The Journey Prize Stories 25 (12 page)

Five hours later, Lucas was ready to close the store and Casey had finished
Red Angels
. Lucas had almost forgotten she was
there. He had filed away two more online orders for Kyle to fill on Saturday, talked to a regular on the phone who wanted to know when the new
Siege
was coming in, and sent an email to his friend Mike in Alberta. And Casey had finished a book. “Can I ask you a question?” she asked Lucas.

“No,” Lucas said.

She kept talking anyway. “I know what a hand job is,” she said. “But I’m not sure what a blow job is. And the picture didn’t really make any sense.”

“No,” said Lucas. “I’m not answering that. Ask your mom or something.”

“My
mom
?” Casey threw the book on the counter. “My mom doesn’t know.” She narrowed her eyes at Lucas, who was counting up the deposit for the night. “Maybe I’ll ask Nana. I’ll tell her I read about it in a book you gave me.”

“Christ,” said Lucas. He ripped the top off the deposit bag and stuffed it in an envelope. “Fine. A blow job is like a hand job, but with your mouth. Understand?” He banged open the back cupboard where they kept the safe, and started fumbling with his keys.

“Yeah, I understand.” Casey was quiet for a few moments. Lucas stuffed the deposit bag in the safe and locked the door. He turned around. Casey was still staring at him. “But why do they call them ‘blow jobs’? Do you actually blow?”

Lucas stared back. “How old are you?” he asked.

“How old are
you
?”

Silence. They both answered at the same time.

“Thirty-four.”

“Twelve.”

Twelve. Lucas could hardly remember twelve, and he saw
on Casey’s face that she could hardly picture thirty-four. He grabbed his bag and started walking around the store, switching off power bars. Casey followed him silently. When he got to the door, he flicked off the lights. The store was dark except for the neon glow of the Green Lantern lantern hanging on the wall. He looked at Casey. In the green light, she looked like a little alien.

“You don’t really blow,” Lucas said. “It’s more like you suck. So I don’t know why they call it that.”

“Have you ever had one?” Casey asked.

Lucas had a momentary flash of Laure on her knees, looking up at him. He shook it off. “I’m definitely not answering that,” he said. He opened the door and gave Casey a push outside.

On the way upstairs, Casey ran ahead of him. When she got to the top of the stairs, she turned around and said, “Can I come over?” She slid back and forth across the hall on her Heelys, pulling at a piece of her hair.

“I’m going out,” Lucas lied. “Besides, don’t you think your mother is wondering where you are?”

Casey’s face darkened. “My mother’s
gone out
,” she said. Then she rolled inside Pearl’s apartment and slammed the door.

Four of the things Laure left in the apartment: a bottle of Bath and Body Works Vanilla Noir shower gel, a set of Egyptian cotton sheets, a copy of
The Royal Tenenbaums
on DVD, and the bike. The shower gel Lucas threw out. He never told Laure, but the smell of it always made him sick. The sheets were on their bed and hadn’t been washed since the last time Laure had done the laundry. The DVD, Lucas figured, was partially his
anyway. But the bike really bothered him. He had bought it for her, after all, at a yard sale down the block the spring that she moved in. It was pink and green and had a basket attached to the handlebars with a plastic flower in the middle of it. It was exactly the type of thing Laure loved, and Lucas felt she should have been more sentimental about it.

Laure’s father had been a hockey player in the nineties, a fourth-line journeyman who had played for twelve teams in eight years. Name a city with a hockey team and Laure had lived there, if only for a few months. Toronto had been her favourite, or so she had said. In every other city they had lived in downtown condos fifteen storeys above the street, but in Toronto they had a rented house near the university and Laure remembered backyard cookouts, neighbours with dogs, kids on bikes everywhere. When she came back, after finishing her undergrad in some isolated New England college town, she ended up renting one of Lucas’s rooms above World Famous. She ended up sharing Lucas’s own room, too, but that came later. There were no dogs, no cookouts. Just a comic book store and some IKEA furniture.

One afternoon, just after Laure moved out, Pearl came across the hall with muffins. She liked to bake for Lucas, even though he’d told her a dozen times he didn’t like sweet things. “Where’d this orphan run off to?” she asked. She eyed the bike in the corner behind the sofa.

