Circle of Stones (5 page)

Nik shivers, then starts to sweat in confusion. Ilana is barely over five feet tall with protruding bones and a flat chest. Childlike and tiny enough to break. And she's Aaron's girl. Her arms encircle Nik's waist. Her hands press onto the front of his pants.

“Come on, you know you want me.” Ilana's voice is breathy. “I like this kind of secret.” Nik spins around to face her. Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes aren't. Her hands seize on his belt to unbuckle it. He pushes them away. She leers and grabs at the wallet tucked into his back pocket, but it's attached to a chain connected to his belt loop. Nik has no words. Ilana is directing one of her dramas. He doesn't want to be in it. He pushes at her again, this time with a force halfway between hard and gentle. Like his father would do. Ilana wobbles and takes a step back. Nik steps back too, establishing what he hopes is a safer distance. He turns to the canvas, breathes its wet-paint smell. Ilana gasps. There's a clatter and thunk as Ilana fake-falls to the floor. He doesn't see her slam her hand down on the hardwood and adjust her hair around her face as she lays her head down on it. He looks, startled, thinking she hit her head. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open, her body still. But her eyeballs are still fluttering under her closed eyelids, her long, fake lashes twitching like trapped spiders. Nik sees she is waiting for him to react, for rescue, and for her scene to play out. But he doesn't feel it. He can't do it. Instead there's a familiar lurch. Anxiety like a black wave.

Nik coughs. He doesn't want to be like his father. He thinks finding Jennifer will make him different. Heroic. He leaves Ilana there, grabs his sketchbook from his milk-crate nightstand and begins sketching the lines of her tall black leather, high-heeled boots. They look like the ones Jennifer used to wear. Nik thinks Ilana must have stolen them.

Nik glances down at Ilana's face. She has sharp features: her nose is slightly crooked, he notices, and she has a cut on her lower lip. Ilana opens her eyes and sits up, her elbows turning awkwardly backwards as she rests on them.

“You're sketching me?” she says. “God, Nik, you're sick.” She stands up and skulks out of the room. Nik looks at his sketch. It's not quite right. Jennifer's dancer's calves curved more underneath the leather. He scrapes a fierce
X
over the drawing with the flat edge of his pencil. He shuts his door quietly and wedges a wooden chair against the knob. Then he sits down on the floor and pretends he's talking to Aaron, who used to be his best friend.

“What the hell was that?” Nik whispers.

“She's crazy,” the old Aaron would have said. “She'll be outta here soon though, so don't worry about it.”

Nik misses Old Aaron, who had a lot more sense than Aaron has now. When Nik moved to Vancouver from the island, Aaron's was the only ad that caught his eye on the student housing website. It read:
RAMSHACKLE ROOM! CHEAP AND UGLY.
It meant Nik didn't have to worry about wrecking the place with paint. Not like his mom's house, where Katya, his mom's new girlfriend, now runs the place with hotel-quality precision. White towels. The end of the toilet paper roll folded into a point. Nik always remembers his promise to keep Katya a secret from the rest of the family. Something to do with support payments from his dad. He always goes along with his mom's lies. But he's still relegated to the basement when he visits, like his mom's dogs to their kennel. When his mom and his dad lived together his mom put up with a lot more disorganization. Nik has fond memories of his messy childhood home. There were so many places to hide when his parents fought. Nik used to disappear like a magic trick and lose himself in epic drawings. His adventures in vanishing make the raggedy apartment seem tiny now in comparison. Nik looks around his room. He feels like a rabbit in a hat. The Jennifer mural and paintings are growing, squeezing the walls closer and crowding him.

When Nik moved into the Rumble Shack, it was completely empty. It felt spacious that way. He and Aaron scavenged furniture from the curb, garage sales and thrift stores. They hauled it all home on their skinny shoulders. The older the furniture, the heavier it was. Aaron helped Nik mod his leather jacket with spikes and stitch punk patches to his pants. They did screen-printing in the living room, creating irreverent designs with corporate logos and raucous, symbol-splotched T-shirts they sold at school for beer money. Hardly anyone ever bought anything with the upside-down golden arches on it, but big pink skulls and anarchy
A
's were popular. They had three prolific months.

