Wallflowers (16 page)

I press the ion thruster and the Worldship blazes across the sky. With our improved navigational system, I steer our course toward the extrasolar planet 51 Osiris C. We settle on a moon rich in relevant natural resources, which we’ll enhance through nanotech growth hormones and regenerative cosmic energy. Rapid construction and terraforming begin.

=

Two days in a row, my mother has forgotten to buy toilet paper. She bought SpaghettiOs and Pop-Tarts. She set the SpaghettiOs on the counter and said, I’m sorry, Gina. They were out of the Alpha-Getti. You’ll have to practise your
O
words. O Canada, she said. O me! O life! Then she sang,
O
is the onliest number
,
and walked to the pantry with a stack of cans.

We’ve run out of tissue too, so I’ve left a roll of paper towel in the bathroom. But the towel is rough on my nose, and outside I am allergic to the microgametophytes of seed plants. I have begun to shoot my snot in the sink.

Felicia lives across the co-op in 208. She’s not my friend at school because she is one year older, but last summer we mated our gerbils. Normally her hair is chlorinated blond, but last week she stole hair dye from London Drugs, and now it’s as orange as Smokehouse BBQ chips. She has to wear a retainer. She’s supposed to remove it before she eats, but she doesn’t, and sometimes chips get caught in the metal bar. We ride bikes together. We ride bikes to the 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees, and we ride bikes to the school to drink our Slurpees in the basketball court. Grade seven boys shoot hoops in the court, and we ignore them. They ignore us too, except Scotty Lamb, who calls us lezbos. One day we collected gravel in our Slurpee cups. Scotty walked to us and said, Hey, Felicia. I wrote you a poem. Roses are red, violets are black, why is your chest as flat as your back? Felicia stared at her feet. She was wearing flip-flops. The Sky-Blue-Sky toenails we painted that morning had started to chip. Violets aren’t black, she mumbled, but I think only I heard her. I felt embarrassed. I emptied my gravel over Scotty’s head. Felicia lifted a bigger stone from her cup and threw it at his face, even though he was standing so close. The rock popped the lens out of his sunglasses.

My brother rows on the regional team. He and Mom have been arguing lately, so he keeps to his room at the top of the house. For Christmas, he got a television. He rows his erg in front of
Cops
and
$h*! My Dad Says
. His door doesn’t shut all the way, and the light from his TV spills into the hall.

Aldo lives down the road from the co-op, in a yellow house between the 7-Eleven and a bluegrass field. He says he’s fifty-two, but he has said that every year since I moved here, which was three years ago. Once my mother’s boyfriend called him “the mongoloid,” but my mother said he doesn’t have Down’s, and now my mother’s boyfriend calls him “the mongoose.” The paint on Aldo’s walls is dry and splintered. You can peel strips of it with your nails. He wears a wool plaid coat and gumboots even when it’s sunny, and his yard is overgrown with grass and dandelions and one papery, bruised hydrangea bush.

Felicia likes to talk to Aldo. She rides her bike to his house and lets him untie her shoes. He will pry off her Nike Shox Turbo runners and stroke the arches of her feet. Then he will slip a toonie in her sock and she will put her shoes back on and go to the 7-Eleven to buy Smokehouse BBQ chips or a Slurpee. She has asked me to come twice. She says it’s fun. He touches your feet for only a minute and he pays you. The first time we tried we saw his sister’s car in the driveway. We waited in the field and picked blackberries. The car was still there after an hour so we biked home. The second time he didn’t answer the door, but Felicia opened it anyway. She coasted in on her bike and called his name, then leaned her bike against the wall under the coat hooks. I left mine outside and followed her in.

He’s not here, she had said, and stomped into the next room. I lingered on the doorstep and wondered whether to remove my shoes.

Come on, she called. Sometimes he has cookies.

I followed her voice into a small damp den with wood-panel wallpaper, a Lazy Susan, and two corduroy armchairs. The room smelled like curtains and cold bacon.

What if he comes home? I said.

She shrugged and walked into the kitchen, flicked on fluorescent lights. By the time I followed, she was already on the counter in her running shoes, her underwear riding above her shorts as she reached into a cupboard. She slammed the door and opened another, scanned the boxes and cans until she found a tray of old Digestives. She took two biscuits and passed me the tray, which had no packaging except a layer of cellophane. I took two as well. She tossed the tray back in the cupboard and hopped off the counter.

We should go, she said. He might come home.

I followed her again through the living room, and she backed her bike out the door onto the porch. I was lifting my own bike from the gravel when I noticed her at the wood post with a Sharpie pen. She was drawing a penis. A horizontal penis, which looked like a blimp. When she finished, she snapped the lid on her pen and slid it into the waistband of her shorts.

=

51 Osiris C orbits every 29 solar days at a distance of .139 astronomical units from its parental star. Its mass is 2.8 to 3.9 times the mass of Earth and its radius is 1.1 to 1.5 times the radius of Earth, with a global equilibrium temperature of
-
47 to
-
22°C and a terrain that is pebbly. From its third moon, we shall install a silicate weathering thermostat, which will accumulate enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to permit liquid water to exist at the surface, provided the planet’s tectonic composition can support sustained outgassing. My lab researchers have conducted a series of experiments on moist breads and clementines. Today we spotted our first zygospores. The oranges are moulding.

Felicia sits on a curb in the parking lot and watches my brother’s window. I watch her from the futon in the living room. I don’t remember if she knows which room is his. When she lowers her eyes, her gaze falls on me through the venetian blind. I open the front door. She’s wearing cut-off shorts and a pink cheetah-print bathing suit.

