Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 63

No Chinook, Chapter 3

No Chinook is my first book, oriiginally published in 2008.

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Carly, the high-school sweetheart I took to the prom, rode a motorcycle It was a classic number her dad left behind when he split town, and she was riding it the second she got her license. By the time I came around, it was an extension of her; part of her personality. I never really understood why someone would own a bike in a city with so much gravel on the roads and with an average snowfall of a hundred-and-twenty-five centimetres a year. But some of the best high-school moments were when our leather jackets were pressed up against each other as we roared down some black street with the autumn wind rewarding us for getting through the day. There was always this little spot between her helmet and jacket I could kiss and would; I’d kiss it every chance I got. She usually shrugged me off: “I’m driving here,” she’d say, but I knew she loved it.

I’d been in a fair number of relationships for a guy on my side of the spectrum. My father always told me that I needed to find a better group of losers to hang out with, seeing as I’d always date odd girls and hang out with guys my dad found unsettling in ways he would never explain. My father and I didn’t talk too much, but something about what he said stuck with me. As much as I liked my friends in high school, I knew they weren’t exactly the best choice, and while I was really no different, there always happened to be this wall that kept me from being too intimate with anyone I didn’t sleep with.

Anyways, the thing with Carly was that I was in love with her and she was in love with me. We were going to get married and live somewhere together and be really fucking happy. Neither of us had a clue as to what to do with our lives, but we had at least one constant thing that grounded us into thinking about thinking about the future in a way that was more playful than responsible. Maybe we’d go to college or maybe we’d open up a diner in Alaska and serve the folks up there. It was a nice image, solidified in drifting snow squalls and in our bonding together against this world. It’s not even that we hated the world, really. We just liked each other more outside of it.

Carly introduced me to every rock band I love. She showed me that greater thinking happened at four in the morning than at any other time of day. I drank my first beer with her, three blocks away from her place in an abandoned house the cops never seemed to pay attention to. I’d be such a fucking mess right now without Carly; before her, I didn’t think I could make a living writing anything. She taught me to stop chewing my nails. It was one of those formative relationships: she remoulded me into something so much better than I was before.

It was two weeks later; Kate finally called. After the first few days had gone by, I had convinced myself that our meeting was a fluke, that all she’d wanted was a trip down memory lane; perhaps something more sinister. I went to work on the LRT and I told some people there that I’d caught up with an old friend, and I helped Shawn paint his room. Well, re-apply paint, really. All that arguing about what to do, and finally he just decided to paint it the same damn colour. I lived completely ordinarily, almost oblivious to any crazy ideas about Kate.

I could tell she was crying, but at the same time trying to hold it back as much as she could. I asked her the obvious: “What’s wrong?”

“He fucking left me. That fucking prick.” She embellished the Fs with spit and contempt. She sounded like she had a lisp. I could tell she was pacing around.

“When?” I asked.

“This morning,” she said. “I wake up alone in our bed, and when I come downstairs he’s packing a bag. I ask him where he’s going. He dodges the subject. I follow him around, and he tries to avoid all my questions. He heads for the door, and I block him. Finally, he breaks down and says that he’s been seeing this girl. Some fucking girl. Can you believe that?”

I was crushed right along with her. Everything she said broke my heart.

I couldn’t help but envision the dumbest guy in the world as she kept going: “He’s been seeing her for like, a year, for fucksakes, and she was out in his car, waiting to take him up to her cabin where I’m sure they fucked whenever I thought he was off doing business trips. Jesus Christ. I am so fucking angry right now. I trusted him with everything.”

Immediately, I thought: he knows what she does for a living.

For a second, Kate sounded like she had more to say, but she just fell apart mid-breath. I held the phone close and tried to hold her up with imaginative will. Any remnants of the Kate Foley living in my memories were shattered now. Kate would have never let a guy walk over her like that. She’d never fall to the floor because the tears came too fast and too hard. The Kate I thought I knew was brutally strong, even if I had her completely made up.

It was around this time that I began to wonder how much about Kate Foley I really did know. She never talked about her parents or life outside school. I didn’t know if she had any siblings, or if she had asthma like me, or if she’d had an imaginary friend. It was so hard to picture her as a kid. All I had seen was this woman so capable of affecting my stupid, self-centred feelings. And then I saw it. Something about the way she was breathing into the phone told me she was close to the ground. She’d collapsed, but kept hold of the phone. Finally, I said, “I’ll be right over.”

Kate took a couple of breaths to slow down, and said “Thank you,” in a mouthy, desperate way that really meant she needed me.

Finally, when she needed me, everything was in my way. I couldn’t find the sleeve in my jacket for my arm to go through. I couldn’t find my keys. I couldn’t tie my shoes right. I missed the train. Waiting for a train that comes every four minutes is so excruciating. All I wanted to do was run. For a moment, I considered outrunning the train.

When the train finally reached Kate’s stop, I bolted out the doors and downstairs. It was seventeen below, but my focus kept me warm. I was so preoccupied that I almost missed the car in front of Shawn’s house as I ran right by. But I didn’t.

Mark’s blue Caravan was parked on the asphalt driveway of my lovers’ house. I couldn’t help but stop for a second, immediately feeling sick. That particular car in that driveway meant that Shawn was with him; deceiving Mark and possibly me. I wavered between the two options, trying to decide which was true. Something about Shawn, perhaps his charm, forced me to think that it was simple cowardice, that he’d have loved nothing better than to dump that jerk and rush to my place. But it was four months since I met him and two and a half since we’d kissed, and there was Mark’s stupid childless minivan parked right in front of me. The one time I met Mark was at a party very similar to the one where I met Kate, only it was in someone else’s house and there was much more alcohol. It was a week after Shawn and I had kissed for the first time, and we’d gotten our signals crossed. When he saw me, he flinched. Shawn froze completely, as if fully aware of the fact that his world might come apart right then, in the middle of some guy’s living room.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said, in the coldest tone, and I immediately sensed that he was hiding something. Before he got another word in, this guy Mark, Mark with the minivan, came over to us, wrapped his thin arms around Shawn and kissed him in the way a teenaged girl would. Somewhere behind me, a beer bottle shattered into dozens of sharp pieces, and people jumped. Unable to say anything, I just turned and walked through the front door, cutting my foot open in the process. I limped home, sobbing. Shawn always added far too much drama to my life. 

The only thing that kept me from crying was the cold; I kept running. I couldn’t linger outside Shawn’s house while his other boyfriend was there. What choices did I have? Causing a scene would jeopardize everything, even if this meant matching Shawn’s flair for drama. I knocked on Kate’s door, panting, doubled over. She answered, crying, though still standing tall. She bent over and touched her face to mine, smiling. We were both spent.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“Are you OK?” I asked, and she grabbed me by the shoulders, hugging me very tight, I could barely breathe, but I felt I needed to be strong for her. I came to help; she drew strength from my will.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, holding me, holding back tears and keeping my shoulder dry for the time being. She let go and said, “Come in. I’m a fucking mess.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand, totally.”

We sat down on her couch. The yearbook was still on the coffee table.

“So that was it?” I asked. “He just walked out?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “He said that most of his stuff was packed up, and he was sorry, fucking sorry that he couldn’t explain it better, but he had to leave.”

“Did you see this coming?”

“I mean, we’d been fighting for weeks now. He’s been away more and more; I guess I know where now. He’s been avoiding me. He’s been eating at weird hours to make sure we never spend any actual time together awake. It’s all so damn clear now. I’m such a goddamned idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” I said, feeling like I was reading lines from a book. Everything I said was a cliché. “We all do this,” I said. “We let ourselves believe in everything working perfectly, you know? We let ourselves fall in love. Even if all the signs are there that we maybe shouldn’t.”

“But it doesn’t exist,” she said. “It doesn’t. It can’t. I loved him so fucking much, and I thought he loved me. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fabrication we feed ourselves to feel better about giving everything we’ve got to a guy who sneaks behind your back and gets it on with some slut.”

She got up off the couch and picked up the chair in the corner. She was stronger than I thought. The chair was huge and looked like it weighed sixty pounds, but she lifted it up to her waist, swivelling it. She let go in mid-turn, and the chair’s bottom-right corner hit the wall. As it landed, I could hear the wood creak. It finally rested sideways, slightly more crooked than before. Kate moved closer, sliding her hand across the top. Then, in an act empty of any grace, she kicked the chair with everything she had, turning it into a wrecked heap of wood and upholstery.

“That was his, huh?”

“No,” she said. “We bought it together.” She looked around. “We bought all of this together. And while the logical side of my brain is telling me that the receipts are in my name and that means he doesn’t actually get to call shotgun on anything here, it was still an us thing.”

“So you’re going to kick every piece of furniture in here to death?”

“No,” she said. “Just that one. That one was his favourite.”

I smirked, supposing that was fair enough.

“You want to get out of here? I want to get out of here.” She tucked her hair behind her ears and grabbed her coat. She didn’t wait for me as she left, but I followed close.

With her arms crossed and her pace controlling mine down the increasingly dark and cold street, she asked me if I’d ever dumped a girl. I knew what she was doing and I didn’t like it. I didn’t come here to have her anger toward Ray transferred and flung at me. In these instances it was easy to hate every member of the opposite sex. I began to wonder why I came, but while worrying, I also answered her.

“The only time I’ve ever dumped a girl was in the fifth grade. Her name was Dorothy Myers, and she was my first girlfriend. We were together for six months, from September to February. I mean, we never went out on a date, unless you count watching cartoons together, and we never kissed, unless you count that time during her mom’s second wedding when she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, but the whole thing was really innocent and nice. Then, around Valentine’s day, this other girl, Nikki-something-or-other, gave me a card a few days before the big day, saying she wanted to be my valentine. This was the only time in my entire life that a girl just came up to me and told me she liked me, and it threw me off so much that I just went with it. The next day, I told Dorothy that I was with Nikki, and she cried, right there in the hallway before home room.”

“Wow,” she said, “You’re a real bastard.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I learned my lesson pretty quick. See, Nikki and I were together a total of two days. The day before Valentine’s Day, I saw her ask Dean Walters to be her valentine, leaving me valentine-less and single, officially, until grade 10.”

“I hope you learned your lesson,” she said, understanding that this was a child’s mistake but still digging at me for it. “Don’t drop one girl until you’ve picked up another.”

“Hey, sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

“But that’s it, right? That’s the only time?”

Carly dumped me in a way I found disparaging and sick. The entire affair reminded me of an angry mother punishing a child. I nodded, and Kate looked pleased. I think she was happy to be with a guy who appeared to have finished making the classic mistakes at this point.

And with that, I found that I did have it together well enough. I wasn’t with the boy, but I wasn’t sacrificing whatever happiness he must have with Mark in order to achieve my own. I was the nice guy. I knew the consequences of my naivety, knew that I needed to be strong alone before I could stand to be with others. Carly’s way of breaking up with me was cruel, but at the same time, it forced me to become comfortable in my own skin. I gained a few abilities that helped me through what I would face now and later, standing here with what I couldn’t even call an old friend.

“I mean, you think you figure out love,” she began, talking mostly to herself. I knew that the best thing to do now was to simply let her talk, allow her this time to vent, and when it was over, say something sentimental and cheesy though ultimately comforting. Words like these never did a damn thing for me, but most people I’ve known ate them up with giant spoons of eager need.

The path we took held seemingly no purpose. I followed Kate without checking what road we happened to be on. We were in the suburbs, and the houses were old and painted funny colours like all the older neighbourhoods in Calgary. The streets wound in semi-circles, inviting people to wander the city. The sky was dark grey save the horizon. A ring of bright sunlight was visible from all directions between the mountains, plains, and the cloud that blanketed the city in a temporary warmth.

Kate appeared to be wandering, but only because there were no other options. She took her time, but when an intersection presented itself, she didn’t think before choosing a path. All the while, I thought of Shawn and Mark, and she spoke of Ray and love. “You think you’ve got it. That’s what it is, right? The house, the guy, and the job. It’s all there, and it all fits in a package that defines you. It’s as if I’ve shrunk and been placed into plastic boxes, to be sold in the children’s department as a set. Collect the Kate. Collect the Ray. Collect the car and play, you know?”

