A Special Education (excerpt)

I know that things have been pretty quiet in these parts for some time, but only because I've been hard at work on my latest novel, A Special Education, and I thought I'd share a small piece of it. If you've been around my blog a bit then you've probably seen me make reference to this one as A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine - back when the story dealt primarily with my own experiences growing up in Calgary's Northeast. Once I started writing though, things went off on a different direction. It focused more on high school. A mysterious religion teacher committed suicide and a bearded guidance counselor in red clogs showed up to interview the kids. Two of them go missing.
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12:41 PM, May 31, 1994 Interview #20

Molly examined the guidance counselor. Her first impression was not to like him. He reminded her too much of her father. The thought prompted her to sit up straighter and cross one leg over the other while folding her hands in her lap. The school official watched all of this over the edge of his clipboard as he ticked off the necessary demographic information on the student profile form.

“How are things at home, Molly?” he asked in a soft voice.

“Shitty,” she grinned, “But you knew that already, so why don’t you go ahead and ask me the real question you’re trying to build up too?”

The guidance counselor smiled. “I just meant how have things been lately? There is a note here in your file that your home life has been difficult, in general, over the last few years, but I was wondering about the last few days?”

“No worse than usual,” she answered curtly.

“I understand you’ve been living with your mother for the last year?”

“The crazy bitch? Yes.”

“Why do you call her that?” he asked calmly.

Molly appeared a little taken aback by the question, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just surprised you asked that, but I guess it doesn’t really say in your little folder there and you just assumed I was exhibiting some vestige of teenaged aggression towards my mother for driving my father away,” she chuckled and then assumed an exaggerated matter-of-fact air, “But you’d be wrong. I called my mother a crazy bitch, because that’s what you call a woman who has to go to psychological counseling for emotional and anger management therapy, isn’t it?”

“Hmm,” the guidance counselor added the new information to his chart, “Were you close to Mr. Sinclair?”

Molly shook her head, but the older man noted her red-rimmed eyes suggested otherwise. “Have you been crying?”

The girl paused. A crack appeared in her demeanor and he noticed that her lip twitched almost imperceptibly before she recovered. “No one was close to Mr. Sinclair,” she said, “but he listened. You could go and talk to him. He’d listen to you and be non-judgmental about you but totally judgmental about your situation. If you asked him, he’d walk you through how to weigh your decisions. It often didn’t really go the way you wanted it to go, and if you complained, he just kind of looked at you in a way that wasn’t really non-judgmental but not critical either. Like it was neutral, or impassive, but it was the worst look in the world because he knew you knew what you needed to do and you knew he knew you just wanted someone to say you didn’t have to do it. That look just kinda froze my soul, every time.”

“Sinclair was the one who reported you were drunk at school, wasn’t he?”

She nodded but then also shook her head, “Yes but, technically. I was only technically drunk at school. I wasn’t drinking at school. I only showed up to school drunk, or rather, I showed up still drunk and he had me sent home.”

“Yes,” he affirmed “I have that here. Apparently you were adamant about that fact, even then. This was the long weekend incident you and the other students referred to as ‘the alcoholocaust’?”

“Yes,” Molly answered, looking at the floor.

“Can you describe it to me please?”

Molly laughed sarcastically, “Only what I remember.”

“Who was there?”

“I don’t remember. People were coming and going and I never bothered to keep track.”

“Who did you invite then?”

“Everyone,” she shrugged. “Honours kids, jocks. People I knew from choir. Even those crazy Irish kids that play hurling and ultimate Frisbee in the park.”

“What about Jack and Isabel?”

