The Prince of Neither Here Nor There (11 page)

“Spaghetti with puttanesca sauce! Your favourite! That should cheer you up. I must have had a premonition that you’d need a lift.”

“Cool!” Brendan smiled for his mum, but inside he was still shaken up from the accident.

“And you didn’t leave your books on the hall table?”

“No way, Mum,” Brendan lied. He’d have to grab the books off the hall table as soon as dinner was over. He plunked down in his chair and reached for a piece of bread from the basket in the centre of the table. Hopefully, his mum would let the incident drop.

“No bread. Not until your father gets here! He called to say he’s on his way.” She picked up the wooden spoon and stirred the sauce again. “How was school?”

Brendan frowned
. Well, not the greatest. I’ve had a couple of massive head traumas over the last two days. My scar is turning into melanoma. The girl I adore laughs at me compulsively.
Aloud he said, “I’m fine, really
.”

Delia sat down opposite him. She snapped open a can of diet pop. “Mum, I’m going to the rec centre tonight with my friends Katie and Jenn.” All her friends hung out at the rec centre where they could giggle and watch boys playing basketball. Girls!

“Is that so?” Mum opened the cupboard over the sink and took out plates. “Homework first.”

“Mu-UM …” Delia began to whine in the annoying way she had.

“Yes. Homework!” Mum turned away to fill the plates with pasta from the strainer in the sink. Delia sneered at Brendan and reached for a piece of bread, digging into the butter with her knife.

“We’re waiting for Dad!” Brendan said loudly.

“Yes!” Mum whirled around and pointed the pasta lifter at Delia. “He’ll be one more minute!”

Delia dropped the bread and glared at Brendan, who grinned back. Sadly, when Mum’s back was turned again, Delia flicked her knife and sent a gob of butter sailing across the table to splat on the front of Brendan’s shirt.

“Hey!” he began to protest, but at that moment, Dad came in through the door, his pant leg held tightly in a bicycle clip and a shiny silver bike helmet on his head. His hands were covered in black grease, and he headed straight for the sink to wash them.

“Darn bicycle chain. It falls off every ten feet!” He rinsed his hands and dried them. Satisfied, he turned with a flourish and a bow. “Clairs! I am arrived! Let the rejoicing commence!” He took his wife in his arms and spun her around once, eliciting a shriek from her as she tried to avoid spilling the contents of the plate she was holding. He set her back on her feet and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Gross,” Delia protested. “We’re going to be eating here in a minute!”

Her father made a pouty face. “What’s the matter, Delia? Oh, I know! You want some kisses, too!” He reached for his daughter. She reared back in horror, brandishing her butter knife. Her face conveyed a disgust reserved for plague carriers and affectionate fathers.

“Do
not
touch me!”

“Oh no, Brendan. She has a knife! Watch out!” Dad laughed and sat down in his customary chair as Mum set a steaming plate of spaghetti drenched in the fragrant sauce in front of him. He picked up a fork and began winding noodles around it. “So, children, how was school?”

Brendan opened his mouth to tell his father about Finbar, but Delia interjected. “Dad, can I go to the rec centre? Everyone’s going to be there.”

“I’m not going to be there,” Dad said, stuffing a forkful of noodles into his mouth. “How can you say that everyone is going to be there when I’m not going to be there?”

“Da-ad.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She said I could.”

“No, I definitely did not. I said you have homework to do.”

“But if I get it done? Then can I?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a glance, psychically connecting as mothers and fathers have since the beginning of time. “Fine. But the homework has to be done!”

Delia practically danced in her seat. She picked up her fork and dug in.

Brendan toyed with his food, adding grated cheese and pushing the noodles around. His father frowned. “Brendan? Everything all right?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.”

“He saw an accident today,” Mum offered.

“Really? What happened?”

Brendan reluctantly repeated the censored account he had given his mother earlier. When he was done, his father shook his head. “Poor old fella. Hope he’ll be okay. People used to have someplace to go when they were losing their marbles. Now they just end up on the street.”

“Was there a lot of blood?” Delia asked. “Any brains or things like that?” She was really into slasher horror movies, the gorier the better.

