All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  “I don’t know, why? What are you doing? You’re leaving?”

  “I’m leaving now soon, yeah.”

  “I’m probably going to leave soon too,” I said.

  Everyone around us was heckling Holly to buy another round of break-opens. They were digging through their pockets looking for money to huck in.

  “Want to walk together?” Kris asked.

  Blue Öyster Cult ended and the joyful acapella opening to “Fat Bottomed Girls” filled the bar. The woman from the bathroom whooped and held an empty shot glass in the air.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Okay, I’m going to grab my coat.”

  We pushed through people smoking outside the front door and walked quickly up the street. It’d been warm that afternoon but the temperature dropped when it got dark and now the sidewalks were slicked with invisible ice. At the top of the street my foot shot out from beneath me; Kris caught and righted me.

  “Nearly lost you,” she said.

  She had a practical coat, puffy pockets of synthetic down sheathed in slick waterproof material. I held tight to her sleeve, both of us skating along the sidewalk to her house. She unlocked her front door and we stumbled up the steps to her third-floor bedroom.

  We dropped our wet winter coats on the bedroom floor. I pushed her onto her bed and when she reclined, I undid her pants. She had bike grease caked around her fingernails. She flipped me over and held my hands over my head. We made out and ground our crotches together through our pants for a long time before stripping all our clothes off.

  * * *

  The next morning I woke up hungover in Kris’s tidy bedroom. I had a voice acting gig later that day. A thirty-second spot for a mobile home vendor with a big lot on the outskirts of town. I poked Kris in the ribs and felt the muscle stretched around her narrow rib cage.

  “Do you have the time?” I asked quietly.

  She opened her eyes, skimmed a hand beneath the blankets and shook her phone free from the sheets. It was only eight-thirty in the morning, hours before I had to be at the recording studio to read copy about a blowout sale on units with built-in compost toilets.

  “Should I make us coffee?” Kris asked.

  When we got downstairs, Frankie was already in the kitchen making themself a smoothie. They were shaking a bag of frozen mango chunks into the blender in pink terry-cloth shorts. They weren’t wearing a shirt and I had to stop myself from staring at the triangular patch of thick curly hair on their skinny chest. Frankie’s laptop was open on the table. They were streaming CBC’s The Sunday Edition.

  Kris changed the filter in the coffee percolator. She peeled the plastic lid off a big tin of supermarket-brand coffee and shook grinds into the basket without measuring. Viv would not have approved. It was bright in the kitchen. I thought how nice it was not to be waking up alone at Clarke Avenue.

  “Sorry,” Frankie said and pressed the button on the blender. They pulsed it in a series of short bursts and then opened the lid to pour in more almond milk.

  “Oh, this came for you.” Kris held up a silver package with a mailing label stuck to the front. “What is it?”

  Frankie stared at the package; they lifted the lid off the blender, stuck a finger in and tasted the smoothie.

  “Something you ordered online, looks like it’s from the States,” Kris said, shaking the bag. “Something light.”

  “Oh!” Frankie snatched it from her.

  “What is it?”

  They ripped the packing open: “This!”

  It was a butt plug with three feet of fake hair hanging off the end. The tail was pastel purple. Frankie dragged their fingers through it, untangling it.

  Kris lifted a cast-iron frying pan off the stove and put it in the sink.

  “I mean, it’s kind of a joke,” Frankie said.

  “Expensive joke,” Kris answered.

  “Don’t put dish soap on that,” Frankie said.

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  Frankie stuffed the toy back into the ripped packaging and tossed it on the table.

  “It’s just really hard to get them seasoned properly.”

  “I know. I know how to wash it. So it’s kind of not a joke?” Kris asked.

  “It wasn’t that expensive. Do you want some smoothie?”

  Kris shook her head.

  “Stacey? Do you want some smoothie?” Frankie took down a second glass and held the lip of the blender over it. “Lots here.”

  “I’m just asking,” Kris said. “No judgement.”

  “You can taste it first if you want, spoons are in there,” Frankie said.

  I wasn’t expecting to be included in the conversation. “It looks good, I don’t need to taste it first,” I told them.

  “Big glass?” they asked.

  “Please.” I nodded.

  After breakfast I went upstairs and collected my coat from Kris’s bedroom. When I came down she was waiting in the porch to say goodbye.

  “That was fun,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Coats were hung three and four deep on a row of hooks by the front door. When I stood up from tying my shoes, I brushed against a parka and a landslide of coats fell to the floor.

  “Don’t worry about that.” Kris picked the coats up and draped them over her arm. “We should hang out again.”

  “Yeah.” I knew what was coming. Frankie was tidying in the kitchen, the radio show had ended or maybe been turned off and I was sure they could hear everything.

  “So maybe I’ll message you?” Kris said.

  “Well, my phone is kind of broken.”

  “I think I have you on Facebook, though, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I just don’t have a phone right now.” I could see she was trying to work out what I was saying. “So I can’t really look at Facebook right now. But I’m going to get another phone, soon. Probably tomorrow, I’m working today and tonight.”

  “So message you on Facebook?”

