The alarm went at half past six. I’d been awake since five, lying in the grey light from the lane, listening to Tracy get ready in the bathroom down the hall: the tap, the hair dryer, the tap again, the hair dryer again, her saying “oh, come on” to something.
She came to my door at ten to seven in her work clothes, with her hair up and her keys in her hand and a lunch bag.
“Turkey,” she said, holding up the lunch bag. “And an apple. And one of the Nanaimo bars from the freezer, it’ll be thawed by lunch. Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you? I can drive you and take the later train. I’ll be late. I don’t care.”
“I want to walk.”
“Okay. Okay.” She put the lunch bag on the end of my bed. She stood there. “You’re going to be great. You know that? You’re going to walk in there and they’re going to love you. Are you nervous? Don’t be nervous. Be nervous, it’s fine. I was sick on my first day of Grade 9. All over a boy in a jean jacket.”
“That’s not helping.”
“No,” she agreed. “Okay. I love you. Lock the door.”
I heard the Sunfire back out over the gravel and go. Then the house ticked. I put on the bird top, the jean jacket and the white sandals. I stood in front of the mirror over the dresser with my hair up in a ponytail and looked at the girl in it until she looked back.
I left late on purpose. I left so late I had to run the last two blocks.
* * *
At Bow Crest the bell had already gone, and the hall by the front doors had emptied out except for a janitor with a mop and a kid crying into a payphone. I went up the stairs to the second floor. 9C was the third door past the water fountain that shoots you in the eye.
I didn’t have to look for it. I made myself look anyway, slowly, at the numbers over the doors.
The homeroom teacher was a man in a sweater vest I’d never had before, which helped. He said “Ah, our new student,” and pointed me to the only empty desk, by the window, next to a girl with a lot of hair clips who turned around in her chair before I’d even sat down.
“Are you new? You’re new. I’m Tiffany. Where are you from? Are you from Edmonton? You look like you’re from Edmonton.”
“Lethbridge.”
“Oh my God, my cousin’s in Lethbridge. Do you know Mai? She does figure skating. Are you trying out for cheer? You should try out for cheer, you’re tiny. Cassidy says they need flyers. Cassidy’s the captain. She’s in 9A. She’s really scary but she’s nice, you’ll like her.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You should,” said Tiffany. The man in the sweater vest said “Miss Nguyen,” and she turned back around. Then she turned back again and gave me a pencil with a little rubber pig on the end, since I hadn’t taken mine out yet.
Nobody looked at me twice all through announcements. I was a new girl in a bird top by the window with a pig pencil. There were three new girls in 9C. I was the least interesting one. I’d never been the least interesting anything in that school in my life. I’d been the big quiet kid who got hit with dodgeballs, the one the gym teacher called buddy in a voice like he was sorry for me.
I sat by the window and was nobody, and it was wonderful.
* * *
Between first and second period I saw the back of his head.
I was coming out of math. The hall was full the way it’s always full at Bow Crest between classes, everybody at once, lockers banging, somebody yelling a last name down the stairwell. Down at the end, by the trophy case, there was a knot of football guys in their team shirts. One of them was taller than the rest, broad in the shoulders, with a buzz cut. He had his back to me. He was listening to somebody, nodding, with his hands in his pockets.
Manny was beside him. Manny was talking with both arms.
I knew the back of that head. I’d never seen it in my life. It’s not a thing you ever see, the back of your own head, not unless somebody holds up a mirror at the barber’s.
I turned around and went the other way. Back through math. Out the other door of math, which still didn’t latch, past the library and around through the back stairs, which took four minutes longer and got me to social studies late.
“Lost?” said the teacher.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a big school.”
It was not a big school. It had two floors.
* * *
Third period was science, with Ms. Dufresne.
She was the same. Small and fast, with her glasses on her head and a mug she never drank out of and always carried. She ran the cheer team, and she’d taught me in Grade 8, and she’d been the only teacher who’d ever looked at me like she was waiting to see what I’d turn into.
She looked at me that way now. It was a different look on a different face.
“Welcome to Grade 9 science,” she said to everybody. “Rule one: hydrate. Your body is sixty per cent water and the other forty is attitude, and I need you to keep both topped up. Rule two: if you set anything on fire, you tell me before it spreads. Rule three: lab partners are assigned, not chosen, so don’t look at your friends like that. Paige? You’re new. Paige, you’re with Sadie.”
Sadie was a girl at the second bench with a short brown ponytail who didn’t say anything, and moved her binder over so I’d have room, and smiled at the bench instead of at me.
