Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (12 page)

Mom glopped the rest of Mark’s sauce into the jar, glass catching the candlelight as it filled with red. She washed the sloppy
bits off the edges and presented it to him. He turned it over and over in his hands.

‘Hey, I totally made this stuff!’

He went home when the rain stopped. We cleaned up. I didn’t say
anything unless I had to. Then I went up to my room and tried to read. I couldn’t.

I turned over and set the clock radio for another morning. Wondered what awful song would wake me up, and from what nightmare,
and into what coma dream.

There would be days of this. Months. Years.

It was probably about this time that I started making that stupid list of ways and means to die.

I could hear songbirds and crows, a tractor starting up somewhere, Mr Fitzwilliam opening the gas station across the way and
humming to himself. It sounded like a hymn. The water picked up light from the morning sun and the day began.

I should have been happy.

I was in the little clearing overlooking the river where Mark and I always went, but I was by myself this time. It was seven
o’clock in the morning. The past couple weeks or so, I hadn’t been able to sleep. It would take forever for my brain to switch
off at night and then as soon as there was light, I’d be wide awake again. All day I’d be blinking a lot, feeling like there
was an invisible weight pressing around my skull, brain turning to gravel in my head.

Mid-May. Only a month to go before finals. This wasn’t really important considering I’d already been accepted to university,
but caring about exams was a tough habit to break. So I had all my textbooks with me and was writing out summaries of the
chapters I needed. My notebook was open to a blank page.

My pen was on the paper. I didn’t write anything.

I tried to focus on something good. The programme I’d be starting at college. That cool, intimidating stuff on the reading
list. Plato and Dante, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. And I’d be living on my own. A different life, a better one.

But I couldn’t picture it. Something had happened over the past few weeks, and the future didn’t exist anymore. My new place,
my new friends, my classes. Nothing. A blank. Meeting other guys like me. Total blank. When it came to that, all I could think
of were images on TV, characters from jokes the kids would tell in the cafeteria at school. Cartoons.

I stared at the page in my notebook, eyeballs dried out and wooden from lack of sleep. Should have been. Happy. Such a moron
of a word, those two stupid syllables slapping up against each other. So it should be easy to achieve, right? Why did I have
to feel like this instead?

Why was I so sure I’d never see September?

This ache knocking around the back of my head – like when you’re about to say goodbye to somebody, something, maybe forever.

Goodbye was the general mood around school. Graduation was a precipice we were edging towards, and the Grade Twelves were
getting clingy and huggy and sentimental. Writing in each other’s yearbooks, getting together for marathon bonding sessions.
Even the prom seemed like it was going to be one enormous farewell party.

Just yesterday, we were in a group of fifteen or twenty at Cindy Harrison’s house watching videos, as many
Friday the Thirteenth
chapters as we could stand. People were drifting off to sleep one by one, pushing a big bowl of popcorn around, relaxing
into their chairs like their bones were unlocking themselves.

Jeff Webb’s girlfriend had fallen asleep on him as they lay sprawled
on the couch. I could see her wake up, run her fingers up the side of his neck and through his hair. She was so sure of him.
Jeff said, ‘Hey, weirdo. You loving the movie, huh?’ And they kissed and smiled. A whole room full of people around them and
they didn’t care.

I was on the floor a few feet away from the TV, arms around my knees like a totem pole carving, trying to focus on this stupid
movie. Mark was stretched out half asleep on a throw pillow beside me. On the glass screen, Jason Voorhees made his way through
the woods with his hockey mask and his hiker’s stride, looking for more thirty-year-old teenagers to plop a machete into.
Mark’s breathing was slow and steady, his eyes closing for a few seconds at a time before he’d blink himself awake.

And all I’d wanted was to get thrown through the glass of the TV set and feel a machete sink into my head. Thank you, Jason.

Although
Friday the Thirteenth, Part 7: The Mercy Killings
wouldn’t make too much money. I pictured a dark wood full of disappointed people, all sinking to the forest floor without
complaint as the shambling psycho walked among them with his chainsaw. A day at the office for him. Maybe a few of the murdered
would give Jason the thumbs-up sign as they drifted to the ground.

