Delusion Road (17 page)

She studied Keegan’s profile and found herself wondering if he looked like his mother. She had no way of knowing, of course, but the woman had had blond hair, not at all like that so-black-it-was-almost-blue mess on his head, so probably not. And then Willa was thinking of the lie he’d told her in that SaveEasy aisle
—She died.

She’d felt stupid after he’d dropped that bomb on her. So stupid, in fact, that she’d asked her father about the Frasers at dinner that evening—specifically, what had happened to
Mrs.
Fraser. Willa was surprised when her dad said the marriage hadn’t lasted and the wife had left years ago, something Keegan’s father had shared with him over coffee at the dealership. Why on earth would Keegan say his mother was dead? To make her feel sorry for him? She guessed it made sense—knowing Wynn was pissed at him, maybe Keegan thought she’d get Wynn to go easy
on him. But wouldn’t he know she’d eventually discover the truth?

Willa sighed again. She was spending
way
too much time thinking about a guy she couldn’t even stand.

She heard the hum of a phone and looked to her right. Bailey’s again. This time she pressed the power button and a faint melody signalled the phone shutting down. As she shoved it into her backpack, Bailey saw Willa watching her, and her face suddenly reddened.

Willa was about to ask her if something was wrong when the first-period bell rang. Bailey all but ran from the room.

“Is it just me,” asked Willa, “or are people acting weird?”

“It’s Monday, isn’t it?” Celia responded, pushing away the remains of her veggie wrap, one of the Brookdale Deli’s low-calorie offerings. Celia had announced that morning she needed to lose two pounds and was apparently serious about it, despite being so slim that a stiff breeze could topple her. But Willa could guess what was behind the weight-loss thing—Celia’s mom was still wallowing over her breakup with Dewayne, which meant she was probably hoovering through litres of Chunky Monkey. And whenever her mother went on an eating binge, Celia dieted like a demon. It was like she thought fat was contagious.

“No,” said Willa, shaking her head, “it’s more than just a Monday thing.” She paused, thinking about what had happened in homeroom. “Have you noticed anything about Bailey?”

“You mean
besides
the fact that her jeans make her butt look like a barbecue?” asked Britney.

Todd and Celia chuckled. Jay, on the other hand, said, “I don’t think her butt’s so bad.” Celia elbowed him sharply, and he turned to Wynn for support. “What d’
you
think?” he asked.

Wynn just shrugged.

“I’m not talking about her butt,” said Willa. “She seems jumpy all the time.”

“Seriously, guys?” said Todd, making no attempt to mask his boredom. “Who gives a shit about Bailey Holloway?”

Willa said nothing. She’d googled “poetry competitions” after English last week when she’d learned about Bailey’s prize, and she’d found the contest she’d entered along with close to three hundred others. Those poems had been judged by three Atlantic poets whose names even Willa recognized, so apparently there
were
people who gave a shit about Bailey Holloway.

“I bet
I
can guess what’s bothering her,” said Britney, grinning. “She’s knocked up.” She turned to Celia. “And it’s not even October. I win!”

Willa shook her head. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“You said she was jumpy, didn’t you?” Britney asked. “And that would explain the size of her ass, wouldn’t it?”

Jay chimed in. “Maybe those calls are from the hospital setting up the appointment. You know, to get it taken care of. And maybe now she’s thinking about keeping it.”

“Finally!” said Celia. “Something worth Facebooking about.”

Willa was sorry she’d brought it up. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

Celia slapped Willa’s arm playfully. “I’m not going to mention her
name
,” she said. “People can fill in the blanks.”

Wynn shoved his chair back and got to his feet. “We should be getting back,” he said.

Willa glanced at her phone to check the time. “Crap!” she muttered.

“Problem?” asked Britney.

Willa showed her the device’s black screen. “I just got this a couple weeks ago but it won’t hold its charge. I’ll have to run to the phone store after school.” She held out her hand to Wynn. “Can I borrow yours for a minute? I want to check if they have my battery in stock.”