Molly shrugged again and began describing how Isabel arrived late to the party. The other girl’s shift hadn’t ended until close to 11:00 PM, and it took her awhile to get to Molly’s house by transit. It was now after midnight, and it only worried Isabel slightly that people might have already begun to make their way home. She had come for Jack. Only the dust screen on the front door separated the street from the party. Music wafted loudly into the night air as she stepped inside and over the mountain of shoes. A long flight of stairs led immediately from the front entrance, up onto a second level, emptying out into some kind of area that wasn’t a living room or a study. She cast about for Jack. The room had couches, on which some of the chattier honours girls sat holding pink bottles of wine coolers. The room had no television or books; only a few photographed mementos of mountain hikes, sailboats, and one of Disneyland. Isabel wasn’t exactly sure what one did in such a room. A hallway extended to her right, full of closed doors, the first of which appeared to be a child’s bedroom. She opened the door slowly and saw Lawrence and his girlfriend making out on the bed, next to a pile of jackets. Isabel could never remember the girl’s name, only that Lawrence had met her in his non-honours mathematics class. When she wasn’t around, he constantly made fun of her for still reading R. L. Stine novels. Next, she ran into Dorothy as the girl was emerging from the bathroom and was about to ask if she had seen Jack, but was caught off guard when Sebastian also bumped into her as he too tried to leave the washroom. Noticing their flushed cheeks and rumpled clothes, Isabel tried to dismiss the awkward moment with a laugh, but neither of her two classmates made any eye contact with her, or each other, as they beetled their way back down the hall. The next two doors Isabel discovered revealed more bedrooms in a similar state of intimacy. Frustrated, she retraced her steps back to the stairs and finally recognized a sliding door at the other end of the passage. Initially, she had thought it a linen closet, but discovered it led to the kitchen. Molly was there, standing barefoot on the counter, pouring shots of peppermint schnapps onto a tray of tiny glasses.

“Oh, hi Izzie! So glad you could come. Can I get you something? Do you you want to put something in the fridge?” Molly finished preparing the drinks then turned her back to Isabel, putting the bottle of liqueur away on a high shelf in an open cupboard. Isabel said no, and watched Molly try to negotiate her way off the counter. She counted the number of empty bottles that had collected by the sink and whose presence was causing the blonde-haired girl a degree of difficulty. Isabel calculated that if everyone from the honours programme was at the party, they each would have needed to be on their second or third drink to account for all of the empty bottles. Finally on the ground, Molly blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and then looked at Isabel, “Not drinking? You’ll want to avoid the punch then. Let’s take these downstairs.”

The stairs to the basement were tucked into the back corner of the kitchen and twisted slightly as they descended. Having come up stairs at the front of the house, Isabel tried to make a mental map to account for the seeming fact that the so-called ‘basement’ was simply a ground floor with a glassed-in rear exit to the backyard. She immediately noticed that the music was much louder. Groups of students clustered around each other, yelling over the noise from the stereo, a few on the various couches distributed around the room, others by a pool table standing in the far corner. Another larger group had gathered around the open space in front of the television and appeared to be playing some kind of drinking game. A steady stream of people moved from the basement to the backyard where a fire pit gave off a brilliant and smoky orange light.

“Where’s Jack?” Isabel asked.

“Oh,” Molly replied, offering her tray of drinks to random people, “I think he’s out back on the roof. Sure I can’t get you anything?”

Isabel shook her head again and Molly continued to pass out the rest of her drinks before leading Isabel outside. One side of the backyard, near the fence, had an old wooden playhouse. Despite clearly having had a few drinks she showed the other girl how it was possible to use the playhouse’s window frame to climb onto its roof and from there balance on the fence. Watching her move nimbly in the dark, Isabel remembered that Molly was supposedly some kind of dancer. She also noticed that the fence wasn’t really a fence at all, but a decorative concrete retaining wall wide enough to allow them to walk across it back to the main house and then pull themselves up onto the roof. Isabel saw Chris and Jack halfway up the roof, talking and drinking beer.

“What are you two doing up here?” Isabel asked as each girl took a seat next to either boy.

Jack turned his head quickly to smile at Isabel and she could tell this was not his first beer. “We wanted to go someplace quiet to talk and Molly said there was no place quieter than the roof so up we came. It’s totally a lovely view, don’t you think?” He waved his arm out above the yard. The rear of Molly’s house faced a canyon, below which stood the dense forested canopy of Fish Creek Park. The unlit nature preserve gave off very little light, leaving the only sources of illumination the hundreds of stars visible above them and the small scattering of new residential developments on the far south side of Fish Creek, their distant lights indistinguishable from the pale dots overhead. Jack found it very calming to focus intently on one or two of the stars and feel himself drawn deeply into the surrounding darkness. With the alcohol bubbling through his veins, he could sense himself floating off into the void, the noise of the other kids, the party, the gritty feeling of the roof, would all fall away and it seemed to him like he was drifting alone with only the sound of Chris’ voice to anchor him to the world..

“Yeah, sure, pretty,” Isabel agreed, noticing that Molly had snuggled in close to Chris as if for warmth. She suddenly had the urge to do the same with Jack. Instead she asked, “What are you guy’s talking about?”

