Cricket in a Fist (12 page)

Jasmine heard her father talking to Lara in the kitchen and left the computer to find him already setting the table. She trailed him, putting napkins beside the forks, straightening the placemats, until he put his arm around her shoulder to kiss the top of her head. “How's my little fish? Did you finish your Halloween costume?” She nodded, sad for him. She hoped he would choose a flattering photo for the milk cartons.

“I used to love Halloween,” said Lara, placing dishes of food on the table. She called for Bev. “Remember how I used to love Halloween, Mom?” she said, as they all sat down. Bev nodded noncommittally. “Mom,” Lara said, “did you see the costume Jas made for tomorrow?”

Bev looked at her blankly. “No,” she said after a painfully long pause, “I never did.”

“Steven,” said Lara, “did I ever tell you about the time my sister and I dressed as the twins from
The Shining
?”

“I think so,” said Dad. Lara's laugh, brittle and too loud, faded into a tense smile. Jasmine thought of a quote from Virginia Morgan's website — it was from her new book,
Accidents
. Virginia Morgan's writing always had some embarrassing parts and a lot of incomprehensible parts, but, after reading passages a few times, Jasmine could usually figure out what they were supposed to mean. The quotation said:
Watch closely and you'll begin to see people as actors rehearsing well-learned scenes understood only technically. For so long, I, too, was posed in an exaggerated, pathetically earnest attempt to emulate real life
. Dad reached over to squeeze Lara's hand and kept holding it as Bev said, “I brought my girls to Vegas one year. For Halloween. I had the wildest costume. I was a cigarette girl, and men kept mistaking me for a real cigarette girl. Remember, Lara?”

“Yes,” said Lara. “Well, no. Hil and I were too young to go to the party so you left us behind in the hotel room. We got drunk on those little bottles of booze, and Hilary threw up in the bathtub.”

“Did she?” Bev frowned. “Well, that was before she started all this God business. I will never understand what happened to that girl.” Dad met Jasmine's eyes, smiled sympathetically and winked. He shoved the peas toward her and nodded for her to take some. Jasmine grimaced and, helping herself to half a spoonful, told herself she would never eat peas when she was a sex slave.

“Jas,” said Dad, “did I tell you I might get to put some of my guys on a shuttle? To test the effects of weightlessness on spatial memory.”

“Really? Would you send Edgar?” Edgar was currently Jasmine's favourite of her father's rats. He was sleek and brown, and he was always bumping into things. She was allowed to hold him sometimes, and she'd run her finger over the scar behind his ears, where no hair grew. She'd had a huge fight with Dad when she was in grade five and figured out that the surgeries he did on his rats weren't performed for the sake of their well-being.

“What's the point of being vegetarian,” she'd howled. After a series of long talks, she uneasily accepted his claim that the rats didn't mind, that they had a good life and served the higher good. That he chose to avoid meat “precisely to atone for the necessary sacrifices I make in the course of my work.” And, he pointed out, “I'm responsible for far less suffering and death among animals than the average person is.” She still had pangs of worry over it, but Dad's arguments were, as always, hard to disagree with.

“Well,” Dad said, “it's a long process. Edgar will likely be pretty elderly before the project goes through. What do you think, though? My guys get to be astronauts. Pretty neat, huh, baby?” Jasmine nodded. Sometimes her father seemed so gullible and innocent, so sweet and fascinated by his work, that it made her squirm with frustration, love and guilt. She could see that Lara felt the same way, raising her eyebrows when he talked endlessly about a new neurological study, an outlandish hypothesis posed by a promising student. It was almost Halloween. Why did everyone pretend they didn't remember anything? Did Dad really think that if he didn't bring it up, no one would think about it?

“Edgar's so lucky,” said Jasmine.

*

It was raining the next morning, so Lara drove Jasmine to school. “Why didn't you wear your costume?” she asked, stopping near the gate. The concrete schoolyard was full of kids trying to protect their Halloween makeup under umbrellas.

“I'm in grade eight,” said Jasmine. “I'm fourteen, almost.”

“So is Mei.” There was Mei, in her black cloak and witch hat, huddled under the school's side awning, reading a book.

“Oh God. Mei.”

