Holly was the one who’d invited me to one of their parties; I saw her around school, she said “Hi” to me in the hall. She had yellowish-blonde curly hair, a whole mess of it. She wore denim cut-offs so short the pockets stuck out the bottom and flip-flops into October if she could. We got to know each other working at Burgess Fruit Market. Jim, the owner, was a big man, he could easily palm a cantaloupe. He yelled at old ladies who dug through the bushels of apples, accusing them of bruising the fruit. Kids rarely lasted two weeks working there, but Holly and I lasted. We both did salad bar, deli and bakery, and when Jim-bo wasn’t looking we stole every last thing we could, shoving cookies hot from the oven into our mouths, breaking off croissants and putting them in our apron pockets for later. I’d cut pieces of kolbassa from the coil and hand them to her when we passed each other at the back sink. Walking that fine line, watching each other’s backs, made me feel connected to her.
Red did a lot of the talking, and the rest of us just listened. Red had the whole shebang: the hair, the freckles, the temper. She was the real thing. Her brother had spent a year in juvey for something I didn’t know the details of. She had stains on her teeth from smoking and a laugh you couldn’t get away from. When she was thinking, she bit her nails until they bled. When she asked for the car and her mom told her “No” Red called her a whore and told her to shut up right in front of us. We’d just stand there in the front hall awkwardly until Red got her way. I watched her take cigarettes from her mom’s pack, money from her wallet. Red had the car and the stories, and in exchange, she had our undivided attention.
Gerty’s real name was Joanne. I’m not sure how her nickname came about but I knew it had something to do with a Jersey cow, and I knew she hated it. Joanne was always angry, didn’t say much and when she did she’d snap at you. Someone had pointed out she didn’t have ankles and since then she’d worn pants every day. I didn’t find out until I really got to know her, years later, why she was so angry; she told me when she did go home, which wasn’t very often, she would find her mother crawling around on her hands and knees. Joanne would have to pull her up off the floor and get her back in her wheelchair. I still have no idea what her mother suffered from, but I do know Joanne needed us and that’s why we put up with her.
The only thing I knew about Sherry was she slept like a vampire: straight as a board with her arms folded across her chest. I didn’t see her around school because she had dropped out in grade ten. She lived with her boyfriend Boj in Hamilton and was only around on weekends.
In the summer we’d drive up and down Main Street looking for Kenny or Gordo or Tuck, looking for something to do. We were always bored. We’d stand in Red’s driveway and smoke and wait; we’d sit by her pool and smoke and wait. Sometimes, something would happen. That summer, Red had a crush on Tuck; he was with Jen Romyn, but Red didn’t care. Every day we would drive to Subway where he worked; he would make us all a sandwich and we’d eat it there, or take it to go, whatever Red wanted to do. Sometimes we’d be there twice a day.
“What’s happening tonight, Tuck? You having people over?” Red was at the counter, picking out veggies.
“Yeah, sure Red. We’ll get everyone out to butt-fuck Idaho to hang out with my mom. Hey Mrs. Tuck, want some?” He mimicked passing his mom a joint. “That’d be real cool. I’d like that.”
“Well, I had people over last week. What about Kenny, what’s he doing?”
“How am I supposed to know, I’m making sandwiches here.”
And that’s how it went what seemed like every day that summer, and every time on the way back to her house, Red would ask what we thought.
“What should I do, should I just keep talking to him or what? Do you think he likes me? Gerty, are you listening to me?” She’d look at us in the rearview mirror, hound us for answers we didn’t have until Holly would tell her to shut up, we didn’t know. They had been friends the longest, so she had the right.
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“Well, I just want to know what you think.” We’d all fall silent until one of us needed a light or a smoke. |
Holly told me she thought her mom was crazy. The Christmas just past, she’d come home one night to find her lying under the tree looking up into the branches, singing to herself. I lied and told her my mother thought she was Annie Lennox. I knew I was lucky, and that’s what separated me from them. I sat down with my family every night to eat dinner, I washed the dishes, did my homework, went to bed early on weeknights. I earned my parents’ trust while Holly and Gerty and Red had all told their parents to leave them alone. I was on the honour roll; I knew, for me, the whole scene was temporary. For them, it was the only way to live.
