Théodora Armstrong - Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility

“What do you mean?”

In the parking lot Elgin has turned on the car, his high beams slicing through the forest.

“Elgin thinks you’re lonely,” she says, staring at me like she’s looking for a reaction.

“I’m sad about Max.” I can hear hip hop playing from the car and I take a step toward the music.

“I mean lonely all the time.” Kate’s smile is gone. “You should know, Elgin is being nice to you because he feels bad.”

“That’s not true,” I say, looking Kate in the eye.

“He feels bad for you.”

“We’re friends.”

“He’s not your friend. He’s nice to everyone. He’s just that kind of guy,” Kate says, and now she’s smiling again, gently the way someone would if they were talking to a child. “I just don’t want you to be confused. That’s why I’m telling you this.” She reaches out to rub my arm, but I pull away from her.

Elgin is making his way back from the parking lot, the headlights blacking him out. “Are you guys coming or what?”

ELGIN SAYS WE SHOULD go to Mosquito Creek to get out of the heat. It’s too hot for late September — Indian summer. Everyone’s prickly from it. We sleep late, skip classes. So far no one has missed us. We spend the morning in bed together eating dry cereal. The milk’s gone bad. Elgin keeps the bedroom window shut against the highway noise and all I hear are our feet in the sheets and his deep breathing. We’ve had sex seventeen times. I keep track in my agenda book with a small x no one could decipher.

After his mom leaves for work — I wait for the shower, the teakettle, the mug in the sink, the car out of the driveway — I get up and Elgin stays in bed. He loves to sleep. The most he’s ever slept is twenty-six hours straight, the night after his stepdad left. He told me he slept deeply, like someone had knocked him out. He says he never has dreams and I tell him that’s impossible. Even dogs dream.

While he sleeps I look around the house. There’s not much that’s interesting, but it’s not about finding something secret or dirty. I open the same boxes and drawers and find the same things. All their windowsills have my finger marks through the dust. The bedrooms are always messy. His mom’s closet smells like body odour and something else — maybe the peppermint candies she’s always sucking. They never have any fruit. I’ve only ever seen Elgin eat cereal and microwaved sausage rolls dipped in ketchup. The couch has deep sags, like there are invisible bodies watching TV. I don’t know why it’s exciting — maybe because it’s not mine. Sometimes I feel like I’m not really here. It’s like being a ghost or a tourist. Sometimes I think about Kate’s bare feet in the exact same spots.

I crawl back into bed and run my finger along each of Elgin’s eyebrows. “Wake up,” I whisper. His mouth twitches and I run my finger along his lips. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

One year my parents took Carlie and me to Maui for Christmas. It was hot, but we strung Christmas lights on our balcony. I touched everything in the hotel room before we left — the TV, the lampshade, the towels, the hair dryer — like it was some sort of ritual. I wanted to because I loved it there. And maybe because I thought I’d never be back.

PAUL SHUTS THE DOOR and takes a seat behind his big, crappy desk. If it fell on you it would kill you instantly. I’ve thought about that a lot in this office. “How many classes have you missed since the beginning of the year?” He picks up a pen and taps it against his lip. I have to go see the school counsellor every time I’m late now. The secretary is so tired of giving me late slips she barely acknowledged my presence this morning. Usually she makes a big deal, staring me down, huffing at the other secretaries, her fluffy bangs fluttering around for what feels like forever before she’ll fill out the slip. This morning she must have seen me coming; the late slip was sitting on the counter already filled out and she was back at her desk doing paperwork.

“I’ve missed a few classes,” I say. “I’ve been sick.”

“You look fine to me.” When Paul smiles he shows a mouth full of abnormally long teeth. One of his incisors is dead, grey and creepy. “What made you late this morning?”

“I was sick to my stomach. Really sick. I was throwing up. Berries and seeds and something else, like animal fur or something.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“No, probably not.”

There’s a photo sitting on the windowsill behind Paul’s head. A woman sits at a table scattered with half-empty dishes. There are candles burning as though the dinner is a celebration, maybe a birthday. She’s laughing and she looks young. Her hands are small like a girl’s. “Is that your daughter?”

“That’s my wife.” Paul turns the frame away from me. “Do you have a doctor’s note?”

“No. Do you think I should go to the doctor?” I look back quickly at the clock: ten to ten. Elgin’s probably still sleeping. “Could I have leukemia? Kids my age get that all the time, don’t they?”

“I don’t think leukemia is common.”

“I should get to class.”

“Yes, you should, but you’re here.” He crosses his legs under his desk. Today he’s wearing tan-coloured Birkenstocks. I find his toes offensive even from a distance. He wears sandals in the winter too, but with socks. It’s hard to believe even when you’re sitting right in front of him. Some girls think he’s good-looking, but I don’t see it. All I see is that dead tooth. “Why are you here?” Paul says. When I look up he’s giving me the raised eyebrows and I wonder if he can tell I had sex this morning. He comes around and stands behind me where I can’t see him and talks about my opportunities, my potential, my budding possibilities . He talks about flowers and loses me, then he asks me if I’m distracted by some of the guys at school.

“No,” I say.

He asks me if I still think about Max, but when he says his name what I see is a puffy, bloated body busting up on the jagged rocks along Ambleside Beach, the same rocks Kate climbed down on her thirteenth birthday when we were drunk on a shared beer. Her party dress ballooned around her in the water.

“No,” I say. “I don’t think about Max.”

Out the window Rana is smoking in the courtyard in plain view. Something has happened to her, like she decided to become a completely different person this year. She doesn’t take any bullshit anymore and she gets away with everything. Somehow at school she always manages to stay below the radar. At home is a different story. She sees me sitting in the office and sticks her tongue into her cheek like she’s giving a blow-job.

“You and Elgin Murphy are dating?”

I snap back to attention. “What?”

“How long have you been seeing each other?” He’s sitting behind his desk once again, chin cupped in hand, leaning toward me like a girlfriend who wants all the gossip. His tactics are obvious to the point of being sad.

“We’re friends.” I examine Paul’s face carefully and wonder how he found out about us. When Kate and Elgin broke up the whole school was devastated, like the world stopped making sense and all hope was gone. It was a load of crap and I would have told that to anyone if anyone had bothered to ask me. Everyone wanted to know why, but there was no reason, things just died the way things do and Elgin and Kate went back to eating lunch in their regular spots, Kate in the drama room with friends, and well, no one ever really saw Elgin eat lunch before he was with Kate, so he just went back to wandering through the field and the smoke pit and now I guess he’s with me. The alcove beside the library is still empty.