“She didn’t run,” Lucas answered without thinking about it. “I mean, she didn’t run, because she was adopted.” He laughed. Pearl must have seen something in his face, because she left the muffins and went home without even asking him, the way she did sometimes, for a cup of tea from the
teapot shaped like a rooster that, obviously, someone had left behind.

For some reason, Casey only ever came into the store when Lucas was working. As far as Lucas could tell, Mel had never even met her. On the weekends, Kyle teased him, called Casey his “girlfriend” until Lucas punched him in the arm, hard. Casey’s mom, Lucas had never seen again, although he’d hear her sometimes, coming home late at night, stumbling through the hallway and scraping her key against the lock across the hall while Lucas was playing
Call of Duty
with the sound off so he wouldn’t wake Pearl. Whenever her mom came up in conversation, Casey would make up some elaborate lie.

“She’s quarantined in one of Nana’s rooms,” she said once. “She caught malaria when we were in Southeast Asia.”

“Don’t they have medicine for that nowadays?” Lucas asked.

“Not for the type she has.” Casey dropped her voice to a whisper, the way she always did. She rolled up the sleeves of her cardigan, which was bright yellow, to reveal rows and rows of shiny metal bracelets crawling up her arm. “She was a ninja, you know. The three of us were. Team Ninja. That’s what the natives called us. We crept through the jungles of Tibet, searching for the evil warlord who was holding the princess hostage in a castle built out of vines high up in the trees. My sister nearly caught him, once, near the end. But then she had to choose between killing the warlord and saving my mom’s life. And here we are.”

“There is so much wrong with that story,” Lucas said, “that I don’t even know where to begin.”

“God, Lucas!” Casey slammed her little fists against the counter, and her bracelets sounded like breaking glass. “You have no
imagination
!”

Lucas turned back to the computer. “You are not the first person to tell me that,” he said.

“Well, you should have listened.” Casey rolled over to a box of books at the side of the counter. It was a shipment of the latest issue of
Blood Ring
. She pulled one out and started flipping through it. “Didn’t you ever want to do anything else?”

Lucas grabbed the book from Casey and threw it back in the box. “Who are you, my mother?” He lifted the box up onto the counter. “I have to price these.” He went back to the computer and pulled up the inventory screen. Casey kept watching him while he loaded the printer with labels. The machine started up, a rhythmic whirr and hiss as it spat out the price tags.

“Wouldn’t you rather be, like,
making
a comic book than
pricing
a comic book?” she asked after a while. She pulled on a piece of her hair.

“Nope,” said Lucas.

“Why not?”

The labels spilled out over the edge of the printer in a long loop down to the floor. Lucas picked it up. “Can we not have this conversation?”

“You never want to have
any
conversation.”

Lucas slammed the labels down on the counter. “Casey, I’m working,” he said, a little too loudly. Casey stared at him. Then she rolled away on her Heelys. He could hear her bracelets clinking down one of the aisles.

Lucas sighed. He walked over to a shelf along the back wall and pulled a book out of one of the bins. He followed the sound
of the clinking to the giant Iron Man cutout by the stairs midway through the store. Casey was sitting behind it reading a copy of
Techno Wars 3
.

“You’re not much of a ninja with those bracelets on,” he said. Casey didn’t say anything. He held the book out to her.
“Kaleidogirl,”
he said. “She’s a kid who can see through time. Might be more your kind of thing.”

Casey put down
Techno Wars 3
and took the book from Lucas without looking at him. “See through time?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Lucas sat on the bottom step. “Like, if she was looking at you, she could see you doing what you were doing now, but she could also see all the other things that had happened in this spot, all at the same time, all whirled together like a kaleidoscope.”

Casey opened the book. “I wonder what she’d see.”

Lucas shrugged. “Probably me, vacuuming the carpet or something.”

“Maybe my grandfather,” Casey said.

“Maybe.”

She looked at Lucas, closing the book. “Was he nice?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lucas. “I never met him.” He paused. “Maybe you could ask your mother.”

“My mother …” Casey stopped. “Yeah, maybe. Whatever.” She opened the book and started reading. Lucas sat on the step, watching her. After a minute, she looked up. “Um, I’m reading here,” she said.

“Right,” Lucas said. He went back to the counter, picked up the labels and started sticking them, one by one, on the backs of the books.

