Flannery (9 page)

11

I was almost nine and Tyrone had just turned ten. Almost seven years ago. Before Felix was born. Before everything. Or almost everything.

Tyrone was a scrawny, already too-tall kid with big eyes and dark lashes and black curly hair, waterskiing for the first time.

He was way out on the glassy lake. The boat was rocking gently in a blast of white sparkles. Tyrone's stepdad, Marty, was in silhouette because the sun was a big maraschino cherry behind him, sinking fast.

I could see Tyrone's head floating above the water and the tips of the white skis and the line the rope made floating on the surface. The day was almost over and soon the wedding guests were going to help gather up the chairs from the lawn and the dancing would begin.

A carpet of white sparkles had unfurled on the water from the speedboat to me. I was sitting on the dock kicking my feet through the shimmer, and it looked like I could have stood up and walked out on it, all the way to the boat and Tyrone.

We'd been told weeks in advance that there would be waterskiing for the kids at the wedding. The invitation had demanded, in curly gold script:
Kids
,
bring your swimsuits!!!
Miranda said they'd gone a bit overboard with the exclamation marks, but other than that she didn't say anything about the invitation.

If she was upset that Hank was getting married so soon after they'd broken up, she wasn't going to let it show. I think she decided to go to the wedding to prove she was okay with being jilted — which she definitely wasn't. Or maybe she needed to be there to prove to herself he was really gone.

Tyrone's stepdad was a groomsman. He had promised Hank he'd be in charge of the waterskiing. There was Marty, one hand on the wheel, beer bottle in the other hand, still wearing his tuxedo with a pink carnation on the lapel.

Tyrone had been obsessed with the waterskiing from the day he got wind of it. He had never waterskied before. But he and I watched YouTube videos and read tips and talked about what it must feel like to fly across the surface of the water.

By the day of the wedding, Tyrone's excitement had a voltage of about a gazillion megawatts.

Don't get all worked up about reducing your ski angle, Tyrone was telling anybody who'd listen (even the adults, who had no intention of ditching the open bar for the lake).

Square your shoulders over your knees, he was saying. That's a big part of staying up.

As soon as Marty got the speedboat out of the boathouse, a lineup formed of all the kids at the wedding old enough to waterski. Tyrone was the first in line, but Marty kept ignoring him, taking the kid behind him, and then the kid behind that kid.

Okay, who's next? Marty kept saying. Everybody's hand shot up and they were hopping up and down, jutting their hands into the sky and screaming, Me! Me!

Tyrone had been swimming and I could see beads of water on his bare shoulder, burning with sunlight. He was shivering. But there was a steady current of anticipation flowing out of his brown eyes. He kept his eyes on the boat and he didn't jump up and down like everybody else. He raised his hand and held it straight while Marty's eyes slid right over him.

Parents kept wandering down to the shore to thank Marty, standing at the edge of the wharf and cheering when it was their kid's turn. Marty was every kid's best friend: “Let Uncle Marty help you with that life jacket!”

But Marty made Tyrone wait until the very last. Tyrone had wanted to impress everybody, but the other kids, blue-lipped and shivering in their damp towels, had all wandered back up to the house to change. Tyrone would have an audience of one. Me.

The dancing was going to start soon. Marty looked at his watch. There was a four-piece band on the lawn and they were warming up. The sax sounded like a bawling moose. Marty was drunk, which meant he had to stare at his watch a long time before he could compute the hour. He finally said he didn't know if there was time for Tyrone.

I've been at this all afternoon, Marty said. It's time for me to get myself a real drink.

Tyrone didn't answer. They were just looking at each other. Tyrone on the dock, Marty on the seat of the boat, looking up. Marty had been Tyrone's stepfather for five years, but maybe this was the first time they were recognizing the hopelessness of the situation. Marty drained his beer, tossing the bottle into the bushes.

A short one, he said. You'll have to get it on the first try. I've had enough of this.

And finally, they were out there.

Marty let the engine idle as Tyrone got his skis into position. A cloud of blue smoke hung in the air.

