who was always nervous and fussy. She always wanted Miranda to clean her r
oom, to study more and get better marks, to be a good role model to Cordelia.
When she’s punished Mitchell enough, Miranda leans over and pulls up the button on his door.
“What the hell d’ya lock me out for, Randa?” Miranda sticks out her chin as if to say “let’s go” and Mitchell backs out, spitting gravel in the direction of his parents.
Mitchell’s house is only two miles from the south end of the beach, down a narrow road. Every time they’re on it, Mitchell warns Miranda never to walk it alone. It passes through what he calls the black part of town, only he uses the n-word. He tells her she’ll have nowhere to run if anyone tries anything, except into the ditch where poisonous snakes live. Miranda thinks Mitchell must be paranoid, because she’s never seen a living soul in all the times they’ve driven this stretch. She also thinks about how much Mitchell’s use of the n-word would enrage her parents, who like to think of themselves as progressive. They even attended Gay Pride parades, just to show how open they are. They used to encourage Miranda to come along. Her father said being involved in various causes would look good on her cv and make her attractive to the better universities. And her mom’s work as a legal-aid lawyer made her take up many causes that she was always encouraging Miranda to care about, like fighting for refugees’ rights and helping tenants battle their slum-lords.
Mitchell runs up the wooden steps of the pier in his bare feet, his soles immune to the burning heat. Miranda follows in her flip flops. On their first day together at the beach, Mitchell had insisted on carrying her shoes, saying he’d turn her into a true Southerner yet. She’d had to jump from spot of shade to spot of shade cast onto the boards by tackle boxes sitting on the wide railing until Mitchell finally threw her back her sandals. So much for becoming a true Southerner, or a true anything. Miranda has no idea where she belongs anymore, north or south. She feels pulled in both directions, as though she’s laid out on a dissecting board, pinned at either end.