––

“God, Lucas, for someone who works with superheroes all day, you have no imagination.” That was Laure, during a game of Pictionary against Dave and Julie one Saturday night the previous winter. The subject was SpongeBob SquarePants. Lucas had spent the whole time drawing an exact, detailed replica of SpongeBob, who apparently Laure had never even heard of and thought that Lucas
should have known
that she wouldn’t have heard of him, and because of this he should have taken the drawing in a more abstract direction. Later, in their bedroom, the fight ballooned, and suddenly it wasn’t just his approach to Pictionary that lacked vision, but his entire life.

“Why are we at home on a Saturday night playing Pictionary with Dumb and Dumber, anyway?” Lucas asked. “It’s like we’re fucking retired.” Even before Laure said anything, Lucas knew he had made a mistake. A tub of moisturizer flew past his face.

“Because you didn’t want to go anywhere!” she screamed. “You
never
want to go anywhere!”

“Laure,” Lucas said. He tried to wrap his arms around her while she pummelled him against his chest. “Where do you want to go?”

She wrenched herself away and stared at him, wet-faced and angry. “Spain,” she said. “I want to go to Spain.”

Lucas, who had been expecting a “somewhere fun” or “away from here” or something like that, was thrown off by her specificity. “Uh, okay,” he said. “Why … what’s in Spain?”

Laure sat on the bed with her back turned to him, wiping at her face with the palms of her hands. “Nothing,” she said. “Forget it. Just go get ready for bed.” She lay down and curled herself into a ball. She still wouldn’t look at him.

While he was brushing his teeth, Lucas tried to imagine himself surprising Laure with two plane tickets. She would probably think it was romantic. He tried to think of what airline would fly to Spain. Would there be direct flights from Toronto? Or would they have to switch planes in London? What if they had a long stopover there? Would they have to change their money to pounds, and then to whatever kind of money they used in Spain? What kind of money
did
they use in Spain? The whole thing just seemed so complicated. Later, when he had crawled into bed next to Laure, he decided maybe he’d just take her to a Spanish restaurant. Or Mexican, even. Yes. Mexican would probably be the best idea.

A few weeks after Casey and her mom had moved in, Lucas opened the apartment door to find Pearl scrubbing vomit out of the carpet in the hall. He got down on his knees to help her, the stench curdling his earlier cup of coffee in his stomach.

“She’s going through a rough time right now,” Pearl said. “The divorce was bad enough, but when Dylan chose to live with her father …” Pearl stopped. “I’m sorry, dear. You don’t want to hear this.”

“It’s fine,” Lucas said, breathing in through his mouth.

Pearl looked at him. “I know Casey’s been hanging around the store all the time, Lucas. I’m sorry if it’s been a burden.”

Lucas dropped a paper towel into the Loblaws bag Pearl had brought out for garbage. “Pearl, don’t even worry about it. I barely notice her.”

“I just – I don’t know what to do with her.” Pearl stopped scrubbing and Lucas saw that she was crying. He started picking up the rest of the paper towels and stuffing them in the
bag, slowly moving away from her. Pearl took a piece of paper towel and blew her nose. “She’s just so much like … Nate …” She sat back on her knees and looked at Lucas. “You’re a good boy, Lucas,” she said. “That girl of yours is a fool for leaving.”

Lucas stood up. “I’m going to, I mean, I’m on my way to Falucci’s for some milk,” he said. “Do you, uh, need anything?”

“No, no, go, it’s fine.” Pearl dabbed at her eyes. “I’m just going to …”

“Yeah,” said Lucas. “Okay.” He turned around and walked down the hallway as fast as he could without looking like he was running away.

At Falucci’s he thought about buying something for Pearl, some chocolate maybe, or a bag of cookies. But he didn’t even know what kind of cookies she liked. She probably knew everything about him, but he didn’t even know what kind of goddamn cookies she liked.

On the way back from Falucci’s, Lucas stopped to check on the bike, which, after three weeks, was still there. Lucas supposed he wasn’t surprised. Most bike thieves, he guessed, were men, and it wasn’t a practical bike for a man. Probably not a practical bike for a woman, either. He really thought Laure had liked it, though. She liked flowers, and girlie things. And she seemed so appreciative, when he brought it home, riding it around the parking lot, posing with it for pictures to put up on her blog. “And you can stop taking the subway all the time,” Lucas had told her. “Ride it to school, get some fresh air. You know.”