“I’m not. Why should I? No. I’ll tell you something, Thomasina Baikie. It’s all right for some people to go around psychologizing, but the rest of us have to live in the real world. Wayne has to live in the real world. I would prefer it if you didn’t go giving him colouring books with half-men, half-women in them. To me that’s interfering. It’s more than interfering.”
“He isn’t like the other boys.”
“It’s interfering in a big way.”
“Can you see it?”
“I don’t believe — no. What…”
“You hope you can’t. He’s not like them at all, Treadway.”
“Who says so? Is — has anyone said a word to him at that school? Has Roland Shiwack’s son said something?”
“I was thinking I might say something.”
“The hell you will.”
“I was thinking I might tell him my version of the way things were at his birth.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because his hair is soft. He has two tiny breast buds. And no Adam’s apple to speak of at all.”
Treadway was taken aback by this. He had seen Wayne’s breast buds the day he had tried to tell his son the facts of life. But he had hoped no one else had noticed. Treadway had to go on his trapline now. He had come here to clue things up, not to open new questions he had no time to answer. He put his glass on Thomasina’s table and walked back out under Orion, who glittered brightly, except for the dying red star that marked the hunter’s left foot.
13
Spin the Bottle
WAYNE HAD GOT USED TO HIS feet peeling. He decided there must be a lot of layers of skin on the bottoms of everyone’s feet, because a layer of his came off every day and it didn’t hurt. It didn’t seem to matter, and he did not mention it to his mother again. Seven layers, eight, ten. The layers must be growing at the same rate at which they are peeling, he reasoned. He monitored the other new thing about his body: the ache in his abdomen. It was like the pulled muscle he once got doing sit-ups in gym, only this was deeper inside and did not hurt as much. He figured he would let this go away on its own along with the peeling, which was the more interesting condition of the two in his mind, so long as his feet did not bleed.
Wally had not come to see Wayne since Treadway destroyed her music. Wayne missed her like crazy and wanted to show her his diagrams of Thomas Telford’s bridge and tell her about his peeling feet. But he did not have the guts to go and get her or tell her he was sorry for what his father had done. He felt it was his fault, and he did not know how to make her forgive him.
By the time school started, Wally Michelin had turned into a stranger to Wayne. She was taller and skinnier. No one but Wayne seemed to remember that from grades one to six she had been strong, brave, and independent. It was as if she were an awkward new girl. She did not possess one article of clothing from the catalogue, and she kept her hair in two ponytails with elastic bands. By the first day of grade seven Donna Palliser was the undisputed queen of the class, and no one remembered the time before Donna, when everyone had loved Wally.
Donna Palliser’s parties had grown more numerous and elaborate each year. At her Hallowe’en party her mother had decorated the house with bats and cobwebs. Donna had come to the door to greet each guest with a plate of shortbread cookies shaped like severed thumbs and fingers with red icing. There was a haunted house on the mantel, with diabolical laughter coming out of it. Donna had Remembrance Day parties, Christmas parties, New Year’s Eve parties, Valentine’s Day parties, Easter parties, and Summer Holiday Eve parties, and if there was a lull between these she had sleepovers for selected girls and pizza parties for both girls and boys. Throughout grades five and six she had these parties and had not invited Wally Michelin, the Groves twins, or Gracie Watts, who continued to wear the same wool sweater every day, and Wayne had not told his father about the parties so had managed to avoid them. But in grade seven Donna Palliser changed her definition of a party, and her new tactics entrapped him.
For the first party of grade seven, which Donna called her Junior High Fete, Donna invited those she usually left out. Wayne saw Donna hand an invitation to Wally Michelin at recess, and he hoped she would not go. Anyone could see Donna had something planned for the unpopular people. He vowed not to go, and threw his invitation in the cafeteria garbage. Gracie Watts saw him do it and came over.
“Donna Palliser told Tweedledum and Tweedledee you’re trying to decide which one of them you want to go out with.” Wally Michelin and Wayne were the only students who did not call the Groves twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
“I’m not going.”
