Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“We don’t care,” Marina said.

“See?” Donna gave Wally a great big smile. “They don’t care. Why should you care if they don’t care themselves? Who made you the great authority? Come over, both Tweedles. Tweedledum, tell us the dream you had last night and I’ll interpret it. I might even be able to tell your future.”

Wally sat apart. The rest of the group nudged closer to Donna and her glass fishing weight.

“I didn’t have any dream,” said Agatha.

“Close your eyes.” Donna put on a wavery, occult voice. “Try to remember.”

“I know I didn’t have one because I didn’t sleep very good last night.”

“But surely you dreamt between your moments of wakefulness. Think back. We can only work with material you provide. We can’t cheat.”

“Maybe you could go on to someone else.”

“Do you ever have flying dreams?”

“I love those. But I never had one last night.”

“What happens in your flying dreams?”

“I move my hands at first, real fast.”

“Do it for us.”

Agatha flapped her hands. Everyone laughed.

“Then what?”

“Then I flap my whole arms.”

“And do you fly?”

“It takes a long time.”

“I dare say it does.”

“After I flap my hands, and then my arms, I start to float, then I’m up over the street. I’m over the houses and the telephone poles. Sometimes I look down and there’s a gull flying lower than me.”

“That must be amazing. Is Tweedledee ever up there with you?”

“No. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t have a twin. It feels strange.”

“I guess it is strange. Four hundred pounds floating over Croydon Harbour. I hope none of us is ever down on the road if you decide to fall. Do you ever fall?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Do you weigh four hundred pounds?”

“The nurse measures us in kilograms. We’re on a reduced carbohydrate diet. We have to have gall bladder surgery.”

“So my interpretation of your flying dream is this. Which one are you again? Are you Tweedledum?

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll say you are. You’re alone. You’re weightless. You’ve had your gall bladder surgery but one of you has died. It must be the other one. It must be Tweedledee. When are you supposed to have the surgery?”

“Next August,” Agatha said, near tears.

“Stop it,” Wally Michelin said. “Give it up, Donna. Agatha, don’t worry about it. Donna Palliser can’t tell the future just because she’s wearing a stupid bathing suit wrap around her head and looking at a fishing ball. Donna Palliser is an idiot.”

“We’ll reserve judgement on the death. Maybe there isn’t going to be a death. I never said it was for sure. Let’s do Wayne’s dream.”

Wayne knew Donna Palliser could not see into the glass ball. He knew she was in the business, tonight, of being cruel. He did not like to see Agatha Groves made fun of and did not mind giving Donna Palliser a change of topic. “I dreamed I was a girl,” he said. “I could see my sweater. It was a green sweater with glimmery buttons, like light changing underwater. I looked at my sandals and they were white. I was walking by a river. I tried to see my face in the river but I couldn’t. No one was with me. I tried to run with the river. I picked one peak of water and ran beside it and I thought it was the same peak. But then I wasn’t sure. I didn’t realize I was a girl in the dream until I woke up. While I was waking up I remembered I’m a boy, and I was surprised for a minute, until I remembered that’s what I always am when I’m awake.”

Donna Palliser rubbed the glass ball and her mouth twisted. She rubbed it until Wally Michelin kicked it and shattered it against the wall. Donna picked a handful of shards off the carpet and flung them back at Wally, and one of the shards flew in Wally’s mouth and stuck in her throat, and there was blood coming out from between her lips and it dripped on her blouse, and she was terrified. She could breathe but she couldn’t talk, and the only sound she made was loud, constricted panting through her nose. Even Donna Palliser knew she had to call a grown-up.

Donna ran upstairs and brought her mother down and they called an ambulance, and Wally Michelin went to Goose Bay and a doctor took the glass out of her throat, but it had lacerated one of her vocal cords. There was a lot of parental interrogating, and a policewoman even came in from Goose Bay and asked everyone separately and in groups to explain what had happened. In the end all the grown-ups wanted to believe this was a tragic outcome where no one was to be singled out for blame. The grown-ups wanted to avoid blame at all costs, and agreed this could have happened in any group of young people. It was unfortunate and terrible and everyone had had a part to play, and they would hopefully never find themselves in such a situation again, and they could at least take comfort in the fact no one had been blinded, or killed.

Wally came back to school a week later. Wayne wanted someone to tell him she would still be able to sing, to study the “Cantique de Jean Racine” if someone could find it for her, to go away to Vienna and become an opera singer like Lydia Coombs. But no one mentioned Wally’s singing, and Wayne had to think hard to remember if anyone but he had known of her singing plans, and he realized he might be the only one Wally had told. He couldn’t catch her eye, and she did not wait for him in the hall at recess or lunch. He got the idea he was the only one who remembered about her singing, and he got the idea she somehow hated him for this, and would hate him forever until he forgot what he knew about her.

This was all in his imagination but he felt it as strongly as if she had written a placard and come to his window at night and held it up: “Get lost, and forget about my singing. Forget anything you ever thought you knew about me.”

WAYNE WAS PASSABLY GOOD at parts of gym class, but not at soccer or basketball, which required quick connection. Brent Shiwack and the other boys had radar that let them know the instant one needed to pass a ball. There they were, in the right place, before the ball. In basketball their hands looked to Wayne like some kind of ocean anemones with invisible suckers that drew a ball in and made it stick. Brent stuck a hand in the air, and no matter which way the ball had been headed, it changed trajectory and was attracted to his hand. The ball was not attracted to Wayne’s hand. Still, his was not the last name called if teams were chosen. The last was Boyd Fowlow, who couldn’t see the ball because his mother had written Miss Baikie a note saying he was not allowed to wear his glasses in gym.

Wayne managed to avoid outright disgrace because of his competence in individual sports. He was not a fast sprinter and could not pull himself up by the arms on the chin-up bars. But he could run distances because he ran steadily, which was not glorious but it meant he did not let down his team. He could do a pretty good long jump, though not a high jump, and he liked pole vaulting and, for some reason no one could explain, beat just about everyone else at it. His father said it was too bad they had pole vaulting only once a year, on sports day.

“I like the part after you get halfway up,” Wayne told Thomasina Baikie. He sat on the edge of the gym stage, kicking his sneakers against the wall. “You take off in a kind of slow motion, and you feel like you go way higher than you thought you would.”

“Does it hurt now?”

Wayne nodded. His stomach ache had given him sharp pains while everyone else was doing cool-down laps. Now it was lunchtime and the others had gone to the cafeteria. He put his hands under his sweatshirt and laid them on his abdomen because their warmth felt good.