Rabbit Ears (9 page)

Then, sometime in early June, you get practical.

It happens during one of Mom’s visits, after she mentions Hornby.

You think back and back, all the way to the Hornby trip when you were still a little kid, five or six. Dad was alive. He wasn’t even sick yet, or if he was, you didn’t know it. You camped, right near Big Tribune, the best beach in the whole entire world.

Every single morning of that holiday, you all walked from the campsite along the beach, lugging your supplies for the day, found the very best spot and set yourselves up, constructing a shelter out of one big beach umbrella and all the weathered wood you could drag into place.

In the afternoon, you and Beth would watch for the ice cream guy. “Ice cream!” you shrieked together when you saw him, and Dad would give you a stack of quarters, enough for an ice cream cone each. Sometimes he would come along and get cones for himself and Mom too. You and Dad always had chocolate. Beth had strawberry. And Mom had vanilla.

“Together we’re Neapolitan,” Mom said once, and you all laughed.

Dad taught you to swim that summer, and you took to
the water right off even though you were just five, loving it just like Dad did. Mom and Beth would walk to the pebble cove while you cavorted in the shallows.

They always went on and on about it after: how they would turn over rocks and watch the scurrying crabs, poke at geoduck holes and jump back, shrieking, when the water squirted up past Beth’s waist. And how they looked for glass. Beth still has the pieces she found that summer.

Sometimes you wanted to go with them on those long walks, but the water was better than crabs and geoducks and bits of glass. The water was your home.

But that was before, you think, your insides constricting, because now you remember last year. That guy, Adam, in the car.

How many other men have there been since then? Men who looked at you with disgust; men who paid you and then turned you out of their cars. Can Hornby possibly feel the same after all that? If it could … The longing you feel as you ponder that question is so deep that you have to put your hands on your knees and breathe for long seconds, while Mom looks at you, brows pulled together, lips sealed.

When you meet her eyes again, her face clears. All practicality, she says, “You’re supposed to get out on August ninth, but they told me that you can get out early, a whole week early, if you work hard. We’ll pick you up here and drive straight to the ferry.”

That gets your attention. Anything to get away from the city.

“You’re a changed woman,” one of the guards says a few days later as she unlocks the door between the classrooms
and the refectory. And she only has a slight edge to her voice as she says it.

And you are, at least on the outside. It’s the notebook that makes it possible. A social worker gave it to you early in your stay, along with one pen, but you don’t start writing in it till after you know about Hornby. They keep a close watch on pens here; you have to trade one in to get another one, but at least they’re allowed. Anyway, you draw a bit, but the lines on those notebook pages just beg for words. They’re like greedy little puppies. You feed them and feed them, little stories and poems, taking moments from your time downtown and turning them into things between the covers of a book. You like it. Actually, you like it a lot.

On Monday, August third, you change into the clothes that Mom has dropped off for you, and wait with your tiny bag of possessions, your notebook safe in the bottom. Your stomach clenches and you actually have to go to the bathroom to retch for a minute or two. A year ago, Mom talked about a month on Hornby like it was the best cure in the world. Now, you all know it offers only a temporary escape. Still, it’s better than this place, even though it means Mom and Beth for companions all day, every day, for four whole weeks.

Kaya

Summer is over. Hornby is behind you.

It wasn’t so bad. You dozed and dove the days away on the beach, tanning a deep dark brown, and slipping into the water every time you got too hot. You avoided the hippie part of the beach, and stayed in at night, filling three sketchbooks with pen-and-pencil drawings, and terrible, awful poems filled with agony and longing. They were a kind of angsty fun to write, as long as you didn’t reread them afterward. You didn’t even look in the prison notebook—that’s what you call it to yourself—and you kept it well out of sight. Too hard to write anything real with Mom and Beth around all the time.

Mom tried to talk with you a few times, but eventually she gave up. Beth didn’t even try. She practised card tricks endlessly from a stack of books on magic. She did ask to practise on you once, but quickly switched to Mom when you let her know what you thought of a sixteen-year-old girl pretending to be some kind of magician.

Now, summer is over. And you face home. School. All the people and places that breed dread in your belly.

Downtown is there too. Waiting.

On the first day of school, Mom has ordered Beth to wait for you, to bring you home from school in one piece. And Mom has ordered you to wait for your sister. You’ve decided to go along with them for a bit. See if you can stick it out. Grade Nine.

At three o’clock you tear yourself away from the fringe of the clutch of smokers at the edge of the trees. It’s not as if they’re speaking to you anyway. They ignore differently now. Instead of looking down their noses, they kind of skitter away. They know about the detention centre.

