Little Cat (11 page)

Another finger inside.

‘Ezrah went first.’

John’s hands slid under my ass.

‘He did something from behind.’

More. Do it more!

‘He felt my tits up under my shirt.’

‘Wish I didn’t need a fucking rubber here.’

‘They all did it after.’

‘Mira, spread wider.’

John started moaning. His cock was so hard. He put something on it. My hand was around it – it felt like a doll’s leg. The heat split me open. John lifted my hips and turned me over like that. My stomach was down, my ass high behind me.

‘How many, baby? How far did they go?’

I heard myself moaning. I felt myself wanting. Something to stop myself from being spread empty wide. Ezrah loved The Joy of Sex. He stole it from his parents and hid it in the couch.

‘Hey, come on, what’s so funny?’

‘They go: “Mira, are you a doggy?”’

In the picture for ‘orgy,’ the woman was drawn on her hands and knees and four guys around her were squeezing her tits, holding her hips, pushing her ass. Ezrah called the woman a doggy. Like I want it now. Doggy! Doggy!

‘You love getting fucked on your hands and knees.’

More. Push it more. I want it harder, more! I don’t care if it hurts!

‘Shit, you know how to move. Sexy little girl. How’d you learn how to move?’

John was splitting my ass and watching me jiggle. Wind screamed through the window screen.

‘Yeah, fuck, baby, fuck it.’

Fast up and down. There was thunder behind me. I felt my own body shoot out of my body.

Ezrah knew I was scared of being alone.

In the summers when we were kids we used to walk in the ravine near my house where the darkness of trees made the sun disappear. I’d pick flowers on those paths while Ezrah screamed up at the branches to freak out the birds.

He never wanted to hold my hand. Whenever we held hands it was because I made him pretend. I used to think I would be Ezrah’s wife.

One day we walked further than we’d ever been before. I kept saying that we should turn around, that we were going to get lost, that we should turn around now, when suddenly Ezrah bolted away from me, laughing, ‘I’m leaving this place! See you, Mir! I’m leaving!’

I was glued to that spot full of mushrooms and leaves. I was scared that he would get lost, that I would get lost, both of us lost in the forest forever. What were my mom and his mom going to do? Flies landed on my shoulders and I swatted them off, going jerky.

I looked down at my feet and started shuffling backward. I went so slowly because I was hoping that Ezrah would come running back toward me. I kept turning my head in case he jumped out behind me. Black rubber branches touched the sides of my face. I realized that my whole body was moving in slow motion because I was waiting for something around me to change.

When I finally made it back to my house, our mothers were stretched out in the sun and Ezrah was there. I couldn’t believe it. His arms were draped around his mother’s shoulders. He was smiling at me with his top row of teeth. I thought he was saying: ‘See, Mir? You see? I know how to get home without you.’

My mother gave me a hug and said, ‘Beautiful flowers.’ But the stems of the buttercups were squashed in my grip, their tiny heads all looking down, limp.

Ezrah stayed over at our house that night. We slept together on the bed in the den. My stomach hurt. I was still so mad about how he took off on me. I was pretending to sleep when Ezrah snuck out of our bed and got the flashlight from the kitchen. Then he pulled the covers over our heads and shone the light upward.

‘This is our new house,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘We’ll stay up all night like this.’

Ezrah had grabbed my comic book from the floor and was shoving it in my face. I shrugged and sat up with him. After a few stories, though, I started complaining like I always did about Archie that two girls like Betty and Veronica would never fight so hard over the same guy. Two girls hardly ever want to kiss the same guy.

‘Two guys want to kiss one girl,’ Ezrah said. ‘So what does it matter if two girls want to kiss the same guy?’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ I told him. ‘These girls are supposed to be in Grade 9 but look at their tits! No girl in Grade 9 would have tits like this!’

Ezrah snatched my comic book and wrecked our tent. He got on top of me and wrestled my arms over my head.

‘What do you know about Grade 9 tits?’

‘Stop it! Get off!’ I yelled, laughing.

