Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (17 page)

‘Is
Tato
being boring?’

Lana’s father cleared his throat again.

‘Svetka,’ he said. ‘Now, darling. I’m driving you to this thing, and I’m going to drive you back too. You call me and I’ll
get in the car and go. Even if it’s four in the morning. If you’re drunk, if you’re on drugs … whatever. I just want you safe.’
She’d ignored most of this. He went on. ‘I’ll be here all night waiting for your call. Okay, baby girl?’

‘Sure,
Tato
.’ Rolling her eyes. ‘God, he’s so irritating,’ she said, after her dad had left to move the car.

The boyfriend turned her around and wrapped her in his arms, his hands nearly cupping her substantial boobs. ‘Svetka darling,
call me,’ he said. Had Mr Kovalenko’s voice exactly. ‘My little baby girl! Even if you’re getting fucked by mutants and dwarves
…’ He leaned in and bit her neck. She threw her head back against him, laughing.

‘Yeah, what a tool,’ I growled, from a corner of the kitchen. ‘Caring about what happens to his daughter.’

This was going to be one fantastic night.

Tracey Hicks’ house was old, with newly renovated bits stuck to the sides here and there, like it was preying on younger houses
and eating them. There was a red barn, a lake glittering behind the house, pastures to either side. The sky still full of
June light.

Lana had wanted to make a grand entrance with a guy on each arm, but it turned out we’d mistimed the whole thing. Nobody was
around. It was too early. We couldn’t even find Tracey. A few nervous knots of
people were trying to figure out what to do with themselves, wandering around the back lawn or collecting in sad clumps outside
the barn. Down by the lake there was a loud group who’d been drinking since the afternoon, but they’d set up their own tribal
society by then and you couldn’t get near them.

We explored the house looking for Tracey and ended up in a dusty rec room in the basement that was set up like a bar – but
bone dry except for half a bottle of warm cream soda on a shelf. There was a bell hanging from the ceiling, some artefact
from a British pub. The boyfriend jumped onto the bar counter, shook the clapper and rang it.

‘You’re supposed to make an announcement.’ Lana gazed up at him raptly.

‘Not much to say, is there?’

‘Stephen! C’mere!’

I’d managed to get away from Lana and the boyfriend and had drifted upstairs, my backpack over my shoulder weighed down with
its full quart of vodka. The rooms were empty, the windows were open and you could just make out thin echoes of music, heavy
metal from a boom box down by the lake. And I kept hearing my name – somebody calling me in a strange, hissing whisper.

‘C’mere! Stephen! Over here!’

It was Mark, outside a door near the top of a set of stairs leading to the bedrooms. Jesus, he was so glad to see me. As if
all the awkwardness over the past while had never happened. I had to glance away for a second.

Then I got closer. Oh. He was drunk. Really drunk. Must have been
with the crowd near the lake. Mark was grinning kind of lopsided, face red, hair sticking up, shirt buttoned all bizarre.
‘Stephen, man, I totally need a chair.’

I felt like I was dreaming, pictured myself carrying a La-Z-Boy recliner up the staircase on my back. I asked him what the
hell he wanted a chair for.

‘Under the doorknob. These doors, they got no locks …’

A girl laughed from a room behind him. It didn’t sound like Stacey. She called his name, stretching the syllable in a long
whiny drawl, asked him why he didn’t just get me to stand guard or something.

‘I think,’ Mark said, looking a bit shamefaced, ‘she wants you to keep people out of here. While we—’ He broke off, grinning.

The girl called him again and that seemed to make up his mind. ‘Okay. I’m real sorry to ask you to do this, man, but … could
you? Just, like, hang around? Not right outside the door, but you know …’

I felt myself sinking, wondered which one of them had undone those shirt buttons.

‘And if you see Stacey …’

The girl yelled out, ‘And Ricky!’

‘Right,’ said Mark. ‘He’s Pam’s—’

‘My fiancé.’

I noticed with reflexive snottiness that she pronounced it as ‘feeyoncy’. I knew this girl now. Pam from Arnottville. Stiff
hair. Big boobs. Usually only laughed when other people got hurt.

‘Mark, you can’t just—’

‘Thanks, man!’ He turned and disappeared into the room, slammed the door. I thought I heard Pam laugh again.

Fuck. They’d both barely remember this after they were done with each other. I was the only one who’d still be thinking about
it.

I got halfway down the stairs, smooth shiny blond wood. Then I stopped, lowered myself to the steps and sat blinking into
the empty living room. Trying to stop this porn show of despair from haunting me, starring Mark McAllister and Big Boobs Pam
from Arnottville. Downstairs there were puffy brown couches with nobody on them, and a huge blank-eyed TV set staring sombrely
back at me. I turned my face to the wall. It was a nice pale green.

‘Hey, you look sad. Want a Tic-Tac?’

Something bounced off my head. Lana’s awful boyfriend was peering up from the foot of the stairs. He had a long glass of something
red in one hand, a little plastic box in the other.

‘Now, if you’d opened your mouth,’ he said, ‘that would’ve actually worked. Wanna try again?’ I flinched as another one came
at me and felt it land in my hair.

I turned back to the wall.

He emptied the plastic box of white pellets into his mouth and crunched them all up at once. I listened to the sound of candy
cracking and grinding into gravel against molars, waited for him to get bored and leave.

‘Lana’s looking for you,’ he said, when he could talk again. ‘Thinks you’re mad at her, running off like that.’

‘Just wanted to give you love birds some space.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’ He swirled his drink and inhaled most of it in one long gulp. Then the boyfriend took a seat on
the stairs, two steps under me. He stretched his legs against the wall and blocked my way out.

