Be Ready for the Lightning, page 3
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It was hard to connect that fear to the Conrad I knew, the back of whose head I could see as we drove to the cabin. He’d called shotgun and climbed in beside Al, hanging one lean arm out the window, utterly relaxed, as far as I could tell. It was a bright, cool drive to the ferry dock, but we’d rolled down the windows anyway. Ted handed out Belmonts from the squashed pack in his breast pocket, and each of us smoked in our own way, sunglasses on, offering complaints about Al’s radio selections.
After Al pulled onto the ferry at Horseshoe Bay, we got out of the car and headed to the railings, peering toward Bowen Island. The wind whipped my hair into the sticky cheap lip gloss Annie and I wore back then. Conrad bought everyone coffee, carrying the five cups stacked vertically, concentrating hard.
I burned my tongue on the first sip and put my cup down on the deck, took out the disposable camera I’d bought for the trip and motioned the other four together. “Squish in, guys.”
Annie made a face. “I look like crap,” she said, but she went and stood between Conrad and Al, who bent his knees slightly, so as not to tower over the rest of us. Ted only half-turned from leaning on the railing, his long ginger hair falling into the collar of his open plaid shirt. The crowd he ran with at school then smoked pot behind the portables; the girls were rumoured to put out. He had moved beyond cutesy snapshots, but he indulged us anyway.
“You’re perfect,” I said. “You bunch of sexy beasts.” I snapped two photos of the four of them.
“Want one with you in it?” Annie asked, holding her hand out for the camera.
I shook my head. I’ve never much liked being in pictures.
“I have a theory,” said Conrad. “That when people look at photos of a particular time, it sort of erases their actual memory of that time. Like you believe the photo more than your own mind, and once you’ve seen the photo too many times, that’s the only way you can remember it. Do you know what I mean?”
“I have a theory,” said Ted, turning away from the water, “that Conrad is a synonym for mental case.”
Conrad landed a punch on Ted’s ribs, friendly, nothing like the punches he threw at other times. As they scuffled, I stood with Al and Annie, leaning against the rail and watching the ferry’s progress. When the dock at Langdale was getting close, Annie shooed us all back to the Hearse.
The drive to Roberts Creek felt different from the first leg of the journey: headier, wilder, the five of us dogs that had picked up a scent.
“We all know Al is secretly fucking Mrs. Bakos,” said Ted, naming the septuagenarian physics teacher. “I see her walking funny after your ‘study sessions’—” Ted broke off laughing, as Al, without slowing down, attempted to smack him in the back seat, and the car swerved wildly.
Annie squealed, “Ew, Ted, that’s disgusting.”
“Just wait until she’s coming to Christmas dinner, Annie,” said Conrad. He was trying to play along, even though he no longer attended the same school as the rest of us. “Wait till you try some of her delicious pie. Al loves it.”
“You’re so gross. And we don’t celebrate Christmas, dipshit.”
“You have a Christmas tree!”
“So what? Racist.”
“I’m Korean!”
“Half-Korean. And you can still be racist. God.”
Everyone was laughing so hard and Annie coughing so loudly on cigarette smoke that the banter felt unmoored, bobbing around in the car like a helium balloon, like something we were listening to rather than creating.
When we arrived and unlocked the front door of the cabin, it smelled so much like itself, like that place and no other, that my head swam for a second. I loved the cabin, with its unstirred air and rough wood table that would catch and rip your clothing if you accidentally rubbed against it. The beds seemed softer than the ones at home. Somehow even food tasted better up there to me.
It was a safe haven, and every year I waited impatiently for the Victoria Day long weekend, when we could open it back up. It made no sense to think of the cabin as safer than Vancouver—there were guns and rocks and dark forests in both places. But it felt like a retreat, in the military sense, the place we could fall back to, when something bad happened. It hovered at the edge of my awareness, a back door, an escape.
When I flicked the light switch in the dim kitchen, nothing happened. I tried the light in the bathroom, the lamps in the living room. I realized the steady hum of the old refrigerator was missing. It took awhile to wrangle everyone and announce the power outage—the boys had gone off to piss in different spots in the woods, as if the cabin didn’t have a bathroom—but eventually we all stood in a circle beside the Hearse, discussing what to do.
