August was hot in a way that made the house tick. The siding ticked in the afternoons, and the roof ticked at night as it cooled, and my bedroom over the lane held the heat until about two in the morning. Tracy bought a fan at Canadian Tire and put it in my window, and it pulled in the smell of somebody’s lawn being watered three houses down, and I lay in front of it with the card.
On the inside of my closet door the Xs had gone past the end of July and turned the page.
At the end of July I’d had my follow-up. Dr. Anand had shone her light in my eyes and asked me who the prime minister was again. Then she asked what I’d had for breakfast. I said Shreddies, and Tracy said “That’s right” as if I’d passed an exam. Dr. Anand asked if anything had come back. I said no. She said that was all right, and then she said it again to Tracy, slower.
“Has she had any very long sleeps?”
“No,” Tracy said. “She sets an alarm. She’s very good about it.”
“Good,” Dr. Anand said, and looked at me over her glasses. “Keep doing that.”
I kept doing it. Half past six, every morning, all summer. I woke up before it most days anyway.
* * *
Tracy’s calls from work got shorter in August.
“Did you eat?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good. I have to go, there’s a meeting. Lock the door.”
Some days the meeting was at noon and she phoned at two. Some days she phoned twice. On the news in the evenings the man in the blue tie had stopped smiling about oil. It was down from the peak, he said, at a hundred and fifteen. He said correction a lot. He said the Americans were having trouble with their houses, and when the Americans had trouble, Alberta caught a cold.
“It’s fine,” Tracy said, when I looked at her. She was eating supper standing up at the counter with her work shoes still on. “It’s a correction. It goes up, it goes down. We’ve got the big contract with the Houston people through next spring. Do you want more potatoes?”
“No thanks.”
“You’re so polite,” she said, and looked at me for a second like she was trying to remember something. Then she put more potatoes on my plate anyway.
* * *
Paige Dekker had a Facebook account.
I found that out from Tracy on a Saturday, when I asked to use the family computer. It was on a desk in the corner of the living room under a pile of mail. It was big and beige, with a flat screen somebody had added later, and it took about four minutes to wake up and made a noise like a kettle the whole time.
“You’ve got Facebook,” she said. “You and Mackenzie and all them. Do you want to look? You should look. Maybe it’ll help.”
“I don’t know the password.”
“It’s the dog and your jersey number,” Tracy said. “Rusty seven. All one word. I made you tell me when you opened it. I said if I’m paying for the internet I get the password.” She stopped. “You don’t remember that either.”
“No.”
“I was very strict,” she said. “I was terrible. You hated me for a week.”
She went to do the laundry. I logged in.
The page came up blue and white. There was a picture in the corner of somebody in a soccer uniform with their hair pulled back and their face turned half away, a number seven on the shirt. Under it there were a lot of messages on the wall, most of them from the third week of June, from people in Lethbridge. omg paige r u ok??? my mom said ur in the hospital!!!! get well soon!!!!!! <3 <3 heard about u, hope ur ok, from coach D and the U14s
PAIGE CALL ME. ur mom wont tell my mom anything. CALL ME
That last one was from a girl called Mackenzie Vos, whose own picture was her and two other girls squished into a photo booth, all three of them sticking their tongues out. She’d written on the wall over and over. The last time had been a week ago. hellooooo?? r u alive? lol
At the top of the page there was a box. It said, in small grey letters, What are you doing right now? And in front of the box, already filled in, in blue, it said Paige.
I put my fingers on the keys.
I typed is going to Grade 9. Then I pressed the button.
Paige is going to Grade 9.
It sat there at the top of the page. Two minutes later a girl called Brooklyn in Lethbridge wrote same!!! under it. Then a boy I didn’t know at all wrote who cares lol, and Brooklyn wrote shut up tyson, and I laughed out loud at the computer by myself.
I sat in front of the computer with my hands in my lap and read it again. Paige is going to Grade 9.
Then I wrote back to Mackenzie Vos. sorry. i’m ok. i hit my head and i don’t remember a lot of stuff. its weird. sorry i didnt write.
She wrote back almost before I’d sent it.
OMG. like amnesia?? like on tv??? do u remember ME
I looked at the picture of her in the photo booth. I looked at it a long time. kind of, I wrote.
* * *
I wrote to Mackenzie every day for a week. It was work.
Tracy helped. She’d sit on the arm of the couch while I typed and tell me things. Mackenzie’s mom was Shauna. They’d done soccer together since Grade 2. Mackenzie had a horse called Toffee that lived at her uncle’s in Coaldale, and a brother who was a pain. In Grade 6 Paige and Mackenzie had dyed Mackenzie’s hair blue with Kool-Aid in Tracy’s bathtub, and the tub had stayed blue until Christmas.
“You were so proud of that,” Tracy said. “You took a picture of the tub.”
