Wild Awake (16 page)

“How’s the bike feel?”

“Oh. You know. Like a total death trap.”

I smile at him so he knows I’m kidding.

“I ant to ear oo ay um time,” shouts Skunk, scraps of his words torn away by the wind. I angle my bike closer to him.

“WHAT?”

“I want to hear you play sometime.”

I nod to show I’ve understood him.

“Make you a deal,” I shout.

“Another one?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I want to hear you too.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but I curl over my handlebars and scream, “Race you!”

Before he can answer, I’ve shot ten feet ahead of him, the bike path melting into mercury beneath my tires. Up ahead where the seawall curves, a bronze sculpture shines brightly in the moonlight. I blast toward it.

When I’m halfway there, a huge black shape streaks past me.

It’s Skunk. Cutting through the night like a sailboat. Flying down the path as if he weighed nothing at all.

I tip my face into the wind and charge after him, leaving the ships far behind. I know they will be there, waiting. But as my bicycle carries me deeper into the forest, it feels like I’m carrying them with me too.

It starts raining after we cross
the Lions Gate Bridge back into Stanley Park. Soon, it’s a full-on downpour. The pack dwindles as people peel off in various directions to ride home. Red BMX and Purple Mongoose evaporate into the night somewhere around Denman Street, and by the time we hit Granville, it’s just me and Skunk. The nightclubs have emptied out and the heat lamps have been pulled inside. Granville Street is empty except for cop cars and the leftover drunks and homeless people shouting at each other on the sidewalk. My clothes are soaking wet and suctioned to my skin, and my tires are slick. We bike slowly, floating over the shining pavement.

“You headed home?” says Skunk.

“I guess I should.”

The rain’s soft music has lulled me into a trance, and I hadn’t even realized we’d drifted past Burrard Street, where I should have turned off for the bridge.

“You left your shopping bags in the shed this afternoon,” he says.

“Perfect. I’ll come get them.”

As we coast through the deepening puddles, listening to the muffled sound our tires make slashing through the water, I take another shot at digging for clams.

“So why don’t you smoke pot?” I ask.

Skunk wipes the raindrops off his forehead.

“I used to. I was a big-time stoner when I was twelve.”

“When you were
twelve
? Where does a twelve-year-old get pot?”

Skunk laughs. “In Montreal, you can do anything when you’re twelve.”

He pronounces it
Mo-ray-all
, with this whiff of a Quebecois accent that makes my insides go limp. As we bike to his neighborhood, Skunk tells me about growing up in Montreal: smoking cigarettes at recess, skipping school to play in bands, moving out of his mom and stepdad’s apartment when he was sixteen to live in a shared house with the Band That Shall Not Be Mentioned.

“So you’d what, blaze and do multiplication tables?” I say.

“Yeah. Or just sit in my room and play bass.”

“What happens if you smoke weed now?”

“My paranoia gets worse.”

I give him a funny look.

“It gets worse? You mean you’re just generally paranoid all the time? Are you paranoid right now? Are you paranoid about me?”

I swoop my bike closer to Skunk’s and give him my best evil stare.

“I am plotting to kill you, Skunk. Kiri Byrd in the toolshed with a bike wrench.”

He gives my handlebars a light push. I veer away, laughing.

“How do you know I’m not plotting to kill
you
?” says Skunk. “I could have sabotaged your bike and you wouldn’t even know it. Your tires might blow up the next time you go over a bump.”

I swoop closer again, rain falling lush and heavy on my skin.

“You’re not that evil.”

“Try me.”

“You just think you are because you have tattoos. Speaking of which, should I get one? I was thinking about getting Beethoven’s face right here.”

I point to a spot on my arm. Skunk grimaces.

“Please don’t.”

“Why? What’s wrong with Beethoven? It would make me more legit as a pianist. I’m going to be in this big piano festival soon, and I want the other contestants to know I mean business. When I flex my bicep, Beethoven could scowl at them menacingly.”

“Or you could scowl at them menacingly.”

“Trust me. I’ve got that part down.”

“You’re a little crazy, you know.”

“Look who’s talking, Bicycle Boy.”

