Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (13 page)

The sign was round and solid, set into a concrete base. It reminded me of a tombstone. On one side was written: ‘Welcome to
Riverside – population 1,816. We’re the friendly town.’ On the other side: ‘You are leaving Riverside. Come back again soon.’
I’d reached the town limits. It never took long.

Wind rippled the grass and the sun beat down on the back of my neck. A few rust-coloured cows were staring heavily. I played
around with the sign – stepping forwards and backwards, from one side to the other. Welcome! You are leaving! Welcome!

I decided to keep walking until I knew what to do.

Back to town, pacing those quiet streets. I was so stuck in my own head that I almost didn’t hear my name. It was Lana, on
the front steps of her house. Drying her hair in the sun, applying another coat of black to her toenails.

Nice to see my friend with no make-up on for once, a sweet-faced girl in jeans and her father’s white shirt. When I asked
Lana why
she wasn’t in school, she just said she couldn’t be bothered on such a beautiful day.

‘You okay, Stephen?’

I tried to tell her about the fight with Mark, but couldn’t make myself say his name.

And I didn’t mention it again, not until we’d got really stoned off some very strong hash her cousin had brought down from
Toronto.

‘Watch out,’ Lana told me. ‘This is not that lame crap you and Mark buy off Craig Morrel. Think he cleans that shit out of
his lawnmower.’

‘You think I’m a wimp.’

‘No, but—’

‘You do. You think I’m some kind of girl.’ We were on the kitchen floor with our backs against the table where my mother had
sat and drunkenly told her troubles to Lana’s mother three years before. Lana had made a pipe out of an empty V8 bottle. It
was like drinking smoke. And she was right. I wasn’t used to anything too strong. After a while my heart started thudding,
my eyeballs dried out and I began to be aware of my teeth. I couldn’t stop thinking about them, visualising them, running
my tongue all over my mouth and counting them. I figured they’d leave me alone if I ate something, so I went to the fridge,
got a container of cherry-vanilla, found a spoon and started digging.

‘Oh, do help yourself, Stephen.’ Lana watched me tunnel my way through the vat of ice-cream with a tormented look on her face.
Then we were both in there with our spoons working together.

‘Fuck this diet,’ she said. ‘I could be eighty pounds and everybody would still call me fat. You know why?’

‘People in this town are mentally lazy,’ I said, droning. This was very good ice-cream. I stared at the fridge door, fascinated
by all the notes the Kovalenkos had left there for each other. Advice, reminders, queries. A
lot of it seemed to involve socks. Mr Kovalenko signed everything with
Xs
and
Os
for kisses and hugs.

Lana’s dog let herself in at the back, standing on her hind legs and coming down against the latch until the door gave up
and opened. A huge furry St Bernard named Florence, made up mostly of hair and eyes and drool. You’d see splashes and puddles
of it on the floor as she made her stately progress through the kitchen.

‘Exactly!’ Lana said. ‘Mentally lazy. They just stick an adjective onto you and it’s there for life. So unfair. I mean, why
does everybody call you “that Jewish kid”? You never do anything Jewish.’

‘No, you’re right there. No training, no culture. I’m feral.’

I got up and started banging through the cupboards, looking for microwave popcorn. Stephen, the feral half-Jew. I said it
to myself a few times, then figured out it scanned the same as ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, so of course I had to make
up a song around it. I went through several verses before I found some popcorn and threw a bag in the microwave, while Lana
kept trying to interrupt me with, ‘What I’m trying to say is …’

‘What I’m trying to say is, people in this town are stupid,’ Lana finished, finally. ‘In fact, I think you and me are the
only smart people here.’

I didn’t want to play this game. In the microwave a flat envelope of popcorn kernels revolved on a glass plate.

‘Mark hates me,’ I said. A few sullen pops from inside the bag. ‘He was the only normal part of my life and I fucked it up.
Forever.’

