We walked, fifteen hundred of us, through a misty rain along the canal. I made myself invisible, avoiding teachers and people in my own grade, anyone who would recognize me. I could see my apartment building looming behind the high school. We lived a five-minute walk from school and from the canal. At first, I'd relished the temporary-ness, loved taking an elevator every morning and evening as much as Minnie did. Dad rode his bike to the university, and I could go for walks on Elgin Street in the evenings. My parents had planned to rent only until they found a house in the Glebe, but four months passed and then Mama had her accident. Then another year passed, and I knew that Dad had stopped even looking for another place to live. I'd thought he was waiting until Mama got better â potentially forever.
But now I knew: he was waiting until he could move in with some other woman. Clenching my cold fingers into my sleeves, I thought of the letter I'd found after we moved â the letter my biological father sent after Dad married Mama. As always, I felt sick thinking about that letter. I had no idea where it was, what had happened to it. But I remembered every word of it, and everything it implied. This is what people did; they fell in love and made promises, had children, and then just dropped everything. And then it didn't matter, because there was always someone else.
As the damp teenaged herd approached the National Arts Centre parking lot, I was relieved to see a grey station wagon exactly where we'd agreed, near the stage doors. Sundar was wearing a black tuque, watching the torrent of kids walk by. We'd only met once before, and I realized this was the first time we'd seen each other in normal clothes; he didn't look the way I'd expected. I wondered if I looked as plain and disappointing to him as he did to me, and I considered moving into the midst of the crowd heading to the war memorial. I took one step away from Sundar, then changed my mind. Checking for teachers, I ran to the car and climbed inside. Putting my head down so no one could see me through the windshield, I brushed Sundar's faded-jean hip with my shoulder. “Did anyone see me get in?” I asked.
“I don't think so.” He was wearing a thick grey wool sweater. “No one's looking at us. That's Erin.” There was a girl stretched out on the back seat. A floppy tuque covered her forehead and most of her eyes, and she had a ring through the middle of her full bottom lip, under which she'd somehow applied lipstick. She was wearing baggy black pants and Converse shoes, and her jacket was open over a thin yellow T-shirt with blue writing on it. I couldn't tell if her eyes were open under the hat's rim, even when she said, “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Agatha,” said Sundar, starting the engine.
“Agatha,” said Erin. “This is fucking weird. It's like we're kidnapping you or something.”
“I know,” said Sundar. “Like we're harbouring an underage runaway or something.”
“Nice hair,” said Erin.
“This girl at my grandmother's hair salon does it for free,” I told her through the crack between the front seats, my disappointment over not being alone with Sundar fading fast. He had dirt under his nails and smelled like sweaty wool.
Erin stretched in the backseat, plump belly and fully visible breasts replacing her face in my line of vision. A huge plastic wallet chain hung from her pocket. I sat up straight and saw that we'd
stopped at a crosswalk on Laurier Street. Helena's homeroom class was crossing the street in front of us and none of the students looked at the car; it was like watching them through a one-way mirror. Helena crossed last, by herself, partnerless. In a yellow rain slicker, she clenched her fists so the sleeves hung over her hands. Her newly short hair was dark and damp against her head. As she passed, she turned as though someone had said her name, looked right at me through the windshield and froze. She looked more like Snow White than ever, pale with black eyes. I ducked down again. “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.” I didn't need to see Helena, damp and duped and prettily wretched. Her face made people imagine a depth that wasn't there; boys fell in love with her at first sight and slipped poems into her locker, slipped hands into her clothes.
“Yeah, that's right,” said Sundar, “just move along, stunned missy.” Humming to himself, he drove away from the long trail of my classmates, the first of them already at the war memorial. Not one of them or us was thinking about war.