I typed remember the tub?? to Mackenzie. Mackenzie typed OMG THE TUB with about a hundred exclamation marks, and for an afternoon it was easy, and I felt like a thief the whole time. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
After a week it got harder. She asked about people I’d never heard of. She asked if I was still going out for rep. She asked if Aunt Trish was still dating the guy with the boat. She asked if I’d seen the thing with Kayden at the pool, and I said no, and she said WHAT?? u were THERE, and I didn’t answer that for a whole day. u r being so weird, she wrote on the Thursday. sorry ur always saying sorry now. u never used to say sorry
I didn’t know what to write to that. I didn’t write anything.
On the Monday she wrote ok whatever. have fun in calgary. After that, she didn’t write any more.
I didn’t tell Tracy. When she asked about Mackenzie, I said she was busy with rep. Tracy nodded and said that was Mackenzie all over.
* * *
At night I used MSN.
Paige Dekker had that too. The display name was dekker #7, with no capitals, and the little picture was a soccer ball. There were a lot of contacts, all from Lethbridge, and in the evenings most of them were online, their little men green, talking to each other.
Nobody talked to me. I hadn’t expected them to.
I’d open a window with somebody who was offline, somebody grey, and type into it. Things I couldn’t say to anybody. I’m sorry. I’m not who you think. I’m the other one. Then I’d hold down the backspace and watch it go, letter by letter, from the end, until the box was empty again.
Once I typed I’m happy and held my finger over the backspace a long time before I let it go.
* * *
Murray phoned on Sundays at ten. He told me about combines and the weather down in Lethbridge and a fishing trip with Deanna to Waterton. I said okay a lot. He said kiddo a lot. Once he asked if I’d met any boys yet, and then said “Don’t answer that,” and laughed. I laughed too. It seemed like a thing a dad and a daughter would do on the phone, and I wanted to see what it was like.
It was nice. It was strange. He was a nice man who didn’t know me at all, and that was a relief, and then about halfway through every call it wasn’t.
* * *
Aunt Trish came up from Lethbridge for the long weekend.
She came in a red Caravan with a cooler of Taber corn in the back and her sunglasses pushed up on her head. She was louder than Tracy, and taller, and talked the same way, in questions, only she didn’t wait for the answers. She came in the back door without knocking, put the cooler down, and hugged me so hard my feet came off the kitchen floor.
Then she held me out at arm’s length and looked at me.
“Look at you,” she said. “Look at your hair. You’ve got it up. Trace, she’s got it up.”
“I know,” Tracy said.
“You never let anybody near your hair. You bit me once. You were three.” She turned my head one way and the other with two fingers under my chin. “You look good. You look really good. You look like you slept.”
At supper we ate the corn with too much butter and Trish told stories. She told the one about the Ferris wheel at Whoop-Up Days, when I’d thrown up on a man from the Kinsmen. She told the one about Grandma’s funeral, when I’d said out loud in the church that the priest was boring and Grandma would have agreed. She kept looking at me while she told them, waiting for me to laugh in the right places.
“Sorry,” I said, after the funeral one. “I don’t remember.”
“Sorry,” Trish said. “Listen to her. She says sorry now. She says please. Trace, she said please to me for the butter.”
“She’s polite,” Tracy said. “She’s always been polite.”
“She has not,” said Trish, and laughed, and reached over and squeezed my arm. “You were a little firecracker, kiddo. Mouthy. You told my Kurt to get stuffed at his own wedding.”
I smiled at her. I didn’t know who Kurt was.
Later I was on the stairs in the dark on my way down for water, and they were in the kitchen with a bottle of wine, and I stopped.
“I’m just saying,” Trish said. “She’s like a different kid.”
“She had a brain injury, Trish.”
“I know. I know she did. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying she’s different. She let you do her hair. She thanked me for the corn.”
There was a long time where nobody said anything. Somebody put a glass down.
“She’s happy,” Tracy said. “Look at her. She’s happy.”
“Is she?”
“Yes,” Tracy said. Then, quieter: “I think so. Yes.”
“Okay.” Trish’s chair creaked. “Okay. And you? The job’s okay? Everybody down home says the oil thing’s turning.”
“The job’s fine.”
“Because if anything happens. I mean it. The basement’s empty. You and her could have the whole basement.”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re always just saying,” Tracy said, and they both laughed, the same laugh.
I went back upstairs without the water. I sat on my bed in the dark with my knees up and the fan going.
She’s happy.
I was. That was the thing I couldn’t tell anybody.
* * *
Registration day at Bow Crest was the last Wednesday in August. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Tracy took the afternoon off. She drove me there in the Sunfire with the air conditioning on high, with a folder on the passenger seat that said PAIGE / SCHOOL on the tab in pencil. She’d ironed the forms. I didn’t know you could iron forms. She’d done it to get the creases out.
“It’ll all be new,” she said, pulling in. “Everything. But it’s a small school. Two floors. You’ll learn it in a week. Are you nervous? You can be nervous. I’d be nervous.”