‘Aw.’ Lana threw an arm around my waist, head resting against my shoulder. ‘Too bad you guys are fighting. Still, I’ve never
been able to understand that whole male bonding thing. I mean, no offence, but you’re talking about him like he’s your boyfriend.’

I broke away from her and glared out the window, at the trees with their spongy, green blossoms and tiny wet leaves. I’d already
forgotten the words to my new song. Lana was still talking.

‘Maybe you two should just fuck each other and get it over with.’

There was a series of controlled explosions from the microwave. I thought about the popcorn kernels, lying silent in their
bag. ‘When are we going to be planted?’ they might be thinking. ‘I can’t wait to stretch my roots into the soil, and to feel
the sun on my leaves! Oh, boy!’ Then the heat forcing them out of their sleek brown shells into stiff little mushroom clouds.
Some of us are born to be eaten.

Late afternoon rolled around and we found ourselves in the basement. I was curled up on the floor by the radiator sulking
over my hand – bashed to death by a flying eight-ball in a game of contact pool. (That’s when you run around the pool table
trying to whack the balls into the pockets with your hands. And if you end up with wooden projectiles flying into somebody’s
face, or crushing the bones of a finger when you’re zooming those things around, so much the better.)

We were mesmerised by this one song Lana had on a mix tape her boyfriend Adam from the city had made for her, kept rewinding
it and playing it over and over: The Smiths, ‘Reel Around the Fountain’. Side by side with our backs to the cold radiator
bawling out the words for what seemed like hours.

‘God, Lana. Why can’t I live in this song?’

‘In England they play this stuff on the radio,’ she said. ‘What do we get here? The
St Elmo’s Fire
song. ‘Man in Motion’, every hour on the hour.’

‘We’ll have to move to England then.’ A strange little silence. ‘Everybody’s gonna hate us over there.’ I was apparently still
talking. ‘We don’t have the right accents. They’ll spit on us. We’ll be wringing it out of our hair every night when we come
home.’

‘Sounds about right.’ Lana seemed to be having some kind of staring contest with the dog. ‘But we’ll go anyway. We’ll sit
in our little flat together and we’ll cry. And listen to this music.’

‘Okay.’

I deserved it. All the phlegm the English could muster. Mark. That look on his face by the elementary school, before he’d
turned away. He hated me.

My thoughts seemed unnaturally loud and I was afraid I’d actually been talking instead of thinking. Lana was oblivious. She’d
turned her face to the light, leaning back with her eyes closed, singing the prettiest part of the song in a clear, high voice.
Something about dreaming about you and falling out of bed twice, a mountain and a butterfly.

‘Lana, I don’t think I’m ever going to be happy. Is that normal?’

She looked thoughtful for a moment, but all she said was ‘Trampoline’, and headed out the back door at a run. Florence the
St Bernard went woofing after her.

The Kovalenkos’ trampoline was a famous and wonderful thing. One step and you were sky-bound. The best was when Lana’s parents
had a party, and you’d get all these neighbourhood adults sailing through the air with their hair flying around them – big,
shaggy angels appearing over the Kovalenkos’ hedges for a few seconds and then vanishing. It’s impossible to stay angst-ridden
on one of these things. Try it. All that bouncing and anti-gravity really does force you into happiness, even if it feels
a little insane.

But you have to be careful: if you’re doing this with more than one
person, make sure you’re taking off at the same time. Do not have one of you sitting there laughing and taking a break while
the other comes crashing down on them by accident.

I saw my knee connect with Lana’s head. I freaked.

She was holding her hand over her eye and groaning. ‘Fuck’s sake, Stephen!’

Momentum continued to bounce us along. I had this sudden paranoid thought that when she took her hand away she’d be all bloody
and hideous and maybe the actual eyeball would be rolling around on the trampoline somewhere.

I pried Lana’s hand from her face. She looked fine. The surface under us calmed and stilled. I leaned in and kissed her on
the eyelid, just lightly, and told her I was sorry. Like something my mother would do when I was a kid, to stop me from getting
hysterical over some little scrape.