‘So, Lana brings me on a tour of this town, right? And it’s like, two streets! I mean, sure there’s roads with houses and
stuff, but the whole place is maybe one gas station and a bank and a grocery store. That’s it.’

Not true. He’d left out the lawyer’s office, the bakery, the park and a
whole bunch of other stuff. I told him so. He didn’t seem to be listening, finished his drink and started chewing on the ice
cubes. More liquid crunching and smacking noises.

‘Guess you’re right. Halifax isn’t that great either.’ I hadn’t said anything like this, but I let it go. He’d pushed himself
up two steps and was sitting beside me.

‘I mean, you should’ve seen it. First time I went to school like this’ – he gestured at his face, his hair – ‘all day it was
like, “Hey faggot, where’s the clown show?”’ He shot me a quick sidelong glance. ‘Whole school wanted to beat me up, basically.
I looked a hundred times worse than now, though. Black lipstick! Black eye shadow too. And a dog collar – a real one. Used,
of course.’ He was laughing. ‘I went around all day smelling like my fucking dog.’

I wanted to smile but forced myself not to. Couldn’t figure this guy out, spilling his guts as if he’d known me forever. Was
this what Lana liked about him?

‘What’d you do?’

He leaned back, gazed into the ceiling. His arm was stretched over the step just above my shoulders.

‘Oh, jeez. I just about cried, man. Went to the bathroom and I was about to wash it all off. Go back to looking like nobody.
When I just said, “Fuck it. Fuck these people.”’ His expression shifted into a cold, superior sneer. Exactly how he’d looked
at poor Mr Kovalenko when he’d told him not to smoke in the house.

‘So that’s my super-villain origin story.’ The sneer was gone. He turned and grinned at me. As if he was concentrating the
full force of his attention my way, like sunshine.

My head ducked. I could feel my cheeks getting hot. I had no idea what my face was doing.

‘Oh, look at that,’ he said softly. ‘You can smile. I wondered.’

I slid away from him, towards the green wall. ‘You … you were really rude. To Mr Kovalenko back there. He’s a nice guy, you
know. Wants people to like him.’

The boyfriend nudged himself closer to me without seeming to move at all. ‘Oh, that. You want the truth?’ Our knees were touching.
I couldn’t move any farther away.

‘The truth? Sure.’ Barely got the words out.

His head inclined towards me at a lazy angle. ‘I was just trying to impress somebody.’ He whispered it. He brought his mouth
right up to my ear. His breath was on my neck. I closed my eyes. Couldn’t keep my legs still all of a sudden.

‘Lana.’ I felt for my backpack with the quart of vodka, eased it onto my lap. ‘You were trying to impress Lana. Right?’

He didn’t get to answer because that’s when the drunk girl showed up.

The boyfriend jumped out of her way as she came barrelling up the stairs out of nowhere. Rachel Clements, shyest girl in the
whole school. Very drunk, pulpy-faced and sobbing. She opened a door at the top of the stairs. Gave a little scream. And Pam
gave a little scream. And Mark cursed. Rachel slammed the door, turned around and ploughed through another one. After a few
seconds, all you could hear was the sound of this poor girl being noisily sick into the toilet.

Lana’s guy was looking up the stairs after Rachel. ‘Is she okay? Do you know her?’

I told him she just seemed drunk to me. Business as usual for a Riverside party.

‘It’s too early to be that drunk. And she was crying.’ He went after her. Rachel had locked the bathroom door and the boyfriend
tapped
on it with one crooked finger. ‘Um, Miss?’ He seemed overwhelmed. ‘Stephen, what’s her name?’

I told him, from my post halfway down the stairs. He was making me ashamed. I’d grown up with this person and still only looked
at her and registered ‘crying drunk girl’. It never hit me that she might need my help or have a good reason to be crying.

The boyfriend knocked again and asked Rachel if she was okay. She should at least unlock the door, he said. Nobody was going
to bother her, we just wanted to know that she was safe. I got up and joined him, shaky on my feet. We were right across the
hall from Mark and Pam and whatever they were doing to each other.

Then I heard footsteps taking the stairs two and three at a time, and Emily MacBride was pushing the boyfriend aside.

‘Not how you do it.’ She twisted and shook the round handle expertly. Emily was the younger MacBride girl. Long dark hair
and intense eyes. (The one in my class was blonde. It was how you told them apart.)

‘Poor Rachel,’ Emily said. ‘Down by the lake all afternoon with those guys. I think something happened to her, I don’t know—’

There was a popping click and the bathroom door swung open. Rachel was sobbing and crouching by the toilet seat. But she seemed
okay, at least she hadn’t hurt herself or anything. Emily dropped to her knees beside her.

‘Guys, you’re nice, but we can do without the staring.’ She pushed the door shut.

The boyfriend stood rubbing his forehead, his back to the bathroom door. ‘Good God. So this is what you country kids do for
fun.’

‘Well, what do you do in the city that’s so great?’

He didn’t answer. Instead Lana’s guy smiled at me again, slowly, as
if he were inviting me to share in some secret joke. My defensive pose melted away and I started to smile back. I couldn’t
seem to help it, felt suddenly and completely self-conscious, staring into the wood grain of the bathroom door with my face
heating up. Rachel was still crying in the bathroom and Emily was cooing reassurances at her. Across the hall Pam gave a little
moan. I tried not to connect it with an action.

‘Jeez, what is in there?’ The boyfriend took a step towards the closed door with Mark and Pam behind it and I moved to block
him.

‘Nothing. Nobody. Mark. My … my friend. He’s with a girl.’

‘Your
friend
.’

The scrutiny of that look. I tried to replay what I’d just said, my tone, how much I’d given away.