I did understand, and I knew that what she was saying was coming from a deep place in the spot one keeps leftover epiphanies, but I couldn’t fully focus on her. Seeing that van struck me as something I needed to fantasize out of my mind. I thought that someday soon, a friend of Mark’s would have to saunter in with him down a street he’d never seen before, listening to his laments about Shawn, just the way Kate did it with me. Mark would wonder if Shawn ever really loved him, and his friend would agree with everything and buy him a pitcher of his favourite beer. He would languish in his heartbreak until the enjoyment of his own sadness had worn off. And then he would move on.

Kate continued on without my constant agreeable nods. She exclaimed, “And my mother, Jesus, my mother loved him! She’s going to be so heartbroken about this. I probably would be too if I wasn’t so goddamn pissed off.”

I hoped Mark would get over this terrible break up quickly, but I knew this was wishful thinking. I doubt he would take it lightly. Shawn would be leaving him for another guy. The fact that Shawn had found someone better was not the typical lame excuse for this kind of thing. It wasn’t something benign; it would cause wounds. 

“You get what I’m saying though, right?” Kate asked. Appearing to comprehend, I agreed without trying to interrupt. “The whole idea that there is one guy out there for you, well, I liked that idea. Maybe it’s immature to believe in something most people don’t, but hey, if it gets you by, why not? That’s what it was for me. No matter what happened in my life, I thought I’d always have him, and that was really nice.”

I found myself in a curious position. I empathized with Kate, and this was largely because I knew what it was like to be crushed. It was strange hearing very similar words from her. It was like watching my heart break in someone else’s body.

I thought about the violence that might happen in between Mark and me. I’d pictured the fight before, almost as if my jealousy toward him provoked an interpretative dance. In my fantasy fight, there was broken glass and fire. Shawn wasn’t there, but it happened in his house. We’d break most of the objects in the living room, and knock down all the art. It would be the kind of fight where people cheered, only the house would be empty. I don’t know how it ended, but it wasn’t about winning. My fantasies that included Mark were only ever about confrontation. 

Kate’s tone seemed to match what was going on in my head. Her thoughts were also turning to more sinister ground. “I want to burn everything he owns,” she said. “I want to torch it. You remember what I did with the chair back there? Triple that. I’ll hire thugs to beat the piss out of his car. Oh, and the girl? She’s dead meat. I’ll obliterate everything she ever loved about life, man. I’ll do it.”

I knew it was pointless to actually pay attention to Kate right now. Her current hate of Ray overshadowed all the good things he probably had. These feelings just don’t go away. She was full of fire. In two weeks, she’d feel differently. Two weeks is all it ever takes to turn your feelings right around, if you know how to do it right. Still, I knew what she was doing and why she was doing it, so I let her release it all into the open air.

“I just don’t get how he could love me so much if he was capable of this particular sort of lying. I get the regular lying, you know? I get how someone can lie about how much they love everything but country music, especially in this town. I get it if your hair colour is different and you say it’s natural. I get how you can say that at one point, you were in a rock band that would have made it had the guitarist not been such a dick. All that stuff makes sense.”

“It’s all kind of forgivable in the end, right?” I said, knowing exactly what to say in the right moment. I always found it easy to ride someone else’s rant. The difficult thing was always reigning it in.

“Exactly. But it’s lying about your intentions, you know? I don’t get that,” Kate cried. She sat down, and dropped her head into her curled-up knees. I lowered myself to match. She wiped her eyes, striving to break through her blanketing sadness with as much anger and sweat as she could. She said, “That’s when it becomes criminal. That’s when there’s no grace left in your love.” Kate paused for a moment to let some air space out her words. “And when there’s no grace, there’s just need, and there’s no beauty in need.”

There was some beauty in need, but I was not going to bring this up. The sun was going down fast, but you couldn’t say it was evening yet, and when you can’t yet say it’s evening, it’s impossible to speak about evening things. Saying “I love you” at five thirty just doesn’t have the same levity it does at nine-thirty, but even that pales to identical words in the morning. This was drunken, easy wisdom, but it seemed to work when applied to Shawn, to Kate, and ultimately to myself.

What I didn’t get about both Kate and Mark was their apparent inability to discern what was going on in their relationships. I could tell—at least I think I could tell—when Carly began cheating on me. I didn’t do anything about it, but I felt this interfering presence and slowly realized that it was only a matter of time before I lost her. When you’re in love with someone who’s cheating on you, you’ve got to feel it, at least just a little bit. There has to be at least a minimal knowledge that something very wrong is happening, even if the particulars are muddy. It’s in movies all the time, and if something’s cliché enough to be in a movie, it has to be at least half-true. There’s always that scene where the lovers are in bed together or eating breakfast, and you can tell something’s off much sooner than they do. That’s why I couldn’t completely hate Mark. Like Kate, he’s being victimized. He’s about to lose someone he loves, and it’s because of me, and there has to be a feeling of imbalance hinting to a looming, sad end. 

“You’re a good listener,” she said, finally finished. I‘d thought this would’ve gone on much longer. It certainly had when I did it. 

“You’re a good venter,” I replied. “You’re not torching his clothes. You’re not slicing car tires. You’re not shaving your head.”

“Who shaves their head after someone dumps them?” 

“Don’t you remember Amanda Winters?” I said, knowing she wouldn’t. Kate shook her head right on cue. 

“Yeah, I didn’t think you would. She mostly just smoked her way through high school. Anyways, Amanda went out with Josh Randle, this biker who rode around with Carly and me sometimes.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I remember you two were together throughout high school.”

“Yeah, and Carly and Josh were friends, so this is how I know Amanda,” I said, avoiding any conversation-starter about Carly. I wasn’t ready to deal with that particular skeleton-in-the-closet. “Josh and Amanda fought all the time, like, every single day. They’d fight, then go somewhere and make up. They were, you know, fight-fuckers.”

“Fight-fuckers?” she said, not quite getting the gist of it. 

“Yeah, that’s what you call those thermal relationships, you know? One minute they’re ripping each other apart with words, and the next they’re tearing off their clothes. There’s never a boring moment around those relationships. These are the best kinds of relationships to watch.”

“I can’t imagine that working,” she said.

“Well, it’s like any kind of relationship. Some work out and some don’t. 

“Did they?”

“No,” I said. “But people were surprised that they didn’t. Especially because when Josh eventually got fed up with her, he just took off without telling anybody where he was going.”

“He dropped out of school just because he didn’t want to see her anymore?”

“Nah,” I said. “He’d graduated like four years earlier. There was a huge age gap there, but the maturity level was the same. But yeah, he just split, and after it finally hit her that he wasn’t coming back, she disappeared for about a week too. When she came back, she had no hair and three new piercings.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but where were they?” 

“One was in her tongue, and the other two were on her tits.”

“For real?” she asked, not fully believing me. “How do you know?”

“She showed us,” I said.

“Us? How many people did she show her tits to?”

“Anyone who wanted to see,” I said. “She felt like it was a great revenge, because Josh had been this really protective boyfriendwho never let her hang out with any other guys unless he was around.” 

It was silent for a minute, and that was nice. The sun was finally going down.

Then Kate said, “Are you suggesting I pierce my tits?”

 “I’m not sure you’re the sort.” I wondered then what Mark would do to himself once everything unfolded and he was left with nothing. What section of his body would he disfigure? 

“You’re right,” Kate said. “He’s not worth anything so drastic. The broken chair will have to symbolize all of my violence.”

As Kate and I sat on the grass, I fantasized about how Shawn would break up with Mark. He’d invite us both to his place and sit us down, laying out the whole truth. Mark would weep like a schoolgirl, Shawn and I would achieve an honest embrace amidst the tears. If this were a movie, it would happen like that. 

In reality, I knew the whole situation would be a little more awkward. Mark would find out through cheaper means, then accuse Shawn of sleeping around, and make him promise to never see me again. What would Shawn do then? He wouldn’t promise anything. He wouldn’t apologize. He’d tell Mark to leave, and then Mark would leave. 

“I’ve got to think,” she said. “about how much I really loved him. Was it just safety? Was it just that he was my first big relationship? Was I just afraid to branch out and try other things?”

At somone’s party in the near future, the three of us would be there; Shawn and I there together, Mark with someone unimportant. We’d bump into one another, and immediately, Mark would know how it was between us. He would see how happy Shawn and I were, concluding that it was best this way, that he never should have been with Shawn in the first place, that the best place for him to be was far away. We would be happy, and Mark would have the common sense to leave it be.

Kate was wearing a bracelet on I hadn’t really noticed until she started playing with it, passing it between her fingers, like a rosary.

“We’re pretty close to the river,” she said, getting up. “Come on, there’s this little spot I love going to.”

We dusted off our butts and I followed her. I thought about the things Mark would have to give back to Shawn. They’d have to spend an hour or two a week after their big fight exchanging everything they’d ever left with one another. Maybe it would be ugly enough to involve gifts: old Christmas cards, photographs. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it say so much if there were nothing? I knew they had been together a long time, but it was so telling to know that in all that time Shawn never felt comfortable enough to leave a comb or a CD, and because of that, he wouldn’t allow Mark to do the same. It would make the break-up so much smoother, sure, but what it really stood for was a stance against being together. It would be as if Shawn were simply waiting for someone better to come along.

“Ray gave this bracelet to me on our first-year anniversary,” Kate said. “Except that he didn’t actually present it to me or anything. It was waiting for me on my dresser. He couldn’t be there because he was out of town for an away game with another school. There was a little note: I love you. I guess it was nice, but the gesture itself was sort of empty. Like, he couldn’t skip one damned game to spend our one-year anniversary with me? That wasn’t important enough? It’s not like he was going to marry hockey or anything.”

“We’re you two getting married?” I asked.

“Maybe someday,” she said. “Not anytime soon. But, I don’t know, it was in the cards, I thought.”

We walked down a small path between two identical houses. The fence on both sides was wire and busted through, as if dogs had chewed it to escape. The path was narrow, and I had to walk behind her. When we reached the end, I saw a field that stretched forever. A row of energy towers stretched up above us, reaching as far as we could see in both directions. On the far side, near another set of trees hiding fences and suburbs, there was a drop. “There’s a small river right here,” she said.

The field was calm. It was this little patch of nature where nothing could be built. Because of the power lines, nobody could ever live here except squirrels.

“I don’t want you to think this is sad, because it’s actually really important to me.

Kate and I crossed the field and came to the river. The pond was only a few feet across, but it was oddly deep and swift for a half-frozen current. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from or was going to the Elbow. “I’ve seen fish in here,” she told me, but she had to be lying. We sat down a few feet from the current. I began to play with the patchy, thawing grass. A Chinook was coming, and would be a a sad little tease for all of us, nature included. Kate kept twirling the bracelet between her fingers.

“Tell me something, Scott,” Kate smiled, hopeful, “Am I crazy? Am I overreacting?”

“Not even close,” I said. “I’ve seen a few crazy break-ups. Hell, I’ve been in a few. This is not one of them. At least, not on your end.”

Kate smiled like she used to, when you knew she only had happiness in there. Seeing her frustrated all night showed me that there was so much more to her, but I was happy to see her like I remembered her, even if her hair was longer and she wore skirts.

“I’m sorry if I was mean to you, ever,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said, and it was. Back when it happened, I was a little hurt, but really, she wasn’t in any way responsible for my feelings.

Kate began to cry. “I won’t regret this, because I feel strongly about it. I can say that I’m sorry. I know that I hate him, now. I know that I can’t forgive him or let him back into my life; I can’t ever let him trick me into loving him, so I have to do something permanent. It was good for a while, and even if that was just in my head, it’s still real to me.”

