Maybe, I said. You never know. She burst out of the change room, all in white, all Hi ho, Silver, away! God, you scared me, I said.
What do you think? she asked. She spun around and did a few jumping jacks. She teetered around like Chaplin, twirling an imaginary cane.
You just…I don’t know…You’re beautiful, though. Definitely. Wow!
Does it totally work? she asked.
Yeah! I said. What do you call that colour? Vanilla?
Eggshell, she said.
So we left the store with Thebes wearing a little white double-breasted suit jacket and trousers, shirt, vest and tie.
You look like Hervé Villechaize, or I don’t know…Tom Wolfe, I told her.
Who’s that? she said.
Writer guy, I said.
Brother to Virginia?
No.
Have you read her diaries? she asked.
No.
Min has, she said.
That didn’t surprise me. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anna Karenina…Min’s girl guide to the universe of pain. Her library of loss. She was well read.
Thebes also bought some eggshell tank tops and eggshell terry cloth shorts and eggshell knee socks and eggshell Converse Chucks.
Then we went to find Logan at the basketball court. We got lost on the way, drove around in circles, and then finally remembered the name of the street it was on. When we got there Logan was talking to some cops. Not the same cops, according to Thebes, that had told us we couldn’t sleep in the parking lot.
I jumped out of the van and went over there and asked them what was up. Logan was obviously in pain and the cops pointed at his wrist.
It’s broken, they said. He won’t tell us how it happened. His wrist dangled grotesquely from his arm and the cops said he’d have to get it plastered.
God, Logan, I said, are you okay?
Yeah, yeah, said Logan. His eyes were watering. Turned out that Logan had been hustling some of the kids at the court with his standard ten-for-eleven scam, pretending to suck at first to lure them in and make them put their money on the table.
How’d you break your wrist? I asked him. He shrugged. Whoever broke his wrist must have threatened him with something worse if he told anyone. Or, he broke it himself on another guy’s face and wouldn’t admit it. There was nobody else around.
The cops said if we left town immediately after he got a cast put on that thing, they wouldn’t press any charges.
But what charges would you press? I asked. I mean, they’re just kids, right? Playing?
Mischief, said one of the cops.
Yeah, but, what do you mean, mischief? I mean—
We don’t want any trouble, said one of them.
Yeah, well, I understand that, I hate trouble too, but I mean—
We’re actually trying to give you a break, here, said one of the cops. Are you always this mouthy?
I don’t think I’m being mouthy, I said. I’m just trying to figure this out. I want some information. Like, what he’d actually be charged with…I’m just not clear on the nature of these so-called charges. You know?
The cops were very calm and actually quite reasonable. It was making me nuts. I wanted a fight too. I wanted to break my wrist on a stranger’s head and scam some Moabites and get run out of town for being better at something than the other kids.
Okay, listen, said one of the cops. We’re talking Fraud. We’re talking Extortion. We’re talking Illegal Gambling.
No, c’mon, gimme a break, you are not talking about those things, dude, I said. He’s fifteen freaking years old! It’s a stupid basketball game! What do you mean, extortion? That is so ridiculous. Do you make this shit up or what? What do you do, just drive around town busting kids for being kids? Thebes was tugging on my shirt and Logan was staring at me with a familiar combination of pain and pity, those cobalt eyes going off like alarms way deep in his hoodie. I reminded myself of my mother shorting out on everyone after my father drowned saving our lives.
The cops were quiet. They folded their arms and cocked their heads and looked at me.
Why don’t the three of you just leave, ma’am, said one of them, not unkindly. He put his hand out like, here’s the way, go, we’re letting you off. Thebes and Logan started walking back to the van. I began to cry, stupidly. I asked them where the hospital was and they gave me directions and wished me well. They said Logan should join an after-school basketball program instead of hustling other kids.
Well, yeah, but he’s been expelled, I said.
They understood. It happened. Boys. You know. One of them shook my hand empathetically and said he had a houseful of teenage boys waiting for him when he got off his shift.
Still got the green? asked Thebes when we were all back in the van.
Logan said no, the other guys had rolled him and taken his cash and his knife and his ball. Wicked outfit, T., he added.
At the hospital he got a cast and a lecture and a tetanus shot because he’d also cut his hand grabbing onto the rusty hoop after the dopest dunk, man, and the bill was seventy million bucks, or, I’m not sure, four hundred and ninety billion, and would be sent to Marc Babin at my old address in Paris. It was the only official address I had on my ID.
Coolio, said Thebes, let’s roll. We got back into the van and she dove into the back seat, spelunking through her art supplies until she found her favourite indelible markers and pleading with Logan to let her beautify his cast.
There’d been a girl outside the hospital, smoking, and I’d joined her for a minute while Logan was getting his cast and Thebes was chatting with an orderly who was also dressed in white.
I didn’t know exactly, but I think the smoking girl’s friend had just OD’ed. The girl had leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She’d looked so tired, so sad and messed up.
What do you think the chances are of everything being okay? she said. I told her I didn’t know. I had no idea. Her guess was as good as mine. It was like I was having a conversation with myself and hadn’t worried so much about being polite and hopeful because it was only me.
Now, as we were heading out of town, I felt bad. I had this urge to go back and find her and say something more consoling. I thought about what that might be. I remembered Min after one of her unsuccessful suicide attempts waking up in the hospital, surrounded by me and our parents, and the only thing she said was, rats, dark ages. When she came home, our mother offered to give her a haircut but halfway through Min decided she hated having scissors snipping at her neck and ears and asked our mother to stop. For three months she had a bob that was six inches shorter on one side and even when she went back to school and kids made fun of her she pretended not to care.
Logan said he was going to do some work on his Robert Goulet project, just in case they ever let him back into his school. He didn’t want to be so far behind that he’d be one of those guys, one of those grown men, with a beard and children and two ex-wives, crammed into a too-small desk trying to get his grade twelve.
We had to pick a Western Canadian historical figure, he said. He said he was writing a diary in Robert Goulet’s voice, about his childhood and rise to fame. Did you know, he said, that when Robert Goulet was five years old, his family took a burnt cork and covered his face in “blackface” and watched him perform?
Thebes was drawing on Logan’s cast. She drew a heart with his name and Deborah Solomon’s in it. He made her change it.
She looked up something in her dictionary. I know, she said. I’ll draw an ulna. She drew an ulna along the cast, and the other bone and joint parts of his arm and wrist and hand. Then she coloured it black all around that, so the white bony parts stood out and it looked pretty good, quite skeletal. She asked Logan if she could write two very short poems entitled “The Sunset” and “The Room” on the other side of his cast and he said yeah.