It felt like there were twenty, thirty of us who knew each other and hung out and partied together, and the buzz from that kept us going through the school year and into another summer. Nicknames stuck, were shouted across a party with emphasis. Holly P! Shreds! Gertrude! This was important. This particular summer we were at every party, Red would get calls and we’d head off to the beer store, then off to wherever, someone’s house or the quarry, wherever we wouldn’t get burned by the cops. We hung out with Tuck a lot, and Kenny, and all of Kenny’s friends. There were rumours of eight people piled into Red’s car, then ten, then fourteen. Gordo was in the trunk. No, it was Burno in the trunk, Gordo was too tall and gangly. “Whatever,” we said, each of us shrugging when we told the story again to someone who hadn’t been there. “It doesn’t matter.”
The fire flared up huge, our eyes wild with it. We had built it halfway up the escarpment path on a little out-crop over the ravine, the drop twenty feet or so down. We had beers, and the cops hadn’t found us yet. We were all there. I met Mark for the first time; he was the first person I had ever seen slam a beer bottle over his head. He was short and bald, tight as a fist, wound up and crazy. I was scared of him. I’d heard stories of him and his friends messing people up, getting into bar fights. There were rumours that he and his buddies, all in their twenties, took steroids. There were rumours they did coke. Weeks later I would get into his purple Corvette alone and he would take me for a spin, Ozzy so loud on the speaker which was good because I had no idea what to say, I was just glad he liked me enough to take me for a ride in his car. Holly was scared of him too; I could see it in the way she stood, beside him but not too close, laughing and shaking her head. That was the point, being scared.
From behind us I heard Red calling Kenny, looked over and in the dark saw only half of Red’s body stuck up in the ground. She had fallen into a crevice in the path. Kenny went over and hoisted her up, helped her limp over to the fire. She was so wasted it wasn’t until the next day when she woke up she realized how bad it was—she had dislocated her hip and had to get it put back into place. We heard about it for weeks, Red retelling the story over and over, how Kenny had helped her out. She was feeling particularly popular these days and she was not shy about it. She wouldn’t leave Tuck alone, and finally got him into bed. She told us he was hung like a rhino, and she held her hands a foot apart, saying, “I swear to God, it’s fucking huge.”
Since Holly had quit Burgess, Jen Romyn was the only girl there that I knew from school—she worked cash and would come to the back for smoke breaks, we’d talk a bit while I worked. She knew Jeff was screwing around on her, she knew who with. I felt bad for her; I wanted her to know without saying as much that Red had been harassing him for months, and the words “It isn’t just him” came out of my mouth. Jen looked at me, said “huh,” and slid the door open, walked back out onto the floor. I knew I would get called on it at some point but I didn’t know when.
We were driving home from somewhere; Sherry was in the front seat. Red was looking at me every couple of minutes in the rearview mirror.
“I just want to know who would say something to Jen? Why would someone do that? Do you think it was Ken? Would Ken have said something to her? Burno? Why would they say anything?”
I didn’t speak for a long time. Sherry looked out her window, replying, “I have no idea. I have no idea.”
“I did it.” Red looked at me. I tried to hold steady. “I said something to Jen, all I said was ‘It wasn’t just him.’ I didn’t think it was a big deal, she already knew everything.”
“What were you thinking? What the fuck Sheryda. Now I can’t even talk to Jeff, he won’t call me back.” She caught my eye in the rearview.
“I’m sorry.” It was the only thing I could think of to say when she dropped me off at my place. I called her the next day, went over to her house. It was the first time I had ever been over when she was alone. We sat in her room, I smoked and we just sat there saying nothing. At some point she forgave me. Somehow, nothing happened. Jeff and Jen stayed together, but we kept hanging out with him and Kenny. There were no repercussions for anyone.
