whole class went silent, and I was like, ‘Shit’ …”
No matter what, you’re there. Every thought is brought back to you. While waiting for the bus. While sitting in class. While watching TV. While doing my homework. While sitting here, in the alley, talking to Allison.
“… Mr. Burns walked up to the desk and held his hand out. Aiden was so busted. So busted. And he pretended there was nothing in his lap. I think he was trying to get rid of the Baggie …”
How was your day? What did you eat? Do you feel better? Who did you talk to? Do you miss home? Do you miss me? Do you think of me?
“… and he just jumped up and knocked over the desk and went out the fucking window! … Melissa? Melissa?” Ally jabs me in the arm.
“Hah!” I respond, pretending I’m laughing at her bullshit story.
“Fuck.” She abruptly blows her smoke out. “It’s like talking to a fucking corpse.”
“Sorry. I was listening … He took off out the window and …?”
“Don’t pull that Echo shit with me,” she says.
“I’m not. It’s not that.” I try to bring myself back into this miserable, boring world, but I just can’t fake it. I just can’t fake I care. I know she’s angry about me going to another school, but I’ve got other problems to worry about. “Sorry. Fuck. My head hurts.”
“Well, your head hurts a lot lately. You probably have a fucking brain tumour.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Listen, I’m gonna split,” I say, butting out my smoke and picking up my bag. I walk away, knowing she’s staring at my back. Probably hurt or some shit, but I can’t really be bothered to care. Then, on my way home, I start to feel bad about it. I should have made her feel better. I should have at least pretended to be interested.
Eighteen
In a way, Bradley was lucky to stay a kid forever, immortalized in perfect kid-ness. The world is much easier to understand when you’re young, because everything is black and white: good and bad, nice and mean, beautiful and ugly. You learn this in fairy tales. And it’s comforting to know exactly which category everyone falls into.
But then you get older and it’s like the black and white merge into this murky grey. There’s confusion and anger because no one fits perfectly anymore. You start to see people as whole beings, lovable and hateable at the same time. And this messiness comes along with a whole new frustration. The stepmother who was a bitch suddenly seems sort of smart. Mr. Howard, the nice grade-four teacher, is starting to look like a bit of a pervert in the school photo. And the mother you blindly defended for so long suddenly starts to seem a little irresponsible.
And that’s a hell of a lot to deal with, when all you want to do is come home, eat chips, and watch TV.
Take for example my uncle Freestyle (whose real name is Brian). Growing up, I could see he was clearly an asshole—an irresponsible, obnoxious drunk, a bad father, and a cruel man who would come to our apartment every week or so to terrorize my mother. I used to slam the door in his face and throw the TV converter at his head. All I knew was what my mother told me—“He’s a deadbeat loser”—and all I saw was my mother in a crying, pathetic heap when he left.
But then Uncle Freestyle became sort of good. When I was about thirteen, he started to talk to me out on the balcony. We’d share a spliff and he’d ask me about guys and school and Mom. And he actually listened. It felt as if he cared. And he didn’t judge me, like I was a kid. He just seemed to get it. So we started doing this more and more, smoking weed together. And then he’d give me a big bag of it, for free at first, and I started to sell it to my friends. Not like a real dealer, but I make a bit of extra cash. It’s all sort of unspoken, but I think he feels good for helping me out. I’ve been saving the money for university. He said I’d never get there with my mom being such a financial wreck.
“If you want to walk on water, you need to get out of the boat, Melissa,” he’d say. Which basically means if you want success in life, you first have to take risks.