Fruit (18 page)

I didn’t like the Virgin staring at me anymore.

BEDTIME MOVIE #4

I’m the most famous singer in the whole world.

“You’re the brightest star in the biz, kid,” my manager tells me. He looks like Jameson Parker, the blond brother
from the
TV
show
Simon and Simon
.

“I’m still the same person I always was,” I tell him. I’m signing black and white pictures of myself. “Fame hasn’t changed me.”

One day, while I’m in the studio recording another best-selling album, Jameson comes in and hands me a letter.

“I think you should read this,” he says.

“Can’t it wait?” I ask.

“This one is different,” Jameson says. He sounds concerned, so I take the letter from him.

It’s from Mrs. Archer. She tells me that Billy is very sick and won’t take his medication. She says he’s my biggest fan and that if I could come visit Billy, he might listen to me and take his pills.

“You’re our only hope,” she writes. “Billy is depending on you. We all are.”

I sigh and run my hands through my long, thick hair.

“Book me on the next flight to Sarnia,” I tell Jameson.

When I arrive at the airport, there’s a huge crowd of fans waiting for me. As I step off the plane, they start screaming my name. I’m wearing a pair of black sunglasses and a long brown coat. I wave to my fans and stop to pose for a couple of pictures for the Sarnia
Observer
photographer. Then a limo picks me up and takes me to the Archers’ house.

Mrs. Archer is standing in the doorway when the limo pulls up. She’s wearing a red muumuu and looks very worried.

“Thank God you’re here,” she says to me. “Billy’s
downstairs. Would you like a Nanaimo bar before you go down? I know they’re your favourite.”

I smile in a tired way and tell Mrs. Archer thanks, but no thanks.

“Nadia, you don’t get to be as good looking as me by eating Nanaimo bars all day long.”

Billy is sleeping on the couch. He’s wearing his red parachute pants and looks very weak.

“Billy,” I whisper, “it’s me. I’m here.”

Billy’s eyes open and I can tell how surprised he is to see me. He thinks he’s dreaming.

“Is it really you?” he asks me.

“Yes, it’s really me, Billy,” I say. “Your mom is very concerned about you. She said you won’t take your medication and that you’re dying.”

“I have all your albums,” Billy says.

I laugh softly and say thank you. Billy asks me if I’ll sit down next to him, so I do. He asks me when my new record will be in stores and do I notice a difference between my Canadian fans and my American ones?

“I’m so glad you came,” Billy says. “I feel better already.”

Then he takes my hand and squeezes it. It’s a bold move on his part. I’m not really sure how to react.

“You mean so much to me,” Billy says. He closes his eyes. “Remember that time you were here on New Year’s Eve?”

I say, “I’m not sure.”

“Yes, you do. That was the best New Year’s Eve ever. Remember how we listened to Def Leppard and rocked it?”

“I guess so,” I say. I’m starting to get a bit nervous. I have a plane to catch in five minutes. I don’t have time to listen to Billy’s stupid stories.

“Remember how I made those Jungle Juices?”

I pull my hand away from his and check my watch. Outside, the limo driver honks. He’s getting impatient.

“Remember how after we drank them, you put your hand on me?” Billy asks. “Over my dink? You thought I didn’t know, but I did. I wasn’t sleeping.”

I stand up. “Billy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re hallucinating.”

“No, I’m not,” Billy says. His eyes are still closed, but somehow, he finds my hand and grabs it again. “Please sit down. I haven’t got much time left.”

“That makes two of us,” I sigh, but I sit down next to him. He
is
dying, after all.

“I wanted it,” Billy whispers. “I wanted your hand on my dink. It felt good. I didn’t want you to take your hand away.”

“Billy, please . . .” I must get away. The limo honks twice. I have to get back to the recording studio.

“The only way I’ll get better is if you put your hand there again,” Billy says. “You don’t want me to die, do you?”

“Well, no . . .”