“If you had pulled me out, as if the whole thing was a teetering Jenga tower built high up, I see now nothing would have changed, it wouldn’t even have wavered. But it mattered to me. I had started high school with a whole other group of friends I abandoned for this group; I’d see my old friends around and they would ignore me. If I tried to talk to them it was awkward. I got a nasty note from one girl who made it pretty clear I had hurt their feelings, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I was bored. I didn’t feel like I belonged with them anymore. I found my way into this group; I was on their periphery, an observer, someone who made them laugh, someone who listened. That Holly had someone to confide in, and Red someone else to make fun of, and Gerty, when she needed it, someone to break down to, that’s what mattered.
Things were shifting. Ten beers a night weren’t enough, twelve weren’t enough. I couldn’t keep up, but I pretended to. We were getting into coke, we would go to bars and do lines off the back of toilets, we’d get so high we’d get kicked out. Red was driving drunk every night, and once when I wasn’t there she got caught, thrown in the drunk tank until she sobered up, charged. Another night after they dropped me off at home, they wanted to keep drinking so they broke into a model home, trashed the place. The cops caught them and charged them all with trespassing. They were going to have to pay for everything they broke. Red said all she got was a mirror out of the deal. I didn’t see Holly all that much anymore, she was with Mark a lot of the time. Mark was getting scarier to be around; he’d be coked out at parties, grinding his teeth, picking fights when Holly wasn’t around, and when she was around he was jealous and suspicious, calling her names; they were breaking up and getting back together almost weekly. She called me one night, crying, said Mark had bought some weed off some bikers from Toronto and it turned out to be shake. He had bought pounds of it, had borrowed money to get it, he was fucked if he didn’t deliver. He was on his way with his buddies to track them down. Holly thought they might have knives, she didn’t know if he was going to live through it. I had no idea what to say. I tried to tell her they wouldn’t find them, they’d be fine. She let me go, and I didn’t hear from her for weeks. I heard through Red they never found the guys; they got stuck with the weed. She also told me there had been another fight, some of Mark’s buddies, in Hamilton. Lee Ellis, a guy we knew from around town, had bitten a part of some guy’s ear off. Things were getting out of hand.
“I applied to university, I completed my OACs. Holly was trying to get the last of her credits, so I saw her every once in a while at school; she said she was laying low these days, having an alright time. I got accepted to UVic, I would be moving across the country in September. We made plans to hook up, hang out. It never happened. We would see each other at parties but didn’t have that much to say to each other. Before I left for Victoria I saw her one night on the other side of Carrie’s, the only bar in town. I knew something was up, she didn’t seem herself. It got down to my end that someone had given her drugs. Mark wasn’t there with her; it looked as if she had come alone. I was on my way over when I watched her fall; she almost hit her head on the footrest on the way down. She was out cold. People around her were trying to pick her up, they were smacking her face and calling her name and she wasn’t coming to. I had no idea how to help, so I stayed back. Someone offered to drop her off at home. I watched them carry her out the door, watched the crowd close in behind her.
When I came home from university in the summer, I’d go to Carrie’s with Red and Gerty and catch up. Red had an apartment she shared with Sherry in town; something bad had happened there but she wouldn’t tell me what it was—it was Holly who called a few days later, said she heard I was in town. She was worried about Mark, she’d been over at Red’s drinking beers, her and Mark were broken up, he was jealous and crazy and didn’t trust her with anyone. He’d showed up at Red’s, wasted, smashed a beer over the stair railing and slit his wrist with the broken bottle, yelling, “This is what you’ve done.” I hadn’t talked to Holly in a year.
My voice was like an empty tin cup when I told her to worry about herself and not Mark, to go see someone. She told me she’d talked to her mom about it. I made her promise she’d get help. She said she’d call again before I left, and that was the last time I heard from her.
The only thing Red would say to me about that night was they had just bought brand new pearl-white carpeting for their place and now it was ruined.
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