Every Happy Family (8 page)

Nine Months Later

BEAU

“Think of each boney angle, each indentation, as being shaped by personality,” Ms. Jameson says into the quiet. “Trust the pictures that come to mind. Remember them.”

Beau wishes the art teacher would shut up already. The girl's hands, soft as if covered in flour, are tracing the spiral cartilage of his ears. Here in grade eleven art, they have started portraiture and today are “going in blind.” He could hardly believe it when he was paired with an Asian girl. No, focus on this girl's hands, here, right now probing the weird dips and bumps of his skull. It's like getting shampooed in slow mo and his eyes drift closed. Being touched is heaven.

Each of her fingers deserves a first and last name, he thinks, as five of them convene behind an ear to examine a trough of scar. His diving score too close to someone's cleat comes back to him in high def. Some scars are totally worth it, he wants to tell her and steals a look.

Her short, chubby lips are parted, as if in awe, and the black blindfold swallows her bean of a nose. She's kind of boxy, flat-chested, has a boyish haircut. He's been at St. Paul's two agonizing months now, in this girl's same art class, yet swears he's never seen her before. Asians, both here and at his public high school – which he misses so much he could puke – tend to hang together, speak their unintelligible codes outside of class, and Beau can never tell which side, exactly, is doing the ostracizing.

As her hands linger over his ears, she makes small snufflings through her nose and he remembers how his right ear sits higher than his left. She skims her fingertips from his hairline down to his eyebrows and back up again. Down and up, again, again, so ticklish he bites down and wills her to dig in her nails.

“Don't move,” she whispers, more to herself.

“No problem,” he whispers back, to no reaction.

He hopes he doesn't smell. Having failed room check this morning after putting his washed-out chip bag in the wrong recycling bin, he'd had to run three kilometres. His roommate, Alexei, had to run too because, according to the school's motto – One for All and All for One – no one ever acted alone. Alexei is a musician, spends most of his time sedentary and couldn't begin to run that far, so Beau, feeling guilty, piggybacked him whenever they were out of sight of the monitor.

The way her fingers poke and stab around his eyes, she's disturbed by his eye sockets. She smoothes his eyebrows, roughs them up then smoothes them again. She runs a fingertip along his lashes, the sensation like the butterfly kisses Pema once pestered him with.

Judging by the time she spends on his cheekbones she visualized them instantly, but then she fondles his nose as if it's some archaeological curio. As her thumb and forefinger measure the bridge of his nose, it dawns on him that smelling is a nose's secondary job. First it leads the way into battle, offers itself up to protect the more vulnerable eyes and brain. A nose is dispensable. The rugby coach, Mr. Dugan, broke his three times. When Beau saw the picture, which hangs in the hall down to the gym, of a young Dugan when he played for the national team, he barely recognized him. She pinches Beau's nostrils closed, forcing him to exhale out his mouth with a huff.

Her hands remain cupping his jaw for a weirdly long time until it feels like he's grown a meaty beard. He has a sudden image of her chubby lips kissing him and opens his eyes just as she moves on to his chin. Something about his chin dimple makes her laugh. Hey, what? he wants to say but doesn't. Pema calls it a butt chin. Is that what she's thinking? She mashes the skin around his mouth as if to assess the size and spacing of his teeth. This
doesn't
feel good but he lets her do it. Her fingers make him aware how the long roots of his teeth are embedded in his jawbone. And that teeth can probably only get knocked out from the root end. He wonders what the difference is, if any, between teeth and ivory.

As if she totally owns him, the girl pushes a confident finger between his lips to ease his mouth open and something in him lets go. Relaxing to a degree he didn't think possible in this place, he's hit by a new wave of homesickness because only Pema has ever touched him as freely.

Her finger slides along his lips and he involuntarily shudders. She lifts it away.

“Sorry,” he breathes and she puts it back.

Now she toys with the dip beneath his nose and he knows she knows that he couldn't grow a moustache if he tried. Last year, after Quinn starting growing a moustache, Beau shaved his face with Dad's electric because Pema insisted that shaving makes hair grow in faster and darker because that's what happened when she first shaved her legs.