“We could call Mom and Dad,” I said. “The phone’s still working.”
Annie laughed. “What are they supposed to do from Vancouver? Clap on, clap off?” She launched into the jingle, complete with clapping, and the boys laughed.
“I say we just go with it,” said Ted. “We’ve got matches and lanterns. It’s only a weekend, and the power will probably be back on in a day or so anyway. What’s the big deal?”
So we stayed.
Conrad built a fire in the middle of our rocky, scraggly sliver of beach, even though the sun hadn’t fully sunk below the clouds yet. The dock—pulled out for the winter, tarped and lashed to nearby trees—made for a lumpy windbreak. Al went into the brush and came back dragging a huge log, and soon we were ranged along it, facing the fire, looking out over the ocean. It was colder than Vancouver, and we huddled together, pulling our sweaters down over our hands.
“What now?” said Annie. After a second, she said, “Who’s going in?”
“The water? You’re nuts,” said Conrad.
But Al stood up and pulled off his sweater and T-shirt, his shoes and socks, his pale ’90s jeans with the hammer-loop. By the time he ran in, Conrad was down to his checked boxer shorts, following.
Annie shrieked, “Yeah!” and wriggled out of her clothes, kicking them into the gravelly sand, her orange bra covered in little butter-flies, her cleavage—God, I was jealous—all goosebumps. Ted went last, with an eye-rolling grin to me, like, these crazy kids. He tossed his clothes on the log before running into the water to join the rest of them.
I didn’t go in. I sat there, hugging myself on the beach. Then I thought maybe I would go in—I should go in. This was one of those teenage moments you’re supposed to have, and I was missing it. I took off my shoes and socks. I put them back on. It wasn’t that I was afraid of them seeing me in my underwear, even though I would have felt better about it if I had Annie’s rack. It was more like everything was just happening too fast, like the chance to run into the water was a wormhole that had closed in an instant, and I’d missed it, even though they were just right there, I still could have gone.
They were howling with the cold, splashing each other, screaming. Ted’s chest was covered in a down of ginger hair, and I tried to remember if he’d had that last summer. Then they were all running back, Ted engulfing me in a freezing cold bear hug as he passed, his wet underwear pressing against my hip, and the chance was gone. He let go immediately and crashed off, away from the beach. When he scrambled back with one of the bottles of whisky from the Hearse in one hand and a guitar in the other, everyone cheered. Ted was the only one of us with any musical talent, even though Al and Annie’s parents had made them take lessons too.
We passed the whisky around, with Ted and Annie getting most of it, Ted smiling and complacent and Annie getting sloppy. The four of them stripped off their wet underwear and put their dry clothes back on without it, leaving three sets of boxer shorts and Annie’s little blue underpants drying by the fire.
Halfway through the bottle, Ted stood up, and reflexively I stood up alongside him. He announced that he would retrieve food from the Hearse.
“Let me help you,” I said. I took the guitar out of his slack hand and set it down, and we fell into step beside each other. As we walked away, I saw Annie looking after us.
Ted put his hand on my back, steadying me as we walked, even though he was the drunk one. I felt the air pressed out of me. A nearly smothering devotion just kind of snapped in me, as if I’d lost some kind of battle. I hoped—maybe I’d hoped for awhile—that Ted would ask me to do something for him, to give him something, anything. I wanted to, wanted to be asked. This was love, monstrous and nauseous, my first, and I stood aside with relief to let it thunder in. I was fifteen. It was about time.
When Ted started talking, I couldn’t hear the alcohol in his voice at all. “You know it’s not your fault, right? With Conrad?”
“I know.”
“It just seems like you’re always beating yourself up lately. You seem—down.”
“I’m not. I just—” I stopped. “I’m just…shy.”
Ted laughed. “Shy with us? After all this time?”
It embarrassed me to love him, when everybody else did too. In the books I read, girls who liked boys were vapid B-characters. The protagonists were always girls who hated the main boy, had bigger things on their minds, but who ended up with him anyway. I wanted to be like that, to be a main character with better things to do than fall in love. But what did I know? Maybe love was supposed to be embarrassing.
