of her torn black sweater.
“That’s mine,” Nik says, wiping the rim with his shirt. “Don’t tell Aaron I have it. It’s for drinking slowly.”
“Of course, Nikky,” Ilana says. “I do keep secrets from my boyfriend, you know.”
For a moment Ilana is silent. She picks up her coffee cup and cradles it close to her chest. Nik sighs, daubs paint onto the mural, and then stops. He wants another colour, but doesn’t trust Ilana with the hiding place. He feels rigid when Ilana watches him paint. He can’t think of what to say to make her leave. It bothers him that she is calling him Nikky. Like Jennifer did. He stares at the canvas, raises his paintbrush to it, stops again.
Ilana sneaks up behind him and licks his elbow. The surprise warm wet dries instantly. He tries not to respond, thinking ignoring it will make her stop, but she reaches up under his shirt and scratches her nails up his back.
Nik shivers, then starts to sweat in confusion. Ilana is barely over five feet tall with protruding bones and a flat chest. Childlike and tiny enough to break. And she’s Aaron’s girl. Her arms encircle Nik’s waist. Her hands press onto the front of his pants.
“Come on, you know you want me.” Ilana’s voice is breathy. “I like this kind of secret.” Nik spins around to face her. Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes aren’t. Her hands seize on his belt to unbuckle it. He pushes them away. She leers and grabs at the wallet tucked into his back pocket, but it’s attached to a chain connected to his belt loop. Nik has no words. Ilana is directing one of her dramas. He doesn’t want to be in it. He pushes at her again, this time with a force halfway between hard and gentle. Like his father would do. Ilana wobbles and takes a step back. Nik steps back too, establishing what he hopes is a safer distance. He turns to the canvas, breathes its wet-paint smell. Ilana gasps. There’s a clatter and thunk as Ilana fake-falls to the floor. He doesn’t see her slam her hand down on the hardwood and adjust her hair around her face as she lays her head down on it. He looks, startled, thinking she hit her head. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open, her body still. But her eyeballs are still fluttering under her closed eyelids, her long, fake lashes twitching like trapped spiders. Nik sees she is waiting for him to react, for rescue, and for her scene to play out. But he doesn’t feel it. He can’t do it. Instead there’s a familiar lurch. Anxiety like a black wave.
Nik coughs. He doesn’t want to be like his father. He thinks finding Jennifer will make him different. Heroic. He leaves Ilana there, grabs his sketchbook from his milk-crate nightstand and begins sketching the lines of her tall black leather, high-heeled boots. They look like the ones Jennifer used to wear. Nik thinks Ilana must have stolen them.
Nik glances down at Ilana’s face. She has sharp features: her nose is slightly crooked, he notices, and she has a cut on her lower lip. Ilana opens her eyes and sits up, her elbows turning awkwardly backwards as she rests on them.
“You’re sketching me?” she says. “God, Nik, you’re sick.” She stands up and skulks out of the room. Nik looks at his sketch. It’s not quite right. Jennifer’s dancer’s calves curved more underneath the leather. He scrapes a fierce X over the drawing with the flat edge of his pencil. He shuts his door quietly and wedges a wooden chair against the knob. Then he sits down on the floor and pretends he’s talking to Aaron, who used to be his best friend.
“What the hell was that?” Nik whispers.
“She’s crazy,” the old Aaron would have said. “She’ll be outta here soon though, so don’t worry about it.”
Nik misses Old Aaron, who had a lot more sense than Aaron has now. When Nik moved to Vancouver from the island, Aaron’s was the only ad that caught his eye on the student housing website. It read: RAMSHACKLE ROOM! CHEAP AND UGLY. It meant Nik didn’t have to worry about wrecking the place with paint. Not like his mom’s house, where Katya, his mom’s new girlfriend, now runs the place with hotel-quality precision. White towels. The end of the toilet paper roll folded into a point. Nik always remembers his promise to keep Katya a secret from the rest of the family. Something to do with support payments from his dad. He always goes along with his mom’s lies. But he’s still relegated to the basement when he visits, like his mom’s dogs to their kennel. When his mom and his dad lived together his mom put up with a lot more disorganization. Nik has fond memories of his messy childhood home. There were so many places to hide when his parents fought. Nik used to disappear like a magic trick and lose himself in epic drawings. His adventures in vanishing make the raggedy apartment seem tiny now in comparison. Nik looks around his room. He feels like a rabbit in a hat. The Jennifer mural and paintings are growing, squeezing the walls closer and crowding him.
When Nik moved into the Rumble Shack, it was completely empty. It felt spacious that way. He and Aaron scavenged furniture from the curb, garage sales and thrift stores. They hauled it all home on their skinny shoulders. The older the furniture, the heavier it was. Aaron helped Nik mod his leather jacket with spikes and stitch punk patches to his pants. They did screen-printing in the living room, creating irreverent designs with corporate logos and raucous, symbol-splotched T-shirts they sold at school for beer money. Hardly anyone ever bought anything with the upside-down golden arches on it, but big pink skulls and anarchy A’s were popular. They had three prolific months.
Then the girls arrived. Ilana wrapped herself around Aaron one night at a dive bar in Gastown. Nik had returned from the bar with a fresh pitcher to find her sitting in his seat. She drank more of their beer than she should have, stayed over, moved in. Kendall appeared shortly after. Ilana rented her the unheated back room without asking. Ilana did a lot of things Nik didn’t like. New Aaron watched Ilana like she was television. He often provoked her. He’d speak to everyone else except her, then smother her with attention. Or host parties at the apartment without inviting her, then accuse her of crashing them. New Aaron quit screen-printing, but not beer-drinking. New Aaron was more interested in Ilana’s well-stocked purse pharmacy than design, but didn’t bother asking who funded or supplied her pharmacopoeia.
Aaron still does most of the talking. That hasn’t changed, but the details of his stories are exaggerated with each telling. It keeps Ilana and Kendall entertained. It irritates Nik, but pointing out the errors only leads to more exaggerations. And mocking. Except now there’s an unfamiliar hostility beneath Aaron’s jests. Nik hears stories turn into lies and sees Aaron’s expression shift. He watches the two girls drape themselves over the furniture as though posed for a photo shoot. Ilana in something revealing and black. Kendall in gothic Anne Rice–inspired dresses. Both wear sly illusions: the clothes that appear shiny and dramatic at night are shabby in daylight.
One night when all the roommates were at a noisy goth industrial club, Nik saw Kendall glare at one of the cage dancers. In place of her usual disdain, Kendall’s eyes registered jealousy. Nik turned to look at the dancer. He didn’t shift his gaze for the rest of the night. His roommates left without him. The DJ stopped playing music. Jennifer exited through the Employees Only door. Nik stared at the closed door.
“She gets a lot of attention, that one,” the bartender said to Nik while shoving dirty pint glasses into the industrial dishwasher. Nik nodded. Stools were stacked on tables, a mop was splattered into a bucket of filthy water and smeared across the sticky floor. Nik waited until Jennifer re-emerged from behind the door, wearing skinny jeans in place of PVC hot pants and fishnets. She smiled at Nik.
The next afternoon, as Nik strolled through the living room in his boxers to get Jennifer a glass of water, Old Aaron spoke for the last time. “She’s so hot,” he mouthed. Ilana was sitting next to Aaron on the sofa, but she was painting her nails and didn’t look up as the words floated over her head.
After that, what happened at the apartment didn’t matter as much to Nik. He let it rumble, spending as much time as possible with Jennifer, while