  “Yeah.”

  I opened the door and stepped into the street. I wished I’d kissed her before I left.

  * * *

  On the day of the search, I’d looked over Sergeant Hamlyn’s shoulder and seen the young cop kneel in front of the braided rag rug in the living room. Viv had made the rug years before, at an all-day workshop at the Anna Templeton Centre. She gave it to me when I moved into the house by the church because Courtney liked sleeping on it. It was coated in orange fur: when you stepped on it puffs of fur rose up and floated away.

  The young cop had laid all our electronics out on the rug. Why there? Everything was cluttered together on the lumpy oval: my laptop, phone, and flash drives; Holly’s external hard drive; one small piece of paper — maybe a receipt?

  “What do you know about the girls who lived here before?” Sergeant Hamlyn asked.

  “Nothing, I don’t know them.”

  Hamlyn was making notes in his coil-bound notebook. He wrapped his hand around the back of the book and tilted it towards himself so I couldn’t read what he was writing. The gesture seemed childish to me.

  “You know their names,” he said.

  “Just Natalie Swanson, I don’t remember the other one.”

  The young cop lifted a heavy camera out of a black, soft-sided bag. He took a wide shot of the electronics on the hairy mat and then leaned down for a close-up of each one.

  “You met them both?” Hamlyn asked.

  “Like, very briefly.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, in this house. When we were moving in.”

  The young cop collected the flash drives and another cop crossed the room and took them from him. The second cop walked out of view and I heard the front door close.

  “Don’t worry about him.” Hamlyn said. “You stay focused on what we’re doing here.”
r />   I looked Hamlyn in the face. His skin was dry; the wrinkles around his mouth were collecting dusty bits of dead skin.

  “Why were they still here?” he asked.

  I could hear the young cop moving around and tried hard not to look in his direction.

  “It was a little bit before, a few days before we moved in. Holly — we bought some furniture off Natalie, a bedroom set.”

  Hamlyn made a note in his pad, and I took the opportunity to look over his shoulder at the young cop, who was sliding my laptop into a clear plastic bag. He took a stack of multicoloured sticky notes out of his pocket. I could see other uniformed cops walking back and forth outside the living-room windows, squeezing the walkie-talkies on their shoulders and craning their necks to speak into them.

  “And the other one?” Hamlyn asked.

  The young cop slapped a lime-green sticky note on the bag with my computer in it and wrote on it with a pen. He turned his wrist to look at his watch and made another note.

  “I didn’t talk to her, she was just on her way out when were moving in.”

  “What did you talk to Natalie Swanson about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Think about it.” Hamlyn was holding his pen above the notebook.

  “The bed, I guess. Holly tested out the bed.”

  * * *

  When we were twelve and thirteen Viv and I spent most weekends at the mall. On this particular Saturday, like most Saturdays at that time, me, Viv and Heather were hoping to run into Christian Sharpe and his friends. The boys were three years older than us, already in high school. We’d met them at an all-ages punk show in the church hall down the street from my house.

  They were always mid-scheme when we found them. Once we bought a package of army-man action figures with parachutes from the dollar store and threw them one by one over the railing by Victoria’s Secret, aiming for people’s heads. The army men had spiralled and then drifted serenely away from their targets, landing on their sides on the tiled floor.

  Another time the boys superglued a toonie to the floor in the food court and we watched people trying to pick it up for hours. They would glance around, stoop, and pick at it, becoming more and more confused and frustrated. They’d straighten up, red in the face, and half-heartedly kick at it before walking away.

  Next we ripped open a condom package and glued the greasy plastic tube to the floor. We giggled at the people who gave it a wide berth, some shaking their heads with a renewed disdain for the world.

  Christian got banned from the mall for two months because he used a screwdriver to undo the top of a bubble gum machine and scooped gum balls into his bookbag. He saw the security guard coming and jogged out of the mall with his knapsack flapping open. We watched it all happen, crowded around a four-seater on the opposite side of the food court. We met him down in the parking garage.

  It was dim in the parking garage. The ceiling and walls were made from lumpy concrete that looked like oatmeal, the air smelled of gas. When we found Christian his hands were streaked with rainbow dye. We passed his open bookbag around, everyone taking out a sticky fistful of gum balls. They were coated in grime from the bottom of his knapsack and the dye had worn off in places, leaving them mostly grey. We all stuffed our cheeks with the gum and chewed. The boys let sugary spit dribble down their chins. I saw Christian and Viv looking at each other, their faces distorted by lumps of gum moving in their chipmunk cheeks. Later that summer they made out in Anger Management starring Jack Nicholson and were briefly a couple. Viv had lots of boyfriends when we were teenagers; I never dated anyone until university. I was always sitting beside her in the movies, staring straight ahead while she leaned over the opposite armrest, all tangled up with whatever guy she was dating at the time. I’d tell her about the parts she’d missed while we waited in the porch for her mom to pick us up.

  We were having a contest to see how far we could spit our stiff hunks of gum across the parking lot when two security guards appeared.

  “We’ve got your picture, you’re banned,” one of them called. “You with the bookbag, two months’ probation. If we see your face in there again, we’re calling the cops.”