“Nothing,” Jack laughed, blinking, trying to re-focus on the stars...

Chris smiled, “Yeah, you know, just life, the universe, everything.”

Molly ran a hand along Chris’ thigh. “I don’t know how you two managed to stay up here so long. I’m freezing. Chris, can you help me inside please?”

Jack and Isabel watched the other two negotiate their descent back onto the grass and inside. Within moments, they were alone. A handful of students sat around the bonfire, throwing miscellaneous items into the fire and drinking. Jack had noticed that they paid no attention to him and Chris, nor did they appear to see the coming and going of Molly, neither with Isabel, nor with Chris. He knew that a lot of his classmates were inside, the alcohol helping them to unleash their pent up hormones. That was one of the reasons Jack had come outside, to avoid the temptations within. He was fairly certain that a more than slightly inebriated Dorothy had made a pass at him and he had no desire to go through another such awkward situation with a girl again. Instead he had spent the last two hours trying to avoid the girls altogether as he waited for Isabel to arrive. Now that she had, what he desired most of all was to reach across and hold her hand, but a large part of him was too afraid to move. A smaller part yelled and called him a coward and urged him to action. Jack and Isabel sat alone together on the roof, staring out into the quiet reaches space, Isabel for her part, enjoying the moment, while Jack engaged in his endless internal debate. He wondered how the stars made her feel. Did she long to join them the way he did, as if they could offer him a form of companionship no else could?

“Are you drunk?” Isabel asked casually, hoping to break the awkward silence that had arisen between them.

Jack lifted his leaden hand and placed it on Isabel’s knee, a move he would have been impossibly afraid to try two years ago out of fear of doing the wrong thing, of misinterpreting her looks her or remarks. He felt rewarded when she put one of her hands on top of his. He smiled, “Yes. I am. Indeed.”

Isabel shook her head, ‘Why?”

“Don’t know. Why not?” He shrugged and swayed a little, “You never drink do you? Why not?”

“My father drinks. My mother drinks. My sister drinks. My neighbours drink. It’s like drinking is a part of where I live and I don’t want to live there anymore.”

Jack nodded. “That sounds about right then.”

“So, why are you out here getting drunk with Chris? I thought you two didn’t like each other.”

“Nope.” Jack laughed. “I get along with him just fine. It’s you that doesn’t get along with him. He’s kinda like me. We get along. We have these little parts inside us that won’t shut up, but we both agreed tonight that drinking helps to quiet the dull roar in our souls.”

“Dull roar in your souls? Which one of you poor misguided poets came up with that line?” Isabel laughed. Jack looked hurt.

“It’s just there’s a part of me that wants to do all these things, but there’s another part that keeps holding me back, too nervous to do anything. So there’s this gulf then, between these two sides, and it feels like they’re inside yelling at each other all the time. Except when I drink. Then everything seems to quieten down.”

“Hmm.” Isabel nodded and held his hand, considering his words. “I usually just punch someone or something when I feel like that. Makes me feel way better,” she stood up and tried to pull Jack to his feet. “But we should get down from here and probably go. It’s a long enough bus ride to the train station already and we don’t want to get stranded.”

Back inside, Jack and Isabel looked for Molly to say their good-byes. She wasn’t in the basement, nor did they find her in the kitchen, where Molly’s choir friend, Ciaran, was busy drunkenly washing dishes. Similarly, while the chatty girls from English class seemed to have multiplied in the awkward sitting room, their hostess was not among them. Jack looked down the hallway and Isabel gripped his hand.

“Nothing but love nests down there,” she warned him with a cautious laugh.

Jack looked pained, his indecision visible. “We should say good-bye. We can’t just disappear. People would be worried or upset.”

“It’s your call then.”

He sighed and swung their joined hands towards the hall, “Onward.”

Isabel shook her head and led him down the darkened corridor. She guessed that if Molly had taken refuge with Chris behind one of the closed doors, she would have chosen the largest room, the one at the end of the hall. She paused before knocking. Molly’s voice answered without hesitation,

“Entrez-vous.”

