“We can,” Kate says. “It’s not impossible.”
“I wish things were different.”
The porch light goes off and we’re surrounded by the dark night. After a few seconds the stars get brighter.
“Different how?” Kate asks.
“Just easier,” I say. “The way things were before.”
Elgin sits up on the stairs and rubs his face. “Hello?” When he calls out, for some reason we don’t move or say anything. He stands and goes back into the house, a sliver of light shooting across the lawn toward us before disappearing again.
“I’d never want things to be different.” Kate lies back in the grass and stretches her arms overhead, smiling up at the sky. “I think the moon tastes nice. Like almonds.”
I don’t know how to explain to Kate how wrong she is about everything. This time I learn to control my tears and they only trickle out of my eyes silently. Kate leans over my face, her hair tickling my cheeks. She says, “Okay, let’s be different then. We can just BE different.” Right away the tears evaporate, and for most of the night I believe her, until I hear her later, when we’re back inside the party, telling Rana she should BE different too.
I WAKE UP IN the morning on the grass in front of Kate’s tent, shivering so hard my teeth clack together. The lawn is covered in dew and the sky’s an uncertain silver, like the day hasn’t yet decided what kind of day it wants to be. I unzip the tent to find Kate and Elgin buried under blankets. Inside the house, I step carefully around sleeping kids. I have to wake up some guy in the bathtub so I can pee, and then I dig through my pockets, lining up coins on the bathroom counter and praying for enough to get home on the bus.
I’m walking across the front yard when I find Max. He’s in the bushes, halfway into the neighbour’s property, like he’s fallen asleep while trying to escape something. I shake his leg and then give it a tug. He sits up, staring at me like he doesn’t recognize who I am. His arms are cut up, short, bloody slashes running diagonally from his wrists to his elbows. There’s a piece of broken beer bottle in the grass. We both look at his arms like they aren’t his own. I pull him up, taking him next door to find help, and it’s like guiding a small child by the shoulders. I don’t say anything. I don’t say, Max, what happened, or Max, are you okay, or Max, what the fuck, you can’t do stuff like that. There are so many things I could say, but I say nothing.
I guide him with the tips of my fingers, barely touching him, to a stranger’s front yard. We stand on the porch together and Max stares out at the street while I ring the doorbell. When an older woman in her housecoat answers the door, I realize I have no words to explain. I turn Max gently to face her so she can see what he has done.
ON OUR LAST DAY at Outdoor School they gathered everyone in the large field beside the parking lot for a game of Predator-Prey. They assigned all the kids an animal — bear, owl, skunk, coyote, squirrel. The point was to eat. The predators ate the prey by tapping them on the shoulder. The prey found cardboard food tickets in ice cream buckets scattered around the forest. The counselors were disease and they could eat anything. They set the boundaries for us: to the right, the river and mountains; to the left, the highway; straight ahead we could go as far as the power lines. Kate and I were deer. We stuck together from the start. I made sure to stand next to her before we were given the signal to hide — three long whistle blows. We had three minutes alone in the forest before the predators were let loose. You could hear them howling and barking. Max was a wolf. You could pick out his yowl, short and yippy like he really wanted to get out there, like he couldn’t wait. While we ran, Kate laid out a plan. We’d find a spot to hide, and later, once the predators had tired themselves out, we would go find the food buckets. We ran past some kids hiding in a hollowed out tree, one of them laughing hysterically. “They’ll find you there,” Kate said, as we went by. “Idiots,” she shouted back to me.
The whistle blew again: one long shriek, signalling the release of the predators. We found a path along the river that led deep into the forest and Kate pulled me down the side of a slope, both of us sliding through the mud, landing next to the river. The water was shallow and the riverbed bare in spots. We crept along the narrow bank until we found a small cave in the roots of a tree where water had eroded the dirt. Crouched in the tangle of roots, our shoes sunk in the mud, Kate pulled me close, hooking her arm around my waist. We plugged our noses against the stench of rotting salmon, the greasy humps of their decaying bodies all down the drained riverbed. Kate’s eyes were sharp, her muscles tensed for a quick escape. I could feel my blood speeding through my veins. Above us we listened to the stamp of feet through the forest, the shouts as kids were caught. Counsellors yelled at the ones who were tackling. We shook with silent laughter and the exhilaration of hiding. Kate pressed a hand over my mouth. “Quiet,” she whispered, but her eyes shone. We had found a good spot.
We huddled in our hole until the game was almost over, the forest gone quiet so all we could hear were the leaves turning and falling around us. Weaving through the trees, Kate spotted a food bucket behind a large pine, little tickets scattered across the ground in greedy hunger. Neither one of us heard Max coming up the path behind us as we stooped to grab as many tickets as we could, but Kate saw him first. She dashed off, crashing through a tight thicket of bushes, a trail of tickets fluttering behind her. I froze exactly like a deer would. I pressed my back to the tree as Max approached slowly, his breathing calm and shallow, his eyes over every inch of me as they looked for any twitch of an escape. He raised his two hands, palms cupped inches from each other as though I were a small bird he was trying to trap. As he got closer, I got smaller and smaller until his two hands came down, resting gently on top of my shoulders. “Got you,” he said.
We all waited a long time for Kate to get caught. There must have been at least sixty kids sprawled out on the big field under the power lines, all of us waiting for her. Eventually, they had to send counsellors in to look for her. I never told anyone where Kate might be.
Max was the best predator, having caught the most prey. He paced the edge of the field, desperate to go out and find her, but the counsellors said no. They said the last thing they needed were two kids lost in the forest. One was bad enough.
KATE CALLS TO TELL me Max jumped off the Lions Gate Bridge. I’m sitting downstairs in the family room watching TV. Kate starts to cry on the phone. I haven’t talked to her in months. She says, “I thought you’d want to know.” She tells me they found Max floating in the water around Ambleside Beach and the memorial service is this weekend. I want to talk to her, but I just say thanks and hang up the phone.
On the TV, girls are pinching the skin on their thighs and stomachs. I go to the bathroom and try to throw up, but I can’t. I look in the mirror and pull the skin under my eyes, but I don’t cry. My hair is soft and wavy, the way it looks sometimes when I wake up. It looks good and I wish I had someplace to go, but lately on the weekends all I do is watch TV with my parents. Sometimes I go to Rana’s to watch a movie or play Monopoly, but most of the time I’m too tired. Mom thinks I should go see the doctor again because I like to take long naps in the afternoon after I get home from school. She asks me why I sleep so much and I tell her it’s schoolwork, but the real reason is because sleep is so easy.
I sit on the bathroom floor and stare at the quilted pattern on the toilet paper roll, trying to make myself feel guilty, but there’s nothing inside of me. Even with all this emptiness there’s no room for Max here. I pull one of the towels down from the rack and roll it into a pillow. I can sleep anywhere now.