Betsy Wickwire's Dirty Secret (3 page)

J
ust making that decision did it. I immediately felt better. I could even see the difference in my wavy reflection on the elevator door. I was still scrawny and mauve, but I didn't look quite so much like a crack addict any more. There were signs of life behind the purple circles now.

I'd always liked challenges. I was the type of person who just needed to set a goal, then I was like a dog with a bone. Nothing could stop me. That's how I'd made the varsity basketball team in Grade 10. That's how I'd finally mastered
le conditionnel passé
. That's how I was going to escape this nightmare.

I squared my shoulders and took a breath.
I could do this
. I just needed to get away from Halifax—get away from Nick and Carly and everyone who knew them or me or us —then I'd be fine. I had to go somewhere new where I could start from scratch.

I felt a thud in my chest as if someone had hit me with a medicine ball.

University
. Oh my god. I hadn't even thought about university. Nick and Carly and I were all supposed to be going to McGill in the fall.

A gruesome picture of them writhing on the campus lawn popped into my head and I knew there was no way I could spend four years in Montreal with them slobbering over each other. For a second, it was like my spine melted—then I thought,
No. Forget about McGill
.

I made myself breathe and just concentrated on being realistic. McGill was not happening. In fact, I couldn't see myself going to any university, at least not in the condition I was now. There was no room in my brain for school.

I had to get out of town. That's all I could think of.

But how? Last time I'd looked, I had about $212 in my bank account. That wouldn't get me far. I squinted at nothing in particular and tried to think this through.

I thought of hitting Mom and Dad up for cash but trashed that idea pretty fast. They'd shit if they thought I wasn't going to McGill. Hell, they'd shit if they suspected I was leaving town.

They couldn't even know I was thinking about it.

I needed a job.

A flashback of Nick and Carly in the kitchen got me
right under the ribs, but I tried my best to ignore it. My exit from Jitters hadn't been stellar but I figured the manager would understand. He'd give me a good reference. I'm a good worker.

I smoothed down my hair.
I am
. That much was true. I leaned in close and looked at my reflection again. I'd pluck my eyebrows as soon as I got home, then start looking for a job. I pressed the Lobby button and felt like I was hitting “Go!”

The elevator stopped at 8 again and two ladies got on. One said, “Good Lord. I thought you'd never come back.”

I smiled like
stoopid elevator
. They stood with their backs to me and started talking as if I wasn't even there.

The other lady said, “No really, Cheryl. Twenty bucks an hour? Are you crazy?”

“That's what you pay a cleaning lady these days.”

Twenty bucks. My ears perked up. That's twice what I'd been making at Jitters. How hard could it be to clean a house?

“Is it worth it?”

“Nancy, please. It's absolutely worth it!” Cheryl laughed. “I leave a pigsty in the morning and come back after work to a spotless house. I never even lay eyes on Tonya. It's heaven.”

Never lay eyes on Tonya
. This was almost too good to be true. A place to hide out for a while
and
make twenty
bucks an hour? This couldn't have just been a coincidence. Someone was smiling down on me from somewhere.

I thanked the ladies — I'm sure they had no idea why — and got off the elevator. Sun streamed into the lobby. I was suddenly, surprisingly, starved.

I hadn't had an appetite in so long that I'd more or less assumed I'd just stopped getting hungry, that I'd outgrown it. I hadn't missed it any more than I missed my baby teeth. But now it felt good, the way a back rub that kind of hurts or brushing your hair with wire bristles feels good. It reminded me I was alive.

There was a Tim Hortons right across the street from the Medical Arts Building. Saliva bubbled up around my tongue.

A turkey club on a toasted whole-wheat roll. Iced tea. And a chocolate macadamia-nut cookie.

No. Screw it. I hadn't eaten in over a week.
Two
chocolate macadamia-nut cookies.

Then I thought,
You crazy?
Everyone I knew went to Tim Hortons. Another flashback, this time of Carly stealing the last bite of Nick's sandwich, licking her fingers, winking.

I shook it out of my head. No more turkey clubs for me. I needed to find somewhere else to eat.

A rusted-out Volvo pulled up in front of the Medical Arts Building and I remembered this dark, dingy sort of “alternative” café I'd been to once. It wasn't that far from
here but it was definitely off the beaten track. What was it called again? Poppies? Geraniums?

I could picture the big yellow and orange flower scrawled on the sign. Mom's half-sister had insisted we try it when she'd stopped in Halifax on her way home from Nepal. Aunt Brenda was exactly the type of person who'd hang out at a place like that. People who wore hiking boots and boxy, hand-knit sweaters all year long. Grandparents with scraggly, grey braids and/or beards. Art college students.

