Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (3 page)

But by the end of the week, Dylan was gone.

Her parents had been planning to move away for a while. Nobody had told the kids because they didn’t want us to spend weeks
moping and crying and carrying on. I moped and cried and carried on anyway. I’d known Dylan for as long as I’d been able to
form memories. How could she be leaving, just because her mom and dad felt like living somewhere else?

The day of the move came. I was almost offended by how normal it all was. Saying goodbye forever turned out to be like preparing
for any long car ride – loading and reloading, doors not closing right, people forgetting things and having to go to the bathroom
at the last minute. Mom and I watched their rattling grey truck pull onto the dirt road, Dylan waving out the back window
at me until they were out of sight.

I thought I’d feel better the next day. I didn’t.

Poking through their empty house, up and down the dirt road by myself – I felt hollow. But I didn’t have time to dwell on
it.

We were next.

No sound except the sheets on the line snapping in the wind, or a tangle of birds somewhere over my head. Half-asleep, sitting
on this wooden block with a cigarette between my fingers burned down to the filter.

Back to the house. Maybe I could force myself to study.

I plodded into the living room, where the whole Grade Twelve curriculum was spread out over two card tables for me like a
wedding buffet. The command centre of my super-villain headquarters. Most kids saw high school as a place for having fun and
being with your friends, and the stuff you were asked to do in classes was like rent – you paid it so you’d be allowed to
continue to stay there, and to keep the authorities off your back. I’d fallen into a different trap. They got me early on
with those gold stars. Gold stars on white paper when I was a kid. I was addicted. Especially later when they became invisible.

Now I had three months left to collect the last few.

I couldn’t go upstairs and study in my bedroom, of course. There’d
be too much temptation to revert to my natural state of existence: whacking off, falling asleep, and reading books I’d already
read. I was capable of amusing myself in small enclosed spaces for indefinite periods of time. I would have made a pretty
good hamster.

Anyway.

Still had no idea what I was going to say to Mark when he got back from church. I flipped through the pages of my math textbook,
collapsed into my chair and spun myself around until I was nauseated.

‘Hey, Mom!’

She answered me from upstairs. Yes? What did I want?

‘Hey, Mom! My whole life is fucked.’

‘You don’t have to swear.’ I heard a door pull firmly shut.

Was it always? Fucked, I mean. I thought back again to when I was a kid. I’d just turned eight, lost my best friend and moved
to Riverside, to this house. And that was when the trouble really started.

Being a child always felt like a trick to me, some kind of scam. Looking back, I can’t even picture myself as a little kid.
I think of a
Peanuts
line drawing instead – something with wide bracketed eyes and a big round head, that goggled up at people and was bewildered,
easily fooled, always a bit scared. Waiting for the four panels and the punchline to be over so I could stop being part of
someone else’s joke.

Mom and I had held hands as we walked to school together in the damp morning air. I was about to start Grade Three at Riverside
Regional Elementary. This would be very good for me, she’d said. There’d be lots of other children. All kinds of friends.

She was right about the children. I’d never seen so many in one place. The playground went on forever, with kids climbing
complicated metal structures, swooping on towering swing sets, the chains creaking and groaning. Everybody seemed like they
were in a contest to see who
could be the loudest. I guess that’s how you proved you were having fun.

But friends? No. None of these kids wanted to be friends with me. I didn’t blame them. I kept doing everything wrong.

First of all, we were late, Mom and me, huddled in the doorway while the class was standing for ‘O Canada’. I was still holding
her hand, which was another mistake, and when the teacher reminded my mother that I was starting classes five weeks into the
school year, Mom just smiled and said that it didn’t matter. I didn’t need any review, in fact I was at least two years ahead
of these other kids and really should be starting Grade Five. I could feel a whispery rumbling noise behind me, everybody
starting to shuffle and talk.

I looked wrong too. The other kids were cool – the girls pretty as teacups in little dresses and coloured tights, the boys
all T-shirts and jeans and jean jackets, like a page from the Sears catalogue. (Except one, slouching at the back of the class
in a big army-coloured coat, definitely not part of this group.) Nobody was wearing a scratchy sweater with a pattern of Christmas
trees on the front. Or green corduroys that rolled up and belled weirdly around the ankles. Nobody had a book-bag their mother
had sewn for them, blue with a red felt S. Nobody but me.

