Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (9 page)

Mark. My cheek against his warm shoulder, his neck. His skin under my fingertips. And then what? What was I so afraid of?

He’d turn around and kiss me.

I shivered.

That was it. I wanted him to kiss me, wanted us to kiss with open mouths and tongues touching, like you’d see on TV. Like
you’d see guys and girls doing on TV.

A hundred times worse than thinking about fucking him. A million times worse.

Then there was Mr Randall. How I’d walk the halls at school silently saying his name.
Christopher. Chris
. When assignments came back, I’d be crazy with suspense to see what he’d written (‘Sensitive and insightful.’ ‘V. good analysis!’),
and later I might trace over his comments with a pen, memorising the shape of the letters, picturing him alone in his house
reading something I’d written.

It was ridiculous. I tried to laugh. Nothing. No tears or even a
sound. While this pressure built. Thick, white smoke rolling around inside me, touching everything with cancer. I never should
have had that cigarette.

I felt like turning on the shower and getting soaked in my clothes. But that would be stupid.

I went downstairs to the kitchen instead and sat slouched at the table. There was bread in a white paper bag on a brown board
scraped clean, the knife to cut it for toast left on its side against the owl salt and pepper shakers. I rolled the knife
along the table, watched it thunking like a square wheel over the red and white checks on the plastic cloth.

Wouldn’t the guys at school just love this? The ones who’d still trip me in the halls when Mark wasn’t around. Their eyes
lighting up. Ha ha ha. We always knew it. And now Mark would be one of them.

I gave myself a little cut on the side of my finger.

What would Stanley say? I still thought about Stanley a lot. Every day. Imagined his reactions to everything – me, Mom, Mark,
books I was reading. But that’s all it was. Imagination. Me talking to me.

Blood started to dribble out of the cut I’d made. It didn’t feel like anything. Distant and numb, packed in Styrofoam.

My mother, stuck in this town with me like I was her jailor. I’d screwed up her whole life, being born. I shouldn’t be here.

There was something in the core of me that was wrong. And it was possible that all this stuff about men had nothing to do
with it. My soul kicking sand in my face, trying to cover up what was really going on. Whatever it was. I tried to imagine
myself having a normal, happy life. Chatting with people easily, not worried if I was saying the right thing or standing right
or if they liked me. The only person I could feel that comfortable with was Mark.

Mark. Oh, God
.

There was a box of matches next to a squat round candle on a plate. We liked candles. Mom and me. Made everything smaller,
less lonely. I shook a match out of the box and struck it. A good smell. Satisfying.

I hardly realised what I was doing next.

I was surprised to hear my own voice. I was yelling. Then I cried for a while. The pain was bigger than I was, and I guess
that was a relief. I took big, deep, shuddering breaths, blew my nose, shook my head. It was like something had left me. The
whole side of my hand was throbbing beside the red burst blister on my little finger. I’d have to put a Band-Aid on it before
Mom saw.

But first I had bigger things to decide.

I moved to the counter, looked at my reflection in our toaster. Like I said before, I went through my usual school thoughts
and watched what happened to my face. Snotty. Mark was right.

Then I thought about Mr Randall.

Jesus Christ. It was right there, for anyone to see.

That’s when I had my brilliant idea. Keep your head down. Act shy. Defensive strategy. Like steel doors slamming shut one
after the other.

I hated chess. I hated sports. I hated games. But it looked like I was stuck in one – and one I wouldn’t win. But if I could
get to the finish line alive, that might be enough. I’d have to do this alone, of course.

That part wasn’t going to be a problem. I knew how to be alone.

Every year was the same.

November would come and the first dusting of snow on the mountain. December was all buzzy nerves from tests and exams, followed
by the loneliness of watching TV Christmas with my mom. By February, I was already sick of the snow, the way it piled in pyramids,
chewed up and spat out by the plough, melting in sullen puddles off our boots. April would arrive with its thaws and the warm
peat smell of the woods, and then June opened into that long light that made you feel like you were going to live forever.
July and August were our birthday months. I’d spend them lying around reading or hanging out with Mark or Lana. Green-gold
fields stretched off and away; the sun filled the river with light. Everything looked better when there was no school.

September. A breath of cold and a few trees strangled into flame colours to remind me that the easy times were over. Each
year I’d be ready to begin again with a new stack of blank notebooks, trying to get away from the person I’d been the year
before. Then October:
bright leaves, dark nights, coats and sweaters tumbling from the top shelf of the closet. Grey November blowing in. First
snowfall on the mountain.

I was thirteen, and then I was fourteen and then seventeen. Years like nothing.

After Lana moved to town, it was as if she’d always been there. I spent a lot of time at the Kovalenkos’ that winter as 1984
began, watching videos on the big soft people-eating couch in the TV room where I’d usually end up falling asleep on Lana’s
shoulder, especially if the movie was no good. Once I heard her father chuckle from his recliner and mutter something in Ukrainian.
Lana threw a pillow at him and alarmed the dog.

‘He said I’m gonna marry the boy next door,’ Lana told me later. ‘He’s an idiot.’

But we didn’t live next door. Lana’s place was in the nice part of town. Every house had a satellite dish and the front porches
were stuffed with hanging tubs of flowers.

In the summer of 1984, seven months after Lana’s house-warming party, I went to see Stanley. I went to see my father, but
he wasn’t there. There was a stranger in his place – a man in a suit and tie, with short hair that was already starting to
march back from the crown of his head, his wild beard scaled down to a little scrub and a handlebar moustache. Smiling at
me politely and shaking my hand in the airport, like somebody
famous who was trying to be nice to a fan. We were close to the same height – this was about a month before my fifteenth birthday.