I couldn't imagine any of my “friends” showing up there. (I actually saw the quotation marks around the word friends.) The smoothie I'd had there was pretty tasty, too, come to think of it. My mouth filled up with saliva again. I turned and headed north.

I walked the rest of the way lost in logistics. I'd put an ad in Kijiji, that's what I'd do. I wouldn't use my own name. I'd check to make sure I only worked for people I didn't know. It was all so easy. I practically whistled all the way to Agricola Street.

And then there it was. Zinnia's. That was the name of the café. The black sandwich board out front had some inspiring quotation written on it in chalk. It seemed like a good omen. I checked the price of smoothies. “Extra large, fresh fruit, all natural, locally sourced yogourt and honey — $4.75.”

A little on the pricey side but I didn't care. I'd be making twenty dollars an hour soon. I could splurge, just this once.

It was cool inside. The walls, the ceiling, the floors were all painted a dark, metallic purple. The room smelled of slightly burnt coffee and something that reminded me of my grandmother. The bowl of dried flowers in Granny's downstairs bathroom.

Granny “adored” Nick.

I felt a little stab of panic—was this going to turn into another toothpaste/fake-tree moment? —but it passed. I was fine. I had a focus now and it wasn't Nick. It was getting a life—and that smoothie.

The girl behind the counter had numerous facial piercings and long hempy dreadlocks. She smiled at me blankly. She had no idea who I was. I ordered the five-fruit smoothie and sat down to drink it in a cracked black booth at the back of the café.

It was delicious. Tart and sweet and just thick enough that I had to work a bit to suck it up the straw.

Hard to believe anything that colour could be all-natural. Is fuchsia found in nature?

I couldn't think of any fuchsia fruit.

Was that a weird thing to even think about?

I didn't know. That was another thing that had happened to me in the last week or so. I kind of lost my sense
of normal. Somehow, things used to be so much clearer to me before I'd seen Nick leaning in to Carly with that look on his face.

That made me wonder if I'd have to worry about creeps and sexual deviants answering my Kijiji ad.

I made figure-eights in the smoothie with my straw and kind of laughed. Ten days ago, thinking about dealing with deviants would have scared me or grossed me out or at least given me something to joke about with my friends. Now it just seemed like a consideration. Which bus to take there. How much to charge. Whether I'd have to defend myself against perverts.

I lifted the straw to lick it. A long, shredded-wheat-coloured hair coiled around the end and drooped back into the glass.

My stomach heaved. There was nothing I hated more than random, unattached hairs. Hair in my food. Hair on the floor. Even one of my own hairs stuck to the sink always made me bolt out of the bathroom, screaming.

Oh my god. What was I thinking? I'd never be able to clean houses.

This picture of a damp little nest of hair tucked in the corner of someone else's shower popped into my head. I pushed the smoothie across the table and turned my face to the wall.

Revulsion, depression, hopelessness—all that stuff—

came over me like a wave of motion sickness. I cupped a hand across my mouth and stared at the shiny purple paint, hoping it would make me think of something else. Anything else.

“Betsy?”

I turned at the sound of my name. It was a simple reflex, but it was about to make my life very complicated.

A
short green-haired girl wearing enormous black-rimmed glasses and a little kid's Teletubbies T-shirt was standing beside the booth. She scratched her ribs and said, “What are you doing here?” I had no idea who this girl was. She said, “You don't remember me, do you?” I tried to smile. “Yeah. Yeah. I do. You're …” There was something vaguely familiar about her, now that I got a good look. I just couldn't place her.

She closed one eye and shook her head. “No, you don't. I'm Meghan Morris. You know, from Grade 10 drama?” She slipped into the booth across from me. “Least I used to be when my hair was, like, you know, beige. I'm Dolores now. Mother doesn't care for the name—but too frig-gin' bad, eh? What do you think? Dolores Morris. Doris Dolores Morris. Don't you just love the way it trips off the tongue?”

Was she
trying
to be weird?

I had no idea what to say. I moved my lips a few times but never really got started on an answer.

Dolores/Meghan/Whatever didn't seem to care, or even notice. She picked up my napkin, licked it and started wiping something sticky off the table.

“No, seriously, I mean it,” she said. “What are you doing here? Zinnia's isn't the type of place you'd normally find the—dot, dot, dot —'popular kids.'”

She stopped wiping the table and looked at me as if she actually expected an answer.

