Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (4 page)

But he’d never done anything to me, so when he came closer I smiled and said, ‘Hi’.

The boy stood in front of me and glowered and didn’t answer. Then he told me Phil Doyle gave him fifty cents to beat me up.
I could see Phil over his shoulder, in a corner of the playground with the usual group, watching and grinning.

The blond boy’s empty cuffs jutted out from his jacket. His hands were somewhere in those sleeves, probably bunched into fists.
I thought about running. Or should I stay here and drop into a turtle shape and try to block him? I realised nothing had happened
yet, so I asked if he was really going to do it.

He took a step backwards, shrugged.

‘I don’t really like Phil Doyle,’ he said.

Then he turned away and started off across the playground, lost in that enormous coat. The boys in their huddle were whispering
together. He glanced at me over his shoulder.

‘You’re coming, right?’

I was too stunned to answer. I just ran after him. We spent the fifty cents on Pop Rocks.

In the morning, Mark McAllister showed up at my place to walk to school with me, like it was the most natural thing in the
world.

‘That your boyfriend?’ Kevin Dickson sneered at Mark when we were on our way home.

‘Why? You jealous?’ he shot back. When Mark insulted someone, it felt real. You got the idea he knew what Kevin was thinking
and was disgusted by it.

But the fighting was the real reason people were scared of Mark. Most kids would just kick or smack at each other blindly
with nothing much connecting. Mark took being violent seriously. He’d humiliate people. Make guys two or three years older
than him cry in front of their friends. Nobody wanted that. So even with a crowd of kids there, not one of them would take
him on.

You didn’t mess with Mark. And soon that meant you didn’t mess with me either. We developed this animal kingdom partnership
thing. I helped him with schoolwork, which he wasn’t great at, and he helped me with everything else. Life, I guess. I wasn’t
much good at that.

‘You’re acting like you’re scared all the time,’ he told me. ‘You can be scared if you want, but don’t
act
scared. It just makes people want to get you.’

‘Okay.’

‘And when the teacher gives you a book, don’t tell her you already read it. That’s snotty.’

‘I didn’t want to get in trouble,’ I said. ‘In case I had the wrong book.’

‘You won’t get in trouble for that,’ Mark said slowly.

‘Okay.’

‘And that thing you did yesterday …’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘When you were trying to hold my hand or something.’

‘Sorry, sorry.’

‘You never, ever do that again, okay?’

That was an accident. I was suddenly scared of something and I’d grabbed on to Mark’s hand without thinking. It was the sort
of thing I still did with my parents. Mark shook me off like I’d spat on him, and I’d apologised over and over and promised
never to do it again.

One day, he came to school with a dark purple bruise under his eye.

‘What happened? Did you fall down?’ I reached up and traced the outline of the mark. I was being very careful not to hurt
him, but he still knocked my hand away.

‘Don’t touch people, Stephen. It’s weird.’

I said I was sorry, again. Still learning the rules. Mark leaned over and whispered in my ear. ‘It was my dad.’

I thought about Mark’s father, how much bigger he was than Mark. ‘But that’s not fair.’

‘I know. You’re not allowed to tell anybody.’

I kept my mouth shut. You didn’t spill your friend’s secrets. That was one rule I already knew.

I was fascinated by him. Very pale, a few freckles sprinkled over his nose. His eyes were blue, but not like Dylan’s. They
were lighter – made me think of the sky when it seemed the most far away. He was like that himself, sharp-edged like the little
white airplanes that left trails across the blue and far away, even if he was right in front of you. I could spend all day
just looking.

But why did Mark decide to be friends with me in the first place? I never found out, not for almost ten years.

‘Stephen, think back. Did I seem like a popular kid to you?’

‘Well, you were cool, anyway. Even in Grade Three.’

He’d laughed. This was just a week ago. A Sunday, the last before the world ended. We were in his dad’s old workshop, mildly
stoned off somebody’s home-grown stash Mark had bought cheap. His father had been gone for years and he’d never used the room
much anyway.

Mark was drawing faces in the sawdust on the workbench as we both leaned against it.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You want to know why I started hanging around with you? This is embarrassing, but remember I was just a
kid.’

He’d glanced out the narrow, cobwebby window in the corner. ‘I knew you wouldn’t refuse. To be my friend, I mean. I just had
to stop people beating you up and you were pretty much guaranteed to want to hang out with me. And I knew you wouldn’t say
anything to the other kids. About me, my house, my mother. You wouldn’t go around telling a bunch of secrets. Who would you
tell them to, right? You were always on your own. Nobody liked you.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry, but that’s how I thought back then.
Like I said, I was a kid.’

So, I got it, finally. Made me feel sorry for Mark the child, being so desperate. And I wasn’t insulted or anything. I was
glad Mark had decided to keep owing Phil Doyle fifty cents, whatever the reason.

