Encore Edie (2 page)

“That makes sense, I guess,” Dad says.

“They can stay in our basement until they find a place, can’t they, Jamie?” Mom says to Dad. She looks around wildly and a little vaguely, as though they’ll be arriving in five minutes and she’s forgotten to put clean linen on the guest bed. “She asked if we could find a list of possible schools for Merry so she can start thinking about which part of town.”

“There’s a special class at Burnham,” Dexter says.

Burnham is my and Dex’s high school. I know about the special class because I spent the summer, off and on, consulting the high school handbook my classmates and I were given on our last day of school, to help get us ready for our “new educational situation” (Principal’s Greeting, p. 2). Along with band and drama and woodworking and French and Punjabi and Cantonese and choir and computers and outdoor leadership and all the other classes, the handbook talks about the special class (Additional Programs, p. 14).
The special class is partly integrated, which means (if I understand right) that special kids take some regular classes, such as PE and art, and the harder ones, such as math and English, they do their own version of, in their own classroom, where they won’t slow anyone else down.

“That’s right,” Mom says, staring hard at Dexter, as though she’s just given her a brand new idea.

“It’s a great class,” Dexter says. “They’re sweet kids. So cute.” This is the kind of annoying, false-grown-up thing Dexter has taken to saying lately, which seems to charm our parents no end—
Have you noticed how Dex is getting so mature? blah, blah
—and which I don’t buy for one single minute.

“That’s right,” Dad says. He’s now sitting back at the kitchen table with the rest of us in, I tell myself privately, Dad-disappointed-because-no-one-is-laughing pose. “You did some volunteer work there last year, didn’t you?”

I vaguely remember something about that, Dexter tutoring some kids after school. I assumed these were cute, dumb boys in Dexter’s own classes, a category Dexter seems to enjoy, as opposed to cute, dumb boys in the special class, which is a whole other category entirely.

The phone rings. Dexter jumps up as if someone has struck her with a cattle prod. “It’s for me!” she yells, even though we’re all sitting right there. She finds the phone Mom’s been looking for under a pile of grocery store flyers. “Hello?” she says in her teeny-tiny phone voice, her eyebrows all perky.

I look at Dad, who makes his eyebrows go all perky. This time I have to laugh. Then something flicks me in the head.

“It’s for you,” my sister says, holding out the phone without looking at me. Her face is interesting—almost raisiny, like Mom’s—but I don’t have time to pay attention because the person on the phone is waiting. I know who it will be.

“Grandma!” I say.

“Uh, sorry,” a voice says. “Not Grandma.” It’s a boy’s voice.

“Who is this?” I demand. I don’t know any boys.

“Robert,” the voice says. “Happy birthday.”

“It’s Robert!” I say, because Dex has been whispering to Mom and Dad and all three of them are looking at me expectantly. Dexter still looks the same, tight around the mouth, but our parents look as if they’re trying not to smile. Robert, of course, is not a boy at all, not in Dexter’s sense, but is the friend we see every summer at the cabin. He and his mom always stay in the cabin next door. He used to be a heavy kid, kind of goofy, and at first Dex wouldn’t hang out with us. But over the last couple of years he’s gotten taller, and he actually swims now rather than just lying on the dock, and his voice has gotten deeper. Dex decided, since there was no one else around, she could tolerate someone a year younger than her after all. The three of us spent the summer boating and fishing and playing practical jokes on
each other and renting movies when the weather was lousy, or playing board games. He’s comfortable to be around, Robert, as I imagine a brother would be, or a boy cousin, or a big friendly dog. We only said goodbye four days ago. I wonder how he got our phone number. “How did you get our phone number?” I ask.

“Your sister gave it to me,” he says. “Is this a bad time?”

“For what?” I say.

There’s a silence. “I don’t know,” he mumbles. I think I hear his mom in the background, saying something encouraging. “Do you want to go to a movie sometime?” he says, loudly, all at once.

“What?” I say.