“Well. I was just, I don't know, hungry so I …”

Dolores slid the smoothie toward me. It felt like she'd aimed a blowtorch at face. I had to turn away.

“How come you're not drinking it, then? Too ‘granola' for you or something?”

I managed to shrug.

Dolores said, “Oh, no. Don't tell me. Hold on …” She stuck her nose deep into the glass, sniffed, then slumped back in the booth with her hand on her heart as if she'd just averted a major disaster. “Phew! For a second there, I was worried you'd ordered the Power Smoothie. Big mistake. They put kelp in it. Seriously. A seaweed smoothie. Like, ugh, gross.” She sat up and took another sniff. “But this one smells okay. Not too fishy or anything … So you just, like, savouring it or something?”

I couldn't bring myself to mention the hair. “No. Just not as hungry as I thought, I guess.” I hoped that would put an end to the smoothie discussion.

“Really? Geez. Well, I'll take it, then.” She didn't wait to see if that was okay. She wrapped her lips around my straw and took a big slurp.

My brain gagged. There was no way I'd ever have just taken somebody else's smoothie. No way I'd ever have used somebody else's straw. Especially somebody I barely knew.

Dolores swung her tongue around her lips and groaned pornographically. “Food is definitely love. Don't let anyone tell you different.”

She picked up the straw and started to lick it. The hair was still there but now a mushy hunk of strawberry hung off the end.

A clot
.

I wished I hadn't thought of that.

A clot of strawberry
.

My shoulders curled forward. I was definitely going to hurl if Dolores put that in her mouth.

“Hair.” I said it quickly, keeping my teeth together, just in case.

“Hunh?”

I wagged my finger at it.

Dolores held up the straw and tilted her head as if
she was checking the underside of a car. “Oh.” She slid her fingers down the hair and the clot plopped back into the smoothie. “Wow. The hair's as long as my arm. Look!”

I couldn't.

“Oh. Does this bother you?”

I turned my face to the wall and nodded. Even Carly knew better than to joke about something like this.

“You're kidding. It's only a hair.” I heard her take another long slurp. “I mean, a head hair. I could understand if it was a body hair or something. Like, if I found evidence that, say, somebody's armpit—or, you know, whatever—had been dangling over my smoothie, I'd definitely have second thoughts but …”

I wouldn't normally be rude but I had to stop this. “Could we talk about something else please?”

Dolores didn't seem the least bit offended. “Sure.

What?”

I shrugged like
you decide
. All I really wanted to do was leave but I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

“Well, okay.” Dolores pulled her feet up and sat cross-legged on the seat. There was a big hole in the knee of her pink-striped leggings. “You still going out with Nick Jamieson?”

It was like putting a match next to a plastic bag. My skin shrunk up tight. Who'd she think she was asking me stuff
like that? I gave a little shake of my head and turned away.

I could see the front door from here. What if I just stood up right now and walked out?

What difference would it make? I'd never escape. I'd never be free of this.

Dolores quit vacuuming the bottom of the glass and said, “Well. About time! The guy's a total dickhead. So what happened?”

I literally gasped. No one had ever said anything like that about Nick. Everyone loved him. He was student council president. He was MVP of the rugby and hockey teams. He was athletic and good-looking and polite and an excellent student too.

Carly loves Nick
. I realized I was breathing too hard.

Dolores put two fingers to her lips and went, “Ooooh. That bad, eh?”

That did it. I didn't just feel uncomfortable any more. Suddenly, I felt angry too. I was angry at being made to feel uncomfortable.

“Yes. That bad,” I said. “I caught Nick kissing Carly Gaetz.” Not precisely true but I hoped it would shock Dolores into her place. Make
her
feel uncomfortable now.

Dolores banged her hand on the table and her mouth fell open. “You're kidding? Carly, like, Gaetz?”

She started hooting and laughing. I could feel the heat rising up my neck.

“What's so funny?” I said.

“Nick Jamieson and Carly Gaetz?” She grinned at the ceiling. “We're talking Ken and Barbie here, folks! They're so perfect for each other it's comical. I can't believe they didn't find each other sooner.”

She took off her glasses and started cleaning them with the napkin she'd licked to wipe the table. “Let them rub their plastic body parts together as much as they want! Who cares? I never understood why you hung out with douchebags like them.” She put her glasses back on and blinked a couple of times.

Something about Dolores started to creep me out. How did she know all this stuff? How—or more importantly, why—had she bothered to form these opinions about me and my “friends”? I had this horrible feeling that I'd got myself a stalker.