I started walking again. “Shy with you,” I said. Or I thought I said it.
Ted took my arm and stopped me, and then he turned me around and kissed me. I put my hands on his face, in his hair, on the tender swelling of bone behind his ears, like I was mapping him, confirming he was perfect, and he was. The way my body felt was new, at least in magnitude—pleasure and humiliation wrapped up together. It felt like being choked and at the same time like the shivery goodness of having my hair brushed.
When Ted broke away, the first thing I said was “Don’t tell Conrad.” We were pressed together forehead to forehead, like a boxer and his coach in a movie.
He nodded. For a second, we stayed like that without speaking. Then he took my clammy hand, and we trudged on. At the Hearse, we grabbed coolers filled with raw, cellophane-wrapped hamburgers, kaiser buns, squeeze-bottles of ketchup and mustard, Ripples chips, Ziploc bags of carrot sticks and celery. I grabbed the greasy grill from the top of the charcoal barbecue.
We cooked over the open fire that night, on the wobbly grill-top, biting into raw burgers, laughing and returning the patties for further burning. We finished the whisky, and Ted played his guitar, Oasis and U2 and Nirvana for Annie, and Bruce Springsteen for me, my chest so tight it hurt, while he sang in his reedy, almost pretty voice. Annie stood up and started to dance, alone, her hips near Ted’s face. Conrad and Al chucked stones into the ocean, arguing over whose went farther.
“You’re supposed to throw it, Al,” said Conrad. “Not just let it fall out of your hand.”
“Fuck you, mine went farther than yours.” They were laughing, kicking the toes of their sneakers into the sand to dislodge more stones, throwing like they were trying to fill up the ocean.
“Altaf, I just want to see you apply yourself,” said Conrad, mimicking Al’s father, adding a few Persian swear words Mr. Nassar had taught the boys.
“God, you’re funny, Connie.” Al used our family’s nickname for Conrad. “If you can’t throw farther, will you just punch me out?”
There was a collective intake of breath, and Ted stopped playing, because no one ever said anything to Conrad, only about Conrad, when it came to the fighting. But Conrad just laughed, and then everyone else did too, and whatever tension had risen was gone. It was suddenly dark out; the fire was bright and hot, and our backs, away from the fire, were cold, and sweet drunkenness spread like a hot, fizzy virus. By the time we went into the dark cabin and fell onto the beds we hadn’t bothered to make, pulling throw blankets over ourselves, we were half-frozen. I wondered how Annie, curled beside me in the double bed where my parents usually slept, felt without her underwear.
I believed we were all happy then, and in hell, and that we would fall asleep every night of our lives feeling that way, that intensely, that fully.
“Do you think Connie will grow out of it?” Annie whispered.
I could feel the softness of her skin under the knock-off Hudson’s Bay blanket, the lovely length of her legs, and I felt like a kid beside her.
“I mean, he’s seventeen. He might be completely different when he’s, like, thirty. Maybe he just needs to get it out of his system.”
“I don’t know.” This was what my parents hoped, I knew. They’d assumed it from the beginning. But then Conrad’s split knuckles scarred over, and his bloodied face, his blackened eyes, became facts of life. He never tried to hide it. He never said, I fell down or He started it, though he had reasons that seemed, at the time, good. He stayed silent, shook his head for yes and no, when our parents—and later, others—grilled him; he told no lies. There was nothing to compare him to, no parenting book for what he did. He wasn’t bad or disrespectful or cruel; he didn’t steal or vandalize. He drank a normal amount, in fact the least of the three boys, and he smoked only when Ted gave him cigarettes. When he wasn’t fighting, he was affable and no worse, no better, than any teenage boy.
“Maybe he’s schizophrenic,” said Annie, as we lay in the slightly musty cottage bed.
“Doesn’t that mean he’s crazy?”
“Not exactly, I think? It makes people do crazy stuff sometimes, but then sometimes they’re normal.”
“I dunno. He’s not really like that.”
