All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing? Are you busy?”

  “Did you break my glasses?”

  “No.”

  There was silence on Holly’s end.

  “Have you been talking to the cops?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “They gave you your stuff back?”

  “I know you broke my glasses.”

  “I’ll pay for them.”

  “It’s fucked up that you did that.”

  “It was stupid, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Honestly. Did they tell you they were looking for those girls, Natalie Swanson and the other one. It was one of their boyfriends.”

  “I don’t want to talk about any of that.”

  “Did you sign a form? When they gave you your stuff back? I didn’t even read it.”

  “I signed the form. Listen, the thing about my glasses, it was aggressive.”

  “Holly. I’m sorry, it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident but I didn’t mean it, I didn’t plan it.”

  “See, I can’t trust anything you say. I don’t feel safe in that house,” she said.

  “I don’t think anything happened in the house, they said the investigation took so long because they prioritize cases where someone is in danger. So I guess no one was in danger? Which is good — obviously.”

  Holly didn’t say anything.

  “Did they tell you what they were looking for? Maybe it was some kind of credit card theft thing. Were you talking to the really tall guy? Constable Bradley?”

  “I mean with you,” Holly said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t feel safe living with you.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to go now. I’m jamming.”

  “You’re not coming back to the house?”

  “I’m coming back to the house, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “I didn’t plan that, I was just really frustrated and upset. I was hurt that you thought—”

  “I’m late for jamming.”

  “Okay.”

  “They cost three hundred dollars.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can e-transfer me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, bye,” Holly said and hung up.

  I didn’t have three hundred dollars to e-transfer Holly for the stupid glasses. Maybe I could send twenty, like a down payment, to show I was taking it seriously. I had a new text from Kris: There’s a Drag Race screening at the print shop tonight you should come down. The queasy feeling that had welled up during the conversation with Holly evaporated. Kris wanted to see me again, a second time in the same day. I called Viv to see if she would go with me.

  * * *

  When we arrived most of the chairs were already full. There was some kind of printmaking machine in the centre of the room that was about the size of a photocopier and looked like it weighed hundreds of pounds. Two banks of fold-out chairs were arranged on either side of the machine. A white bedsheet was thumbtacked to the back wall between two floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the harbour. The other walls were covered in prints of varying sizes, some framed, some mounted on poster board, most with a thematic link to Newfoundland — smeary reliefs of cod and puffins and dories and row houses.

  A woman with waist-length red ringlets and a sequined bra was bent over an Acer laptop plugged into a set of computer speakers. A thick blue extension cord snaked across the hardwood floor between the chairs and around the printmaking machine to an outlet on the other side of the room.

  “We’re starting in ten minutes,” the woman with the ringlets called. “So do your pee, grab a beer, sit down and shut up.’

  The sheet behind her lit up with a projection of a desktop screen. The background photo was a selfie of two young men standing under the dangling flowers of a golden chain tree in a fenced-in backyard. The one taking the photo was holding a scruffy dog with a diamond-studded collar; the other guy was resting his chin on the photographer’s shoulder. The image was covered with folders and thumbnails of photographs. The woman with the ringlets was also the man curled around his boyfriend in the photo.

  I undid the line of snaps down the front of my jacket, scanning the room for Kris. There were only a handful of people in drag; the audience was mostly men around our age in snug sweaters and jeans. Kris was in the front row, sitting next to Frankie. She was talking close to their face, waving her hands in the air. Frankie was nodding and wincing: it looked like it was a story about bodily injury or maybe about an intensely uncomfortable social situation. I unwound my scarf and took my mitts off, stuffing it all down into my bookbag.

  “Should we get a beer?” Viv asked.

  A guy in the back of the room was selling India out of a case on the floor. He had a see-through fanny pack clipped around his hips with some crumpled bills and change in it.

  “Sure,” I said, I took a ten out of my jeans pocket and handed it to Viv. “Can you get it? I’m going to find us some seats.”

  I didn’t want to look like I was rushing towards the open chairs behind Kris — I felt like a kid trying not to get caught running on the pool deck. But I knocked into the back of Frankie’s chair making my way down the aisle. Frankie and Kris both turned around in their seats and looked at me.

  “Viv is here too,” I said.

  “Everyone kindly shut the fuck up,” the host said.

  The screen lit up with a pixelated live stream of the opening of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Viv jostled down the narrow aisle with two beers. I lifted my coat off the seat I’d saved for her. Kris turned around and gave Viv a friendly wave. Usually it was me and Viv at a thing hoping to run into the person she was seeing. Or me and Viv at a thing with the person she was seeing. I held my beer up to Viv for a little cheers.

  “Thank you for coming with me,” I said into her ear.

  “Did you talk to Holly?” she asked me.

  “No.” I turned back to the screen.

  The show started with a recap from last week; a communal moan flooded out of the people around us when footage of the most recent elimination played. Viv and I looked around, surprised. Kris leaned back in her chair, making it balance on two legs, and grinned at us. She’d caught our tourist-y surprise.

