Redemption (16 page)

“What do you think of my style?”

She sits next to me and looks me over.

“I’ve always loved your style. I loved how even when you were eight years old you were already trying to be different from the other kids. I’ve always approved of how you expressed your individuality.”

“But am I only being different for the sake of being different? For the sake of being cool? And is it really different? I mean, other people have this type of style everywhere, don’t they? It’s not that rare.”

Mom points to the design that I’d hand drawn on my fitted tee with fabric paints. “This is special,” she says. “What brought this all on anyways?”

I can’t admit to my mother that a guy has me doubting myself, so I shrug.

“Aren’t you running a bit late for band?” she asks.

“A friend is coming along, and he seems to be running late.”

“You’re not
dating
a boy, are you?” She says
boy
like it’s some sort of disease.

“No Mom, it’s a friend, a guy friend who I’m not dating.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

I swallow hard, almost choking on my own saliva. “Excuse me?”

“I know I don’t lead by the best example and all, but I was hoping you’d be smarter than that, Aude. Smarter than me. What’s his name?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mom! Stop it right there. I am not dating, sleeping with, kissing, holding hands, or anything like that with Guillaume, or anyone. Seriously.”

Mom stares at me for a moment and then smiles.

“I’m glad. You know boys are not worth it, there are too many rotten ones out there. Not worth sorting through them to find the good ones … if they even exist. They’re too much of a complication.”

I nod. This isn’t the first time she’s shared this little speech with me, but it’s never been needed. I came to that conclusion on my own a long time ago. She leaves my room and I hurry to finish getting ready because I don’t want him to come to the door to get me. Mom would read too much into his attentive behavior.

I watch out the front window waiting for Guillaume to arrive, and as soon as I see him, I rush out the door and down the stairs to meet him.

If Lucy sounded happy on the telephone when I warned her I’d be bringing Guillaume to practice, she is completely ecstatic when we actually show up. Trick enthusiastically brings Guillaume to the basement for a beer, and I wonder if he is the drinking type. I go to follow them but Lucy pulls me aside.

“Wait,” she says. “I need some girl chat time.”

“Girl chat?” Lucy doesn’t have girl chats. This is why I like her so much.

“Aww come on. Humor me,” she says. “It’s so nice for you to bring your boyfriend to practice.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” I can’t believe I never thought about how this would look. I can’t blame Lucy for thinking what she’s thinking, but at the same time it makes me want to scream. And I’m not sure what has me most frustrated; that people think he’s my boyfriend, or that they’re wrong. Maybe a boyfriend is not really my style, but it’s normal and comforting and not full of people attacking you and mystical chanting crap and all the things I’m working so hard, in vain, to pretend never happened.

“But you’ve never brought anyone to band practice with you before, so Guillaume must be important.”

I have no one else. The realization hits me, then. I don’t know when he has become so important in my life, but he is. I guess he never gave me much of a choice. No one has given me much of a choice.

“I never had the need to make new friends before. But with you and Patrick doing the annoying couple thing I had no other choice. That is all he is. A friend, just like you and Trick are to me!”

“Sure.”

I let out a cry of frustration and she laughs at me.

“Come on. You know I’m teasing.”

“I guess,” I answer. I’m still grouchy about it.

She sits down on Trick’s living room couch and looks at me with a mischievous smile.

“Oh no, what is it?” I sit next to her.

“Trick and I did it, last weekend,” she whispers.

“Did what?” There is only one meaning of
did it
that I can think of, and I really hope I’ve interpreted it wrong.

“You know;
it
. We had sex.”

“I see.”

I can’t believe she feels the need to tell me this shit. I have enough worries right now without fearing what this is going to do to the band. To our friendship.

It pisses me off that they’ve stepped the whole relationship thing up a notch. It’s now past the point of no return and I can’t see any other end to this other than the destruction of Lucid Pill. “I don’t know what made you think this was a good idea.”

“What do you mean? We used protection. You don’t strike me as a prude. I don’t understand why you’re making this into something.”

“We’re on the verge of something with Lucid Pill, Lucy. Can’t you see it?”

She leans back from me and watches me with a frown etched on to her face.

“What the hell are you talking about? This is about Patrick and me, not about the band and not about you.”

“No, this is where you’re wrong. You, Patrick, and I
are
Lucid Pill. We are the band. Everything we do reflects the band. What’s going to happen when you guys break up?”

“
When
we break up? Really?”

I sigh and pull my knees up to my chest. “Okay, the band aside, what about us, our friendship? We’ve been inseparable for so long. How will that still work when everything falls apart and there is that whole sex thing hanging between you two?”

“Why do you insist everything’s going to fall apart?”

“Because things fall apart, that’s what they do. There’s no such thing as happily ever after.”

“I hope you don’t really believe that. It makes me sad.”

“Do you personally know anybody for whom the whole
love
thing’s worked out?”

“Sure, Trick’s parents!”

“They’re not happy.”

“They’re very happy.”

“They’re always fighting.”

“Bickering, actually, it’s cute.”

I put my hand on my forehead. “You’re even crazier than I thought.”

Patrick and Guillaume come to find us. They each have a beer in their hands and are talking about cars and gas mileage or something. I want to roll my eyes. Lucy glances at Guillaume and smiles at me.

“You may want to rethink your cynical views on love there, Odd,” she whispers to me.