  Nicola Stevens had been caught shoplifting once and she’d told us the security guards brought her into a cinderblock office where they watched every corner of the mall on closed-circuit TVs. The walls were plastered with pixelated images of people who were banned from the mall. Now Christian’s face would be added to the mosaic.

  The two men kept their distance — maybe the parking garage was outside of their jurisdiction. They’d come to hand down Christian’s sentence, and when they were done they walked towards the elevator that would carry them back up into the mall. Once the security guards were far enough away, the boys made a show of laughing hysterically, slapping their thighs, yelling, “You’re not even real cops!”

  “Who cares? Who fucking cares?” Christian was saying. “Banned from the mall? Who cares?”

  He kicked the concrete wall with his torn Converse sneaker, then tried to stomp the pain out of his toes. One of his friends wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “Fuck them, man.”

  On the Saturday I was remembering, two months had passed since the gum day — we’d been counting down. We knew Christian was allowed back at the mall, now with the revered status of the formerly banned. Viv, Heather and I spent the evening wandering around, hoping to run into him and his friends.

  We’d already walked through the arcade, checking for spools of red tickets left hanging out of the machines. We put on tester lipsticks in Shoppers. We dribbled basketballs in the sports aisle at Wal-Mart. We walked through the lobby of the movie theatre and fished abandoned bags of popcorn out of the garbage. The whole time we were giddy with hope that we might run into the boys.

  After cycling through both levels of the mall, we sat in the food court with our cold popcorn, losing faith. There was only an hour until the mall closed. The three of us pooled our change to take a photo in the booth at the edge of the food court. It cost three-fifty and we paid the last twenty-five cents in nickels. I sat on the circular stool, Heather squeezed in behind me and Viv sat on my lap. Viv pulled the pleated curtain closed. When the first flash filled the booth, Heather wrapped her arms around me and Viv and we all smiled into the glare. In the dark afterwards Viv said, “Lift up your shirt.”

  She pulled her own shirt and bra up over her face; her bare side brushed against my cheek. Behind me, Heather pulled her shirt up.

  “Quick,” Viv said.

  I lifted my shirt, straightened up and tried to suck my tummy in. Light filled the booth. I wished I wasn’t sitting down. I could feel my belly hanging over my pyramid-spike belt. Viv and Heather were both washboard-thin, I would look so stupid beside them. We stayed frozen in the same position as the light went off two more times. The sounds of the food court were loud in the booth; feet walked by the curtain. We waited for a fifth flash but nothing happened.

  “I think it’s done,” Viv said.

  We shifted our clothes back into place. Viv pulled the curtain open and we gathered around the front of the machine. The booth hummed loudly. We made a human shield around the slot where the photos were dispensed.

  “Is it working?” Heather asked.

  “It takes three to five minutes,” I said, reading the backlit poster on the side of the booth.

  “Did we pick colour or black and white?” Viv asked.

  “Colour,” Heather said.

  “We should’ve done black and white, it would’ve been classier.”

  The strip of photos slid out of the slot; Viv caught it and pressed it to her chest. She peeled the strip away from her body, looking down her nose at it. She laughed a loud, harsh laugh and pressed the photos back into her T-shirt.

  “Let me see,” I said.

  “Hold it so we can see,” Heather said. />
  “They’re hilarious, you guys should see your faces.”

  “Let me see it.” I felt a rush of heat travelling up my neck into my cheeks.

  Viv held the strip up over her head and waved it in the air.

  “Oh my god! Stop it!” Heather screamed.

  A mother eating burgers with her two kids gave us a dirty look.

  “Fine.” Viv passed the photos to Heather, who held them so I could see.

  Heather was right: colour was a mistake. Everything was so garish. I actually didn’t mind how my body looked. My boobs were way bigger than Viv’ and Heather’s — they looked like children next to me. The bottom half of my stomach, the part that hung out over my belt, was out of the frame.

  “Stacey looks hot,” Viv said, and snatched the photo strip out of Heather’s hand. She folded it in two and slid it into her jeans pocket.

  “What are you doing with that?” I asked.

  “I’m going to put it somewhere safe,” Viv said.

  “We should rip it up,” Heather said.

  “No way,” Viv said.

  I didn’t weigh in but I silently hoped Viv wouldn’t rip it up. I hoped it hard, directing my wish up through the asbestos-filled ceiling tiles, not to god exactly but into the sky. I’d never liked how I looked in a photo before, especially not when I was beside Viv.

  We had forty-five minutes until Viv’s mom showed up, so we took a final trip around the mall. We checked for the boys in the skateboarding store where they sometimes leaned on the glass case filled with bearings and wheels and other heavy parts. We checked in the family bathroom where they sometimes hopped up on the change table to roll joints on exercise books in their laps. We pushed open a heavy side door and stuck our heads into the dark wind-tunnel of an alley where they sometimes smoked the joints. Mostly we wanted to brag. The boys hadn’t come to the mall that night but in their absence we’d come up with our own scheme, something worse than anything they could ever have dreamed up or executed.