Wild Awake (22 page)

That night, Lukas finally texts back after I’ve already sent him a million texts asking when we’re going to practice now that I’ve fixed my synth. I go over there for dinner, and Petra’s made potato-and-cheese pierogi. She comments on my outfit, which is somewhat more daring than what I usually wear, and I tell her now that our band is famous, I need to look the part. Lukas still looks the same, but that’s because he’s the drummer and drummers are never fully in the spotlight, it’s kind of a rule of drumming. He doesn’t say much during dinner, just picks at his pierogi. Lukas’s parents and I do most of the talking.

“Where are your parents now?” says Petra.

“Paraguay,” I tell her, “taking care of sea tortoises.”

“I thought Paraguay was landlocked,” says Lukas.

I lean forward confidentially.

“Not anymore.”

We go downstairs to jam, and Lukas goes straight to his drum kit and sits. I look at him expectantly. “Don’t you want to smoke first?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Seems like you already did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why are you acting so weird?”

“I’m not.”

“You haven’t been the same ever since you found out about your sister.”

“I’m not the same. How could I be the same?”

He picks up his drumsticks and starts playing, and even though I try again and again to catch his eye, he won’t look up. Something about that scares me. I stand there with my fingers hovering over the keys of my synth.

“Lukas?” I say.

He stops drumming. “What?”

A dozen possible things-to-say swim nervously around the edges of my brain. A few weeks ago, Lukas knew everything about me, and now there are so many things he doesn’t know, and so many things I don’t know about him. It’s scary how a friendship can change like that, so fast, so completely. It’s like walking past your old elementary school the week after graduation: The swings and slides and buildings are the same, but suddenly, incomprehensibly, the place doesn’t belong to you anymore, and you don’t belong to it.

I want to tell him about Sukey’s rooftop, and the fact that I now have a boyfriend, and that I’ve found the perfect person for Goth Girl to date.

I want to tell Lukas all this, but the way he’s glaring at me over his drum kit—annoyed, impatient, sick of my bullshit—I feel small and queasy and not very illuminated at all.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and he gives me a quick, embarrassed shrug, and for the rest of the jam session we don’t make eye contact again.

The next day, Skunk and I are exchanging lustful embraces on the floor in the radio temple, and when I shimmy out of my jeans he notices the scabs on my knees. He springs up with a look of alarm and pulls my legs onto his lap to inspect them.

“What happened?”

I yawn and try to pull him back down to kiss me. “Oh, nothing.”

“No, seriously.”

He runs his fingers over the scabbed parts, touching the bits of gravel I never managed to pick out. Some people have such warm hands. Skunk’s feel like old pillowcases fresh out of the dryer. “I fell off my bike.”

“When?”

“Like a week ago.”

“What were you doing?”

I give him a mischievous grin. “Ridin’ dirty.”

Skunk traces his thumb over my kneecap. “What did you do, cut off a bus?”

“No-o-o. I got hit by a car.”

Skunk freezes. “You got hit by a car and you didn’t tell me.”

I swing my legs off his lap and sit up. “Whatever, homey. The Way is an invincible fortress.”

He looks at me all pop-eyed and distressed. “What color was the car?”

I reach out and smooth Skunk’s hair. He looks like he’s about to faint.

“I don’t know. It was just some car.”

“Are you sure you don’t remember what color it was?”

I lean forward and lick his ear. “Relax, Bicycle Boy. As you can see, I am alive and well.”

Skunk’s body has gone all tense, like he hears a strange noise: a mouse in the wall, or a burglar. “Was it following you?”

I sit there blinking at him. “No. Well, actually she did follow me for a while after it happened, but I think she just wanted to make sure I was okay.”

“Oh God,” says Skunk.

“What? What?”

But Skunk holds his head in his hands and won’t even start to relax until I get up, tiptoe across the room, and quietly turn on a radio.

Later that day, when Dr. Scaliteri calls me in for an extra lesson, I tell her all about my new practice regimen. I’ve been practicing constantly, I tell her. Now that I’ve realized I can do it in my head, I have basically been practicing piano twenty-four hours a day.

“How many hours does Nelson Chow practice per day? Probably just four or five, right? I can teach him my technique, if you want. It could really help him out when he’s at Juilliard. He’ll want to practice on the subway.”

