Whatever Doesn't Kill You (6 page)

After we leave the nursing home, Simon drops me off in front of the used-
CD
store where Katie works. “Are you sure you're okay to walk home? It's minus forty with the windchill,” he says. “It's Sunday. If you miss the bus, you're going to be stuck outside for an hour waiting for the next one.”

“I'm fine. I'll get a ride with Katie's mom. She won't mind.”

Not only will she not mind, she'll insist on driving me home and probably offer to buy me dinner on the way. I probably won't turn her down; I rarely do. It's not like Katie and her mom are exactly poster children for the average nuclear family, but after a visit with my mother, sometimes it's just nice to feel normal for an hour. I think that might be my favorite thing about Sundays.

Katie's sitting behind the counter, watching a
DVD
on the store
TV
. The place is tidy enough, but it has that musty old-building smell that seems to permeate most of the stores along this strip. She has the whole store to herself. There are no customers on Sunday afternoons at this time of year—Ottawa Street is deserted on cold days. There are occasional shoppers pulling up to one store or another and running in for a minute, but it's far too miserable out for browsing. The real soul of the street—the antique stores, consignment stores, the store where Katie works—is more or less asleep for the winter. It will come alive again in March or April when trendy shoppers who think
antique
is a verb will wander from shop to shop, looking for treasures.

Katie's a sucker for chick-flick romantic comedies the way I'm a sucker for eighties family sitcoms. Maybe that's because she thinks having a boyfriend is as unlikely for her as having a normal family is for me. She's watching something with Meg Ryan in it, with the volume on low so she can listen to music on her iPod at the same time.

I pull up a second chair behind the counter and sit beside her. “Any customers yet?”

“Yeah, one guy. Right when we opened. He was waiting outside to see if we have a copy of Ted Nugent's greatest hits.”

“Who the hell is Ted Nugent, and why would you wait outside in this weather for his greatest hits?”

“Beats me. We didn't have it anyway, so I guess he's still out there looking.”

Katie takes out her earbuds and turns up the volume on the movie.

“What are we watching?” I ask.

“
Prelude to a Kiss
. This young woman switches bodies with an old man on her wedding day.”

“Why would she want to do that?”

Katie shrugs. “I think because she's got her whole life ahead of her and she's afraid it's going to suck. So she trades bodies with this dying old man because he's already lived his life, and he doesn't have anything else to worry about anymore. I don't really get it, myself.”

“I do.”

“Really?” She sounds astonished, which I try not to take as an insult. I guess it's not very often that I understand something and Katie doesn't.

“I really do. I'd trade places in a heartbeat with somebody who doesn't have anything left to worry about. It feels like I spend my whole life thinking about what awful thing is going to happen next.”

“I know you do. Which is a shame, because it takes up all the time you should be spending actually having a life.”

I wonder whether I should feel insulted by that or whether I should point out that Katie's life isn't exactly a laugh a minute either, but in the end I just lean back in the plastic chair behind the counter and try to watch the movie.

Katie's mom takes us out for supper at one of the new restaurants that was built after the old mall got torn down. I order a personal pizza—it's the cheapest thing on the menu, and much as I like getting free food, I don't want to wear out my welcome. I could buy my own dinner if I wanted to today—I still have a pocket full of money and no particular plans for it—but I'd rather save it, if I can, for when I really need it.

Griffin texts me halfway through supper: Wane 2 coma ova? As technologically savvy as he is, Griffin has yet to master the finer points of both spelling and predictive text. We get Katie's mom to drop us off at his place, with promises that we'll be ready at nine thirty sharp for her to come and pick us up.

Griffin's dad is a university professor, and his mom is a nurse. They live in a brand-new two-story stucco house with an attached garage and a finished basement. It sticks out like a sore thumb on a street full of ratty eighty-year-old bungalows in various states of disrepair. Or rather, I guess it would be more accurate to say it sticks out like a healthy thumb on a street full of broken fingers. Griffin's parents seem to think they're doing the neighborhood a favor just by living in it, like they're singlehandedly going to raise the property values of the entire street. They talk all the time about doing their part to make the East End a better place, but I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that. It's not like they're doling out food at the soup kitchen on their days off or anything. They don't even talk to their next-door neighbors except to tell them to move their garbage cans.

Griffin's dad meets us at the door in a golf shirt and khakis. He plasters on a smile. “Griff! Your friends are here, buddy.”

Griffin's room is through the kitchen and living room and down the stairs. We hang up our coats in the front hall and shuffle past his mom. She's sitting in the kitchen in yoga pants and a
T
-shirt from some fundraising 10
K
race she ran last year, reading the
Toronto Star
and munching a rice cake with peanut butter.

“So nice to see you girls again. How is everything at school?” she says.

“Fine,” we mumble in unison, and carry on down the plush-carpeted stairs to Griffin's domain. It's more of an apartment than a bedroom: he's got his own fridge, his own bathroom, every piece of electronics you could imagine and, best of all, a lock on the inside of his door. He bolts it as soon as we come in, like his parents might chase us downstairs to ask us more shallow, meaningless questions.

