The Journey Prize Stories 27 Read online

  CHARLOTTE BONDY

  RENAUDE

  Mischa and I met on the second day of grade nine when our French teacher mistook him for a girl because of his long dark hair and cheekbones like Kate Moss. Everyone giggled and Mischa flushed red down to his shirt collar. After class I found him in the hall and told him I was jealous of his curls. I also told him this story about when I was twelve and had a terrible mushroom cut. My mom took me to the Gap to buy a pair of velvet pants. The salesperson kept trying to steer us to the men’s section, away from all the leggings, until my frazzled mother eventually pointed at me and yelled, “She’s a girl!” After I told him this, Mischa gave me his special look, the one where his eyes squeeze shut like a smiling Buddha. Then he asked if I wanted to eat lunch with him and that was that.

  Mischa and his mum live on the second floor of an old row house on Parliament. When I’m over there everything feels exotic. The smell of Mischa’s mother’s cigarettes sits heavily in the air. There are built-in bookshelves and coloured glass bottles of foreign liquor. Mischa’s mother sometimes speaks to him in Russian and her words sound livid and impassioned. When I ask him to translate afterwards, it’s usually something mundane, like asking him to take out the recycling or clean out the litter box. I love the way she pronounces my name. Claw-ra, drawing it out like it’s something important and precious.

  The two of them moved here from Moscow when Mischa was nine, and she is working on her doctoral dissertation, something complicated to do with physics. His dad was a radical Russian poet and left when Mischa was still a baby. His mum hasn’t dated anyone since. She’s always in the lab, working. When she’s out, Mischa and I pretend that the apartment is our own. We make fancy devilled eggs and drink loose-leaf tea in china cups. Or we put on a classical record and waltz around the tiny kitchen, taking turns to lead. Occasionally at night when we’re bored or stoned we watch porn on the laptop in Mischa’s bedroom. Mischa watches porn the same way he watches nature documentaries, his head angled to the side, a mixture of confusion and fascination settling over his face.

  Luckily, my parents let us have sleepovers a lot. We like to stay up until the sun rises, playing Do, Marry, Die and dreaming about running away to Amsterdam to live on a houseboat. Mischa has just discovered French cinema, as he calls it. He watches Breathless basically on a loop. He says it makes him nostalgic for something he’s never experienced. He’s always saying that kind of stuff and I’m always rolling my eyes at him. Mischa’s mother says he’s an old soul. Sometimes, in the mornings, she makes us coffee in her French press, pushing the top down slowly with the flat of her palm.

  My seventeenth birthday falls on the weekend before we start our last year of high school. It’s the end of a summer in which basically nothing has happened. Mischa and I started hanging out at this 24-hour Lebanese diner called The Lip. It’s actually called the Tulip but the t and the u have been burnt out for as long as I remember. If you order cold tea, they bring you a giant white teapot filled with Labatt 50. The owners have a son named Carl who works the night shift and silk screens his own T-shirts that say lewd things in Arabic. Carl’s a bodybuilder and he’s always sitting in a booth, loudly eating a cut of red meat, with his girlfriend, who wears white denim and has nodes on her vocal cords. Carl loves Mischa and me. Calls us his young thugs and even gave us one of his T-shirts for free. It was purple with gold writing that apparently spelled out the words Bitch-Tit.

  For my birthday, Mischa takes me to a gay bar on Church Street with the fake IDs we had made in a basement downtown which say we’re twenty-year-olds from Michigan. But when we get to the door I’m too nervous, so instead we go sit on the swings at Riverdale Park. You can see the whole skyline spread out in front of you and pretend you’re sitting in a diorama of a city. The grid of condos and office buildings look like you could pluck them up and put them in your mouth. We decide to eat some mushrooms that Mischa bought from a white guy with dreadlocks at school, but nothing happens except stomach cramps.

  “The CN Tower looks like a dick,” Mischa concludes, and we hop off the swings onto the grass below, rolling down the hill. Mischa does a cartwheel at the bottom and his shirt rides up, exposing a chest that’s so skinny it looks concave.

  “Eat a fucking cheeseburger, Misch,” I call out to him. And he comes over to tackle me on the grass. Pretends to take a bite out of my forearm. He walks me home and, standing on my front porch, he digs around in his pocket and produces a flat rock. I look at it closer and it’s a fossil, the shape of a small butterfly encrusted on the cool stone.