As she went on about Ray, it all sounded a little rehearsed, as if she knew some bad break-up song really well and wanted to use the words for her big moment. While she went through it, I looked into the tiny river and pictured getting my own toothbrush for Shawn’s place, keeping a stick of deodorant there, maybe leaving an extra change of clothes. All this fantasizing about a great, brand-new relationship while Kate waxed on about hating her last. I didn’t know which one of us was being more selfish.

“Eventually, it all means nothing,” she continued. “It’s all just dust. And this, this bracelet, it’s the worst reminder. So here,” she said, tossing the bracelet into the river. Instantly it was swept up, and in a few scant seconds it was gone. Ever since we’d got here, I‘d been waiting for her to do that. Did she expect me to stop her? Ever since I first saw her playing with the thing, I knew the entire journey was meant to dispose of the ugly little chain. I just didn’t expect it to be so pedestrian.

I wanted to tell Kate that in ninth grade, Linda Jacobson did the same thing to her boyfriends’ necklace. I wasn’t there back then, but she told me the day after. I thought it was a pretty immature thing to do then, and I felt the same now. But she was sad enough without the knowledge there was no originality in what she’d done.

The thing was, I imagined people like Kate were everywhere. The popular girl with the popular boyfriend blazed forward out of college, and a couple years later, she’d be miserable. Meanwhile, all the people who couldn’t have cared less about popularity (or couldn’t seemingly do anything about it) ended up striking it rich or having the time of their life when the pressure was off. The spectrum promised that everything would even out, and seeing Kate here all heartbroken in ways others had been before made me more comfortable in my own skin.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong about any of this, Kate,” I said. “Because you’re going to be right in your own mind no matter what you do. Even if other people think you’re wrong. But you know what? Other people’s opinions only get you in trouble.”

And then, Kate did the one thing that made her unique. At any moment, Kate had the power to destroy my entire reality, every philosophy I had ever thought of, and every truth I had believed in, Kate had the ability to crush my world, and when she did, all I could do was hold on to the tiny fragments as best as I could, hoping to have time to super-glue them back together.

Right at that moment, when Ray’s bracelet was lost in the water and Mark’s car still sat in Shawn’s driveway, Kate did the last thing I ever expected: she fucking kissed me. It was sudden, more akin to a snakebite than anything human. I recoiled, instinctively.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just didn’t see that coming at all.”

“Don’t reject me,” she said, suddenlty not sounding all that depressed. “Not right now. I need someone right now.”

I inched forward, knowing precisely what I was doing, what it meant, and who it would eventually hurt. Still, I couldn’t stop. It was everything one version of me had ever wanted. She touched my cheek, and we kissed along the river, below the overreaching clouds. She was an inexperienced kisser; rough, trying to consume me rather than play the situation. Not a minute had gone by before she was on top of me, thrusting her tongue into my mouth. It hurt. It wasn’t special, but she was right: you don’t reject someone who’d just had her world shattered. Sometimes you have to kiss people to let them know that everything is going to be all right.

After a few minutes, I calmed her down and she began kissing me with recovered feminine grace, though she still kissed like a rookie. I wanted to ask her if Ray was her first boyfriend, but her hair was all over my face and her lips were all over my lips and her breasts touched my chest and her hand was on my hand. I couldn’t think of anything I didn’t daydream about when I was eighteen.

Read chapter 4

No Chinook Chapter 2

No Chinook is my first book, oriiginally published in 2008.

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In the short amount of time I had after returning home from Shawn’s party, but before I finished writing my article, the phone interrupted everything. It was Shawn and he had news.

“Guess who gave me a call?” he said, playfully. I could see him lying upside down on his couch, wrapping the cord around his fingers, managing to also fill out a personality quiz in some pulp magazine. It was something I’d seen Veronica from the Archie comics do, and for some reason I associated her peronality with Shawn’s whenever I could.

“Was it Jesus?” I asked.

“You’re horrible,” he said, pausing for drama that didn’t need to be there. “It was Kate. She called me not long after you left. Apparently, something jogged her memory and she feels absolutely horrible about how she treated you last night.”

“It’s not that she was rude or anything.” She hadn’t been. She had been perfect.

“Well, whatever,” he said, eager to get his point across. “The point is, she’s sorry and wants to get together.”

“With you? I don’t think you’re her type.” I said, turning a possibly horrible situation into a joke so I wouldn’t freak the fuck out.

“Actually, she said she wanted to take me to Edmonton and turn me straight,” he said, trying his best to add value to my sad joke. “No, stupid. She wants to see you. Tonight, if it’s possible.”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“I know it is. You weren’t seeing me tonight, so I knew you’d be free.”

“I have other friends,” I said, half-lying.

“Well, I would certainly hope so,” he said, “I’d hate to be your only avenue of getting out of that hen’s den you call an apartment.”

“Henhouse,”

“What?”

“It’s called a henhouse. You’ve never been to a farm, have you?”

He snickered in his particular scheming way. “Anyways, be there at seven. I set it all up for you.”

“Where?” I asked. “At her place?”

“If you can remember where it is.”

“It’s just a few blocks from yours,” I said. “Do you want me to come by beforehand?”

“Sure,” he said, “I’d like to see you. Mark’s coming over a little after that, but the timing should work out just fine.” I could see him jotting all of this down in his planner. He was meticulous with his organization. It was why he was able to get away with all the things he did.

“Okay, I’ll be there,” I said, and hung up. She remembered and knew who I was, and this might be the worst possible thing to happen to me.

I had no idea what to wear. This was a stupid conundrum, but really, I had to think about it for a few minutes. I was seeing two very different people from very different lives. I’d have to wear something other than that jacket, but what?

Last night was perfect. I saw her, and there was no registration. That worked with the spectrum. She wasn’t supposed to remember who I was. The whole evening fit, right down to her slightly using me. And then this! Now she knows who I am? She remembers me as I was in high school? And worse, she wants to see me again? This could only lead to horrible things. She’s going to invite me to a party where everyone’s only purpose is to point and laugh.

I figured out that I would wear a plain brown t-shirt and jeans, not because it was easy, but because I’d been given a chance to make a new first-second impression. I’d wear nice shoes, though.

I also had to consider Shawn’s encouragement for this to take place. He had sensed that I had feelings for Kate last night as we lay in bed. Although he had little right to be jealous of anyone I was interested in, it seemed strange that he would aid in any romantic endeavour not including himself. Perhaps this was his way of showing that he was casual, and that until he sorted himself out with Mark I was just a proximity infatuation, or at best a future investment put on hold by an insecure situation. But perhaps he didn’t read into Kate as much as I did, and to be fair and honest I would need to put it all out on the table and make sure that he was okay with this happening, if anything at all were to happen.

I held both of my jackets up to the window, trying to breathe the outside air into this decision. She saw me last night in my leather jacket, but she was drunk, so I could wear it twice and, oh, hell, who am I kidding? I wear this damn thing everywhere.

I knew the fantasy of this entire situation was approaching ridiculous heights. Shawn knew of Kate’s boyfriend, knew she was currently off limits, and knew that I had no chance with those odds. He knew that Kate was no threat to whatever plans he might have for me. Surely he thought that he would break up with Mark, and hopefully soon, either by telling him the truth about me or because of some other circumstance that would prompt serious relationship discussions. Shawn had to have it in his head to set everything right, and this situation with Kate didn’t swerve his intentions from the desire to finally be with me. His casual behaviour towards her meant nothing, just as her sincere behaviour around me meant nothing.

I walked down to the subway, catching people’s eyes as they looked through me, trying to see if anyone was impressed with my choices. I expected and noticed nothing. 

It occurred to me not too long ago that I thought about Shawn more than he thought about me, and that I put more effort into thinking about our situation than he did. Perhaps I did have a chance with Kate and this thing with Shawn would end up being only a fling with someone unavailable; maybe Kate and I were the real thing and were meant to be. Still, it was best to expect nothing more than an afternoon of humiliation and heartbreak. I would leave scarred, crying, and seeking comfort in sad pop songs while not answering my phone.

All afternoon, I rehearsed what to say to Shawn when I saw him, but when I knocked on his door and he hugged me and offered me a beer, I’d half forgotten my spiel. He’d cleaned up from the morning and was wearing a blue tshirt and that grey ball cap that drove me crazy. We clinked bottles and sat down on his couch; he reminded me about painting his place next week.

“How about Monday?” he asked. We both agreed that Monday was best.

“What colour?” I asked.

“I’m thinking fluorescent green.”

“Or perhaps a lovely shade of puce.”

“I think instead of painting it I’ll just put up a bunch of pictures of Tom Cruise.”

I said, “If you do, I’m not helping.”

“You don’t like the Cruise?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you? I’m always the third opinion on Tom Cruise.”

Shawn looked confused, as if he’d never seen this scenario take place.

“The Tom Cruise scenario goes like this,” I explained. “There are two girls talking about absolutely nothing. They’re anywhere, at any time. The conversation shifts slowly to movies and naturally movie hunks, and Tom Cruise comes up. The first girl says how much she just adores him, and the second girl agrees, although her descriptions of what she’d do to him are always slightly more perverse than the first girl’s, because girl number two is always hornier than girl number one. Then, another girl comes over and those first two ask her her thoughts on the matter. But in a shocking twist and in total rebellion to the clearly established preference, the third girl chokes on whatever she’s drinking and says ‘Are you kidding? Tom Cruise is such a fucking creep.’”

“You know,” he said, “I think I’ve been there before.”

“Everyone has,” I said. “And I’m guessing you’re the second girl.”

“You probably don’t want to hear what I’d do to that man,” he said, swigging his beer.

“So what did you mean by ‘her memory got jogged?’” I asked, regaining my footing and moving ahead to the truth about Kate.

Shawn didn’t know, however, or he knew and was holding back secrets. “She didn’t tell me,” he said. “She just said that it hit her sometime after you dropped her off. She said she felt horrible about not remembering, and wanted to make things right.”

“Things were right,” I said. “Everything was exactly as it should have been.”

Shawn gave me a look. It spelled out that he had no idea what I was talking about.

“She was a lot more popular than I was in high school,” I continued. “Actually, I wasn’t very popular at all. I only had a couple of friends, and none of them were qualified to be valedictorian, or even spend more than a few hours out in the sun. But you know that part. Kate didn’t notice me most of the time, you know? I saw her every day, and I’m sure that sometimes, she saw me too. Most of the time, there was this wall between us that I didn’t have the courage or nerve to break through, and eventually I forgot to try.”

“So what are you getting at?” he asked.

I said, “So last night, when she didn’t remember me, it made all the sense in the world. Who would remember someone they barely had any contact with?”

I guess at that point Shawn picked up on the subtleties in my vocabulary because he began questioning them. “What do you mean about the ‘barely?’”

“Huh?” I muttered, not terribly eager to get into the whole thing, but at the same time needing to know he was okay with any prospective scenario.

“You said ‘barely’ and ‘most of the time.’ You’re playing coy, Scotty boy. Did you two ever...?”

“No,” I interrupted. “I mean, I wanted to, but I was too afraid. Like I said, there was this barrier, this wall that I...”

“I know that one,” he said, brazen and clearly over whatever pitfall he’d encountered. “It’s that desire to go get something you completely fear, because it might screw up every belief you’ve ever had about anything.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of exactly it.”

The spectrum of popularity and happiness was a theory I scrambled together in high school as a way to get over the sense that the universe was terribly unfair. My idea was that the more beautiful or smart or popular someone was, the less happy they’d be. The uglier, dumber, and more lonely people were compromised by having an excessive amount of happiness. Even if they were depressed, they’d still be generally happier than that smart, pretty girl or boy you might come to be jealous of. To me, this levelled everything out. By judging people not just on their exterior features but also on their thoughts and feelings, everyone was measured against a ruler of equality.

“The reason I say ‘most of the time,’” I continued, “Was because there were a few moments in our last year that Kate and I shared. It almost ruined everything I had ever believed in. It almost ruined my spectrum.”

“What kind of moments?” he asked.