Wynn handed her his phone, the same model as hers in black instead of white. As the six left the deli, she scrolled through his contacts to see if the store was among them, but it wasn’t. Most of the others listed were the same as her own, but there was one that was new to her. It stood out partly because he hadn’t assigned a name to it but also because it was a palindrome, one of those numbers that read the same backwards as forwards. She had a thing about numbers, although she’d never shared that with her friends, knowing it would earn her an eye-roll to beat all eye-rolls. But it probably explained why she was good at math, even liked it, despite Deadhand Shedrand’s commitment to wringing the joy out of every moment in his classroom.

Sliding into Wynn’s car, she pulled up the store’s number on the phone’s web browser, made the call, then handed the phone back to Wynn. As he took it, she thought she saw something in his eyes that surprised her. Relief?

Jeez, she was imagining weirdness in everyone around her now, even her boyfriend. Maybe it
was
a Monday thing after all.

V
ancouver!”

Keegan sighed, turning toward the voice. “Yeah, d’Entremont?” He’d known this moment was coming, and he wished he’d gotten it over with before the weekend. But after witnessing the blow-up between Keegan and their dad on Thursday, Isaac had been so unsettled the following morning that Keegan had stayed home with him.

“You didn’t show up at tryouts last week,” said Wynn, as he and Willa arrived at Keegan’s locker. The bandage he’d worn last week was gone, revealing only a faint red mark on his cheek. “Guess you didn’t want anyone to see you’re a one-hit wonder, right?”

Keegan knew how he had to play this, but it was still hard saying the words. “You got me.”

Wynn grinned. “So,” he said, “
that’s
the problem? You don’t have the stamina for team play? The
guts
?” he added, his voice suddenly booming. Others near them turned to stare.

“Look, Wynn—” he began, but then he heard Forbes in his head:
Don’t attract attention.
And there was another voice in there, too, except it wasn’t saying words. The sounds it made were sobs, the ones Keegan had heard from Isaac as he and his dad went at it Thursday afternoon.

“Got something to say, Vancouver?”

Avoiding Willa’s eyes, Keegan tried his best to look sheepish. “You’re right,” he said, hating the words he could feel his mouth forming, hating himself even more for saying them. “I’d be lousy on the team. No stamina.” There. He hoped his father would be happy. Nothing
else
he did ever pleased him.

Wynn’s expression looked like something you’d see on a Powerball winner, all teeth and laugh lines. “Well,” he said, his tone suddenly magnanimous, “at least you know your limitations.” He reached out and slapped Keegan’s shoulder, the way you’d pat a dog that had finally learned not to piss in the house. “Better than wasting the coach’s time, right?”

Keegan forced down the bile that rose hot and sour in his throat, made himself look Wynn in the eye and offer a smile of his own, although he was pretty sure it paled in comparison with d’Entremont’s million-kilowatter. “Yeah,” he said. “I know better than to waste anybody’s time.”

Wynn looked down at Willa, his grin still blinding. “C’mon, Wills,” he said. “Places to go, people to do.” And he laughed.

Keegan watched the two walk off, a storm of unvoiced expletives raging through his head.

“How’s it taste?”

Willa had asked him that last week when she’d teased him about eating crow, and for a moment Keegan thought what he’d heard was a memory surfacing amid that surge of silent swearing. But then a voice repeated the question, and he turned to see Russell looking at him, his expression unreadable.

“How’s
what
taste?” Keegan asked, then realized that was the same response he’d offered Willa.

“The shit you just swallowed.”

Keegan reached for his backpack on the floor. “Forget it, okay?”

“Like Wynn’ll forget it?” asked Russell. “Like you won’t hear him all day telling everybody what just happened?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” muttered Keegan.

“You’re kidding, right?” said Russell, his voice bitter. “I wouldn’t
understand
?” He pointed at his oversized sweatshirt, which bore the words
When my pager goes off, people think I’m backing up.
“You figure I
like
wearing stuff like this?”

Keegan didn’t know what to say. He shook his head.

Russell looked down at those letters, and Keegan thought he saw his lower lip quiver. When he raised his eyes again, Keegan could see the torment in them. “My mom won’t buy these for me. I use my own money, get them custom-printed at that silk-screening place on Church Street.”

“Why?” asked Keegan.

