Flannery

  Flannery

  Lisa Moore

  Groundwood Books

  House of Anansi Press

  Toronto Berkeley

  Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Moore

  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2016 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright License, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  groundwoodbooks.com

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Moore, Lisa Lynne, author

  Flannery / Lisa Moore.

  Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-55498-076-5 (bound).—

  ISBN 978-1-55498-873-0 (epub).—ISBN 978-1-55498-874-7 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8576.O614444F53 2016 jC813’.54 C2015-904606-8

  C2015-904607-6

  Cover illustration by Carey Sookocheff

  Cover design by Michael Solomon

  For the gang from Livingstone —

  Emily, Shannon, Eva, Theo and Angel

  (and gang associates Rachel, Ben, Max and Jack)

  1

  I’m walking up Long’s Hill, hoofing it because I am about to be late for school. Again.

  If you’re late for school you get an automated phone call. A fake-human voice, faux-friendly and regular-guy-sounding, calls to rat you out.

  A child in your household named — and when it says “named,” the voice changes. A completely different voice inserts your name right into Regular Guy’s sentence.

  And the second voice is very disappointed in you. The second voice sounds all blamey and sad and rumbling like a clap of thunder. The voice says FLANNERY.

  And after your name it goes back to the first voice.

  Regular Guy. Mild-mannered guy, who is just doing his job.

  A child in your household named Flannery was absent for period one on September 17th. Regular Guy goes on to tell whoever picked up the phone that they better send a note explaining why Flannery was absent, or else the child in your household named Flannery will be condemned to the bowels of hell from now to eternity.

  Yesterday was the third phone call since I started grade twelve, a mere two weeks ago.

  I’m always the one to answer the phone. Miranda, my mother, never answers the phone. She hates the phone.

  Then I have to write myself a note and forge Miranda’s signature because if she does it, she’ll write a manifesto about how she doesn’t believe in punctuality. She believes punctuality promotes conformity, and high-school kids need more sleep and fewer alarm clocks screaming through their early-morning dreams.

  I usually have to write the note the next morning. I am tearing through the house looking for a piece of paper to write the note and then I’m late again.

  So this morning I am hoofing it, because otherwise, tomorrow FLANNERY will receive phone call number four.

  First period is Entrepreneurship. It’s the last elective I need to graduate high school and, frankly, the only one that fits into my schedule.

  It’s raining in slanting sheets and my jeans are plastered onto my thighs and I’m trying to think of what my unit is going to be. The unit I’m going to produce for 60 percent of my grade in my Entrepreneurship class.

  Mr. Payne advised us to think about the sorts of things people don’t have already. Things they only realize they want the instant they clamp eyes on them.

  You have to create a desire for your product, Mr. Payne said. Where, hitherto, there had been no desire and no need at all. That is the essence, he said, the very soul of being an entrepreneur.

  For instance: furry toilet-seat covers, pet rocks, fluorescent-pink feather dusters, avocado scoopers, ice-cube trays molded into starfish, and Christmas sweaters with lights that blink on and off. Mr. Payne had a PowerPoint presentation and he flicked through images of these items.

  Next there was an image of a vegetable juicer. Then a yogurt maker and a massage chair with straps and buckles that looked medieval. Then an image of fridge-magnet words so people could make poetry on the front of their fridges while sipping their morning coffees.

  All things people got along fine without until they were invented, Mr. Payne said. He closed the lid of the laptop.

  That’s the sort of thing, Mr. Payne continued, that you should design for your unit. You have to intuit what the world is waiting for, because the desire for new products is insatiable. Make something new or reinvent something old so it appears to be new.

  Stuff, he said. Let’s make stuff.

  Rumor has it that Mr. Payne once invented a grain-sized microchip that could be inserted painlessly between a child’s shoulder blades and was sensitive to the biometric changes that occurred whenever the child told a lie. A fluctuation in temperature, quickening of the pulse, dilation of the pupils and sweaty palms. The microchip was said to emit a high-pitched alarm on the parent’s key chain when the lie rolled off the tongue.

  Apparently it did not take off. But Mr. Payne still has the black hairy eyebrows and gelled helmet hair of a scientific genius.

  First I was thinking a waterproof bra. A waterproof bra that actually fits properly. I am a girl with big boobs, and an innovative bra design could revolutionize the lingerie market.

  A bra that could offer a girl support.

  But a bra might be embarrassing to present in front of the class.

  So now I’m thinking a designer toilet plunger. Something with polka dots or stripes.

  The design of your typical household plunger never really changes. Everybody has the same plunger. Black rubber bell, wooden handle. Nobody ever really seems to buy them, but everybody has one. Where do they come from?

  But maybe there’s room for a plunger with pizzazz. After all, the humble plunger has a noble function; it removes stoppages.

  That’s what they’re called: stoppages.

  Things that get in the way of the natural flow. Why not celebrate that simple service with a few polka dots?

  And there, in the middle of Long’s Hill, water wheezing through my Converse sneakers with every step, I experience one of those stoppages. I see Tyrone O’Rourke flying through a red light on his motorcycle. He takes the corner and a huge splash flies up and he’s gone.