“Just leave it,” Brendan snapped. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

An uncomfortable silence hovered in the room until his father eventually broke it by repeating his question: “Apart from the mayhem, school good today?”

“Um … yeah, I guess. The substitute teacher, Mr. Greenleaf, was weird again.”

His father laughed. “Then everything was as it should be, eh?”

“Yeah.” For an instant, Brendan was tempted to tell his father about Mr. Greenleaf, the walk in the park, the weird feelings he had been having, but he decided against it. They wouldn’t get it. Delia would rip him mercilessly. His parents would think he was just having some teenage freak-out or something, and make him sit through a prolonged analysis. Ugh. He shovelled some pasta into his mouth. It tasted good. He felt a little better. He started to relax. After all, everything was right with the world: his sister was being a total brat, his dad was cracking horrible jokes as his mum shook her head and rolled her eyes. This was his family. This was normal.

Still, as he looked around the table at the people he’d known all his life, he couldn’t suppress a feeling that things were going to change, that his life would never be the same. Something was coming that would alter the life he had known.

Brendan, would you chill? What is wrong with you? One smack with a ball and a kooky teacher and you totally lose it. Come on.
He made a conscious effort to throw off his gloomy state of mind, concentrating on his father’s accounts of the strange customers he’d served that day. Usually, his father’s hilarious stories cheered him up, but the dark feelings lingered all through dinner.

The dinner ended with Brendan washing the dishes and Delia drying. He was just putting the last dish in the cupboard when his mother said, “Wow. Have you been using something new on your skin?”

“No,” Brendan replied, confused. “Why?”

His mother frowned and reached out to touch his cheek. “It just looks clearer today than usual.”

“Yeah,” Delia interjected. “Most days your face makes me want to barf, but today, I just gagged a little.”

Brendan whipped the wet dishtowel at her, but his sister ducked easily out of reach. “Too slow, Dorko!”

“Why are these people my children!” Mum sighed.

Delia laughed and ran out of the kitchen, in a hurry to get her homework done and get to her rendezvous at the rec centre.

“You need any help with anything else, Mum?” Brendan asked.

“No, you go do your homework. And your skin does look a lot better.”

Brendan felt his cheeks redden with embarrassment. He wasn’t used to compliments from girls, even if the girl in question was his mother. He went back down the hall to retrieve his books. As he passed the mirror on the wall by the coat rack, he decided to take a look to see what his mother was talking about. He leaned in close to the mirror and studied his face.

“She’s right,” Brendan whispered. The usual cluster of zits that plagued the corners of his mouth was fading. The giant angry, potential- Siamese-twin
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pimple between his brows was half the size it had been that morning. “Wow.” Well, one thing had gone right today, even if he had absolutely no control over it. Brendan grabbed his books off the hall table before his mum saw them and went up to his room.

Brendan’s room was at the very top of the house, a converted attic that he reached via a steep set of narrow stairs that were more like a ladder than a real stairway. Brendan had begged for the room even though his mother and father had been dubious. The steep steps and his natural clumsiness were a dangerous mix. In the end, he’d prevailed. Delia was fine with him taking the attic room. She had a room with a tiny balcony to herself looking out over the street.

Brendan hoisted himself up into the room and tossed his books onto the small single bed. He stood up and immediately cracked his skull on the roof.

“Ow,” he grunted aloud, rubbing his scalp. He’d lived in this room for years and he still banged his head every day like clockwork. Shaking his head in self-disgust, he went to his desk and sat down at the computer, being careful to duck beneath the slanted wooden beams that sloped overhead. He’d cracked his skull even more lately as he had shot up a foot in the last couple of years.

The room was small and cramped. As a result, Brendan had to keep the place meticulously tidy. His sister’s room was liberally carpeted with dirty clothes and half-eaten food. Brendan had always been a neat freak. His cleaning habits gave Delia further fuel for her nerd insults, but Brendan didn’t care.

The slanted roof was plastered with movie posters, mostly sci-fi films. A small bookshelf held comic books and paperbacks. His bed was small and narrow, tucked under the eaves next to a tiny bedside table. On the table sat a combination iPod dock and clock radio. He reached over and switched on the iPod; after a few clicks, music filled the small room.