We were supposed to be labelling a diagram of a cell. I labelled the nucleus. Then I labelled it again, in the wrong place. My hand was shaking. I’d been holding it together since half past six. I’d held it through the back of his head in the hall, and the photo in the glass case last week, and the whole summer before that. Now, in the middle of science, it was coming apart.
I put my hand up.
“Can I go to the washroom?”
“Go,” said Ms. Dufresne, without looking up from the bench she was at. “Hydrate on the way back.”
* * *
The washrooms were at the end of the second-floor hall, by the stairwell, side by side. GIRLS on the left. BOYS on the right. Two wooden doors with steel plates on them for pushing, and between them, a drinking fountain that had never worked.
I’d walked past the left one a thousand times.
I pushed it open. It was empty. It smelled like the pink soap and the floor cleaner and somebody’s body spray. I stood at the sink and ran the cold water over my wrists. Tracy did that when she was upset, and I’d started doing it too without noticing. I looked at the girl in the mirror with her ponytail. You’re fine, I told her. You’re a new girl at Bow Crest. Nobody knows anything.
I dried my hands on the paper towel and put my shoulder to the door and pushed.
The other door opened at exactly the same second.
We both came out into the hall at once, a foot apart, and stopped, and looked at each other.
It was my face.
Not the way it was in the class photo, or the hall from behind, or the mirror at the barber’s. It was my face the way other people had looked at it for fourteen years, from the front, from close up. My long face. My eyebrows, up in the middle. The pink line over the right one, where the desk had got me. My mouth, open a little. My face, with somebody else behind it, looking down at me.
And he was looking at his.
I watched it happen on him. I watched him see the long face and the black hair in a ponytail and the eyebrows. I watched him know it. I watched him go white, under my old summer tan, and grab the door frame of the boys’ washroom with one hand.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
Down the hall a door opened and closed. Somebody laughed in a classroom. The drinking fountain between us didn’t do anything.
Then he took my arm, above the elbow, not hard, and pushed open the stairwell door with his other hand, and pulled me through it.
* * *
The stairwell landing was concrete, with a window of wired glass that looked out over the field and the portables. It smelled like dust and sun. The door swung shut behind us on its slow arm and clicked.
He let go of my arm. He stood with his back against the door. I stood with my back to the window.
“You’re him,” he said. “You’re the kid. The Reimer kid.”
His voice was my voice, low and cracked. It was doing something it had never once done in my mouth. It was saying exactly what it meant.
“You’re the one who,” I said. “From Royal Oak. You’re the one who was in here.”
“Yeah.”
We looked at each other.
“I’m not giving it back,” he said.
He said it fast and hard and low, with his fists shut. He said it like he’d practised it. Like he’d lain in bed in my room in Hawkwood all summer saying it at the ceiling.
“I don’t want it back,” I said.
It came out at the same time as his. It came out over the top of it.
He stopped.
“What?”
“I don’t want it back,” I said again. My eyes were going. I let them. “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it. You can have Gordon and the camp and the cleats. You can have my room. You can have the whole thing, I don’t...” I had to stop. “I figured you’d want it back. You’d want Tracy back. Your mom. I figured you’d come and find me.”
“I figured you’d come and find me,” he said.
“I saw you at Stampede. I walked the other way.”
“I phoned your house. The first night. I heard her. I hung up.” He put one hand flat on top of his head, on the buzz cut, and held it there. “I hung up on my mom.”
We stood there. Out the window, a gym class was running laps on the field, little red shirts going around.
“What did you wish?” he said.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came. I’d never said it out loud. I’d stopped before the last word every year since I was six.
He waited. Then he said it first.
“I wished I could wake up as a boy.”
He said it to the floor, then he looked up and said it again to me, to my face, his face. “That’s what I wished. At the cake. I wished I could wake up as a boy.”
“I wished I could wake up as a girl,” I said.
It was the first time I’d ever said the whole thing out loud. It was very quiet in the stairwell after.
He nodded. He kept nodding. He put his hand on the back of his neck. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
* * *
He got the card out of his wallet. I got mine out of the snap pocket in my jean jacket. We held them out, side by side.
They were the same. The same white card, folded once. The same blue ballpoint. The same ordinary handwriting, like a supply teacher’s. One year. Then wish again, together: stay, or go back. No name on either one.
We were holding them in our left hands.
I saw it first. I saw his little finger, curled in at the top joint, bent toward the others. It was the finger I’d had for fourteen years. Of course it was. It was my hand.
Then I looked at mine. My new hand, my small one, with the pink polish grown halfway out. The little finger bent in at the top joint, toward the others, exactly the same.
He was looking at it too.
