Both sets of twins became agitated, but in different ways, during the telling of the squeezed-child tale. The identical Booth girls sucked their shared blanket; they emitted a wet humming sound, which in turn upset Jimmy Bacon, who commenced to moan. The agitation of Gordon and Caroline French, the boy-girl twins on either side of Jack, was more physical in nature and came in unexpected bursts of frenzied, seemingly pointless activity. Under their separate blankets, the French twins thumped their heels on their rubber mats, their stiff legs drumming out of sync; as startling as this was, it was more disturbing when they stopped. The French twins stopped kicking so abruptly, it was as if they’d died of a shared disease—in spite of their enforced separation from each other.
The three possible conclusions to Emma Oastler’s squeezed-child story had the kindergartners enthralled. “For three of you,” Emma always said, “your bad day just got worse.” Sudden heel-thumping from the French twins, which was quickly followed by their as-sudden deaths; identical blanket-sucking sounds intermingled with humming from the Booth twins; dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon. “One of you is spending the night with your divorced dad,” Emma went on. “He has just passed out from too much sex.” (Jack hated this part.)
Maureen Yap, a nervous girl whose father was Chinese, once interrupted Emma by asking: “What is too much sex?”
“Nothing you’ll ever have,” Emma answered dismissively.
Another time, when Jack asked Emma the same question, Emma said: “You’ll know soon enough, Jack.”
Jack shuddered under his blanket. He was relying on his flawed understanding of his mom’s conversation in Amsterdam with Saskia and Els. If you looked sexy, Els had said, men thought you could give them good advice. Sex, therefore, was related to advice-giving; like advice, Jack guessed, sex could be good or bad. If the divorced dad in Emma Oastler’s story had passed out from too much sex, Jack suspected this was the worst kind.
“Your dad has had bad girlfriends before,” Emma continued, “but this one is just a kid. A skinny, tough kid,” Emma added. “She’s as tough as a stick, her fists are as hard as stones, and she hates you. You get in her way. She could have even more sex with your dad if you weren’t around. After your dad passes out, she grinds her fists against your temples—you think she’s going to crush your head!”
The French twins were flutter-kicking, as if on cue; more blanket-sucking, humming, and moaning. “Meanwhile,” Emma always said, “one of you has a single mother who’s passed out, too.” (Jack really hated this part.)
“Too much sex again!” Maureen Yap usually cried.
“Bad sex?” Jack sometimes asked.
“A bad boyfriend,” Emma informed the kindergartners. “One of the biggest bad boyfriends in the world. When your mother passes out, he comes and lies on top of you—he covers your face with his bare stomach.”
“How do you breathe?” Grant Porter, a moron, always asked.
“That’s the problem,” Emma usually answered. “Maybe you can’t.” Unprecedented, out-of-sync heel-drumming from the French twins; soggy-blanket noises from the Booth twins; moans, approximating suffocation, from Jimmy Bacon.
“But what about your mother who has a girlfriend?” Emma asked. (Jack hated this part most of all.) “She has bigger breasts than all your mothers. She has harder breasts than all your dads’ youngest girlfriends. She has bionic breasts,” Emma said. “Like they have bones inside them—they’re that big and hard.” The very idea of breasts with bones inside them would, years later, still wake Jack Burns from a sound sleep—not that any of the kindergartners slept a wink during the squeezed-child saga. “Which of these poor kids are you?” Emma asked every time.
“I don’t wanna be anybody!” Maureen Yap predictably cried.
“I especially don’t want to be trying to breathe with the bad boyfriend’s big belly on my face,” Grant Porter usually made a point of saying.
“Not the breasts with bones!” James Turner, another moron, always yelled.
Sometimes Jack mustered the courage to say: “I think I like the tough, skinny girlfriend’s fists of stone the least.” But Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford had already made their selections. With his eyes tightly closed, Jack could nonetheless sense them moving into their chosen positions.
The divorced dad’s skinny, tough girlfriend with the fists of stone—well, that was Wendy Holton. She squeezed your temples between her knees. Her knees were as small and hard as baseballs. She could give Jack a headache in less than a minute—and the view up her skirt, when he dared to look, was disappointingly dark and unclear.
The unthinkable mother’s girlfriend with the bionic breasts, the breasts with bones inside them—that was Charlotte Barford with her melon-size knees. No breasts ever felt like knees—not before there were implants, anyway. As for the view up Charlotte’s skirt, Jack never looked; the imagined consequences of her catching him looking were too intense.
And the mom’s bad boyfriend, the one who spread his bare belly on your face and made you fight for your last breath—that was Emma Oastler, of course. Jack first located her belly button with his nose; he found a little room to breathe there. Once, when he explored her navel with his tongue, Emma said: “Boy, do you ever not know what you’re doing.”
It was only slightly less scary at the actual bat-cave exhibit. While Miss Caroline Wurtz was losing her mind, the grade-three children could at least rest assured that only vampire bats and giant fruit bats might approach them. No divorced dads’ bad girlfriends—no single moms’ bad boyfriends or girlfriends—were hanging out in the bat habitat! Compared to these sexual predators of the recently divorced, what did the kids have to fear from mere bats?
As for those grade-three children who’d not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda’s, they were initially unfrightened by the power failure in some of the mammal displays at the Royal Ontario Museum; they’d had no previous experience in the bat-cave exhibit to be frightened of. But the former kindergartners among them were frightened enough that their terror was infectious.
That Miss Wurtz was also afraid was at first unsurprising—she had a history of coming unglued in the grade-three classroom. However, in the bat-cave exhibit, Miss Wurtz could not call upon The Gray Ghost for help. In the environs of the junior school, Miss Wurtz was routinely rescued by the supernaturally sudden appearances of Mrs. McQuat. Not in the Royal Ontario Museum with Jack and his fellow third graders wailing around her; that they’d instantly closed their eyes further disconcerted Miss Wurtz.
“Open your eyes, children! Don’t go to sleep! Not in here!” Miss Wurtz cried.
Caroline French, with her eyes firmly closed, offered the hysterical teacher some excellent advice: “Don’t startle the fruit bats, Miss Wurtz—they’re only dangerous if they’re startled.”