“Finish up now,” warns the teacher and Beau's anger flares. “And no matter how strong the urge, when you remove your blindfold, no looking at your subject. Just turn directly to your easel.”

He reluctantly opens his eyes to see the girl wheel back to her easel and her hands become her own again as they remove her blindfold, take up her stick of charcoal and attack the paper with alarming confidence. Makes him think of Dad and the way he chooses a certain knife for the job, then chops with speed and abandon. God he misses his dad's cooking.

He turns to face the blank paper taped to his easel. He's supposed to transfer the image in the mirror clipped onto the side of his easel – a self-portrait – onto the paper. He does some careful measurements so that, at the very least, he'll get his features in the right places. He looks at the Asian girl's drawing. The hair she's drawing actually looks like hair, and he tries to mimic the abrupt, wispy motions of her hand.

“It's all in the shading,” chimes the teacher as she passes behind him. “If you forget the rules for shading, look in your book.” Beau opens his book.

He's trying to get his lips to look less wormlike when the girl appears beside him. She's only a foot taller than him seated.

“Turn to me, please.” She doesn't know his name either.

He turns and she takes his chin in hand to study his eyes. Her irises are so dark they bleed into her pupils. Seal eyes, he thinks, and pictures Pema's, which are a more velvety brown.

“Smile,” she whispers and smiles herself as if to show him how. She has a sly but sweet smile, dimples. When he mugs a grin, she tickles his ribs, hard, and he laughs – more because it hurt – smiling for real as she objectively studies his face.

“I'm a lot bigger than you,” he threatens.

“No looking at your subject,” calls the teacher.

Poker-faced, the girl returns to her portrait of him, which he sees is finished except for the empty eye sockets. She's caught the greasy shine to his nose which he hates, and she exaggerated, he's sure, the cleft in his chin, but still it looks like him, which is more than he can say for the monkey face on his easel.

After the bell rings and he's gone through the receiving line to thank the teacher formally for the class – a ritual inconceivable at his public school – he goes over to where the girl's packing up her things. “I'm Beau,” he says and holds out his hand.

She looks at his hand then at him. “Tu es beautiful?”

“Yeah,” he snickers. “I, I didn't name myself.”

“You've got classic good looks,” she says, glancing at her portrait of him. “It fits.”

“You made me look good.” He's blushing now.

“I was going for realism.”

“Well, yeah, it's good. I, I, I won't come anywhere near capturing your face.” He apologizes ahead of time because next class they're switching roles. “And your name is?”

“Satomi. Means fat fish in Japanese.”

He smiles, unsure if she's joking or not. “Well, that doesn't fit.”

She puts on her backpack. “I'd like to draw your hands.”

He looks down at his hands. “Sure.”

“Bye Beautiful.”

“Bye Fat Fish.”

She smirks. “Satomi, Beautiful.”

He watches her leave, her pleated skirt swinging over strong shapely legs, and tries to recall what he knows about Japan: samurais, sumo wrestlers, kamikaze, sushi, atom bombs.
Mulan
had been Pema's favourite movie when they were little, and she'd make him watch it with her then proceed to block the TV screen as she performed each of the songs. He never did see the whole movie. She can't sing worth shit, he thinks smiling. Or was Mulan Chinese?

Beau thought he might have the dorm room to himself for a few minutes, but Alexei is there, leering into his computer. The constant companionship of boarding school is overwhelming and he doesn't know how kids stand it. It's Pema times ten, times seven hundred. Morning chapel, meals in the dining hall, classes, afternoon practices, mandatory group study in the evening, house meetings. At night, the shared bunk makes him aware of Alexei's every move, and self-conscious of his own. The bathroom's the only place he has any privacy. Pema made him promise to Skype her every night at bedtime, and he kept his promise for the first couple weeks before managing to get it down to Saturdays. School rules, he lied. Last Saturday he kept the video off so he couldn't see her. That made it easier.

