Dream Where the Losers Go Read online

  Skey’s grin came clear out of the blue. “The whole morning while you were snoring in bed,” she said.

  Giving her an answering grin, Janey stretched and yawned. “I had a dream about you girls working away,” she drawled. “Cleaning everything up for me. It was a lovely dream. I really enjoyed it.”

  That evening they joined the girls in Unit C for a video, crowding together onto couches as staff set up the VCR. Squeezed in between Ann and Tena, Skey had a momentary flash of Viv sitting alone on a bed, in a small bare room with concrete walls and bars on the window.

  “How d’you think Viv is doing right now?” she asked.

  The girls stopped taunting staff and shoving popcorn into their mouths. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Tena said it for all of them.

  “Loser,” she snorted.

  “THIS PICTURE...” She paused and ran her fingertips over the carving again. In the dark, an image had come into her mind, a memory of her mother at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window as the sun rose into another winter day. Her father sat at the breakfast table, entrenched in The Globe and Mail. Standing in the doorway, Skey was watching her mother wipe the clean counter over and over, her beautiful face turned aimlessly toward the window as the gray sky lit up with pink and amber and she saw none of it. The carving in the tunnel wall seemed to move under her fingertips the way her mother’s hand had moved across the counter—meaninglessly, without purpose. As if the day had nothing to bring her.

  “This picture?” prompted the boy.

  “My mother never touches things,” she said. “This is a picture of the way my mother doesn’t touch. Nothing can touch her either.”

  “Or she’ll scream and run away?” the boy asked wryly.

  “My mother doesn’t move,” she said. “She doesn’t make a sound. It’s as if I was never there at all.”

  WHEN SKEY TOOK the birth control pill Sunday morning, she realized she hadn’t thought of Jigger in twenty-four hours, since she had taken the last one. After swallowing it, she stood for a moment, remembering his hands on the steering wheel, casually turning his car into an alley for more of the backseat, the sweat that glistened on his neck as they made love, the heat that flowered in her groin and legs. Then the fierceness of that heat, the way it tore her open, flimsy as paper. All she could do as he loved her was give out long curved cries of loneliness, even though they were together, even though he was inside her, even though he held her gently in his arms and was touching and touching and touching her.

  AS SKEY TURNED INTO the first floor hallway that afternoon, she saw Lick standing outside the visitor’s lounge, peering nervously through the doorway. The room was crowded with girls and their families, relatives and boyfriends—no one who looked remotely like him. Even though he was probably wearing his toughest T-shirt and coolest jeans, Lick still looked as if he had tiptoed into a lockup to complete a high school English class assignment on architecture in Shakespeare’s era. When he saw Skey coming toward him, he got a fuzzy look and seemed to go weak at the knees. For a brief singing moment, she wanted to kiss him thoroughly. It would probably hospitalize him for a week.

  “I’m going to let you two work in here,” said the staff supervising the visitor’s lounge. With a smile, he led them to a very small room next to a social worker’s office. “Make sure the door stays open,” he said. “I’ll check on you every now and then.”

  “Yeah yeah,” said Skey.

  The room was so small that two overstuffed chairs took up most of the floor space. Sitting down, Skey opened one of her thick books while Lick set up his mother’s laptop.

  “I was reading this book this morning,” said Skey, holding it up. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff—gables and gargoyles. I couldn’t do any work yesterday because we had a riot on Friday, so we had to clean the place up.”

  She watched the obvious sag of his jaw, enjoying the moment. Lick licked his lips.

  “Are you all right?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Yeah,” she said easily. “I hid in my room while it was going on. What did you do Friday night?”

  He stared at her, a slight red traveling his cheekbones. At first Skey thought he was puzzled by her carefree attitude, her ability to brush off fear. Then she thought, No, he’s hurt. But why would he be hurt? It was the sort of answer Jigger always wanted.