I'd known Sundar for eleven days, since he first appeared as a fairy godmother, transforming me into something beautiful among the plastic food-court tables at the mall. I knew Reiko from math class â she sat beside me and liked to draw cartoon animals with sarcastic speech bubbles between my theorems. She rebelled with rare grace even when buying acid in the food court. She was dressed as a tabby cat, all in tight clothes, with ears on a fuzzy headband and whiskers painted on her cheeks. She'd stuck a Band-Aid on the toe of her black boot. We drank vodka out of a Coke bottle in front of the closed fast-food stands. My fairy godmother was sitting beside Reiko's dreadlocked drug dealer on a yellow plastic seat, army-booted feet on the yellow plastic table.
“This is Diesel,” said Reiko, “and Sundar.”
Curly black hair full of sparkles, eyelids peacock blue, Sundar pressed his wand's flat, yellow-sparkled star against the middle of my chest and asked me to share my cigar. We smoked it out in the bus shelter while Reiko haggled.
“What's with the costume?” he said.
“I'm a Freudian slip,” I admitted. Dad had given me the idea for the costume, and I should have known better. No one knew what I was supposed to be.
“A Freudian slip,” repeated Sundar. “When you say one thing but you mean your mother.” I laughed. “My parents have a mug with that on it,” he said.
Then my tongue was numb and my costume was no longer a costume at all, but Sundar's phone number was inside my bus pass. At the school dance, Reiko, pupils gaping, spun around me in circles, and I thought of Sundar's sparkly star, its tips grazing my breasts like a promise.
During the next ten days, I spoke to Sundar on the phone five times. He told me he'd dropped out of high school, worked as a canvasser for Greenpeace and lived in a boarding house. His parents were rich, he said, but he cared about things more important than money. I didn't tell him anything about my own parents. Instead, I thought of Sundar's body. I couldn't wait for him to see me naked. My lips had not made contact with another human being since I'd started ignoring Ingo Bachmann the year before.
Sitting upright in the passenger seat, I glanced at Sundar's profile. I'd never known a boy with thick, dark stubble before. “Want to dye my hair blue?” I said.
“Let's all dye our hair,” said Erin.
“Okay,” said Sundar. “I guess.”
“We can go to my place.” My mother was at therapy, my sister at school and then a friend's house, and my father at the university. None of them would be home for hours.
Sundar parked in the market, uncomfortably close to my grandmother's salon. It felt like a betrayal to take my hair into my own hands instead of acquiescing to Tam-Tam and her hair-styling minions. I glanced down the street in the direction of Inner Beauty as we walked away, afraid Tam-Tam might appear in the doorway and catch me. At the drugstore, Erin selected three boxes of ultrablond hair bleach. She said there was no point using anything else until we were as blond as we could be. Although I was blond already, she said I wasn't ultra-blond. We chose our future hair colours at a
store on Rideau Street: Turquoise for me, Pillar-Box Red for Sundar and Bubblegum Pink for Erin.
Sundar and Erin followed me through the lobby of my apartment building to the elevator. They were quiet all the way up to the eleventh floor and watched with a kind of subservience as I unlocked the door. They dumped their tuques and jackets on the bench beside the closet. Without her hat, Erin's face was something different entirely; she had straight, mousy brown hair, and her eyes and nose looked small in contrast with her lips.
After they'd admired the view of downtown from the living room window and we'd all crowded into the bathroom, Erin took charge. We filled Sundar's hair with bleach first. Erin said it was too dark to turn white, but that it didn't matter because we'd just put the red on top after. He rolled a joint in the living room while Erin and I did each other's hair and secured plastic shopping bags around our heads. My mother's library books were piled on the coffee table, a collection of new-age advice books with “PhD” after the authors' names. My father winced whenever he saw her reading these books, her new passion. I moved them into a tidy pile on the floor before we lit up.