“Then do it. Please. Save me.”

Then Billy takes my hand and puts it over his dink. He presses my hand against the material of his red parachute pants. “Just keep it there,” he says. “Keep it there until I start to feel better again. That’s all I ask.”

I look up at Billy. His eyes aren’t closed anymore. They’re open.

Then I fall asleep.

eight

I can’t get Billy Archer out of my head. Every morning when I wake up, I wonder if he’s waking up at that moment, too. When I come home for lunch, I wonder what he’s eating that day. When I’m doing my homework at night, I think about how Billy isn’t all that bright and how he could use a tutor — maybe me — to help him. And every time I put the showerhead on my dink to make sperm, I think about Billy and his parachute pants. The showerhead is evil and it makes me think things I don’t want to think. Back in grade 7, after I discovered how the showerhead could make me feel if I left it on my dink for a few minutes at just the right angle, I was the cleanest kid in Sarnia.

“
Another
shower?” my mother would ask. “You just had one this morning.”

I was in the shower two, sometimes three times a day. Now when I look back on it, I’m lucky no one found out what I was
really
doing in there. Since then, I’ve calmed down a little bit and gotten smarter. Instead of showers, I tell my mother I’m taking baths, which makes her less suspicious. Then I use the showerhead to fill up the tub.

Anyways, I made a New Year’s resolution not to use the showerhead in that way anymore, because it really is The Devil’s Instrument, as Mr. Mitchell might say. And I felt like it was the one thing I could do to get into the Virgin’s good books again, considering what happened between me and Billy. But I only lasted until January 3rd, which I know must’ve disappointed the Virgin. But I’ve decided I’ll quit on my fourteenth birthday, which is just around the corner.

I feel very bad about what happened with Billy because my nipples were right. I had the chance to make a real boy friend and I blew it. All this month, there’s been a dark cloud over my head. I almost lost my appetite a couple of times. It’s that bad.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mom asked me the other day. “You hardly say a word to me anymore.” Then she gasped and pressed her hand against her chest. “Are you on drugs?” she whisper/screamed.

I rolled my eyes and said no. “I’m fine.”

“Well, just remember. If anyone ever offers you drugs, you just walk away. Do you understand?”

I grabbed a Vachon Flakie out of the cupboard and went to my room.

The trouble is that I know I will never be friends with Billy Archer. Or Andrew Sinclair. Or Craig Brown. Or any other boy in my class. And then what? I’ll be the only boy in grade 9 without a locker partner.

My mother is upset at the Catholics again. Not because of
the cars parked along our street on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, but because the students of Our Lady of Perpetual Hope High School are putting on
The Sound of Music
.

“I mean, honestly!” she said, flipping down her
Observer
. “I don’t see why your sisters’ school can’t put on musicals. Sometimes I have to wonder if Catholics are Catholic just to make everyone else feel inferior.”

Then she called to order tickets.

The day of the show, Mrs. Randall, the woman my mother planned to go with, called to cancel.

“Female problems,” my mom whisper/screamed. “Now what am I going to do?”

My dad couldn’t go with her, since he had to work the night shift. Something told me he was pretty relieved about that.

“I guess I could try calling Mary or Janet,” my mom said, “but it’s kind of late notice. There’s Mrs. LaFlamme, too, but she gets so easily agitated, Henry. What if there are strobe lights?”

“Why don’t you take your son?” my dad asked.

I froze.

“Peter? He wouldn’t want to go out with his mom.” Then she turned to me. “Would you?”

I don’t like the idea of going anywhere with my mom, especially places where I might be seen. Going out in public with your parents is like screaming, “I have no friends!” And maybe I don’t, but that’s not the point. It’s better not to be seen at all than to be seen with your parents.

But then I thought back to that morning. My mom
kept slapping the thermostat with a tea towel, screaming, “Who keeps playing with this? Who keeps playing with this?”

