Flannery Read online

Nevertheless, a partner you shall have, Mr. Galway. You are going to be partners with …

  Mr. Payne wiggles the laser pen around. The sharp beam of light slices through several necks in the front row. The tiny dot zips up to the ceiling and down again and zings from one end of the room to the other.

  Where’s Tyrone? I whisper to Amber. His desk is empty.

  Il n’est pas ici, Amber says. Quelle surprise!

  Amber and I took French last semester.

  Mr. Payne is gently prodding the air with the laser pen, sort of in my direction. I duck down behind Amber. The laser beam skims over us and lands on Elaine Power’s giant dangling dragon earring. The tiny violet dot hits the teensy chip of red glass in the dragon’s eye and I swear the thing winks.

  Mr. Payne says, And you, Miss Power, will be Mark Galway’s business partner.

  But Mr. Payne, why can’t I choose my own partner? Elaine asks. Elaine Power despises Mark Galway.

  Elaine has a nose ring and wears the same black T-shirt, held together with safety pins, every single day. Her nails are long and black and her lipstick is black and her eyeliner is black and she often has a little sprinkle of blue-black glitter on her cheekbones.

  She wears black evening gloves up to her elbows with the fingers cut out. Sometimes, over her T-shirt, she has a lace-up black thing that has been spray-painted gold and has big plastic jewels all over it. It sort of looks like a corset, with a ruffled black lace collar like Henry VIII. On her legs, black fishnet stockings with holes and red-and-black-striped leg warmers. One red Converse sneaker, one black. She has shaved half her head and dyed the other half very black and wears it teased up and stiff with hairspray (though she is always ranting about how Holy Heart should be a scent-free environment!).

  Elaine is a mathlete and consults with professors at the university at lunchtime. Or, to be more precise, they consult with her. In her younger years she won an international spelling bee. But then she announced over the PA that spelling is a form of imperialism. She had seen the ugly face of spelling up close, she said, and it was a shackle she had chosen to throw off.

  None of us understood a word but we applauded like crazy and the secretary took over the mike with a hiss of static and crackle and announced something about the bus schedule.

  All we know is that Elaine is the smartest student in the entire history of the school. That’s why she’s allowed to wear whatever she likes. The rest of us have to adhere to dress codes. No baseball caps for the boys; no bra straps or midriffs showing for the girls. Elaine has shown the rest of us how to rebel by wearing her bra outside her shirt.

  And she’s already developed her project and taken it out for a test drive. An app that disseminates electronic petitions around the world in a matter of seconds. The petitions are designed to save a different endangered butterfly every month. Elaine has contacts in twenty-seven countries who translate the petitions simultaneously into twenty-seven different languages, and, as a test, last week she organized a protest to save British farmland butterflies, focusing on the common blue butterfly, which has been endangered but is now projected to make a comeback, partly because of Elaine.

  Never mind that Elaine’s app isn’t really a product you can sell, which is the main requirement of the assignment. Mr. Payne suggested Elaine think of ways to monetize her product. Elaine just raised one of her very black drawn-on eyebrows at him.

  I wouldn’t think of trying to make money off the endangered, she told him.

  And I won’t think of giving you a passing grade, Mr. Payne said. Elaine slitted her eyes at him.

  Mark Galway, on the other hand, would monetize his own grandmother if he could and comes to school in his granddad’s Hummer.

  I do not need a partner, says Elaine.

  It’s no good being smart if you can’t cooperate with your fellow students, Mr. Payne says.

  Would you say that to a boy? Elaine asks. I want to do this alone.

  That’s too bad, Miss Power. You are now partners with Mark Galway.

  Please, Mr. Payne, sir, Elaine says.

  But Mr. Payne has moved on. The laser dot is flying all over the place.

  You, Mr. Payne says. He has pointed to Gary Bowen.

  Uh-oh, whispers Amber. She sits up as tall as she can.

  Okay, wait. Let me explain Amber, because this is not her best moment. Amber has puffy black circles around her eyes from her swimming goggles getting suctioned onto her eye sockets, and she smells like chlorine and has to be nudged awake every five minutes or she’ll be snoring her head off.