I hear the front door open and Nelson Chow walk in for his lesson. I hear him stop in the hall to take off his shoes.

“Hey, Nelson,” I shout. “How many hours a day do you practice?”

No response. Nelson is the kind of person who always pretends he hasn’t heard you. “Hey, Nelson! I said how many hours?”

Dr. Scaliteri calls out to Nelson that he should wait in the hall. She leans forward so her speckled old cleavage is practically falling out of her silver blouse and hisses, “I will not have this behavior in my studio.”

“What behavior?” I say. “I’m trying to help him.”

“Kiri,” she says, “I have never before had this kind of behavior in my studio. You will go home now and practice.”

“I just told you, Dr. Scaliteri. I already
am
practicing. I’ve been practicing the whole time we’ve been talking.” I point at my temple. “In my
head
.”

On my way out of the room, I realize the stained-glass fruit bowl is glowing a little too hard, like someone installed neon tubes behind the glass.

Denny and I get sushi most nights because I threw out all the food. Denny always gets an avocado roll and a yam roll. I always get a yam roll and a California roll. I rip open the foil packet of soy sauce and pour it over my sushi like pancake syrup. Denny can hardly contain his disgust.

“That’s not how you’re supposed to do it,” he says, pouring soy sauce onto his tray and mixing in a dainty green dab of wasabi with the tip of his wooden chopstick. “You’re supposed to dip it in the soy sauce. Like this.”

I pay close attention, marveling at Denny’s mastery of the simple things in this world, thinking if I could only learn to mix my soy sauce correctly, maybe my life would make perfect sense.

I read the
Tao te Ching
over and over until I have it memorized.

I text Lukas over and over about band practice, and when he doesn’t text back I show up at his house with my synth and my own stash of weed. I’m pretty sure he’s dating Kelsey Bartlett; his phone beeps ten minutes after I show up, and he gets all awkward and says he has to go.

I bring my bike to Skunk’s house, and we snarfle in the shed with pear blossoms knocking on the door.

I sit in the hall after my lesson, listening to Nelson Chow’s lesson and taking notes.

I follow Nelson Chow to the bus stop when he comes out and read him my notes.

I sit next to Nelson Chow on the bus, questioning him about his practice habits until he pulls the yellow cord and gets off.

I text Lukas about buying a new amp, and when he doesn’t text back, I go on eBay and order one to be delivered to his house.

I smoke weed and practice piano until Denny says, “When did you turn into a fucking pothead? Don’t you sleep?” and then I practice inside my head, pacing and pacing around the living room very slowly like a Zen monk doing walking meditation in a garden of very tiny bonsai trees.

Skunk makes me promise to call him at once if I am hit by any more cars, or if I have even the slightest suspicion that I am being followed by secret agents. We fix my brakes and he sniffs my hair like a flower. We listen to radio mysteries and I climb onto him like a branch. We read the
Tao te Ching
out loud to one another and suck on guavas. We ride bikes to English Bay and build a nest in the sand. We make love ten thousand times and then make omelets. I call him Bicycle Boy. He calls me Crazy Girl.

Denny says, “Where are you always going on your bike?”

Since Lukas doesn’t seem to think
we need to practice anymore, I spend the last few days before Battle of the Bands finals keeping a close eye on Skunk. He doesn’t like to talk about his paranoia-thing, but ever since my bicycle crash I’ve been noticing the ways it slips out when he’s not paying attention, like a foreign accent or a stutter he’s worked hard to tame.

Sometimes when Skunk wakes up he’s really groggy and disoriented, and he squints at me suspiciously like I’m a Russian spy whose motives are not to be trusted.

Sometimes when I show up at his house without calling first, I catch him standing outside smoking with a pile of cigarette butts at his feet, his face blank like an open document with all the text deleted.

Sometimes when we snarfle he gets embarrassed, and when I ask him why he’s embarrassed, he gets apologetic and says he didn’t always used to be this fat.

I tell him he’s my love-bison and to stop apologizing.

I silently take note of all the things that trigger his paranoia and steer clear of them when we’re together. I do this so masterfully that Skunk thinks he’s the one looking out for
me
.

“You should really wear a helmet,” he says, and I pat his big warm hand. “Oh, Bicycle Boy,” I say. “Most things in life feel better when you don’t have a chunk of Styrofoam strapped to your head.”