“She told them you want to French kiss both of them and then decide.”
“Fat chance.”
“Donna will tell everyone that proves you’re a fairy.”
“I’m not kissing the twins.”
“French kissing. You should say you can’t pick either of them because you want to go with Wally Michelin.”
“I don’t want to go with anyone.”
“But everyone knows you want to go out with her.”
Wayne felt sick. He loved Wally Michelin the way he loved constellations, or leaves, or king eider ducks.
“Wally Michelin is going to the party. Everyone is. And you have to go with someone or you’ll have to French kiss Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Gracie took an Oh Henry bar out of her lunch bag, started biting the peanuts off it, and left him beside the garbage can.
Donna Palliser’s mother had laid out a cut-glass bowl of Cheezies and a matching punch bowl with cups on hooks. There was a plate of toothpicks stuck with Vienna sausages and bread-and-butter pickles, and there was orange Jell-O made with Carnation milk and shredded coconut. The party was in the rec room. There was a bar, a pool table, and a corner chest bulging with stuffed animals.
The Pallisers’ rec room had a dartboard and a hockey table, the kind where you shift handles to make the players dart around. There was a shelf with a copper Aladdin’s lamp on it, a set of ruby shot glasses, and a scrimshaw hunting horn. The ceiling was stucco with silver flecks. The Pallisers had a beagle, and the beagle blocked the bottom stair leading up to the kitchen. It had an orange rubber ball in its mouth, slimy and bitten to show rubber the colour of the Vienna sausages.
Brent Shiwack and the other boys took turns smoking Rothmans and sticking them out the window. The girls gathered around the punch bowl. Donna had put rum in it. The bar had Tia Maria, Baileys Irish Cream, crème de menthe, and some almond liqueur no one had ever opened, that Donna said was made by monks. Donna had floated a tub of pink ice cream in the punch. The boys argued about who was better: Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix or CCR. Wayne was on Pink Floyd’s side, but that was not what he listened to at home. He listened to “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, and “Song Without Words” by Tchaikovsky, and late-night radio.
There was a downstairs toilet, a tiny cubicle with a bolt on its door, and that was where you went for spin the bottle if the bottle pointed at you or if you had spun it. Donna announced it was time for Casey Kasem’s top forty, and “The Tide Is High” came on, and all the girls sang in falsetto with Donna doing the harmony. Carol Rich went in the cubicle with Archie Broomfield and they came out in fifteen seconds. Bruce McLean went in with Donna, and Mark Thevenet started counting on his second hand.
“Whoa,” he said as they came out. Donna’s hair was all over her face and their heads dipped as if ducking a shower of confetti. “You guys took six minutes!”
The bottle was an old wine bottle with Hungarian writing on it, and it knew where to point. It put Chad White in the cubicle with Ashley Chalk, and it pointed at couples as if it had intelligence. It did not put a popular girl with an unpopular boy, and it never put a popular boy with a girl who wasn’t pretty. It did not point at Wayne or the Groves twins or Wally Michelin or Gracie Watts at all for a long time. Gracie had new clothes on tonight, a pair of pants no one had seen. They were elephant pants like the popular girls wore, but Gracie did not look like a popular girl in them. She looked like an unpopular girl in a popular girl’s pants. She looked as if she didn’t own them. The rest of her was the same as usuaclass="underline" bony wrists and a nylon cardigan and a ten-karat gold signet ring. The other girls wore lip gloss and scarves and earrings. Ashley Chalk had a new silk headband every day; Gracie Watts wore elastic bands that broke her hair. Wayne suddenly knew this was who the bottle would choose for him, and it did. Donna Palliser might have planned something for him and the Groves twins, but the bottle had Gracie Watts in mind. The bottle cared about no one’s plan but its own. Wayne was prepared to go in the cubicle with Gracie Watts if he had to. He did not have to kiss her.