Flannery Page 9

  Maybe he was right. Maybe we were invisible.

  Tyrone’s face, as he was flying toward that dock after he let go of the rope, was still full of the thrill of getting up on the skis for the very first time. I think that’s what pissed Marty off. But I saw the joy switch to terror just before he hit the dock. The edge of the wharf broke one of his ribs and made a total mess of his clavicle which would require a metal plate and some permanent screws and would possibly give him arthritis in his thirties, the doctors said.

  I had to shout for help, but I felt like I couldn’t even make a squeak. I felt my voice was coming out in a whisper. But I must have actually shouted pretty loud because I was quickly crowded out of the way.

  Tyrone’s mother was swaying on the outskirts of the crowd that had gathered around Tyrone, and then she just sank down into the grass, her skirt riding up so it showed the control panel of her stockings, her champagne flute still upright. She was pinching the skinny plastic stem of the glass and one of her pinkies was curled out. She hadn’t spilled a drop.

  She knocked the champagne back and tossed the glass into the bushes and got herself standing back up again and smoothed down her skirt and followed the crowd back up to the big house. Tyrone was in some other person’s arms, and Marty was cursing and swearing under his breath and trying to steer the boat back into the boathouse.

  My arms and legs and belly were stinging. I had goosebumps, and the hair on my arms was standing up.

  I had understood about evil. I had seen how it was ordinary and stupid and there was nothing magical or fairytale-like about it.

  It was just a grown-up taking his problems out on a kid. Because he could. Because nobody stopped him.

  It was easy to hate Tyrone. He was too huggy. He hugged everyone and Marty thought it was girly. Knock it off with the hugging. Grow up. Even at ten Tyrone could draw. He was goofy and when he laughed really hard sometimes Orange Crush would come out his nose and his whole body would shake with it. He hooted when he laughed. Whoo-hoo-hoo. He did sometimes chew with his mouth open. He had a big vocabulary and Marty didn’t. He never ran out of energy. Except when he ran out of energy, which happened all at once, and then he would be hard to wake up, because he could sleep very deeply.

  Everything he did was all or nothing.

  Tyrone was driven hard through the water, and his skis popped off, and he was lucky he had missed hitting the dock with his face because he would have lost every tooth in his head.

  Just before he hit the wharf, he screamed.

  His freckles, his deep brown eyes.

  After they carried him up to the house, I was alone. I leaned over the water and threw up all the barbecued hotdogs I had wolfed down and gallons of Orange Crush and a cucumber sandwich and I have never eaten hotdogs since or cucumber and I’ve switched to Lime Crush.

  Can you picture the very particular pink-gray color of a thrown-up hotdog, floating, as it was, on the surface of the lake and bright bits of thrown-up orange processed cheese?

  I was in love.

  I knew I was in love with Tyrone O’Rourke.

  This is how hopeless the situation was. I still believed in Santa Claus. I believed that my father would show up one day out of the blue, even though he didn’t know I existed.

  I believed my mother was a goddess and that she was always right and that Hank had something wrong with him for leaving us.

  How could he not love Miranda and me? Hank, who had hugged me when my skin was so sore from sunburn, and how much I would miss him.

  I still hid my baby teeth under my pillow for the tooth fairy, but I had begun to doubt the tooth fairy.

  I knew Miranda put the money under my pillow and sometimes she forgot and once I’d just held out my hand with the tooth and she reached in her pocket and took out five bucks and put it in my hand and dropped the tooth in an amber-colored pill bottle on the top shelf in the kitchen cupboard behind a broken toaster. The pill bottle had all my other baby teeth but I had forgotten to stop believing in the tooth fairy. (My mother had forgotten to stop believing she would ever get the broken toaster fixed.)

  Not believing in something requires a lot of effort. It is easier to believe. Once I have accepted that something is true, I have a hard time losing faith in it.

  I believed in Tyrone and I will always believe in him. I mean that there is something in him, something I can’t even say or put into words that makes me love him and it’s so scary, loving someone.

  It’s a big, out-of-control, jumping-jack love that makes me crazy and lonely.

  Of course it went away when he went to a different junior high. I joined the drama club and the school newspaper at Brother Rice, and I was busy with Amber, and there was the birth of Felix.

  Or maybe I just put it on hold. Because when Tyrone O’Rourke comes into a room I find it hard to not believe we are meant for each other, because I know him inside out, since forever.

  12

  Mr. Payne has announced Part B of our Entrepreneurship unit. We have to approach a person, or persons, in the business sector and conduct a recorded interview about the promotion and sales of our units. We are supposed to choose a business representative who has marketing experience related to our particular projects.

  Mr. Payne makes it sound like there are gazillions of business people out there just dying to share their time and sales strategies with a bunch of grade-grubbing high-school students.

  And he’s giving us only two weeks.

  Amber and Gary have already decided they’re interviewing some big film producer who happens to be in town filming a battle re-enactment for a documentary about the First World War. Even Elaine Power looked impressed when she heard that.

  But who am I supposed to interview about magic potions?