Michelle is here today too. She doesn’t skitter.

She sucks on her cigarette like she’ll die without it. You haven’t seen each other in a long, long time.

“They put me in treatment,” she says, and lets out a big smoky laugh. Treatment’s a joke, apparently.

“I got arrested,” you say. That’s got to be one up, you think. And hate yourself.

She breathes out a cloud and sucks on her cigarette again. Smoke held in, she asks, “What did you do?”

“Punched a girl.”

She breathes out and looks at you, hard. The rest of them are watching you, murmuring to each other. Drug addicts and delinquents. That’s what you are.

No. That’s what you
were
. You don’t know about Michelle, but you’re clean. You’re clean and it’s three o’clock, time to meet your sister out front and go home. Maybe you’ll stay away from Michelle for a bit.

“I have to go,” you say.

Michelle doesn’t say a word. But it’s hard to tear yourself away. Her eyes hold onto yours with a death grip.

For a long moment, you don’t even try to free yourself. You look back, thinking hard. You avoided her all spring when you were going back and forth downtown. Gemini warned you off “girls like her,” and the image of Michelle on that filthy bed made it easy to listen. The fact that you ended up nodding off in exactly the same spot with the same nasty man next to you just made you more determined to stay away from her.

You’re done with downtown, with all of it. And that has got to include her, no matter how desperate she is.

Or precisely because of it.

Beth is sitting on the bottom step, with that awful pseudofriend of hers, Jane, chattering away. Her other sort-of friend, Samantha, is hovering in the background looking kind. Jane sees you.

“How’re you doing, Kaya?” she says. “I hear you spent some time in juvie atoning for your sins.”

Nothing on earth could compel you to speak to Jane or even to look at her. “Let’s go,” you say to your sister.

Jane laughs.

She sounds like a braying donkey, you think, and suppress a small annoyed smile.

“Jane,” Samantha says quietly, but Jane barely glances in her direction.

Beth hoists herself to her feet, and you feel your nose wrinkle at the sight of her. She sure has packed on the pounds over the summer. And she has such a big mouth, telling Jane about Willingdon. And Jane, it seems, has already told the whole school that you spent time in jail. Fury comes in a wave, and recedes. Disgust is easier anyway. Besides, you’re staying home now. You can’t afford to react. You can’t.

Beth

Every minute of those first weeks of September is a pain. No. Every minute is
hell
.

First off, there’s school.

I learn Kaya’s schedule and keep checking up on her. At first I plan to do it just once or twice a day, but I can’t help myself; it’s like I’m spying on her, following her when I have a spare, and dropping in on her teachers during breaks and asking them if she’s attending classes. Every afternoon, I wait out front, afraid that she’s given me the slip, that she won’t show, even though I always know that she’s been in school all day. Most days, Jane manages to say something rude and Kaya lashes back, just as mean, and Samantha murmurs something or other. Kaya doesn’t really show signs of running away, so maybe I should just relax and let her be, but I can’t.

Then, there’s Mom’s job. She went and got herself a new one after we got back from that conference—she’s less of a nurse now and more of a social worker, or some such thing—and she starts the same time we start school. So,
she’s trying to settle in at work, when as far as I’m concerned she should be making sure that Kaya settles in at home. She shuts herself in her room in the evenings, though how she can work in that mess, I don’t know.

Every Saturday, she emerges for a few hours to have fun with Kaya, as if a movie or two will fix her. She does invite me along, but the plans are clearly hers and Kaya’s. They go to
The Wedding Singer
one Saturday,
The Mask of Zorro
the next. They don’t ask me what I want to see. Apparently surviving juvenile detention earns you the right to order up movies, meals and whatever else. I stay at home with the contents of the kitchen cupboards, which is sad since both those movies are supposed to be great. Yes, I know I’m sulking. No, I don’t care.

Mom whispers at me once in a while about my weight, and Kaya makes snarky comments. I wear sweatpants and T-shirts and avoid mirrors, but I can feel the thickness when I move my arms or turn my head. Tomorrow I’ll stop, I say. Tomorrow.

I practise my magic a lot, at least. I made leaps and bounds while we’re on Hornby, and I’m still getting better every day, though I’m not ready to let anyone know. Samantha’d be all right, probably, but I can just imagine what Jane would say.

The magic soothes me—not just the doing of it, but the learning, the mastering. I think about that sometimes, about how good it feels, the deep concentration. I wonder about unravelling it from the soaps and the ice cream, which soothe me too. But I still get the best kick, the best flood of calm, when I’ve got all three going at the same time.

