Hello Groin (23 page)

As quietly as possible I moved away from the rail and started walking back over the bridge. My legs had gone stiff from standing still for so long so I was walking slowly, my head down, full of a damp emptiness. Then, halfway over the bridge, a new thought hit me. What if Joc came climbing up the riverbank right now and saw me walking away like this? She would know that I’d seen her down there and hadn’t talked to her, hadn’t even bothered to say hello. Our friendship would be over for sure then, nothing would ever bring us together after that.

Without looking back I took off, running full out into the rain.

Saturday evening Cam picked me up at 6:30 and we headed to the mall. The movie we wanted to see started at 7:30, so we hung around the arcade for a while, playing Streetfighter, Cam’s favorite game. He was in a good mood—I was wearing a sweater he liked, a light green crew neck with pale yellow flowers worked across the front, and his face had lit up when he’d seen it. So we were holding hands and leaning against each other a lot, and the whole thing could have been really fun if it hadn’t been for the cold I was coming down with due to being out in yesterday’s rain. And, of course, I kept thinking about Joc crouched alone on the riverbank, watching the water go by. Watching her thoughts go by. Just watching the sadness all go by.

“C’mon, Dyl,” said Cam, turning toward me. “You have a go at it.”

With a grin he stepped back from the controls, and I moved into the player’s position. But just as he leaned forward to drop a looney into the slot, I glanced around the room and who did I see but hot lips Sheila, the passion of Confederation Collegiate, standing in the entrance to the arcade. Immediately I froze, watching as her eyes traveled the dimly lit room. She appeared to be looking for someone, and a sick feeling in my gut told me who
it probably was. Would she be able to see me from the entrance, I wondered frantically. Cam and I were at the rear of the room, partially hidden by several junior high boys at the next machine, but as I watched, Sheila’s eyes focused in on me and she stiffened. Yes, she’d seen me, and there was that familiar desperate hungry look again, erupting all over her face.

“Uh, Cam,” I said, every nerve in my body going into red alert. “I’ve gotta go to the can, actually. C’mon.”

“Hey, I don’t have to pee,” Cam grinned. “You go and I’ll wait here.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, ducked around the junior high boys and took off through the crowd. Across the arcade I could see Sheila steaming down the far aisle, probably headed for Streetfighter. If I stuck to the aisle I was in, I would reach the entrance without a direct encounter—if Sheila didn’t suddenly start leaping over the rows of video games that separated us, that is.

That left the question of how long she would hang around Streetfighter, watching Cam play once she’d realized that I was gone, but there was no point in worrying about it now. Barreling out of the arcade, I headed down the mall at light speed toward the food court and the nearest girls washroom. A small private space, that was what I needed—something I could close myself inside, get my head together and
think
. Fortunately the lineup waiting at the washroom entrance was short, and I got into a cubicle quickly. Without even checking the toilet seat to make sure it was clean, I sat down and buried my face in my hands. I could feel it coming—another extraterrestrial funk. Mad chaos was taking over my brain, and all I could think about was how much I wanted a smoke. A smoke with Joc. Where was she now? What was she doing? Was she sick in bed with a head cold, from being out in yesterday’s rain? Or was she with Dikker, working her way through a six-pack and not even thinking about me?

Miserably I glanced at my watch. Fifteen minutes had gone by. Would Sheila have given up looking for me in the arcade and headed off somewhere else? And Cam must be wondering what was taking me so long. Reluctantly I stood up, flushed the toilet and stepped out of the cubicle. A quick scan of the waiting lineup revealed no one with a desperate hungry look on her face. But as I approached the sinks my eyes fell on a familiar figure, half-hidden behind several women and leaning against the paper-towel dispenser.

Hot lips Sheila. Waiting for me. Obviously.

“Uh-uh,” she said grimly, ducking behind me and cutting off my escape. I had to give her credit—she moved fast, faster than I could
think
. Turning to face me, she added sarcastically, “Don’t you want to wash your hands?”

“That’s my business,” I snapped, trying to step around her, but she moved with me, cutting me off again.

“Fine,” I said, trying to keep a grip as I turned back to the sinks. “I will wash them.”

