The Journey Prize Stories 24 Read online

  I am not sure yet exactly which passages I will quote, because I am only on page four. I reached page four this morning, as I sat in the hallway of the school with my best friend, Amy. Every day we have our mothers drop us off exactly forty-five minutes before the bell rings, and we sit on the ground outside the English office. I’m usually reading and Amy is usually peeling the varnish off the floor. The varnish lies in a loose coat over the hardwood and cracks as we step over it. Our school building deteriorates at an exponential rate; it seems like every day another part of it breaks off. One time I bicycled by and looked at the school and thought to myself, with fierce affection, “That is my high school,” relishing the still-newness of ninth grade, and just at that moment, a piece of one of the window frames creaked loose and fell from its hinge to the pavement.

  Amy regularly peels the floor in patches all over the school. We eat lunch in stairwells, our backs against the concrete walls and legs crossed in front of us, sandwich bags in our laps, cackling at each other over inside jokes we’ve had since second grade, and she’ll take a break from peeling the floor to peel her tangerine, trying to remove each peel in one long strip. She peels the floor in the gymnasium during stretches, and then leaves the waxy scraps in small piles here and there so that later, when we’re made to do push-ups, people’s hands and shoes accidentally land on these piles and their limbs go sliding sideways.

  I keep telling her not to do this, but lately she’s sort of been turning on me. I do think it’s natural to get irritated with your best friend, with whom you spend so many hours, encountering so many opportunities for disagreement – over which movie to see or whether to eat at Subway or Tim Hortons or whether Americans have the right idea about making the drinking age twenty-one or whether moustaches worn ironically can ever look really handsome – but once you have invested so many years in a friendship, such things should cease to matter. I’m not sure Amy recognizes this. Although our lives have run parallel since age eight, when, in Mrs. Hollifriend’s class, we both agreed that dinosaurs were not as fascinating as everybody else seemed to think, lately I’ve been thinking that Amy might easily drop me, like a jacket with a hole in it, like a hair elastic that’s lost its stretch. So today, we’re sitting there outside the English office and I go, without really thinking, “Amy, what’s wrong with you? Why do you always have to peel the floor and deface our school?” and she turns to me and goes, “At least I haven’t memorized every article of clothing owned by my English teacher.” It’s sort of a joke of hers that I spend so much time gazing at Mr. Sears that I must have his clothes memorized by now, except that it’s not really a joke, because I know that he owns six button-downs (three different shades of blue, one white pin-striped, one yellow, and one grey) and white athletic socks that show when he sits down, and four pairs of pants that are all sort of beige-ish brown. Only once did I see him wear a pair of jeans, at the English Club fundraiser, which was a car wash to raise funds and awareness for literature from the Augustan period. We used the money we made to buy used copies of Gulliver’s Travels on Amazon.com and then we just handed them out to people on the street. Mr. Sears called it “Spreading the Word.” He smiled when he said it, his mouth an open oval. It took me the first half of the car wash to adjust myself to that new jeans-wearing version of my English teacher, but then I found something beautiful in his effortlessness, and decided that his casual style did not take away in the least from his devotion to our cause.

  I like to record these lists of clothing, and also all my related thoughts and observations, in a notebook, a Moleskin notebook like the kind Mr. Sears said Hemingway used.

  Also, sometimes in class his socks fall around his ankles and I want to duck down on to the half-peeled floor and crawl under his desk and pull them up for him.

  Because of all this pent-up sexual frustration, I’ve cultivated a new hobby, namely, interacting with pedophiles in Internet chatrooms. Or not pedophiles, but one pedophile in particular. His name is Ronald, and we’ve been talking online for about a month. He has asked me to think of him as my boyfriend, though he’s really more of a manfriend, because he is forty-one years old. When I told him I’m fourteen, he typed, “Your age is my age in reverse,” as though that means we are meant to be. He says he thinks I’m exotic because of my Indian background, so I didn’t tell him I was born in Canada. After I’m done with school and English Club meetings or band practice, I go home and go on “Internet dates” with Ronald the pedophile. We’ll Google important political figures and then discuss our findings, or we’ll furnish an imaginary home with furniture we imagine buying on eBay, and sometimes we’ll go to Freerice.com and spend hours defining words and ending world hunger.