We all told my mom that none of us had touched it, which was the truth. But she called us liars and said that we were all plotting against her and Jesus Murphy, could somebody please open a window in here before she melts?

So I did the right thing — I shrugged and said, “I guess so.”

“Well, it’s a date then!” my mom said. “Me and my son. How nice is that? Maybe people will think we’re a couple!”

Then she started laughing, but I didn’t find it very funny. Actually, I thought it was gross. Moms shouldn’t joke about things like that with their sons.

“You owe me big time,” I said to my dad through a mental telepathy message.

I wasn’t sure what to wear to the musical, since most of my clothing has been getting tighter. I think it’s the way my mom does the laundry. I ended up picking one of my favourite sweaters — a black and blue checked wool one — and my black rugby pants. I made sure I taped my nipples up good and tight and then I put on some of my dad’s Old Spice for a nice touch.

“Oh my, don’t you smell heavenly,” my mom said. She was wearing a green dress with gold earrings.

“Ready for your date?” Christine asked. She was sitting in the living room, painting her nails.

“Shut up!” I yelled. I was still angry at Christine for what she did to me at the mall before Christmas. I had barely said two words to her since then.

“Do you kids always have to fight?” my mom asked. She was re-reading her driving route for the hundredth time. “Come on, Peter. We have to hurry up. We’re running late.”

We weren’t late, since we still had a half hour to get to the school. But since my mom had to take every side street in Sarnia to get there, it was going to take a while.

“I always loved the theatre,” she said, as we turned right onto Lorne Crescent. “Especially when I was your age, Peter. I had roles in a number of school plays. Did I ever tell you that?”

I nodded.

“Never a starring role, mind you. Just scenery. Trees, mainly. But that’s the wonderful thing about theatre — every person’s role is just as important as the next. Oh sure, I’d get jealous from time to time. The bark costumes were always so uncomfortable and talk about sore arms! But then I would think, ‘Without me, the wolf would have no place to hide and then Little Miss Perfect Riding Hood would never get eaten.’ That always made me feel better.”

We turned right onto Wellington Road.

“You like the theatre, too, Peter. You’re just like me.”

My mom was only saying that because I signed up for a drama class at the college a few years back. Our teacher, Mrs. Tipperwhirl, was from England and wore a red wig. She had this thing against shoes and made everyone wear
Chinese slippers to class.

“It cuts down on the clutter of your little feet,” she would say, rubbing her temples.

There were about twenty kids in the class. Some of them were nice, but most were annoying. One girl named Nikki had a thing for cats. I think she thought she was one, because no matter what role we were playing, she’d purr and pretend to clean herself.

Mrs. Tipperwhirl carried around a tambourine and would bang it to get our attention. Sometimes, she had us do the dumbest things.

“You’re a bird!” she would yell and bang her tambourine. We would flap our arms while she walked around us. “Let me see those big, beautiful wings riding on the wind! So proud, so free!” Then she’d hit the tambourine again and tell us we were rocks. We’d have to fall to the floor and curl into lumps. I made an excellent rock, because I would lie very still and pretend my skin was hard as steel.

“Excellent,” Mrs. Tipperwhirl would say. “Such, strong, silent rocks. Nikki! Rocks don’t purr.”

Anyways, towards the end of the course, I started gaining weight. And the idea of stepping on stage with everyone watching me freaked me out. So I didn’t sign up the following year. But when I’m skinny and popular in high school, I might get back into the world of theatre. You never know.

“I even dreamed of being a star one day,” my mom laughed as we turned right onto East Street. “Can you imagine? Of course, I wasn’t pretty enough. Or skinny
enough. Or talented enough. And I knew that. But somehow, I just figured that didn’t matter. Until, of course, I came to the realization it did.”

I kept my eyes on the road.

“But that’s the way life is sometimes, Peter. You spend all your time up in the clouds until, one day, reality decides to pull you back down.” She sighed.