Every move Marty made was deliberate and slow. He'd finished off a half-dozen in the boat.

The bottom edge of the sun was very close to the rim of the lake. The sky was flamingo-feathered. Tyrone was floating behind the boat, not saying anything at all.

Marty revved the engine and the boat flew. The rope pinged out of the water in a straight line and water drops flew out in a misty spray.

I watched Tyrone rise out of the white wake. The nose of the boat spanked down hard.

Marty increased the speed. He seemed to be going too fast on purpose.

But Tyrone was up. He was bent forward with his bum sticking out and then he was leaning way back, like he was trying with all his might to stop the runaway boat in its tracks. Then he nearly fell face first, his knees in big shackles of foam, and then he was straight up again.

They roared around the other side of the lake. They flew past the wharf where I was jumping and clapping and when Tyrone was passing me, he lifted one hand off the wooden bar and waved at me.

I could see the thrill of it and how audacious to let go with one hand, the fastest wave you ever saw, and he slammed his hand back down on the bar and his whole body crumpled, one ski lifting off the water, wonky and boneless, bent and tipping, left, right, and then he was up straight again.

He righted himself. He was still up.

Marty had seen Tyrone's little wave to me. He did a double take. That wave must have enraged him.

Marty cut the speed, letting the boat slow down so the rope went slack, and Tyrone was sinking down to his knees, almost down to his waist, and once he was good and low in the water, Marty thrust the boat into full speed again, and it jerked Tyrone so hard his body flicked like a whip and his skis smacked down on the hard surface and bounced up over and over.

The sun was so low that its reflection was a perfect bright red circle on the water's surface and as the boat swung around, the circle was smashed into a thousand pieces that skittered away from each other and then floated back together, making the perfect circle again.

Tyrone was still up. It was as though his hands were welded to the wooden bar.

It seemed there was nothing Marty could do to ditch this ten-year-old kid.

Was this when I fell in love? Was it that little wave?

He was a head taller than everybody else in our class, just a couple of months older than some of us, and the loneliest person I had ever met. A prankster, begging for attention. His freckles. His curls. The space between his front teeth. He just believed if he worked hard enough at it, people would see what a great kid he was. He needed them to see it.

I think I was his only friend.

Marty and Tyrone had hated each other pretty much from the beginning.

I'm still trying to figure out the reason Marty hated Tyrone.

Why Tyrone hated Marty was easy. Tyrone hated Marty because Marty had told Tyrone to chew with his mouth closed.

I don't want to see what you're chewing, what are you, a little pig? That's what Marty said. He said it front of me and he said it in front of Jordan who was over for lunch too and Chad Yates-O'Neill. And Marty mimicked Tyrone, and we all giggled, because somehow Marty had managed to look just like Tyrone.

The man's face had turned into a boy's, and it was a magic trick and there were gobs of peanut butter and bread tumbling around in Marty's mouth like clothes in a dryer, and some fell out on his plate.

We giggled. But I regretted that giggle pretty fast because Tyrone had clapped his hand over his own mouth and he was blushing.

After that Tyrone kept his lips pressed together in a funny way whenever he chewed. Almost like he was trying to watch his own lips. Lips that were pressed very tight together in a small hard line.

And Tyrone's mom had just sat there not saying anything.

It had been a moment when she might have taken her son's side against a stranger who stank up their house with a cologne so strong it made everybody's eyes water, and who insisted on being served first at the supper table, and who took over Tyrone's video games, saying, Hand over that controller, and whose silence, when the garbage wasn't put out on time, felt like a weather system.

And meanwhile, in school, none of the boys would sit with Tyrone in the lunchroom because they said it was gross how his food showed when he was chewing, even though he now chewed with his lips pressed tight and very slowly, and only a single bite before he threw his sandwich out. Or he just unwrapped the Saran off his sandwich and didn't touch it at all.

But the boys made fun of him anyway and he had to go sit with the girls. They just barely put up with him.