  On top of the interview, Mr. Payne wants us to hand in revisions to our project proposals next week and have the prototypes of our actual projects ready on November 2nd. We have this very demanding timeline for the project because, as Mr. Payne says, he’s teaching us how manufacturing works in the “real” world. He seemed to sort of love my plan for the potions, though — I mean our plan — except he said it was too ambitious for a start-up. Choose just one kind of potion, he said. We can diversify later if the product is a hit.

  It’s been two weeks since Tyrone has been in school. He doesn’t answer my texts and he’s probably lost his phone. He’s probably couch surfing at the apartment of some university students he met and sleeping until one because he’s playing video games all night and getting stoned.

  His mother told Miranda that she’s getting daily automated phone calls from the school. A person in your household named TYRONE …

  She says he shows up every day before Marty gets home from work and tosses a few pizza pockets in the oven and then he’s gone again on his motorcycle, leaving her to yell out the front door about wearing a helmet.

  Since Miranda won’t let me take the cell phone to school (she’s waiting for a call from a journalist who wants to talk about her new project — she’s working in neon now), I have to wait to get home to text Tyrone.

  I text him after dinner: Payne says we need to choose only one potion. What do you think?

  I certainly don’t expect to hear back from him.

  But before I go to bed I go up to Miranda’s study to check the phone. And there’s a two-word message from SprayPig. It says, Definitely Love.

  Boom. Boom, boom.

  Okay, I know it doesn’t mean that Tyrone definitely loves me. I know that. I know it doesn’t mean he’s not serious about that parrot-haired girl I saw him with at the mall or that they’ve broken up.

  It does not mean that he’ll show up at school to help with our Definitely Love potion. And it doesn’t even mean he’ll lift a finger to help us get a good mark on our project. I’m not a total fool!

  So why is my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest? Why am I clutching the phone so tightly in both hands, holding it over my very-loud-pounding heart?


  Well, what’s a girl to think? After weeks of silence — Definitely Love.

  I put the phone down on the desk, right where it was. But I pick it up again and read the text again. SprayPig — that’s Tyrone. Definitely Love.

  What are you doing in my office? Miranda calls up from downstairs.

  Oh, nothing, I say.

  You sound funny, she says.

  Really? I say. There’s no worry about Miranda reading the text. She doesn’t know how to open them. She’s never texted in her life, though I’ve certainly offered to teach her. But she has materialized silently in the doorway of her study.

  What’s up? she says. And steps into the room and lays her hand on my forehead.

  You’re all flushed, she says.

  Just heading to bed, I say. And I trot down the stairs and get in under the blankets and layers of dirty laundry piled on my bed and stay awake for a long time, thinking in the dark.

  It doesn’t really mean anything, I keep telling myself.

  It probably just means that I am going to feel seriously f—ked up, as Miranda would say if she were writing this, only she of course would spell out the whole word, which I refuse to do.

  Miranda believes there is no such thing as bad language, only the inappropriate use of language in a given circumstance. She believes curse words, including some very disgusting ones, have a radical power and they can make huffy, uptight people uncomfortable, which Miranda believes is generally a good thing to do.

  Miranda thinks these sorts of people are, generally speaking, too prissy for their own good and a well-placed curse word can have the effect of a “laxative for the soul.” Loosen up all those stoppages. She has blogged as much.

  I refuse to use the F-word because I believe f—king, should I ever have a chance to engage in that physical/spiritual/emotional activity, is a beautiful thing, or has the potential to be a beautiful thing, maybe, and that it should be treated as if it’s secret and sacred, and it should definitely not be spoken of in such harsh language, or so casually, or without respect for its beauty, actually, and maybe not even spoken of anywhere at all.

  Because I think it should be private and maybe wordless, if you know what I mean. Something between two people. But if you do have to speak of it for some reason, I think making love is a really nice way to describe sex if one has to describe it.

  Miranda thinks this is a very silly idea. Which I think is ironic given that when it came time for her to explain sex to me, she failed pretty spectacularly.

  Miranda sat me down on the edge of the bathtub with a picture book about sex when I was eight. I don’t know why she chose the bathroom. But there we were, sitting on the side of the tub, the clear plastic shower curtain covered with angelfish tugged back so the fish looked like they were swimming somewhere in a big hurry, all banging into each other.

  Miranda’s policy was, If kids ask, you answer.

  With the truth.

  She’s blogged all about this theory too, of course.

  Apparently I’d asked about the box of tampons in the cupboard under the bathroom sink. What are those things? was probably all I said.

  From tampons, Miranda’s thinking must have gone, It’s time for the sex talk.

  Miranda decided to present the whole thing with a library book. A picture book. I thought it was strange when I saw it in her hands because we’d already progressed to I Can Read chapter books.

  But in the little book there was a drawing of a man and a woman. The man was on top of the woman. They were kissing. It showed their outlines, but it also showed what was inside them, as if their bodies were transparent.

  It showed the man’s penis fitting snugly into the woman’s vagina. It showed little sacks inside the woman with lines drawn from the sacks to words like ovaries and womb, and it all looked painful, like there wasn’t room inside the woman’s vagina for that ugly-looking penis, and what the hell were they doing, why was the man on top of her, probably squashing the life out of her? How had these two people ever agreed to this, how had they found themselves with each other without their clothes on, and what was the bizarre exchange of words, to end up in this position with his penis sticking into her vagina?