  “It’s a trilobite,” Mischa says. “I found it when Mum and I went up to the Bruce Peninsula last month.” He brushes the face of the rock with his thumb. “It’s Paleozoic. Old school. Happy birthday, Clara.”

  I hold him tightly for a long time, listening to the cicadas pulse underneath the porch light.

  On Monday, the first day of school, a girl shows up twenty minutes late to our Canadian history homeroom. Dark bangs in her eyes. Wearing a baseball shirt and Doc Martens, a black bear tattooed on her forearm. Mischa and I exchange a significant glance as the teacher explains that she’s a transfer student from Montreal. Her name is Renaude. The teacher mispronounces it, and Renaude softly corrects her, then shrugs. At lunch we go to the usual spot by the park. I pick up two cans of club soda from the Korean grocer and we sit on top of the picnic table, drinking them while Mischa rolls a joint. I curl one of his brown locks around my index finger and then let it go, watching it re-coil itself. We pretend to make fun of Renaude.

  “She’s trying too hard,” I say, and Mischa nods with his eyes closed, sparking the joint.

  He exhales and takes a sip from the can. “This stuff tastes like static-y sweaters,” he says. “And yeah. Maybe she’s just like, a pure aesthetic object.”

  I laugh, but I can tell that we’re both already a little bit in love with her.

  It only takes two days of thoughtful observation before we figure out how to intercept Renaude at lunch. She goes to a deli down the road from school. We wait for a few minutes before walking in one lunch hour to find her sitting in one of the cracked vinyl booths, drinking coffee and reading Lolita. I raise my eyebrows at Mischa and he smiles.

  We ask if we can sit with her, and she nods and gestures toward the other side of the booth. We sidle in and order grilled cheese sandwiches. Renaude gets a side order of kosher dills, and we ask her questions about her life. She speaks in this frank, unapologetic way, gesturing a lot with her hands. Between her raspy smoker’s voice and Québécois accent, all her words have this fiery quality, curling at the ends like slow-burning paper. She tells us about how her mother died six months ago. Afterwards, her father needed to get away. He got a job here and sold their house in Mile End.

  “And he’s already dating someone new. A Japanese painter with tiny tits.” She bites the skin around her thumbnail.

  We ask her if she likes it here, and she looks up at the ceiling for a few minutes. “No.”

  Before class we go behind the diner to smoke. Afterwards, Renaude re-applies her red lipstick in a way that makes my lower intestines quiver. She looks up at us.

  “So. Are you guys together or what?” Mischa and I look at each other.

  “Well, Clara likes girls,” he says, pointing a thumb in my direction.

  “And Mischa likes girls,” I say, pointing a thumb at him. Renaude smiles at this and nods, twisting the lipstick back into its tube.

  That night I go over to Mischa’s. After watching Fight Club for like the sixth time, he throws a sock at my head and says: “Okay. You gotta fuck one, marry one, kill one: Tyler Durden, Taylor Swift, and Renaude.”

  “I’d fuck Renaude, marry Tyler Durden, and kill Taylor Swift. Easy.”

  Mischa looks at me and curls a strand of hair behind his ear. “I love you, Clara.”

  I give his clammy hand a squeeze.

  On Friday night, Renaude invites us over to her father’s house. He and his girlfriend
are supposedly out at a dinner party. They live in an old chewing gum factory that’s been converted into lofts. It’s a cavernous, raw space. A lot of stuff is still in boxes and a gigantic projector screen takes up an entire wall. Renaude’s bed is separated from the rest of the room by one of those flimsy Japanese dividers. She’s wearing a flapper dress and a porkpie hat and cracks open a bottle of her dad’s Prosecco as soon as we walk in the door. I feel immediately homesick for the soft domestic clutter of my own home, where my mum and dad chop onions for soup while listening to the CBC.

  After the Prosecco, Renaude pours us fingers of vodka from a bottle in the freezer and starts sifting through some records that are stacked in a milk crate beside a turntable in the corner. She pulls out a copy of Histoire de Melody Nelson.

  “I love Serge Gainsbourg. He’s so sexy.” She droops her eyelids and puffs out her bottom lip, pulling a cigarette out of her pack.