Ezrah put his hand over my mouth. ‘They’ll hear us! Shut up!’

His hand smelled salty and I stopped squirming.

‘Tell me you’re sorry,’ he said.

‘Fine,’ I said through his hand.

‘Tell me. Then I’ll get off you.’

‘I said I was sorry!’

Ezrah eased up off my gut. His pyjama pants looked weird, like a button was pushed out. He lay down beside me and kept crossing and uncrossing his legs. He pulled the covers up over our heads again and stood the flashlight between our faces.

‘Let’s stay up all night,’ he said.

All I felt like doing was looking at his face. The haze in the blanket made his eyes huge and grey. Ezrah was catching his breath, letting me stare. Right between his eyebrows, his face started changing. First his eyes got bigger, then his eyebrows pointed up. Ezrah looked like a fox. Then he looked like a clown.

Ezrah complained that I’d never stay up all night with him.

‘No, I’m awake,’ I told him. My eyes were half-open.

It bothered me that I could never remember the second I fell asleep. I wanted to memorize that exact click. I knew people died in their sleep and that meant going to sleep without ever waking up. I thought that if I remembered the exact second before falling asleep, I would know for sure I wasn’t ever going to die like that. There was a prayer that I heard some kids say at school that always freaked me out: ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ Those words kept going over and over in my head. I did not want to die before I woke up.

‘Mira, you’re falling asleep.’

Ezrah set the flashlight at the top of our heads. A soft yellow circle touched the ceiling through the blanket. I asked Ezrah to tell me what was happening on my face.

Ezrah reached out and touched the spot above my left eye. ‘It’s okay to go to sleep,’ he said. He stroked my eyelid down.

My face felt so hot. I reached out my finger to do the same thing to him: a little, light stroke in the space above his one eye. We each had one eye open, one eye shut. He kept touching my eyelid and I kept touching his. Our thin purple skins there rippled together.

As I woke up, I felt Ezrah’s breathing, humid on my lips. I rolled on my back and took the blanket off my head. From the blueness in the room, I knew it was near morning.

I think I can remember every moment when I touched him or he touched me, because something always happened afterward. It was as if I could feel more things under my skin, as if there were a night light searching inside me. I liked it when Ezrah touched me, but I just didn’t always want it to get started. I think maybe the difference between all those times is lost in a pile in my head. Or my thoughts are too lazy to keep my brain clean.

Still, I know the best times happened when nighttime pressed us together, sweating.

Then Ezrah started wanting his friends to hug me, too, and we all started looking at these books, then magazines – two naked people on top of each other, three naked people inside of each other, his head there and her head there, his legs up and her legs down, tits and pussies, cocks and dicks, Ezrah’s hands on top of me, more hands underneath. What other girl played these kinds of games? And who else didn’t say anything after? I thought I was the only one.

Nadia worked at Carousel’s. She’d been there as a bartender since she’d turned eighteen and she always served all of her underage friends. Because of her dad, she said to me, the cops didn’t care. I still had no idea what he did. But I’d been hanging out at Carousel’s since I was sixteen and Nadia always fed me double rum and Cokes.

The very first time that I met Adi, it was the summer after I graduated from high school. I remember that night how I didn’t want to go home because I knew my parents were just going to ask me if I’d gotten a summer job and why didn’t I have a job yet. There were a few cute roadies wandering around with cigarettes and beers, a bunch of kids from our school too. When Nadia saw me come in, she flapped her hand sort of frantically at her nose like something stank. Nadia’s hair wasn’t braided like it usually was; it was full of static, down to her shoulders, not brushed. She wasn’t wearing her silvery lipstick either. She looked so rattled, I thought, because she was drinking too much Coke or something. I knew that my parents would be happy if I just got my old job back at the Second Cup to save money for university. They would never want me to work at Carousel’s.

‘Mira, fucking help me god,’ Nadia whispered, lighting up a cigarette. She grabbed my hand too tight, dug her nails in. ‘This girl my dad brought in today is fucking crazy. She’s in the bathroom right now. She’s here on one of those exotic things.’