Hey, she says.

Hey, I say. Want to come in for a freezie?

She shrugs and walks in, leaving her flip-flops on the mat, though her heels look just as dirty.

We only have orange and blue, I say, and head to the kitchen. I bring the box from the freezer and she takes the last blue. I select orange. We cut our ends with scissors and suck ice from the butts of plastic.

Look what I found, she says. She lifts a yellow bottle from her backpack. The label says lighter fluid.
Ideal for all petrol lighters and cleaning the home.

Where did you find that?

Rob’s shed.

Rob is the caretaker. He mows the boulevard and prunes the barberry shrubs in the parking lot.

Why were you in Rob’s shed?

He left it open. Want to go to Aldo’s?

With that?

It’s nighttime—he’ll be home. No construction on.

When Aldo’s out, he’s either with his sister or watching construction. There’s a site down the road where they’re filling the marsh with cement. Aldo watches through the chain link. The boom trucks and bulldozers, the orange men in their vests. He’ll stand all day with a paper cup of coffee and sometimes a worker lends him a hard hat.

Come on, she says. I want a Slurpee.

I think about telling my mom or brother, but Mom’s with her boyfriend, and my brother won’t care. I grab my change purse. We walk because Felicia’s dad took her key to the bike shed.

Why’d he take your key? I ask. Are you grounded?

She shrugs. She points to my Silver Surfer change purse and says, That movie was stupid.

I like the comic book.

There’s a book?

Yeah,
Fantastic Four
#48, where they introduce the Silver Surfer in three issues known as the Galactus Trilogy.

Do you think 7-Eleven refilled the sour peach?

How I got into action comics is my brother gave me his entire collection of the
Fantastic Four
and
X-Men
. Most of the day he spends in his blue room, but in the morning he comes down for cereal and orange juice and I show him my experiments. Right now I am investigating the hydro cycle. I can produce rain with the tea kettle and a frozen spoon. For my birthday last week, I told him I wanted to be the first girl on the moon. He said they already sent women to the moon, so I told him I wanted to be the youngest girl on the moon, and he gave me freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream and dehydrated strawberries. He said the first space explorers only packed food that fit into squeeze tubes, so the Americans ate applesauce and the Russians ate borscht. Borscht is a gory soup made of beets and cabbage. When I made a batch, my brother helped me with the blender. Then we funnelled the soup into a tube of toothpaste, which first we had squeezed into the sink.

At Aldo’s, we speak to Aldo through the door, but he won’t let us in.

C’mon, Aldo, says Felicia. Open sesame.

I can’t, he says, in his voice that sounds like he bit his tongue.

I painted my toenails for you, she says, singing
toenails.

My sister said to ignore you.

I brought a friend ...

My sister said you have to leave me alone.

Your sister’s a cunt, she says.

I look at her. No one speaks.

C’mon, Aldo, she starts again. Aldo, c’mon.

He opens his door a crack and peers at us over the chain. He’s got a squat pumpkin face, but all you can see through the opening are his eyes and flaky red nose. I smile at him. I want to leave.

Let’s go, Felicia.

You owe me money, she says, and kicks his door, which slams closed.

I’ll buy us Slurpees, I say. I brought my change purse.

You owe me, she says again. There are tears in her eyes.

Aldo locks the door, but I don’t hear him move.

Felicia kneels to unzip her backpack.

Let’s go, I say again.

She lifts out her plastic bottle of lighter fluid and squirts a figure eight over his porch. Before I can think how to respond, she flicks a lighter from her pocket and the figure eight ignites across the cement. It takes a few seconds for the entire shape to catch, and then the flames are ankle-high, and we watch the fire in silence until the fluid burns out.

We walk home without Slurpees. She doesn’t say anything to me, so I don’t say anything either. When we reach the co-op, I start toward my side of the parking lot.

Gina, she says.

I look at her.

See you tomorrow at 8 p.m.?

Okay, I say, though we never made plans.

My house, she says. See you.

At home, I stand outside my brother’s door and listen to the breath of his row machine.

Dylan? I say.

Busy.

Can I come in, Dylan?

I’m busy.

His TV is on. I hear sirens through his door. Now silence. Now the clanging of a railway crossing. I go downstairs.

My mother’s still on the patio with her boyfriend. She’s blowing smoke rings. He waves the smoke away from his face with the back of his hand. From the futon, I see a small white face in Felicia’s bedroom window. All the lights in her house are off, but her dad’s Volkswagen Golf is in the parking lot. When I look again, her face is gone.

From the kitchen, I launch a bubble to protect the Worldship as we orbit a dying sun. I microwave a mug of hot chocolate. I carry the hot chocolate to the futon and worry about accelerated age.

The next morning, Dylan eats Apple Cinnamon Cheerios with apple juice instead of milk. I build a sink volcano and suck borscht out of a tube.

Choose a colour, I say.

Hmm?

Choose a colour.

Green.

Choose red or gold.

He looks up from his
Sports Illustrated.

Gold.

I funnel baking soda into my Coke bottle and add thirty millilitres of glitter. In the measuring cup, I combine vinegar, dish soap, and yellow dye.

Count me down, I say.

Hmm?

Count down!

Ten, he says as he flips a magazine page. Nine, eight.

My mother shouts my name from upstairs.

Seven. He pauses. Six.

Gina.

Five, my brother says, ignoring Mom, slurping juice off his spoon.

When she charges into the kitchen, she’s got my petri plate of zygospores.

This is what you do to the food I buy you?

She’s wearing her soft nightie. The faded butterfly print that ties at the bust with two strings.