  Usually while I’m doing this, my parents are either working late or in the basement praying. They have created a “God Room” in the basement, where all of our Hindu gods and goddesses hang in rows around the blue walls, staring out with peaceful expressions.

  “You are as beautiful as a goddess,” Ronald said to me once, after describing himself as an agnostic. I’d added him on Facebook, though he’s on limited profile so he can’t see my address or anything, but I did allow him to see my photos, so he looked through all the ones of me and Amy and told me that I’m infinitely more desirable than she is.

  I regularly watch To Catch a Predator on Dateline and am amazed at how often the child molesters resemble the guys my dad works with. I told Ronald about this and he found a bunch of episodes of the show on YouTube, and so we watched those on another Internet date. We witnessed one predator wearing a large shapeless hat atop his large shapeless head, entering the house, unaware of the NBC cameramen drinking coffee behind the decorative curtain. Then the decoy thirteen-year-old chirps something about going to change into her bathing suit and the guy with the large hat smiles to himself and actually, literally starts rubbing his hands together in anticipation, and I bet he has really dry hands so bits of skin are flaking off them, and also he has this backpack on that’s maybe too small for a grown man, and he takes that off and started rifling through it, but before we found out what monstrous equipment he has in this backpack, Dateline correspondent Chris Hansen emerges from behind the decorative curtain and introduces himself, and the man with the hat removes his hat and uses it to cover his face.

  “Don’t worry, my darling,” Ronald said to me, “I am ten times the man he is,” which makes me wonder if Ronald knows how math works. Ten times a pedophile, I think, as I look through his Facebook pictures. Unlike most people’s Facebook photos, Ronald’s feature no other people. Mostly they show him leaning against a blank wall, his head rounded in a way that indicates he took the photo himself with one outstretched arm.

  In my most recent conversation with Ronald, he asked me for my phone number. I was reading Beowulf while talking to him, and thinking maybe I should rent the movie instead, and I was caught up in thinking about Mr. Sears and whether the movie version would be significantly different from the book version and checking Wikipedia to see whether the movie script used quotes from the Seamus Heaney translation. So I’d pushed the Ronald conversation window to the side of my screen, and all of a sudden he typed, “Are your parents home? Can I call you? What’s your phone number?” all three questions in a single row. I pictured him on a sofa, his laptop on his lap, sinking back into the cushions as he waited for my reply. And maybe due to all my unreturned love and daydreams for Mr. Sears, I started imagining what would happen if I fell in love with Ronald the pedophile. He lives in the next town over, so it wouldn’t be a long-distance relationship. Instead of Internet dates, we could go on actual dates to local hotspots and events like Heritage Village Day. We could climb each of the 144 flights of stairs to the top of the CN Tower in Toronto, something I have always wanted to do, but Amy refuses to go with me. “Would you climb the CN Tower with me?” I typed, and Ronald said, “Yes,” with a winking emoticon, and so then I typed my phone number in one swoop of momentum, with no spaces or dashes.

  He dialled the numbers just as quickly. I let the telephone ring four times, fanning myself madly with my copy of Beowulf, the mesh face fluttering forwards and backwards as I wondered whether to answer the phone. But then I realized if I didn’t answer, the call would go to voicemail. Ronald would leave a message accessible to anybody in my family, because this was our landline and not my cell phone since my parents for some reason won’t get me a cell phone. Also, my parents were not out at work or at the store or at a baseball game or wherever it is parents go when strangers call the house. While a weird man preyed on their child, my parents prayed in the basement, singing light religious tunes in their atonal voices and clanging finger cymbals that clashed with the ringing phone. My parents might put down their photocopied Sanskrit mantras at any time and unfold their piously curled bodies to get up and answer it. I wondered if Ronald would pretend to be a salesman, and then I thought, if my parents pick up the phone, Ronald will probably never speak to me again. So I answered it.

