My Beating Teenage Heart (26 page)

Celeste, Ellie and I became a trio. We shopped together, went to the movies together, baked shortbread cookies together and met Ellie’s best friend, Natasha, and her boyfriend, Jack. Callum was out with his own friends a lot, which meant we didn’t see much of him, but it’d been so many years since we’d really spent time together that I didn’t expect any different. If I hadn’t seen him at various points in between I might not even have recognized him as the boy I’d known when I was seven. He was nearly six feet tall, had his hair shaved so short that you could tell his ears stuck out a little, and mostly smelled like a mixture of smoke, citrus body spray and the mint shampoo my aunt stocked the bathroom with. Ellie said her parents were furious that he’d taken up smoking, that it’d been going on for over a year now and that they𠆚t Christ;d done everything they could think of to make him stop but nothing had worked and now he only lied about it and sprayed himself silly.

On Christmas Eve I couldn’t sleep and, after an hour and a half of trying, slunk down to my aunt and uncle’s family room to watch TV. Callum was lying in front of the lit gas fire in the dark with his eyes closed but the TV on. All the various smells I associated with him must’ve worn off earlier in the night because I couldn’t smell anything. I scanned the room for the remote so that I could change the channel to something more seasonal than
The Dark Knight
.

In Callum’s hand, of course. I slid the remote out from between his fingers and climbed into the armchair closest to the TV.

“Hey,” Callum said sleepily as I began flipping channels, “are you not a fan of Batman?”

“He’s okay.” I flipped back to
The Dark Knight
for Callum’s sake. “I was just looking for something more Christmassy. You know, like
The Polar Express
or
A Christmas Story
. Something with snow.”

“Go on.” Callum yawned. “Watch whatever you like.” His cell phone rang and he reached into his pocket for it and then whispered into his phone, facing away from me and into the fire.

I went back to channel surfing and settled on
Die Hard
, which, though it doesn’t have any snow because it takes place in L.A., is at least set during Christmas.

After a couple of minutes Callum dropped his cell down on the carpet next to him and eyed the TV. “My girlfriend,” he said. “She’s still awake too.”

I didn’t know he had a girlfriend. I only knew the things that his parents and his sister had told me—that he did okay in school although he hardly studied, that he loved scuba diving and fencing, that he and his father fought often, and that he was a volunteer with a government program that helped teach kids sports.

“You found something to watch,” Callum observed. “But I don’t see any snow.”

“It was the best I could do.”

We watched
Die Hard
together for a while, Callum from the floor and me curled up in the armchair with my legs draped over one of the arms. Then he sat up, pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head and said, “I’m just nipping outside for a bit.”

“For a cigarette?” I asked. I don’t know what made me so blunt and nosy; maybe it was just too late at night to sink much effort into censoring myself.

“Aye.” He grinned a little. “Filthy habit. Don’t start. Everyone will hate you for it.”

When he came back in a few minutes later the cold air and smoke smell came with him and Bruce Willis was picking shards of glass from the soles of his feet on the TV.

“So you should tell me your bad habe yis waits then,” Callum said, taking up his previous spot in front of the gas fire, “and I won’t have to feel too bad about mine.”

“I think you
should
feel bad about yours,” I told him. “Then maybe you’ll quit.”

“If it was that easy I’d have given up already. The things are bloody addictive.”

And maybe it really was because it was the middle of the night that it seemed perfectly natural to talk about things we never would’ve discussed during the day. He told me that when he’d first tried smoking at fourteen it was one of those stupid things you do just because everyone else is, then he found it stamped out any stress he was carrying around with him and by the time he wanted to stop, it’d already become a habit. His girlfriend, Lucy, was a brand-new one—no one in his family knew about her yet—and I felt happy to have a secret about him.

I would’ve shared one back if I’d had some kind of equivalent. Because I didn’t, and had barely even been kissed, I confessed that I’d never had a boyfriend and that all the guys I knew just seemed to think of me as a friend. Callum looked up at me from the floor and said, “Because you’re so easy to talk to, probably.” And because I wasn’t as skinny as Celeste or Ellie or any of the other girls that had boyfriends. But I didn’t want to tell him that and sound like I was feeling sorry for myself. “Blokes are easily confused,” he added.

