Flannery (3 page)

Gary had snuck in five beers right under Jordan's mom's nose. Each bottle in his knapsack was covered in two black sweatsocks so they wouldn't clink. There was pizza and Kanye West and then everybody got in a circle. Gary finished his beer and leaned into the circle and put the bottle down in the middle. For a while everybody pretended to ignore it. Then Gary gave the bottle a good hard spin.

It spun around on the tiles and when it stopped, it was pointing at Amber.

A few drops of beer had spun out of the mouth of the bottle, and my sock got wet. Everybody went, Oooohhhhh, Amber.

Amber was sitting absolutely still. A blush started in her neck and went all the way up her face to her hairline,
swoosh
. Her hand went up to the side of her head to do the hummingbird flutter, but she just smoothed her hair back and then tucked her hands under her legs so they'd stay still.

A couple of the guys started chanting,
Gar-y
,
Gar-y
,
Gar-y
.

Jordan put his thumb and finger in the corners of his lips and whistled so loud that it tickled the inside of my ear.

Moira Kennedy put her legs out straight in front of her, leaned back on her elbows and made her heels drum on the floor, just the way we all used to do at Happy Kids when Miss Stephanie said we were taking a journey in a rainstorm through a tropical rainforest.

Brittany Halliday put her legs out too and Brittany Bishop did the same thing, and then all the girls were doing it. And all the guys were whistling.

When the noise reached its highest pitch, Gary Bowen shuffled across the circle on his hands and knees to where Amber was sitting. He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in and kissed her on the lips.

Everything stopped.

The boys stopped chanting.

The whistling stopped.

The tropical rainstorm stopped all at once, except for Moira Kennedy, who slowly tapped one foot, just like we also used to do in Happy Kids, so it sounded like a single drop of rain, falling from leaf to leaf to leaf after the storm.

They were still kissing. They kissed in utter silence. They kissed with their tongues. They forgot they were in a circle with people watching them. They forgot the laminated puzzle of Mona Lisa who was gazing down on them and it was hard to say what she thought of it. They kissed until Jordan Murphy wrecked the moment by yelling, Get a room, man.

Since that kiss Amber has been addled and dopey. Everything you say to her, you have to say twice. She came first last week at a provincial meet, the one that determines who gets to go to the Nationals. But she lost a few seconds from her best time and didn't seem to care. And she hasn't mentioned the Nationals since. She's constantly swirling the tip of her pinkie in a little pot of cotton-candy lip gloss. You can see the hard plastic circle of the lip-gloss lid pressed into the very tight back pocket of her jeans, like a charm.

Mr. Payne says, And Gary Bowen's partner will be . . .

The little violet dot from the laser pen hesitates here and there. For a moment it lingers on Tiffany Murphy's face. It rests on Tiffany's chin.

Not Tiffany Murphy, Amber whispers. Please not Tiffany Murphy.

But the dot moves on to John Mercer. John gets the dot right in the eye and he has to dig at his eye socket with his knuckle. The dot zips away before it permanently blinds him.

Finally, the little violet dot sits smack dab in the middle of Amber's lips. There's a direct line from Mr. Payne's laser pen to Amber's lips, as if she's a fish he's about to reel in.

I think it's you, I whisper. But the dot from Mr. Payne's laser pen slides off Amber's mouth. The dot skips over the aisle between the desks and lands right on Gus Wong's Adam's apple.

Gus, says Mr. Payne. You and Gary . . .

Amber suddenly flings herself across the aisle into the path of the violet laser dot. She throws herself on top of Gus Wong's desk as the tiny violet dot hits her cheek.

Ms. Mackey, please, says Mr. Payne.

Sorry, sir, Amber says. I dropped my pencil. And, sure enough, she had somehow managed to fling her pencil onto Gus's desk. She picks it up and wiggles it at Mr. Payne.

Sorry about that. It flew right out of my hand, sir.

Okay, said Mr. Payne. Now, let's see. Gary Bowen and Amber Mackey will be partners.

Amber turns to me, and there's that smile again.

The classroom door creaks open and in slinks a boy, black curly mussed-up hair, big brown eyes, lanky (okay, skinny), tall, and the beautiful, worn jean jacket stitched with a patch on the back that says
ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING
, and on the collar, a button with a marijuana leaf, and a tiny Santa Claus pin with a little string and if you pull it, the red plastic nose lights up, and on the back, a patch with
The Clash
cut out of a T-shirt and embroidered on with green silk embroidery thread and jagged little stitches.

