At the Rosseter Road entrance, where Peewee stopped the Town Car, the grade-six girls struck Jack as particularly secretive yet unrestrained. At eleven or twelve, girls think they look awful. They have ceased being children, at least in their estimation, but they have not yet developed into the young women they will become. At that age, there are great differences among them: some have begun to look and move like young women, others have boys’ bodies and move as if they were shy young men.
Not Emma Oastler, who was twelve going on eighteen. When she opened the car door for Jack, he mistook the faintest trace of a mustache on her upper lip for perspiration. The hair on her strong, tanned arms had turned blond in the summer sun, and her thick, dark-brown braid fell over her shoulder and framed one side of her almost-pretty face. The weight of her braid, which reached to her navel, served to separate and define her budding breasts. Maybe a quarter of the grade-six girls had noticeable breasts.
When Jack got out of the limo and stood next to Emma, he came up to her waist. “Don’t trip on your necktie, honey pie,” Emma said. The boy’s tie hung down to his knees, but until Emma warned him, he hadn’t considered the danger of tripping on it. And Jack’s gray Bermuda shorts, which he’d outgrown, were too short to be “proper”—or so Mrs. Wicksteed had observed. (Unlike the girls, the boys wore short socks.)
Emma roughly lifted Jack’s chin in her hand. “Let’s have a look at those eyelashes, baby cakes—oh, my God!” she exclaimed.
“What?”
“I see trouble ahead,” Emma Oastler said. Searching her face, Jack saw trouble ahead, too. He also realized his earlier mistake—the mustache. Up close, there was no way you could confuse the soft-looking fuzz on Emma’s upper lip with beads of perspiration. At five, Jack didn’t know that young women were sensitive about having mustaches. It looked like a neat thing to have; naturally, he wanted to touch it.
If your first day of school, like your first tattoo, is a pilgrim experience—well, here was Jack’s. And touching Emma Oastler’s mustache would certainly prove to be character-forming. “What’s your name?” Emma asked, bending closer.
“Jack.”
“Jack what?”
For an agonizing moment, her furbearing lip made him forget his last name. But more than her mustache made him hesitate. He had been christened Jack Stronach. His father had abandoned him, without marrying his mother; Alice saw no reason for either of them to bear William’s name. But Mrs. Wicksteed disagreed. While Alice made a point of not being Mrs. Burns, Mrs. Wicksteed believed that no child should suffer from illegitimacy; at her instigation, Jack’s name was legally changed, making him “legitimate” in name only. Furthermore, Mrs. Wicksteed was an assimilationist; in the Old Girl’s view, a Jack Burns would be more easily assimilated into Canadian culture than a Jack Stronach. No doubt she thought she was doing the boy a favor.
But Jack’s hesitation to tell Emma Oastler his last name had attracted the attention of a teacher—the one they called The Gray Ghost. Mrs. McQuat was a spectral presence. She’d mastered the art of the sudden appearance; no one ever saw her coming. In her previous life, she may have been a dead person. What else could explain the chill that accompanied her? Even her breath was cold.
“What have we here?” Mrs. McQuat asked.
“Jack somebody,” Emma Oastler replied. “He forgot the rest of his name.”
“I’m sure you can inspire him to remember it, Emma,” Mrs. McQuat said.
Although The Gray Ghost was not Asian, her eyes were forcibly slanted by how tightly her hair had been pulled back and knotted into a steel-gray bun. Her thin lips looked sealed in contrast to Emma’s, which were usually parted. Emma’s mouth was as open as a flower, and on her upper lip, her mustache was as fine as powder—like a dusting of pollen on a petal.
Jack tried to hold back his hand, his right index finger in particular. As quickly as Mrs. McQuat had appeared, she’d disappeared—or else Jack had closed his eyes, in an effort to stop himself from touching Emma’s mustache, and he’d missed The Gray Ghost’s departure.
“Think, Jack.” Emma Oastler’s breath was as warm as Mrs. McQuat’s was cold. “Your full name—you can do it.”
“Jack Burns,” the boy managed to whisper.
Was it his name or his finger that surprised her? Maybe both. The simultaneity of saying his name at the exact same moment he ran his index finger over her downy upper lip was completely unplanned. The incredible softness of her lip made him whisper: “What’s your name?”
She seized his index finger and bent it backward. He fell to his knees and cried out in pain. The Gray Ghost made another of her signature sudden appearances. “I said inspire him, Emma—not hurt him,” Mrs. McQuat admonished.
“Emma what?” Jack asked the big girl, who was breaking his finger.
“Emma Oastler,” she said, giving his finger an extra twist before she let it go. “And don’t you forget it.”
Forgetting Emma or her name would be impossible. Even the pain she caused him seemed natural—as if Jack had been born to serve her, or she’d been born to lead him. Mrs. McQuat may have recognized this in Jack’s pained expression. He would realize only later that The Gray Ghost had undoubtedly been at St. Hilda’s when Jack’s father was sleeping with a girl in grade eleven and impregnating a girl in grade thirteen. Why else would she have asked, “Aren’t you William Burns’s boy?”
That rekindled Emma Oastler’s interest in Jack’s eyelashes, in a hurry. “Then you’re the tattoo lady’s kid!” Emma exclaimed.
“Yes,” Jack said. (And to think he had worried that no one would know him!)
Another teacher was closely observing the new arrivals, and Jack recognized her perfect voice as if he’d heard it every night in his dreams—Miss Caroline Wurtz, who had cured his mother of her Scottish accent. Not only did she excel in enunciation and diction, but the pitch of her voice would have been recognizable anywhere—especially in Jack’s dreams. In Edmonton, where she was from, Miss Wurtz would have been considered beautiful—without qualification. In a more international city, like Toronto, her fragile prettiness was the perishable kind. (More likely, she may have suffered some disappointment in her personal life—an illusory love, or an encounter that had passed too quickly.)
“Please give my regards to your mom, Jack,” Miss Wurtz said.
“Yes, thank you—I will,” the boy replied.
“The tattoo lady has a limo?” Emma asked.
“That is Mrs. Wicksteed’s car and driver, Emma,” Miss Wurtz said.
Once again, The Gray Ghost was gone—Mrs. McQuat had simply disappeared. Jack was aware of Emma’s guiding hand on his shoulder, and of his jaw brushing her hip. She bent over him and whispered in his ear; what she said was not for Miss Wurtz to hear: “It must be nice for your mom and you, baby cakes.” Jack thought she meant the Lincoln Town Car or Peewee, but Mrs. Wicksteed’s patronage of “the tattoo lady” and her bastard son was a story that had gained admittance to St. Hilda’s before Jack entered kindergarten. Emma Oastler was referring to Mrs. Wicksteed’s broader role as their patroness. The boy also misunderstood what Emma said next: “Way to go, Jack. Not everyone is lucky enough to be a rent-free boarder.”