  Then she remembered herself huddled against the wall, alone and moaning in fear. Shuddering slightly, she took a deep breath. “When the girls said they were going to riot,” she said hesitantly, “I just went to my room. Something...pulled me there. I can’t explain it. It was almost as if some kind of spirit did it. Do you believe in spirits?”

  “I...dunno,” murmured Lick, the hurt slowly leaving his face.

  “At first I was mad like the rest of the girls,” Skey said, gaining confidence, “but then something seemed to get hold of me and pull me away from them. It pulled me into my room, and I locked my door. Three of the other girls went to their rooms too. The rest trashed the place.”

  Across from her, Lick seemed to be struggling for words. “What was the...something like?” he asked.

  “Like a dream come real,” she said. “Not a bad dream. Like darkness reaching into the day. Not bad darkness. Like your mind, the secret part of your mind that lives on its own and only talks to you in darkness and dreams. That secret part of my mind reached into the rest of me and pulled me away from the riot.”

  Lick looked as if she was touching him with her words, gently stroking his face. “I believe in that,” he said. “My mind’s always doing that kind of thing to me.”

  “It is?” she asked, surprised.

  “Except I can’t remember much of it after,” he said slowly. “I’ll be sitting in class, or walking somewhere, and this other part of my mind, a secret place like you said, comes up from the darkness. I feel it deep and coming up like a shadow. Then the real world fades back in. I look at the clock and ten minutes have passed. And Ms. Fleck is on Scene v instead of Scene ii, and I can’t remember anything I’ve been thinking about for the past ten minutes.”

  “Could be just daydreaming,” Skey said quickly.

  “But sometimes it’s hours,” said Lick. “I was sitting on a park bench last week and I almost froze, I was there so long.”

  Wings were beating in Skey’s throat, pale dainty wings that wanted up and away. “Do you...” She fumbled carefully between words. “Do you ever dream about tunnels? Dark tunnels?”

  “I don’t remember my dreams,” said Lick. “I have a hard time remembering anything unless I write it down.”

  Without warning, the staff who was supervising the visitor’s lounge stuck his head through the door. “Everything all right in here?” he asked, smiling cheerfully. “Oh, I see you’ve got your books open. Raring to go, eh? I’ll leave you to it.” He withdrew, leaving Skey and Lick slumped in their chairs and staring at each other.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” said Lick. “Mom worries enough about me as it is.”

  “How come?” asked Skey.

  A wary look crept into his face. “She just does,” he said.

  Sensing his unease, Skey picked up one of her thick books. “This one talks about canals,” she said. “You ever been to Venice?”

  “Nope,” said Lick.

  “Me neither,” said Skey.

  “And this one here,” she said quietly, “is the sound the wind makes when it moves through the trees, softly, in summer. Singing to the baby in the cradle, telling her things. D’you remember summer?” she asked the boy, tracing the soft wispy lines carved into the tunnel wall.

  “I’m forgetting more and more things in here,” he said. “I want to forget.”

  “You don’t want to forget the wind in the trees,” she said. “Or green. That’s the color trees are. First it’s the tiniest April green, when the leaves are just whispering their way out of the brown bark. Then the green gets stronger, more like a song, like the trees are singing themselves through June, July an
d August.”

  “To the baby in the cradle,” the boy said softly.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Then they get...yellow?” the boy asked hesitantly.

  “So yellow,” she said, “that it’s like a woman singing high up. Way up against the blue sky. Then scarlet and orange. Then brown.”

  “Falling off dead,” said the boy...

  ...SAID LICK.

  No, Lick wasn’t saying anything. Motionless, he was seated across from her, the two of them caught in absolute silence like flies trapped in amber.

  “It just happened,” Lick said hoarsely. “Did you notice?”

  In Skey’s pocket, the rock pulsed. “How long have you been gone?” she asked.

  “I dunno,” said Lick. He glanced at his computer screen. “The last thing I keyed in was sewer systems.”

  “That’s not much,” Skey said quickly. “Just a couple of sentences. I’ll back up and run them by you again.”

