Twenty Miles (18 page)

Pelly dropped our card into Hal’s lap. She picked it up with a look of distaste.

‘Pelly chose it,’ I breathed quickly.

‘Who’s a thoughtful Barbie?’ Toad said as Hal tore it open. I watched her eyes move in lines and held my breath. She looked up.

‘I hate you all,’ she said finally. But then she started to smile and I tumbled back into my seat. Out the window, the highway ran a gash through endless brown fields. Boz brought out the cake. It was eight in the morning. We all sang.

G
race’s arrival on the deck sent the blue heron into flight from the big rock on shore. Its slow form a shade darker than the sky. She was wearing one of her sweaters. Grace didn’t follow a consistent pattern when knitting, preferring instead to improvise. She let patterns and colours bleed into each other, tracking a confused palette across her shoulders, another around her middle.

‘Jesus, Grace,’ Sig said and then wouldn’t look at her any more.

They sat in silence the length of two cigarettes. Jack shifted lazily, splayed in a patch of feathered sunlight coming down through the branches of the birch. A bird in it somewhere that wouldn’t shut up.

‘When will you tell her?’ Grace said finally.

‘Never.’ Sig jutted her chin skyward.

Grace sighed. ‘You don’t want her finding out from someone else.’ Climbing into patience. ‘You know this.’

‘What? You’re going to advertise it in the paper? You’re the only one I’ve told.’

‘Oh, Sig.’ Grace’s voice was tight and thin, stretched across a distance.

The girl was in a new city, surrounded by a team of girls. She was laughing.

‘Not yet,’ Sig said.

L
uigi, of Luigi’s Restaurant in Regina, put together a custom buffet for our team. Wearing a white chef jacket, he lead us into the back room, throwing open the door.

‘Eat, eat, ladies. All for you!’ he sang proudly. I saw Pelly’s eyes widen as we approached the table, which must have been several
tables lined up end to end, but a gigantic green tablecloth tricked the eye into believing it to be a table of epic proportions, smothered in every manner and ethnicity of carbohydrate imaginable. Toad approached the table, arms outstretched.

‘God love ya, Luigi,’ she said.

‘This isn’t right,’ I told Pelly.

‘I think I’m going to ralph,’ she said.

Buffets sparked a particular brand of team joy and bonding. I grabbed a plate and jumped in, sink or swim, everyone jostling up against each other in line, shouting recommendations, exclaiming over finds, comparing this buffet to buffets of road trips past.
We got macaroni salad. Dessert! I’m talking chocolate cake here. Steer clear of the broccoli salad, for the love of God. Best buffet ever. Better than Holiday Inn Saskatoon.

Plates grew pyramid-shaped and players spilled off toward the tables for Round One. I went heavy on the perogies, fished from a vat of melted butter, their tubby bodies emerging with the rainbowed gleam of oil patches. Lasagna. Potato salad. Fried chicken. On my plate, I pretended I was fearless and so maybe at some point I’d become the person who’d attack a buffet in this manner, who’d put together a plate like this. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Moon always told us visualization was half the battle. I’d been trying out this theory on the ice – pretend to be in love with the game like everyone else and maybe the love would come.

I sat next to Pelly at one of the long, cafeteria-style tables. Heezer brought up some buffet legend from last year. The last-year stories were unending. Their first season together. This seemed unfathomable – that they hadn’t known each other. I tried to imagine the mass chemistry experiments that must have gone on in corners of the dressing room, during the long highway hours, layered together in motel beds. I could hear it in their voices, the excitement of those legendary days, the rapture they’d felt when they found the perfect groupings, when they all began to fall for each other.

That inaugural season was a test run for the university and so the team had been on welfare, as Toad described it, paying a fee at the beginning of the year, buying their own jerseys, paying for their
meals, taking passenger vans on road trips instead of buses, staying in cheap motels with depressing names.

The athletic program had begun to throw the team more money my year – still not as much as the other teams, but enough to get us out from under the poverty line – so I’d missed this depression. There was collective pride among the ones who’d weathered it, though: the solidarity of a family of poor kids done good, sharing the hilarity and perversity of their meagre beginnings. The more ridiculous stories incited a kind of avalanche, everyone shrieking out pieces, different versions, tumbling their voices in.

I considered the rubbery texture of the lasagna with my tongue as Tillsy brought out the one about the news crew from Birtle, the segment they did on the team. All of these stories with their doors shut against me.