Suicide by Jason. I’d have to file that one away with the rest of them. The ways and means. Razors, pills, hanging, guns,
jumping in the river, rigging up a car to feed me carbon monoxide. I’d been through the pros and cons. I wasn’t sure how or
when it would happen. Really hoped I’d be dead before people started finding out about all this weird sex stuff. Because if
they knew this about me, I was sure they were going to assume that it was
the reason
. Everybody milling around my mother’s house in black, eating little triangle sandwiches with the crusts cut off. ‘Oh, of
course. That’s why. Well, how unfortunate.’

I didn’t want to be dismissed so easily. There were a hundred different reasons. Or there was no reason at all. There was
just big, fat, fucking fate sitting on my head.

Too much time had gone by. The light was different already. I had to have breakfast with Mom, meet Mark and head off to school
with him. Start another day.

On our way to school, I tried to fill in the silence.

Hey! Only a month to go and we’re finished.

Man, I will not miss this place at all.

Wow! I have nothing to say but I’m going to keep blabbering on forever anyway.

We were halfway to Riverside Regional High School and about a block away from Riverside Regional Elementary.

Then Mark mumbled something about English class and it all fell apart because I realised I’d forgotten to do his homework.

Forgot Mark’s homework, for the first time. The first time in almost ten years.

Mark and schoolwork were never a good mix. It’s not that he’s stupid. He just has some kind of block. A bit like me and sports.
I used to lend him books I liked and he’d lie about reading them. It was sad to know we couldn’t share this stuff.

I got hyper and panicky, started apologising.

‘Hey, calm down,’ said Mark. ‘It’s no big deal.’

‘But, I should’ve remembered …’

‘Well, jeez, if you’re that worried, we’ll just copy it out now.’

Mark took hold of my backpack and lifted it off me like he was shelling a turtle.

‘Whoa, Stephen. This is fucking heavy. What do you need all this shit for?’

He opened the pack, started shuffling books and papers around. Handling everything, looking at everything, taking stuff out
and laying it on the sidewalk. He found a flattened pack of cigarettes in the bottom of the bag, shook one out of the little
squashed box and stuck it in his mouth.

‘Look, just leave it alone,’ I said. The
Hamlet
short answers were in my Chemistry textbook where I’d left them: my answers and Mark’s blank sheet folded together. The remedial
kids had the same homework as the rest of us. The teachers just expected less.

Mark balanced the textbook on his knee and tried to write, but it wasn’t working. He swore. Then he smacked the book onto
the nearest flat surface, which was my back, and started to copy the answers onto his paper.

I moved away. He lodged the book between my shoulders again.

‘What is your problem?’ he said.

‘I don’t want us to be late.’

Mark was having trouble holding the textbook and my answers at the same time. He moved up close, fingers on the back of my
neck. Blew a stream of smoke past my ear.

‘Wait,’ I said, ‘I can copy it out faster than you can. I can do your handwriting too. Nobody will know.’

Mark ignored this. That pencil crawled along, letter after stubborn letter. He spat something on the sidewalk.

‘I can even make it sound like something you’d write.’

The book slid off me.

‘Fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Just – you wouldn’t use some of these words.’

He slammed the book onto my back again, kept scratching away. I winced and wished I was at the bottom of the river.

‘Hey, what’s this word? I can’t read your writing.’

‘How do I know what word you’re looking at?’

He read, in that thick tortured voice he used whenever he had to read anything out loud. I hated the sound of it. It brought
Mark down, and brought whatever he was reading down too, and they’d meet in a space that was all blunt edges and hostility
and confusion. When it was his turn in class, the teachers used to let him struggle through a half a sentence and then say,
‘All right, Mark, thank you.’ And if he mixed up ‘b’ and ‘d’, which he sometimes did, everybody would laugh. He’d sit with
his face going deep red, looking like he wanted to murder someone.

‘This quote. Shows. That. Hamlet. Ass … sumes his. Dead—’

‘His death.’ Still on question one.