I should have had to stretch my imagination to fill in the hazy memories, but like anything to do with Kate, they were fresh and complete from too many painful nights spent awake thinking about how things always go wrong. “I was in a class with her, and that one particular day she was sitting right beside me. We were writing a test, and I finished early. I reached into my bag and got out my notebook where I wrote my ideas and poems and short stories and began jotting some things down. I was halfway through a story about an actor moonlighting as a boxer, and I was concentrating on his taxing relationship with his father. I was getting really into it, too. I’d probably written three pages in twenty minutes. Ideas were coming left and right. It was probably the most inspiring writing moment I’d experienced so far, but then she ruined it by saying hello.”

Shawn nodded, “I suppose it would be strange for someone who’d never spoken to you before to start all of a sudden.”

“And it sort of pissed me off in hindsight, because it would take me months to finish that damn story and I think I could have put it all down that afternoon if nobody had got in my way. At that moment though, all I could think was that Kate Foley acknowledged my presence and that there was no God. My idea of the world was in place, and my lowly position in it was set and I was happy to know where I stood in relation to everyone else. My philosophy put everyone on an equal footing, I found so much comfort in that. But Kate, man, for a time there she forced me to question the nature of the entire universe. After I said ‘hey’ back, she went one further and asked me what I was writing. I explained it to her, you know, in that way you’d tell someone the description of your job if you had a feeling that they just didn’t give a shit. I downplayed everything and made myself sound like I wasn’t doing anything important. I used to be kind of shy.”

“You’re still shy,” he said. “But that’s half of what makes you so cute.”

“What’s the other half?” I asked, deviating from my point.

“Well, that would be your fleeting attempts to make everything whole.”

I had to kiss him at that moment. That line was one of the things that made me forgive Shawn for being a cheating asshole. I was a sucker, and I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself. He always seemed to know just what to say.

When I stopped and smiled, he looked instantly worried.

“What is it?” I asked.

“So what’s going to happen tonight between you and her?” he asked, trying the role of bullet to the chest in a dark murder mystery.

I didn’t know what he meant. I thought back to my previous neurotic ideas about Kate, but couldn’t see how they applied to Shawn in any way.

“Remember what I asked you last night?” he reminded me. “I asked you if you liked her.”

“You didn’t ask, Shawn. You insinuated.”

“Was I wrong?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was hopeful.

I kissed him again, only this time he didn’t reciprocate. Shawn was nervous, maybe jealous, and I didn’t want him to feel that way about me. I wanted security and would say anything.

“There’s nostalgia there,” I went on, finding a valid point in my otherwise meandering bullshit. “Have you ever wanted to view parts of your life through the eyes of your old friends, or even just innocent spectators? I’ve always loved the idea of that. You get your eyes, sure, but what about everyone else’s? What do they see? Do I look different to them? Do I sound different? I’m a little curious, I guess, to know what she thought of the whole thing now that it’s all over.”

“The whole thing between you and her?” he asked, not sure what I meant.

“Sure, that,” I said, “but more than just that month when we were sort of friends. I want to know what she thought of our high school, and if she keeps in touch with her old friends. You know, things like that. I think it would give me a different outlook on what happened.”

“You mean between you and her?” he asked, now clearly being an ass.

“Stop it,” I said. “Nothing happened between you and her. I mean, her and me. Kate and me.”

“You promise?” he asked.

“What do I promise?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Shawn spoke more languages than I did. Every word he spoke was aimed at uncloaking whatever I was hiding. Sadly, Shawn knew everything there was to know about me and whatever I meant to conceal. I made myself completely open to him. More and more, I wished he would do the same.

“Just promise that you’re not trying to screw this up,” he said, his hand flirting with mine on the couch. I was surrounded by his sense of ideas and style, but I still held small things over him, if only because I was something he couldn’t resist.

“You’re the one with the boyfriend,” I said.

Shawn laughed and said, “You can be such a bitch sometimes.”

“You can match me,” I said, not letting win.

“You have to get going,” he said, mockingly tapping my watch.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin your date.”

First Shawn feigned anger, then disgust, and finally pangs of guilt. Then he showed me the door. He knew I had the upper hand in any dirty tiffs we would have so long as I was the honest one and he wasn’t. He kept me away from Mark so that I would never get the chance to come forward. I didn’t see the point to this game, but knew that if I became too honest, I’d ruin my chances of being with him. I felt trapped and typical in the same way the lesser half in an undisclosed number of other relationships with dishonest origins had to have felt. Still, I was in his house and he could kick me out if he liked. His shift in attitude, from completely open to defensive and ready-to-attack, had forced me to alter my plans for him. If he was going to be jealous of some old crush I’d had, then I wasn’t going to stop him.

I said, just before leaving and without a kiss goodbye: “I honestly don’t know what to expect when I get there.”

It felt satisfying to be catty with Shawn. It was the first hint of something more between us than just easy attraction. We’d almost had a fight there, cut short by Shawn’s restraint. He had to realize it too. From what little he told me of their deal, Mark and Shawn fought incessantly, and I felt jealous of that particular aspect of their relationship the most. A fight always signified the presence of additional emotions at play. It represented our feelings for each other being strong enough to make it worthwhile to quarrel. 

The same leather jacket Kate saw me in the night before kept me as warm as possible. Carly, my girlfriend from high school, called me “Linus” the winter we hooked up because of that thing, but it didn’t stop her from stealing it at every opportunity.

I don’t know what made me think of Carly as I headed down to Kate’s place. Perhaps it was the warmth in the wind. Carly loved this strange time of year. She thought of it as this beautiful little vacation in hell.

Kate’s townhouse was painted a wretched shade of rain-torn white and more vines sprouted around it than other houses in the area. It was about a quarter of the size of Shawn’s house. A yellow house was to the left and a pink house to the right. These colours were a strange characteristic of Calgarian suburbs that I’d never seen in the few other places I’d visited. It was like this in most places here. The houses surrounding Shawn’s, however, were the same tan colour as his. I didn’t notice this last night, but she had a small dead garden, tucked away on the left side of her door, with plant markers in the hard dirt probably appearing there by accident. I knocked on the door, and at that moment a bird flew down to the garden and stayed there with its little head tilted to the side, trying to fight the beginning gust of wind.

Kate opened the door and smiled, but looked exhausted. “Scott,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I must have come off as the biggest bitch in the whole world last night.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “And you were fine.”

“I’m sure I wasn’t, but whatever. Come in.” She took my coat and led me through. Her place was nicer than I’d imagined. She was such a jock in high school that I would have assumed hardwood flooring, but instead there was beige carpeting. On the walls I expected beer mirrors, but several framed paintings and old photographs hung sporadically along the hallway. She led me to her living room and we sat on her aged-green sofa. Perhaps it was her parents’ or a garage-sale bargain. It smelled old, and it didn’t fit with the rest of the place. The coffee table looked much newer; but even it was dusty. It was obvious that somebody in here had serious money.

“I’ve been cleaning all day,” she told me, “but this place is so huge that it takes a weekend. I haven’t even begun the upstairs yet.”

“I can see that,” I said. “This is the upstairs, then?”

“I know,” she said, feigning defeat. “I’m horrible at the domestic thing. If all of us didn’t rotate on the cleaning, and if it was all up to me, we’d be living under a growing mountain of garbage. You remember that Simpsons episode where...” she stopped, and placed her hands on her hips, as if examining me again for the first time.

“What?” I asked.

“You really put yourself together,” she said, looking me over. I felt immediately intimidated, but she went on. “I mean, I looked at your yearbook photo today, and I have to say that you have come a long way. I mean, I didn’t remember you last night, but afterwards, when it hit me that I’d been talking like an ass to someone too polite to let me have it, I had to see you again. I had to make sure it was you.”

“Is this why you invited me? To check me out?”

“Sort of,” she said, but then broke into that laughter she had.

I went with it. “So, how many goats am I worth?”

She put her finger to her lips and gave me a more thorough up and down. “You look taller than before, but maybe you’re just not hunching. I like your hair more now that you look like you’re seeing a barber. Your clothes are definitely more fashionable, even if you’re still wearing that same jacket. I’d go with twenty.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Daddy says if I can’t net thirty goats I have to join the convent.”

“Damn,” she said, “And just when I was thinking I could score some free labour.”

“Well, you could certainly use some,” I said, wiping my finger across the table to pick up the dust. As I pushed through, I hit a a stack of books. I recognized the one on top immediately. 

“So you have been looking through the yearbook,” I said.

“There’s this one picture of you in there, where you’re standing alone against some lockers, looking away. That’s the shot that did it for me, when I knew that it was you I’d talked to last night.”

I flipped to the picture, about halfway through. My right hand was clutching my left elbow, and I stared pitifully at something off in the distance. Wesley had taken it. She was the yearbook editor, so she would always be around trying to snapshot group photos with everyone smiling, everyone loving high school so much. Sometimes, though, she’d find people alone and shoot them differently. My picture showed longing, she told me afterwards, but she never explained what she meant. I didn’t long for anything then. At that time, all I really cared about was smoking.

“You just happened to be looking through your yearbook and recognized me?”

She sat a little closer and looked at my picture. “Okay, little confession. Ray remembered you. I came in last night, and he was home already.”

“Ray’s the boyfriend?” I asked.

“Yeah. We had a fight last night, because he bailed and went home without saying goodbye. He didn’t even give a good excuse, you know? It was really rude and put me in this awful mood all night. During the fight, though, I mentioned you, because you were there to take me home when he wasn’t, and out of nowhere he blurts out ‘that punk from high school?’ Can you believe that?”

“Wait,” I said, “Ray went to school with us, too?”

“Ray Salinger,” she said, and then we mouthed, “Captain of the football team” together, both sarcastic. Of course she was dating Ray. Everything about that made sense.

“Anyways,” she continued. “After he went to bed I rummaged through my old boxes and found our graduating yearbook, there we were, wearing bad clothes and looking all cheery. I mean, everyone except you. You just looked like you wanted to get out of there.” She looked up at me. “Kind of like you do now. Is something wrong?”

I thought I might start crying. I wanted to be home and holding on to something soft and warm and inanimate. “Nothing,” I said, “This is just coming as sort of a shock, you know?”

“What, someone from high school remembering who you are? It was only a few years ago.”

“I suppose it’s good,” I said, retracting my point. I didn’t want to insult her by telling her about just how right it was that she didn’t remember me the night before. “I’m sorry,” I said, “Can I use your washroom for a second?”

She pointed me down the hall and I shut the door, sat on the can and held my face in my hands. This should have been nostalgic and nice, but instead it was terrifying. Suddenly, I was glad to have known Kate for only a few scattered hours in high school. If she had ever invited me to her house or out on a date, it would have been so much worse.

“Sorry,” I said, returning after a minute, “Asthma, I think.”

“That’s right, you had asthma,” she said. “See? It’s all slowly coming back.”

While in the bathroom, I figured I could handle this situation in two ways. I could act as if I was still interested in Kate Foley, still woozy when thinking about how beyond me she was, or I could treat this as an occurrence outside of my reality. It didn’t take long to figure out which option to choose. My life revolved around Shawn/was directed by Shawn. Kate was someone I once fell for in impossible conditions, but she was now someone with the insight to perhaps let me in on some things I’d done wrong. The situation was not really so much bigger than I felt I could handle; I didn’t need a panic attack. I looked at my face in the mirror, and watched my eyes scanning the reflection. And then I went back.

“What was high school like for you?” I asked, “You know, now that it’s all over and you can look back at all of it.”

She closed the yearbook and got up from the couch. “Come with me,” she said. She stepped into her brown winter boots and threw on a coat. She was much faster than I was. I left with my shoes untied.

Down the street was this tiny convenience store selling dirty magazines and chewing gum. She asked, “Do you remember those old Fizz candies?”

“Yeah, I loved those.”

“Me too, they were my favourite.” She knelt down by the candy wall and picked up a string of them. “Remember when you were ten and they used to stick in your teeth and it would take half the afternoon to suck them clean? I loved doing that so much.”

