Fireball (7 page)

‘Razor?'

Chris offered me the pipe. It had come full circle again.

I shook my head. ‘I'm good, man.'

My skull had gone all light, like a balloon. At any second it was going to lift clear of my shoulders and float straight up, leaving the grass and sand and surf miles below. Chris and Julian kept smoking. I ran a hand through my hair, feeling the strands all damp and stringy with sweat. I began to notice things. I noticed the seaweed smell of low tide and the reek of food frying at the concession. I noticed the lazy burr of mosquitoes and the lap of sea on sand. I noticed the total still­ness of the day – the way the heat seemed to stifle everything.

And I noticed that car.

It was long and low and ancient – some kind of old-school sedan. It cruised along like a glossy-black landshark, coming down the road that connects Dollarton to the parking lot. Sunlight flashed off the chrome and windshield, as if the whole cab was glowing.

At that point, you couldn't see the driver.

‘Hey,' I said.

Chris and Julian looked at me.

‘They're going too fast.'

We were sitting next to the boat launch so we saw exactly how it happened. There was no wild swerving or braking or honking. That's what some people said but they were lying. When I'm baked I remember things way better so I'm sure about this. The car just kept going, picking up speed. It flew past the parking lot and headed straight towards the boat launch. There was this moment when I thought to myself,
It's not going to stop
. And it didn't. It rolled down the ramp and slipped into the ocean, smooth as a submarine.

Chris said, ‘Shit.'

The three of us stood up together to watch. The car cleared the ramp and floated about ten feet further. Bubbles boiled up around the doors and bumpers and steam started hissing out from under the hood. Now we could see the driver at the wheel, just sitting there.

Someone on the beach screamed, ‘Oh my God!'

Then everybody started shouting and running around. It reminded me of that saying: like a chicken with its head cut off. There were about six hundred chickens on the beach that day and they'd all had their heads cut off. I guess one of them had the sense to call for help, since Bates turned up a little bit later, but other than that they were pretty much useless. They were great at tossing frisbees around or rubbing each other down with suntan oil, but when it came to something like this their mechanical limbs short-circuited and their robot brains blew a fuse. The thing is, I wasn't much better. I was so fried I might have stood and stared with the rest of them, hoping somebody else would know what to do.

Somebody did.

Chris said, ‘Fucking come on.'

Then he sprinted down the boat ramp and dove in.

I followed.

She'd had a stroke. That's what the doctors said, and I believed them. There was no other explanation for why an old lady would drive her car into the ocean like that. She'd felt it coming on and turned off Dollarton highway. Then she'd lost control – of her body, of the vehicle – and ended up in the drink.

Everybody agreed on that.

Of course, there's no way to be sure. I mean, did she actually have the stroke while she was driving, or did she have it after she'd sucked back a few litres of seawater? Nobody asked that question. They just assumed it was an accident – like with Chris's dad. I guess they didn't want to think about the alternative. I thought about it, though. I thought about it before we ran into that guy at the funeral, and after what he said I thought about it even more.

I still do.

The cop was older than us, but only by a few years. His face was round and fleshy, like he'd never lost his baby fat. Also, his uniform looked one size too small. I don't know if he'd just
grown too chubby for it, or if they were cutting costs at the police
department, but either way he didn't fit that thing. He looked more like a kid who'd dressed up as a cop for Halloween.

Basically, that was Bates. That's what was waiting for us on shore. He waded into the water up to his knees, but he didn't actually help carry her. He just ordered us around.

‘Great job, guys – now bring her up here. That's it.'

I could barely walk. My legs felt like strips of liquorice and I was quivering all over. We managed to pulled her up the boat ramp. Soaking wet and limp as a doll, she must have weighed about five hundred pounds. Her dress dragged and slithered across the concrete, and left streaks of water where it touched. The beach mannequins gathered around us, pressing in and pushing against our backs. They wouldn't shut up, either. They kept whispering and chattering like the whole thing was part of some reality TV show.

‘Back the hell up!' Chris yelled.

‘Let's remain calm, here,' Bates said. ‘Everybody just remain calm.'

We ignored him. Even then, we knew he was full of shit.

‘Over there, man,' Julian said. ‘Not on the cement.'

We stretched the woman out on the grass beside the boat ramp. She looked awful. Actually, she looked worse than that. She looked dead. The skin on her face was grey and puckered. Both eyes showed white except for a sliver of iris just below the lids. Her lips had gone all blue and her mouth was parted as if she'd just seen something really, really, horrible.

Bates said, ‘Oh, shit.'

Then somebody screamed. It wasn't a girl, either. One of those big, beefy guys let out a little shriek, like a baboon.

‘She's dead!'

‘She's not breathing!'

‘What happened?'

Chris shouted, ‘Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!'

By that point, there must have been nearly fifty people surrounding us, all of them useless. Bates was useless, too. He stared at the lady with this frozen expression on his face, as if seeing her had turned him into stone. When I asked him if an ambulance was coming, he couldn't even answer. He just stood there, like a total fucking pylon. In movies, cops are always the ones in charge. Not Bates. They printed it differently in the papers but the sight of Mrs Reever completely threw him. He didn't know what the hell to do. We didn't know what to do, either, but at least we did something. Chris started it. He knelt in the grass and pressed his ear to her chest, trying to listen.

After a few seconds he said, ‘She's not breathing.'