A jacket I have lovingly memorized every square inch of.

The boy lopes down the aisle and pours himself into the empty desk.

All heads turn in his direction.

Mr. Payne says, Ah, look who has graced us with his presence!

Tyrone O'Rourke has arrived.

Mr. Payne, without warning, snaps off his laser pen and drops it in his shirt pocket. He picks up a clipboard and consults. It seems he has paired everyone already, and the dancing laser pen was only for show.

He reads down the list in a flat monotone. Finally he gets to me. Flannery Malone, you will be partners with Tyrone O'Rourke.

It seems like a fortune-cookie message, a marriage vow. I half expect Mr. Payne to ask if anyone present sees any reason why these two people should not be joined together, and if so, speak now or forever hold their peace.

Tyrone glances back at me and lifts his pencil to his temple and gives it a tip, like an army salute. He wiggles his eyebrows. I'm pretty sure a couple of girls in the back groan with disappointment.

Boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Okay class, says Mr. Payne. You'll need to have submitted a proposal for the unit you're going to sell by September 30th. The revised proposal, incorporating my feedback, will be due October 14th. You'll be docked two percent for every day you're late. I simply suggest not being late at all. Off you go.

The buzzer goes and we head down the corridor to the stairwell and Tyrone is on the staircase above me and he leans over the rail and says, Flan, I know what we should do for our unit.

He's being pushed through the door by the waves of students charging to their next classes.

I've got a brilliant idea, he calls out.

But then he's out the door and by the time I get up the stairs to math class, which he's also supposed to be in, he's disappeared.

3

When we were in grade one we had to do a project called
All
About Me.
We had to write about what we looked like, what we wanted to become, our secrets, our families, our favorite foods, our favorite animals — each topic on a separate page, with a blank space on top for a crayon drawing. Each kid's project went in a duotang with our grade-one school photo glued onto the cover.

My printing went outside the lines and bunched up and slanted like the losing team in a tug of war. When the teacher complained to Miranda that my writing didn't fit between the lines, Miranda said, Make the lines bigger.

My crayon drawings, however, were masterpieces. They were violently emotional. I loved that all the crayons had names printed on the sides. The names were either very dramatic (Banana Mania, Laser Lemon, Cerulean Blue, Atomic Tangerine) or mysteriously plain (Medium Red).

It was during the process of creating
All About Me
that I first noticed I didn't have a father.

I mean, I knew I didn't have one, of course. But it was the first time I noticed that almost everybody else
did.

On the page that was supposed to be about my father I ended up writing about some guy named Phil, who lived in the house attached to ours for two months and who owned a Doberman.

The Doberman barked and gnashed his teeth against the living-room window and slathered ropes of saliva from his pink-and-black spotted jowls every time someone walked down the sidewalk.

Once Phil gave me a bubble wand. It made giant wobbling bubbles as big as my head that would burst with a cloud of mist. The bubble wand seemed to qualify Phil for page 6 in my duotang, the page about
Dad
.

The Doberman is also featured on the My Favorite Animal page, a portrait in Turquoise Blue and Crimson crayon, with the studs on his dog collar scrawled with my most prized and never-cracked crayon: Silver.

Phil moved out two days after he gave me the bubble wand and we never saw him again.

If I had to write
All About Me
now, complete with crayon illustrations, what would it contain?

Name: Flannery Malone

What I Look Like:

1) Freckles (Burnt Sienna)

2) Pale skin (Silver)

3) Green eyes (Sea Green) . . .

4) . . . with little hazel flecks shooting through the green (Raw Sienna)

5) Limp, whip-straight orange hair to my shoulders (Sunglow)

6) 5'6" on tiptoes

7) Skinny, except for my boobs, which are, I think we can say, big.

Secrets: I've had the school glockenspiel hidden under my bed since I quit band in grade five. I quit because I couldn't do the glockenspiel justice and the teacher was threatening me with the triangle.

It took me so long to return the glockenspiel that after a while I was afraid to return it at all. It lives under my bed, silent in a glockenspiel coffin, a heavy, velvet-lined box of guilt (a toss-up between Crimson or Medium Red for the lining).

