Yesterday (11 page)

We go down to the kitchen together, me remarking how hooked my sister is on Hamburger Helper. Ever since the first package Nancy picked up for us along with a bunch of other groceries when my mom was too sick to go shopping. Olivia ate so much of it that she nearly made herself sick again, something I teased her about once she was feeling better.

When I realized I’d left Olivia alone after school again today I felt guilty but the other feelings I have about her, the ones that make me dizzy and feverish, haven’t left me either and at the end of the night—hours after I’ve helped my mom with the Hamburger Helper and the three of us have watched
Magnum P.I
. together—I dream about Olivia.

A slightly smaller Olivia on a path to a stately Victorian building. I’m several feet away but can see her clearly from my spot on the path. She’s flanked by two things that look almost like men but aren’t. Inside, the building is filled with children and teenagers—all of them attractive, whole, healthy and intelligent.

I know that because I know exactly where we are. The place is a school, our school. In another time and another place. I catch a glimpse of Garren as I wander through the hallway to my classroom, my clothes feeling weightless like a second skin.

The sight of Garren, his dark hair wavy and nearly wild, makes my breath catch in my throat. He’s talking to four other teenagers in a cluster in the middle of the hall and I stop to watch him like I’ve done so many times before. Sometimes I think he knows that I watch him.

I’ve never felt this way about anyone else. It seems a little like insanity.

Garren’s the kind of person who says what he thinks and that makes some people angry and draws others to him like honey. He doesn’t like the way things are and that’s not something you’re supposed to say, although this is a free country.

I should stop staring before he catches me at it, but he’s smiling and that makes it tougher to look away and then … then his gaze flicks over to me and it’s already too late.

In the morning I feel gloomy and weak and lie on my side with the covers pulled up over my chin wishing that I were someone else. My dreams mock me. I don’t know which parts of them point to a deeper truth and which are only a kaleidoscope of images from my everyday life. What will happen to me if I can’t filter out the truth? I have the terrible feeling
that leaving the truth buried will poison me in one way or another and when Olivia—sent upstairs by my mom—tells me that if I don’t get out of bed soon I’ll be late for school, I burrow into my pillow.

I don’t want my feelings about Olivia to be true but the creeping doubts won’t leave me alone. I listen to Olivia pad out of my room and shout from the top of the stairs, “Mom, she won’t get up!”

I throw back the covers and yell after her, “I’m up! I’m up.”

“You better be!” my mother hollers from downstairs.

I change out of my pajamas and into clothes. My hair’s kind of grimy but there’s no time to wash it; there’s barely enough time to do my makeup. I fly through the process and then dash downstairs to gulp down cold cereal.

Less than thirty minutes later I’m standing at my open locker, pulling out the textbooks and notebooks I need for my morning classes. Having to deal with such mundane things when I don’t know what happened to my father and why a boy who should be a stranger to me isn’t, seems ludicrous and just like that, the energy it took for me to get out of bed fizzles and dissipates. Misery descends with a vengeance and I freeze in front of my locker with my bio textbook in one arm.

Time stops.

For a while—who knows how long—I’m not sure where I am, the Victorian school from my dream or Sir John A. MacDonald. The realities merge unevenly in my head and the pieces that don’t fit make my head ache.

I could stay this way forever and never decide what to do next. Maybe that’s easiest.

“Freya?” a faraway voice calls. I turn, expecting to find small Olivia, wild-haired Garren or the well-intentioned blond boy.

I hadn’t realized there were tears streaming down my face and as my eyes close in on Seth Hardy next to me I feel embarrassed, which is just as stupid as having to gather my books in the first place. Who cares about Seth or any of the people brushing by me in the hallway?

I need Garren
. He has to help me. He’s the only one. None of this means anything.

“Freya,” Seth repeats. “Are you okay?”

I drag one of my sleeves across my face, smearing white makeup onto black cotton. Then I sniffle and try to clear my throat.

“Hey,” he says, inching closer. “Is there anything I can do?”

I sense that he means that, despite the fact that I’ve treated him badly, and I thank him but tell him no, there’s nothing he can do. On impulse, because he’s being so nice, I apologize again for leaving the party without warning. “But I’m a mess,” I add. “That’s just the way things are right now.”

