Hey Nostradamus! (2 page)

Truth was, Jason and I
were
doing everything in there that
weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.

In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words
GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE/GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE
. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.

 

 

Stillness is what I have here now-wherever
here
is. I'm no longer a part of the world and I'm still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can't tell where. And for whatever it's worth, I'm no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where's my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?

It's quiet here-quiet like my parents' house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they're the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.

I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses-not the voice of the speaker. I'd like to hear from Jason and my family, but I'm unable to sift them out.

 

Dear God,

Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vileness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.

 

As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles' “Lovely Rita” pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I'd get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle-moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.

 

 

The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn't have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch-six girls from the
Youth Alive!
program. We'd go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I'd stolen a blusher from the drugstore; I'd peeked at my
brother's porn stash-nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. In the end, it was simply easier to be with five people in a restaurant booth than three hundred in a cafeteria. I was antisocial at heart. And if people knew how dull our lunches were, they'd never have bothered to waste energy calling us stuck-up. So, I was surprised when I went into the cafeteria to meet Jason to find the Bunch hogging one of the cafeteria's prime center tables. I asked, “So what's this all about?”

Their faces seemed so-
young
to me. Unburdened. Newly born. I wondered if I'd now lost what they still had, the aura of fruit slightly too unripe to pick.

Jaimie Kirkland finally said, “My dad got smashed and took out a light post on Marine Drive last night. And Dee's Cabrio has this funny smell in it since she loaned it to her grandmother, so we thought we'd go native today.”

“Everyone must be flattered.” I sat down. Meaningful stares pinballed from face to face, but I feigned obliviousness. Lauren was the clique's designated spokeswoman. “Cheryl, I think we should continue our talk from earlier.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

I was trying to decide between Jell-O and fruit cocktail from the cafeteria counter.

Dee cut in: “Cheryl, I think you need to do some confessing to us.” Five sets of eyes drilled into me in judgment.

“Confess to what?” Forcing them to name the deed was fun.

“You,” said Lauren, “and Jason. Fornicating.”

I began giggling, and I could see their righteousness
melting away like snow on a car's hood. And that was when I heard the first gunshot.

 

 

Jason and I connected the moment we first met (albeit through some seat switching on my part) in tenth-grade biology class. My family had just moved into the neighborhood from across town. I knew that Jason's attraction to me would go nowhere unless I learned more about his world. He appealed to me because he was so untouched by life, but I think this attraction for someone dewy clean was unnatural for a girl as young as me. I think most girls want a guy who's seen a bit of sin, who knows just a little bit more than they do about life.

Jason appeared to be heavily into
Youth Alive!,
which added to his virginal charm. I later learned that his enthusiastic participation was an illusion, fostered by the fact that Jason's older brother, Kent, two years ahead of us, was almost head of
Alive!
's Western Canadian division; Jason was roped in and was dragged along in Kent's dust. Kent was like Jason minus the glow. When I was around Kent, I never felt that life was full of wonder and adventure; Kent made it sound as if our postschool lives were going to be about as exciting as temping in a motor vehicles office. He was always into
planning
and preparing for the
next step
. Jason was certainly not into planning. I wonder how much of our relationship was a slap on Kent's face by his brother who was tired of being scheduled into endless group activities.

In any event, Pastor Fields's sermons on chastity could only chill the blood in Jason's loins so long. So I began attending
Youth Alive!
meetings three times a week, singing
“Kumbaya,” bringing along salads and standing in prayer circles-all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.

And I did-nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn't ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.

The thing was, I
did
discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that's not something I'd expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle-no God being feared there. My family wasn't so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don't know. I'd be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it's a different place from where my family's headed.

My family didn't know what to make of my conversion. It's not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith-the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.

My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she's-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few
Alive!
meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.

 

Dear God,

I'm going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can't see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.

 

I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.

For starters, nobody screamed. That's maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers-part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits-military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition-and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food-the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-
colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen-gun
boys,
really-turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.

Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.