When Toad intervened with a Perogy Challenge, I was relieved. Eating myself into the conversation offered itself as a possibility.

Moon let it all go. We had the room to ourselves, so she didn’t have to remind Toad and Heezer that they were representing their team, their university, their city, their nation, their gender, their generation, like I’d seen her do at other points during road trips. She sat with Stan at the far side of the room, her back to us, wilfully oblivious. And so Toad and Heezer, already stuffed from Round One, rolled on the ground to the buffet table for the next round of perogies, a form of protest and appreciation for the buffet’s fascism.

I made an obvious competitor with my pre-existing stack of perogies, so all I had to do was raise my fork slightly when Toad sent out her call for participants. Heezer wrote all our names on a scoreboard napkin.

I didn’t have time to think. The first five went down pretty smooth. Pelly signed on as my manager – brought a pitcher of water to our table and kept my glass full, then massaged my shoulders in between five and six when fork-to-mouth motions began to slow. Going bite for bite with Toad across from me. Boz folded early on. Booed for her poor effort. Roxy spiked her napkin at seven. My stomach began to carousel, telling me to give up. That’s when I decided I wanted to win. Duff gave up, groaning. Tillsy toppled off
her chair. I held Toad’s gaze as she chewed ten in slow motion. Pelly dabbed my forehead with a napkin. The carousel sped. Spectators gathered around our table. It was down to Toad and me and so they cheered for me. Stomach spinning up into my throat. Eleven down and my swallow mechanism short-circuited, my throat sprained. Systems shutting down. Something larger than the sum of the perogy parts rising now. Coming up. Thirteen and Toad making a sound like a sick cow. Both of us lifting fourteen at the same time, biting the wan, rubber heads off, their skin the texture of formaldehyde frogs in science class. The perogies becoming these living, crawling things. Their esophageal creep.

The moment of reckoning. Toad gave an unconvincing growl. Our eyes locked. Don’t look away. They were all watching, rapt, cheering me on. I breathed deeply. I saw her about to do it, the decision made in her eyes. As she threw her fork – which speared that remaining fraction of perogy – against the plate, she was the older sister pretending sudden weakness in an arm wrestle. Letting me win. She put her hands up in surrender and I swallowed my last bite and swooned suddenly under Toad’s unexpected generosity and the hot release of nausea.

‘You heinously obese sow,’ Toad said, grinning.

It came to me. I was practically in a perogy coma, but it felt like a spell. ‘Well, champ,’ I said. ‘Pain is temporary. Pride is forever.’ It just came to me.

You imagine yourself into the game and then you force your stomach to get behind you. I looked at Hal. She was examining me with a surprised smirk. Pelly screamed. Tillsy said, ‘We have our front-runner for Rookie of the Year!’ Toad shook my hand and Heezer took our picture.

I ran to the bathroom and fell to my knees.

‘Y
ou play hockey?’ the punk-rock guy next to me said out of the blue. We were learning personality types in Psych class and Dr. Hurlitzer kept whipping the overheads off before I’d finished copying the notes, panic accumulating with each one. It was starting to
feel competitive. I looked over and, next to this guy, I felt like an extreme jock in my Scarlet hockey sweatshirt, which was hoodless, my number,
5
, stitched on the arm. He had black bedhead and his thumbs hooked through holes in the cuffs of a black hoodie, slouched in his seat.

I didn’t have time to chat. ‘Yep,’ I said and then Dr. Hurtlitzer was snapping away another overhead.

‘You don’t look like a hockey player.’ He wasn’t even holding a pen. He smiled and shoved his hands into the front pouch of the hoodie.

‘Okay,’ I said, insulted and flattered, my pen racing. ‘So what does one look like?’

‘Not you.’ He grinned, a chipped front tooth.

The rest of the class, I kept catching him looking at me. Sig might have called them bedroom eyes.

Dr. Hurlitzer told us there are two main types of personality: Type A and Type B. Each with its own collection of traits. You’re one or the other. I was finding it hard to believe in this division, but then I walked into the dressing room and all I could see was As and Bs. I went through the stalls and labelled them, each of my teammates. Split them into these two teams, and they didn’t even know. It felt like a trick.

They all looked like hockey players.