He sometimes wonders why he misses his mom but not his dad and why he feels that missing in his throat when they talk on the phone. Realizes how Pema's famously purple bedroom, which is so chock full of photos, stuffies and souvenirs from every day of her life that you can't see the colour of any wall or surface, is the place he feels the safest. He was desperate to come home for Thanksgiving but there was a rugby clinic that weekend, a renowned coach in town from Argentina. The cafeteria made a traditional turkey dinner and he was tempted to get his dad to call the cafeteria and tell the cook to put curry and a single whole clove in the gravy.

“Hey, Alexei.”

“What's up Bobo?”

He hates being called Bobo. “Game day.”

“Oh, yeah. Rah, rah for the good guys.”

“You know a girl named S...S...Satomi?” Beau can't believe he's starting to stutter again.

“Artist?”

“Yeah.”

“Came the year before my incarceration. Tragic background if I remember.” He spins in his chair to face him. Alexei's lip hitches up on one side making him look like a Russian gangster. “Why, you want to toss her the dog water?”

The expression makes Beau both feel guilty and want to shower.

It's hard to believe he and Alexei grew up in the same country, much less the same province. Alexei plays piano, is into music composition, a hybrid of baroque and folk rock. Beau had to look up the word baroque. Alexei's father is rich, his mother Persian, and the guy speaks five languages. While Beau spent his summer working at a pizza joint and racking up kills on
Call of Duty 4
, Alexei was dancing in taboo nightclubs in Tehran and having his V-card punched in Paris. And, despite his sophistication, or maybe because of it – Beau has no idea – Alexei is crude around the subject of girls.

“Just think she's funny,” says Beau and grabs his pumice stone.

“Good. Gay as a parasol is my guess. But the Japanese, hey, they'll let anybody on their swing. Satomi reminds me of Hello Kitty, if Hello Kitty wasn't a kitty, or a doll.”

Beau drops the subject, sits and pulls off his socks.

“Checked out Jenna?” Jenna was one of the girls on Alexei's list of hot girls.

“She's all right.” He files the ridge of callous that's forming on his left heel.

“I hear she's drooling to get her hands on you, Bobo. And Melissa too. You know her. She's the blazing redhead in your English class.”

Beau, perversely, is never attracted to girls attracted to him.

“Talks too much,” says Beau, blowing away the dead skin.

“Tell them that whoever gives the best blow job can go out with you. Have a blow-off.” He laughs, a tight high trilling. “Best of three,” he adds laughing harder, the sound like his head's coming unscrewed.

Beau forces a snicker, keeps pumicing.

“Speaking of gay.” Alexei scoffs at Beau's foot then spins back to his computer.

“Keeps the blisters away,” he says checking his other foot. Alexei wouldn't understand the truth. That soft-skinned feet means he can feel the ground, meld with it, like an exchange of fluids. And though he thinks this contact makes him infinitesimally slower, it also makes him infinitesimally harder to knock over.

He opens his side of the closet and takes out the brand new uniform. He likes “suiting up” as he thinks of it. Likes the way his black underarmour hugs his thighs and butt, defines the muscles of his chest and arms. Loves this black and gold jersey with his number, 18, and the warm-up jacket with his name sewn in perfect cursive on the sleeve. Beau Wright. Great rugby name, people always say. He pulls on the used shorts he bought from a guy in the house who claimed they were worn by Stephen Jones, captain of Wales and a friend of a cousin back in Ireland. Alexei said Beau'd been had, but whatever, they were top quality, only a small tear that he easily stitched.

Dressed, he admires his body in the closet door mirror, flexes his neck and practices his “cannibal” look. “The other guy should be convinced you're about to take a bite out of his face,” coach Dugan said at last week's practice.

He fusses his hair into place then shuts the door, grabs two protein bars. He'll eat one at halftime, one directly postgame.

Alexei swings around in his chair. “You could strangle someone with those thighs, you know.”

Beau snorts to hide a smile and grabs his bag. “Have a good jam,” he says. Alexei's afternoons are spent with a quartet of student musicians.

“Make someone ugly, Bobo.”

•••

“Beau-man!”

“Killer.” Beau stops to let his teammate catch up and is glad to see Killer's black eye has healed so fast and so well. Dropped a dumbbell on it was his story.

“How's it going?” Killer is beaming. “Game day!” He's always happy as far as Beau can tell. The kind of happy, though, that looks like a decision, and effort.