  “I know, right?” the host said into the microphone. She was slumped in a plastic chair next to her laptop.

  During the first commercial break, the host muted the stream and called Tiffany Trash to the front of the room. A tall, thin woman in a short shift dress made from strung-together toilet paper rolls and a stole made of layer upon layer of bunched-up toilet paper strode up to the stage. She lip-synched to “Downtown,” flicking the stole around as she danced. When Tiffany finished, the audience whooped and she curtsied, lifting her toilet-paper-roll dress as she bent her knees. The host pulled the live stream up on the screen as Tiffany made her way to her seat.

  “Silence you saucy friggers!” the host roared into the mic, swishing her ringlets around.

  When the screening finished, Viv and Kris and Frankie and I stood together getting our coats on.

  “What’re you guys doing now?” Kris asked.

  “I’m going home, I have to work in the morning,” Viv said.

  People were folding up the chairs around us and stacking them against the wall.

  “You want to come over, Stacey?” Kris asked. “One more beer?”

  We all trooped down the steep steps to the street together.

  “Well, I guess I’m going this way,” Viv said when we got outside. “Goodnight.”

  The three of us murmured goodnight and Viv started walking towards her new house. I watched her back as she pulled a mitt out of each pocket. It was strange for the night to end without us debriefing about what had hap
pened. Part of me wanted to chase after her. Instead I took my phone out and sent her a smiley emoji with heart eyes.

  Eleven

  A couple of days later, I asked Kris if she wanted to go to the Santa Claus parade. I had to stop by the theatre to pick up my tips, so I told her to meet me there.

  There was a rehearsal of Scrooge: The Musical happening upstairs. The night before I’d done box office for a poorly attended stand-up-comedy open mic in the bar. After every show the bartender splits the tips with the person on box office and leaves the money in a sealed envelope in the staff mailbox. I felt a cold lump of change through the paper. I ripped it open — three toonies and a quarter. I put the change in my pocket and dropped the envelope in the recycling bin.

  When I stepped out of the office I saw Kris waiting outside the theatre through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the lobby. She was wearing a black bomber jacket and had a big purple scarf swirled around her neck.

  “Come in, I’m going to make us some hot chocolate.”

  Kris leaned on the bar and I plugged in the kettle. An actress in an ankle-length dress and a frilly apron rushed through on her way to the dressing room. When she came back she held up a round, poufy hat. “Forgot this!”

  Kris raised her eyebrows at me as the woman left the room.

  “It’s always like this,” I told her.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re an actor, right?” Kris said.

  “I went to school for it. I’m not really doing it right now.” I ripped open a hot chocolate packet and split it between our two cups.

  “Why?”

  “I did go to an audition recently.”

  “You’re waiting to hear.”

  “I didn’t get it.”

  “Oh.”

  I dropped one of my tip toonies into the register and we left, walking along Gower Street holding the hot chocolates. There were big flakes of wet snow coming down — normally the parade would be cancelled, but it had already been postponed three or four times due to bad weather. We stopped halfway up Prescott, above the crush of families who were filling the sidewalk and spilling into the road. Kris took my hand and I leaned into her and put my cheek on her shoulder.

  A pack of teenagers in big sweatshirts and shiny tan-coloured tights were doing a dance routine. A girl in the back carried a boom box with an iPod stuck into the dock on top of it. The rest of the group kicked their legs together, did a twirl and wiggled their fingers in the air before taking a few steps forward and doing it all again. Some of their faces were slack with boredom and others had tetanus-stiff smiles. Kris loved the dog groups: the owners chatted amongst themselves and the dogs trotted obediently ahead in a pack, leashes criss-crossed behind them. Heavenly Creatures, Beagle Paws, Greyhound Rescue. After a half hour we got cold and I invited Kris back to my house. We climbed the hill with empty Styrofoam cups in our hands. When we got to the front door I remembered about my mattress being out in the hallway.

  “The heater is broken in my room,” I said, pushing my shoulder into the door.

  “Okay,” Kris said.

  “So I brought my bed into the hall.”

  “Like you would,” Kris said.

  She helped me wrestle the mattress back into my room. We stopped for a moment with the bed in the doorway. Kris touched her toes and reached for the ceiling.

  “How did you do this by yourself?” she said.

  “It was kind of nice to look out these windows from a different perspective, you know what I mean? Different vantage point, different view.”

  “Never do this again, you fucking weirdo,” Kris said, laughing. “Get your heater fixed.”

  * * *

  The next morning I got up long before Kris and made myself a coffee. I was waiting on an English muffin I had in the toaster, leaning on the counter scrolling through Kris’s Instagram. I had gone far enough back that she looked younger, maybe three years back.

  There was a knock on the door and, like every knock since the cops had stormed in, it tightened my chest. But it was a gentle, patient knock. I opened the door to two old women in blazers and matching skirts. One was dressed completely in lavender, the other in dusty pink. They each had felt hats with felt flowers on the brim. One was wearing white gloves with pearl buttons on the wrists.