“A movie. My mom could drive us. Or both our moms could and we could meet halfway somewhere.” Robert lives way out in Vancouver, near the planetarium. They don’t even own their own car really, but share different cars with a bunch of other people in something called a co-op. This is because they can walk everywhere, to the planetarium and Robert’s school and the shops and Robert’s mom’s work. Dexter and I live in a much more realistic place—a suburb called Coquitlam—that requires driving in one’s own personal car to get anywhere.

“What movie?” I say.

There’s a pause, and I hear his mom’s voice again in the background. “What kind of movies do you like?” he asks.

“I don’t know. What kind of movies do
you
like?”

“I don’t know,” he says. Which is ridiculous since we’ve been watching movies together all summer long, and we both know that we both like the same kind: Bollywood.

I’m getting fed up. This is not a conversation; this is more like a thumb-war. I look up and see Dexter whispering urgently to Mom, her eyes flicking to me and back again, and our parents exchanging a long, fond look that tips me over the edge. “I can’t,” I say.

“Okay,” Robert says. He sounds relieved.

“There are no good movies right now,” I say. I have no idea if there are or not. “And school starts next week, and then I’ll be too busy.” I see Mom trying to catch my eye and ignore her.

“Okay,” Robert says. “Maybe some other time.”

“Bye,” I say, so I won’t have to answer this question, which I’m not even sure is a question. I hang up.

“Oh, Edie,” Mom says right away. “You won’t be too busy. You could have gone on a weekend. I’ll drive you. Call him back.”

“Don’t know his number,” I say.

“You could star-six-nine him,” Dad says.

“I know that!” I say. “I don’t want to star-six-nine him! Leave me alone!” Then I see my sister’s eyes are oddly bright. “What’s the matter with you?” I say. I don’t mean to snap at her, but I was caught off guard. I thought Dex was making fun of me, whispering to our parents while I was having that embarrassing phone call. It’s only now sinking in that I’ve
just been asked out, for the first time, in front of my entire family, and I managed it less than graciously, which makes me feel even less gracious now. “Are you crying?”

“Shut up!” Dexter says.

“You shut up!” I say. “A boy called and it wasn’t for Dexter, wah, wah.”

“Go to your room, Edie,” Mom says, pulling Dexter in for a hug. Dexter’s shoulders are shaking now, but she isn’t making any noise.

“IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!” I say.

“Do what your mother says,” Dad says. This is so completely unexpected—usually he’s on my side when it comes to seeing the humour in Dexter’s absurd moods—that I almost start crying myself, except that I’m not going to give anybody the satisfaction. I stomp out of the kitchen, stomp back to scoop up my new CD, and stomp upstairs to my attic bedroom.

My bedroom has recently undergone some changes. Mom is addicted to those shows on TV where people in matching T-shirts make fun of each other’s furniture and buy wildly unlikely paint colours and make craft-y light fixtures instead of buying them like normal people, and then pretend to be all surprised about how much they love each other’s bright, weird results. “You are literally watching paint dry,” I told her once. But Mom seemed to take me seriously, and a few days later came home with a sheaf of paint chips.

“I thought about what you said,” Mom said. “I thought,
instead of watching other people decorate, we could do some decorating ourselves.”

“Who is this ‘we’ all of a sudden?” I asked.

“Well, Dad and I just repainted our bedroom last year. And Dexter’s room is—”

“—perfect,” said Dexter, who happened to be passing through the kitchen that moment on her way to the bathroom.

“—still relatively fresh,” Mom said carefully.

“What’s not fresh?” I demanded. I loved my room, with its sloped ceiling and warm yellow walls, and my shelves of old books and toys I’d outgrown but wasn’t ready not to see every day of my life. It was true the paint was getting a little picky here and there, and the curtain was torn, and the carpet was stained in some places and threadbare in others, and I had books piled on the floor now that the shelves were full of everything I had ever owned since I was a toddler, practically. But I knew where everything was, and nobody else had to live there, so why was it anybody’s business but my own?

“She means your room smells,” Dexter called from the bathroom.

“Does not,” I called back, thinking,
It does?
I fingered idly through the paint chips, sorting them into piles with one finger.
No, no, no, actually, actually no, hey!