I struggle to keep the corners of my mouth from rising up without my consent. She’d get the completely wrong idea if I smiled now.

In the basement, Guillaume takes a seat on the worn couch and Trick throws him another beer. I unpack my guitar and get everything set up while Lucy talks about set lists.

Once everything is set up and we agree as to what we want to work on, we start on the first song. We have some problems syncing up with each other at first, and then we finally get it and it sounds awesome.

My eyes meet Guillaume’s as I’m about to start singing, and I’m momentarily distracted. I miss my cue. I wait a little longer until the timing is right and sing the lyrics that had started as a few lines scribbled in a notebook on the metro.

Look at the way you sneer,
Think you’re just like your peers.
But I know,
There’s nothing in your eye.

Guillaume is watching me intently, as if what I sing next will somehow alter the meaning of the universe. He breaks eye contact, and looks at his feet instead.

You hold your head up high,
You say you’d never cry.
But I know,
The reason for your fear.

His gaze flickers on me again and I falter a bit, losing timing with the guitar before I pick the pace back up. There are so many questions in his eyes. I don’t know how to handle it, so I lose myself in the chorus.

I look to Lucy who grins at me and raises her eyebrows pointing with her face between Guillaume and me. If I’m going to concentrate, I need to ignore her as well. I return my attention to the song.

My guitar solo is before the last refrain and I stare at my feet while playing. I can’t handle looking at him right now.

Before we start the next song, Lucy leans in on me. “What was that all about?”

I want to ask her what she means, but my throat feels dry and I can’t get the words out, so instead I raise my eyebrows at her. Something passed between Guillaume and me during that song, and my gut feeling tells me it was more than just the usual magic mumbo-jumbo.

“I saw the intensity in his eyes when he looked at you. You may pretend to be oblivious to it, but he’s seriously into you.”

Did she see it too? Was that what it was? For some reason, Lucy’s comment makes me doubt my previous feeling. She couldn’t be right about him being into me. It was just too simple of an explanation for someone like Guillaume.

“No, I don’t know what it’s about, but I think it’s something else.”

“I never knew you to be so dense.”

I glance at him again and whatever was going on earlier is gone. He smiles at me pleasantly and I can’t help but smile back.

Trick catches the exchanges and smiles at the both of us.

“What?”

“Nothing. I like him,” he says way too loud and nowhere near cryptic enough. I feel my face flush and I yell at the other two to get started on the next song. We’ll work on the previous one when I’m feeling more in control.

During our fifteen-minute break, Lucy and Trick leave us alone together. What they’re doing is so obvious. It makes me want to scream.

“I like your friends. They seem to be a really good match,” Guillaume says.

I roll my eyes at him.

“What? You don’t agree?”

“Nope. I don’t agree,” I answer.

We sit on the couch in silence for what feels like an eternity.

“That song, what was it about?”

“Which song?”

“The first one.”

“Oh, it’s kind of stupid. I don’t really know what it’s about. It came to me after I sat beside you in the metro … it was you, wasn’t it?” I looked at him, knitting my eyebrows together. I’m still not clear if the strange guy who asked me about the drums in the metro was Guillaume or if he’s become so ingrained in my subconscious that I see him everywhere.

He ignores my question and asks me one of his own. “It came to you? Like the voices?”

I don’t know if he’s being purposely evasive or he’s just too focused on his own line of questioning, but I’m glad he hasn’t answered me. I remind myself that I just can’t deal with this stuff until after the gig, if at all.

I scan the room, but Trick and Lucy are nowhere to be found.

“No, not like the voices … well, maybe more like the voices than most of my songs. But it’s different … and I changed some of the words and meanings as I played with it too.”

He reaches toward me, and I instinctively lean closer to him.

“You’re one interesting girl, Aude Vanier.” He pushes a strand of my hair out of my eye and his face comes within a few centimeters of mine. He smells of rain and without thinking, I open my mouth to breathe it in.

“Come on,” I hear Lucy whisper as she’s trying to push Trick back out of the room.

Now they’re definitely going to get the wrong impression.

25

Guillaume

Antoine managed to get a hold of a car for me to use to get to Kahnawake, the Mohawk reserve directly southwest of Montreal. I went alone as Aude had decided to back out at the last minute.

“I just can’t take the time for these things,” she’d said. “The band is more important, more real. I haven’t been attacked since the first days and I’m starting to think it never really happened.”

“It happened.”

“I’m sorry. You can still go, but I’m overwhelmed with getting Lucid Pill ready for its big show. I can’t dwell on this mystical nonsense.”

I probably could have worked harder at convincing her, but in the end, I couldn’t find any reason why she should be there.

I took a detour to get to the reservation. Though the most direct route is Mercier Bridge, I couldn’t drive by the spot where I’d seen Marguerite jump to her death. So I took a different route and when I finally reached the reservation, I wasn’t surprised that it, too, had changed in the face of time.

Tired-looking houses reminded me of the poverty the reservation had always struggled against, but it had lost its edge. The area has seen some revitalization since the Forties.

Robert’s wife answered the door and pointed me in the direction of his study. The room was a cozy mix of modern conveniences and First Nations artifacts. A couple of overstuffed chairs sat against a wall and I lowered myself into one of them. I seemed to perpetually find myself in awkward conversations these days. Once I could no longer bear the silence, I said the first thing that came to my mind.