Fireball (11 page)

‘How do I look?'

Karen twirled around, balancing on her toe like a ballerina.

‘Good,' I said.

‘Yeah. You look hot.'

She did, too. She'd picked out a black skirt, low heels, and this burgundy top. Sexy, but classy. Jules had told us all to dress up. For Karen, that wasn't a problem. For us, on the other hand, it was a huge problem. In the end I borrowed a pair of old cords and this V-neck sweater from my dad, which made me look like a cop from some seventies TV show. Chris didn't even bother. He just wore his jeans – the ones he'd sliced up for Halloween – and a t-shirt with the faded picture of a wildcat on the front. It was supposed to look like Native art but you could tell it had been painted by some shitty white person. Neither of us was going to win any kind of best dressed award for the evening.

‘There he is!' Karen shouted.

She ran onto the street, waving her hand like somebody trying to hail a cab. Julian was driving his dad's Lexus, not the Mercedes. It was twice as big as a normal car and only got about three miles to the gallon – but it looked awesome. He pulled up onto the curb, just to show he could, and we piled in. Karen took the front. The interior reeked of leather polish and Julian's cologne. He'd really dolled himself up. He'd lathered gel in his hair and worn this Calvin Klein polo shirt, unbuttoned at the top so you could see his silver chain. I had to admit he looked pretty good. He knew it, too.

‘You guys ready to lock and load?'

‘You got it, Richard Gere.'

‘Yeah – put it in gear, gearbox.'

I could tell that pissed him off, because he floored it before we'd even shut the door. Straight away, he cranked up his dance music and started careening around corners. The beat was so loud it felt as if the speakers were actually inside my skull. He was doing it on purpose, too. Chris and I couldn't hear shit, which meant he had Karen all to himself in the front. Only snatches of the conversation reached me.

‘… super nice house…'

‘… cool guy…'

‘… think I know him…'

I leaned forward and shouted, ‘Hey!'

‘What's up?'

‘Whose party is this, anyways?'

Jules turned down the music to answer. ‘Tim Williams. He goes to Collingwood.'

That's the school with the graphite hockey sticks and super good tennis team.

‘Sweet,' Chris said, making it pretty obvious that it wasn't sweet at all.

Julian pretended not to notice. ‘Yeah – it should be.'

Then he turned his music back up and kept talking to Karen. The two of them were ridiculously excited. Meanwhile, me and Chris brooded in the back, in the dark, nursing a mickey of his mom's Smirnoff. We didn't even have anything to chase with.

I started feeling a bit sick.

The thing is, it's not like I hate everybody in West Van. I've got some relatives out there who are pretty sweet. But they've never really liked it much, either. The problem with West Van is that it tends to be super excessive – and this party we went to was no different.

We came off the Upper Levels at the Caulfield exit, and wound our way through this endless maze of monster mansions. Each one was the size of three normal houses. That area of West Van is unreal. There's no poor people left. They've all been shot or run out of town. Realtors charge you five grand just to look at a house, let alone make an offer. Some of the lots were so big you couldn't even see how far back they went. Most of them had gates, too.

‘Here. This must be it.'

The street out front was crammed with all kinds of super sweet cars: Beamers and Audis and monster SUVs. There was even some kind of limited edition Porsche. It was nuts. We parked further down and walked up the drive, which was about five miles long. The house looked crowded, but also pretty sedate – not at all like the toga party Julian had later. To begin with, there was some kind of professional bouncer at the door. He actually had a little clipboard with a guest list and everything.

‘You got an invitation?' he asked.

‘Tim invited me. I'm Julian.'

The guy checked his list.

‘What about your friends here?'

‘Uh …they're with me.'

‘Hold on a sec.'

The guy pulled out his cellphone, which was so small you could hardly see it. ‘Tim – I got a Julian here. Brought three friends with him. Can you confirm?'

Me and Chris looked at each other. We were both trying not to laugh. I leaned over and whispered, ‘Yeah – I can confirm that this is officially the shittiest party of all time.'

The guy didn't hear. He was listening and nodding into his phone.

‘Uh-huh. Gotcha. Okay.'

He stepped aside.

‘Go on in,' he said.

It was like we'd arrived on another planet.

The first thing I noticed was the space. Every room was massive, with super high ceilings and yawning archways. Even a little room, like the foyer or the bathroom, was at least twice as big as you'd expect. The next thing I noticed were the people filling the space. It was as if somebody had dressed up all the beach mannequins in ridiculously nice clothes – Diesel, Armani, Banana Republic, whatever – then carefully arranged them around the house in various positions. They stood there sipping cocktails and chatting, totally stiff and fake.

‘This is fucked, man,' Chris whispered.

‘I know. It's nuts.'

We stuck close to Julian as he made his way through the hallway, the lounge, the dining room, another lounge, and into this entertainment room with a huge TV hanging on the wall. Every so often he'd stop and say hello to somebody. He knew a bunch of the people from tennis lessons or the winter club or whatever. Karen did too, actually. We didn't. We just trailed along in their wake. We'd get introduced to somebody and then end up standing there as Karen or Julian talked with them. Conversations were always the same.

‘It's so good to see you!'

‘How do you know Tim?'

‘That outfit is amazing!'

Everybody looked incredible in exactly the same way. It was like they all had the same personal stylist. The only ones who stood out were me and Chris. People noticed us wherever we went. I mean, it was obvious we didn't belong within a hundred miles of that house. Eventually we got sick of everybody staring at us. We left Julian and Karen to their mingling and headed off on our own.

‘Let's check out the balcony.'

‘Lead the way, Chubby Checker.'