‘Assumes his death. Is in – something. Can’t read this. Your letters are all, like …’

This might have been bearable if I was wearing a winter coat or maybe a dozen sweaters. But I just had this one stupid T-shirt
that was about a hundred years old and I could feel his weight and his breathing, could practically feel the ridges of his
fingerprints on me.

‘Inexorable,’ I said. ‘He assumes his death is inexorable. That’s the question about the “divinity that shapes our ends”,
right?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t read the questions. Spell that.’

‘I – N – X …’ I couldn’t concentrate. ‘No, that’s not right.’

‘What’s after X?’

‘I said it’s not right, for fuck’s sake!’

‘Jeez, take it easy.’ Mark leaned in closer. ‘So it’s not X. What is it?’

Change the channel. Think about something serious, something gross. The Holocaust. Gangrene. Old people doing it. People with
gangrene and leprosy having sex with old people in the lobby of a
Holocaust museum, bits of everybody jiggling and falling off while tourists walk in and out crying and wailing.

‘I – N – E …’ Desperately trying to think straight, spell one retarded little word. I couldn’t. Not with him breathing in
my ear. ‘I – R – Fuck! Just fucking write “fate”!’

‘How do you spell …?’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ I lunged away from him. The book went smack on the ground. The papers fell whirling around us.

‘Goddammit,’ I said. ‘Can’t you leave me the fuck alone? Every time I turn around you’re in my face. And nobody’s gonna think
you wrote that yourself. You wouldn’t say “inexorable”. You wouldn’t say it and you wouldn’t write it. You don’t know what
it means!’

He stood and stared at me. Everything I’d said started echoing back. I listened to the creaking of the swings at the elementary
school just down the street, children laughing and calling to each other. Mark turned around and marched back the way we’d
come.

I ran after him, telling him I was sorry, hanging from his arm like a little kid. He lashed out with an elbow to my ribs that
sent me reeling.

‘Don’t fucking touch me. Think I don’t know what’s going on here?’

Oh, God. I stood perfectly still, waited for it.

‘So you’re going to college. Guess you think that makes you something special.’

‘It’s not that!’

‘It’s because you’re an arrogant piece of shit. You always thought you were better than the rest of us.’ He turned his back,
started away again. ‘Fuck you.’

I tried to make him face me. He put his hands on my shoulders and shoved, and I stumbled backwards. There were knots of children
bobbing down the street all around us. Must have been nearly time for the first bell.

When Mark spoke, his voice was level and calm. ‘Stop following me around. I don’t want to talk to you. Not now, not ever.’
He looked me up and down. ‘Fucking Jew bastard.’ He left. I didn’t try to stop him.

This was serious. Mark didn’t give a shit about Jews one way or another. He wanted me to know he’d drawn some kind of line
between us. He thought it was my number-one insult. It wasn’t – it hadn’t been for years – but he didn’t know this.

I picked up the textbook and papers and shoved them into my backpack, then found myself sinking to the kerb. Children were
passing by, debating with each other about whether I was sick or crazy or on drugs or all three. Somewhere behind me a voice
was saying, ‘Gonna be another beautiful day, eh? Good laundry weather.’ Another voice was agreeing.

A very small hand touched my shoulder. ‘Stephen? Are you okay?’

It was Kyle Healey.

‘I’m fine, Kyle. I got a headache, that’s all.’

‘I don’t have any aspirins. But I have some gum. Do you want it?’

I said sure, and he found a cube of green Hubba Bubba in the pocket of his cords, squashed and lint covered, with the wrapper
half off. I thanked him and told him I’d have it later.

It occurred to me that he was alone. ‘You’re not walking with your friends?’

‘My friends don’t like me.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Maybe they’ll like me tomorrow.’ He started walking away, waving over his shoulder. ‘Bye, Stephen! Don’t have a headache,
okay? You shouldn’t.’

‘I won’t.’

I watched Kyle making his way towards the school, keeping an obedient three paces behind a group of boys who kept turning
around and telling him to go away.

My backpack was on the sidewalk. I hauled it towards me and took out the cigarettes. There was a bit of money in there and
I got that too. The rest I just left. Schoolbooks. Notes. What did I need this shit for?

I looked down the street where Mark had gone. Then I turned and headed off in the opposite direction.