“Just think about it,” Mom said.

I pushed a chip over to Mom.

“Really?” Mom said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

We got it done in a weekend, just like on the TV shows. We even took the carpet up so Mom could put down laminate. “I’ve always wanted to do this!” she said, puzzling together the strips of wood, or wood-like substance, or whatever laminate is. The result looked like a dance floor. Mom persuaded me to box up most of my old toys and books and store them in the other half of the attic, where I could get them whenever I needed them, Mom promised. Surprisingly, I haven’t needed any of them so far. We scrubbed and sanded and painted and put up nifty wooden blinds instead of curtains.

Now I slap the CD into my stereo and slap on the earphones and flop on my bed and stare at the ceiling, listening.

After a while, Dad comes upstairs. I know it’s Dad because his step on the creaky attic stairs is the slowest and heaviest. He knocks.

“Yeah,” I call, which isn’t very nice and I know it.

In comes Dad, stooping a little under the low doorway and then standing up straight once he’s in. Then he pretends to stagger, brushing his hand across his eyes. “What’s happening?” he says. “Everything’s gone dark. My life is flashing before my eyes! Help!” This is his joke every time.

“Quit it,” I say. I painted the room dark purple, and Mom and I went down to Little India on Main Street and bought an entire bolt of flame orange sari fabric that we
swagged from ceiling corner to ceiling corner. Even Dexter was impressed, and her room is pink.

He sits on the end of my bed, which is still covered by my bunny quilt. Mom says we can afford to replace the quilt cover in a few months or so, which is secretly a relief. I know it kind of mutes the dramatic effect, but I’m not quite ready to give up every last trace of my childhood.

“Dex thought he was going to phone
her
,” Dad says. “When he asked for our phone number.”

Interesting that it’s Dad having this conversation with me, and not Mom. “Interesting that you think I care,” is what comes out of my mouth.

“No,” Dad says, and I know the joking is over. “That’s not nice. And you were very rude on the phone. It takes a lot of courage for a boy to call up a girl like that. Girls have it easier that way.”

“Please. Boys call girls, girls call boys, boys call boys, girls call girls. It’s all the same now, in the nineteenth—I’m sorry, the twentieth—I’m sorry, the twenty-
first
century. When were you born, again?”

Dad looks surprised. “I need to watch more of that music channel,” he says.

“For instance,” I say, “if Dexter wants to go out with Robert so badly, I don’t know why she doesn’t just phone him up and ask him. I don’t know what’s stopping her. Not me, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t think your sister is used to doing that,” Dad says.

I consider this. It’s probably true. Dexter has blond hair and blue eyes and takes Advanced Ballet and wins competitions and gets straight As (well, so do I), and is used to boys coming to her. Like bees to honey, Dad said once, but they’re more like mosquitoes for my perfect princess sister to swat. I think of Robert’s thin little voice on the phone, and his mom’s faint drone in the background, encouraging him. How
do
you catch a mosquito, other than swatting it?

“This is a stressful time for you,” Dad says. He starts playing This Little Piggy with my toes, wiggling them between his fingers one after the other, without really seeming to notice it. “You’re getting so big and grown-up, and going to a scary new school, and now boys. Then your body’s going to change, and your skin will start to break out—”

“Stop it!”

Dad seems to snap out of his reverie. “Well, I guess your mom has talked to you about most of this stuff. I guess I’m just trying to say your mom and I know you’re stressed out, and we’ll help you however we can, but if you could try to be a little nicer to everybody, that would help too.”

“I am perfectly nice,” I say.

“Dexter went through a phase like this,” Dad says, off dreaming again. “You guys are so similar. All awkward and rude all the time. We were at our wits’ end.”

“Stop it!”

“Okay,” Dad says, and when I won’t look at him, mortified by the comparison, he gets up to leave.

“Wait,” I call just as he’s closing the door behind him. He sticks his head back in. “I really like the CD.”

He looks happy then, and blows me a kiss, and goes downstairs. I sigh and lie back down. It’s almost too easy. Sometimes, being nice just makes me feel alone.