  I feel the stoppage under my ribs.

  I picture a polka-dotted plunger with cosmic suck, the big suck clamped onto my chest, right over my heart.

  This is how Tyrone makes me feel: boom, boom, boom.

  I imagine the Angel of Love giving the cosmic plunger a little elbow action. Before you know it: plop. My purple, gushing, blood-squirting, shivering heart is sucked way the hell out of my body straight into that rubber receptacle.

  The heart ripped, torn, stamped on, minced and mangled, flushed down the crapper. That’s what love with Tyrone would be like.

  Our mothers gave birth to Tyrone and me a few hours apart in Grace Hospital. That’s how they met. They were sh
aring the hospital’s industrial-sized breast pump. No wonder they ended up bonding with each other. They were both single mothers and they rented public housing on opposite sides of the same street.

  Tyrone and I ran around in diapers together at Happy Kids daycare. There’s a photo of the two of us and Tyrone’s mom on the first day of kindergarten, on the school steps. Tyrone has a brand new Transformers knapsack; I have a Dora the Explorer lunchbox. He’s holding his mom’s hand and looking up at her, but she’s got her head turned the other way. She’s looking down the street as if something big and important has her attention — maybe a three-car pile-up or a good-looking guy.

  But when Tyrone’s mom met Tyrone’s stepdad, they moved out of downtown and up to an apartment behind the Super 8 with the eighty-foot water slide.

  So Tyrone was zoned for Macdonald Drive Junior High then, and I was going to Brother Rice. Things just changed. Tyrone was into basketball for a while, then skateboarding. I got on the school newspaper.

  In grade nine everybody at Brother Rice transferred to Holy Heart for high school and in grade ten, everybody from Macdonald Drive transferred to Heart too. And there, on the first day of grade ten, a head taller than everyone else in the sea of students thronging down the corridor, was Tyrone/not Tyrone.

  I mean, he had the same big brown eyes as the Tyrone I knew by heart, with the sooty black eyelashes. The same black curly hair — but now it was long, near his jaw. His once-pudgy little cheeks were sharp-angled cheekbones. He had the same gangly lope, but now I had to look up at him.

  He was the same Tyrone O’Rourke who made a Tyrannosaurus rex out of Play-Doh in kindergarten when we were supposed to be making farm animals and the teacher peeled it off the palm of his hand and squished it, telling him to start again. A dinosaur is not a farm animal, she said.

  Maybe that was the beginning of Tyrone’s troubles at school.

  He was the same Tyrone who, when we were eight, rode down Long’s Hill in a supermarket shopping cart, the whole thing rocking and jittering and then tipping on two wheels, gathering speed as it headed for the harbor until the front left wheel nicked a pothole and we crashed into a parked car. I was flung over the hood, unharmed — except for an everlasting fear of shopping carts.

  But Tyrone landed on his feet, also unharmed — with an everlasting fear of absolutely nothing.

  This grade-ten Tyrone had the same megawatts of trouble/glee in his eyes — but this was not the same Tyrone as the eight-year-old who tried to tame the bucking bronco of a shopping cart.

  This Tyrone had big shoulders and a jean jacket so faded and worn it seemed like a second skin. This Tyrone made all the girls in the corridor fumble with their binders and flick their hair over their shoulders as he walked by, hoping to get his attention.

  This Tyrone was not only very different from the Tyrone I’d played with almost every day from K through six; he was different than every other boy at Holy Heart.

  He did not walk in a cloud of nose-lacerating cologne, he was not plagued by pimples and sweatsock funk, he did not thunder around the basketball court, part of a team of stampeding rhinoceroses, he did not try to disrupt the class in the middle of all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

  In fact, he didn’t even show up for class all that often.

  Tyrone was not a gronky, sweaty, profane, pretending-to-be-fencepost-stupid, arrogant, loud, math-failing, poetry-hating, eat-a-whole-pizza-by-yourself-in-less-than-five-minutes-and-burp-the-loudest, fart-joke-telling, buy-a-40-ouncer-off-a-taxi-driver-and-get-drunk-at-parties-and-puke-all-over-somebody’s-carpet, typical high-school person of the male persuasion.

  Tyrone had become an artist.

  A graffiti artist.

  An outlaw.

  His tags and murals are all over St. John’s and there have been letters in the paper. The cops have even come out with a statement. They’ll stop at nothing to find SprayPig — that’s Tyrone’s tag.

  He smells of fresh air and sometimes, faintly, of pot. He can pick up any sort of musical instrument and play a riff on “American Pie” or “Stairway to Heaven” or “Hot Cross Buns.”

  He owns a motorcycle. The rumor is he took it apart on a garage floor and lovingly polished each nut and bolt and put it back together.

  That first morning of grade ten, Tyrone O’Rourke’s face lit up when he saw me.