Other: I am sixteen, currently without a boyfriend, though I am horribly in love with Tyrone O'Rourke. The very worst kind of love. Unrequited love.

I am in high school at Holy Heart in St. John's, Newfoundland. I have a driver's permit, level one. I once had a math tutor who told me that whales have veins big enough for a person to swim through and many other interesting facts that did not appear on my math exam but have made me feel awe.

I am a person who likes to feel awe.

I also enjoy making pancakes, often spelling my brother's name with the batter. Which leads me to . . .

Family: Miranda (mother), Felix (half-brother) and two goldfish, Spiky and Smooth.

Miranda (see above) has nearly killed these goldfish many times, but they are true soldiers. She forgets to feed them when it's her turn, and feeds them again when it's supposed to be my turn, and lets their water evaporate until they're almost beached.

Once Miranda let Smooth bellyflop out of the soup ladle when she was in the middle of transporting them so she could clean the bowl. She stood there screaming and waving her hands around her head yelling, Flannery, do something! Do something! And I had to pick up poor old Smooth and practically give him mouth-to-gill resuscitation before plopping him back in the bowl.

Once after a party I found a cigar butt floating on the water. Smooth and Spiky climbed up onto the stogie, one on either end, and stood on their fins attempting the age-old sport of log rolling. They made that cigar roll back and forth with deft slaps of their tails, just like the stubble-faced lumberjacks of yore.

Okay, Spiky and Smooth, they didn't really do that with the stogie. But they did waste a day or two head-butting the soggy cigar from one end of the bowl to the other.

They are a lesson in fortitude and commitment.

Father: I have a single artifact, from the once-upon-a-time love affair between my mother and father. A sole memento in the form of a single chocolate shaped like a heart and wrapped in bright red tinfoil and hidden in a jewelry box under my bed.

Soon after my father left, sailing away from St. John's forever, Miranda discovered she had no contact info on him — that, in fact, she hadn't really caught his last name. And, before I was even born, she had already fallen in love with someone else. And then someone else. And so on.

My father's first name is Xavier. That much she knows. It's a French name. That's why I took French last year — I figured that if I ever meet the guy, it would be nice to say a few words in his mother tongue. Father tongue.
Xavier
. X is the unknown variable in a math equation. If Y equals my mother in her tiara, with her love for fairness and feminism and
joie de vivre
, her inability to pay bills, her blogs and her non-existent domestic skills, and if I am the answer, then Dad must be X, right?

So I like to call him — my father — 
X
. In my head, I mean, because of course I don't actually get to talk to him or call him anything because, like I said, Miranda forgot that little thing of asking for his address, or his last name, or blood type, or genetic propensities for disease or special talents or whether he has a strong sense of smell, which I do have, or if he was good at the glockenspiel, or if he loves chocolate, or if there are aunts and uncles or even other children. Brothers and sisters.

What she does remember I can fit in a thimble. 1) He had hazel-green eyes; 2) red curly hair; 3) he was six foot two; 4) he cared about the environment; 5) he laughed a lot and they stayed up until dawn on the fateful night of my conception and they drank and went for a skinny dip in the ocean under the cloak of darkness and shortly after that frigid, primordial-soup dip, I was created.

Otherwise, yeah, no father. Though I have more Mom than most people ever have to contend with.

Favorite Things: I love strobe lights, the smell of cloves and bonfire-roasted marshmallows, the feel of my teeth after they've been cleaned at the dentist (though not the actual trip to the dentist, of course).

I love long baths without anybody banging on the door, or would love those kinds of baths, I'm pretty sure, if I ever experienced one.

As it is, I'm lucky if I'm not sharing my bath with, at the very least, a rubber ducky or a wind-up alligator that wags its tail and snaps its jaws, and maybe a fire truck or two.

I love skating on a pond in the evening, even though I can't skate very well, but I love being dragged around the ice by Amber, me holding one end of a very long scarf and Amber holding the other, that moment when you know it's time to turn around and head for home, when it'll soon be getting dark and all the ice on the trees starts to tinkle in the wind and the moon and the sun are there together and Amber swishes to a stop and sprays snow dust with her shiny blade. She digs her toe pick into the ice and uses it as a pivot and I'm gliding in wide arcs around her and then she lets go of her end of the scarf and the centrifugal force spins me out toward the darkening horizon, and I am flying.

These are a few of my favorite things.

And Tyrone.

Obviously.