  I was flabbergasted. That’s the word. It’s a word that shows up in the old yellowed Agatha Christie novels you find at your friends’ summer cabins. There are British people in those novels with big green lawns and rock walls and there are little old ladies who murder people with arsenic or by stabbing them straight through the forehead with an ice pick, and portly butlers with double chins and cooks with bright red faces and rectors, whatever they are. Those are the kinds of people who get flabbergasted.

  And little eight-year-old girls sitting on the side of the tub in the midst of a school of terrified angelfish, with their mothers and a library book about sex.

  I thought about Miranda going to the children’s library to borrow the book. The chat she and the librarian must have had.

  I would never go to that library again.

  Why would anybody do that? I shrieked. Why?

  I felt betrayed. I felt like there was a big secret and I was mad it had been kept from me and mad that I had been told about it.

  I was deeply angry with whoever had invented this crazy thing. I knew, without being told, that the line drawing in the little pastel book with the organs and the eggs and the kissing people was a cover story for a horrendous, crazy explosion of emotion and weirdness.

  Now that I knew about it, there was no not knowing about it. No going back.

  Then it hit me.

  That was the way I had come into existence. People sit down on the sides of cold bathtubs everywhere, with their mothers and with books that begin deceptively with a picture of flowers and some bees hovering, and it’s la-la-la with the pretty drawings, and a box of tampons tucked into their bathroom cupboards near the snaking, cold, sweating pipe that curls out of the sink — the pipe that’s there to get rid of toothpaste spit and germs and scum. People find themselves in that situation, because those people have mothers who have had sex.

  That’s how I had come into being.

  Miranda had done this terrible thing.

  To make me.

  I stayed far away from any book that might have to do with sex until grade seven. That’s when Amber and I got our hands on a fat paperback called Love’s Tender Fury and we sussed out the steamy parts and read them over and over. Every time something was about to happen — something hotter and more anatomically complicated than a kiss — the heroine swooned.

  As far as we could gather, the swoon occurred because of the extreme tenderness of the kiss.

  First there was a struggle on the woman’s part to avoid the kiss. She’d fling her head to the side and all her long tendrils would fly around, covering her face, her shoulders, her soft, plump, heaving breasts. She had a lot of hair. It tangled and coiled as she thrashed. But the hero held her arms firmly in his grip. He was calmness itself.

  Then she’d just happen to look in his eyes, totally by accident, and she would pull an emotional one-eighty. Instantly, she’d be all for the kiss. She couldn’t get enough of it.

  What the hell, we thought.

  She didn’t want the kiss. She wanted the kiss. There was nothing in between. Then she swooned.

  Swooning was generally followed by some of the fury mentioned in the title. But the swoon part, that was love, dawning in all its glory.

  Now I think love must be more like a strike than a swoon. You get struck is the way I imagine it, is the way I feel about Tyrone. Struck with awe by every single thing about him, his army surplus knapsack, the way the cuffs of his jeans are worn down to white threads on the back, his big eyes and the curly black hair and the way he walks, long limbs all over the place and how tall he got in grade ten and his eyelashes and his freckles and once, when he first transferred to Holy Heart and saw me by the lockers, and we were talking just like when we were kids, as if no time had passed, he pushed my
hair back with a finger, just tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear and my ear burned even though we’d known each other since car seats. Our moms went to movies with us in the middle of the afternoon and breastfed us in the back row, which is kind of weird but I’m just saying — pretty much since we were born.

  Lying in bed, under all that laundry, thinking about his Definitely Love text, I also remembered that little wave while he was waterskiing.

  But love is not just something that befalls you. It’s also hard work, the work of believing in someone. This is another theory of Miranda’s that she’s drummed into my head. It’s been pretty hard this past week to believe in Tyrone when he has been so absent — from school, from our project, seemingly from the face of the earth — and I am depending on him to help me with this project. Amber has Gary helping her and everyone else has their partner helping and I have no one, basically.

  So love is work and it’s always changing and it’s making and noticing and needing and giving and definite. It’s definite.

  Definitely Love.

  It’s a start.

  13

  The school secretary is eating a tuna sandwich behind the counter in the principal’s office. She’s sitting in a swivel chair and she has her high heels up on the desk. The wedged heels of her shoes are clear plastic and have tiny nuts and bolts and miniature wrenches suspended in the wedge.

  My mission here is complex. I have to figure out a way to get the voice recorder from the secretary while also faking sick so I can miss Healthy Living, a course I am required to take and which I loathe.

  This week, for example, we are going to be put into pairs and given a bag of eggs to take care of. It’s supposed to show you how much work it is to have a baby. The eggs are always loose in a paper bag, and if one gets broken you must discuss the symbolic significance of the spilled yolk in an essay lamenting the evils of teen pregnancy.

  Since I am the product of a teen pregnancy I find the whole idea of the project insulting. And I don’t want to get stuck dragging around a bag of eggs.