When we get to Skunk’s house, the rain is still pouring down. We wheel our bikes through the iron gate and down the side of the house, flower stems slapping wetly against our legs. Skunk unlocks the shed and lifts his bike onto its pegs. He finds my plastic shopping bags stowed under the workbench and hands them to me. I feel the ridiculous shape of the acorn squash and the straw hat. The piano lesson I had this afternoon feels like something that happened years ago, to a different Kiri altogether. My legs are slick with bicycle grease and rainwater, muscles aching from the ride. I want to freeze myself in this feeling like a fern in amber.

I saw the ships
, I want to tell Sukey. I know she’d know what I mean.

Skunk closes the shed door and hooks the combination lock through the metal latch. We stand in the courtyard, rain splashing off our shoulders. I think of my empty house and nudge my kickstand down, playing for time.

“Mind if I use your bathroom?”

I do need to pee, but mostly I just don’t want to go home. When I think of everywhere I’ve been tonight, the warehouses and the sea wall, my house seems lifeless, a plastic Monopoly piece in a world full of brick and glass and water and wood and stone.

Skunk plays with his keys.

“Sure. We have to be quiet, though. My aunt and uncle are sleeping upstairs.”

“No problem. I’ll be in and out.”

I leave my bike in the courtyard and follow Skunk to the house, waiting as he unlocks the sliding glass door and pulls it open. I can’t help but feel a little excited. I’m finally being admitted to the inner sanctum. The Sanctum Skunkorium. The cave of mysteries.

He goes in first, and I follow. As I step inside, I forget all about my need to pee. My senses reel.

Skunk’s room is one of the most bizarre and beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

The entire room is filled with old radios. It reminds me of nothing so much as an aviary, each radio a different bird, some with gleaming wooden coats like sparrows and some with green plastic shoulders like parrots. They perch on ledges and shelves, peeking down from windowsills and peering out from in between stacks of old books, their antennas perked at quirky angles, their dials glowing faintly in the dim golden light of an antique lamp. Some of them look ancient, with curved wooden cases and glass-plated dials, and some are squat and cheerful. I even think I can hear birds in here, a faint hooting and scratching, until I realize one of the radios is turned on with its volume low.

There’s an unmade bed loosely covered by a black-and-green quilt. A row of red Chinese lanterns hangs above the bed, their bellies glowing. The ashtray on the bedside table is littered with the stubs of incense sticks. I glimpse the soft curves of an ornate velvet armchair piled with clothes. Behind the armchair hangs a painting of the Hindu goddess Kali, her four arms held at right angles, tongue stuck out. The room smells like something I’ve only smelled one time before. It takes me a moment to place it: myrrh.

Skunk plants his hand on the wall and slides off his wet shoes.

“Bathroom’s through there.” He indicates a little hallway with his chin. “The light switch is sort of hard to find. It’s on the wall under the mirror.”

His face is turned toward the floor, concentrating on his shoes. Rainwater slips off his hair and the back of his neck and drops to the floor, making little wet polka dots on the hardwood.

I’m not listening to his instructions about the light switch. Something in the corner of the room has caught my eye. “My grandma had that radio.”

Skunk looks up, smiling. He’s peeled off his wet socks and balled them up inside his shoes. His bare feet are surprisingly pale and hairless.

“Oh yeah?”

“The blue one with the clock on the front. She kept it tuned to this crazy Christian station where they were always telling you to put your hands on the radio and pray for healing.”

“The blue one’s my second favorite,” he says.

“Which one’s your first favorite?”

“See that little red one on the top ledge?”

I scan the wall until I see it.

“The plastic one?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s cute. Where’d you get it?”

“I found it sitting next to a fire hydrant. I was walking past and thought I heard something, and it was this radio sitting on the sidewalk, running on batteries. It was like it had wandered out into the world and gotten lost and it was calling out, hoping someone would find it.”

“Aww. That’s sweet. What was it playing?”

Skunk grins.

“Marilyn Manson.”

I go to the bathroom, and when I come back the rain is slapping horizontally against the glass door. Skunk is sitting on the floor, putting on dry socks. I put my hand on the door. I know this is supposed to be the part where I go home.

But what would happen if I didn’t?

“Well, it was nice riding with you,” I say, reaching up to brush the wet hair out of my eyes. “Next time we race, I get a head start.”

I realize, to my simultaneous horror and exhilaration, that I’m flirting with him.

Skunk pulls on a wool sock, his face carefully composed, as if he’s trying to figure out how far into his private universe he should let me intrude, and for how long.