  But there’s a clip on YouTube from a swim meet in the UK last year.

  Amber comes out of a dressing room onto the white poolside and stops to glance around at the crowd. The walls of the pool deck are draped with flags from all over the world. She is dressed in red and white sweats with a big maple leaf on the back of her jacket. She’s wearing her goggles and red cap. For the briefest moment, her fingers flutter all over her swimming cap. Fingers flapping fast over her ears like hummingbird wings.

  It’s just for a brief moment, but if you’re her best friend, you know what it means, this finger-flapping thing. Nerves. She has been working toward this race for her whole life.

  She raises one arm high over her head. Reaching up on her tiptoes. She waves at the crowd. You can see a lot of little Canadian flags waving back from a big patch of the crowd in the bleachers. I know she’s looking for her father, Sean.

  Sean is the one who drives her to all those practices at five in the morning. He’s the one who paces the side of the pool day after day with the stopwatch. He’s the one shouting, Move, go, keep going, yes, yes, Amber, yes!

  Amber’s mom is an alcoholic. Actually, her father is an alcoholic too, but he’s been dry for sixteen years.

  In the video, the camera pans over all the swimmers as they slip out of their sweats. The American girl scratches her chin. The Japanese girl holds her arms down at her sides and shakes her hands out. Amber’s fingers flutter over her swimming cap once more.

  They step up onto the blocks. On your mark. The buzzer. They fly off the blocks. I mean they really fly. Then they are underwater. They don’t look human. They are too fast for humans. They aren’t machines either. What are they?

  They are silver arrows they are eels they are licorice they are Lycra they are muscle they are will and will not and want to be and winning, for the first few seconds they are all winning and winning and winning and they are can’t and must and will never and don’t.

  Amber watches the video over and over, looking for a lost second. Somewhere she lost a beat. A measure of time tiny as the head of a pin. She makes me watch it too.

  The video has 120,000 views and I swear most of them are Amber and me.

  She placed second. Amber did not win as she had promised her father she would. She did not win as she had promised her school she would. She did not win as she had promised her country she would. She did not win as she had planned to do ever since she was a baby and her father took her to a pond and let her kick and splash and eventually put her face in the water to rely on those instincts from the Triassic Period when we gave up our gills for feet and swam out of the ocean up onto land, those instincts that tell you when to hold your breath.

  The Japanese girl won. The Japanese girl beat Amber by less than a second.

  You should see that Japanese girl’s smile. It’s worth watching the video 120,000 times, just for that smile. But there’s a better moment coming.

  Wait for it, wait.

  There’s Amber. She explodes up out of the water, a big splash of bubbles and froth around her waist. It is my belief that in that moment she still thinks she has won. There’s a roaring crowd and clapping and the coaches pouring out onto the pool deck and reporters with cameras and flashes, and the digital boards with the times.

  She sees from the boards that she is less than a second behind the Japanese girl. She turns toward the Japanese girl.

  And here it is. />
  Amber reaching over the lane divider to hug the Japanese girl. Amber’s face in the camera and it’s sincere.

  A sincere smile.

  That’s Amber.

  She’s goes straight back at the training. In the pool at five every morning except Sunday. They’re allowed to sleep in until seven a.m. on Sundays.

  Then she comes to school and conks out at her desk.

  If a teacher says her name, her head jerks up, and she snorts like a horse and rattles out one of the maybe ten answers she has memorized for just such an occasion.

  Answers like: Photosynthesis, sir.

  Or: The area equals half the base times the height, miss.

  Or: A character trait that brings sorrow or ruin to the protagonist.

  Or: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

  Or: An imaginary line drawn around the earth equally distant from both poles.

  By using this technique she averages a correct answer about one-third of the time. She rattles it out and her head droops again and she’s gently snoring.

  Swimming is all she’s ever wanted or thought about.

  Until Gary Bowen.

  Suddenly, Amber is all, Swimming? Who cares!

  Okay, I’m exaggerating. She still cares about swimming, but boy, is she distracted.