I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I had Mark and I had Lana, my other best friend ever since I was fourteen.

It was Saturday afternoon, a week after the world ended, and I was over at her place killing time before my babysitting job
at the Healeys’, both of us cross-legged on her purple bedspread surrounded by pictures torn from catalogues and magazines.
She was making some kind of collage, an album cover for an imaginary band. Mark was in Arnottville with his girlfriend. I’d
been avoiding him.

Last week when church was over, he’d dropped my father’s jacket over my shoulders as I lay slumped across the card table in
my living room, and I’d opened my eyes and nearly told him everything. But I didn’t. Instead I forced myself through the afternoon,
smiling and laughing, turning everything into a joke, all very painful and fake. Mark knew something was wrong, but he didn’t
come out and say it. I got the feeling he was waiting for me to tell him in my own time.

I moved back and felt Lana’s bedsprings twang and adjust themselves around me. There was something wedged under my knee –
a round plastic container in a muted shade of orange. Weird. I’d seen an object just like this, in my mother’s purse once,
when I’d been rooting around looking for smokes. The thing popped open like a seashell as I was examining it and I found myself
staring into a ring of prim white tablets.

‘Don’t take one unless you want to grow boobs,’ Lana said merrily. ‘They’re birth control pills!’

I froze for a pulse beat of cold horror.

Okay, I knew Mom went on dates. Occasionally. I even remembered the first one, a couple of years after Stanley left. I was
eleven. ‘Stephen, I’m going out to meet a
new friend
,’ she’d told me, in the kitchen where the babysitter couldn’t hear. ‘But I won’t introduce you until I’m sure it’s something
serious. And that goes for any other
new friend
I might make. Do you understand?’

I understood. There’d been no introductions so far.

I’d got a whiff of Mom’s love life last year when I’d overheard her on the phone complaining about someone. ‘But I didn’t
know
he was married!’ she’d said. And more. A lot more. I’d slammed my door and put a tape on, so she’d remember I was home.

Birth control pills. This meant my mother and the married guy had probably … oh, God.

Lana chuckled to herself and angled two curving paper zucchinis over a photo of Reagan so they appeared to be bursting out
of the old man’s nose. She was in her usual get-up: black clothes that looked as if they weighed an awful lot, thick make-up
ringing her eyes in raccoon shades, with her cheeks rice-white and her hair short and dark and twisted into spikes. The closest
thing we had to punk in this town. Lana was from Toronto, so maybe she felt like she had to be an ambassador
for urban life. She was also kind of solid and round. Plump, you might say. I wouldn’t call her fat. Everyone else did, though.

‘Great, Lana. So you’re doing it now?’

‘Not yet.’ She shot a flirty glance towards the photograph staring numbly from her bedside table: a pale kid with thick glasses
and black hair, clusters of pimples blooming on his cheekbones. Adam, the boyfriend in Halifax. Lana had told me many times
that this picture had been taken before he was cool, and now the guy was an absolute rock star. They’d met in a record store
when she was Christmas shopping in the city and every few weekends she’d spend hours on a bus going to see him.

‘I don’t know about this guy, Lana. If he’s making you go on the pill …’

‘Relax. It was my idea. Remember the schlong malfunction?’

Of course I did. A few months ago the two of them had been on the point of having sex at the boyfriend’s place while his parents
were out on a grocery run. But nothing was working for him down there and I guess he’d freaked out and said some pretty nasty
things. She’d cried, telling me about it. I knew I was going to have to beat this guy up at some point. Or put in a decent
attempt.

Lana looked down at her fingernails, short, ragged and flecked with black rinds of nail polish. ‘Well, look,’ she said. ‘He
told me later it was all subconscious fear, right? Because he doesn’t want to get me pregnant. Now it’s gonna be easy for
him.’

She flicked over a page of the Sears catalogue in front of her. The men’s underwear section. Sick little trap-door jolt, seeing
these images here. I watched as she attacked them with a pair of scissors.

I went straight to the Healeys’ from Lana’s house. Supper waited in Tupperware containers on the kitchen counter and my six-year-old
friend Kyle was in the backyard, scaling a bank of lumpy crystalline snow. I dropped my winter coat over a chair. Everything
out there was still melting, drip by drip, disintegrating in beads that caught the light.

A square hardback book had been set on the table, next to a bowl piled with oranges and plums.
Chess for Children
. Jesus, this thing again. There was a copy in our house somewhere. Unless I’d burned it.

‘What do you think – is he old enough?’ I nearly jumped. Mrs Healey was standing in the doorway.

‘I know Kyle couldn’t get through the whole thing on his own yet,’ she said. ‘But if someone read it
to
him …’ An encouraging smile.

‘Sure. No problem.’

‘You can change to a story or something if he doesn’t like it. But maybe he will. Could even turn out to be a prodigy, huh?’
She paced into the kitchen, smoothed a cloth across the spotless counter.

