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

At the house party I don’t recognize any of the kids sitting on the front stairs, so I duck through the hedges on the side of the house and go around the back. Kate and I were at a party here once. A bunch of guys built a bike jump in the backyard and they all smoked dope and fell off it all night. Kate got drunk on Slippery Nipples and puked in the bushes by my front porch. My mom thought it was the neighbour’s golden retriever when she found the vomit the next morning.

Elgin’s with friends in the kitchen, sitting on the counter beside a sink full of beer cans and a dinner plate overflowing with cigarette butts. He’s dressed normally, but he has a cardboard sign around his neck that reads serial killer . “Good costume,” I say, hopping up beside him. When I look around I realize most of the people at the party are out of high school and almost no one is wearing costumes. “What are you supposed to be?” Elgin says.

I take a sip of his beer, pretending not to hear him. “Where have you been? You haven’t been at school all week.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Elgin smirks and his buddies laugh. While he talks with his friends about the new skate ramps they’re planning to build, I pluck the feathers off my slip, letting them drift down to the kitchen floor. When I ask Elgin to follow me, he comes reluctantly, his fingers laced limply in mine while his friends make blah blah gestures at my back.

Outside, kids lie on their backs in a circle in the yard, their heads almost touching and their feet fanned out like the rays of a sun. Elgin leans against the side of the house lighting a cigarette and watches them. “By the way, I’m suspended,” he says.

“What?” The kids are making weird movements with their hands in front of each other’s faces — starbursts, elephants, waves. “For how long?”

“I don’t know,” Elgin shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What did your mom say?” I try to grab his hand, but he’s stuffed it into his pocket.

“What do you think she said?” He slides down the side of the house and crouches on the walk.

“What happened?” I sit cross-legged on the cement in front of him so he has to look at me.

“What happened?” He raises his eyebrows and laughs. “Paul’s what happened. You know anything about that?”

“Why would I know something?”

“Did you talk to him about me?”

“No,” I say, unable to hide the hurt in my voice.

“You know people say you’re sleeping with him, right?” He flicks his half-smoked cigarette into the bushes and watches my face closely, but before I can utter a word he laughs it off. “It’s a joke,” he says.

“What kind of joke is that?” I say, pushing myself up from the ground. I consider joining the circle of kids in the grass.

A door opens beside us and Rana stumbles out, bee-lining for me. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says, grabbing my arm. “You have to come with me.”

“Not now,” I say, trying to shake her from my elbow.

“Trust me,” Rana says close to my ear. “You want to see this.”

We all go back into the house through the basement, where kids are packed wall to wall, but when I turn to look behind me Elgin is gone. Rana leads me down a dark hallway, the noise from the party growing dimmer, and I can hear someone humming. At the end of the hallway, she shoves me gently toward a door that’s partially ajar and I push it wide open. An older guy is sitting on the bathroom floor, his head against the wall and his eyes closed, tapping the beat he’s humming on the tub. Kate’s lying beside him on the linoleum. She’s passed out beside the toilet bowl, an arm wrapped around its base, her cheek pressed to the floor as the guy strokes her pale face absentmindedly. Her jeans are unbuttoned. The guy opens his eyes. “Do you know her?” he asks.

I shut the door and walk quickly down the hallway with Rana trailing behind me. I look in every room in the house, but Elgin is gone. Outside the kids are still lying in the grass. One of Elgin’s friends pushes up the driveway on his skateboard. “Do you know where Elgin is?” I ask as he flips his board and goes back down the driveway. “Left,” he says, gliding past me with a smile.

“Where’d he go?” I say. Rana grabs my hand and squeezes it.

“Didn’t say?” He circles me on the board. “I’ve got weed. Wanna go somewhere?”

Before I can say anything, Rana’s pushing me across the lawn, telling the skater to get a life . There’s a bad feeling everywhere, around the house, in the sky, climbing the walls of my stomach. The skater follows us on his board to the end of the road until Rana starts screaming bloody murder.

RANA IS STILL HOLDING my hand in the elevator on our way to her condo. She tells me she’s too stoned and asks me if I will stay with her awhile. My heart is in my throat, but I say sure, why not. The weed was laced, she tells me, with something bad — crack, arsenic, Drano, rat poison. Before she opens the front door, she clutches my hoodie and tells me if I wake up her mother she’ll kill me. I say sure, no problemo, I’ll be a mute.

We take off our shoes in the hallway and slipper-foot over the condo’s thick carpets into the dark living room with its view of the city stretching out on the other side of the inlet. “I’d rather be somewhere else,” I say, pressing myself right up against the floor-to-ceiling windows, the way I always do when I visit Rana.

“Thanks, asshole,” she says, rubbing my greasy nose marks off the glass with her shirt sleeve.

“You know what I mean,” I say. “Do you have any food?”

We lie on the carpet because her mother’s furniture is uncomfortable — all carved wood and expensive upholstery — and eat honeyed pastries, licking our fingers. Rana takes me out on the patio and we throw all of her carved pumpkins over the side of the building. We lean over the railing, laughing as they bust apart in the parking lot, fifteen floors below. “Imagine that was my head,” Rana says. The cold night air creeps under my nightgown, making it billow around me, but we stay out there jumping up and down until we can’t feel our fingers. Back inside we make up dance routines in front of the windows that look out at other darkened apartments. It’s like everyone in the city is sleeping except for kids. It would be easier to synchronize our routines with music, but Rana always likes it this way, quiet so she can concentrate. She thrusts her hips from side to side and glides her hands over her body, over her breasts and her stomach and the insides of her thighs. My phone blinks on the couch and when I check it, it’s a text from Elgin to meet him at Ambleside Beach. I tell Rana I have to go, but she barely looks at me. Her hands are in the air, and to her feet, and in the air again, and I leave her to dance alone.

WEST VANCOUVER IS DEAD at night. Even on Halloween the streets are empty, the windows of multi-million-dollar homes lit up with blue television glow. I zip up my hoodie and cross the train tracks, making my way down to the beach. Waves hit the shore hard and ahead of me Stanley Park looms, a darker shadow in the night, while the Lions Gate Bridge looks almost cheerful with its twinkling arcs of light. I walk down to the far end of the beach before finding Elgin sitting with his back up against a log. Instead of staring out at the ocean, he’s looking at the bridge and smoking. I plop down beside him in the cold, damp sand and Elgin leans over, kissing me lightly on the lips. “I didn’t want to be at that party anymore,” he says.

“Me neither.” I lean back on the log, looking up at the clear October sky. The waves roll in a few inches from our sneakers.

“It’s not just a suspension,” Elgin says, after awhile. “They want to put me in the work experience program.”