My hand was on her cheek, holding her steady. She put her own hand over mine. So different without that make-up. A smattering
of freckles, dark circles from a restless night, a scar she’d got banging her head on a table corner when she was five. All
the stuff she kept painted over, coming out like flowers after the snow had melted. She looked younger than me, a little sister.

Lana kissed me on the lips, very softly. I edged away. She pulled me closer and kissed me again. There was pressure on my
shoulders and I felt myself sinking. Then my head was knocking against the frame of the trampoline and she was above me, on
top of me, and we were still kissing, her tongue moving in my mouth. I started to sweat. My arms were rigid by my sides. I
wondered if she could tell I wasn’t really kissing back.

The sun burned into my eyes. Half a tub of cherry-vanilla. Three bags of microwave popcorn. About a hundred marshmallows.
All churning
around my stomach in a mass, making itself known. We continued to bounce lazily. Lana was unbuttoning buttons and moving my
hand up inside her shirt. Her father’s shirt. How far was this going to go? If I told her to stop, she’d be hurt. Maybe she’d
think it had something to do with her weight. What kind of life was this, where I had to be so cruel to my friends?

She shifted and I got an elbow in the gut. The trampoline sent us swaying like a ship at sea, a ship in a storm with the sailors
hanging off the deck being sick into the waves.

Lana stopped, rolled off me. ‘Hey. Is everything …?’

I didn’t think. I just squirmed out from under her as fast as I could, slid off the trampoline and hit the ground. Ow. Had
to get away from this sun, this carnivorous, blue sky. I crawled under the trampoline and sat clutching one of the metal poles.
I could see Lana’s shape weighing down the black circle above me.

‘Stephen? What’s wrong?’

For some reason, I could not open my mouth.

‘Okay,’ said Lana, ‘once for yes and two for no. Is it the drugs? Was it too much?’ I figured out what she meant and poked
the Lana shape above me, once for yes. Well, that part was true, even if it was more like a detail.

‘See, I told you to take it easy.’

The backyard was quiet. Birds twittered blankly. Bugs droned. A truck drove by with ‘Man in Motion’ blaring out the windows.

‘Listen, we’re just having fun here, right?’ Her voice was shaky. ‘I’m not … you know, expecting you to be my boyfriend. I
can see how that would be embarrassing.’

I reached up and nudged her twice, very hard because I wanted there to be absolutely no doubt about this. She laughed, and
the shape above me seemed to relax.

‘So what is it? Being outside? Too much sun? Do you want to go to my room?’

I nudged her twice again, more gently this time. The dog approached as I sat scrunched up and cowering under the trampoline.
I put my arms around Florence, buried my face in her soft majestic fur.

‘Look, I just want to understand,’ Lana said. ‘Is it something to do with sex, like do you have some kind of problem being,
uh, intimate?’

I held the dog tighter.

Lana’s head appeared, upside-down on the edge of the black circle. ‘Stephen, are you crying?’

‘No.’ My voice surprised me, thick and throaty, filtered through dog hair.

She slipped off and sat beside me on the ground, at the outer edge of the trampoline. I had Lana on one side of me and Florence
the dog on the other.

‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

I squeezed my eyes shut and thought about how much I wanted to be away from there.

‘Please. I can’t guess any more, Stephen.’

My chest felt like it was compacting into itself and my throat was huge, face burning up.

And then I said it.

‘I’m in love with Mark.’

The sentence hung there, as if it was printed on a cartoon word balloon. I braced myself for whatever Lana was going to do
next.

She laughed. I wasn’t expecting that. I sat feeling like the bottom had fallen out of the universe and I’d be falling forever.

But seconds later she was apologising. ‘I thought you were joking!
You’re always making stuff like that up.’ Lana kissed my forehead, my eyes, my ears. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you. I promise
I wasn’t.’

Then Lana surprised me again. She started to cry. I held on to her. Florence got bored with us and went off to smell things.