  It was spin-the-bottle at Jordan Murphy’s, just after the first week of school. We were in Jordan Murphy’s rec room with the pool table and the velvet paint-by-numbers of a rearing stallion that Jordan’s mom had done (also a crying clown and a frozen river with a stone bridge and a laminated 1,000-piece puzzle of the Mona Lisa).

  Gary had snuck in five beers right under Jordan’s mom’s nose. Each bottle in his knapsack was covered in two black sweatsocks so they wouldn’t clink. There was pizza and Kanye West and then everybody got in a circle. Gary finished his beer and leaned into the circle and put the bottle down in the middle. For a while everybody pretended to ignore it. Then Gary gave the bottle a good hard spin.

  It spun around on the tiles and when it stopped, it was pointing at Amber.

  A few drops of beer had spun out of the mouth of the bottle, and my sock got wet. Everybody went, Oooohhhhh, Amber.

  Amber was sitting absolutely still. A blush started in her neck and went all the way up her face to her hairline, swoosh. Her hand went up to the side of her head to do the hummingbird flutter, but she just smoothed her hair back and then tucked her hands under her legs so they’d stay still.

  A couple of the guys started chanting, Gar-y, Gar-y, Gar-y.

  Jordan put his thumb and finger in the corners of his lips and whistled so loud that it tickled the inside of my ear.

  Moira Kennedy put her legs out straight in front of her, leaned back on her elbows and made her heels drum on the floor, just the way we all used to do at Happy Kids when Miss Stephanie said we were taking a journey in a rainstorm through a tropical rainforest.

  Brittany Halliday put her legs out too and Brittany Bishop did the same thing, and then all the girls were doing it. And all the guys were whistling.

  When the noise reached its highest pitch, Gary Bowen shuffled across the circle on his hands and knees to where Amber was sitting. He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in and kissed her on the lips.

  Everything stopped.

  The boys stopped chanting.

  The whistling stopped.

  The tropical rainstorm stopped all at once, except for Moira Kennedy, who slowly tapped one foot, just like we also used to do in Happy Kids, so it sounded like a single drop of rain, falling from leaf to leaf to leaf after the storm.

  They were still kissing. They kissed in utter silence. They kissed with their tongues. They forgot they were in a circle with people watching them. They forgot the laminated puzzle of Mona Lisa who was gazing down on them and it was hard to say what she thought of it. They kissed until Jordan Murphy wrecked the moment by yelling, Get a room, man.

  Since that kiss Amber has been addled and dopey. Everything you say to her, you have to say twice. She came first last week at a provincial meet, the one that determines who gets to go to the Nationals. But she lost a few seconds from her best time and didn’t seem to care. And she hasn’t mentioned the Nationals since. She’s constantly swirling the tip of her pinkie in a little pot of cotton-candy lip gloss. You can see the hard plastic circle of the lipgloss lid pressed into the very tight back pocket of her jeans, like a charm.

  Mr. Payne says, And Gary Bowen’s partner will be …

  The little violet dot from the laser pen hesitates here and there. For a moment it lingers on Tiffany Murphy’s face. It rests on Tiffany’s chin.

  Not Tiffany Murphy, Amber whispers. Please not Tiffany Murphy.

  But the dot moves on to John Mercer. John gets the dot right in the eye and he has to dig at his eye socket with his knuckle. The dot zips away before it permanently blinds him.

  Finally, the little violet dot sits smack dab in the middle of Amber’s lips. There’s a direct line from Mr. Payne’s laser pen to Amber’s lips, as if she’s a fish he’s about to reel in.

  I think it’s you, I whisper. But the dot from Mr. Payne’s laser pen slides off Amber’s mouth. The dot skips over the aisle between the desks and lands right on Gus Wong’s Adam’s apple.

  Gus, says Mr. Payne. You and Gary …

  Amber suddenly flings herself across the aisle into the path of the violet laser dot. She throws herself on top of Gus Wong’s desk as the tiny violet dot hits her cheek.

  Ms. Mackey, please, says Mr. Payne.

  Sorry, sir, Amber says. I dropped my pencil. And, sure enough, she had somehow managed to fling her pencil onto Gus’s desk. She picks it up and wiggles it at Mr. Payne.