‘What exotic thing?’

I was thinking about eight hours standing behind steaming coffee pots, the tuna-fish stink of grinding beans. John.

‘I mean exotic dancer, come on, the exotic dancer visa thing. What the fuck, I don’t need you to jew me out right now.’

‘I’m not jewing you out, you Rusky! Who is she, I’m just asking.’

Nadia motioned behind me. The roadies were watching. I turned around in my seat and watched too. The girl strutted out from the bathroom in these fat plastic shoes, Alice in Wonderland shoes, like a cartoon or something. Maybe it was her short white fur coat, too, which was shaggy like a goat. I started to laugh. Nadia hissed at to me to stop. The girl kind of shimmied onto a bar stool. She threw her short white fur coat on the floor.

‘Most of them are Romanians,’ Nadia whispered. ‘But that bitch over there, she’s this notorious Volgograd whore.’

I started to laugh again and Nadia couldn’t stop me.
Volgograd whore.
It sounded so comedy-ominous. I knew Volgograd was Nadia’s hometown and I shouldn’t laugh. But that Russian girl who was at the opposite end of Carousel’s leather-bumpered trough started laughing too.

‘Stop it, I’m serious.’ Nadia knifed me harder with her nails. ‘I don’t know why my dad left her here.’

That girl kind of reminded me of Nadia at twelve: the albino bunny hopping on our sidewalk. Maybe it was her fur coat.

The Volgograd whore was watching me.

‘Don’t even look at her, Mira. She’s a fucking terrorist.’

‘Can I get a rum and Coke?’ I asked. ‘Please? Double-shot me, Rusky.’

Nadia swigged the rest of her Coke. ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ she said.

Nadia always made it seem like the world was going to come down around us, as if everything was just about to go dark. While Nadia was getting my drink, I could see that girl head-on. Her face was as high as a moon off her neck. She had black ink eyeliner painted beyond her eyes. Her hair was bone-blond like Nadia’s, but pulled tight in a bun. I knew that Nadia had to help girls from Russia before, when we were younger especially, and I’d always thought it was about learning how to speak English, not some kind of exotic visa thing. I felt stupid right then.

Nadia clipped back with my rum and Coke. ‘I need to do something about that bitch.’

‘Whatever. My god, Nadia, she seems harmless to me.’

Then the girl yawned, loudly. It was like she was showing us the inside of her mouth on purpose. It was gleaming brown and slimy. I couldn’t see any of her teeth.

‘Mira, she’s an evil horse-fed whore from my hometown and I’m supposed to teach her how to be a Canadian or something?’

‘Why doesn’t your father do it? Why do you have always do things for him?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mira, you don’t understand. You need to get out in the world and grow up. Get a fucking job.’

‘Shut up! I am getting a fucking job!’

The Volgograd whore made a choking sound and started spitting on the bar.

‘Oh my fucking Christ, do you see what I have to deal with? That girl just spit up on my bar.’

‘Sorry.’

I watched Nadia rush to the other side of the bar with a spray bottle and a cloth. The girl started talking to Nadia in Russian. She was flinging her hands around, these bony hands, and her whole body started moving.

When Nadia came back to my side, she was on the verge of tears. ‘She’s, like, telling me her fucking sob stories about being oppressed. Can you believe that that girl Adi is a fucking mother? She works at the titty club at the end of the road. I feel sorry for her.’

I passed Nadia my empty glass.

‘I’ll get you another. Jesus, I’m so fucking stressed.’

As Nadia worked I tried not to keep looking across the bar, which was impossible. There’s no way that person was a mother! She looked twenty years old, twenty-five at the most. She was wearing one of those shirts with only one arm – it was white and it had a fabric flower on the shoulder. She also had two cigarettes sticking out of her mouth. She tried to hold both cigarettes with her lip muscles and smoke them at the same time with no hands. It was really funny. She was banging the bar with both fists.