I spent a week at the Shulevitz home in Montreal, mostly hanging out with Stan’s wife Sheila and helping her take care of
the little babies, my sisters. If I saw my father, I tried to be somewhere else, and I was pretty sure he was playing the
same game. Sheila threw us together a couple of times. She’d heard Stanley mention something about teaching me to play chess
as a kid, so one night she set us up with the board at the dining room table and made herself scarce.

Silence hung between us like humidity. My father hunched over the chess board, his eyes fixed on the pieces in front of him.
I slouched, sat up straighter, slouched again. I stretched my legs under the table, bumped his foot with my sneaker and apologised.
He mumbled that it was okay.

I moved pawns when I couldn’t think of anything else to do. They stumbled forwards onto buried landmines and died. I watched
as my other pieces got mowed down and eaten. My horses and my castles. My thin bishops with their gilled mouths gaping downwards
in shock. My queen shuffled dejectedly around the board, afraid of bothering anyone. My king was easily surrounded and paralysed
– surprised by Stanley’s troops with his feet in a tub of water and a towel around his head. I couldn’t protect him.

I toppled the piece over, tiny fat cross on its sleek black head.

‘You win.’

‘I win,’ he said joylessly. ‘Want to play again?’

‘Okay, sure.’

We passed an hour like that and then he said something about needing to get some work done. My father stood up, clapped a
hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. I sat at the table for a long time. The castle walls crumbled and I was alone.

At the end of the week we said goodbye. His wife told me that this had been a lot of fun, that we should do it again next
year. And so we did. Next year and the year after and on and on. A week in a great city with a nice young family and a guy
who used to be my father.

At home I started skipping gym and reading grown-up books, got addicted to cigarettes. Grade Nine turned into Grade Ten.

I decided to quit being shy. Lana helped. I told her I had a problem talking to people, so she started bringing me along whenever
she was out with a group of her friends. If I got too quiet, Lana would step on my foot under the table, and I’d force myself
to say something.

I quit the other stuff too. The burning. The voodoo stupidity. I put the matches back by the casserole dish, slid the drawer
shut and didn’t open it again. The fingers on my left hand were all scarred up near the palms. I never let anyone see them.

In the spring, I skipped a lot of classes. It wasn’t my idea.

This was around the first few months of 1985. Mark’s dad had been gone for a while at that point, and his mother had boyfriends
over a lot. Some of them seemed to be living there. Mark hated them all, thought the whole situation was bad for his little
sister. Eventually he’d had to tell his mom not to bring men to the house anymore. They’d fought about it for weeks. He was
only fifteen.

So I could understand why he was too restless to sit at a desk all day at school that year. We’d go down by the railway tracks
instead, stand around throwing bottles at other bottles, sometimes have a few beers or smoke some low-quality weed. But I
never went near anything stronger than hash.

Except once.

Patty Marsh’s party. By then I was a few months shy of sixteen – old enough to get really fucked up, or so I’d thought. Everybody
else who’d taken whatever the hell I had was strolling around the backyard gazing up at the stars. I was somewhere whimpering
and clutching an aluminum garbage can. It was decorated with a picture of two little girls in old-time bonnets and inside
there were clusters of tissues and something off Patty’s hairbrush that looked like a big sticky tumbleweed and kept popping
into weird staccato movements – faster and faster the longer I looked at it, like it was boiling.

Mark stuck something plastic in my mouth. There was a taste of searing mint.

‘Leave puke on your teeth and pretty soon you won’t have any.’ He pried one of my arms off the trash can, tried to get me
to take hold of this toothbrush that was jutting out of my face like a thermometer.

‘Come on, man. I’m not gonna brush your fucking teeth for you.’

The toothpaste drool on my chin felt corrosive. I was sitting on the side of a pink bathtub staring up at Mark. There was
a message on the trash can, scrolled in fancy handwriting under the little girls’ feet: ‘While days are warm and skies are
blue, spend lots of time just being you.’

‘I’m gonna die, Mark. I’m gonna die. I’m really sorry.’

‘No, you’re not. I told you. You’re not allowed dying unless I say so.’

I argued with him for a while. I’d be dead any minute. I was so sure. I moved the toothbrush around my mouth and pictured
my teeth breaking off and falling into my throat and then I couldn’t breathe.

Mark laid a hand on my back. Little shivers went all through me and I felt myself starting to calm down. ‘You’re okay, Stephen,’
he said carefully. ‘Everything’s gonna be okay. You believe me?’

I nodded.

He got the garbage can away from me somehow. We walked home through wet grass and backyards and I followed his voice in the
dark. I couldn’t see because I couldn’t open my eyes – the stars were too overwhelming. I just felt the pressure of his arms
around me as I was dragged along, pictured a lobster claw closed across my shoulders, twin furrows from my feet skidding through
the grass.

The last thing I heard was Mark on the phone with my mother, telling her that I was with him, and that I was safe. When I
opened my eyes the next morning, he was asleep on the floor beside the couch in his living room. I was on the couch.

‘You went nuts when I tried to leave,’ he explained to me later. ‘So I didn’t.’

Outside Riverside the world was churning out new horrors. Mom was getting sentimental because this old-time actor she’d always
liked had cancer, and then it turned out not to be cancer at all – it was a new disease just for homos. They showed before
and after pictures of him on the news a lot. In one frame he was a good-looking older guy in a tux under soft-focused light.
In the second he looked stringy and tortured, and his eyes were insane. At school everybody made jokes about it. By October
he was dead.

Grade Eleven. I got my driver’s licence, after spending hours in the car practising with my mother. Poor Mom. The way she’d
brace herself in
the passenger seat, rigid and white-faced, shouting commands at me in a cracking voice. Sometimes I’d take my hands off the
wheel completely and grin at her while she freaked out.