The Lottery (18 page)

“Fuck off,” she said, struggling to her feet. “Just fuck the hell off and leave me alone.”

She woke to a tumultuous rain, wind sweeping the house, the roof a drenched, pounded shell. Beyond her bedroom window, Tuesday morning was a smear of colors, one ache dribbling into the next. She was cold. Why hadn’t her mother turned up the heat last night? Muttering her way to her closet, Sal pulled on her housecoat and shuffled grumpily down the hall.

“Good, you’re up,” said her mother, coming out of the washroom. “If you’re ready in twenty minutes, I can give you a ride to school.”

“For eight o’clock?”

“It’s Tuesday. Don’t you have band practice?”

“Oh yeah.” Too many aches had run together, she was beginning to lose track of the basics.

“I’ll pack you a breakfast to eat in the car,” said her mother. “C’mon now — skedaddle.”

She skedaddled through her hair and face, avoiding her eyes in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. It was with her constantly now, a pale sick feeling that clung like a half-peeled skin. Washing didn’t do anything, and getting her sugar high or flying the streets on her bike was nothing but a temporary fix. The sick feeling had attached to her like a phantom understanding, the kind that told her things about people she didn’t want to know.

“For Pete’s sake, go back into the house and get an
umbrella!” hollered Ms. Hanson as Sal ducked, soaked to the skin, into the passenger seat.

“I’m already wet.” Sal set her clarinet case on the floor and accepted the muffin her mother handed her.

“But you have to walk home.”

“This isn’t Noah and the ark, Mom. I’ll survive.”

With a long involved sigh, her mother put the car into gear and backed down the driveway. The hood thrummed with rain. Everywhere Sal looked, water poured in long, blurred streams, the outside world putting in a brief appearance with each swipe of the windshield wipers. Settling into the damp give of her clothes, Sal worked her way through the oatmeal muffin, tunneling her tongue into the coarse grainy texture, chasing the sweet burst of each raisin. For the moment she was safe and out of reach, the car a blurred cave of sound, her whole being focused on the smaller cave of her mouth. Thank god her mother leapt out of bed at the crack of dawn and always remembered to feed her morning-challenged offspring.

“Don’t forget your orange juice,” said her mother.

“Thanks.” After the muffin, the juice went down in sharp bitter gulps. Suddenly Sal cried out, doubling over as pain engulfed her stomach.

“What’s the matter?” her mother gasped.

“It hurts,” Sal whimpered, clutching her stomach. “When I eat.”

“Did the muffin hurt?”

“Not as much.”

“You could be getting an ulcer,” said her mother grimly. “It’s because of all that junk food you eat. I’m booking you an appointment with Dr. Rajani.”

“It’s okay. I’ll stop drinking orange juice.” Hugging her
stomach, Sal slouched lower in her seat. She hated doctors — they had an unnatural fetish for orifices, always wanting to poke around where no one else wanted to go.

“You’ll do no such thing,” snapped her mother. “You need your Vitamin C.”

“Or my teeth will fall out and I’ll get scurvy,” finished Sal. “Isn’t that what happened to Vasco de Gama?”

“Before my time,” said her mother.

“Scurvy finished him,” Sal said bleakly, watching water funnel down the side window.

Her mother chuckled. “Well, scurvy isn’t finishing you off. I can probably get you in to see Dr. Rajani after school. I’ll leave a message with the school office.”

“He won’t want to check my gall bladder or give me a hysterectomy, will he?”

“He’ll probably prescribe something for you to drink,” her mother said comfortingly. “Here’s another muffin.” Pulling over to the curb, she set a paper bag in Sal’s lap. “And take my umbrella — the forecast is predicting rain all day.”

“But what about you? You’re wearing makeup.” Sal stared stupidly at the umbrella her mother was holding out to her. “And you curled your hair.”

“Take the umbrella,” repeated her mother, tapping the wheel. “You’re already sniffing. I don’t want you home missing school because you’re sick.”

Hurt flared, a whiplash burn. “Of course,” Sal snapped, grabbing the umbrella and her clarinet case. “We can’t have S.C.’s best student missing a single day of school, can we?”

Closed umbrella in hand, she plunged into the downpour and slammed the door. Just ahead of her mother’s car idled a van, its side door open. A woman stood on the curb holding
an umbrella, waiting to hand it to the boy who was swinging himself from the van’s back seat into a wheelchair.