She bought the string. It cost a quarter, which seemed to be about the exact same amount I paid for them as a kid. We left the store and she handed me the string after popping one herself.

“See, the sucking part is the same as I remember,” she said, exaggerating the whole process more so than any commercial actress. “And when it breaks and all the fizz comes out, that’s still really cool.”

I popped the candy in my mouth and chomped down immediately in order to catch up with Kate.

“But then, when all the liquid is gone and all there is left are the tiny little rock parts, they get stuck in your teeth.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling something surely not intended by whatever factory produced this stuff. “Jesus, that’s annoying.”

“I know!” she said, excited to share her annoyance. “You can’t get it out of your teeth right away. It’ll still take all day, and now that we’re older, it’s so fucking awful. How did we ever like this feeling, right?”

I thought for a second about prying two fingers into my molars and scratching at the stuck debris, but that that would be way too gross for Kate to watch.

“This,” she said, opening her mouth wide to sell the effect, “Is how I feel about high school.

“See, I’m surprised,” I said. “From where I stood, you were having a great time. You were always laughing or gossiping, always focused on whatever it was you were doing at that moment.”

“Well, sure,” she said, tossing the wrapper into the trash. “While I was there, it was my whole world. I did everything I could do. But you didn’t ask me if I liked high school while I was in high school. Opinions change. I mean, look at you. You probably hated the whole institution, but now you’re curious about it, wondering if I had just as awful a time as you did. That would be a nice picture, right? Acting happy but really decomposing inside? I liked it while I was there, but what else do you do? I didn’t want to spend four years wishing I was somewhere else. I mean, I’m sure you regret doing that, right?”

“I’m not sure my opinion has changed all that much,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “at least one of us is full of surprises.”

“This shit is still really annoying. Is there nothing we can do to get it out?”

Kate smiled. “There’s only one way,” she said. “We have to get really drunk.”

This made absolutely no sense to me. I said, “I’m never going to get your way of thinking, am I?”

“Just shut up, will you?” Kate took hold of my hand and didn’t let go for a few minutes. I was surprised until I realized that this is what she’d done with her girlfriends. Still, this was only the second time we’d ever touched. 

The first time, she hugged me in the hallway of our high school, beside my locker. I’d stopped her to wish her a happy birthday. She smiled, but there was more to her smile than just appreciation. It felt like disclosed information. Other than that first time she’d talked to me, every other meeting had been semi-private. On her birthday, she looked around quickly, and I later assumed she must have been checking to see if any of her friends had seen her with me. This cloaked me in shameful self–consciousness which would take years to shed. After she’d looked around, I grabbed my backpack from the floor and took out the story I’d been writing; the one she had interrupted. It was done, and at the time I thought I’d finished it because of her. It was signed ‘For Kate’ on the front cover of all the loose-leaf. It had cost six dollars to do the binding at Kinko’s, but it was always about the thought, anyway. She read the signature and smiled a little longer than she was used to, and then hugged me. I remembered everything about it. Kate didn’t throw herself at me like some girls did when they hugged boys. She took a step forward, placed her arms around my shoulders slowly, and held me really tight. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept my hands at my sides. I tried to hug back, but before I could completely do it, she was finished. “Thank you for this,” she said. I don’t know if she ever read it, but I hope she didn’t.

She let go of my hand after a moment, and then we walked three blocks in a direction Shawn had never taken. 

“The thing is,” she said, trying to sound like she’d been talking about her life this whole time, when really for the last three blocks we agreed that at some point in time we should trick Shawn into chewing some Fizz. “I wanted to ask you the same thing. I mean, I haven’t really talked to anyone I went to high school with but Ray in almost a year, and even then it was just at parties and when I ran into them at the pet store.”

“All your friends work at a pet store?”

“Just Rachel,” she said. I didn’t recall Rachel. “But there is that curiosity you get, right? When you experience all the same things with a bunch of people, you have to know how everyone else felt?”

“Like when we got math tests back and, even if we didn’t know the person next to us, we’d ask what they got, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Same thing, just on a bigger level. Man, all of a sudden you’ve got me wondering if everyone hated it as much as you did.”

“In general, I’ve found that nobody admits to liking high school after the fact,” I said. “It’s like a social standard, like pretending that we care about movie stars. I mean, unless they’re the ones planning the reunion, I can’t imagine a single person who lives in that kind of past.”

She asked, “Celebrities are planning our reunion?”

“No, I’m not sure who’ll be doing it, but they’ve got to be .” And then, quickly, “You’re not planning the reunion, are you?”

She said, trying her best to pose like a pirate, “I was thinking about buying a parrot and an eye patch and telling everyone I spent every year since graduation thieving the high seas.”

“Only if it doesn’t get in the way of me convincing everyone that this is, in fact,” I paused, thinking of a way to play along. I shaped my hands into a gun and pointed at her freckles, “A stickup.”

And right then she laughed like someone who’d just fallen head over heels, which was the way she’d always laughed. I remembered that about her best, and I loved that bit of her. I’ve found that not every girl can fall down laughing at some stupid joke and make it sexy. Kate’s laugh never wavered. She must have spent thirty years in some past life as a lounge singer. She had it down.

“Come on,” she said, “My favourite place in the world to get completely fucked up is right over here.

The bar was a converted corner-house. As we came up to it, I noticed the forgotten backyard, and the white plaster adorning the side. It had one of those flat roofs, and two unassuming doors at the top of a few steps. It was called “Pete’s,” possibly the most harmless name a place like this could have. Inside, the bar was littered with foreign beer posters and TSN on the TV above the booze. She’d taken me to a sports bar. It’s not that I hated them, but I never liked to surround myself with a male crowd dedicated to spending every Friday night indulging a passion towards sport scores. The Hip were playing, and as soon as we entered, Kate shook her fist in the air and yelled ‘Thirty eight years old, never kissed a girl!” The bartender gave her a wave. The few people over in the corner paid no attention to her.

“My dad made me listen to these guys for ten years straight,” she said, sitting down in a booth and talking with her hands as if she were explaining some great war. “Whenever we’d get into his Thunderbird, they’d be cranked the whole way. He always told me that each piece of music is written for a certain place, a certain time, and a certain person. He said The Hip wrote their songs for when he and I were in the car going one-forty down the highway.” She saw the bartender coming around and hollered, “Two Kokanee’s, please.”

About a minute later she asked, “You like Kokanee, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever’s good.”

“So what do you do?” she asked. I could have sworn she’d asked that same question the night before.

“I write a column for a weather magazine,” I said.

“Is that fun for you?” she asked. I didn’t know if she heard me, or if any answer I gave would have been reciprocated. She always had a gun loaded up with responses before I even had a chance to speak.

“It gets me by. It’s interesting doing it in Calgary, because the weather is kind of insane here. I’m also working on a novel.” This was half true. I’d been working on a novel for about two years. It was nowhere near done and I had no intention of finishing it anytime soon.

“So you actually ended up being a writer? That’s fucking crazy.” Our beer arrived and she clinked hers with mine. “Congratulations. That’s great.”

“Thank you,” I said. She was right. The beer helped with the shit stuck in my teeth. “It’s hardly earning me Pulitzers. I’m a total nobody right now.”

“Nobody is anybody at first, right? What are you working on now?” she asked.

“I’ve got an interview with some guy who tracks tornados in two weeks.”

“That’s kind of cool. Like that movie...”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’ll come up at some point.”

“So you think it’ll be a fun interview?”

“Um, I don’t know. I guess. I mean, it’ll be as fun as you’d figure talking to a guy about the language of tornados would be.”

“The language of tornadoes?” she said, mocking me.

“Yeah,” I shrugged it off. “The language of tornadoes. It’s this book he published. That’s why we’re interviewing him. I read it, and it was kind of philosophical. The idea was that everything’s got a language if you get deep enough into it.”

“Huh. Interesting, ” she said, likely regretting having gone down this road in the first place.

“Yeah, it’s like when two totally different civilizations come across one another, like the Indians and the Europeans. They couldn’t understand anything of what the other was saying, but there were some simple actions each understood, denoting universally shared ideas or vocabulary, you know: hunger, food, bed, water, women, king, queen, love, gold. They’d take that and eventually go deeper, and that’s when they’d kidnap a tribe member and teach him English or French or Spanish, take him back and figure the rest of the stuff out.”

“So this book he wrote is like his version of the kidnapped little indian?”

“I guess so,” I said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded. “Still, I guess it’s better than telemarketing or standing outside a flower shop in a bear costume.”

“I think you’d definitely look cute in a bear costume,” she said. I couldn’t begin to fathom what she meant by that. 

“Anyways,” I said. “It pays the cable bill, though I don’t ever seem to watch TV.”

“You’re not missing anything on TV,” she said. “My mother is addicted to all those reality shows. I swear — that’s half the reason I moved out.”

“The other half was Ray?” I asked, finally getting to the issue foremost on my mind. I wasn’t here to tell her stories about my life. I wanted to dig through hers.

“It was his idea, he’ll always say. But I totally used him to get out of there. It’s the whole ideal of stability. But lately, I don’t know; I’m not comfortable talking about it, really.”

“Well, what do you do?” I steered the conversation off Ray, finding more comfortable ground. I was doing my best not to piss her off now that we were enjoying a fun conversation settled in the comfortable present. “I’m assuming you don’t interpret foreign languages or work in telemarketing.”

“Nope,” she said, as if I’d offered her gum.

“Nope what?” I asked.

“I’m not telling you what I do,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s just something that people have to accept about me.” She quickly added, “It’s nothing lewd. I’m not a prostitute or a loan shark. It’s legal and some people have no problem with it, but it’s just something I can’t get into, all right?”

I knew I wanted to say something in the vein of “that’s ridiculous” or accuse her of working at Wal-Mart, but she told me I had to accept this about her. If there was something to accept, it meant I had to accept her, and this offered more than a good chance that she wanted to see me again. “Sure,” I said, “If it means that much to you.”

“Good, I’m glad you understand that secrets are important.”

“What happened to honesty being the best policy?” I asked.

Kate leaned in and said something so very characteristic to herself, “Clichés are only true because everyone believes in them.”

Afterwards, when she was home and I was walking the streets alone at one in the morning, I felt like sprinting down the middle of the road. She had a boyfriend and I practically did as well, but we were both in strange situations; I was pretty much in love, and this fuelled a run all the way to the C-train. I jumped every third stair and when I got to the top and grabbed my ticket, the train came, wind hitting me hard. I was almost knocked over, but I kept my footing.

On the LRT, the girl across from me had her headphones on and the music was cranked loud enough for half the car to hear. It was just Kate and me; every beat was clear. It was a pop song that was big when I was in junior high. I remembered it from my first dance, when I kissed Jordan, my first crush, in front of everybody. Instead of thinking about how wet that kiss was, I remembered about a point earlier tonight when Kate told me that music was made for people in specific times and places. I was simultaneously flushed with nostalgia while yearning to be part of the future in which Kate seemed to exist.

Read chapter 3

No Chinook Chapter 1

No Chinook is my first book, oriiginally published in 2008.

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I met Kate Foley for the second time at a party I didn’t want to attend. It had been a few months since I moved to Calgary, a tiny jump from the small suburban town a few hours away where my parents lived. I didn’t know too many people, and I wasn’t making any money. I spent most of my time watching Best Week Ever and throwing paper basketballs, and only ever went out for coffee and groceries. I was happy because I was finally living in a small, expensive apartment, with bad fixtures and a shitty refrigerator. It was a housewarming party, just after New Year’s. Shawn had invited me, but I remember this party because of her.

Kate looked beautiful as ever, but I didn’t recognize her at first. Her hair was down, something I had never been lucky enough to see before. But it was more than that. She was wearing a green dress over jeans and had bracelets on her arms. She had gained a little weight, and she looked taller than what could be attributed to the heels. She also never used to wear heels. Kate was the kind of girl who wore running shoes and shorts and skirts and was focused. Here, she was laughing. I never saw her laugh this way before, more patronizing than genuine. It was as if someone had sent her back to the shop for remodeling.