A
fter practice, I sucked in the humid dressing-room air and yanked hard on the zipper of my jeans. I blew a quick breath out and then inhaled again and did up the button, elbows bent in a tight angle from my sides. The jeans – an old pair normally sagging at the rear, the knees – fit tightly across my thighs, my butt, digging in at the waist. I thought the bloating must be due to the coffee I’d been drinking twice a day, before class in the morning, before practice. I’d gotten hooked, like Jacob said I would. The shrill buzz ringing through my body, my mind gaining speed, hands springing alert. I would have to stop.

When I turned to grab my jacket, Toad grinned at me from her stall, eyebrows raised.

‘Having some pant problems, Izzer?’

‘Yeah, I’m bloated or something.’

‘Bloated, eh?’ Toad snorted. ‘Bozzo! Iz’s pants don’t fit.’

‘Did you call me?’ Boz’s voice strained over the music that churned from the
CD
player. Wearing a sports bra and basketball shorts that dangled down past her knees, Boz juggled tennis balls. Her six-pack danced, mirroring the movement of her arms, eyes steady on the electric green arcs. She moved in closer to Toad. The balls didn’t flinch.

‘Iz’s pants don’t fit.’

‘Oh, you’re getting junk in the trunk, Iz,’ Boz said encouragingly. She nodded in my direction, but didn’t look.

‘Junk in the trunk?’ I said.

‘Let’s see,’ Toad pushed me into a clumsy half-pirouette so I faced the opposite wing of the dressing room

‘Very interesting,’ Toad said.

I squirmed under her scrutiny. ‘What?’ I turned.

‘The ass fairy has visited you, child – you are truly blessed.’

‘Are you talking about Barbie?’ Hal said over her shoulder. She stood in front of her stall, arms pretzeled into the middle of her back, hooking her bra. She turned to face us, the bra lace and blood-red. ‘Impossible.’

Boz retreated to her stall, tennis balls bulging in one hand.

‘Yeah, you do look like you’ve grown a bit. You’re getting some legs,’ she said, an approving nod.

‘Really?’ I looked down. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own two eyes,’ Toad said. ‘We got Pelly last year. Another success story for the Scarlet Eating Disorder Clinic. We should make a brochure, eh? Iz on the front, before and after shots – “Send your skinny children to the Scarlet Anorexia Clinic at the
WU
Ranch, success guaranteed.”’

‘If they don’t come back with junk in the trunk, we’ll give you your money back,’ Heezer said, without skipping a beat, Toad’s Hype Man, always.

‘And, a special limited-time offer – if you call now, your child will receive a lifetime membership to Club
160
, made up of several
illustrious members of the Scarlet hockey organization! Just ask Iz, one of our satisfied customers.’ Toad held an invisible microphone up to my face.

I smiled, mind grabbing at any words they might want. ‘I won the perogy-eating contest,’ I offered, bending toward Toad’s hand, their laughter turning in my chest.

‘She’s still skinny.’ Hal applied deodorant emphatically, her eyes pointed at my legs.

A
piece of looseleaf winged up in front of my feet as I opened the door to my room. The paper had a ragged edge, torn from a notebook. At the top, three scrawled lines of Psych notes, crossed out. Below this, a sketch: feathered lines in ballpoint pen. An outline of a girl with a ponytail, a side profile of her face and then a smiley face where her heart would be, its mouth open, a wave pouring out.

I walked over to St. Mark’s, the third floor, knocked on Jacob’s door. His head reared with surprise as he opened it.

‘Wow,’ he said. I’d never seen him blush before.

‘Are you the artist?’ I asked, holding up the picture.

‘Ah, you got it. Excellent.’ He laughed, stepped back from the doorway. ‘Come in, or – ?’

I nodded my head, stepped inside. The room smelled like week-old towels and Old Spice. An unmade bed, the same plaid comforter all guys in Rez had. A couple of team photos on his bulletin board. One of him as a kid, crouched in a snow fort, sticking out a purple tongue, a sucker held in his mitt. An autographed poster of Ted Nolan when he played for the Penguins above the desk scattered with notebooks and pens and textbooks. Sports Psych. Rocks for Jocks. Religion. A couple of sticks poked out from under his bed and he had a running-shoe fetish. A pile of laundry climbed the wall in the far corner.

Jacob yanked up the bed covers, grimacing, and stuck the desk chair on top of the laundry. It teetered, legs off the ground.