“Sally Hanson!” cried Ms. Wallace. “Is that you or a drowned rat?”

Brydan appeared in the van doorway, panic trapping his face as he caught sight of Sal.

“A drowned rat,” said Sal, turning from Ms. Wallace’s welcoming smile toward the rainsoaked gloom of Saskatoon Collegiate.

For the next several days, Sal was kept busy slurping Ranitidine and working on Myra Hurgett’s terror campaign. Envelopes kept showing up in her textbooks or taped to the outside of her locker. Every time she turned around, someone from Shadow Council — Rolf, Ellen or Judy — seemed to be stepping out of a crowded hallway toward her, three fingers raised. Sal’s response was automatic, a wave of shock that reverberated through her like a languid guitar string, then a bleak vague feeling, colorless and useless as the four stone faces carved into Mount Rushmore. “Follow” was always the command, the Shadow Council member turning and starting off down the hall as if her compliance was part of the assumed order of things.

And she always followed; it seemed as natural as breathing. So did her listless unthinking manner as she scuffed along behind the Shadow Council member who was busily scouting out a quiet place to hand over the latest envelopes. She wasn’t told what these contained. Each one arrived with her instructions clipped to it, detailing the target as well as the time and place of delivery. As per Willis’s suggestion, the terror campaign was given a grassroots
appearance — there was no predictable pattern to the targets, and Sal was handing out an average of five envelopes a day. She never saw any of the duties take place, but overheard students talking: “... did you see Ryan Havel trip her in the cafeteria? She was plastered with Jell-O...” Or “... she let out a scream that shattered the trophy case, man. I think she actually thought the paint was blood ...”

Twice during this time, Sal crossed paths with Myra Hurgett in the hall. The first time the girl was still her normal bubbly self, cruising with the rest of the champagne-giggles crowd, but by Thursday afternoon she was walking differently, her eyes wary and darting, books held protectively over her chest. That night Sal dreamed of bodies walking in fear down endless hallways — the bodies of everyone she knew hunched inward, protecting themselves against the envelopes that kept appearing in her hand — and silence, dense unbroken silence. Friday morning the dream remained with her, unshakeable as she entered the school. Braced for the usual eruption of stomach acid, she approached her locker cautiously but no one stepped out, three fingers raised, to meet her. As the morning passed free of envelopes to deliver, the violence in her stomach gradually settled. Perhaps Shadow Council had gotten its fill and the goddam thing was over; maybe she could finally get back to some pretense of sanity.

Then, just before lunch, she entered the seldom-used girls’ washroom at the back of the Tech wing and discovered a sobbing Myra Hurgett, her face pressed against the tampon machine. As Sal entered she whipped around, her face a cataclysm of fear. Equally startled, Sal froze, ready to bolt backwards out the door. Myra’s face was a blur of make-up, her eyes swollen and bloodshot. With a jolt of surprise, Sal realized the other girl wasn’t pretty, not really — her appeal
had always been in the effortless way she carried herself, a carefree glee now defined by its absence.

“You,” Myra whispered, staring. “What do you want? Haven’t you done enough already?”

So the grassroots camouflage had been a bust. Myra had guessed the true identity of her tormenters from the beginning, and she probably thought Sal had hunted her down now to deliver some kind of ultimatum.

“Don’t worry,” Sal stammered awkwardly. “I just want to use the can.”

Myra turned, moaning, toward the sink, and Sal slipped gingerly into the closest stall. Heart thudding, she locked herself inside. Everything she touched vibrated as if about to explode, and the sound of her urine hitting the toilet water frightened her so badly she almost vomited herself inside out onto the cement floor. Crouched on the cold seat, she listened with radar — enhanced hearing, but there was no sound of anyone leaving the washroom. Reluctantly she emerged from the stall to find Myra waiting by the sink, her face washed and a tense determination shaping her mouth. The air pulsed, radioactive. Approaching the sink, Sal began to wash her hands.

Tugging two paper towels from the dispenser, Myra handed them to her. Sal hesitated. Was the lottery victim allowed to accept kindness from a target? Hell, Sal thought, suddenly furious. Was the victim allowed to own a single moment of her own mind, or was the inside of her head available only for the nauseating sludge of self — contempt?