I don’t say why I’m a mess and he doesn’t ask. His sympathetic eyes linger on my face until I break the silence again by saying, “I need to get to bio.”

Seth nods and soon we’re going our separate ways, him hightailing it down one end of the hallway and me the other,
towards biology. I hate the days that I have double bio first thing. My morning concentration sucks and today I feel like I shouldn’t be here at all.

As I slide into my seat, Derrick takes one look at me and then glances down at his hands, pretending that he hasn’t noticed my bloodshot eyes.

“Hey,” I say, dropping my biology textbook down on the counter in front of me.

“Hey,” Derrick says back, his mouth inching open as though the thought of having to ask me what’s wrong is making him tired.

Some people just aren’t good at dealing with emotions and I save Derrick the trouble by saying, “Don’t ask, okay? I don’t want to talk about it.”

Derrick bobs his head in relief. “You ready for the grasshopper dissection today? Payne’s gone into the back room to get them.”

Derrick and I actually had a debate about this on Tuesday, knowing that we’d be lab partners. Both of us wanted to be the one to cut the grasshopper open, like kids with a new toy. Dissection seems exciting compared to most of the other things we have to do in school.

“Do you still want to be acting surgeon?” I ask, because just trying not to dissolve or freeze the way I did at my locker a few minutes ago is draining my energy reserves; there’s nothing left for pulling apart a dead grasshopper.

“Getting cold feet?” Derrick smiles. “Don’t worry, I’m on it.”

Sure enough when Mr. Payne hands us our grasshopper (a male) Derrick enthusiastically grips the scalpel. Mr. Payne makes us name all the specimen’s external parts for him before getting started. The only ones I recognize by sight and name are the most obvious ones: simple eye, compound eye, head, antenna, wings and the ovipositor. I feel woozy as I listen to Derrick name the rest. When I close my eyes I see the interior of the Victorian school I walked through in my dreams last night. I never reached the classroom I was headed for before I spotted Garren but I can see it in my mind now—row upon row of wooden desks with cast-iron frames. The floor is wooden too and faded maps and diagrams hang on the walls like props in a Hollywood movie. The contrast between the historical setting and the students’ perfect skin and features puzzles me. The oddly mechanical men escorting Olivia can only have been a product of my imagination but the thought of them makes me shiver.

“Are you doing all right there, Freya?” Mr. Payne asks.

It’s time to pin our grasshopper into the dissecting pan and I mumble that I’m okay so Mr. Payne will leave us alone. He walks away, casting a final look over his shoulder.

With the pins in place Derrick drags the scalpel down the grasshopper’s abdomen. Then he switches to the tweezers, digs into our specimen and pulls out a clump of mushy brown innards. “What the hell is this supposed to be?” Derrick asks, examining the gunk at the end of his tweezers. He turns to get my opinion but his face—the entire
classroom—is fading to black with me in it. I fight the darkness, clawing my way back towards consciousness but not reaching it. As my body turns to jelly and begins to slide towards the floor, my lab partner’s lightning-fast reflexes are the only thing that keep me from hitting cold linoleum.

T
he blond boy and I are weaving through a tangled mass of young people, some of them dancing with their arms stretched sensually up towards a hot summer night, others swaying—or even sleeping—as they lounge on blankets, towels and pieces of abandoned clothing. There are people upon people upon people as far as the eye can see—guys with long sideburns and flowing locks, girls with blissful smiles on their faces, some of them bare-breasted. The ground is squelchy underfoot and the air smells like mulch.

A curly-haired guy with grungy cheeks grabs my ankle as I step forward. I kick him loose and turn to shoot him an angry look. “Hey, man, what time is it?” the guy asks in a tone so mellow that he should be sitting atop a mountain, cross-legged, chanting for world peace.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“Don’t sweat it,” he says dreamily. “Stay beautiful.”

I stare into the distance at the blond boy who’s managed to get thirty feet ahead of me. “Latham!” I shout, not the least bit surprised that I know his name because it’s second nature; I’ve known him forever.

Latham turns to wait for me. When I catch up to him in the dark he drawls “Far out” in a perfect drugged-up imitation of the hippies surrounding us.

“Out of sight,” I declare, trying to match his dazed tone.