“And Megan.” Megan, dressed as a gypsy, was sharing an umbrella near the basketball nets with a tall ghoul. Lara said that everyone was dressed up, and as far as Jasmine could see, she was right. She didn't need Lara to remind her of all the hours she'd spent constructing her papier-mâché astronaut helmet before she realized just how embarrassing and childish it would be to wear it in public.

“That's okay,” said Lara. “Maybe you'll use the costume for something else.”

“Maybe.” Jasmine sighed.

They stayed in the car for another two minutes until the bell rang, then Jasmine kissed Lara on the cheek and ran for the door, down to the basement to her locker, and checked to see if the rain had smudged her eyeliner. She rubbed under each eye with a fingertip. Down the hall, she saw Benna pull off a long, black, stretchy dress, shove it in her locker and secure bunny ears to her head. A cowboy swaggered over and grinned while Benna made bunny paws and hop-hop-hopped, put one hand on her hip and smiled.

Jasmine turned away quickly to hang up her jacket so she could look up in mock surprise when Benna arrived breathlessly at her side. “Oh my God.” Benna squeezed herself between Jasmine and the locker mirror. “I'm so embarrassed. This is my cousin's Playboy Bunny T-shirt.” Hand on hips, she swivelled to show Jasmine her costume. The short white T-shirt with the bunny logo covered the top half of a black ballet leotard. On her legs, Benna wore only pink stockings, and there was a pink cotton-tail sewn to her leotard's bum. “Ryan said I was sexy,” said Benna, glowing with exalted
mortification. She was sexy. She was so beautiful and sexy it made Jasmine's stomach hurt.

“I might put on my costume at lunch, Benna,” said Jasmine. She always said Benna's name when speaking to her. Sometimes she said the name under her breath when she was lying in bed at night. “Benna. Benna Hadrick.” She had recently persuaded Benna to confess her middle name, too, and had been sworn to secrecy.

Benna Caraway Hadrick, mid-September, had been untouchable, unreachable, had been standing beside Jasmine at the sink during recess, circling her eyes with dark liner. This was the closest Jasmine had ever come to the too-old-for-her-age, up-to-no-good queen of grade eight; Benna's sexy underwear was clearly visible above her studded belt. Standing beside Benna at the mirror, Jasmine grimaced at her own reflection. She'd parted her hair on the side because it said in one of Tam-Tam's old-fashioned magazines that a side part distracts attention from a prominent nose. Her grandmother kept baskets full of fashion magazines, the latest ones and the big, matte-paged kind from the sixties and seventies, and Jasmine often read them out of boredom when she visited. The magazine was right. Jasmine's mother used to wear her hair parted in the middle, and it made her nose look huge. Jasmine knew about this because she used to sleep over every weekend when Agatha lived at Tam-Tam's house, and one time they found an old driver's licence of their mother's at the back of a drawer. Jasmine still had it. None of the old albums had photos of their mother; anyone flipping through them would have thought Dad was a single parent until he met Lara.

Putting one hand over the middle of her face, Jasmine looked herself in the eyes. As far as she could see, her eyes and her long hair, both the same reddish brown, were the only attractive features she had left. During the summer, not only had she got her period, which stopped her from swimming for five days every month, but her body had expanded, relentless and itchy, leaving her about a foot taller and her breasts two cup-sizes larger. The bump in the middle of her nose seemed to be getting bumpier. If Lara had been her real mother, Jasmine might have been dark haired and rosy cheeked, with big black eyes. She might have had a small, straight nose. Benna Hadrick
was adjusting the safety pin that held the shoulder of her black T-shirt together, and Jasmine felt the unmistakable pre-nosebleed ache under her eyes, the iron taste at the back of her throat.

Benna was known to have made out with Barbara Steele's older brother, who was in high school. Jasmine had seen the older brother and had imagined Benna sitting on his lap in one of her short short skirts, tongue-kissing. The image forced itself back into her head as she stared at her traitorous nose in the mirror, waiting for the inevitable.
Will it thus
, wrote J. Virginia Morgan. The book had a lot of hard quotes from philosophers, and it often wasn't clear how these quotes related to the stories the author told about herself. Waiting for the blood that was welling into her sinuses, Jasmine understood what the book was trying to tell her. It was like what Justin, her swimming coach, said — streamline your body, and you just ease through.
Own the events of your own life
. Don't drag, cannon-balling through life. She put her head back and blew hard through her nostrils, spattered the mirror, scarlet spray. Benna jumped and stepped back.