  “Tu t’appelles comment?” she whispers huskily, brushing the edge of my jaw with her fingers. Then she laughs and carefully lowers the record onto the turntable. She does a strange-looking interpretive dance to the music as Mischa and I hover clumsily around her.

  We smoke cigarettes on the fire escape, their lit tips dangling between the wrought iron rails. Renaude sits in the middle of us. An arm slung across each of our shoulders. There’s a moon and I’m about to ask whether anyone knows if it’s waxing or waning when I hear the sound of the front door being unlocked.

  It must be Renaude’s dad and his girlfriend, home early. Their voices are raucous, speaking half in French and half in English. Suddenly, Renaude’s dad calls out her name and she puts her finger to her lips, glaring at Mischa and me as though she thought we were about to give her away. We hear her dad’s girlfriend say, “Thank God” loudly, and then the sound of the freezer being opened, ice clinking into glasses. High-pitched laughter and singing and then the soft, wet sound of two people kissing. I look over at Renaude with alarm, hoping she will offer some kind of way out, but her face is stoic. At one point her dad says, “We have to hurry, I don’t know when she’s coming home.” It’s the first time I’ve heard people have sex in real life and it doesn’t sound nearly as loud or as showy as it does in the porn that Mischa and I watch. In fact, there are a lot of uncomfortable sounds, like boxers during a particularly brutal round. At the very end, Renaude’s dad sounds almost whimpery and I hunch my shoulders up around my ears, but then all of a sudden it’s over.

  When I look over at Renaude, she has this creepy half-smile on her face, her fists clenched into white knuckle balls. The alcohol has burned through me and I’m left with a dull throbbing in my left temple. I want to go home to bed. Renaude suddenly points down, to where a long black ladder unhooks and connects the fire escape to the ground below. Mischa and I look at each other, and nod. He begins shimmying down the side of the ladder, and I wonder whether Renaude is going to follow us, but when I look back to the grated platform she’s still sitting there, knees pulled into her chest, tapping a cigarette out of her pack.

  We catch the Dundas streetcar and walk the four blocks to my house. My mum is waiting up for me. I can see her reading the paper on the living room couch, with Oscar curled up on her stomach. When we walk through the door she stands up to give us both a big hug and I squeeze her back for much longer than usual. She’s wearing a nightgown with a pattern of moose wearing cross-country skis trotting across it.

  “How was the movie?” she asks, stroking my hair. Mischa shrugs. “Not great.”

  We make hot chocolate and take it downstairs to the basement, where we lie side by side on the futon. Mischa flicks on the television. A re-run of Trading Spaces. He lies back down, and I curl my body around the soft parabola of his spine, thinking of how few ways there are for bodies to fit together.

  GEORGIA WILDER

  COCOA DIVINE AND THE LIGHTNING POLICE

  It is 1979 and the silkscreen letters on my DISCO SUCKS T-shirt are all cracked and falling off, so it just says I CO UCK. Better not be too much of a butch rocker chick here anyhow with those girly het-girls in strappy sandals and spandex dresses and everyone a little on edge from doing poppers all night. Cocoa Cherry Divine, aka Mon Cherie, the Divine Cocoa Puff, steps off the stage and begins to circulate through the crowd. She hugs Billy from behind, shedding glitter on his sweaty black satin shirt. “You be wantin’ a cock up yo’ ass and tits aflappin’ on yo’ back, honey.” Her long green nails caress his hair. Billy’s wasted: “You need permission from my girlfriend here first,” he says to Cocoa, winking at me. Katrina’s is a mixed bar—a lot of David Bowie groupies with bi-curious chic: Toronto’s provincial outpost of the Studio 54 avantgarde. I’m sipping a tequila sunrise, chewing the ice cubes to stave off drunkenness. I look into the glass as the coloured layers dance into one orangish liquid cloud. Staring beyond the bevelled edge of the tumbler, I can see the reflection of my eye swimming toward the half-submerged cherry garnish. Alcohol tastes like shit but ordering ginger ale is the damn stupidest way for a juvie to get blown off the scene. You’ve got to tip well but not so much as to seem like a bribe. Better to be really nonchalant, like you’ve got some citified ennui.