I sat up a little straighter and tried to sound nonchalant. “So, uh, how'd you know Nick and I were dating?”

“Excusez-moi?”
Dolores coughed like the dying hero in some bad play. “You think I've been in solitary confinement or something? You've clearly let my ghostly pallor deceive you. I'm not totally out of it, you know. By Citadel High standards, you're like Beyoncé and”—she spun her hand in the air and looked around the café for inspiration—”and … Bob the Builder or Adolf Hitler or something. Everybody knows who you are. And
everybody knows that Nick and Carly are douchebags. Or if they don't, they should.”

Dolores might not have been a stalker but she was definitely insane. Nick and Carly were the most popular kids at school. I had to get out of here.

“Yeah, well. Whatever. That's all behind me now, I guess.” I started to slide out of the booth.

“Really? Don't you guys all work at Jitters Coffeehouse? That must be, like, mucho awkward.”

I tapped my fingers on the table. I could almost hear myself snap. I was going to shut this girl up once and for all.

“I don't work there any more,” I said. My voice, my eyes, my lips were flat. “There's where I caught them kissing. Now I've got to find myself another job so I can make enough money to get out of this hell hole. I was going to start a housecleaning service but decided against it. That's why I'm leaving right now to Google ‘summer employment Halifax' … Anything else you'd like to know? My social insurance number perhaps? My Facebook password?” I didn't even pretend to smile.

“Oooh. Shouldn't be giving that type of information out to strangers!” Dolores swung her feet back onto the floor and leaned across the table. “I would, however, like to know why you decided against the cleaning service. I mean, what's the matter with you? That's a brilliant idea!”

Dolores couldn't even compliment a person without being irritating. I told myself to just shut up and go. Instead, I untwisted my mouth enough to say, “Well, you know about my little issue with hair …”

“Phht. Big deal. You'd get used to that in no time. So what do they pay cleaning people these days? Ten, twelve bucks an hour?”

Again, should have shut up but didn't. I couldn't miss this opportunity to make Dolores look stupid. “No, more like twenty.”

“Twenty!” The dreadlocked waitress stopped with her tongs hovering over the biscotti jar and looked at us. Dolores gave her a fake wave, then whispered to me at the top of her lungs. “You nuts? For twenty bucks an hour, you can't stand a few hairs?”

At that moment, I truly hated Dolores. I wanted to say something so cruel, so cutting that it would positively impale her. I pictured an old-fashioned jousting pole going right through Tinky Winky's big purple belly.

“I mean, really.”

Dolores tilted her head at a jaunty angle. She looked like a pretentious pigeon.

That's when I gave up. It wasn't just that I was losing. I felt dirty even being involved in the conversation. I wasn't the type of person to hate people, to say mean things to them, to fantasize about impaling them, pounding them,
smashing their little green heads repeatedly with empty smoothie glasses.

I said, “Yeah, well. It's not happening anyway so doesn't matter. Gotta go. See ya.” I stood up to leave.

Dolores yelled, “Stop!” and the waitress looked over again.

I sat back down. I really couldn't handle a scene right now.

“You thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Don't know,” I said. “What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking about my mother.”

I closed my eyes.

“My mother always says the universe will provide. ‘Cast your desires out upon the waters and they will come back fulfilled!' Something like that. Whatever. Sounds corny but she's right. It's like me and the smoothie. I needed something to cheer me up. I had no money. I walk into Zinnia's—and bingo! There's my old friend sitting here with an untouched smoothie. That's how it works. Same thing with the cleaning business. Know what I mean?”

No. I didn't know what she meant. I was still stunned hearing Dolores refer to me as her “old friend.” I shook my head.

“Come on! It's so obvious. You need a job. I need a job. You've got the idea. I've got the stronger gag reflex. It's fate taking care of us!” Dolores threw her arms open. “Seriously. Let's do it together!”

When will this nightmare end?

I chose my words carefully. “Yeah, well, look. It's not a good idea to rush into something like this and I've really got to go. Why don't we just sort of think it over and maybe talk about it some other time, or whatever, okay?”

“Sure. Great. Great!” Dolores made her hand into a little fist and shook it above her head. It made her look like a really hip senior citizen.

I nodded vaguely and headed for the door. Why hadn't I done that ages ago? I stepped back out into the sunlight and sighed.

Dolores, I realized, was right about one thing. Fate does have a way of looking after you.

Fate, in fact, had just talked to me. It told me to go back to bed. At least I'd be safe there.