It was my idea. I was hoping that we might find some normal people out there. We did, too. Well, Chris did. I didn't have much luck. We split up and I approached this group of guys standing around one of the tables. There were tons of tables on the balcony – these fancy wooden tables decorated with fresh flowers and Chinese candle lanterns. The guys had cleared everything off their table except for a bunch of coins and buttons and a couple lines of coke. I had no idea what they were doing, but I walked over anyways.

‘We could feed it out here, to the wing.'

‘Not if they're man-marking.'

‘Well, if they're man-marking it's a different story.'

They all talked pretty fast, bobbing their heads and chewing their lips. Totally coked up. One of the guys bent down and snorted a line through a bill, then stood up and pawed at the powder beneath his nostrils. He started moving buttons around, arranging and rearranging them like a general making a battle plan.

‘If they're man-marking, we should go inside-outside.'

‘Like a basketball-style pick play?'

‘Exactly!'

I nodded along with the others. ‘Then you could take a shot from the point.'

They all looked at me, then at each other.

‘From the point?'

‘Yeah. You know – just throw the puck towards the net.'

‘We're talking about ultimate, buddy.'

‘Oh. I thought you were talking about hockey.'

After that they all turned their backs on me and closed ranks. Like I cared. I mean, what kind of treats get ripped on coke and plan frisbee strategy at a house party? I hate coke. Me and Chris could never afford it. This one time we crushed a bunch of caffeine pills and tried snorting them instead. We thought it would be like poor man's coke. It wasn't. It just burned our nostrils and tripled our anxiety levels. Next to acid, that was probably the worst narcotics experience of my entire life.

‘Razor!'

Chris called to me from across the balcony. He was standing by the railing with this dark-haired girl. She was kind of pudgy, but not bad pudgy. Not fat. Just soft. She had a nice smile, too. Chris waved me over and I went to join them.

‘Linda wants to smoke a joint.'

‘Sweet.'

Me and Linda stood together while Chris got out his stash.

‘Where are you guys from?' she asked.

‘The Cove.'

‘I knew you weren't from around here.'

Chris lit up and handed the joint to Linda. We smoked it sort of furtively, taking big, fast tokes. It got us baked pretty quick – especially Linda. I don't think she'd smoked a lot of pot before. After two or three rounds, it was like a switch had flipped in her brain. All of a sudden, she couldn't stop talking. It was nuts.

‘Do you guys like West Van?' she asked.

‘It's okay, I guess.'

‘That's only because you don't live here. I go to Handsworth, and some days it makes me so crazy I want to scream. I can't wait to graduate. I'm going to move to Korea and teach English. Oh my God!' She put her hand to her mouth, eyes wide. ‘I have to tell you about what happened on the weekend. My little cousin's cat got eaten by a cougar.'

‘Holy shit!'

‘That's crazy.'

Me and Chris were both smiling. She was pretty fried.

‘Uh-huh. And get this: it was her birthday. How awful is that? She's only five years old. And apparently, she was sitting by the window, watching the cat play around in the yard, when this humongous cougar came out of nowhere and gobbled it up.'

I started giggling. It just seemed too bizarre. ‘In one gulp?'

‘In one gulp!'

She laughed, too. We couldn't help it.

Chris said, ‘How's that for a birthday present?'

‘Instead of getting a cat, your cat gets eaten.'

‘Happy birthday!'

We laughed about that for at least five minutes. Then, when we finally calmed down, I started feeling a bit guilty. Linda did, too. You could tell. I mean, it was her cousin after all.

She sighed. ‘What would you tell a five-year-old if that happened?'

We didn't answer at first. Chris flicked our joint off the balcony. It landed on the perfectly cut lawn and smouldered for a few seconds before fading away. For some reason, I started thinking of Mrs Reever.

Chris said, ‘You tell her that life's fucked, and everything dies.'

19

The old lady started choking. Chris jerked back as yellow bile burbled out of her mouth. Me and Jules got her on her side. That was one of the things they'd taught us in first aid: get them on their side. It worked, too. This mixture of lung fluid and seawater spurted all over the grass. I couldn't believe how much came out of her. Later they said it was about a litre. At the time, though, it looked like way more. And the smell was harsh nasty. I couldn't take it. I turned away and started dry-heaving. It was pretty embarrassing, actually.

Jules shouted: ‘She's breathing!'

She was – if you could call it that. It was weak and raspy and shallow, like a sick dog. That didn't stop everybody from cheering. A few guys patted me on the back, as if we were all on the same team and I'd just scored a game-winning goal. Chris didn't move. He knelt there the whole time, staring down at her. His face was completely white, like an egg. He had some of that bile on his lips and chin. I remember thinking:
He tasted it
. The smell made me gag but he had to taste it.

A few minutes later the ambulance arrived.

Everything went haywire after that. I guess that's what happens if you save somebody's life, but I still wish we'd refused to accept those medals, or go on the Crazy Dan show, or talk to any of the newspapers. I wish we'd just hauled her out of there and left it at that. We didn't want any of the attention. They forced it on us. At first, we didn't mind. But after she died, well, then we minded.

They put her on life support for a few days.

At that time, nobody knew she was a vegetable. Physically, she was in pretty good condition. The doctors assumed she'd pull through. Everybody loved us. For a little while, at least, it felt like we'd really done some good. They printed our picture on the front page of the North Shore News, and pretty soon people were writing in to say how inspirational we were and shit like that. No joke. Mostly it was other old ladies and senior citizens. That's the thing about elderly people. From reading the headlines they just assume the world is full of insane kids who want to throw phone books at them and egg their houses. So when they saw the article about us they thought we were really something.