Later, I was working at my desk when I got bored and forgot where I was for a second and started singing. Everyone laughed.
The teacher told me to apologise because I’d disrupted the class. When I wrote the date in my scribbler (October 15, 1977)
the letters looked wobbly and weird, as if something had got inside me and was changing everything that came out. I could
not seem to stop making these terrible mistakes.

So I understood why nobody was in much of a hurry to be my friend. Mom said it was just a bad first day. But every day after
that was pretty much the same.

A group of girls would come up to me at recess or lunch, stand around in a semi-circle and ask questions in bored, flat voices,
like they were taking a census. Blowing bubbles with their gum, taking it out of their mouths to look at, putting it back
again.

‘Heard your parents aren’t even married. That true?’

‘Why do you wear those clothes?’

‘If your parents aren’t married, how do you know your father’s really your father? Your father could be anybody, right?’

‘Your mom buys your clothes at Frenchy’s, doesn’t she? They sell dead people’s stuff there.’

‘Why can’t you throw a ball?’

‘Why do you always know the answer in class but you act like such a retard when anybody tries to talk to you?’

‘Do you have mental problems? My mom says kids whose parents aren’t married have mental problems.’

I asked my parents about some of the stuff the girls had been saying.

‘Married?’ Mom seemed worried. ‘Well, we were planning on it. Sometime this year. You know, it would be better from a legal
standpoint, better for you. We were talking about this, right, Stanley?’

My father sighed like he was blowing a bug off his arm. He was leaning on the kitchen counter, staring down at the funny pages
of the newspaper.

‘We were thinking about having some kind of wedding at the end of December.’ She was folding and unfolding her hands. ‘Or
February, maybe? Stan?’

He flicked aside a newsprint page full of coloured squares. I didn’t want to be in that room anymore.

Every day I’d ask my mother when we could go home. Must have
driven her crazy. ‘But we already
are
home,’ she’d tell me, smiling. I’d look at her as if she was hiding something.

October 1977 became November. November turned into December. The ground froze and crunched under us and we wore the tops of
our snowsuits to school. I learned how to deal with the girls. It took a while, but eventually I trained myself so I could
just switch a channel in my head and stop listening.

The boys were different.

Lunchtime was safe because I could fasten myself to the teacher on yard duty and nobody would go near me. Recess was safe
too. Bathrooms were safe if I was quick. But there was still the walk home from school.

From a distance you might think I was really popular, a crowd of guys buzzing around me, some on bikes and some walking, even
a few big kids from Grade Six.

‘Hey, Spaz.’

‘Hey, Retard.’

‘Hey, Faggot.’

‘He looked! He knows his name!’

‘Are you a faggot, Stephen?’

My fault. Shouldn’t have turned my head. Usually I’d make my face go dead and keep my eyes on the end of the road. Stanley
had taught me to do that.

‘Ignore them,’ he’d said. ‘Just ignore them.’

The rest of my parents’ advice was stupid.

‘Laugh it off,’ my mother told me. ‘They’ll respect you if you can laugh at yourself.’

‘Next time they insult you, agree with them,’ said Stan.

‘I read somewhere that when people call you names, they’re really talking about themselves. Maybe try telling these kids that.’

‘Show them it doesn’t bother you.’

I never told my parents half of what was really going on.

‘Your father’s a freak. Your mother’s a big slut, and you’re a little retard.’

‘Oh, he’s getting mad!’

‘I know! I’m scared! I’m really scared! Help, you guys!’

Kevin Dickson, pretending to cower behind Phil Doyle. But I hadn’t even looked at him.

‘Are you retarded? Are you retarded, Stephen?’

‘Duh. Duh. Duh.’

Just keep walking
, I told myself.

If you ran, it was like admitting the truth: that this was much worse than it looked, and could turn horrible at any minute.
And if you admitted the truth yourself, everybody else stopped pretending too. Then worse than bad names would happen.