  He was the same Tyrone who had chased me around Bannerman Park with water balloons the year I got my sneakers that flashed red lights, and the same Tyrone who dressed as an astronaut for Halloween in grade three, with silver spray-painted cereal boxes on his shoulders and a section of hose from his mom’s dryer glued onto his hockey helmet and a backpack of “oxygen.” He was the same Tyrone who made potions of dirt and mustard and vinegar from the packets we’d saved from Ches’s fish and chips — potions we mixed in old spaghetti sauce jars, hoping they would work like gasoline if we poured them over the pedals of our tricycles to make them go faster.

  He was one-and-the-same Tyrone of yore, but when Jenny Clarke walked past and asked him if he wanted some of her chocolate bar and he said yes — and she folded back the foil and held it up to his mouth and he took a nibble, looking her straight in the eyes, and chocolate crumbs tumbled off his beautiful plump bottom lip and onto the collar of his jean jacket and Jenny pressed her index finger onto one of those crumbs and then put the tip of her finger in her mouth and turned and walked away with all of her long hair swinging over her shoulders — then he was not the same Tyrone at all.

  Boom.

  Boom, boom.

  2

  The morning buzzer for my first class, Introduction to Entrepreneurship, rips through the school. Allie Jones sees me beating it down the hall and at the last second tries to slam the door in my face. I stomp my foot between the door and the frame and try to squeeze my body in while she leans against the door on the other side, trying to squash me.

  Then Allie steps away from the door and I almost fall into the classroom.

  Sorry, Allie says. I didn’t see you.

  Mr. Payne is looking out the window and digging around in his shirt pocket with two fingers. He doesn’t notice me sneaking in late. I slide into my desk behind Amber Mackey. Amber is my best friend and has big beautiful swimmer’s shoulders.

  All the better to hide behind, my dear.

  Mr. Payne draws a silver laser pen out of his shirt pocket. This is a new teaching aid for him. He loves gadgets. Mr. Payne clicks the tip of the laser pen and a sharp purple line slices through the air over our heads, and at the back of the class, a frenetic violet dot jiggles over the wall.

  Now then, he says. Everybody, quiet please.

  Everybody grudgingly turns it down to a low murmur.

  I have a few announcements about the Youth Entrepreneurial Fair, Mr. Payne says. We have secured several booths at the Glacier in Mount Pearl. As you know, every high school in the province will be competing. Traditionally, Holy Heart takes the gold. I know it seems like the school year has just started, but Christmas will be upon us before you know it. The Entrepreneurial Fair is the crowning achievement in your graduating year. The media always attends.

  The murmuring ratchets up several notches until people are talking and laughing. Allie Jones is taking a selfie while she puts on lipstick. Elaine Power is scribbling notes. Chad Yates-O’Neill is rolling a basketball over the length of his outstretched arm, onto his shoulder, behind his head and down the other arm. Then he bounces it off the back of Allie’s head.

  Mr. Payne, Allie whines.

  There will be lights, there will be cameras, there will be action, says Mr. Payne. Chad, the ball, please. Businesses near and far pay close attention to the winners, people.

  Chad unslouches himself out of the desk and dribbles the ball to the front of the class. He passes it a few times under each knee and then he rolls it to the corner of the room and returns to his desk.

  In the past, our winners have been offered top-paying summer jobs
the day they graduate, says Mr. Payne. He strolls down the aisle and confiscates Allie’s phone.

  But sir, she says.

  After class, Miss Jones. We’ve even had interest from Toronto. This brings me to my next point. I’ve noticed some of you people dragging your heels, deciding on what to make for your units. So I have decided to put you into pairs. Business partners.

  Everybody goes instantly silent.

  He waves the tip of the laser pen in little circles. And then he points it directly at Mark Galway.

  An angry violet dot vibrates like a mad hornet over Mark Galway’s right eyebrow. Mark’s eyebrow twitches.

  Mark is the grandson of one of the richest people in Newfoundland, and maybe even Canada and quite possibly all of North America — Mr. Fred Galway, the communications mogul.

  Mr. Galway owns all the radio frequency bandwidth available in Newfoundland. He started one of the first television stations here, back in the seventies. It’s rumored that he himself was Captain Newfoundland, the superhero who appeared after midnight on NTV back in the nineties, dressed in a hooded cape and a face mask with the map of Newfoundland drawn on it. His cape fluttered into a background of zooming comets and blasts of disco-funk. A deep voice intoned that the captain was the Spirit of Newfoundland who lives in the hearts of all of us. You can still see it on YouTube.

  This means that Mark is the spawn of Captain Newfoundland, and of course he’s planning to make some kind of radio thing for his unit at the Glacier.

  The laser dot is jiggling all over Mark’s face.

  Mr. Payne says, You.

  Mark Galway looks quickly over one shoulder, and then the other. The violet dot zips over to his ear, and then it reappears on his cheek. It finally settles on the tip of his nose.

  Me, sir? For a split second Mark Galway’s eyes cross.

  Yes, you, Mr. Payne says. Galway.

  I prefer to work alone.

  No man is an island, Galway, except maybe Captain Newfoundland. You’re not Captain Newfoundland, are you, Galway?

  I don’t want a partner, Mr. Payne, sir.