Stop it, Kiri!
says the part of me that’s shocked by my boldness.

The other part says,
Why?

I smile at him and cast a mischievous glance at my wet tank top, knowing Skunk’s eyes will follow.

“I wish it wasn’t raining. But I guess it doesn’t matter, since I’m already soaked. Anyway. See you later.”

I turn around to slide the door open before he sees the half-mortified, half-triumphant expression on my face. My heart is beating like a castanet.
All right, flirt-monster. That’s enough for one night. He obviously doesn’t like you
. My fingers find the plastic handle.

“Wait,” says Skunk.

The rain doesn’t seem to be
stopping anytime soon.

So I stay.

Skunk tiptoes upstairs, and when he comes back down he’s carrying a small clay teapot and two tiny cups without handles. We sit cross-legged on the rug in the middle of the floor, drink our tea, and talk in whispers so his aunt and uncle won’t hear. I can’t stop looking around the room, stealing glances at the radios, the lanterns, the junk-store painting of Kali, the quilt on Skunk’s bed. I still can’t quite believe I’m in here. Part of me’s on my wet bicycle, making her disciplined, hard-working, and responsible way home. It takes all my self-control not to chicken out and follow her.

Between thimblefuls of smoky, earthy tea, I make Skunk tell me the story of every radio in the room.

The boxy green one he found on top of someone’s trash.

The antique one in the walnut cabinet someone left at the bottom of their driveway with a
FREE
sign the morning after a garage sale.

The digital clock radio he stole from a hospital room.

The vintage 1960s transistor radio his dad gave him a week before he committed suicide in his apartment.

I tell myself I’ll only stay until we’re finished our tea, but the teapot never seems to run out. Every time Skunk lifts it to fill our cups, more tea trickles out. He asks me about the Imperial, and I tell him everything I’ve found out since the night we met.

“Are you sure you want to hear this?” I ask, remembering Lukas’s reaction, but in the cozy lamplight, it feels like there’s no secret too terrible to say. Skunk gives me a sweater to wear, a big brown woolen one that drapes over my whole body like a warm, fuzzy tent. I feel self-conscious wearing it, like I’m taking a nap in his bed. But it also makes my chest tingle.
Get real, Kiri
, I tell myself.
This isn’t going anywhere
.

Every few minutes my eyes flit to the clock on the little red radio.
It’s four thirty a.m., I should go home. It’s five a.m., I should go home. It’s five fifteen, I should go home
. At six a.m. there’s noise upstairs, and we can hear Skunk’s aunt and uncle taking showers and making breakfast.

“I should probably leave too,” I whisper. “I really need to practice.”

“At six in the morning?”

“Why not?”

“It’s still raining.”

“I’ll get wet.”

“At least finish your tea.”

“That teapot is enchanted. It never runs out.”

“I know.”

“So you’re saying you’re trying to enchant me?”

Skunk presses his lips together. “Wait and see.”

I sip my tea, trying to play it cool. But I can’t help it. I spring to my feet. “I really need to go.”

Skunk waves his arms. “Oh no! She’s fiending!”

“I am not
fiending
.”

“How many hours has it been since your last hit?”

I count. “Nine and a half.”

“Fiending,” says Skunk.

“I swear I’m not a junkie,” I say. “It’s just that my piano will explode if I don’t practice for long enough each day. It’s sort of like a bomb in that respect.”

Skunk goes to the wall and turns on a radio. He tunes it to a classical station, and the slow first movement of Beethoven’s
Moonlight
Sonata
comes pouring out.

“I’m playing that piece in the Showcase,” I blurt.

Skunk kneels on the floor and pours me more tea.

“Tell me all about it,” he says.

In the afternoon we go upstairs to make breakfast before Skunk’s aunt and uncle come home from work. Their house is a mysterious planet of vitamin bottles and piled-up mail, as different as could be from the warm, cluttered radio temple below. There’s a stack of cookbooks on the counter with titles like
Lo-Carb Italian Cooking
and, disturbingly,
The Zero-Calorie Solution
. I page through them while Skunk puts on a kettle of water for coffee and gets out the ingredients for an omelet. Between reading recipes for celery salad and low-carb meat-balls, I pace around the kitchen, taking in the stacks of clean dishes and bowls, matching white mugs with square handles, sets of espresso cups and saucers. There’s some sort of work schedule taped to a cupboard door.