Douglas Coupland: Hey Nostradamus!

I thought about my own child-to-be as I stared out the window, turning the pages only when I heard everybody else turn theirs. I saw fleeting images of breast-feeding, prams and difficult labor, my knowledge of motherhood being confined mostly to magazines and cartoons. I ignored Lauren Hanley, two rows over, who held a note in her hand that she obviously wanted me to read. Lauren was one of the few people left from my Youth Alive! group who would still speak to me after rumors began spreading that Jason and I were making it.

Carol Schraeger passed the note my way; it was a plea from Lauren to talk during homeroom break. We did, out by her locker. I know Lauren saw this meeting as being charged with drama, and my serenity must have bothered her.

"Everyone's talking, Cheryl. Your reputation is being tarnished. You have to do something about it."

Lauren was probably the key blabber, but I was a married woman, so why should I care? I said, "Let people say what they want, Lauren. I take comfort in knowing that my best friends are squelching any rumors from the start, right?"

She reddened. "But everyone knows your Chevette was parked at Jason's all weekend while his parents were away in the Okanogan."

"So?"

"So you guys could have been doing anything in there -not that you were - but imagine what it looked like."

Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.

In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE /GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.

Stillness is what I have here now - wherever here is. I'm no longer a part of the world and I'm still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can't tell where. And for whatever it's worth, I'm no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where's my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?

It's quiet here - quiet like my parents' house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they're the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.

I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses - not the voice of the speaker. I'd like to hear from Jason and my family, but I'm unable to sift them out.

Dear God,

Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vile-ness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.

As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles' "Lovely Rita"; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I'd get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle - moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.

The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn't have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch - six girls from the Youth Alive! program. We'd go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I'd stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I'd peeked at my brother's porn stash - nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they'd never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria's prime center tables. I asked, "So what's this all about?"

Their faces seemed so - young to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I'd now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.

Jaimie Kirkland finally said, "My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee's Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we'd go native today."

"Everyone must be flattered." I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique's designated spokeswoman. "Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.

Dee cut in: "Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to as." Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.

"Confess to what?" Forcing them to name the deed was fun.

"You," said Lauren, "and Jason. Fornicating."

I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness melting away like snow on a car's hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.

Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason's attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who's seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.

Jason appeared to be heavily into Youth Alive!, which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason's older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of Alive!'s Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent's dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into planning and preparing for the next step. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent's face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.

In any event, Pastor Fields's sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason's loins so long. So I began attending Youth Alive! meetings three times a week, singing "Kumbaya," bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles - all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.