  Jacques weaves through the crowded dance floor hefting a tray of drinks over his head. He works out at Gold’s Gym on Yonge; he keeps his arm slightly bent under the weight of the tray to show off his muscles. Even his forearms have little bulges, like Popeye’s. Angelo swaggers over, gold chains snaking through his bushy chest hair. His shirt is unbuttoned to the waist. “My girlfriend thinks you’re cute,” he slurs, handing a fiver to Jacques. “Merci, merci beaucoup, ooohlala,” says Jacques, sizing up the breeder and pretending not to speak English. Jacques tucks the fin into his jock strap and blows Angelo a kiss. He smacks Cocoa’s ass on his way back to the bar. “Cochon!” she exclaims in mock outrage.

  Angelo sulks back to his girly-girl with the Farrah Fawcett hairdo; her kohl eyeliner has smudged into a bruised boxer kind of look. Jacques winks back at Cocoa, his amour. Angelo and boxer girl start necking to give them a show. He pulls her onto the dance floor and feels her up to the music; then he stops suddenly and points to the ceiling. I look up to see what he’s pointing at and the mirror ball makes me dizzy. Then I realize he’s trying to strike that John Travolta pose and the Bee Gees are singing “Night Fever,” their creepy falsetto voices whining mosquito-like against the pneumatic backbeat. I hate the Bee Gees. I hate their saccharine harmonies and their blow-dried hair and their pretence of wholesomeness: the Brothers Glib. Give me synthesizers that pound like electronic jackhammers, not polyester snare drums. It’s the deceit that gets to me.

  I stare up at Cocoa just trying to look bored. “Billy is an asshole, saying I’m his girl,” I say. I reach over to her shimmering fingers, where her cigarette is idle. I bring her hand to my lips and I take a long haul off her smoke before I say anything. “Fuck him, Cocoa. I’m nobody’s girlfriend and I would pay you to screw him up the ass.” She looks down at me with a raised eyebrow. I realize that she must be nearly as old as my mom: thirty-five, at least—she’s the mom and dad I really want, all rolled into one tall, black drag queen with a penetrating eye. She snaps out of her vernacular: “I am not some common whore, you know!” I’ve fucked it up. She gazes down into my pupils and takes back the last drag of her smoke. She says something about being a true libertine, like it’s got to have rules. I’ll think about it later. I’m too fuzzy now. I suck in my cheeks and bite down on the insides of my mouth. I taste a little blood, but I have to bite harder to feel any pain, trying to find a way to shake off this tequila buzz. “Coffee,” I think, and the next thing I know I’m at work.

  I’m training Stacey-Jane. “Just be sure there’s a new paper filter in there before you open the bag. Just dump it in—that’s right, the whole bag. Remember, if you push the button without putting in coffee, you just get a pot of hot water. If you don’t put in the paper filter, the grinds clog the hole and boiling water spills all over—like that mess
we just cleaned up.” We scalded our fingers trying to stanch the flow of boiling water and coffee grinds that flooded the counter, and we’ve dumped a pot that looked like a giant’s urine sample because Stacey-Jane pressed the hot water button without changing the used filter. Cocoa has dropped by for a coffee. I can feel her waiting for her caffeine fix, captive attendant to the slowly brewing pot. I gently touch Stacey-Jane on the shoulder: a reassuring pat, a tiny feel of her soft arm. I go a little further, Cocoa’s gaze daring me from behind. I give Stacey-Jane a pals-y shoulder squeeze, brushing my fingers through her hair as if by accident.

  Stacey-Jane is a Roman Catholic girl from Saskatoon. She’s sweet and pure and perky and so supremely gullible that even the concept of religious hypocrisy is far beyond her grasp. Her honey-brown hair curls a bit at the shoulders. She has big brown eyes and full lips and a slight gap between her front teeth. I love saying “Stacey-Jane”—the long assonant A’s feel delicious in my mouth. Whenever I suspect that someone might suss me out as a naive country girl, I just sidle up to Stacey-Jane’s farm-fresh face and feel like a kick-ass urban butch intellectual. She makes me feel canny: not just by comparison, but there’s something genuine about her aura that helps me think before I open my mouth. She is so completely without artifice that she’s sexy, and the air kind of tingles around her.