  Sorry about that. It flew right out of my hand, sir.

  Okay, said Mr. Payne. Now, let’s see. Gary Bowen and Amber Mackey will be partners.

  Amber turns to me, and there’s that smile again.

  The classroom door creaks open and in slinks a boy, black curly mussed-up hair, big brown eyes, lanky (okay, skinny), tall, and the beautiful, worn jean jacket stitched with a patch on the back that says ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING, and on the collar, a button with a marijuana leaf, and a tiny Santa Claus pin with a little string and if you pull it, the red plastic nose lights up, and on the back, a patch with The Clash cut out of a T-shirt and embroidered on with green silk embroidery thread and jagged little stitches.

  A jacket I have lovingly memorized every square inch of.

  The boy lopes down the aisle and pours himself into the empty desk.

  All heads turn in his direction.

  Mr. Payne says, Ah, look who has graced us with his presence!

  Tyrone O’Rourke has arrived.

  Mr. Payne, without warning, snaps off his laser pen and drops it in his shirt pocket. He picks up a clipboard and consults. It seems he has paired everyone already, and the dancing laser pen was only for show.

  He reads down the list in a flat monotone. Finally he gets to me. Flannery Malone, you will be partners with Tyrone O’Rourke.

  It seems like a fortune-cookie message, a marriage vow. I half expect Mr. Payne to ask if anyone present sees any reason why these two people should not be joined together, and if so, speak now or forever hold their peace.

  Tyrone glances back at me and lifts his pencil to his temple and gives it a tip, like an army salute. He wiggles his eyebrows. I’m pretty sure a couple of girls in the back groan with disappointment.

  Boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

  Okay class, says Mr. Payne. You’ll need to have submitted a proposal for the unit you’re going to sell by September 30th. The revised proposal, incorporating my feedback, will be due October 14th. You’ll be docked two percent for every day you’re late. I simply suggest not being late at all. Off you go.

  The buzzer goes and we head down the corridor to the stairwell and Tyrone is on the staircase above me and he leans over the rail and says, Flan, I know what we should do for our unit.

&n
bsp; He’s being pushed through the door by the waves of students charging to their next classes.

  I’ve got a brilliant idea, he calls out.

  But then he’s out the door and by the time I get up the stairs to math class, which he’s also supposed to be in, he’s disappeared.

  3

  When we were in grade one we had to do a project called All About Me. We had to write about what we looked like, what we wanted to become, our secrets, our families, our favorite foods, our favorite animals — each topic on a separate page, with a blank space on top for a crayon drawing. Each kid’s project went in a duotang with our grade-one school photo glued onto the cover.

  My printing went outside the lines and bunched up and slanted like the losing team in a tug of war. When the teacher complained to Miranda that my writing didn’t fit between the lines, Miranda said, Make the lines bigger.

  My crayon drawings, however, were masterpieces. They were violently emotional. I loved that all the crayons had names printed on the sides. The names were either very dramatic (Banana Mania, Laser Lemon, Cerulean Blue, Atomic Tangerine) or mysteriously plain (Medium Red).

  It was during the process of creating All About Me that I first noticed I didn’t have a father.

  I mean, I knew I didn’t have one, of course. But it was the first time I noticed that almost everybody else did.

  On the page that was supposed to be about my father I ended up writing about some guy named Phil, who lived in the house attached to ours for two months and who owned a Doberman.

  The Doberman barked and gnashed his teeth against the living-room window and slathered ropes of saliva from his pink-and-black spotted jowls every time someone walked down the sidewalk.

  Once Phil gave me a bubble wand. It made giant wobbling bubbles as big as my head that would burst with a cloud of mist. The bubble wand seemed to qualify Phil for page 6 in my duotang, the page about Dad.

  The Doberman is also featured on the My Favorite Animal page, a portrait in Turquoise Blue and Crimson crayon, with the studs on his dog collar scrawled with my most prized and never-cracked crayon: Silver.

  Phil moved out two days after he gave me the bubble wand and we never saw him again.