“Get me toilet paper,” said Jasmine.

Benna replaced soggy red wads of paper with fresh white ones for the next twenty minutes. She watched with undivided interest while Jasmine pinched her septum. “That was so gross.” Benna was clearly impressed. They left the mirror caked with brownish, drying blood, walked into French class together five minutes late, and sat together near the window. In the weeks that followed, Benna Hadrick changed Jasmine's life. Before she met Benna, Jasmine had often sat and watched the rest of the class glumly. J. Virginia Morgan explained, basically, that it's a mistake to try and fit in with the people that happen to be around. Who cares if they like you or not, or if they think you're weird. But Jasmine couldn't help it — she did want them to like her. After the nosebleed, she and Benna sat together, and Benna giggled all through class at all the jokes Jasmine made. After school, they drank peach schnapps on Benna's fire escape and laughed until Jasmine almost threw up; they drank coffee in cafés; they talked to the punks on Rideau Street; and Jasmine watched Benna get her belly button pierced by a friend of
her cousin's, who was covered in tattoos. She'd been sure Benna was too cool to dress up for Halloween.

“Where's your costume?” said Benna.

“Yeah,” said Megan, sidling up behind Jasmine. “You said you were working on it all week.”

Jasmine promised she'd change at lunchtime, so after history class they all went to her house to eat — Megan, Mei and Benna, with Jasmine leading the way on zigzagging tiptoe because the morning's rainfall had left the sidewalk covered in earthworms. Megan and Benna did the same, stepping gingerly. “This is sick,” Benna said, more than once. Her tail looked silly under the clingy black dress, a lopsided bump just below her jean jacket. Megan was dressed as a gypsy, with a long skirt, a kerchief and huge hoop earrings. Mei trailed behind, hands in the front pocket of the
YWCA
sweatshirt she'd pulled on over her witch costume. The year before, Jasmine and Mei would have picked up worms and helped them to the safety of the grass.

As they turned onto her block, Jasmine bent down, picked up a worm and waved it in Benna's face. “Sick!” squealed Benna, grabbing Megan's arm. Megan hollered, and Jasmine tossed the worm into the street.

“Don't get run over,” Jasmine yelled.

“You are seriously damaged,” said Benna. Megan laughed, and Mei, watching glumly, fell further back. Jasmine glanced at Benna's hand, still holding Megan's upper arm as they turned up the driveway of her house. Benna and Megan only knew each other because of Jasmine. None of her friends from before liked Benna. Mei had even phoned Jasmine one evening to say, in that painfully serious Mei way, “You think you're cooler now, but I'm telling you as your friend, Benna's changing you for the worse. She's not even a real person, Jas.” That Mei was right in a way only made her more annoying. In a way, Jasmine was getting tired of Benna — how she seemed, almost always, to ever-so-slightly miss the point, and the way she ran her hand absent-mindedly up and down her thigh like she was trying to rub something away. How she was always pointing out high school guys with baggy pants and stupid expressions on
their faces and wanting Jasmine to get all excited about them. Mostly, though, Jasmine was tired of waking up every day with Benna's face in her head and Benna's name running through her mind like a tune too catchy to shake. Against her will, she memorized Benna's words and agonized over them later; every day, she dressed anticipating Benna's approval and planned funny comments so Benna would laugh and grab Jasmine's arm as though to keep from collapsing. It was not a good feeling. It was just like Virginia's description of “toxic love” — how
one random person glows with a poisonous, greedy light
. Jasmine looked at Benna's hand on Megan's arm, felt sick and thought
poisonous
. But that kind of love, Virginia promised,
ceases quietly and without warning, and the beloved turns out to be just like anyone else.

The back door was half open and the smell of cigarettes loomed as Jasmine reached for the doorknob. Bev was smoking at the table in the back den with a white-and-silver-clad Elvis impersonator. They had been there for a long time, judging from the density of the smoke. Silver sequinned sunglasses lay neatly folded on the wicker table. “Hi,” said Bev. She waved cheerfully at the other three girls and dropped ashes on the floor. “Lara's stepkid,” she told Elvis. Jasmine led her friends to the kitchen and then up to her room without looking at any of them. Bev had once invented a board game called “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” The game involved cards, dice and a map of Graceland. It turned out she couldn't sell it because of copyright infringement — the greatest tragedy of her life.