One afternoon when they’re out at some matinee, I get
stuck on the box-to-box trick, making something appear somewhere else. I lose the thread of my muttered patter against the drone of the TV. I press the mute button, take another bite of ice cream and try again, but the boxes are all crooked and tippy on the bed.

Normally when this happens, I switch back to card tricks. I’ve rigged up a pretty good lap table with one of Mom’s nursing books, and the cards stay put. Today, though, something’s driving me. I have no idea what. I grab the remote, push the “off” button and shove the half-eaten Häagen-Dazs into the freezer, burying it under frozen peas and a couple of ancient steaks, white as snow.

It takes two minutes to clear the clutter off the dining table, to set up my boxes, long-eared rabbit at the ready. The blurry film in my head clears away, and my fingertips tingle as my brain tells my hands what to do. The patter flows, even though I’m only talking to myself. When I lift the second box at the end, there is the rabbit, gazing up at me through her beaded eyes, exactly where she is supposed to be, whisked there by my magic.

I drop onto a chair and burst into weird confusing tears.

Kaya

Every single day, you go to school, day after day, week after week. Well, for two weeks anyway. Almost every day, you see Diana, hanging out in the halls with her friends. When your eyes meet, though, she darts away.

The movies with Mom on the weekends are fun. Beth
is a big baby and won’t come along, but it’s nice being alone with Mom for a change. And you avoid the theatres downtown.

You can do this, you tell yourself. You can go to school like other kids, do your homework, learn a bit of math, some French. Hang out.

You pull out the prison notebook early on in those days at home, and fill up the last few pages on the rare occasions when you find yourself alone. When it’s full, you hide it, and you hide it well.

You avoid Michelle for the whole first two weeks, but then you hear about a late-September beach party, and it sounds like fun. That’s what normal kids do anyway, they don’t go off to sleazy hotel rooms and shoot up: they party together. You can’t face going alone, and Michelle’s the closest thing you have to a friend, so you call her.

You climb out your window that night, after making sure that the sliding door is unlocked so you can get back in later. And Michelle is waiting on the corner, so you can hitchhike together. The bonfire’s already huge when you get there, and lots of kids are wasted. Still, there are no needles here. No gross old men. You and Michelle hang out for a while, sharing a little bottle she stole from her foster parents. It feels so good, the liquor, warm in your belly and your chest. Nothing like the stuff you do downtown. This is what normal kids do. This is normal.

Michelle does get a bit out of hand, slurring and saying stuff you really, really don’t want to hear. You stick with her, and the two of you head up the steps to Marine Drive fairly early, you supporting her a lot of the way. The guy who picks
you up pretty much as soon as you stick out your thumb wants to take the two of you out to a club, but you just say no thanks, and he drops you off not too many blocks from home. He’s even pretty nice about it.

Midway through that week, almost three whole weeks into the school year, you come out of a stall in the washroom to find Diana waiting for you. She doesn’t just happen to be there. She’s facing you, bracing herself on a sink. She looks awful.

You start to move past her toward the door, but she steps in front of you. “He’s … he’s dead,” she says, finally.

That stills your flight. “What?” you say. “What?”

“He’s dead,” she says again, more wailing now than speaking. “He … he …”

“He what?” you say. Not
who
.

Diana’s shoulders are shaking. She’s actually sobbing. You wait for her, pondering the word
dead
. Can she really mean it? And, if so … “He … he shot himself,” she says, the words drawn out through her sobs. “In his front garden. Yesterday.”

You stare at her for another long moment, searching tentatively inside yourself as you do. You do not try to comfort her. You do not feel sad yourself. Sad? That’s crazy. Crazy.

Her sobs die down at last, and she looks at you like she wants something. What?

Something burbles deep down inside; it gathers force in your gut like lava in a volcano. It starts its way up. Up. Up. It’s
already high in your chest when you recognize it for what it is. Rage. It’s white-hot rage.

“What do I care?” you say then, and you see her eyes widen, her shoulders curl forward, almost reaching for one another. She takes a step back. “Why are you telling me?” You’re almost spitting, struggling to stop from shouting. “Can’t you mind your own fucking—”

That’s when three girls tumble together through the washroom door. They stop in their tracks, staring.

“Ooh,” one of them says. “Drama!”

Diana takes an enormous breath. You know you’ve hurt her. But the knowledge does nothing to quell your rage. And she’s gone. Out the door. You’re close behind, but you turn the other way down the hall. You hope never to set eyes on that meddling bitch again.