“Thanks.” Drying her hands, Sal dropped the paper towels into the garbage. Slowly her eyes climbed the wall, brick by brick, until she met the question of Myra’s gaze. “It’s over,” she said tersely, her own eyes flitting away. “I think.”

“You mean it?” Myra’s face hesitated, afraid to leap toward hope.

“Just keep away from Linda Paboni on the volleyball court,” said Sal. “Let her score every point she wants.”

Myra nodded, her eyes vague. “The bitch.”

“The bitch has friends,” Sal said, turning toward the door. “Or whatever passes for friends in this place.”

“Do you?” asked Myra suddenly, and Sal found herself riveted to the spot, unable to will herself forward.

“Do I what?”

“Have friends.”

“Ask me a year from now.”

“But it’s not fair.”

“Nine thousand people got wiped out in an earthquake in Turkey last week,” said Sal. “Was that lottery fair?”

Myra’s mouth opened, then closed.

“Just don’t tell anyone what I told you, okay?”

“I won’t,” said Myra. “I swear on everything that’s important to me. Cross my heart.”

Their eyes held and Sal found herself looking into the beginning of friendship, a friendship that might or might not survive being put into deep freeze for the next nine months.

“Have a good year,” she said harshly, turning this time without hesitation toward the door.

“Inside the Question” suspended on lofty drawn-out notes, high above the mundane. The trumpet line arced slowly, a bird dreaming its way toward the sun, while the clarinet hummed and rippled beneath it like grass in the wind, repetitive restless sequences of notes. The two melodies
scarcely seemed connected, one so high, the other breathing across the surface, each pulling its own thoughts into sound. Yet the longer Sal played, the more she felt them singing toward one another, parallel rhythms of bliss.

“That’s gorgeous,” she sighed, resting the clarinet bell on her knee and staring at her musical score. “How did you ever think of it?”

“At my uncle’s farm,” said Willis. “Lying on my back in a field and watching the enormity of sky above me. There’s a family of hawks in the area and I’d watch them hovering, the way they drifted weightless, like a mind set free. I’d lie there and watch the hawks hover and try to feel the sound of it — the song of that kind of dreaming. A hawk’s reverie. One day I brought my trumpet with me and played while I watched.”

“Did you feel like you were flying?” Sal’s voice was husky, as if she’d gone deep into the dream of it and was speaking herself awake.

“There’s a way of calling beauty into yourself,” Willis said slowly. “Of opening to it. Out in that field, I’d feel as if I was calling all the blue of the sky down into me. You ever feel like that?”

Sal nodded.

“We’re more than just this,” Willis said, touching his arm. “When I play trumpet, I can feel it.”

“Soul?”

“Soul, mind, dream — whatever you want to call it. Sometimes I can hear it in your playing too. You’ve been practicing.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t tell him the way practicing felt when she was alone — repetitive, useless. Like lifting weights, climbing stairs, bricks in a wall.

“You should try writing music.” Willis blew an experimental riff. “I’d like to hear what you’d come up with.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” He met her eyes, expressionless, and they were back to square one, the basic tension that underlay everything between them — inside the question: Why are you doing this, Willis? Why are you spending time with the victim?

“Why can’t anyone in this school talk to the lottery winner?” She couldn’t say victim, not out loud. Not yet. “I could still deliver Shadow’s messages if people were talking to me. What’s the big deal with no one talking to me?”

“Your loyalties would be divided.” Willis fiddled with his trumpet valves. “What if a duty targeted one of your friends? Sooner or later, you’d squeal.”

Sal mentally ducked all thoughts of Myra Hurgett. “You could make me sign a contract. In my own blood. Threaten me with a zillion demerits if I told.”

“Uh uh,” said Willis. “You have to be set apart. Your friends have to set you apart. All connctions have to be broken. The victim exists in limbo. It’s the only way.”

“So Shadow can get its rocks off.”

“It’s just for one year. No one takes it personally. Wait and see — next year no one’ll even remember.”

“I’ll remember.”

“I know you will,” Willis said quietly. “Why d’you think I’m here?”

Sal wondered if he knew he was lying — if he was presenting this lie to make her feel better, or if it was simply to improve his own self-esteem. “Inside the Question” had two parts — the trumpet couldn’t soar as spectacularly without the low hum of the clarinet to give it contrast.
Where was the astonishment of sky without the horizon line of earth to worship it? Just like everyone else, Willis Cass loved a victim. He needed her.