Brendan had a wide range of musical interests. At school, everyone fell into categories: punk, goth, metalheads, emo kids, euro house music fans. Everyone seemed to feel the need to lock themselves into a certain genre. For comfort, he supposed. Belonging to a group made things easier in high school.

Brendan found it funny that a school like the Robertson Davies Academy, even though it was a melting pot of nerds and misfits gathered from the four corners of the city, was still full of cliques and clans. Some were thought to be nerds by other nerds.
³⁵
You’d think a nerd was safe to be a nerd at nerd school but no such luck. Brendan had so far managed to remain outside any group. He had banded together with Harold, Dmitri, and Kim. Together they formed their own group. He and his friends were like the ubernerds, ultranerds, and nerd untouchables.

Which made it even weirder that Kim had latched onto them. He couldn’t figure it out. Maybe she was a nerd on the inside. Kim always seemed a little exasperated with him and his friends, but she hadn’t dumped them so far.
The year is young,
he reminded himself.

HE JUMPED
when his father knocked on the ladder—he didn’t have a door for his room. Sitting up, he managed not to knock his head again. His father’s head and shoulders popped up through the hole in the floor.

“You ready to go?”

“Go? Go where?”

“The concert tonight. Remember? I got the free tickets.”

Brendan had forgotten. He groaned inwardly at the thought of going to see Deirdre D’Anaan at Convocation Hall. Going to see a show was the last thing he felt like doing. He’d rather just lie down and take it easy tonight after all he’d been through today. He opened his mouth to try to beg off but stopped. The picture on the poster loomed in his mind. He recalled how he had felt when he’d seen it in the bus shelter by the pizza shop: like destiny was calling.

“Let me change out of my school stuff.”

“Cool. Ten minutes in the lobby, Mr. Clair.”

³⁴
 Brendan is exaggerating, of course, but there is one documented instance of a man growing a twin out of his forehead in Eastern Turkey. That is to say, the man was in Eastern Turkey, not his forehead. Well, to be accurate, both the man and his forehead were in Eastern Turkey. And the twin as well.

³⁵
 
Nerd
is a term that first appears in the Dr. Seuss opus
If I Ran the Zoo.
It has come to refer to a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities. To be judged a nerd by other nerds is a sad situation to find oneself in. There have been some pretty wonderful nerds throughout history: Socrates, Copernicus, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci. I don’t care if Galileo could carve on his snowboard: he observed that the Earth revolved around the sun, which is way cooler, if you ask me.

THE CONCERT

They walked through the chill of the autumn evening. Brendan was basking in the afterglow of his streetmeat,
³⁶
a special treat that he and his father had picked up on the way. Soon they were standing in front of the polished wooden doors of the concert hall.

Convocation was one of Brendan’s favourite buildings on the whole university campus. As a little kid, Brendan had come here to see Christmas concerts and hear chamber music with his mother, and he always looked forward to being inside the place. The seats, already full of buzzing concert-goers, were dark and polished oak, arranged in a circular pattern around the central stage.

Brendan’s dad presented the tickets to the usher, who guided them to their seats, a bench about halfway to the stage.

As they sat, Brendan’s dad pointed at the stage. “She doesn’t have any drum kit,” he observed. “All acoustic. This should be interesting.”

Looking at the stage, Brendan took stock of the instruments. The stage was arranged in sections, each devoted to a type of instrument. One area had a number of stringed instruments: fiddles of various sizes, a mandolin, and a guitar. Next to that was a rack of small drums and percussion instruments: tabla,
³⁷
bongos, bells, and blocks. A rack full of different woodwinds glittered under the house lights: whistles, flutes, and fifes. Finally, in the centre of the stage was a simple, low stool. There were no microphones at all.

“There’re no amplifiers,” Brendan said. “How will they fill the hall?”

“I don’t know.” Brendan’s dad frowned. “The hall’s pretty good acoustically, but that’s the thing with this performer, she insists on playing halls with no amplification. She’s a bit eccentric. She’s a recluse, and she doesn’t perform live very often, but she has a dedicated, almost cult following.”