Just at that moment, Kat heard high-heeled clicking on a wooden floor. She looked up and noticed a woman standing a few feet away from the sofa.
"Mom," Ian said, pushing the piano stool back and standing up.
"Hi hon," said the woman. "That was beautiful, although Chopin is so showy." Then she turned and looked at Kat. "And who do we have here?"
Kat stumbled to a standing position and extended her hand. Ian's mother took it and shook it without enthusiasm. As she did, Kat got a good look at the woman. Nothing that she wouldn't have expected, now that she'd seen the house. Manicured, custom suited, expensively frosted hair, face tightly pulled back in a wrinkle-free facade. "Hello, dear," said the woman in a cool voice. "I'm Samantha Smith." She looked Kat up and down. "And you must be one of Ian's new friends?"
"Mom" said Ian in an indignant voice.
Kat looked over at him and noticed that the bright red of his face clashed with the pink hair.
Mrs. Smith continued, "You should see some of the people he's brought home." Her face broke into a sardonic smile. "I mean, if it's possible, they look sillier than he does himself."
"That's enough, Mom," said Ian, walking away from the piano and over to where Kat was standing. "This is my friend, Kat Baliuk, and she's helping me design my set for the winter concert."
One of Mrs. Smith's perfectly waxed eyebrows arched slightly. "Really?" she said. "Well, I'm sure she'll do a fine job."
"Come on, Kat," said Ian, grabbing her hand and pulling her up a dark wood staircase. "We can go over some ideas in the privacy of my room." He glared angrily at his mother as he enunciated the words.
Kat followed him upstairs, not sure that she wanted to be going into his bedroom. However, she knew for sure that she didn't want to stay downstairs with Ian's mother, and her own mother wasn't picking her up for another thirty minutes.
Never in her life had she seen a messier room. In fact, how could it even be called a room? More like an archaeological dig. There were piles of papers stacked all over the floor. Some of the papers were yellow with age. Kat could see that some of the piles were old school binders, and others were sheets of handwritten music. And there was a musty, sweaty smell about the place.
There was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase up against one wall, and it was filled with books that must have been Ian's from childhood: Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, the Narnia series, Tolkien. Dog-eared Mad magazines were also shoved onto the shelves, as were more sheets of music. Virtually every square inch of wall space was covered with posters — mostly of obscure Goth musical groups that Kat was not at all familiar with. There was also a poster of Chopin at the piano, and another of a vampire.
Kat noticed that in one corner of the floor, it looked like someone had thrown a bunch of trophies into a heap.
"What are those?" asked Kat, pointing at the pile.
"Nothing."
Kat walked over to the trophies and squatted down. She picked each trophy up one by one and examined them. "Most valuable player, 1996," said the plate on one cup, and, "Most valuable player, 1997," on a hockey trophy. There was a hockey trophy of some sort for every year from about grade two to grade eight.
Kat set the last trophy back down in the pile and then stood up, brushing the dust from her knees. "I never would have pegged you as an athlete," she said.
"Me neither," said Ian. "But that wasn't really me anyway — just my parents' idea of who I should be."
Ian picked up a stack of magazines that were heaped on the one chair in the room and placed them on the floor. "Sit here," he said. "And here's a drawing pad so we can come up with some ideas."
Kat quickly sketched the rough dimensions of the stage and then sketched in a piano in the pit. "The piece is dramatic enough," she said. "I think we should go with simplicity in the set."
Ian nodded.
"You're going to wear black, right?" asked Kat.
"Yes," said Ian. "I've got a black tux that I was thinking of wearing without the jacket, and I've got this new coat that I just had made." As he said this, he walked over to his closet and began pulling back hangers. "Here it is."
Ian held out a floor-length black velvet coat.
"Put it on," said Kat.
When Ian put it on, Kat saw that it gave a perfect subtle, yet dramatic touch. The coat was fitted at the top, but wide at the bottom and it was lined with brilliant red satin. He would be able to make a grand entrance in this coat.
"Why did you get that?" asked Kat. "Surely not just for the concert?"
"No," said Ian. "This is my winter coat. Those safety pins holding the seams of my leather coat together make it pretty chilly in the winter."
Kat didn't say anything, but she thought to herself that this coat wasn't going to be all that much warmer.
"If you're wearing black, then the deep maroon curtains on the stage will make you almost invisible," said Kat. "I'd like to see a more neutral colour. I need to find a huge piece of light coloured material that we can drape behind you."
"Something like a painter's drop sheet?" suggested Ian.
"Something like that. Let me think on it," said Kat. "What's Lisa doing for the lighting?"
"I think she's waiting to see what you come up with for the set," said Ian.
Just then the doorbell rang, and Kat knew that it was probably her mother. She ran quickly downstairs behind Ian, but Mrs. Smith had already beaten them to the door and was making small talk with Orysia. Or "Iris" as English people called her.
Kat glanced from Mrs. Smith to her own mother and was starded by the contrast. Ian's mother looked so sleek and cared for, while Kat's mother had a harried look in her eyes that Kat had never seen before. Her navy blue pant suit was crisply ironed, but it looked cheap standing in the doorway of Ian's house. And she looked so small.
Something was the matter. Kat knew it. She had an urge to hug her mother right then and there. She didn't do that though, because she didn't want to show their vulnerability in front of Ian's mother.
"I'll see you tomorrow," called Ian, as Kat and her mother walked down the front steps and towards their car.
As Orysia turned the ignition key and then backed out of the driveway, Kat realized that there were tears welling up in her mother's eyes.
"What has happened?" asked Kat.
"Nothing," said Orysia. "Everything's going to be fine."
Kat knew that everything was, in fact, not fine. She didn't know what was the matter, but something definitely was. During supper that night, her parents barely talked, and her grandfather seemed preoccupied. Was someone sick? Were her parents getting a divorce? Kat wished she knew.
Kat's parents didn't realize that her bedroom heat vent provided her and Genya with a perfect eavesdropping apparatus to the master bedroom. They would blush if they realized that she knew for a fact that they made love each Tuesday and Friday night like clockwork. They also retired to their bedroom to discuss serious matters. And to have arguments.
Kat was already dressed in her favourite flannel nightgown, and she grabbed a pillow from her bed and lay down on the hand-braided rug in front of the heating vent. Genya had walked into the room not long before and was still dressed in her school uniform. She had flopped onto her bed without bothering to get undressed and her eyes were closed. The two girls lay silently as the sounds from the heating vent drifted up.
".... but Vincent and Gray is the best law firm for immigration matters," her mother's voice said.
Immigration matters, thought Kat to herself. So this was something to do with her grandfather? Something to do with the form from fifty years ago?
"They're two hundred dollars an hour," said her father. "And that's per lawyer. How could we possibly afford them?"