Soaping my hands carefully, I held them under the tap and watched the water sluice off each and every soap bubble. Under no circumstances was I looking at Sheila, the line of gawking women behind her, or the mirror and my beet-red, obviously guilty expression. With a grim dead-end feeling, I dried my hands and tossed the paper towel into the garbage. Then I turned toward Sheila and fixed my eyes on her left shoulder.

“There,” I said coldly. “Satisfied?”

She shrugged, then said, “Are you?”

I wanted to slug her. I mean, why didn’t she just
get
it? Didn’t she ever fuck up? Had she never made the slightest itsy-bitsy little mistake?

“What business is it of yours?” I demanded. “What business is anything I do of yours?”

“It is when you kiss me,” she replied, her voice calm and deadly clear.

Panic swept me and I almost clapped a hand over her mouth. “I did NOT...kiss you,” I spluttered, taking a step back. “I was
drunk
. I wasn’t
kissing
you, I was
drunk
.”

By now every woman in the lineup had forgotten her need to pee and was eyeballing us frantically. Fortunately they were all complete strangers. With any luck, I would never see them again. Arms crossed, Sheila was also ignoring the row of fascinated expressions, her dark eyes flat on me, bright and full of hurt—hurt that had undeniably been caused by me, hurt that I was continuing to cause. Well, that was her fault, really. If she hadn’t come in here, looking for me when I so obviously didn’t want to see
her
, this conversation wouldn’t be happening.

“I just want to talk to you,” she said softly, her eyes getting even brighter. Then she started blinking rapidly, and I realized that she was trying to keep herself from crying. “Just...talk,” she added, her voice trailing off.

“Yeah, well,” I said, my eyes flitting everywhere but her face. “I don’t want to talk, okay?”

This time when I moved toward the door, she let me pass. The lineup of waiting women stepped back quickly, creating a path, and then I was out of there and letting the washroom door swing closed behind me. With a deep breath, I turned to head back to the arcade and saw Cam leaning against a nearby wall, a concerned expression on his face.

“There you are,” he said, coming toward me. “A girl asked me where you went and I told her, but you were taking so long I got worried.”

Behind me the washroom door opened and Sheila came bursting out. Hurt still glimmered in her eyes, but the desperate hungry expression was back and she looked very determined.
Walking up to me, she held out a slip of paper. When I didn’t take it, she jammed it into the left front pocket of my jeans.

“Call me,” she said, leaning so close I could feel her breath on my face. Then she turned and strode off across the food court.

“That’s the girl who asked about you in the arcade,” said Cam, watching her go. “Who is she? What did she want?”

“Just someone I met at the Confed dance,” I said quickly. “It’s not important.”

“Confed?” asked Cam, looking startled.

“Yeah,” I said, shooting him a glance. “Why?”

His eyes dropped. “Nothing,” he said, but he seemed uneasy. “Hey, the movie’s about to start. We’d better get in line.”

I held out my hand and for a second, just the flicker of a heartbeat, he hesitated. Then he reached out, our hands connected and we were in sync again, headed down the mall toward the movie theater.

Chapter Nineteen

I spent Sunday in bed, riding out my cold and working my way through a box of Kleenex. Every now and then Mom or Dad would come into my room with some tea or chicken broth, and Keelie thudded in regularly on her Quidditch broom. Outside my window rain poured steadily down, and the phone beside my bed remained quiet. As the hours dragged by, Joc didn’t call me and I didn’t call her. Inside and out, everything felt the same— thick, gray and cold, like something out of
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
:
Hail, Basti, I have not, did not, am not
.

Mid-afternoon, I dragged myself downstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich. As I was going back up, I noticed a dog-eared copy of
Hamlet
sitting on the top shelf of the hallway bookcase. Pulling it out, I took it to my room and crawled into bed. When I opened the front cover, I found Dad’s name written on the overleaf—Daniel Brian Kowolski. The book was obviously one of his university texts and it got me thinking about him, trying to imagine him in his twenties, going to classes and hanging out with his friends. His girlfriends. How many had he had? What had they been like? What if one of
them
had become my mother? It would have meant an entirely different set of genes
contributing to my makeup, and a very different me. Maybe then I would have turned out hetero. Maybe then I wouldn’t have been so fucked up.