At first, I thought she was just another beautiful girl on the other side of the living room, but she stopped laughing and began listening to someone I couldn’t see clearly. She crossed her arms. As I watched her, she tapped her nails against her arm, and smiled–courteously, almost–at an interval. I knew it was really her at that moment. Kate was being patronizing in the prettiest way.

Other than Shawn, I didn’t know anyone at that party. Still, I found myself in conversation with some guy. We were talking about music. I remember that he had a ponytail, and that I was bothered by it much more than by his obsession with Nick Cave. I yawned as I listened to him drone on about misrepresentation and getting breaks. I was in a bad mood that night. I don’t know why I agreed to go. I think it had something to do with my leather jacket. I think Shawn told me that I had to come because I had a cool leather jacket. I don’t want to say that this was the kind of person Shawn was—because he was so many different kinds of person—but at least a few of them were fashion victims.

I stopped him mid-sentence and told him that a friend of mine had just come in and I had to go say hello. Kate was in another room, but I could see her down a straight hallway. I walked right down the middle, breaking up everyone’s conversations and trying not to knock over paintings and end-tables. I kept apologizing to people I bumped into. I was heading toward someone I hadn’t seen in seven years. It was forever, and I had every reason to have forgotten her. But I hadn’t, and I began to think why.

As I came into the room, I remembered about a dozen quick things about Kate Foley. This short-list scared me into the opposite corner. I remembered that Kate had started out wanting nothing to do with me. Then, suddenly and without any kind of fair warning, she began to pay attention to me. And then, with the dumbest amount of awkward propositioning, she stopped. I stood only a few feet from her, and I saw her clearly enough to know that this wasn’t some stranger who just looked like a girl from seven years ago. I felt that familiar sense of panic. I wanted to be in Tibet, up on a mountain, praying with Buddhists, holding beads in my hands and wearing nothing under my ceremonial robes. I wanted that kind of ideal peace at this moment, when my memories were telling me to run away.

There was a girl right next to me who wasn’t talking to anyone, so I introduced myself and turned my back to Kate. I needed more than a few seconds to think about what I was going to say. I shook her ringed hand in that half-flirtatious way that guys and girls shake hands, but this was completely instinctive. The plastic rings rubbed against my skin in a funny way, almost like a squeak. She had glasses and freckles and cute shoulders. We talked about Shawn just like I’d talked about Shawn to almost everyone in the house. He knew entire worlds of people. She went to school with him, and thought once that he was the cutest guy. What eventually turned her off was the realization that just about every girl thinks about Shawn in the same way at first. Still, the two of them work together on art projects at the school where he taught, so they’re the kind of friends where other colleagues would constantly wonder if they’ll hook up. I gave the same kind of patronizing laugh that I had heard Kate give a moment before. 

I looked over at Kate and wondered if this was all a big joke on me. Shawn had orchestrated this, and was doing this to test me. I’d figure out how he found her later. He was waiting for me to slip and make a mistake so some drunk ex-boyfriend would steer the crowd in my direction, and then it would all crash down like mid-afternoon hail from the west. The party would become a lesson in humiliation, culminating in my being thrown into the dirty pile of old snow on the front lawn. Almost every time I came to one of these kinds of parties, I envisioned something like this happening to me.

Suddenly, I felt like I absolutely had to leave. I excused myself from the conversation, walked away, and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets. I had no drink. I didn’t fidget. I kept my head down and headed for the door. It wasn’t that far. I just had to get by some people who wouldn’t suspect a thing, because I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t have to grab my coat because it was still on my shoulders. If Shawn saw me, I would say I was just going for air or a smoke or something. I had been trying to quit, and he knew this, so maybe going out for air was a better excuse. Sure, it was probably eleven below, but it was crowded and he’d buy it because I’d made him believe that I’m shy. I could be out in the midnight winter chill and home within an hour. It would have been safe, and I would have been warm, and no Chinook would have hit me.

I was looking at my feet and trying to shuffle out of the room when Shawn grabbed my arm. “What’s up, buddy?” he asked. I smiled at him, one of those sober smiles that he did not appreciate. He didn’t show any awareness of my intentions of leaving, and it was too late for an excuse now. His eyes caught mine and I’d go where he took me. He said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.” Shawn held my arm and led me to the room I was last in and trying hardest to avoid.

She was turned away from us, but I could picture all the things that might happen once she turned around and saw us. I tugged away, and looked at him somewhat pleadingly. I knew what he was doing, and I’d seen him do this with impunity to others. He kept his grip on my bicep, because nothing was going to stop him from introducing us.

Shawn tapped Kate’s shoulder and she turned around. She had a drink in her hand, and she smiled at him. She didn’t even look at me, even though I was staring at her intently.

“Kate!” he exclaimed, forcing me to remember this name. “How are you doing tonight? Enjoying yourself?”

“Of course,” she said, the bottle of beer barely escaping her lips long enough for her to speak. “What’s up?”

Shawn, as only he could, said, “I’m making introductions. I’m going around and introducing people to other people, you know, people who don’t know each other and probably won’t get along.”

“Are you trying to start a fight?” She asked, and they both laughed.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” he said, too cocky for most people’s tastes, but not either of ours. “So, Kate Foley, this is Scott Clarkson. Scott, this is the lovely Kate.”

She extended her hand and I gave her mine. “I’m sorry, Scott, but I don’t think I’m going to fight you tonight.”

She shook back as if she had no damned clue who I was.

“Well, you never know,” I said. “Fights tend to break out at the most inopportune moments.”

“Exactly,” she pointed out. “But in the middle of a party where the host is trying to pick fights to entertain himself, it wouldn’t be exceptionally inopportune, would it?”

Shawn looked pleased. He half-giggled, for Christ’s sake, and then he gave me that look he always gives when he runs off earlier than I want him to. He proceeded to take the arm of the girl that Kate was talking to and undoubtedly went to introduce her to some other crazy stranger who enjoys a misunderstood relationship with our host.

“You never used to talk like that,” I said.

Kate turned her head and looked at me cock-eyed. She took a swig of her beer and shrugged her shoulders. “Did we go out sometime or something?”

This only made me more uncomfortable.

“Yes, we did,” I said. Her face paled and she looked guilty. She let out a breath that let me know she was trying to remember me. She must have been scanning every face of every guy she’d ever come across, but still couldn’t quite place me. She didn’t remember my name. She didn’t remember anything. And her face, with all this written on it, instantly made me feel bad.

“No, we didn’t.” I smiled, alleviating the tension and returning us to proper strangers.

Her next breath expressed relief. “Okay,” she said. Another swig, and she punched my shoulder. “Don’t fuck with me like that, man.”

“I couldn’t help myself,” I said. “I pick fights, sometimes. You know how it is.”

“What do you mean?” She asked me, and it was at that moment I knew she had only changed in minor little ways. Years ago, when I had really wanted to know Kate, she asked me this exact same question. She was sitting across from me and I was doing my best to ignore the world. I was writing a story that I was, at the time, taking very seriously. Out of nowhere, she asked me what I was doing. When I told her I was writing a story, she asked me what I meant, as if she’d never seen anyone write a story in her life.

“Leaving,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Why?” She asked. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

God, that question. It was miles away from the original context. It was in that moment that Kate showed me some truth. She was still the same girl that broke my heart. She looked different now, but the energy, the snappy lines and the wilder hair were all just extra.

I just looked at my shoes and said, “I don’t know,” which was exactly how I replied to this question seven years ago. I sort of laughed, but what else could I say?

I had killed the conversation with this, and Kate looked like she was reaching for small talk. Like everyone else at this party, she found it in him. “So, how do you know Shawn?”

I laughed and shrugged my shoulders. She tilted her head again and smiled, looking torn; perhaps only half-interested in the answer and half-hoping it would always stay a mystery.

“How do you know Shawn?” I asked.

“It was a dare,” she said. “He was sitting across from this group of girls I used to hang out with, and one of them dared me to talk to him.”

“To talk to him, or to ask him out?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“I know those kind of dares,” I said. Someone once dared me to ask this girl out in junior high. He had no idea that it would be my first date, and I’d remember the entire debacle for that lone fact. I’d later forget all about my second date, with a less pretty but more interesting girl, because of this, and it would make me kind of angry.

“You know,” she said, changing the subject back to us. “You do look sort of familiar. Are you in film?”

“Not at the moment,” I said, wholly lying. It was lame and one of those bohemian answers that only frustrates people, but I wanted to keep this going long enough to give her a fighting chance of actually remembering. “You’ve probably seen me on the train or somewhere like that.”

“Maybe,” she said, as if it were the climatic line in an alternate universe Archie comic.

Her eyes were flirting. Was she drunk? She was smiling at me, not drinking too quickly. She wasn’t looking around for anything to use an as escape. Kate, for maybe the fourth or fifth time in my life, was actually paying close attention to me. The most recent time flashed in my head, but only for a moment. I was doing my best to keep this new moment with Kate completely independent of outside influence.

Two thoughts brushed over my mind. The first thought was that this party and Kate were a dream. Not in a dream in the actual sense of the word; I knew I was awake and that it was happening. It was a dream in the way that talking to a stranger on a bus is, or dialling the wrong number and finding yourself in a conversation is, or buying groceries and hearing a pop song that you used to love is. It’s real, but it isn’t your real life. It’s outside somehow, and it can’t interfere with the regular goings-on. There are spiritual boundaries and rules for these sorts of things.

The other thought was that I should ask for her number and scratch it into my arm so that I wouldn’t go seven more years without seeing her again.

“So are you studying anything right now?” she asked.

“I’m not at school, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“I think that’s what I meant,” she said, “but now that you mention it, I’m not so sure.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying the question out for myself.

“Well,” she said, ready to get into a debate she’d clearly had before. “I guess I asked because, hey, that’s what we do, right? What’s your name? What school do you go to? Survey questions, you know? But the way you answered, it did something. Like, it flipped a switch or something. It made me think, why did I ask you that at all? What am I doing? What am I doing here, even?”

If it were anyone else, I have been surprised that she’d stumble over her own logic. She was only self-aware when she stumbled. I always wondered what her friends thought of her clumsy forays into questioning the entire universe.

“I’m sure you didn’t mean any harm by it,” I said, getting back on track about the whole thing. “You’re going to think I’m so boring. Um, I write up these weather reports.”

“You’re a meteorologist?”

This is how the conversation about my job always goes. “No, I work at a magazine; a weather magazine. I take charts and figures and reports and I turn them into something like an essay so that professors and, I guess, meteorologists can do research.”

“Cool,” she said, in the same inflection that I probably used when I said ‘cool’ to the guy with the Nick Cave obsession a few minutes ago.

I had a line in the back pocket of my mind that usually saved the conversation from falling into the “what was your major” realm. I said, “I’m working on a novel.”

“Really?” I nodded. “What’s the plot? You got a hero?”

“I guess he’s me, so far. Though I don’t know. It might be a girl.”

“You see yourself as a girl?”

“No, but I thought it might be more interesting to write a book using a girl’s perspective. I always thought so before, but now I’m not sure.”

“Before what?”

“Before now, actually. Right now.”

“Why’s that?”

“You,” I said. “You’re showing me that I have no idea and never did about any woman I’ve ever met.”

Kate choked on her drink. It was only for a second, but it was the first time we’d broken eye contact since we began. “You’re definitely a writer.”

“Trying to be,” I said.

“Well, whatever. Scott, right? That’s what Shawn said your name was?”

“Yeah,” I said, knowing now that she was drunk and stumbling on something she wouldn’t otherwise. She was great with names, with lyrics. It was one of those talents one has, but that one has no practical application. I don’t remember Kate ever really liking music.

She surprised me again. “I want to go home,” she said. She was drunk, but still in enough control to know she couldn’t drive home. “And my boyfriend doesn’t seem to be anywhere anymore. I mean, we came together, but who knows. He always leaves early when he’s not having any fun, you know?”