“So I should act bitchy and stuck-up,” I kidded.

Callum laughed. He asked me if I still liked Cheetos and said I should’ve brought some over for him. And suddenly we were those two people who’d played cards together by Lake Farlain in the dark. It happened in the blink of an eye.

Instantly it seemed ridiculous that I’d believed we’d changed too much to be friends. We talked about Callum clashing with his father and how I sometimes still felt overshadowed by Celeste, who’d always been closer to perfect than I was. Then, because it was the holidays and we’d been to church earlier, we talked about God and whether he was really out there, watching, listening and letting bad things happen to people.

Callum said he’d turned into an agnostic and it was another thing that irritated his parents, even though they hardly went to church. I told him that I guessed I was one too—that I wanted to believe more than I actually did—but that if there
was
a God and he was a loving God he probably wouldn’t care if we went to church or believed in him so long as we treated everyone with kindness.

Callum agreed but said regardless of whether or not there was a God he was a big fan of Christmas, and with that the topic shifted towards holidays and those magic times at the lake years earlier. “That was one of the most brilliant summers of my life so far,” Callum declared.

“Me too!”

Neither of us mentioned the summer before or after. Callum said, “We should play cards before you go—for old times’ sake.”

We never did get around to cards but that was okay. A couple of days after Christmas we went to an indoor climbing arena with Garrett, and one night the two of us skipped dinner and bought fish and chips from a place a couple of blocks away and sat on the curb eating them, Callum simultaneously smoking a cigarette and being careful to exhale away from me, in the opposite direction. “You don’t look right with a cigarette,” I told him. “Do you think you’ll ever try to give it up?”

Callum sucked in his cheeks. “I’m already trying to cut down. But so far that just makes it worse. I spend all my time figuring out how long until I can light up again.”

He smelled like smoke (and citrus and mint) when he hugged me goodbye at the airport. I didn’t realize that would be the last time I ever saw him, Ellie and my aunt and uncle. If I’d known I’d have held on to them all longer, but at least Callum and I were able to be friends again. I’m so grateful for that.

After I got home, we stayed in touch online. He and Lucy didn’t last. His next girlfriend was Yumi and she did, although she hated his smoking and wanted him to quit just as much as his parents did. I told him a little about Ikenna, downplaying how much I liked him because I didn’t want to let myself get too crazy only to be let down later.

Ikenna …

Ikenna Shepherd showed up at Hillfield Park Secondary out of the blue in October of tenth grade. By then I’d had a few minor crushes, but the only person I’d ever really kissed was a guy named Anthony. We’d made out a little by a hotel pool during a wedding reception that I’d gone to with my family that past summer, and Anthony kept telling me how pretty my name was but he didn’t ignite anything inside me. Looking at Ikenna, on the other hand, made me feel like I’d never been kissed. And being near Ikenna filled me with restlessness and daydreams.

Just when I thought I’d figured out what tenth grade would be like and more or less who everyone in my classes were, there he was sitting in the second row from the window in French, with hazel eyes that made my throat ache and cheekbones so sharp that they could’ve been lethal weapons. Ikenna’s smile looked shy but maybe that was only because he was new. My very best friend since seventh grade (the year after I’d fallen out with Shenice) was Carrie Chappelle and he’d popped up in her English and science classes too. Carrie told me that his mother was from Nigeria and his father was from Calgary and had been transferred here with work. This she learned from listening to Teena Simmons pass on the info to her own best friend, Shenice Campbell (one and the same).

I thought Ikenna would be snapped up by Teena within weeks. It seemed that every time I rounded a corner she was laughing and grabbing his arm or smiling dazzling smiles at him. I kept waiting for the news, bracing myself for the inevitable, and then one cold Wednesday in November I saw Marshall Roy (a power forward from the junior basketball team) and Teena kissing at the top of one of the school stairwells. She didn’t bother with Ikenna after that.