  “But what happened to me?” asked Lick, his voice rising. “Did you notice anything?”

  “No.” Panicking, Skey stared at the book in her lap. What the hell was she supposed to tell him? That there was another world, a dark tunnel, with a magic rock that took them both there? Maybe. If she told Lick about it and he didn’t believe her, if he laughed, it would destroy everything. The boy in the tunnel would run away again, and maybe never come back.

  “I’ve got to use the washroom,” Skey said abruptly. “Be back in a minute.”

  Entering the women’s washroom on the first floor, she stood inside a cubicle with her face pressed against the cold metal barrier, and waited for the shaking to subside. First the larger shakes, and then the smaller ones. When her body quieted, she began to breathe again, steady and even. The mind’s secret place, she whispered to herself. That was what it was, what it was supposed to remain. You weren’t supposed to share it with anyone else, not in this reality. Secrets weren’t supposed to be pulled into the light of day. They were your most tender part, like a name in the dark. She smiled, remembering. The boy in the tunnel had a right to his secrets, and she had a right to hers.

  Breathing cleanly, Skey emerged into the hallway, walked past the noisy visitor’s lounge and stepped into the small room. To her surprise, she found it empty. When she asked, staff told her that Lick had departed without leaving a message, but when she collected her books, she noticed something written across the top page of her notes.

  I was thinking about you Friday night, it said. I couldn’t let go.

  WHEN SHE RETURNED to the unit, Skey saw that new furniture had been delivered—two sofas and a TV. In one corner, Ann’s clock radio continued to blare.

  “Skey,” called Janey as she walked in. “Your friend San phoned while you were downstairs studying.”

  Alarm shot through Skey. “What did she want?” she asked.

  “No message,” said Janey.

  “Did you tell her where I was?” asked Skey.

  “Just that you were studying with a friend from school,” said Janey. It was such a rarity to see a girl reading Shakespeare in this place. Staff were thrilled about it. Stretching out her arms, Janey began quoting lines about hearts being cut out and bleeding, then dribbled off under Skey’s blank stare. “I guess you haven’t gotten to the climax yet,” she said.

  “No,” mumbled Skey. She hadn’t read any of The Merchant of Venice. All she knew of the storyline were the scenes that had been read aloud in class. The play had too many words that weren’t part of the English language anymore. Who cared about Shakespeare?

  “Can I call San?” she asked.

  San was on her approved list, but her number was busy every time Skey called. When she tried to reach Lick to warn him, the phone rang and rang into the empty tunnel of her ear.

  SHE WAS HUNCHED against a wall in the tunnel of light. Brilliance glared everywhere, blurring the difference between floor, walls and ceiling. When she closed her eyes, the inside of her skull lit up like a hundred-watt bulb, lines of light shooting across her aching eyes.

  The carvings here were sharp-edged. She kept cutting her fingers on them. They were the mouths of wild animals, the blade of a surgeon’s scalpel, the sound of her mother screaming. The edge of a broken bottle coming closer and closer to her skin.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JIGGER’S CAR IDLED in the usual place, one block from the bus stop. Stomach churning, Skey stood watching it from the corner, then realized Jigger was staring into his rearview mirror, watching her.

  “Hi.” Dumping her stack of books between them, she leaned in to kiss him. Something glinted in his eyes, but he kissed her back. She climbed over the books and they cuddled.

  “How was your weekend?” he asked.

  She told him about the riot as he slid the car into morning traffic.

  “Whoa,” he said softly. “That is some place. You kick in any walls?”

  “No,” she said. “Then I’d be at the detention center, waiting for my trial. And jail.”

  He gave her a sidelong grin. “I guess,” he said.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “Nothing much,” he said. “Anything else happen?”

  “A riot’s enough, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “It didn’t take the whole weekend,” he said.

  “We cleaned up,” said Skey, chewing her lower lip. Jigger’s arm slid around her shoulders, his hand on her throat, measuring her pulse. “Oh,” she added quickly, “I got frisked on Friday when I got in.” She explained, dramatizing the details of her regurgitation into Janey’s face, and Jigger threw back his head and laughed.