Isabel pushed the door open and motioned for Jack to enter first. He stopped short, barely past the threshold, causing her to bump into him. She peered over his shoulder, before moving around to a better position. Molly and Chris lay in the large bed, apparently naked, the grey sheets tucked under their armpits and their pale skin contrasting with the dark wooden headboard. Molly looked very relaxed, her hair spreading out on the pillows like an angelic nimbus. Chris barely noticed his friends as he stretched towards the nearby nightstand, fumbling for some cigarettes. He placed one towards his lips, but Molly gave him a playful slap.

“Don’t you dare smoke in my parent’s bed. That’s rude.” She looked at Jack and Isabel and then pretended to yawn, stretching her arms above her head, thrusting her breasts forward. She flipped a section of the covers to reveal the delicious length of her leg and thigh. “I take it you’ve either come to join us, or announce your departure from our little soiree.”

“No thanks,” Isabel answered sternly. Jack remained immobilized by the sight of them. “We’re leaving.”

Cigarette dangling unlit from his lips, Chris raised an eyebrow, “Jackie?”

All the other boy could manage was an astonished, “You smoke too?”

Chris shrugged, “We all need to peer into the abyss from time to time.”

“Let’s go,” Isabel grabbed Jack by the hand and took him from the room.

Molly blew them a kiss, “Thanks for coming.”

“That’s pretty much all I remember,” Molly said, looking at the clock behind the guidance counselor. He stared at Molly the blonde girl. She could tell he had a question in him and decided to head it off.

“Yes, I was drunk when I slept with him. I assume we had sex at any rate since I woke up naked. No, I don’t remember if we used anything in terms of protection, and yes I recognize that would have been a risky and unsafe behaviour to have indulged in, but apparently I didn’t get pregnant so all is good, and no, it’s not something I’m particularly proud of so you can spare me any parental or moral concern you might have.”

“That wasn’t going to be my question, actually.”

“Oh,” she said, somewhat taken aback, but continued with an air of defiance. “Well then, let me just say that I think I continued drinking the rest of the weekend in an attempt to forget about the whole episode. People seemed to know all about it anyways, so I think I just hoped that if I pretended to forget about it, I could pretend it never happened.”

“Why is that?”

“I think some part of me knew it was wrong, that’s why.”

“What was wrong?” he made a mark with his pen. He judged her apparent antagonism as an attempt to defuse her own sense of self-loathing. “You don’t strike me as someone overly concerned about the sin of premarital sex.”

She took a deep breath. The guidance counselor took it as a sign to look for the nearest source of tissues. “It just seemed that Chris was this good kid and I ruined him. I’d never seen him drink or smoke or anything like that before my party. Maybe he wasn’t a virgin, maybe he and Annabel fooled around, I don’t know, but I do know that I woke up the next morning and he was gone. My house was a disaster. The whole thing looked like a film set debauchery and I was the one who had organized it all. I just remember seeing him there that night and I wanted him, like maybe if I had a little part of him inside me I wouldn’t feel this way all the time,” she started crying and the old man passed her the tissue box.

“Feel what way?”

“He just seemed so calm all the time and I wanted a piece of that. I wanted to feel something other than the anger I felt. At my parents, at myself, like I’m just this thing that my parents pass back and forth and show off at parties. I hate them. I hate them both. They make me feel like I’m nothing without them. I’m graduating this year and I’ve no idea what I’m going to do. All the other kids here know where they’re going and what they’re going to do. My mother wants me to study dance, my father wants me in business and I’ve no clue what it is I want,” she shook her head, “Chris just seemed like nobody ever told him where to go, like he had it all figured out on his own. He looked like he had a plan and that’s what I wanted, a plan.”

“Interesting,” he paused and scratched at his neck. “I can tell you based upon my professional experience that you’re not the only one who feels that way, even among your honours class peers. I’m not sure if you’ll believe me, but it’s true. Anyway, you say he had a plan? At any point during your, ah, time together, did he talk to you about this plan of his?”

She lowered her eyes and whispered, “No.”

“Did he give you any indication that he was about to drop out of school?”

“No.”

“Have you heard anything from him since?”

“No.”

“Do you know where Jack and Isabel are?”

“No,” she sniffed, tears abating.

“Would you tell me if you did?”

Molly raised her head and looked at him, her eyes viper black and glistening. The guidance counselor was taken aback by the suddenness and intensity of the blonde-haired girl’s anger. Yet despite her obvious resistance, she calmly and casually tossed her hair, flashing him a sweet venomous smile. He knew her answer even as her lips formed around the single word,

“No.”