Then the girls arrived. Ilana wrapped herself around Aaron one night at a dive bar in Gastown. Nik had returned from the bar with a fresh pitcher to find her sitting in his seat. She drank more of their beer than she should have, stayed over, moved in. Kendall appeared shortly after. Ilana rented her the unheated back room without asking. Ilana did a lot of things Nik didn't like. New Aaron watched Ilana like she was television. He often provoked her. He'd speak to everyone else except her, then smother her with attention. Or host parties at the apartment without inviting her, then accuse her of crashing them. New Aaron quit screen-printing, but not beer-drinking. New Aaron was more interested in Ilana's well-stocked purse pharmacy than design, but didn't bother asking who funded or supplied her pharmacopoeia.

Aaron still does most of the talking. That hasn't changed, but the details of his stories are exaggerated with each telling. It keeps Ilana and Kendall entertained. It irritates Nik, but pointing out the errors only leads to more exaggerations. And mocking. Except now there's an unfamiliar hostility beneath Aaron's jests. Nik hears stories turn into lies and sees Aaron's expression shift. He watches the two girls drape themselves over the furniture as though posed for a photo shoot. Ilana in something revealing and black. Kendall in gothic Anne Rice–inspired dresses. Both wear sly illusions: the clothes that appear shiny and dramatic at night are shabby in daylight.

One night when all the roommates were at a noisy goth industrial club, Nik saw Kendall glare at one of the cage dancers. In place of her usual disdain, Kendall's eyes registered jealousy. Nik turned to look at the dancer. He didn't shift his gaze for the rest of the night. His roommates left without him. The DJ stopped playing music. Jennifer exited through the Employees Only door. Nik stared at the closed door.

“She gets a lot of attention, that one,” the bartender said to Nik while shoving dirty pint glasses into the industrial dishwasher. Nik nodded. Stools were stacked on tables, a mop was splattered into a bucket of filthy water and smeared across the sticky floor. Nik waited until Jennifer re-emerged from behind the door, wearing skinny jeans in place of PVC hot pants and fishnets. She smiled at Nik.

The next afternoon, as Nik strolled through the living room in his boxers to get Jennifer a glass of water, Old Aaron spoke for the last time. “She's so hot,” he mouthed. Ilana was sitting next to Aaron on the sofa, but she was painting her nails and didn't look up as the words floated over her head.

After that, what happened at the apartment didn't matter as much to Nik. He let it rumble, spending as much time as possible with Jennifer, while Old Aaron disappeared entirely, absorbed by nightly parties and Ilana's games.

Nik tries to sleep, but he can hear his roommates talking about him in the living room. Kendall says, “Oh my God,” and Aaron says, “That bastard,” and Nik knows Ilana is twisting everything into something convoluted. Nik gets up, lights a candle under Jennifer's cobalt eye, and is suddenly thirsty. He steps out of his room into a sudden silence. A circle of stares.

“Hey.” He tries to act casual on his way through. In the kitchen he has to wash a glass before he can use it. He takes his time, pouring dish soap droplet by droplet. He lets the water become hot enough to turn his hands pink. Then he fills the glass, watching soap bubbles billow over the edge. Nik swings the fridge door open and grabs the water jug. It's full. For once. On his way back to his room he holds his glass of water in front of him like an excuse. His roommates are draped across the sofa, limbs sprawling.

“I can't believe you assaulted Ilana and pushed her down just for looking at your paintings,” Kendall says. “She probably has a concussion.”

Nik is almost at his door. He turns around, faces the stares, opens his mouth.

“You're messed up, dude.” Aaron lights a joint. Ilana is lying down, her head in his lap. He pats her lightly like a cat, but holds the joint out of her reach. “Don't ever touch my little girl again.”

Nik looks at Aaron, expecting a wink or a nod of understanding.

Aaron looks away.

Ilana's eyes are still red. She sits up, glares at Nik, and scratches at the runs in her tights. Nik notices the dead rat is gone and wonders what they did with it. Its stench still lingers underneath whorls of cigarette, pot, and incense smoke.

“I think we should talk about what's going on here.” Kendall reaches a long, black-gloved arm over Ilana and toward Aaron for a drag. He hands it to her. “We could call the police, you know.”

“Ya, we could.” Ilana watches Kendall inhale, deep, like a vacuum. “But we won't.”

“We won't.” Kendall nods and exhales at Ilana in agreement then hands the joint back to Aaron. “But we could.”

“Wait — no. Kendall, this story isn't right,” Nik says, still staring at Aaron. “Why are you even getting involved?”

“Because I live here and I don't want a violent freak in my space, that's why.” Kendall rolls her eyes and tugs at the trio of piercings across her bottom lip.

“Yeah. All you do is paint and act like an asshole.” Ilana wriggles back onto Aaron.