Like this.

‘Let’s make him eat dog shit.’

I didn’t get very far. They got me by the arms. Two of them. Another boy grabbed my hair and held my head back, and somebody
else pried open my mouth and kept it open while I screamed.

Even then I was thinking,
They’re never going to do this
. But Randy McTavish really did find a piece of it on the ground that was frozen enough to pick up, and he brought it up close
to my face, and I could see it there in his red-mittened hand, and everybody was laughing, and I thought,
Oh, yes they are
.

Something hopeless happened in my head then. I went limp. Stopped screaming, stopped struggling. Gave up. I gave up.

They didn’t seem interested after that.

‘We weren’t really gonna do it.’

‘Aw, look at the little girl crying.’ Some of them were making sobbing noises at me.

‘Gonna tell your mommy?’

Then Randy McTavish threw the shit at my head and they all walked off to find something else to do.

That happened almost every day. Not the dog shit, but the other stuff. Yeah, just about every day.

I retraced my steps, picking up my books where they’d been tossed around the sidewalk. And my action figures: C-3P0 and the
sand-person, crushed into a mud puddle close to the school. (I wouldn’t have cared about the sand-person except Dylan had
given it to me. She said it was actually a girl named Sandy who was married to C-3P0, which I thought was dumb, but I still
wanted to keep it.)

Then I went home and had a big fight with my mother.

‘Why do I have to keep going back there?’ I stomped around the house, slamming doors and kicking at the walls. ‘Why can’t
we just read the books at home like we did before?’

My mother followed me. My father hung around watching and leaning over the banister by the stairs.

‘Well, Maryna?’ Stan said. ‘What do you want to tell him?’

‘But you’re enrolled,’ she said. ‘And I’m on full-time now. I can’t just—’

‘I miss Dylan. Everybody hates me here.’

‘Oh, honey, I’m sure nobody hates you.’

My mother looked as if she’d been forced backwards, her legs against the lower steps, Stanley on one side of her and me on
the other. She was trying to say something about how if I was patient and waited for everybody to get to know me, that I’d
grow to really enjoy school and would make friends I’d have my whole life long and …

My father stood with his back turned, arms folded, laughing and shaking his head. I couldn’t listen to another second, so
I told them about the dog shit.

‘There,’ said Stanley. ‘You see what kind of people these are?’

She sank down and put her head in her hands.

‘You wanted him to have a normal life, Maryna. You wanted to move down here so he’d have a normal life. Are you happy now?’

‘I didn’t know this would happen!’ She was crying, in her Mom way, tears but no sounds. ‘Stephen, come here, sweetheart.’

She tried to pull me into a hug. I wanted to go to her, but I couldn’t. Not with him standing over me. He had to see that
I was on his side. She’d forgive me. She’d always be there. I didn’t know if he would, and that was scary.

So I pushed away from her. ‘Leave me alone! I hate you. You’re the one who wanted to move here. This is all your fault!’ It
was like I was reciting lines that Stanley had written for me to say.

‘Come on, buddy,’ he said, looking at Mom over my head. ‘Let’s get C-3P0 cleaned off.’ My father and I shuffled off to the
kitchen together, his hand grazing the back of my head. Two against one. I was being rewarded.

I remember being nervous all through classes the next day. I’d noticed those boys liked to make things worse as they went
along, every time a little more serious, like this was a story moving towards a really great ending. The final bell rang and
I was close to shaking.

But the boys who usually followed me were gone. I didn’t see them in the coat room as I pulled my brown and orange snowsuit
top from
its swinging hanger. I didn’t see them in the crowd of kids surging towards the doors. In the playground no one said a word
to me. Was this luck or some danger I couldn’t see? I decided to get home fast.

Then somebody was striding in my direction, big army-coloured coat like armour bulking him up. It was the scary kid, the blond
boy who sat at the back of the class and didn’t talk to anybody. Mark McAllister. Everybody was afraid of this guy, and nobody
really knew him, always off on the sides or standing around the edges. There were rumours that if you gave him money, he’d
beat people up for you.