“The same reason you just told Wynn you suck ass at soccer. To keep him off your back.” He shook his head sadly. “What you did during phys ed last week? The way you put him in his place? I can’t tell you how much I—” He shrugged the thought away. “But you’re no different than the rest of us losers. Welcome to hell.” He turned away and moved down the hall. From behind, his XXXL sweatshirt looked like a large white flag.

Keegan looked down at his feet, clenching his fists as he tried to hold in his mind that image of his brother sobbing. But all he could see was the back of Russell’s sweatshirt, like the universal symbol of surrender disappearing into the crowd.

W
alking down Mid-Valley Mall’s concourse, Willa glanced at her reflection in a store window and sighed. Despite all the time she’d spent straightening her hair that morning, her natural curl had come back with a vengeance. The haze floating over the valley had intensified the heat, and she could only imagine what it must be like on the soccer field, where Wynn and the other members of the newly rostered team were enduring the first of four after-school practices this week.

That thought, of course, reminded her of the scene Wynn had made at the end of lunchtime. She’d felt bad for Keegan, and she didn’t know why. It wasn’t so much that he had admitted not having enough stamina to be on the team, although that was embarrassing enough. It was more the way his face had looked as he’d said it. There’d been something in his eyes that hadn’t seemed defeated, certainly not the way you’d
expect
a guy to look as he handed over his balls on a platter. It was almost as if he—

Forget it. The important thing was that Wynn was satisfied. Maybe life could finally get back to normal—or whatever passed for it in the Jaffrey household. Her mother had called after last class, saying she was on her way to Halifax for a few days, leaving
Willa and her dad to fend for themselves. Celia’s mom refused to stop wallowing in her post-breakup Chunky Monkey binge, so Lenore had arranged some time for them at a spa interspersed with some serious shopping to get her mind off Dairy Queen Dewayne.

It took only a few minutes to get her battery replaced and, as she left the phone store, she spied Bailey Holloway walking in her direction. Willa couldn’t help thinking of Bailey’s weird reactions to the calls and texts she’d been receiving. And then she thought of that palindrome on Wynn’s contact list.

There was, of course, no connection between the two. Wynn hardly knew Bailey, barely even spoke to her at school. And the only time he ever spoke
of
her was to make some remark about her mother and the men she slept with, all of which clearly disgusted him. Still, Willa couldn’t stop her fingers from pressing that palindrome’s digits on her keypad and, almost immediately, she could hear in her receiver the call going through.

And even from metres away in the mall’s echoing concourse, she could hear a phone ring.

T
he bus lurched to a stop in front of the mall’s main entrance, and Keegan joined the handful of people in the seats around him who got off and entered the large glass doors, grateful for the sudden wash of cool air that enveloped them. That cool air was, in fact, one of the reasons he’d decided to head to the mall after school—their house would be oven-like this afternoon. The other reason had to do with Isaac. Their dad was leaving work early to pick him up from his after-school program, thinking that some one-on-one time with him might help his emotional state, and Keegan had decided it would be easier on everybody if he wasn’t home. Neither he nor his father seemed to be able to share space anymore without one of them pissing off the other.

But, hey, at least he’d gotten Wynn off his back. He’d been dreading phys ed that afternoon, and not just because he suspected Wynn would reassert his alpha status on the soccer field—Keegan also wasn’t looking forward to Coach Cameron’s response to the thanks-but-no-thanks message he’d left on the teacher’s voicemail last week. Fortunately, the coach had assigned some general aerobic exercise that didn’t involve soccer drills, but as soon as he’d gotten everyone in the class performing a
series of cardio routines, Cameron had taken Keegan aside and third-degreed him about not wanting to play. Keegan had felt lousy doing it but he laid the blame on Isaac, telling the coach he was needed at home to look after his younger brother, that he couldn’t commit to the time required for practices and games. The coach had seemed to accept this, but that hadn’t made Keegan feel any better about the lie.

Making his way down the concourse, he passed a skateboard shop that reminded him of the one he and Joaquin used to hang out at sometimes, and he fought the urge to go in. His first time at Mid-Valley Mall, he was about to do the last thing most people would expect of a guy his age—look for a place to sit and read. He was still only halfway through the novel Richardson had assigned them, and he knew he’d be more likely to get a chunk of it read here than in his ninety-degree bedroom. Or whatever that was in Celsius.