  There was no pause at all, and I heard a soft, wheedling voice say, “You didn’t think I’d call, did you?” And then the door to my bedroom opened, and I saw a man standing there, peering around the doorframe at me and grinning this slow grin and saying, “What do you want for dinner?” because the man was my father, so then I immediately hung up the phone and told my dad rice was fine as always for dinner, and when he asked what I’d been doing the past hour, I said (very convincingly, I think) that I’d been researching the incarnations of all the various Hindu gods.

  In English class, third period, Amy has disengaged herself from me and moved to sit with this new boyfriend of hers. His name isn’t even worth mentioning, but he was in my fourth grade class and he used to try to join conversations but everybody hated him and ignored him so then he would just give up and stare at the wall. But then one day, he started talking to the wall, and telling it things and asking it questions, why won’t they talk to me?, all I have is you, and so on, and I wonder if he and Amy have similar conversations now.

  Before Amy started dating him, and before I had fully fallen for Mr. Sears, we would spend all of class laughing silently behind our open notebooks. The first book we read in this class was Washington Square, and we both hated it, so we left Post-It notes throughout the pages of our copies, to warn future readers. Our notes said things like, “I hate this book,” and “Don’t read any further,” and “Aunt Penniman is a flat character,” but now I regret writing those Post-Its and wonder if I should retrieve my copy from the library and remove them. I won’t though, because that would be like erasing our history when already I can feel Amy slipping away, and it’s different from that time she bleached her hair orange and became cool for a week and sat on the radiator where all the cool kids sit. It’s different partly because relationships of weird teens last forever. It might never be me and her sitting and laughing together ever again.

  Instead of socializing with Amy, I try to imagine Grendel from Beowulf and draw pictures of him across my notebook in red pen. I compile monster parts from passages in the book and from generic TV monsters, heads that nearly aren’t there dissolving into the lines of the page, wide white teardrops instead of eyes, teeth protruding through stretching mouths. Their bodies have torsos disproportionate to arms, veins visible through the surface of skin like the bulging, textured veins of leaves, legs narrowing into a pair of skeletal feet that leave bony, blood-filled footprints, footprints that stalk over the page of notes that I’m supposed to be taking. Instead of grammar exercises, I’ve drawn penciled, mesh-faced men, weaponless, knees curling under them like paperclips.

  Mr. Sears goes on with his lesson, and in the background I hear someone call him, “Oh Captain, My Captain,” because he is one of those teachers who tears up textbooks and says there shouldn’t be a rubric for poetry. Mr. Sears delivers an impassioned speech about some Alexander Pope poem and then he asks me a question, but since I’ve been drawing monsters instead of paying attention, I only know that the poem may or may not have something to do with haircuts. I curse myself for not listening and wonder if this is karma for the time I invented a Hindu holiday as an excuse for skipping gym.

  “Disappointing,” Mr. Sears says, and his head tilts sadly sideways under the weight of his disappointment. “You have to do the reading,” he tells me, “or there’s no point in coming to class.”

  I want to tell him that I have done the reading, I’ve done more reading than any of these other fools, but he turns away and makes a joke about how his wife never reads any books either, with the exception of Harlequin romances.

  In the romance corner of the room, when Mr. Sears turns to the board, Amy and her boyfriend caress each other’s faces. In an online article, I read that if a boy touches your face, it means it’s true love. The boyfriend bends his head and lays it onto Amy’s shoulder, and he looks almost handsome. It’s the only time I’ve seen him look anything other than stupid. The only person I can remember being that close to me is my mother, and I find it painful to try not to yearn for that strange, solid, intimate warmth of a human head. Amy sighs her chin into the boyfriend’s palm. She pulls at his nose and he embeds his fingertips into her cheeks, and I worry that they will accidentally gouge each other’s eyes out.