We watched Kyle through the window as he filled a red plastic beach bucket with soot-tinged, leftover snow. I noticed he was
using a fork. Mrs Healey sighed. The stained-glass animals suspended on the pane in front of us rattled in sympathy.

After she’d left, I propped myself against the stove and started flipping through
Chess for Children
. The same cartoon figures smiled up at me, page after page of them.
Pawns are brave soldiers. Knights are clever. This game is fun!

That’s the thing about a book. You can leave it for years but it’ll still be there, every detail perfect, waiting for you
to come back.

It was the only game Stanley and I ever played together, and I hated it. He’d taught me the rules when I was eight. I was
all excited. I thought it would be fun. It wasn’t.

‘Think it through, Stephen,’ my father would say. ‘Take your time and think it through.’

So I’d rock back and forth and look at my hands and pretend to be considering the board. Then I’d do the first thing that
came into my head. And I’d lose, which always made me feel squashed and frustrated.

‘But I took your horse!’

‘I know. I sacrificed it.’ Grinning at me.

Even losing at chess lacked a satisfying ending. Nobody ever captured the king. The point was to trap him, freeze him so that
any move would be impossible. So he wouldn’t get killed and he wouldn’t be a prisoner. Instead he’d be stuck, looking out
the palace window and realising it was all over, forever.

Later I started to understand the whole idea behind defensive strategy, and that was even worse. I couldn’t make a move without
anticipating how it would be punished. If I do this, he’ll do that. And then this and then that. Stanley would get bored waiting
for me to move and wander off. When he was out of the room, I’d cheat.

Would things have turned out differently if I’d been smarter? Better at games?

My parents got married in February 1978. Stanley was in jeans and his white sweater from Peru. Mom wore a pink, fluttery dress
with a flower pattern, too light for the cold. We drove to another town and
they signed some papers in a courthouse. Then we got back in the car and drove home. Stanley headed straight for his little
study and the door banged shut behind him. My mother and I went to the kitchen together. She’d decided to make a cake.

‘What’s a lucky colour?’ she said.

‘Orange.’

A little smile, her eyes crinkling. ‘Really?’

I figured orange was a good bet because it was two colours at once. One of them might be lucky. My mother dropped yellow food
colouring from a tiny glass bottle into the icing while I stirred and it turned buttery and bright. Then it was a soft sunrise
orange that deepened to a pumpkin shade as splashes of red fell.

‘I like it,’ Mom said.

This was a special occasion, so we had supper in the dining room. Stanley’s ugly mood clung to everything like an extra layer
of sooty air. When my mother left to get the cake, he turned and smiled at me, as if he thought I was funny.

‘Well, congratulations, buddy. You’re not a bastard anymore. How does it feel?’

I said I was sorry. I wasn’t sure what else to do.

My mother came back into the room, without the cake. Then she was standing behind Stanley’s chair and laying a hand on his
shoulder.

‘Don’t,’ she said. Her voice was low and firm and quiet.

My father sighed deeply. After a moment, he placed his hand over hers and leaned back, head against the pink flower pattern
of her dress. He shut his eyes.

‘Maryna.’ Stanley’s thin mouth was lost in that bramble of beard. ‘Did we really need to do this?’

‘It’s done. Now don’t humiliate our son.’

I put one foot on the floor. They didn’t seem to notice. Mom’s fingers grazed the soft dark hair just above his ear.

‘Let’s go for a drive,’ she said.

‘What’s the point?’

‘A walk, then.’

He agreed to go for a walk. I thought it was funny, the three of us just leaving the house for no good reason – like we’d
come back to find Goldilocks asleep in one of our beds. We zipped up our winter coats and shoved our feet into boots, walked
in the dark until we were huddled on a bench in a long empty park that led to the river. A thin curve of moon hung over our
heads. Stanley put his arms around us both. The surfaces of our coats shifted and slid against each other, made pockets of
air between us. So bundled up it would take a long time to feel anything if we fell.

When we got home, we ate square slabs of cake with orange icing. I hoped it really was a lucky colour.

Stanley spent more and more time in his study. Then one day he left. It was April, a little more than a year after the wedding,
and the snow was just starting to melt. I asked Mom where he’d gone and she told me she didn’t know.

Every time I picked up our mail at the post office I got nervous, thinking I might see my name on an envelope in Stanley’s
handwriting. But nothing like that ever appeared in the bundles of bills and magazines I brought home for Mom. After a couple
of years, I stopped expecting it. Sometimes I wondered if he was dead.

When I was twelve, everybody in my year moved up to the high school.

The place was huge, bigger than a mall, and full of people who looked more like adults than children. Riverside didn’t have
the population
for a Junior High and a Senior High. Instead we had six years in the same building – a boundless vista of boredom with no
end in sight but graduation. Graduation in 1987. I was sure the farm kids would be bussed to school in rocket ships by then.