“How could you not have fun here?” I said, “I mean, a party where nobody knows anyone but Shawn. Where’s the lack of fun, right?”

She had a boyfriend. There was something else new.

She laughed again, “Exactly. It’s a blast, and I just can’t stand all the excitement. It’s stunning, really. Would you mind?” She raised her arm, elbow-first to me.

“Not at all,” I said, knowing the question before she could say it. 

“I’d really appreciate it. This city, you know? It’s dangerous at night.”

“All cities are,” I said.

Looking at this so far, it was clear that Kate didn’t remember me at all. Still, there must have been something, because we had been together for three minutes and she was asking me to escort her home. There must have been a register in her head of people who were, among other things, completely safe.

“I’m not far from here. Won’t put you out of your way much, and you can come back and soak in all the fun if you so desire.” She put down her drink on a table, and wobbled only slightly. Kate rambled like an honest girl from Alberta, the kind that could keep you up on the phone until four in the morning in a conversation neither of you remember until two years down the road.

“Sure, no problem,” I said. I followed her to the closet. She grabbed her coat.

“Nice jacket,” She said. I’d had it on the whole time.

“Thanks.” I grabbed the door. I’d wanted to say goodbye to Shawn, but he wouldn’t have any right to care if anything happened anyway. Not that I was really thinking about it at this point. It wasn’t completely out of the question to hook up with someone you fell in love with years ago on some random drunken excursion. It didn’t matter if she had a boyfriend, or that she was half-unconscious and completely trusting her well-being to a veritable stranger who had somehow gained trustworthy status because he’s claiming to be working on a novel. But nothing was going to happen because nothing between Kate and me was ever supposed to happen.

I would saunter back and tell Shawn everything while helping him clean up, because doing so always purged me and brought us closer as friends. I wouldn’t tell him about Kate in any context he didn’t already know, because lying was something that needed to be done every now and then to save ourselves from referring to each other in terms not altogether comforting or complimentary.

We stepped out into the biting January weather. It wasn’t snowing. In fact, there was no snow in the sky and nothing had come in the past few days, so what was on the ground had long been properly shovelled, sectioned off, and used primarily as a place to pick up and drop young children. There were lots of dog prints showing where they’d leapt. It was a well-lived snowfall and one of the few things in the city that reminded me of home. As we walked I mentioned this, and she agreed.

“Wait,” she said, “What nice, tiny little hovel of a town did you say you were from?”

“Strathmore,” I said, knowing exactly what was coming.

“Oh my God, me too! What school did you go to? We’re about the same age, right?”

I stopped, “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“I thought you said you were joking. Shit, you weren’t joking?” She was worried that she might actually have to feel bad if I turned out to be a past lover, but she had no responsibility to feel anything if I was nobody.

“The name Scott Clarkson means nothing to you, does it?” It was fair for me to say that, at least. I wouldn’t push it. I’d do my best not to be completely pathetic and mean.

The thing was, she looked like she was really trying. She looked up and I could tell she was reaching deep into her memory. She spun around. She held my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. God, she was pretty. I’d never seen her hair down before; it was long, wavy and nice. Everything about her was so nice, even her drunkenness.

“I’m sorry, Scott. I don’t remember you.”

I’d like to say that this pierced me in some way, but it was exactly what I would have expected, and knowing I was right all along actually hurt more.

“That’s okay,” I said. “What’s important is that we get you home safe. Are you far from here?”

She pointed, and said, “That way, just another block or so. I live with my boyfriend. But it’s my place.” My time with Kate hadn’t been nearly long enough. From the second I saw her, I’d had a thousand questions to ask but no pretext to inquire. They didn’t matter now. If she didn’t remember me, if I had absolutely no place in her memory, then any question, anything at all, was pointless. I was a stranger and had no right to ask her how she was, what she had been doing all these years, why she broke my heart, why I have no confidence when it comes to women, how to solve that, if she’d love me now, if she’d give up everything to run rampant with me through every romantic setting we could muster, or if everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. She’d had such a great idea of most of that before. I wanted to know what her thoughts on these things were now. But I had no foothold and was lost in a sea of anonymity.

“This is me,” she said, finally stopping at a homely-looking porch. There were leaves where the snow had rescinded.

And that was it. She said thank you, gave me a wave, and went inside. I was so afraid I’d never see her again that I quivered. It might have just been the cold, but I couldn’t be sure. 

The walk back to Shawn’s was fast. It didn’t give me enough time to work up a proper sadness. What did I care, anyway? This was happenstance. It was nothing material in the giant schism of whatever it was I was doing here.

As I came in, nobody turned around to say hi. There was a group of people all leaving together, and my arrival did nothing to evoke a reaction. It was a quarter to three. Between now and sunrise everyone would eventually bustle out.

I needed Shawn like I needed warm blankets all over. I had this idea once —after having moved out of my parents’ place, of course— that I’d cover every single wall of whatever kind of house I lived in with blankets. They would be so warm that when I needed to, I could throw myself into any of them and be instantly comforted. The walls wouldn’t hurt because the blankets would be so thick. They would catch me, like giant furry Muppets, whose only purpose was to keep me warm, alive and comforted. I needed Shawn on every wall. I wanted to throw myself at him and tell him this stupid little fantasy of mine and have him laugh it off as childish. Shawn never really thought highly about any of my ideas, but this never bothered me. I wasn’t here to seek acceptance or mutual respect. I scanned the first floor and the living room and the kitchen, but I couldn’t find him.

Shawn had just moved here from his last place, where we first met, and I had no idea how massive it was until I found myself searching all these hallways. He couldn’t afford a place like this by himself. He lived with other people but I had no idea how many. It had to be seven, at least. This place was a mansion. It was only two floors and from the front looked like any other flat, but it ran so damn deep. I found the kitchen, but its only occupants were a couple, younger than me, and better looking, knocking fridge magnets onto the ground with their clumsy kissing. The dining room was empty. The living room had half a dozen people inside, but none that I recognized.

A girl was sitting on the stairs, reading a book. She read with a focus so unnatural to the setting that I wondered if she was an illusion. I passed beyond her, and at the top of the stairs I saw some doors on both sides of the hallway. I envisioned people running from one door to another with no justification for coming out of a door they hadn’t entered. This was my first time here. I had no idea where Shawn’s room was. He hadn’t had a chance to give me the grand tour. I was home visiting my parents when he moved, and I couldn’t help. It was getting late; there were only a handful of people left downstairs. All the doors were closed. This was hopeless. Even if I found the right door on the first try, Mark might be in there and I was not prepared to handle anything that serious or that heartbreaking tonight. This was already a night to forget.

I sat on the stairs next to the girl. She was dressed like someone who lived here. She had giant, comfortable slippers on. She wore a robe, but the black t-shirt and jeans she had underneath were hardly hidden. She looked like she was waiting for everyone to leave.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m Alice.”

“Scott,” I said. “I’m Shawn’s friend. What are you reading?”

“It’s for class, but I kind of like it,” She said. “And isn’t everyone one of Shawn’s friends?”

I ignored her comment about Shawn and focused on the book. “Whose book?” I asked. I studied quite a bit of poetry in school and wondered if she could’ve been in one of my classes.

“Anne Sexton,” she said. “You know her?”

I nodded. I liked her. Generally, I was a fan of artists whose negative aspects became the inspiration for their art. It worked with my spectrum, verified it in every way. And I kind of liked the idea that if things ever got really bad for me, then at least my writing would soar.

“Can I see it?” I asked. She handed me the book, and I flipped through until I found my favourite.

“You like that one most?” She asked.

I nodded. I skimmed parts of it, lines that I liked:

For My Lover, Returning To His Wife

Lets face it, I have been momentary—

This is not an experiment. She is all harmony—

I give you back your heart—

I give you permission—

She is the sum of yourself and your dream—

She is solid—

As for me, I am watercolour—

I wash off—

“Which one do you like best?” I asked. She shrugged.

“Probably the one about Snow White,” she said. I smiled. She was studying in the middle of the night in the twilight of a house-warming party. She did not have time to care about favourites. I had never studied this late. Maybe that was why my grades stunk.

I heard a door open upstairs and footsteps slowly heading our way. Shawn’s house creaked like something haunted, and I wondered how anyone could have any privacy here.

“Hey man,” I heard from behind and above. Shawn. Sanctuary. “I looked around for you a little while ago. I thought you left?”

“I came back,” I said. 

Shawn looked tired, spent. This was the end of the party, even for the host. I wasn’t tired, though. Perhaps it was the walk in the fresh air. Or perhaps it was the strange combination of seeing a former crush in the house of my current one. The whole strangeness of tonight had been a little dizzying.

He came and sat down above Alice and me, and now there was no room to pass on the stairs. People would have to climb over us or find another way.

“Did I introduce you two?” He asked.

“Did you want us to fight?” Alice asked, without looking away from the poetry.

“If you want,” he said, “but do it down there. You can’t really get into a good scrap halfway up a staircase.” Alice laughed a bit, but I just looked at Shawn pleadingly. I needed him now. I needed his abilities to fix anything that was ever wrong. He noticed the look I was giving him, and signalled me to follow him upstairs. I waved goodbye to Alice. She waved back, glancing upwards for just a second.

Shawn’s room was off-white and all I could think of was how much he must hate it.

“You’re probably itching to paint this room,” I said.

“It’s hideous, isn’t it? Next week, how about it? You and me?”

“You’re on,” I said, plopping down on his bed. It wasn’t made. It smelled of new sex, but there was nobody else there. Perhaps they’d left before I returned? Perhaps they were hiding behind the curtains? Nothing would have surprised me. I hoped I wasn’t breaking anybody’s ribs by sitting on the mattress.

“Mark?” I suggested, motioning to the strewn pillows.

He nodded, looking both ashamed and affirming, “But not since before the party.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said, and the look I gave him let him know which was the correct path to take.

“So,” he said, “Where did you go? You were gone just long enough for everyone to get sick of the place.”

“I walked Kate home,” I said.

“Where was her boyfriend?” Shawn placed a hand on the terrible paint and looked like he was trying to remember the lyrics to an old favourite. “She has one, doesn’t she?”

“Somewhere, apparently,” I said. I felt at least partial satisfaction that absence was Kate’s boyfriend’s only known characteristic. He existed, but nowhere tangible and always on the move. 

Shawn knew immediately. “You have a thing for her.”

I tried to dodge it: “I barely know her.” But he was unrelenting.

“And somebody blonde, too. Well, you are full of surprises.”

“It’s not that she’s blonde.”

“Still,” he said, “It’s clear.”

“Nothing’s clear. Not about this one.”

“You walked a girl with a perfectly good boyfriend home from the party. Or, at least the boyfriend she claims to have.” Shawn lay down on the bed next to me, stretching out like a cat. It was then I realized he was barefoot. “You think she lied about the boyfriend? Maybe to you, but why me?”

“I used to know her,” I said, ending his lame conspiracy. “Back in high school.”

“Fuck her?” he asked, hoisting himself up onto his elbows, enjoying every second he got to be frank as much as possible.

“Barely spoke. We were on opposite ends of the spectrum.”

“Ah, the spectrum,” he said, realizing we’d had this discussion before.

I ignored him. “We did speak a few times though, and when we did it was like...I don’t know, like she was interested or something. It was like I represented something curious to her, unique, you know? Maybe she was like that with everyone.”

“That sort of blows your whole spectrum philosophy out the window then, doesn’t it? I mean, how could she be interested in you if she was on one end and you were on the other?”

“Exactly,” I blurted. “If she was interested in me then my theory was completely off. But that’s the thing. Even back then, when she talked to me, I felt it was throwing off every idea I’d ever had about that spectrum. She did that. Kate threw everything off.”

“That’s very sweet,” he said, cracking his neck and falling back down. “I hope I find someone who changes my view of the world.”

I stood, knowing what was coming. “Shawn, don’t.”

“Oh wait...” he said.

“Don’t.”

“...I already did.”