Erin turned on the television and stopped at the first channel. They were replaying the service at the war memorial, which had ended while we were deliberating over hair dye. I watched the pipers playing in the rain and I held smoke in my lungs, trying not to cough. Sundar and Erin smoked pot like experts, letting it settle into their lungs and ooze lazily from their mouths and nostrils. Mama and Dad, I knew, used to smoke pot, too, in the seventies. Mama at parties, quiet and smiling flirtatiously at boys across the room. I looked for people I knew on the
TV
screen, but the cameras stayed on the veterans. I watched the old men with their incomprehensible expressions until I turned, startled by the piano. Sundar, behind us, was playing out-of-tune Beethoven on Mama's piano: some version of the Fifth Symphony, a sure sign of childhood lessons. Despite the poor condition of the neglected instrument, his proficiency was apparent. I laughed in surprise, and Erin laughed as well. Sundar played it up, the plastic bag on his head bobbing. No one had touched
the piano since Mama's accident. Music, once her chief comfort and long-time source of income, was forgotten. She also seemed to have forgotten that the piano had once belonged to her idealized, martyred father, who, she'd always said, gave up his life while saving hers. I had no way of knowing if Mama remembered the hours spent beside me at the piano bench in the futile hope that I'd secretly inherited her talent. Watching my hands mutiny across the keys, she'd lamented, “
Concentrate
, Agatha.”
Sundar stopped playing with a crashing finale and rolled onto the floor in front of the sofa by our feet. The sofa was grey-blue and too hard to sink into. “Nice apartment,” he said.
“Yeah,” I told him, grinning so hard it hurt my cheeks. “We've only lived here for about a year. We used to live in Aylmer.
Vive le Québec libre
, you know?” I stared at them, my eyes watering. “
Vive le Québec
. You know?”
“Fucking right,” said Sundar.
Erin grabbed my hand and yanked. “We should hang out again sometime.” She took a pen out of her pocket and wrote her phone number on the inside of my arm. “There. Now you can't lose it.”
Through the blue-carpeted hallway, I passed every room, tapping my fingertips against doors so they swung slightly open. Kitchen, Dad's room, Minnie's room, my room, Mama's room. Finally, the bathroom. I sat on the toilet for a long time, trying to discern some pattern in the differently shaded green tiles on the wall.
Lara
. I tried saying the name out loud. “Lara.” I knew I'd have to say that name again. Many times. But maybe it wouldn't last. And, I told myself again, who could blame Dad, a man whose wife screwed his best friend before marrying him. Surprised by my spastic giggle, I held my palm against my involuntarily grinning mouth. Then my burning, watery eyes. It was one year ago, just over a year ago that Mama had come home. She'd been in the hospital for the first week of November, and Dad brought her home the Saturday afternoon after her accident. He pushed her into the apartment in a wheelchair; her face was wan, and she sat in the entranceway, quiet and curious as a first-time visitor. The break had been bad, and they'd had to screw the bones together with steel. She couldn't use crutches because her
left arm had gone completely numb, and she couldn't move it. Dad had explained this â that she had hit the back of her brain, which controls motor functions. She had only been unconscious for a short time, though, and it shouldn't be serious. Even her arm would recover. She lay on the sofa while I helped Dad make spaghetti for dinner, Minnie colouring intently at the kitchen table. Throughout the meal, Mama listened in silence to our forced conversation. Whenever we addressed her, she shook her head apologetically, as though she had been thinking about something else.
According to Dr. Jessup, Mama had retrograde amnesia, a condition that usually resolves itself in hours or days. “Her memory will come back,” she assured us. “Surround her with familiar things. Remind her of anything that makes her comfortable and happy. Try to reinstate her old routines.” Dr. Jessup said we should remind Mama of happy times, but she would likely never remember the accident itself, and even the hours or days leading up to it could be gone for good.
“But she
might
remember?” I asked. “The hours leading up to it?”
“It's possible. But it's also likely that she won't.”
“How likely?”
Dr. Jessup gave me a funny look. “It's very likely that she'll never recover her memory of the accident and the hours leading up to it.”
Dad set out to bring Mama back to normal as quickly as possible. On the first night, he cooked her favourite spaghetti sauce, and Mama blinked down at her plate, blinked at Dad. Gave that apologetic little smile, with more than a hint of distress playing around her eyes. Minnie was uncharacteristically silent as well, looking down at her food in shy discomfort, as though there were a stranger in the house. Dad had explained to her about Mama not remembering anything, that we had to act as normal as possible. Later, he would say that he should have left Minnie at his parents' house, at least for the first few days.