  “Good morning,” the woman in lavender said.

  “Do you have a moment?” the other woman asked.

  The neighbour kids were playing with a basketball in the plowed parking lot. The older one was throwing the ball high into the sky with both hands and then rushing backwards, letting it crash back down and bounce until it stilled on its own and started rolling away.

  “Sort of,” I said, still waiting for them to ask for directions.

  “Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart?”

  I hesitated.

  “Let me just give you this, it’s free.” She held a magazine out to me and I took it. “There’s a lot of interesting information in there. You know there are a lot of things that were predicted in the Bible and later confirmed by science. For example, Jesus knew we should wash our hands to prevent getting sick long before science confirmed it.”

  The cover of the magazine was an illustration of an empty highway stretching into a broody sky. It looked like the cover of a science fiction novel or a heavy metal album. White font in the bottom corner read, What Does the Future Hold?

  “I don’t think we can take the Bible literally, though.” What I meant to say was I’m gay, my girlfriend’s upstairs in bed.

  “It’s about the message,” the woman in lavender said. “It’s about Jesus Christ’s message.”

  In the doorway I towered over the women, they were old and frail.

  “I’m actually getting ready for work,” I said.

  “We’ll come back to talk more another time. When would be good?” the woman in lavender asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “We’ll come by and hope to catch you.”

  I watched them walk very slowly across the parking lot to their car. The woman in pink held her partner’s elbow. When they got to the car they tried to unlock it with the remote car starter and accidentally popped the trunk. The woman in pink helped her friend into the front seat, then went around to close the trunk. I could see it was hard for her to reach up enough to get her fingers on the lip of the trunk. Then she didn’t bring it down hard enough and it bounced open. She had to press down with both hands; her elbows came up around her neck and the back of her blazer wrinkled. Finally it stayed down.

  That night Kris and I went to a movie. We’d barely spent a minute apart since the parade. Kris had gone home to shower and change her clothes but that was it. I’d been ignoring Viv’s texts, she even called and I didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to talk about Holly and the situation with the cops.

  When we arrived, the mall was packed with people doing Christmas shopping. There was a long line of children waiting to be photographed with Santa. A girl with a big plaid bow pinned to the top of her head was howling. Her mother knelt beside her, cajoling. There were about fifteen sets of parents and children ahead of them in line. The girl threw her head back and wailed; the sound ricocheted off the mall’s domed ceiling. Shoppers around the photo area turned to look at the girl and her kneeling mother.

  I saw a grandmother holding a small boy’s hand look Kris up and down. It was a slow, deliberate scan. Short hair and men’s clothes. She stretched her mouth into a thin mean line and turned away.

  “God,” I said indignantly.

  “What?”

  “That old lady gave you a dirty look.”

  “Did she? I don’t even notice that anymore. Fuck ’em.” But she didn’t say it with her usual conviction.

  The mall was closed when we left the movie. E
veryone who’d been in the theatre with us walked in a staggered procession to the escalator. A girl with a plush unicorn backpack and her older boyfriend were ahead of us. The girl leaned in and nuzzled his shoulder and then they started making out on the escalator. A steel ball in the girl’s cheek caught the light and shone up at me. Kris was looking at a display of Christmas decorations hung from the ceiling with see-through thread. I poked her in the side and pointed with my chin at the couple on the step below us. Kris nodded like “Oh, I know.” I tried to keep from laughing and ended up snorting.

  At the bottom of the escalator the couple separated. After a few steps, the girl leaned her head against her boyfriend’s shoulder again and they slowed to a shuffle. We passed them.

  “Gross,” Kris said when we were out of earshot.

  “’Cause he’s older?” I said.

  “Yeah, but also just PDA in general, it’s obnoxious. Especially when straight people do it.”

  I thought of earlier when I’d taken Kris’s hand while we waited in line for a cup of pretzel bites. She’d let me hold it for a moment but then she shook me off to adjust the strap of her messenger bag, and when she’d dropped her hand again she didn’t reach for me. I felt a lick of shame whip through me.

  “I don’t find it obnoxious.”

  “Making out on the escalator is pretty obnoxious.”

  “You said PDA in general.”

  “You laughed at them too,” Kris said. “I can’t believe we spent like thirty bucks on that movie.”

  Freezing rain was pelting the sliding glass doors at the entrance to the mall. There was a layer of grey slush the texture of mashed potatoes on the ground. It splashed up on my jeans when we ran through the parking lot. All the cars that had been surrounding Kris’s were gone. I stood in the driving rain while Kris dug through her pockets for the keys. As soon as she got in the car she dove across the seats to unlock my door but I kept tugging the handle right at the moment that she was pulling up on the lock. Eventually we were able to co-ordinate, making eye contact through the slush on the window. I let go, she pulled the lock up, I squeezed the handle — it felt like we’d executed a complicated dance move.