Annie said, “He could be, though. I mean there must be something—” She stopped abruptly, clearly dropping the word wrong.
“Schizophrenic,” I said. I didn’t think it was true. I didn’t know what was wrong with Conrad, but I thought it was something wordless, imprecise, a need so simple it had no name. And he wasn’t delusional, had no trouble with reality—if anything, he grasped it better than me. I was never quite sure where the real world ended, and the world inside my head began.
What Ted and Al and Annie didn’t know was that Conrad’s first fight, or Conrad’s first very bad fight, had been my fault, and that was one of the hardest things to wipe away. When I was in sixth grade and Conrad in eighth, there was a boy who liked me, whose name and face I would successfully wipe away, as the years went by. He had followed me around in the hallways, putting his hands on me. I didn’t like it, but I knew I’d be called a bitch if I complained about it, or worse, hurt his feelings. It was a compliment. How lucky I was to have his attention, and me not even that pretty.
One day in gym class, we were turned out into the nearby woods to play Capture the Flag. We weren’t supposed to get physical, just tag each other, but no one ever followed that rule. Last time we’d played, the first flute in the school band had grabbed me by the hair to keep me from snatching the flag. Not keen to repeat the experience, this time I wandered away from my team—and was found by the boy who liked me, alone. For a moment, we just stared at each other. Then his arms were around me, and I was squirming away, hoping that it was a joke. Anything cruel could be a joke, if the person doing it said it was—those were the rules of middle school. I even tried to laugh a chagrined butt-of-the-joke laugh, to be game. But the joke wasn’t a joke and he got me on the ground with a knee on my hip, one hand holding my arms above my head and the other roaming over and under and inside, but roaming is too soft a word. He leaned down, crushing himself flat over me so hard, it was like he was trying to bury me without digging a hole. He rearranged my arms using both of his, stretched me taut as wire and spat in my face, first an unsuccessful spray and then a better-focused little bullet of it, which dripped down my jaw and neck, and then he spit again, rubbing it across my face and under my chin and into my mouth. I gagged on his fingers, and then his hand was around my neck and bright pain behind my eyes, and maybe I was going to die.
He let go, stood up and walked away.
I curled into a ball, tight as one of those shells that spiral in on itself. After a moment, I got up, but I was muddy, my gym shirt torn at the neck. I needed an excuse to be such a mess. It didn’t occur to me to tell the truth. Telling the truth seemed tantamount to going to war. Lying meant it was over.
I found a rock and sawed away at my forearm until the blood came up, and then a little more just to be safe. It hurt, and it didn’t hurt. I didn’t think about doing it or even know why that was the solution that occurred to me. When I walked back to my group, they saw the state I was in and circled around me, as I held up the arm as a passport and was cooed over. The blood was somehow enough to explain my ripped shirt, my dirty face, my bird’s-nest hair. Clumsy, I said. Silly. Accident. Whoops.
Annie shouldered the others aside and took me to the bathroom to clean up, the aura around her both sympathetic and proud, the reflected attention of an injury. When I was washed and the bleeding had slowed to a sluggish seep and the Band-Aid had been doled out by the teacher, we rejoined the class.
Standing a little ways off was the boy who had liked me—that was the only word we had for it, liked—looking at me strangely, confused by the arm. I was relieved. Confused seemed like a safe thing for him to be. What I didn’t want him to be was mad. I thought about apologizing to him. I don’t know why. If I could smooth it all over, it couldn’t happen again, surely.
Lunch hour came, and Conrad found me, having heard about the blood.
“Let me see,” he said. “You fell?”
I said, “I fell.”
And Conrad, fourteen years old, looked at the arm and the torn T-shirt and saw what the teacher and Annie and the other students hadn’t, that I hadn’t fallen. That unlike him, I was a liar. Though he couldn’t get a story out of me, he finally got a name, a now-forgotten name, and he went to that twelve-year-old boy and beat the living shit out of him. He refused to say why he’d done it, and because there had been other, smaller fights before, hallway scuffles and playground shoving-matches, detentions and suspensions, he would be expelled, sent to a school where there would be many more, worse fights.
