Monkey Beach (21 page)

“You’d better run!” Jimmy yelled after me from the porch.

I gave him the finger.

“You’re gonna get it!” Jimmy said. “You hear me, you freak? You’re gonna get it!”

The next day, Frank left a dead frog in my desk. It was dark green and tiny, barely out of its tadpole stage. I stared at it, then slowly turned to face him. He smiled at me. I hated his smug expression, the cocky way he lounged in his chair. But what made my blood boil was that he’d killed the frog just to make me scared. I grabbed his chair and yanked. He landed with a thud, yelled and held his head where he’d hit the floor. I reached into my desk, grabbed the frog and tried to stuff it up his nose.

Unfortunately, the teacher pulled me off. We both had to write “I will not fight in class” a hundred times on the chalkboard. She wrote notes for our parents to sign. Mom was going to be pissed, but I was sick of taking it. From now on, if he was going to try anything, I was going to give as good as I got.

At lunch, I sat with Erica and her friends in our usual spot near the seesaws. They gossiped and giggled, talking in high, excited voices about how to get bigger hair, what they were going to wear to the Christmas dance, and which boys were the cutest. Anger flashed through me—they seemed so young and stupid. I must have been making a face because Erica turned to me and asked me why I was looking so crabby.

“We talk about the same stuff every day. Aren’t you bored of it?” I said.

“If you think we’re so boring,” Erica said in an aggrieved tone, “why don’t you go sit somewhere else?”

“And miss your fascinating debate on hair spray?” The second it came out of my mouth, I knew I’d have to start apologizing or I’d be socially dead. But I couldn’t bring myself to care. It was my voice saying
these things, but it felt like I was watching some mildly interesting program on TV.

Erica snapped her eyes at me, then turned back to her friends, who spent the rest of the day pointedly ignoring me. When the last bell rang, they shadowed me to the bus stop. They hadn’t got up the courage to start name-calling yet, so they were just whispering. I stood apart from them and glared at my hands, trying to think of a convincing way to tell Mom I wanted to change schools. I looked up to find Erica’s gang forming a circle around me, giggling and giving me sly looks.

“She looks like a boy,” one of Erica’s friends said with the greatest contempt as they took the bus seats directly behind me.

“She is a boy.”

“No,” Erica said. “She’s an animal.”

“Hey,” one of Erica’s friends said, pushing at my shoulder. “Hey, Miss Piggy.” More giggling. They began oinking.

“Well,” I said. “At least I didn’t have an accident on the Zipper, did I? I’m not scared of a baby ride.”

Total silence. I turned to look Erica right in her face, which was flushing the deepest, darkest, most satisfying shade of red. Tab had told me that when they were on the carnival ride and their car got stuck upside down at the very top, Erica had panicked. If I kept my mouth shut, it would end right there. They would pretend I didn’t exist and I could live my life in peace. But when I looked into Erica’s furious face, I couldn’t stop. “Isn’t that right, Pissy Missy?”

She lunged. I’d never seen her move so fast. She grabbed fistfuls of my hair and yanked for all she was
worth. It hurt like hell, but I just pushed her away and laughed, which made her slap my face.

“You’re an animal!” Erica screamed. “You’re nothing but a lying animal!”

“Miss Piggy, Miss Piggy, Miss Piggy,” her friends began to chant.

“Pisssssssssss,” I said, still gasping with laughter.

Erica’s arms were pinwheeling so fast she looked like a cartoon, but she was so mad that most of her hits missed me.

Then, from the back of the bus, Frank and his friends started their own chant: “Pis-sy Mis-sy, Pis-sy Mis-sy, pisssssss.”

“If you don’t knock it off,” the bus driver yelled, “I’m stopping the bus right here!”

Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.

My fall from grace was spectacular. If I’d had head lice, scabies, worms and measles, I couldn’t have been more unpopular. Rather than sit with me on the bus, kids would sit on the floor. Rather than be my lab partner in science class, kids would claim to be sick and have to go to the nurse’s office. Rather than eat with me, kids would throw their lunch bags in the
garbage and claim they weren’t hungry. All I had to do to be back in Erica’s good graces was grovel and kiss ass, but I’d die before I did that.

After school, when I walked into Ma-ma-oo’s house, the smell of spice cake floated through the room. Ma-ma-oo had a cake pan as large as her oven. Ba-ba-oo had made it especially for her. It was older than me and deep brown with encrusted oil. It made enough cake to feed sixty people. At funerals, when so many people visit and the family members are not supposed to cook for themselves, huge amounts of food have to be prepared. She used to have two pans, she told me, but the other one wore out. In the past, she’d used it for weddings and showers, but lately I’d begun to think of it as her death pan.

“The next time I bake with this,” she said as I strolled into the kitchen, “you’ll be getting married.”

“Yeah? To who?” I said.

“Someone rich.” Then she said it was time to go and that she wanted to show me something. She brought the cake out to the car and I thought we were going to a funeral, but we went to the docks instead. We climbed into her boat, she cast us off and we left the village. I held the cake in my lap as we bumped along. She beached the boat just below the old graveyard. We struggled through the snow and bare branches to arrive at the first graves.

“Lots of family here,” she said. She pointed out long-dead cousins, great-aunts and uncles, great-grandparents. “This is your great-grandfather. He was a good hunter. Never missed a shot. He was a sniper in the first war.”