Still, I was too self-conscious about my feelings to try to talk to him. The other side of the class may as well have been the other side of the world. The semester went by without either ofhouscious us saying a word to each other, but I felt like I knew him a little anyway, just from watching him. Ikenna was the type of guy who usually knew the answer when called on during class but looked as if he’d rather not have to give it. When he did speak he was thoughtful about it and I noticed that he wasn’t the kind of person who laughed just because everyone else was laughing.

The one thing I didn’t like about being in class with him was that he made me want to keep my mouth shut too. When I was around him I felt like I was still the awkward kid I used to be. Knowing he was listening to the sound of my voice made me mangle the French language more than once, and then, when the class ended, I felt even more panicked because that meant no more staring at Ikenna’s cheekbones from across the room. I’d had my chance and let it slip through my fingers.

But sometimes there really are second chances in life. Callum and I were proof of that and in January I got
another
second chance—Ikenna and I had history together. When I told Carrie she made me promise to speak to him ASAP. “But about
what
?” I asked. My palms sweated at the thought of it.

“I guess it has to be something about history,” Carrie summed up. “Homework or whatever.”

I virtually never saw Ikenna in the halls. If I had to go up to him in the cafeteria in front of the guys he’d been hanging out with—Terrence, Lee and Barrett—the odds I’d trip over my words would triple. It was two weeks before I had an opportunity to speak to him alone, and when I did it was rushed because he was hurrying over to one of the portables for class and I was veering away from them, having just finished English in portable 12. By the time I got up the courage to call to him he’d already passed.

“Ikenna?” I said as I turned and caught up to him.

“Hey,” he said casually, those hazel eyes of his feeling like the sun as they settled on mine.

“I know this is random,” I spit out, “but I spaced in history today—do you know what tonight’s homework is?”

Ikenna smiled at me. There’s a tiny gap between his top two front teeth that I’d fallen for the first day I’d seen it. Between his eyes and grin I was in danger of burning up. “I wrote it down, but I don’t have it on me now.”

Except for the fact that he was smiling at me, asking Ikenna about history class already seemed like a dumb idea. If I’d really forgotten to write down my homework, wouldn’t I have just checked with my friends from history class?

“Right,” I said. “Okay, thanks anyway.”

I sped away from him, silently cursing myself for being obvious. But the next morning when I was walking down the hall I heard him say my name from behind me. “Ashlyn?”

“Yeah?” I swung to look at him.

“Did you get that history homework all right yesterday?”

The history homework was a series of questions on Trudeaumania and naturally I’d known that all along but I said, “Yeah, I did—thanks.”

From then on we spoke to each other with gradually increasing frequency until one day in mid-April Ikenna stopped by my locker while I was looking for a hair band that’d fallen out of my knapsack and said he was thinking of calling me over the weekend but realized he didn’t have my number.

By then I could look into his eyes without turning stupid and I recited my number and added, “Give me yours too.”

We talked for an hour and a half the following Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t difficult speaking to him but I could feel an anticipation-energy between our words that made my heart beat fast the whole time. Before hanging up Ikenna said, “We should hang out sometime—go to a movie or something.”

“For sure,” I said breezily. My head was whirling like when you’re on one of those fairground rides that make you want to throw up and laugh at the same time. I tried to picture myself holding Ikenna’s hand at the movie theater, the two of us stealing kisses in the dark. “For sure,” I repeated.
For sure, for sure, for sure
. Maybe we could take the bus. Maybe Ikenna had an older brother or sister who could drive us so my father wouldn’t have to. Celeste would’ve done it as a favor but she was away at university in Guelph.

But the details would take care of themselves, I thought. Things with Ikenna were moving in a certain direction—the right direction—and the only thing I needed to do was swim right along with them.

I thought, I
thought
 … and then everything changed on me in a heartbeat. It happened without warning, and by the time I saw my very best friend again on Monday morning the damage was already done. People stared at me in the hallway, whispering amongst themselves, sniggering and then looking away. Not everyone but lots of people from tenth grade. I glanced down at my jacket and jeans, wondering what they were noticing.