“I hear you have a huge secret stash of good booze.” Aaron crosses his arms in front of his chest, flexed forearms hovering above Ilana. “You always used to share. I share with you.” Aaron's speech begins to slur. His head nods slowly forward then jerks back up again. “I think I'm entitled.”

Ilana pets Aaron's thigh to get his attention. “Nik is obsessed. He can't seem to get over the fact that Jennifer the skank dumped him,” she says.

“Are you even sleeping?” Kendall asks, but doesn't wait for Nik's answer. She turns toward Aaron and Ilana, shoulder angled to cut Nik off from the conversation. “I think he's becoming a toxic presence here.”

“Jennifer is missing,” Nik says.

“She left you, Nik,” Ilana snarls. “She walked out.”

Aaron's head nods forward again. He jerks awake and offers the joint in Nik's direction, but Ilana grabs it. Nik takes two steps backwards.

“You haven't seen her, though,” Nik says. “Nobody has. I don't want her to become a circle of stones.”

Ilana and Kendall exchange looks.

Nik thinks about the park by his grandmother's condo.

Aaron laughs. “What the fuck are you talking about? Aw man, I've got the spins.”

“Oh, baby.” Ilana shifts to make room for Aaron to lie down. “What did you take? I told you to be careful with my stash.”

“Nuffin.” Aaron clutches at his forehead and moans.

Nik sees Ilana's eyes turn mean and retreats to his room, pushing at his door to close it, shut them out.

“Hey, asshole,” Ilana yells after him. “Get help or get out.”

Nik runs his hands through his hair so many times it stripes in a rainbow of paint. He gulps from his glass of water. His hands shake and he shudders, thinking of his grandmother, and the fact that Parkinson's is hereditary. If Jennifer were here she'd set them straight about Ilana. She'd explain for him, like she did in his writing assignments. He paints a red
X
on the back of his hand for not standing up for himself. When he tries to calm down and daub red and purple onto the blood vessels of Jennifer's right eye, the apartment rumbles and the paint bleeds into a smear. Nik kicks the baseboard along the wall with his steel-toed boot. His toes crash into steel, stinging.

“Ilana's lying,” he says, talking to Old Aaron. “But I can't prove it. I don't know how.”

“I know,” Old Aaron would say.

“I have so much to deal with right now and Ilana makes everything worse,” Nik says.

“I trust you, dude,” Old Aaron says reassuringly. “And I'll talk to her, so don't worry about it. Maybe it's time for her to go. Make it you and me again, like old times.”

“Does that mean you'll help me find Jennifer?” Nik says.

But even he can't imagine Old Aaron understanding why he needs to find her.

He drops his paintbrush. It lands on top of his boot, splattering red over the skull and crossbones he and Aaron had silk-screened over the toe in glow-in-the-dark paint. As the paintbrush clatters to the floor, Nik drops onto his futon. He clutches the duvet his grandmother gave him and thinks of the island. He could have stayed. But he knows he wouldn't have been content playing video games with his high school friends. Working somewhere part-time. He wishes his mother had never taken him to see an Emily Carr exhibit in Victoria when he was a kid, and then unwishes it. He wishes he'd never answered Aaron's ad. Or let Ilana and Kendall move in. Then he unwishes that, too. If he hadn't, he might not have met Jennifer.

Dry air rasps in his throat. He feels lightheaded when he stands, but shrugs the feeling off as hunger. He needs to walk. Think. He takes his leather jacket from the closet, blows out the candles, and leaves, locking his door behind him — not that it will prevent anyone from snooping. No one's left in the living room. He hears Aaron retching in the bathroom and music coming from Kendall's room. Outside, fine rain coats his hair and sticks to his face. If he keeps going, he stays warm, so he walks and walks. Lights blur and dance through the raindrops. Aside from a few men hefting boxes out of delivery trucks he doesn't see anyone else on the street. The city feels empty. Vacant enough that if Jennifer was in it and he walked far enough he'd see her. He'd find her. An image of the Granville Street Bridge appears in his mind like a tarot card. He imagines he's drawing the bridge, lifting it up by the point of a pencil to let a tugboat and barge through. He looks at his hand, but he's not holding a pencil. He walks toward the bridge. When he reaches it, he touches the cool metal railing. It feels admirably solid. It's real. A boat sounds its horn in the harbour, bellowing like his father. His mother was always a foghorn. Repeating everything, low-voiced, her words crawling into his ears and up under his skin.