“Groovy, man,” Latham adds.

We laugh together, thinking we’re clever. Then Latham says, “I wish I could’ve been there for the real thing.”

“I don’t know—it was pretty unhygienic,” I joke. But I know what he means. Life was rawer then but more innocent. People like these thought they could change things and that the changes would last.

We start pressing forward again, looking for safe places to put our feet as we near the stage. “You should come to the concert in Chicago with us,” Latham says. “You know I can get more transit documents no problem.”

“And you know that I can’t go. Leila would explode. She’s angry enough with me already.”

Latham’s opening his mouth to say something else when I begin to drift away from him and back towards my biology classroom. I hear it before I can see it—raised teenage voices and chairs scraping across linoleum. When I open my eyes Mr. Payne and Derrick are gazing down at me with matching looks of concern. They’ve laid me down on the floor after
all but at least I didn’t fall and crack my skull open. I can feel something soft under my head and notice that they’ve elevated my feet over a pile of textbooks.

“Don’t try to sit up,” Mr. Payne advises. “I’ve called for the nurse.”

My mother comes to pick me up thirty minutes later. I’m lying in the school nurse’s office under a scratchy gray blanket, staring at a cobweb on the ceiling and listening to the tinny radio that sits on the nurse’s desk. The DJ’s introducing a new Simple Minds song when my mom walks into the room along with the nurse, who’s in the middle of telling her that I’ve perked up in the past few minutes but am running a low-grade fever.

“So she didn’t faint because of the dissection in science class?” my mom asks as I sit up on the cot. My mother crosses over to me and spreads her right hand across my forehead.

“I’m feeling better,” I say. “I just got light-headed watching my lab partner cut into the grasshopper.”

“You do feel warm, though,” my mother notes.

“I didn’t sleep well last night. On top of that, there was the bio thing. I guess I couldn’t handle it.”

My mother faces the nurse. “She had a very rough case of flu a few weeks ago. We all did. But she’s had some fairly bad headaches since then and I’d feel better if I could get her checked out by our doctor.”

“Of course,” the nurse says approvingly.

I continue to protest that I’m fine but my mother isn’t interested in my assessment and asks the nurse if she can use the telephone. Then she calls Doctor Byrne, who tells her he can see me in an hour.

My mom propels me out of the office and towards her car as I repeatedly insist that I don’t need to see a doctor and was the victim of a run-of-the-mill fainting spell. The truth is that my head feels like a balloon that’s been overfilled and could pop at any second. If Garren hadn’t told me about his father I might still suspect a brain tumor was the cause of all my strange thoughts and feelings over the past few weeks.

In the car, the sun feels like a jackhammer chipping into my skull and I close my eyes and sleep. We arrive in Toronto early and sit in Doctor Byrne’s waiting room listening to his receptionist answer the telephone and book appointments. My mother leafs through a copy of
Life
magazine and I cross my legs and grip the armrests of my chair, determined that no matter what Doctor Byrne asks me, I won’t crack and confess the sense of loss that runs deeper than my father, the holes in my memory, and feelings of distance from various family members. The only things I intend to reveal are physical symptoms.

“And where’s he taking you this year?” the receptionist says into the phone during what sounds like a less formal conversation than the ones I’ve overheard so far. “Ah, very nice. Lucky you. I’ve only been there once and everything
was delicious. But listen, as soon as he’s finished with the patient he’s in with, I’ll have him call you back, all right?”

Not ten minutes later Doctor Byrne emerges from his office with a man in a ski jacket. The receptionist nabs the doctor before he can disappear back inside his office and informs him that his wife called. “Thanks, Marjorie,” he says to the receptionist. Then he turns his attention to me and my mother and instructs, “Please come through.”

“I have a wedding anniversary coming up on the weekend,” he explains as my mom and I file into his office behind him. “So the pressure’s on.”

“Your anniversary?” my mother asks.

Doctor Byrne pinches at his eyeglasses. “That’s right. Seven years.”

Since Doctor Byrne looks about sixty, I would have guessed he’d been married for decades. Maybe it’s a second wife and because I’m in no hurry to talk about myself I ask, “Where are you taking her for dinner?” I heard the receptionist ask his wife the same question over the phone.