Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“I’m not going.”

“She told them you want to French kiss both of them and then decide.”

“Fat chance.”

“Donna will tell everyone that proves you’re a fairy.”

“I’m not kissing the twins.”

“French kissing. You should say you can’t pick either of them because you want to go with Wally Michelin.”

“I don’t want to go with anyone.”

“But everyone knows you want to go out with her.”

Wayne felt sick. He loved Wally Michelin the way he loved constellations, or leaves, or king eider ducks.

“Wally Michelin is going to the party. Everyone is. And you have to go with someone or you’ll have to French kiss Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Gracie took an Oh Henry bar out of her lunch bag, started biting the peanuts off it, and left him beside the garbage can.

Donna Palliser’s mother had laid out a cut-glass bowl of Cheezies and a matching punch bowl with cups on hooks. There was a plate of toothpicks stuck with Vienna sausages and bread-and-butter pickles, and there was orange Jell-O made with Carnation milk and shredded coconut. The party was in the rec room. There was a bar, a pool table, and a corner chest bulging with stuffed animals.

The Pallisers’ rec room had a dartboard and a hockey table, the kind where you shift handles to make the players dart around. There was a shelf with a copper Aladdin’s lamp on it, a set of ruby shot glasses, and a scrimshaw hunting horn. The ceiling was stucco with silver flecks. The Pallisers had a beagle, and the beagle blocked the bottom stair leading up to the kitchen. It had an orange rubber ball in its mouth, slimy and bitten to show rubber the colour of the Vienna sausages.

Brent Shiwack and the other boys took turns smoking Rothmans and sticking them out the window. The girls gathered around the punch bowl. Donna had put rum in it. The bar had Tia Maria, Baileys Irish Cream, crème de menthe, and some almond liqueur no one had ever opened, that Donna said was made by monks. Donna had floated a tub of pink ice cream in the punch. The boys argued about who was better: Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix or CCR. Wayne was on Pink Floyd’s side, but that was not what he listened to at home. He listened to “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, and “Song Without Words” by Tchaikovsky, and late-night radio.

There was a downstairs toilet, a tiny cubicle with a bolt on its door, and that was where you went for spin the bottle if the bottle pointed at you or if you had spun it. Donna announced it was time for Casey Kasem’s top forty, and “The Tide Is High” came on, and all the girls sang in falsetto with Donna doing the harmony. Carol Rich went in the cubicle with Archie Broomfield and they came out in fifteen seconds. Bruce McLean went in with Donna, and Mark Thevenet started counting on his second hand.

“Whoa,” he said as they came out. Donna’s hair was all over her face and their heads dipped as if ducking a shower of confetti. “You guys took six minutes!”

The bottle was an old wine bottle with Hungarian writing on it, and it knew where to point. It put Chad White in the cubicle with Ashley Chalk, and it pointed at couples as if it had intelligence. It did not put a popular girl with an unpopular boy, and it never put a popular boy with a girl who wasn’t pretty. It did not point at Wayne or the Groves twins or Wally Michelin or Gracie Watts at all for a long time. Gracie had new clothes on tonight, a pair of pants no one had seen. They were elephant pants like the popular girls wore, but Gracie did not look like a popular girl in them. She looked like an unpopular girl in a popular girl’s pants. She looked as if she didn’t own them. The rest of her was the same as usual: bony wrists and a nylon cardigan and a ten-karat gold signet ring. The other girls wore lip gloss and scarves and earrings. Ashley Chalk had a new silk headband every day; Gracie Watts wore elastic bands that broke her hair. Wayne suddenly knew this was who the bottle would choose for him, and it did. Donna Palliser might have planned something for him and the Groves twins, but the bottle had Gracie Watts in mind. The bottle cared about no one’s plan but its own. Wayne was prepared to go in the cubicle with Gracie Watts if he had to. He did not have to kiss her.

But in the cubicle she stood waiting. “I’ve kissed lots of people.”

Had kissing been going on among his classmates all the time? Was he the only one who had no clue? Had people been kissing each other behind the school Dumpster where they smoked? But Gracie Watts didn’t smoke. She got eighties and nineties.

“Lots?”

“I’ve been kissing since I was four.”

“Four?”

“I kissed Duncan McQueen in his father’s garage when I was four, and I kissed Brent Shiwack in the woods when I was only seven.”

“Brent Shiwack?”

“I kissed Kevin Stacey in his backyard tent hundreds of times, when I was eleven.”

“I haven’t kissed that many people.”

“Have you kissed anyone?”

“I don’t want to kiss people. I don’t want to go out with people.”

“Do you fall in love with boys?” She stood close and he was interested in her lips, but not in kissing them. He was interested in how the two peaks at the top were so sharp and the scoop in the middle had freckles in it, three, like stars behind the Mealy Mountains. He wanted to get a nice sharp pencil and draw that part of her lips. He got the idea she didn’t want him to kiss her at all, not really. He got the idea she wanted someone to talk to.

A great hoot went up, and Mark Thevenet called out, “Seven minutes!” Gracie and Wayne went back to their places in the circle.

“This is from Key West.” Donna wrapped a sarong around her head and put a glass ball on the floor where the bottle had spun. “You’re going to tell me your dreams, and I’m going to interpret them.”

“That’s only a weight for a fishing net,” Mark Thevenet said.

“You have no imagination. I’m an excellent dream interpreter. I learned how to do it from a kit I got for my birthday when I lived in Riverside, New Brunswick.”

“I’ll go,” Wally said. It was the first interest she had shown in anything at the party.

“You’ll have to wait your turn. The ball is telling me Tweedledee has to go first, and then Wayne Blake, and then Tweedledum. We’re going to split up Tweedledee and Tweedledum for once in their lives. That’s what the ball wants.”

“Fuck,” said Brent Shiwack. “I need a smoke.”

“Which one of you is Tweedledee?”

“Does it matter?” Brent asked.

“Who here knows which twin is which?”

“Everyone knows,” Wally Michelin said quietly. “Except you. Their names are Agatha and Marina. Agatha is shyer than Marina but she smiles more. She wants to be a travel agent. Marina makes things. She makes jewellery out of old copper pipes. Agatha and Marina aren’t identical. We all know that. How come you don’t?”

“Which one,” Donna stared Wally down, “is Tweedledee? That’s all I want to know. And which one is Tweedledum? Can you tell me that?”

“No,” Wally said. “I can’t. Because Tweedledum and Tweedledee aren’t their names. They don’t correspond to one or the other. Those are names people call the twins as a unit.”

“Does anybody else here think there’s anything wrong with that?”

Wayne said, “I think the twins probably like it better if you use their real names.”

“Do you?” Donna looked at the twins, who sat with their chins buried in the collars that peeped out of their cardigans. Both wore necklaces Marina had made. Everyone waited. Agatha directed one of her shy little smiles at the loops on the carpet.

“Do you mind us,” Donna said in a louder voice, as if the twins could not hear, “calling you a friendly nickname like Tweedledum or Tweedledee?”