Whenever he brought it up, I cringed. I got that he was trying to be romantic, but very few of his come-ons rang true with his charm. Lots of people thought that Shawn was charming, but only people who’d slept with him recognized his insecurity and sleaze. Still, the uneasy feeling of having this twisted compliment flow through me was nothing like his guilt trips. Still, I knew the amount it hurt me meant nothing compared to how much he was hurting himself.

“Mark still doesn’t know,” I retorted, knowing it would piss him off but unable to leave it alone. “Does he?”

“Don’t be cute,” he said.

“This is getting fucking stupid,” I said, knowing now that the subject was cracked open, realizing that since he took the first shot that everything was fair. “If you tell him, we can stop fucking around and...”

“And what,” he said. “Start fucking around?”

“Without the around,” I said. “Maybe.”

Shawn knew that telling Mark the truth would crush him and end whatever it was they had going. It wasn’t love, no matter what either of them would say about it. It couldn’t be love with me in the picture.

“Just for the record,” I said. “I’d like to be without the around for once with you.”

Shawn looked like a boy about to break apart, held together only by his ego and his ability to grab unforeseen toeholds. I knew that face and knew that nothing would happen with this subject tonight. It was still at last in Shawn’s house. Everyone else had begun their journey home or fallen asleep elsewhere. I could feel that Shawn and I were the only two left awake. 

It was at this time I lay down beside him and nestled my head under his arm. The bed creaked slightly under our weight, and by the silence I finally knew that no one was hiding underneath. He returned my little cuddle and before too long our breathing synced. We both knew that what we were doing was wrong but weren’t bothered by it. I could smell Mark, but it was just a ghost of a presence and didn’t matter. Shawn’s smell, although present, was more subtle; I focused on him. 

Being held by Shawn reminded me that I was okay and safe and fine, regardless of what happened. 

“Good housewarming,” I told him, whispering next to him, barely awake. He shifted to face me, and I could feel his breath just above my mouth.

“Thanks,” he said. His eyes were half open and his gaze fixed on me through the slivers.

“Mark went home, right?” I asked in a last gasp of jealousy.

“What a stupid question,” he whispered. He was asleep within seconds.

I drifted in an out, thinking about Mark and Shawn and myself, finally settling on a renewed image of Kate. First, I thought that how she looked tonight was a figure completely separate from my previous memories. Her dress and her hair and that little bit of extra weight tricked me into thinking I’d found a different person altogether, but her retorts brought me back to my reality. Her interest in me was just as much of a hallucination as it always had been. Surely she was just drunk, eager to have anyone remotely available help her home. I was harmless and it was precisely that simple. In her eyes I was something to fall back on if the situation required it. In her eyes, I was little.

Still, I couldn’t help but dwell on the precious seconds I had with her, both now and before. Shawn’s arms held me tight, as though by unconscious instinct. I thought back to how Kate walked around in high school. She always wore black athletic shorts or pants and grey t-shirts or sweaters. Her ponytail was a fixture, as permanent as her eyes or lips. She only wore running shoes, and walked with an even pace, strutted without vanity. Her backpack was from a camping store, and that implied trips up north or out west, weekends with friends, drinking, fucking; experiences in which I hadn’t yet had my turn. I didn’t invest as much time memorizing her friends, but they were similar, though never quite as perfect. From an outsider’s view, Kate was always happy. 

I slept beside Shawn until morning. We ate grapefruit for breakfast while he complained about his hangover, and talked about the coming few days. It was one of those mornings that I felt married to him, and I treasured the chance to be involved in his daily routine. The house was sweaty with slowly stretching bodies and left-over liquor. Sometime after breakfast and before Mark came back to grab his forgotten wallet, I found an exit in the excuse of having to finish a column I hadn’t yet begun. Shawn only hugged me goodbye, but I knew it was because of the audience that knew only half the truth.

Outside, the day was bright and the sunshine hit me through cracks in tree branches and rooftop spaces. This morning, I was happy to be walking down city streets, to have a convoluted social life, to finally be away from my parents. I had seen Kate Foley in the present tense, and it didn’t break me in any way. Cars steadily drove through the streets across which I jaywalked, and the people of this bright city were out enjoying the hint of warmth in winter. The air and the people I passed had a briskness to them, and I felt separate, like a tourist without his camera. The lack of sleep gave me a distance from those shopping or chatting on patios, and a refreshed eye for every reason I came here in the first place.

Read chapter 2

Solving circles in the corners of tables in InDesign

I'm trying to solve a very specific problem with InDesign and am at a loss. This may very well be impossible in InDesign but I'm not ready to give up yet.

I'm trying to make ellipsis appear in the centrepoint between cells in a table. It would look something like this.

In the image above, I have a table with four columns and two rows. On top of the table, I have five ellipses. These are all seperate objects, however, as the ellipses are simply sitting on top of the table. Though it's attaining the aesthetic I'm going for, I consider this a messy solution. Grouping them together might do the trick, but it can be a lot of work at any sort of larger scale. Creating a page full of these would require a lot of step-and-repeating, grouping, and unnecessary work. Not to mention when the design inevitably changes and I have to alter the size of the ellipses.

What I'm looking to make is some kind of stroke style that would allow me to make a quarter-circle in the corner of a table cell. I know I can play with strokes on cells, but I don't think there's any way of creating a stroke that only affects the corner.

Using dots or Japanese dots takes us one step into the solution, but I can't get past what you see above. Dots are in the corner of each cell, and I can change the size of the dots (2pt on the outside, 1pt on the inside, just to demonstrate), but I can't substitute the non-corner dots with a straight line, nor can I contstrain the dot to just the inside of the table.

By cutting an ellipse into quarters in Illustrator, I can at least guarantee placement in a table cell. I can resize this table and the corner effect will remain. However, I can't place anything else in these table cells, as I've had to modify alignment in the cell to keep the quarter-circles in place. It also makes re-sizing the circles themselves difficult, because they're no longer connected. Re-sizing one dot would require four individual steps.

Another route to go is to make a seperate object box with the ellipse repeated as needed, placed behind the table cell. This solution isn't awful, but it requires almost as much fiddling to get rid, and because there's just custom tab marks in between each ellipse, there's an increased chance of accidental offsetting.

Anchored offsets don't work either, since inline anchored objects can't leave the vertical threshold. I can push this ellipse horizontally all I want, but not vertically.

And here's where I'm at. Does anyone have a simpler way of attaining what I'm looking for? I want to be able to scale the ellipse using a stroke style (1pt, 2pt, etc) while not affective the table cell stroke, while also allowing text to exist inside the cell.

Sonder

The best blogs build on one another. While stories and links will appear in other articles, I want to set aside a space for those that left a particular impression on me. I'm calling this collection of posts Sonder. This is what I'd like to call my "holiday" edition, with a few extra-long pieces about reflection that pair well with the time of year and alcohol. 

The final entry that night was the punchy “Clintern,” but the seventh was the most Letterman-esque of all: “A Regis tattoo right in the middle of your ass.”

I found the silence lonely and isolating. So I started to play music at the office but sometimes, it's hard to choose what to listen to! What mood do I want to be in? What songs are good in the background, and not so good that I'm busy singing along and getting distracted? What music would be okay if suddenly I pulled out my earphones and my colleague heard?

“You can’t sit back and say ‘The world will beat a path to my site.’ I think those days are gone and I don’t think they’re coming back.”

When best-ofs only rehearse some envisioned canon, they spurn every beguiling glance and revelation of convenience.

Stephen Colbert, the improv star, never really wanted to be a political comedian. And that’s precisely why he was the best one.

I remember when my blog died.

This is one of the novel’s greatest brutalities against its characters, but it’s not intentionally mean-spirited: it’s a way in which fiction seeks to present life as truly as possible.

Mindlessly self-deleting, it turns out, is addictive.

Apart from simply wanting to be entertained, we watch TV so that we have something to talk about with the people around us, some form of cultural currency to be exchanged, whether that’s reading and commenting on the Internet or chatting up the guy wearing the Heisenberg T-shirt behind you in the grocery line.

It’s time for us to take it slow. The internet’s not going to do it for us.

Fiction release schedule for 2014-2015

Christmas 2014: No Chinook, one chapter per day until New Years.
January 2015: A Record Year for Rainfall, three chapters per week until the end of the month.
February 2015: Sprites, parts 5-10, released twice per week.
March-May 2015: Jets, parts 1-10, released weekly.
June-August: Elves, parts 1-10, released weekly.

Post-August: collapse.

Always Move Forward

This is stable advice. It doesn't matter what industry you work in. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter if you're in grade 1 or teaching grade 1. You have to keep learning. You have to keep adapting. You have to always move forward.

Technology will advance. Your competitors will advance. Industries that have nothing to do with you will accidentally destroy your livelihood and not even notice. We know these things. We've seen it happen. Not all of us get the benefit, as I do, of walking past a machine like this every morning.

InDesign won't last forever. Squarespace won't last forever. Twitter will get crushed by something sooner than later, I'm sure. Every platform, tool, and hack I use today to make a living and communicate will go the way of this machine. If they're lucky, these things will get the honour of a museum-like placement in our periphery.

If I've learned anything in my short career in design is that what works today probably won't work tomorrow. This isn't a bad thing. It's often why anybody ever hires a designer in the first place. And this isn't so much a reminder to you as one to me. I want to remember this one when I'm failing to solve a problem because I'm foolishly sticking to what I know.

TCM Remembers 2014

The Oscars have a video highlighting people who have passed in the movie industry, but TCM's is always better. There shouldn't be any surprise there: TCM is a historical document. The Oscars commemorate, but TCM actually remembers.

Classic movies are a part of my life. I watch movies that are near a hundred years old on a regular basis. Most of the actors I love the most are no longer around. But many of them are. Lauren Becall was still with us until this year. Shirlie Temple and James Garner, too. They're in this short film, along with more contemporary actors like Robin Williams and Harold Ramis. You're gonna cry. I did.

Sonder

The best blogs build on one another. While stories and links will appear in other articles, I want to set aside a space for those that left a particular impression on me. I'm calling this collection of posts Sonder.

What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order?

Every creative person of color I talk to, whether it’s friends of mine or Lupita Nyong’o, their career wasn’t something they aspired to, let alone felt entitled to. It wasn’t until they saw something that gave them permission to do it that they did it. I always think, what if that moment hadn’t happened? What if Lupita Nyong’o had never seen The Color Purple? We are foreclosing so much available talent. One of the many tragedies of oppression is this vast untapped potential, not just on an individual level, but as a culture.

Another vow should read: ‘However much the other seems to understand me, there will always be large tracts of my psyche that will remain incomprehensible to them, anyone else and even me.’

Whether it was mixing up and remembering out of order a series of shots, or conflating scenes from different movies that happened to star the same actor, or simply forgetting portions of a film, it was difficult to recall a film correctly, accurately. Which isn’t the same thing as not recalling a film truthfully.

Back in 2004, Men's Health ran a poll to check the moral pulse of the average guy. This year we did it again. The responses, from nearly 1,500 men, were not encouraging.

YouTube, in contrast, can feel like some hermetically sealed, for-kids-by-kids world. It’s a place where an oddball 17-year-old with a video camera can gain an audience of millions, drop out of school, and regularly send malls full of teenagers into a frenzy, all while remaining completely anonymous to anyone over 30... . [W]hat happens when that culture grows up?

Sprites, Jets, and Elves elevator pitch 1.0

So I'm halfway through the "Sprites" part of Sprites, Jets, and Elves, which means I'm a sixth of the way through my first draft. The actual plot of the story may not be evident yet, but that's going to change with part 5 and 6. Essentially, E, my main character, is going to get an offer for a job that will change her life. The first part will conclude with her reaching a tense point with her decision, where she'll have to make a drastic choice.

Part 2 will follow through with the consequences of that choice. She'll find herself isolated while being more connected than ever. She'll help more people than ever before but feel awful. And finally, she'll break free of everything. Part 2 will end with her totally alone and disconnected for the first time in her life.

Part 3 will be about finding a way forward.

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