  “Anything else?” he asked when she finished.

  His arm tightened, her breath came quicker.

  “Brenda,” said Skey. “She’s a girl from my English class. Sunday afternoon, she came in during visitor’s hours, and we worked on an English project. She’s a cafeteria committee weirdo.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Jigger.

  The city slid by, distant as the music pouring from the radio—words about love, heat and eternity. Jigger steered the car into a deserted lot. “We’ve got ten minutes,” he said, turning off the ignition. “Give it to me, Skey. It’s been how many days? You freaked Friday...”

  She pressed against him with relief, gladness taking her as they sweated it out in the front seat. There were so many ways she could make him moan, prove that she loved him, she was his, she belonged completely to him. She had never even thought about doing it with anyone else. Afterward, she stroked his face, kissing and kissing him.

  “Do you love me, Skey?” he asked, his eyes close to hers.

  “You know I do,” she said, her heart clear, effortless and blue. Still, his eyes watched her the way a person watches the sky for signs of storm, danger, change.

  “School,” he said. “Hell’s bells, nine AM.”

  WHEN SKEY TURNED around in her homeroom desk, Lick flushed a deep tomato red and his eyes darted all over the room. Tenderness opened in her, she was so relieved to find him unhurt. No matter what happened, she was going to make absolutely sure Jigger never found out about Sunday afternoon.

  “Why’d you leave so fast?” she asked. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling. “I got your message after you left.”

  Lick’s lips parted and she watched his tongue flick across them. He began spinning his pen.

  “Stop,” said Skey, and grabbed the tip. As she did, the Bic grew suddenly warm, and the strongest, most incredible turn-on that she had ever felt passed through the pen from Lick to her. Or was it from her to Lick? Immediately they both pulled back, dropping the Bic, which rolled off the desk and onto the floor.

  “Hey, what’s with you two?” asked the pornographer across the aisle, halting his sketch.

  Quickly Skey turned around so that she faced the front of the room. In her pocket, the rock pulsed. Briefly the classroom disappeared and darkness surrounded her.

  “Don’t touch me,” said the boy, his breathi
ng harsh. “You just touched me.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Her words felt huge, thick as a heartbeat. “You’re imagining it.”

  “Don’t imagine touching me then,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  THE SMALL ROOM off the Counseling office lobby was starting to feel welcoming, a place she could walk into and find herself. It was a new self that waited for her here, tentative and shy like the sky of a watercolor painting, but it was a part of her that definitely wanted something. What that something was, Skey couldn’t yet define; she knew only that she had never wanted it before. Maybe that was what made these noon hour sessions with Tammy Nanji so difficult to figure out. Sitting down across from her tutor, Skey tucked in her legs and eyed the food that slid toward her. Rich with savory smells, it looked harmless, but Skey knew better.

  “That last one I ate gave me gas,” she said.

  Tammy’s face broken into a wide smile. “Beans,” she said.

  “I had reggae farts,” said Skey.

  “I figured you might,” said Tammy. “You have to get used to beans, so today I brought you one with hamburger.”

  “No beans?” Skey asked carefully.

  “I promise,” said Tammy.

  “Do you swear on your mother’s grave?” demanded Skey.

  “My mother made it,” said Tammy. “It’s bean clean.”

  Skey gave it a dubious glance, then lifted the meat pastry slowly to her mouth. As the smells closed in, her stomach opened into a loud roar and she ditched her concern, biting deep into the flaky crust, meat, vegetables and spices that made her head sing. Instantly the animal in her came alive, tearing its way through deliciousness until the pastry had been engulfed.

  “That was so good,” she mumbled. Staring down at her empty hands, she felt her eyes begin to water. Was she starting to cry? But why?

  “I thought you’d like it,” beamed Tammy. “In fact, I brought you another one.”

  “Two?” squeaked Skey. “But I’ll get fat.”