Soft music floated through the gymnasium—a pan flute mingled with rolling surf, the distant cry of sea birds. Mr. Taylor had dimmed the lights and was pacing between our exercise mats, reading from a script. “Picture a beach,” he intoned. “The sun on your face. The warm sand beneath you. A gentle wind ruffling your hair…”
Someone in the gym snorted. Mr. Taylor ignored them and kept reading. Two feet to my left, Nikki Pederson lay breathing evenly—hands on her stomach, feet bare. To say that I liked Nikki would have been a wild understatement. She wore safety pins in her ears and sleeveless T-shirts printed with grinning demons and flaming skulls. She had big thighs and small breasts, and her hair—a 1980s frozen waterfall—gave her at least three inches on me. Shuttered away in my room, masturbating into gym socks, I mainly thought about her mouth: how it looked when she laughed, or chewed gum, or smoked outside in full view of the teachers.
“Above you,” Mr. Taylor read, “the sky is filled with colourful balloons. Those balloons are your restless thoughts. Wave goodbye to them. Let them float away…” He paced between the mats, frowning at the paper in his hand. “Wonderful. Now I want you to relax every muscle in your body, starting with your feet…”
Nikki flexed her toes.
“That’s right. Let all that pent-up tension go. Now relax your ankles…”
With every named part, I grew increasingly tense, a map of Nikki’s body unfolding as he moved from calf to knee to thigh. When he came to the genitals—when he actually named them—not one of the Grade Nine students around me made a sound. I was having trouble breathing. Nicki shifted on her mat. I didn’t so much want to have sex with her, as I wanted to smash into her, to be pulverized by her.
“Be in the moment,” Mr. Taylor read. “This moment of perfect stillness…” He let the waves play for a few minutes, then stopped the boom box and turned on the lights, giving us a minute to collect ourselves. Nikki stood up and stretched like a cat, arms up, butt out, drawing the attention of every heterosexual boy in the class. Even Mr. Taylor was watching her, his usual gruff manner returning as he sent us off to the lockers. I picked up my shoes and carried them past the girl’s change room, seeing just enough to know that it was a fundamentally different space: lavender walls, gleaming white floors. In the comparatively dingy boys’ locker room, I sat on a bench in front of my slate-grey locker and made the walls disappear. In my mind’s eye, most of the girls in the next room were changing quickly, as if ashamed of their bodies, but Nikki stripped fully naked and strolled to the showers, pausing just long enough to glance over her shoulder and give me an inviting smile.
“Felix.”
I looked over at Mr. Taylor, standing by the door.
“Get a fire under your butt, son.”
I was alone in the locker room. The other boys had scattered. I looked at my watch. Chemistry class was about to start. I hauled on some jeans and hurried back out into the empty gym, where I ran into Nikki emerging from the girls’ locker room, her hair wet, her mouth lacquered with purple lip gloss. Our eyes met. In some parallel universe we were wrestling on the gymnasium floor, our clothes blown from our bodies, students and teachers gathered in the bleachers to watch. She wanted it as badly as I did. I couldn’t have been carrying all that desire alone. But of course, Nikki didn’t look the least bit excited to be sharing the empty gym with me. She held me up for the briefest moment, like a shirt from a sale bin, then tossed me back down, her indifference absolute.
A glowing screen appeared in front of me. Suddenly, I wasn’t standing anymore, but sitting in front of my open laptop, watching a woman do something creative with a large purple dildo. She looked uncannily like Nikki. I set the laptop aside, my head pounding. I’d fallen so deeply into the past that it took me a moment to regain my bearings. I raided the cupboards for painkillers and returned to the computer with a reckless dose of Tylenol dissolving in my stomach. A puzzled emoticon sat in the middle of my screen. I refreshed. Nothing happened. I restarted the entire machine but the coloured rooms had gone dark. My watch alarm went off, reminding me that Jasmine’s shift was about to start. I tried to access her site in twenty different ways without success, my headache growing steadily worse, in spite of the drugs. At one in the morning I drank my vodka and headed downtown. The café was empty. I took my usual spot by the window, nursing my drink until one of the baristas came over.
“Waiting for someone?” she asked.
I blushed and shook my head. The girl had three studs in her lower lip, her head shaved on one side. She reached into my eyes and rummaged around in my heart, fingering the contours of my secret. I got up without a word and walked stiffly to the door, understanding that I would never be able to go back.
The next day, Jasmine’s website was still down. I went to the bathroom and stared at the mirror for a long time before deciding I should eat something. My cupboards were empty, the fridge bare. I moved to the balcony and lit a cigarette, grinning fiercely to myself when the inevitable slam came. The smoke took the edge off my hunger, but I soon found myself back in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors. There was no getting around it. I had to go the store.
I took down my last bottle of vodka and finished it without measuring, then knocked the wildly protesting voice out of my head with three firm blows from the heel of my hand and made my way to the bus stop at the end of the street. A woman in a headscarf sat on a bench a few steps away, joggling an infant in her lap. The second hand on my watch moved incredibly slowly. I tottered on the curb, feeling as if I were standing on a diving board, an empty pool yawning beneath me. My chest hurt. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them still. I wanted to scream at the woman on the bench to stop looking at me. Eventually, the number six bus pulled up and I forced myself to climb on, finding an empty spot near the back. I looked out the window, seeing Jasmine everywhere: on the sidewalk, on the street, in the windows of passing cars. My fellow passengers scrutinized me mercilessly, and I cupped one hand to the side of my face to shut them out. The massive form of the supermarket appeared and I grabbed the cord on the wall and stumbled off the bus. The automatic doors whisked open. I crossed the threshold and a subtle change in air pressure confused my inner ear. The ceiling yawned above me, cross-hatched beams dotted with sinister black cameras. I struggled to dislodge a grocery cart from a jammed-up line until a teenaged boy in a blue vest yanked one out for me. “Thank you,” I muttered and pushed the cart deeper into the store. One of the casters seized up every three steps, making a terrifying grinding noise. As I rolled past a wall of blaring cereal boxes, the pain in my chest intensified, migrating to my back and spreading across my shoulder blades like wings. The fluorescents added a fourth dimension to my fellow shoppers, rendering them hyper-real, bristling with whiskers and pimples and bloodshot eyes. I snagged items off the shelves at random—mayonnaise, sunflower seeds, raspberry-flavoured Kool-Aid. Every box or can that found its way into my hand involved a decision I didn’t feel equipped to make. I grabbed spices that I knew I’d never use, abandoned produce in the wrong bins, forgot, then remembered, then forgot, to look for toilet paper, doubling back repeatedly, to the consternation of foreign-looking employees. And all the while, Jasmine haunted my peripheral vision, slipping out of view every time I tried to look at her directly. The alcohol burned out of my system. The workers exchanged secret codes over the PA and gathered behind glass display cases in the deli and the bakery to watch me. After three passes of the checkout lines, I approached a surly cashier who slammed my things into plastic bags, while I stared at a spot on the counter, tics fluttering and jumping all over my face. With four bags in each hand, I stepped out of the store and found my bus just pulling away. I slumped and trudged over to wait for the next one. How, I wondered, had things gotten so difficult? I’d made it through high school and several years of university. I’d held normal jobs, worked alongside other human beings, slept with at least five different women. But the world had gradually forced me out, the way the skin forces out a sliver of wood. And now that I’d been rejected, I had no way of finding my way back.