But then I remembered that it was Dad who had the questionable uncle and sister. So having a different mother wouldn’t have solved the faulty gene problem. If only Dad had been infertile, and Mom had resorted to a sperm bank.

With a sigh I opened
Hamlet
to Act I, scene i, and started reading. The story was definitely geared for a head cold and a rainy day—poison, ghosts, insanity and talking to skulls.
If,
that is, you could understand half of what you were reading. Like Joc said, it was almost a foreign language. After looking up twenty or so ancient words in the dictionary, I gave up on all that
to be or not to be
-ing, closed the book and just lay in bed, listening to the air whistle through my stuffed nose. After a bit I realized that by blowing harder or softer, I could whistle different notes. It took a lot of concentration, but I’d managed to work my way through half of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” when my phone rang, interrupting my musical masterpiece.

Joc!
I thought, and all thoughts of Mary and her lamb exploded out of the top of my head. Petrified, I lay staring at the phone. My sinuses were tap dancing and my heart doing absolute reggae. On the fifth ring I finally got it together, leaned over and picked up the phone.

“Hewwo?” I asked cautiously.

“Dyl—is that you?” asked Cam.

At the sound of his voice my heart took a sky dive, then slowly picked itself up. “Yeah, it’s me,” I said, trying to pull my voice down out of my nose. “My code is worse, and I’m sig in bed.”

Cam laughed softly. “You sound like it,” he said. “I caught a bit of the sniffles off you, but not that bad.”

“Mage sure you eat lots of chiggen soub,” I said, trying to be helpful, then lay there listening while Cam went off into howls of laughter. It sounded as if he would be enjoying himself for a while, so I reached for another Kleenex and tried to blow some of the haze out of my head. But that just set him off again. Finally he calmed down and started telling me about a CFL game he and Len had watched that afternoon.

“So, uh, what did she say?” he asked, changing the subject so abruptly that for a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What did who say?” I asked slowly.

“On the note,” said Cam. “The girl at the mall, remember?”

“Oh,” I said, my eyes darting to the jeans I’d worn yesterday. After taking them off last night, I’d thrown them across the back of a chair and climbed straight into bed. I’d felt so sick, I hadn’t even bothered to check the note.

“Nothing,” I said carefully. “I haven’t looked at it, actually.” Cam paused, as if thinking, then said, “Well, look at it now.”

Again my eyes darted to my jeans. Why was Cam so interested in this? After last night’s run-in with Sheila outside the girls washroom, he hadn’t mentioned her for the rest of the evening.

“Uh, I can’t,” I stammered, trying to ignore the guilt heating up my face. It was so hard to
think
with a head cold. “I threw the jeans into the laundry this morning. I guess I forgot about the note. Like I said, it wasn’t important.”

Silence stretched out on the other end of the line. “Cam,” I said nervously, “are you there?”

“Yeah,” he said quickly. “Are you?”

“Of course, I am,” I said indignantly, fighting a flash of panic. “Why are you asking me that? And why is this such a big deal to you? I don’t even know her name.”

Well, not her last name
, I added guiltily inside my head.

Cam took a long breath, then let it out slowly. “It’s not a big deal,” he said quietly. “At least...Oh, never mind.”

“Never mind what?” I demanded, sitting up in bed. Suddenly my head felt ten times worse and my heart had graduated to a kick-ass thud. Power funk time, definitely.

“See,” said Cam. “Now you’re making a big deal out of it.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, glancing nervously at my jeans. “Hey, wait a minute,” I added, trying to keep my voice casual. “There’s something on the floor. Maybe the note fell out of my pocket when I took off my jeans last night.”

Placing the phone on the bed, I got up and pulled the note out of my jeans pocket. Then I climbed back into bed and picked up the phone.

“Here it is,” I said, spreading out the crumpled paper. “It’s just her name and phone number. Sheila Warren. Do you want me to give you her number?”

Cam gave a short laugh. “Hardly,” he said. “Why would I want to call her?”

“Exactly,” I said. “And why would I?”

“I dunno, Dyl,” he said. “She seemed to think you would.”

“Ah, she’s just got some crazy ideas in her head,” I muttered. “She needs a reality check, big-time.”