“That’s my hook,” he said. “Mom calls it my hook.”
“Donna wrote nothing on the calendar,” I said. “When the doctor looked at it.”
“Huh,” he said.
“Huh,” I said.
He turned his hand over and back. I turned mine. They did the same thing.
“When’s your birthday?” I said.
“Fourteenth of June.”
“Same.”
“Where are you from? Before. China, I mean.”
“Hunan.”
“Hunan,” he said.
We stood there with that between us.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “They guessed. The orphanages. They put the birthday as the day they found you. Lots of kids from China have the same birthday as somebody. Half of them are from Hunan.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. That’s what Mom always said.”
The door behind him opened six inches and bumped into his back. A little kid, Grade 7 or 8, with a backpack bigger than he was, peered around it at us. He looked at the big football guy and the small new girl standing on the landing holding up two cards, and he looked from one face to the other.
“Are you guys siblings?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Okay,” said the kid, and squeezed past, and went down the stairs two at a time, and we heard him go out the bottom door.
Nathan breathed out through his nose. It was almost a laugh.
* * *
“How’s my mom?” he said.
He said it to the window. He was looking at the field.
“She’s okay. She’s good.” I had to think how to say it. “She cries in the car sometimes. She says it’s allergies.”
“She’s really nice to me.”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “Yeah. She would be.”
“How’s...” I couldn’t do it. I tried again. “Is Donna okay?”
“She does the dishes really straight,” he said. “Like this.” He stood up straight with his shoulders back, like somebody had put a broom handle down his shirt, and it was so exactly Donna that I laughed, and then I had to put my hand over my mouth because I was crying too.
“And Gordon?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“He’s happy,” he said. “He thinks I got better.”
I looked at him. He looked at me.
“That’s not right,” he said. It came out slowly. “Him being glad. You shouldn’t have been somebody he needed to get over.”
I said “Thanks,” which was stupid, and he nodded, like it wasn’t.
* * *
“What do I call you?” I said.
“Nathan.”
“That’s my...” I stopped. “Okay. Nathan.”
“What do I call you?”
“Paige.”
He looked at me. “That was my name.”
“It’s mine now.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.” He almost smiled. It was a strange thing to see, my mouth doing that on his face. “It’s better on you.”
I looked at the card again. Together.
“What if this is us,” I said. “What if together means us. Both of us have to wish it. The same night. In the same place.”
“Then we wish to stay.”
“What if we’re not? In the same place?”
He looked at the card in his big hand.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t say.” He put it back in his wallet. “So we’re in the same place. On the fourteenth. Wherever that is.” He said it the way Gordon said where a furnace was going to go.
“We don’t know that’s what it means.”
“No,” he said. “So we find out.”
* * *
Down in the hall a bell went. It was the one that meant fifteen minutes left, not the end of the period. We’d been gone twenty minutes.
“I have to go back,” I said. “Ms. Dufresne.”
“I have Thibodeau.”
“He’ll call you Mr. Reimer,” I said. “It’s a joke. You have to smile.”
“He calls everybody that?”
“Just me. Just you.” I didn’t know how to say it. “It’s because I never talked.”
He thought about that. “Okay.”
We needed numbers. We both thought of it at once, standing on the landing. He took a pen out of his pocket and held it over the back of his hand, and then stopped.
“I know your number,” I said.
“I know yours.”
“It’s my number.”
“It’s my number too.”
We stood there. Then I took the pen anyway and wrote the Hawkwood number on my palm. I gave him the pen, and he wrote the Royal Oak number on the back of his big hand. It seemed like a thing you should do. It seemed like the beginning of something you should do properly.
“After school?” he said.
“Tracy gets home at six. Call at six-fifteen. She’ll answer. Ask for me.”
“What do I say?”
“Say you’re a friend from school.”
“I’m a friend from school,” he said, trying it. Then: “I am, though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You are.”
He pushed the door open with his shoulder and held it, and I went out into the hall first, back past the two washroom doors and the fountain that didn’t work. I didn’t look back. I knew if I looked back he’d be standing in the stairwell door, holding it open with one arm, watching me go, and I’d never get to science.
* * *
When I came back into the lab my face was burning. My hand was in my jacket pocket, holding the card, and the other hand had the Hawkwood number on it in blue pen.
Sadie had finished the cell. She’d done both halves. She’d done my labels in pencil, very lightly, so I could go over them.
Ms. Dufresne looked up from the front bench. She looked at me for a second, the way she used to look at me in Grade 8, waiting to see what I’d turn into.
“Everything all right, Paige?”
“Yes,” I said.
It was the first time since June that I’d meant it all the way down.