I can't remember whose idea it was. I mean, it wasn't like one of us came out and said, ‘Let's try to resuscitate her.' We'd taken
this stupid lifesaving course in gym class, and it all kind of
happened automatically. We pulled it off, too. I don't know how.
In class, we screwed up every single time, but that day we were like this team of trained professionals. Jules held her shoulders,
ready to flip her over if she choked. I knelt beside her and worked her heart with the heel of my hand. Chris was the one who breathed for her. He slipped a finger under her chin and tilted her head back, then pinched her nose with his other hand. It was pretty sick. There were little wispy hairs all over her chin, and yellow slime leaking from her nostrils. I couldn't have done it. Not a chance. But Chris didn't flinch. He leaned forward and put his mouth over hers – gently, as if he were kissing her.

12

The medals they gave us looked expensive. They were gold-plated, with a wreath etched all around the edges. Hero of the Week. That's what it said on the front. Our names were engraved on the back. I guess the medals were kind of impressive and shit, but I wish they hadn't made such a big deal out of it. We had to go downtown, to a conference room in City Hall. The air was rotten and dusty, like in the basement of a library. A bunch of people gave speeches and said how great we'd been. Then the old lady's daughter got up and thanked us, all teary-eyed. Even Bates was there, getting a few words in on our behalf.

‘Every so often,' he said, ‘kids can surprise you.'

I bet he regrets saying that, now.

They saved the worst part for the end. Everybody piled out onto the steps, where the press was waiting. There were reporters from the papers and a camera crew from City-TV, this local station. Nobody came from the CBC, though. We weren't big enough news. Yet.

The mayor made a lame speech and hung those medals around our necks, like a hangman preparing the noose. All these flashes went off, right in our faces. The mayor shook hands with each of us, smiling this super fake smile at the cameras. I don't think he said anything to us. He said stuff about us, but not to us.

He said, ‘If only we had more citizens like these young men.'

After the photo session, the reporters asked us a bunch of questions, but they didn't want to sit down and actually hear our version of things. They just needed a couple of easy quotes to put in their article. My dad told me how it works. They've got a quota for all the different sections in the paper: sports, news, politics, human interest. We were the human interest. The TV networks are the same. Nothing else had happened that week so we became this huge deal. Thanks a lot, dickheads. The guy from City-TV was pushier than all the others. He shoved his microphone right in Chris's face.

‘How does it feel to be a hero?'

Chris swatted the mic away. ‘I don't know. All right, I guess.'

They didn't print that, for obvious reasons. I think they printed Julian's answer instead. He said something very polite, something like: ‘We were just glad to be of assistance.' That harsh cracked me up. But I don't blame Jules. Not really. It was easy to get caught up in all that, and think we actually were the heroes they made us out to be. The press can make you believe anything. We'd pulled her out of there and revived her and got those medals so we had to be heroes.

Two days later she died anyways.

13

They called him a dropout, which was another lie.

Chris didn't drop out of a single school. He got kicked out of at least six, but he never dropped out. That didn't stop them, of course. They chased down all his old teachers, and each one said the same thing: that Chris had a history of bad behaviour. By ‘bad behaviour' they meant that he didn't do every single thing they said. He smoked weed. He skipped classes. He got in fights. It was like the reporters had a little list they needed to tick off so Chris would fit their shitty profile. All the staff they interviewed hated Chris, anyways – except maybe our principal, Mr Green. And Mrs Oldham. She was the band teacher. Me and Chris both joined band in grade eight. I think it was my dad's idea. He had these clarinets stashed in the attic from when he played as a kid, and he gave them to us. We used to get super baked and meet in the music room at three o'clock with all the other band geeks. Neither of us could play worth shit. We'd just sit there, making these shrill sounds on broken reeds and laughing our asses off. Mrs Oldham didn't seem to mind. She was about eighty-nine years old and deaf as a skeleton. She always said she liked our enthusiasm. After Chris got kicked out, Mrs Oldham would sometimes ask me about him – even when I stopped going to band. She'd accost me in the halls, or catch me at my locker.

‘How's your friend Chris doing these days?'

‘Oh. Okay, I guess.'

She'd nod – sort of sagely – and keep walking. She was pretty cool, in a weird way. And she was the only teacher who didn't say anything bad about Chris. If everybody else is saying something bad about a guy, most people will try and get in on the action. But Mrs Oldham kept it pretty real. She just told them Chris was a music enthusiast. That harsh cracked me up. It also made me cry, actually. I mean, when your friend dies, you expect to miss all the obvious things about him. But what you don't really expect is to miss all the little things, too. Like the way he played the clarinet. Chris played his kind of backwards, with his right hand above his left instead of the other way around. He only knew about five notes, and they were never the right ones. That didn't bother him, though. In the middle of a recital, you would hear Chris blaring away, making up his own music as he went along. I didn't have the guts to do that. Maybe in practice, but not during a performance.

I always just sort of faked it.

Our old school, Seycove, used to be pretty rad. Since I left apparently they've fucked it up and made it like all the others, but when we first arrived in grade eight it was just this giant chunk of concrete, painted blue and grey, with dirty linoleum floors and battered steel lockers. There was never enough space. They kept having to add portable classrooms and extensions to accommodate all the students. Our sports teams always got their asses kicked, and when it came to exams and academic standings and shit like that the teachers at Seycove kept things fairly casual – which was fine by me.

It meant that some of the wealthier kids commuted across the North Shore to Sentinel or West Van High or wherever. Supposedly, those places have better facilities. There's this one private school, Collingwood, that has a super good athletics programme and tennis team. They even get to use graphite sticks when they play floor hockey. All we had were these raunchy little plastic ones. But whatever. As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter if you go to a good school or a fairly shitty one. It's still school. Nobody actually learns anything there – except maybe how to dress and act and talk and think like all the other mannequins.