“Oh,” I said, staring at the plain white headstone. Hector Hill, it read, 1902–1943.

“He loved my baking,” she said.

“Is it his birthday?”

“No,” she said. “Just visiting.”

We built a small fire and she fed it her cake. “You been in a lot of trouble these days.”

I stared at my feet and waited for the lecture.

“Your ba-ba-oo was a fighter too. Second war. I was so proud of him. He was very handsome in his uniform. All the girls were jealous of me.” When I looked up, she was smiling at me. The graveyard was filled with creaking trees and skittering things. The woods were shadowed and eerie.

“You scared?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Don’t be scared. Only ghosts here are relations.”

I shivered, staring around, feeling the silence as a tangible thing, heavy and smothering. Imagining eyes staring at us and judging me.

“Do you know where Mick is?”

“Rotting in the ground,” I said bitterly.

“I bet you anything he’s arguing away with your ba-ba-oo. Never got along for more than five minutes, those two. He’s meeting Hector. And Eleanor. And Phillip. Lots of singing, dancing. Good place, where he is. Good people with him.”

“So you don’t miss him?”

“All the time. So does your dad. He hides it. You hide it.”

“I don’t see you crying.”

“I cut my hair when he died. I talk to him every day.”

“What do you say?

She sang a low, sad song, first in Haisla, then in English:

She touched my hair. I put an arm around her waist. “Your great-grandfather Hector made that song when his wife, Eleanor, died. Oh, he had a beautiful voice.” She looked at the sky. “Getting dark. Kick the fire out.”

When I got home, I went into Mom’s sewing room and hunted for a pair of scissors. Mom caught me in the middle of cutting my hair. She let out a horrified
shriek and ran into the room to grab the scissors away from me. We wrestled for them. She won after smacking me on the side of the head and saying, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m mourning,” I said.

“God,” she said, touching the side that I’d cut down to the scalp. “God.”

“It’s just hair, Mom.”

“It was beautiful hair. Oh, sweetie.” She sat down on the bed, reluctantly handing me back the scissors and letting me continue to cut my hair, pressing her hand against her mouth and making squeaking noises as I chopped the rest of it off. Then she marched me down to the kitchen, threw a garbage bag over my shoulders and stared at my head for a long time, her eyes squinting in concentration.

“Yes,” she said, starting her barber’s razor. “Yes, I think we can save this.”

She carefully shaved the sides and the back and spiked the top, leaving the left side long so it all fell over in a prickly arch. She touched the ends with gel and sighed. She handed me a mirror. “It’s the best I could do.”

“You are so cool,” I said, massively impressed with my new do.

I wasn’t sure if there was a ceremony that went along with the hair burning, but just the cutting alone had made me feel better. Mom said she’d heard we were supposed to burn it. I didn’t know how to start a fire, though, and Mom said that if she tried to chop wood for the basement stove, she’d probably hack off a leg. I stood on the back porch and tried to use a lighter
to set handfuls of hair on fire over a metal garbage can. But my hair had been long and thick, so it took forever and burnt my fingers. In the end, we fired up the hibachi and threw my hair on the coals.

“I can’t believe we’re barbecuing your hair,” Mom said.

“I like mourning,” I said.

As I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of Mick. I wanted him back. I whispered his name. For a moment, I felt light, free, as if a warm wind blew through me, making my skin tingle. I was filled with a sense of calm, peace, and I saw Kitlope Lake, flat and grey in the early-morning light, mirroring the mountains.

At school the next morning, Erica’s goon Lou Ann came up to me five minutes before the first buzzer rang and told me she was going to kick my butt good later. She was a head taller than me and about twice my weight. Since she told me just before classes, I knew she was trying to psych me out so I’d worry about it all day.

Ironically, for the first time in months, I didn’t want to fight. But I didn’t want to get my butt kicked either and Lou Ann never backed down. No matter what I did or said, it was going to happen. I’d hurt Erica too much to be left alone. I resigned myself to getting creamed. So instead of waiting for Lou Ann to come get me, I went up to her at lunch and without preamble punched her in the nose. To my surprise,
she collapsed to the pavement and began wailing so loud I thought I’d broken it. The teacher on playground patrol came running. I spent the afternoon in detention and was warned that the next time I was caught fighting, I’d be suspended for three days. The principal phoned my house and Mom yelled at me, telling me I was a disgrace. On the bus ride home, there was a circle of empty seats around me.

Thoroughly depressed, I didn’t notice that Frank and his friends had followed me off the bus. They blocked my way as I tried to go around them. I frowned at him, secretly glad that we were going to have it out. Hitting someone who wouldn’t burst into tears would be a relief.

“You’re okay,” Frank said.

If he had ripped off all his clothes and set his hair on fire, he couldn’t have surprised me more. It must have showed, because he started grinning.

“Big Lou had it coming,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, more to say something than because I agreed with him.

“We’re going up to the old hall.” He watched me. I realized this was an invitation.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It was a trap. It had to be. They were going to kick the shit out of me. That’s what was going to happen. But even knowing that, I wanted to go. I hadn’t played with anyone in months.

We ran. The other guys didn’t say anything. I thought they were being snobby, but I didn’t mind. Council Hill was slippery. We scooted up, around the
hairpin turn and right to the top, where the old hall had stood before they tore it down so kids wouldn’t play in it and get hurt. We were all out of breath.