Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

Isabelle, on the other hand, didn’t like to draw attention to herself. Even when she was in grade school, the teachers would write on her report cards that she didn’t play well with other children. The kids asked her if she wanted to play Red Rover or soccer or baseball and she would say no, no, no, no. She was always by herself in the corner, flipping through picture books.

Now she was in high school and her name was at the top of the honour roll list when you entered the school. She didn’t really have any friends though. Now that they were teenagers, it was like the other girls carried around bullhorns that they held up to their mouths when they laughed. She liked to go straight home after school and go to her room and read books until the sun went down. They lay scattered about the room, open to hold their places, like drawings of seagulls by little kids.

One of her aunts drove them to a wedding on a Saturday. When she was there, relatives she barely knew kept asking her whether or not she had a boyfriend yet. That’s what they wanted to talk about all the time. They used to be interested in her marks and all the awards for academic excellence that she had won. Now the bigger news was that one of her older cousins was engaged to a millionaire who owned a spaghetti restaurant franchise. They were all worried that Isabelle would be unlucky in love, like her mom.

There were things about herself that Isabelle knew should be evolving. She was fourteen and she still had a school bag with Kermit the Frog on it. In the winter, she wore big moon boots and a Canadiens toque with her curly and frizzy hair sticking out from underneath it. She figured that she would have to make a concerted effort to change. Things just weren’t happening naturally, the way they were for everybody else.

The next Saturday, as she was walking home, her path was blocked by ambulance workers pulling a stretcher across the sidewalk to the truck. The body was covered, but she knew it must be the old man with the big-assed dog. She crossed herself as she wondered what had happened to the dog and about how life is short. When she got home, she went straight into her sister Corinna’s room.

“I’m going to a house party,” Isabelle said. “This girl in my class said that I should not be a ninny, and come. I think I need a makeover, though.”

Corinna jumped up and down on her bed, clapping her hands. She handed Isabelle a T-shirt with a print of a unicorn on it and one of her jean skirts that she had cut ludicrously short. Her sister fixed Isabelle’s hair up with dozens of little butterfly clips and she put the reddest lipstick in the world on her. Her mouth was the colour of Superman’s cape when he was standing in his ballet shoes, about to jump off the roof of a building.

Corinna said attitude was also important when it came to boys.

“You should crawl on your hands and knees across the bed. Men get crazy when you go at them like an animal.”

Most boys liked it a little rough, she assured Isabelle.

“You should try to slur when you talk too. Guys are like crazy about that speech impediment thing.”

The way that a cheetah would go after a gazelle with a broken leg, boys would go after stupid girls.

Her mother was playing cards in the kitchen with two of her sisters. They all made such a fuss when they saw Isabelle.

Isabelle’s stomach was fluttery, and she felt like she had to pee the whole way over to the party. The yellow reflective lights on the pedals of the bicycles passing by looked like the eyes of wolves catching the light. She passed a store that gave massages and had all its windows painted silver. There was a jewellery store that sold huge hoop earrings and rings that had giant gold lion heads on them. The moon looked like the Day-Glo face of a wristwatch. Everything had Saturday fever!

It was near the first of the month, when people got their welfare cheques, so they were out. She saw some men that looked familiar from the neighbourhood, but they had a wildness about them now, as if they had been infected, like pet dogs who had got rabies. They all turned to stare at her in her party outfit, as if they were wondering if she wanted in on their secret. Did she want to join them and be a vampire and live forever?

There was a little boy, carrying a paper bag with milk in it, stuck outside his house because he had forgotten his secret knock. A piece of newspaper flitted by in the breeze like Mikhail Baryshnikov in the frenzied finale of a ballet.

The party was on the third floor of an old triplex. There was a big gargoyle of a demon on top of the building, looking down. Most of the gargoyles had committed suicide, falling to the ground like the rest of the old masonry on the buildings. When they leapt, they would hit the pavement like an asteroid and you would feel the ground shake while in your bed.

She went up the steep staircase that led to the top apartment, where all the windows were lit up. It was like someone had propped a ladder up to the moon and had told her to go ahead and ascend. People had locked their bicycles to the outside of the staircase, like they were magnets stuck to a fridge. There was a familiar little piece of paper next to the doorbell, saying it didn’t work. There was a sign like that on everyone’s doorbell. There was one at her apartment and it made her feel at ease.

When she walked through the front door of the girl’s apartment, the sound system was making so much noise that Isabelle couldn’t hear herself think. Everyone was dancing while they held their plastic cups of beer over their heads. The kids had formed a tight circle around the carpet, watching a boy dance. He was rolling his fists around each other as if he was rolling up a ball of yarn. He swapped spots with another boy who put one hand on his heart and the other in the air and jumped up and down. A different boy pushed his way in and kept tucking his hands into his armpits, leaning his torso back and strutting in a circle like a rooster at a cockfight. Then he dropped to the floor and moved his hands around like he was trying to put together a puzzle at record speed.

The girls gathered in clusters, like horses worried about a storm. Their long skinny legs looked impossibly vulnerable.

She saw Luc, a boy from a grade higher, coming toward her. He had on a bolero jacket. He was legendary. He’d become quite the player since he had had his braces taken off. No girl was able to resist him, and a huge number had lost their virginity to him. He liked girls that were hard to get because he needed a challenge.

She was glad when Luc took her hand and led her down the hallway, away from the party. He opened a door and led her into a bedroom. Isabelle knew that if she let Luc go all the way, when they came out of the room, everyone would be happy and congratulate her. Everyone would want to hear about it in school the next day. She would finally have a subject of conversation that they were all interested in. They would applaud her, go nuts, and sit with her at the cafeteria table. They were like a coliseum full of people waiting for her to take off all her clothes.

He gave her a sip from a bottle of beer and it made her feel warm and glowing, like there was a spotlight on her. Like she could open her mouth and a song would come out and everyone would be entranced by her. She laughed. The laughter sounded strange. It didn’t sound like herself laughing at all. It was like she was listening to her own voice on a tape recorder.

“Come on, sweetie,” Luc said. “You’re so pretty. I can’t keep my eyes off of you. You’re like the best-looking girl in the room. And you’re so smart too. I just want to hold you. I was watching you when you were giving a science report and I thought, That’s the kind of girl that I would want to wrap my arms around. You’re the kind of girl that a guy gets serious about.”