We ride our bikes to the university and go to the Nitobe Memorial Garden and walk around looking at the little stone pagodas and drinking tea Skunk brought in a silver thermos. I make up stories about everything we see: This is the temple where the Frog King lost his teeth, this is the pond where the Riot Snake wrestled with a lightning bolt, causing daffodils to be invented.

“Oh, Crazy Girl,” says Skunk. “I love to listen to you talk.”

On the ride back to Skunk’s house I count all the billboards for new condo developments.

LUXURY LIVING IN THE HEART OF GRANVILLE ISLAND

LIVE. WORK. SHOP. PLAY

AN EXCLUSIVE WATERFRONT LIVING COMMUNITY

From the looks of the billboards, it appears that people who live in condos spend most of their time shopping, drinking cappuccinos, and doing yoga. As a matter of fact, the new condo developments are basically ashrams: billboard after billboard of slender white women in yoga pants doing the lotus position in front of windows showing blue-white views of the North Shore. Prices starting in the high four hundreds. Om Shanti Om.

Later, at home, I Google the Imperial Hotel, and just as I feared, the top hit is for a yoga condo that will soon be taking its place on Columbia Street. A month ago this wouldn’t have bothered me, because the Imperial is a horrible murder-hole unfit for human habitation, but now that I’ve met Doug and found Sukey’s rooftop it feels like a profound injustice, and I immediately fire off an email to the developers, informing them of my objections.

That night I sneak back to Skunk’s house very late, after Denny has gone to bed. I rap softly on Skunk’s sliding glass door, and he answers it a moment later.

“Oh, Crazy Girl,” he says, and lets me in.

We’re sitting in the radio temple, drinking pine-needle tea and taking turns reading the
Tao
out loud, when we hear footsteps creaking upstairs, and then Skunk’s aunt appears at the top of the stairs wearing those big-butt sweatpants I borrowed the first time I stayed over. I’ve never met Skunk’s aunt or uncle before, because so far we’ve managed to evade them. But here she is. She stops when she gets halfway down the stairs and stares at me like I’m an escaped baboon Skunk has been harboring in her basement.

I’m about to offer her some tea, since she seems to still be awake at four a.m. anyway. But then I realize maybe she’s awake at four a.m. because the sound of us reading woke her up. Skunk has been more worried than usual about thought control, and we have been reading the
Tao
to throw the agents off. I smile and say hi, assuming she will realize in one look that her nephew and I are hopelessly in love and give us one of those wistful glances like the old couple we walked past at the Zen garden.

She looks right past me to Skunk.

“What’s going on?”

Her voice is sharp. Maybe she wasn’t already awake. I don’t see how we could have woken her, though—we were being very quiet. I lean my face down to the teacup Skunk’s holding and lap it with my tongue like a cat.

“Kiri, this is my aunt Martine.”

I swallow my tea. “Hi.”

She frowns. She has a pale, puffy face that says I Have to Work in Three Hours. A face like a day-old hamburger bun. She looks at Skunk.

“What are you doing up this late?”

Skunk indicates the teacup.

Martine sighs and rubs her forehead like he’s giving her a headache. The way her glasses sit on her face looks unnatural, like she’s a person who normally wears contacts and on the rare occasion she actually wears her glasses people look confused and say,
Whoa, I didn’t know you wore glasses
. She takes off her I-didn’t-know-you-wore-glasses glasses and presses her thumb and forefinger into her eye sockets. Her hair is cut short in that I-don’t-have-time-for-hair style that my mean kindergarten teacher had. Her face is square and droopy. With her glasses off, she looks like a haggard dingo.

“It’s four in the morning. You should be asleep. Don’t you take your meds at eleven?”

Skunk stiffens. “Not always.”

“You’re supposed to take them at eleven.
Every
night at eleven.”

“Only if I need them.” Skunk’s voice is strangely petulant. I get the feeling they’ve had this exact same conversation before. Martine’s hand flies off her eyes.

“
Mon dieu
. Does this mean you haven’t been—”

“Can we talk about this later.” He doesn’t say it like a question. I glance back at him and see a coldness I haven’t seen before. His face has closed up like a cardboard box. He won’t meet my eyes. On the stairs, Skunk’s aunt is shaking her head and muttering swear words in French.