Maidenhead (9 page)

‘That was me!’ Lee said later, proud. ‘I was backlit, watery, electroshocked.’

‘I didn’t know if you noticed me in the kitchen there, or if I was just noticing you.’

‘Of course I saw you, Myra. You were alien-like.’

‘God, yeah, you’re right. I was skimming the floor!’

‘Slimy, sucky and isolated.’

‘The Electrocuted and the Alienated ... ’

There was bubbling in my stomach. I felt sick from all the beer. The group at the table laughed as I walked up the back stairs. I didn’t know if they were laughing at me. The guy whose party it was, I knew he had an older brother. The older brother was the one who got us the keg. Jody once told me that stairs off a kitchen were for a maid because a maid was not supposed to be seen. This was when Faith worked for us, every single week. I remember Jody was pissed off because she’d asked my mother to not let Faith go in her room. Jeff was listening to us argue, pretending to read.

‘She’s a maid,’ I said to Jody. ‘She’s paid to clean and your room’s a mess.’

‘My room is my private property, thank you very much. And Faith is not a maid.’

‘Of course she’s a maid!’

‘No,’ Jody said. ‘She just helps mom with the housework. She’s a cleaning lady. I mean, a cleaning woman. A domestic worker. She comes once a week, not every day. She doesn’t look after us.’

‘Yeah, but how is a cleaning lady different than a maid?’

‘A cleaning woman is a domestic worker who works in lots of people’s homes. She’s freelance. She can raise her fees. She doesn’t need to walk the dog, for example. She doesn’t need to put kids to bed. And my room is fucking private. End of story.’

‘Well, if you don’t want Faith in your room then we should clean the toilets, we should vacuum, we shouldn’t have her in our house at all. That’d be better, anyway.’

Jody got mad at me. ‘Mom is giving Faith a job, Myra. You don’t know all the details. It’s complicated.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I know she was abused, all right?’

Jeff put down his book and we watched Jody storm out. ‘Mom is
sponsoring
Faith, Myra. That costs a lot of money. You don’t know everything, you know.’

I was totally parched climbing up the maid’s stairs. The floor felt like paste. Faith never came back from Jamaica. On the slanted third floor there was a tiny landing with two doors to enter. I faced the brown one that was open a bit and plastered with skateboarding stickers. Elijah was fifteen years older than everyone here. Faith returned to a husband who abused her, she had to live there on an island with him forever.

I saw the older brother in his room. He lay on a mattress on his side on the floor, reading a book without a cover. His hair was greasy, sticking up, with one gluey black curl on his forehead. An old fried egg on a plate on the floor was orange and hard. I entered and the older brother looked up at me. It didn’t look like he was surprised to see me – a freak with peach-coloured makeup half-off. The older brother was drinking a plastic red cup of beer. His mattress had faded flowers on the sheets.

I was glad to be away from Jen and Charlene. The older brother looked smart. Most girls are fucking mean. If they’re nice, it’s an act.

The older brother motioned for me to come over, come closer, as if he knew that I was having these bitch-like thoughts. I stumbled and sat on his mattress.

‘I drank too much,’ I whispered. My white T-shirt felt wet. I didn’t know if I’d drooled or spilled beer. ‘I walked up the maid’s stairs ... ’

The older brother’s eyes roamed around my face. I smelled the oil of his hair.

‘We used to have a domestic worker named Faith but you guys have real stairs for a real maid.’

(GAYL: Oh shit. Don’t let her get into this topic. Forward, forward. She’s with a guy!)

‘I was talking to you when you came up the stairs,’ the older brother said.

I remembered that the older brother wasn’t even in the room when I got to the top of the stairs, I didn’t think.

‘I wanted to trick whoever was coming up the stairs, like, trust in them and trust in myself ... ’

The older brother assumed that I understood, the way he was looking at me nodding, trying to get me to nod too.

‘See, I’m experimenting with two complicated actions, to see if I can do them both at once. I mean read and intuit. Like, read and feel someone’s need for connection intertwined with my own need for connection. See how we can play these little games with ourselves?’

All of a sudden, the older brother hugged me. It felt so strange that I went blank. He smashed me into his chest, his oil-smelled shirt. I didn’t have enough air with my lips on his chest. My secrets weren’t going to be secrets anymore. I pushed myself out of the older brother’s arms.

‘You know, you’re different from the rest of those girls downstairs,’ he said. The older brother stared at my face. ‘You’re way more mature.’

Yeah, I almost had sex with a guy who pissed on me!

‘You don’t have to be weirded out or anything, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘You know I’m Aaron, right? I’m Jeremy’s bro.’

Aaron patted the space right beside him on his bed, like – come a bit closer, not gonna bite you. I nodded and nodded. It was easy to do. I lay down then and Aaron lay down beside me. I dissolved into the mattress, down through the floor.

Aaron kissed my forehead. ‘You smell good,’ he said. ‘Like rosehip rustic rummy delight.’

Then he started kissing down my nose, then over my top lip. All of a sudden he was on my mouth and we were kissing. I felt his tongue in my mouth. I smelled our beer. We did that for a while until I shifted away.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I felt weird all of a sudden.

‘It’s cool, it’s cool. You’re amazing. Whatever.’

I closed my eyes and Aaron started reading out loud. I focused on his hands. The knuckles were purple and over-cracked.

