… colours,” she said. “Marcia has such a good sense of colour. There’s something about them that’s so perfect … so real … in a way … but not real. So … imperfect …”
“Imperfect?”
“Yes, Jim. Imperfect.”
“Oh.”
“Imperfect,” she whispered to herself, and stood there, neck hunched, chin up, knees locked, small belly pushing against her floral-patterned button-down blouse, gazing deeply into the watercolour as if she were trying to find Waldo, until I asked her — and this was an honest inquiry — how come she didn’t hang the picture in her room if she liked it so much.
My sister huffed loudly and turned to me. Her face was long, and she had a small, squishy nose like my father’s, a bum chin, tiny eyes, straight brown hair with blond streaks bunched together at the back of her head with a see-through plastic clip. She gazed at me in that I-know-something-you-don’t way she had of making her chin wrinkle and her upper lip touch her nostrils. Instead of answering my question, she turned back to the watercolour, stared at it silently for a few moments, then, still looking at the picture, told me that Marcia had spent the summer sleeping on the uneven giant-cockroach-ridden dirt floor of a thatched hut in a small, impoverished West African village helping to build a library with a youth organization, and she wished she had done something interesting like that with her summer, something meaningful, something challenging, something … altruistic. Altruistic. Did I know what that word meant?
“No,” I said, and instead of telling me what that word meant, Amanda scratched the back of her neck, made a face as if she’d just taken a sip of rotten milk, and told me how much it sucked being stuck in nothing-to-do Toronto all summer working as a stupid lifeguard at stupid Sunnyside Pool, and how she hated the guy who worked with her, just hated him. He was this annoying high-school kid who called himself G-Bone, and he was cocky and talked as if he was black even though he was skinny and white and was so ignorant about everything, so affected, so uninformed, so … high school. And it was a stupid idea to take the job, and when she thinks about it the only real reason why she worked here all summer was because she felt as if she had to be around the house, that it wasn’t fair for her to be away all the time, the way our father was so … old. Seventy-one. Could I believe Dad was seventy-one?
“I guess,” I said.
“He was sixteen at the end of World War II.”
“I know.”
“He walks with a cane.”
“I know.”
“It’s hard for him to get to the second floor sometimes.”
“I know.”
“He has dentures.”
“I know,” I said.
Amanda smiled at me in an older-sister-kind-of-way, cocking her head a little, peering at me as if I were still an infant, and told me again how miserable it was being stuck in Toronto, especially knowing there was sooo much to see in this world, soooo much to do, sooooo much to learn, soooooo many interesting people to meet, and how wonderful it would be to travel around Europe or South America or Asia for a year, and her and Marcia were planning to go on some kind of trip after they graduated but that was still a long way away and she didn’t want to start thinking too far ahead because you never knew how things were going to turn out, and I should always remember that, that you never knew how things were going to turn out.
“You don’t?”
“No,” she said, then turned back to the watercolour, made a face as if somebody were shining a flashlight in her eyes, and said that living in Kingston last year, being independent, going to university — all of that was a really good experience. She couldn’t wait to leave tomorrow and move into the five-room apartment she’d found with Marcia and this other girl named Deborah who lived on her dorm floor during first year. Deb was from Ottawa and was really funny, said the most random things, and the three of them got along really well. They were all pretty much like twins, triplets, really, and she knew she’d already told me about Deb a hundred times. It was just that she was really excited for everything, especially her courses. They all looked super-interesting and stimulating, and the professors all seemed sooooo smart … and one of them was really young, still in his twenties, she thought.
“What courses you take?” I asked.
“Mostly soshe.”
“Soshe?”
“Sociology, Jim.”
“Oh,” I said.
Amanda walked to the fridge, opened the door, slouched down, and peered inside. Her grey sweatpants were riding low, and you could see the white elastic on her underwear pressing against the chubby pale skin where her back began, a few inches below where her blouse cut.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s asleep.”
“Oh.”
Amanda bent down farther, scanning the bottom shelves, and her sweatpants slid lower on her hips, making more of her underwear visible. Baby blue. Cotton.
“I gotta go then,” I said.
She turned around, let the fridge door swing shut. “You’re going?”
“Yeah, I gotta go … with Oleg. Play some ball in the alley.”
“Well, okay, Jim.” She walked toward me. “My bus leaves early tomorrow morning, so I probably won’t see you for a while. You’ll come visit me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jim,” she gushed, and gave me a quick, tight hug, pulling my head into her bosom, then pushing it away.
Her blouse smelled like baby powder. Then she held on to my shoulders for a minute or so, looking into my eyes. I thought maybe she was going to cry. But suddenly her gaze dropped from my face and hovered directly below my belly. She stared at the small bulge for half a second, then, realizing it wasn’t piss showing through my light blue jeans, she whipped her hands violently from my shoulders, opened her mouth to speak — or scream, or vomit, or laugh — but I ran out of the kitchen before I could see which one it was. Ten seconds later I was jogging east through an alleyway, back toward the front entrance of Lawson Street Junior High.
* * *
Somebody was strangling me. An arm. Wrapped around my neck. Cutting my breath. Probably some homicidal maniac. No point fighting him, though. Too strong. I was a goner. Goodbye. Wouldn’t take long. Just let myself go. Don’t fight. Don’t scream. Couldn’t scream. Jeez, it was easy to die …
But suddenly the grip loosened, and Charlie was standing in front of me outside the entrance of Lawson Street Junior High, a half-finished cigarette hanging from his lips, feet turned out like a duck’s.
“Oh,” I said.
He took the smoke out of his mouth, ashed on the sidewalk. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”
“What?”
“I said meet me here at six-thirty.”