“Did my mom try to give you anything?” he asks me.

“Not today. We really didn't stop to chat though. She may get me on the way out.”

Every time I see Griffin's mom, she offers me something: clothes, mostly, or old books. I guess she sees me as a convenient way to make a charitable contribution without even leaving the house.

“She'll probably offer you her winter coat,” Katie says.

She perches on Griffin's overstuffed chair. It has speakers built into it so his video games can be in surround sound. “His dad was giving you the hairy eyeball when you came in.”

“I like that coat,” I say. “It's warm. And it's got history. I like things with a story behind them.”

Griffin takes the
Pöang
chair, which is stretched canvas over a plywood frame. It comes from IKEA, where every piece of furniture has a name. Half the stuff in Griffin's room is from there. He can tell you his bed is a
Trondheim
, his dresser is a
Hemnes
, his bookshelf is a
Grevbäck
. “What's the story behind your brother's old coat then? It used to be his, and now it's not. So what? It's actually a little gross, if you want the truth. I don't get why you're so attached to it.”

“I just like it. It reminds me of a simpler time.”

“But…” Griffin trails off, frustrated. We've had this conversation before, and I've never been able to make him understand. “I just don't understand the appeal of being obsessed with the past. It's not like you can fix it. Why not be obsessed with the future instead? Plan what you're going to do once you get out of school, worry about your career. Settle down, have a kid or something. Get out of this hellhole of a city.”

“Why is everybody suddenly so obsessed with my obsessions?” My voice gets a little shriller than I want it to. “Two days ago, you were all about pushing me to go see Travis Bingham and have some big showdown, and now you all want me to get over it and move on with my life?”

Griffin shrugs. “Well…we got to talking. Katie and Marie-Claire and me, while we were waiting for you up at the mall. We were really hoping you'd run into this Travis guy and get this all out of your system. I mean, don't get me wrong, you're awesome. But we all think it would be better for you if you just moved past this.”

My eyes tear up suddenly, like I've just been slapped hard in the face. I look back and forth from Katie to Griffin, my two best friends in the world. Katie looks a little guilty, like she's ratted me out or something, but Griffin doesn't look a whole lot different than he always does: long-nosed and beady-eyed, with his eyebrows slightly arched like he's only mildly interested in whatever's going on.

“I'm really sorry if I can't just get over my entire life and move on,” I shout, yelling so loud I can hear my voice bouncing off the ceramic tiles in Griffin's bathroom. “But since it seems to be a big deal all of a sudden, how about I just get over the two of you and move on?”

I stomp up the stairs, wishing the plush carpeting would allow me to make a louder, more dramatic exit. I slip my shoes on without untying them, stomping down the heels, then grab my coat from the rack in the front hall and carry it outside with me to put it on, slamming the door behind me.

Griffin's dad hears me from the living room and follows me out.

“Everything okay, Jenny?”

“My name is Jenna. And I'm afraid your son is a colossal asshole.” I put up my hood, dig around in my pockets for my mittens. I can only find one, but I'm not about to go back in the house to look for it.

Griffin's dad looks perplexed. “Do you—can I—um… offer you a lift home?”

“I'm fine.” It's cold enough that the tears in my eyes are freezing, making them sting. I put on my one mitten and stomp down the front steps to the driveway, turn right on the sidewalk and head home.

It takes longer than I thought it would to get there, and I'm switching my mitten back and forth from one hand to the other every few minutes so my fingers won't get too cold, but it doesn't do a lot of good.

I mumble under my breath, catching the eye of a little old man dragging his garbage can to the curb. He probably thinks I'm crazy and homeless, roaming around talking to myself on a night like this, because he keeps his eye on me as he heads back up to his porch, making sure I keep on walking past his house.

What kind of friends do I have, anyway? It's not like I can pick and choose, of course. Most kids take one look at me and either laugh or turn the other way. But I've spent most of my life hanging out with Griffin and Katie, putting up with all their faults and foibles; isn't that what friends do? So what if I'm fixated on what happened to my dad? It's better than being fixated on food, like Katie, or designer clothes, like Griffin. Isn't it?

“You don't look like you got a ride home.”

“What?”

Simon's watching that
TV
show where a team of interior designers visits a family who has had some horrible crisis and builds them a new house. As if that's going to solve all their problems.

“I said you look like you just walked across half the city. You said you were getting a ride from Katie's mom.”

I shrug. My nose is starting to run, and I wipe it on my mitten. “Katie and I had a fight.”

“Well, you should have called me. I would have picked you up. That's why I pay for you to have a cell phone, dumbass.”

“Go to hell.” I drop my coat on the floor in the front hallway, too cold and lazy to hang it up.

“Pick up your jacket, you lazy slob. And then go have a bath. It'll warm you up.”

I shoot him a dirty look but head for the bathroom anyway. A long soak will do me good, I suppose. At least it'll give me a chance to think things through.