‘“Love is a sign of our wretchedness,”’ Aaron read. ‘“God can only love himself. We can only love something else.”’

‘Uhm-hum,’ I said, in the middle of a wave. I suddenly felt too drunk all over again. I’d screamed at Jen downstairs, fucked up our entire relationship, and I’d just made out with Aaron for no reason.

(LEE: Yo yo yo! Don’t forget about me. You saw me. We communed.)

I covered my mouth so that nothing would come out. Aaron looked at me funny. I had to go to sleep.

‘I know I just met you,’ Aaron whispered. My eyes tried to keep open. ‘But there’s this space in me, I hope it’s not too wretched to say it ... Uh, there’s this space in me, kind of opening up ... Like, I think that space is opening up in me to love you.’

I grunted.

‘It’s okay,’ Aaron said. He turned me on my side, off my back. ‘This will be your position tonight.’

Aaron was being so nice to me. But I didn’t feel a thing falling into his bed. I wanted to make out with Elijah. Elijah naked, a god. God can only love himself. I can only love something else.

‘Myra? Are you okay? Your cheek is kind of bleeding or something. Wake up for a sec.’

I’d left a note for my father saying that I was sleeping at Jen’s but I’d already spent my cab fare contributing to the keg. Now I was trying to remember the minutes before I got drunk. Pissing, falling around in the bathroom at Jen’s while Jen and Charlene were putting on rouge. The flask had been filled up again and was drained. We three in a cab. Me on Jen’s lap. The driver’s bad eyes. I was going to vomit.

Aaron stroked something damp on my forehead, then he dabbed into my cheek. It felt freaky, like my head had no neck.

‘It’s okay now, it’s okay. You don’t have to wake up.’

I must’ve passed out. There was smoke and rose smell. Aaron had a bathroom right off his bedroom. Shadows were coming in and out. I could see them through my eyelids.

‘I like this strain,’ a girl said. That was her from downstairs, I knew.

‘You’re not going to test it all tonight, are you, dudes?’ Aaron laughed.

‘We’ve got lots to bag up,’ a guy said. ‘The party next week.’

‘For King Anarchist.’ Again, that was her. The blue-lit calf from downstairs.

The smoke was perfumed.

‘What’s up with that chick with the Rasta necklace?’ the girl said.

‘She’s an angel,’ someone said.

An angel? God, no. I couldn’t open my eyes. If I opened my eyes they’d spill over like eggs.

‘Her face is bleeding.’

‘She’s fine, Lee. All good.’ Aaron’s fingers touched my forehead. It was soaked. All I wanted was to open my eyes. All I wanted was to vomit my thoughts.

‘She doesn’t look so hot, I mean I think ... ’

There was a violent push up and I felt myself gag. My eyes still didn’t open but I could see pearly white. All over my chin there was hair and hot fizz.

I heard Aaron shout: ‘Get a towel, man, fuck!’

The girl held a plastic bag up at my mouth that was filled to the top with papers and food. I didn’t know if she thought I was stupid for puking. I had one hand on my cheek. It’s true that it was bleeding.

The girl handed me a towel to put under my head. She wiped some blood off my cheek with her hand.

‘You okay now?’ she asked. She wiped her hand on her jeans.

I looked at her. I tried to say yes. The girl looked pissed. She held the full plastic bag of my puke and walked out of the room with it.

LEE: I had to leave you there with Aaron, even though it wasn’t my instinct to.

GAYL: It’s good that you were gonna be her friend. Because there’s no way I was gonna protect her.

LEE: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s already apparent.

§

‘Myra? This is Myra?’

There was a patch of static on the line. It was only six in the morning. I thought it was him.

‘Myra, right?’ the voice said to someone else. ‘Myra. Hello? Hello?’

I pressed the phone to my ear to hear through the noise. I wanted it to be him. ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

There was another long line of static. I thought this is what it would sound like when my mother called from Korea.

‘Who is this?’ I asked. I heard coughing, a laugh.

‘Your friend entered you in a contest,’ the voice said. It was deep like his, but it didn’t have an accent. ‘We picked your name for the grand-prize win but I have to ask you a few questions first.’

My room was still dark. It wasn’t Elijah. It occurred to me that Jen had written my name on some raffle ticket or something from Holt Renfrew. Or maybe this was her idea of a really mean fucking joke. Me and Jen hadn’t spoken since the party. The first day back at school her and Charlene totally ignored me.

‘Are you a senior or a freshman?’

‘I’m in Grade 10,’ I said. What the fuck’s a fresh man?

‘Name of your school?’

‘Mount Pleasant Secondary.’

‘What’s your height, weight and date of birth?

‘Um ... Five-two. November twenty-third. One hundred and seven. Why?’

When I went to Dr. Bernhard for the second time about my cheek because of the bleeding, he did a full physical on me. He said that what was going on was a manifestation of acne, that girls my age have a throng of active hormones. Jody had some acne when she was my age. Before she went back to residence, she told me to put toothpaste on my cheek.

Dr. Bernhard asked me if I had a boyfriend. Then: did I know about safe sex? I remembered the thawing flesh of hot dog with Jen. I told Bernhard I knew.

‘Hair colour, eye colour.’

‘Brown. Brown.’

‘Hair down below?’