He'd do annoying things. He tipped Tamara Gordon's pudding cup over her head and he had to go to the principal for that. The office called his home for an emergency meeting.

I was called to the office as a witness because I'd been at the table. Tamara was already there. She had washed her hair in the nurse's room but it was still wet. So were Tyrone and the vice principal, Ms. Kearsey, and one of the women who served in the cafeteria, still in her hairnet and white plastic apron.

And Marty was there doing all the talking. He informed us that Tyrone was exactly the same way at home, that he, Marty, and Tyrone's mother didn't know what to do with him, but he, Marty, would make a promise to Tamara and to everyone else present that there would be no Xbox for Tyrone for the rest of the year.

In fact, he was going to be throwing the Xbox out the second-story window as soon as they got home. He wanted very much to see how Tyrone would like that.

There'd be no nothing, according to Marty. For the rest of the year. No allowance and no soccer and no art lessons. No nothing.

Marty said that Tyrone's mother was too soft. That was the problem. Tyrone got away with murder because of his mother. What he needed was a good smack.

But you can't do that anymore, Marty said. That makes too much sense.

Tamara said, I'm not even sure it was Tyrone.

But you said just a moment ago that Tyrone emptied your chocolate pudding over your head, said Ms. Kearsey.

It wasn't even him, Tamara said. Of course she knew it was. But Marty had frightened us all.

Who was it, then? the vice principal asked.

I didn't see, she said.

Somebody saw, Marty said. Somebody bloody well saw.

The cafeteria woman said she was just a volunteer.

The vice principal asked Tyrone and me to leave the office.

I'll have a word with Tyrone's father alone, she said.

Step
-father, Tyrone and Marty corrected her, in unison.

But for some reason Tyrone was immune to Marty's hatred that day out on the waterskis.

His body was like a lightning bolt of joy. He couldn't believe how good he was at keeping his balance.

Neither could Marty.

Miranda has her faults. She gives me peanuts and kiwis for lunch even though you're not allowed to bring them into school because some people have allergies and will blow up like balloons and clutch at their throats with both hands and writhe on the floor until their heads explode and they die, if they get even a faint whiff of a peanut or kiwi. When I explained this to Miranda she said, Oh, for God's sake, it's just a little kiwi, take it.

She didn't give me piano lessons even though Felix gets karate lessons, and she can't buy the grade-twelve biology textbook that is, as I may have mentioned, required.

But I had been shielded from a particular truth that was coming over me there on the grassy bank of the lake, watching Tyrone waterski when I was nine years old.

Adults could be evil.

Evil was something Miranda had made sure, up until then, I knew nothing about.

It was a lie by omission.

Miranda had a lot of boyfriends, but every one of them was kind to me. Every one of them offered to cut my steak, or they carried me on their shoulders. Every one of them was the kind of guy that daubed blue icing on the end of my nose if we had a birthday cake from Sobeys, which you could get cheap if it had somebody else's name on it written in icing and it hadn't been picked up or if it was three days old. We've had cakes that said Happy Birthday Declan or Raoul or Jasprit, or Keira or Fiona or Sally or Molly.

Every one of the boyfriends showed up with Miranda on Sports Day, sitting with her on the patchwork quilt with the picnic basket. They all did the egg-on-the-spoon race, on my team, and tied one leg to mine for the three-legged race and ended up on the parents' side of tug of war when it was the parents against the teachers.

Every one of them made me a part of the conversation. They asked me what I thought. They used big words, and they explained the big words. They told me about politics and explained what elections were, even though I yawned the whole way through the explanations, and sometimes actually and truly fell asleep.

Here's the word that explains my relationship with every one of Miranda's many boyfriends: cahoots.

I was in cahoots with them.

Never in cahoots against Miranda, not really. But we pretended. Yes, I'll read you another chapter, but don't tell Miranda. Yes, you can put that broccoli in the garbage, but wait until your mother turns her back. Stage whispers, with Miranda right there in the room pretending not to hear. Or if they were babysitting me: Quick, before your mother gets home, let's get these dishes cleaned up, it'll be a surprise.