  I wait for Amy after school as I always do, but she doesn’t show up. I duck into the library. Nobody’s using the computers, so I sign into my account and find Ronald online.

  “What a terrible day,” I type.

  “You’re early,” he replies, and then, “What happened?”

  “My friend ditched me for her boyfriend,” I type, and then, because it’s not like I’m in a committed relationship with this Internet pedophile, I tell him that I have a crush on my middle-aged English teacher and about my moment of embarrassing inattention in class.

  There’s a pause, and then Ronald types, “Pretend I’m him.”

  I suppose what Ronald wants me to do is to lean into my screen and enact an elaborate sexual fantasy I have about Mr. Sears via the Internet. It’s true that I spend much of class time and much of my own time fantasizing about my English teacher. I imagine us in a warm fireplaced room with burgundy wallpaper and clawfooted furniture, but we’ve disdained this furniture to sit on the floor. We read to each other from a shared copy of Beowulf. Mr. Sears holds the book and I turn its pages. Our heads are pressed together, my hair over his shoulders. For some reason in this fantasy I have flaxen hair, despite being Indian, and I’m wearing an empire-waist gown and a wreath of flowers, and Mr. Sears is dressed similarly in eighteenth-century garb, like maybe a navy waistcoat and white pantaloons. We’re sipping from glasses of wine, no, goblets of wine, no, chalices of wine, and we’re uttering guttural words to each other in Middle English, as the fireplace flashes at us like an unanswered chat window.

  The problem with these fantasies is that I never actually get past the reading part, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to describe to Ronald, and so, to diffuse the situation, I type the letters LOL.

  “What’s so funny?” Ronald asks.

  I try to think of something provocative to ask him. I type, “How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

  There’s a long pause and then Ronald types, “Haven’t we had this conversation before?” which doesn’t make sense because Ronald and I have certainly never had this conversation before, or even this type of conversation, since our imaginary dates have remained pretty tame and educational, and it occurs to me that I am not the only teenager with whom Ronald regularly speaks on the Internet.

  Ronald starts typing long strings of text, full of typos, and I realize that he’s describing all the things he’s going to do to me, except I don’t understand most of the terms so I open up a separate window to look them up on Urban Dictionary.

  He begs for a response. I’m thinking of his Facebook pictures and how he could be a guy that works at my dad’s office. My dad could be right there in an adjacent cubicle, entering numbers into his computer with the Lord Ganesha desktop wallpaper, working overtime for the money to send his daughter to medical school, because I haven’t yet told him that I plan to get an English degree and concentrate in pre-1800 literature. I humour my parents, because they are pious and kind and easily deluded, and if you try to have a serious discussion with my father, he will always bring God into it.

  Ronald’s words become more garbled and he’s used the F-word at least four times. He waits for me to say something. I consider the keyboard and then type the letter “M” repeatedly so it seems as though I am moaning, and I follow it with exactly seven exclamation points.

  “You are so beautiful,” Ronald types, though he spells beautiful wrong, and I assume he’s looking at my pictures, and then he says, “Are you still having a terrible day? Let me come there and comfort you.”

  Through the library door, I see Amy and her boyfriend walking through the hallway. They are peeling the floor together, in one unbroken strip. They walk slowly, as not to tear it, focused on the piece of varnish that passes through their collaborating hands and curls and trails behind them.

  It’s possible that Ronald is talking to four different girls right now, four different fourteen-year-olds typing covertly in their high school libraries before catching the school bus home. One by one they must sign off, until he’s left with a single girl who does what? Answers the phone and talks to him? Invites him home?

  “Okay,” I type to Ronald, “I can be home in fifteen minutes.” I give him my address, 53 Pickett Crescent, near the intersection of Elgin Mills and Yonge, and I send him a link to the Google Map. “I can’t wait to see you,” he types, and I don’t let myself wonder what he means by the word see.