I’d gone to Bow Crest for two years. I knew which door stuck. I knew which water fountain worked and which one shot you in the eye. I knew the girls’ washroom on the second floor was right beside the boys’, by the stairwell at the end of the hall. I’d walked past its door about a thousand times on the way to the boys’.
“I’m okay,” I said.
The front office was where it always was. Mr. Thibodeau was in the doorway, in a short-sleeved shirt and a tie, holding a coffee mug from the Calgary Zoo with a chip out of the handle. He’d been my homeroom teacher in Grade 7, before he got promoted. He used to call me Mr. Reimer as a joke. I never talked.
“You must be the Dekkers,” he said. “Welcome to Bow Crest. Paige, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Dekker.” He shook my hand. He shook Tracy’s. “We’re a small school. Easy to find your way around. Let me show you the library first, it’s the heart of the building.”
“It’s through there,” I said, before I could stop myself.
Tracy looked at me.
“There’s a sign,” I said. There was. There always had been. Mr. Thibodeau beamed, and said I was going to do just fine, and walked us there anyway the long way round.
While Tracy filled in forms at the counter, I went and stood in front of the glass case in the hall. It still had the class photos from June in it, one for each homeroom, in cardboard frames. 8B was on the bottom shelf. I found myself in the back row without looking for me: the tallest one, at the end, with hair over my ears, looking just past the camera at the wall behind the photographer.
Nobody in that picture knew I’d be standing here. I hadn’t known either.
I got a timetable and a locker. I was in 9C for homeroom. I had science third period on Tuesdays and Thursdays with Ms. Dufresne. I already knew she was the best thing on the timetable, and I had to make my face not know it.
Outside the gym there was a bulletin board covered in sign-up sheets.
FALL SPORTS. FOOTBALL, GR. 8 AND 9. There were twenty-some names on it in pen and pencil, and halfway down, in big square capitals that pressed through the paper, it said NATHAN REIMER.
It wasn’t Gordon’s writing. I knew Gordon’s capitals from fourteen years of lunch bags and birthday cards. These were different, blockier, leaning a little to the left.
He’d signed it himself.
I stood in front of it. Tracy was saying something about the cheer poster beside it. It was pink, with a megaphone drawn on it in marker.
CHEER TRYOUTS! SEPT. 15!
ALL GRADES! NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY!
SEE MS. DUFRESNE
Somebody had drawn a pom-pom in the corner with a smiley face.
“Paigey,” Tracy said. “Look. Look at that. You should.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to,” she said, very fast. “You don’t have to. I’m just saying. Think about it.”
I said I’d think about it. I was looking at the football sheet. NATHAN REIMER, pressed through the paper.
He’d be here. Of course he’d be here. It was his school now. His locker, his football team, his best friend. We’d be in the same building every day from eight-thirty to three.
All he’d have to do was walk down the hall.
* * *
Tracy and I did the back-to-school shopping at Zellers in Crowfoot on the Saturday.
The list from the school said binders, loose-leaf, a geometry set, a calculator, pencil crayons, a USB stick. Tracy had cut the list out of the newsletter and put it in her purse, and she crossed off each thing as it went in the cart, with the pencil from her hair. I picked a purple binder with a clear plastic cover you could slide a picture into. I didn’t have a picture. I picked it anyway.
She bought me a backpack, a navy one, and a jean jacket off a rack at the front of the store. It was twenty per cent off. Tracy said that made it free.
“Do you need anything else?” she said at the till. “Anything? Pens? Do you have enough pens?”
“I’m good.”
“You’re so good,” she said, and paid, and squeezed my shoulder. “You’re such a good kid. You know that? I don’t think I tell you.”
She did tell me. She told me every day. I didn’t say so.
* * *
The night before school was Labour Day.
Tracy had gone to bed early, with her alarm set for six and her clothes for work on the chair. I sat on the floor of my room with the closet door open.
The Xs had got to the first of September. Under the calendar, on the rail, were the hoodies. I’d moved them all to one end, but they were still there. Grey, navy, black, green, grey. I took the first grey one off the hanger and held it.
It was soft from being washed a hundred times. The strings were chewed flat. It smelled like the fabric softener in the laundry room, the same as everything else in the house now, the same as me. You could wear a thing like that to school and nobody would look at you twice. You could go a whole year in it. I’d gone fourteen.
I put it back on the hanger. I pushed it down to the end with the others.
The bird top was on the chair, folded, with the jean jacket on top of it. I’d ironed the top myself, the way Tracy had shown me, and nearly burned the bird.
I got the card from under my pillow and put it in the inside pocket of the jean jacket, the one with the snap, and snapped it shut.
Then I set my alarm, and checked it, and lay down in front of the fan. It pulled in the dark and the smell of the lane. Somewhere in Hawkwood, ten minutes away in a car, a boy with my face was setting an alarm too, or not. Tomorrow we’d be in the same building.
I hoped he was more scared than I was.