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  Not Diane Kruisselbrink, she wanted to whisper. I can’t. I won’t.

  Seated in his armchair throne, Willis remained as silent as she did.

  “Victim dismissed,” smirked Linda.

  Standing in the cold drafty gym, Sal waited as Ms. Simms took a quick attendance. Then, as the teacher bent to pick up a volleyball, she slipped out of the cluster of girls and through the door that led into the locker room. Pulling the slip of paper with Diane Kruisselbrink’s locker combination from her pocket, she headed for the wall next to the showers. Diane’s locker stood seven from the end. Ten minutes earlier Sal had watched, carefully counting and recounting locker doors as the huge soft-gasping girl had bent to pull on her gym shorts and tie her running shoes. Now it took three spins of the dial, and the lock clicked in her hand. The locker rasped startlingly loud in the empty room as it opened to reveal the hidden contents of one girl’s life: a rank pile of crumpled polyester underwear, a pair of street shoes worn severely on the instep, a huge pair of jeans, and a white blouse — nothing extraordinary but private nonetheless, almost holy, as if the locker contained a sad tenderness that couldn’t be carried into the actual activities of living.

  There really was quite a stench. Quickly, Sal pulled out two pairs of stretched, stained underwear and stuffed them into her binder. Easing the locker shut, she leaned her body around the lock to muffle the click as it closed. Even so, the sound ricocheted through her like a bowling ball. Her heart kept taking runs up her throat. Guilt crawled out of her palms. She felt a terrible urgency to wash and rewash her hands.

  She came out of the locker room into a hall that stretched into a long begging loneliness. Walls loomed, every brick in place, every other student in class — only she stood outside the perimeters of life as it was supposed to be. Walking quickly down the north hall, she progressed along a row of endless locker doors. Quiet and unassuming, #772 appeared on her right, without any insignia of shame or self-loathing to identify its current occupant. Slowly, Sal pulled the first pair of underwear from her binder. Even in the drafty hallway, there was an immediate reek. Diane Kruisselbrink obviously didn’t invest much in personal hygiene. She certainly never showered after gym.

  Also inside Sal’s binder was the tube of Krazy Glue that Rolf had handed her as she’d left the Celts’ clubroom. Holding a panty seam to the left side of Diane’s locker, Sal squirted Krazy Glue under it and pressed firmly. One of her fingers stuck and she panicked, visualizing herself eternally glued to locker #772 as an expressionless Diane Kruisselbrink trudged remorselessly toward her. Then her finger pulled free, minus a small patch of skin, and she carefully glued the panty’s other seam to the opposite side of the locker. Stepping back, she tugged once to make sure the gotch was hanging securely in place before taking off pell-mell for the west hall and Myra Hurgett’s locker.

  When she slipped back into class, Ms. Simms was on the phone in the office, the girls running laps around the gym. The tube of Krazy Glue had been ditched in a nearby washroom garbage pail, and no one seemed to have noticed her leave or return. In fact, the only evidence that anything out of the ordinary had taken place was the tiny patch of missing skin on her left index finger.

  Were you real if nobody noticed you?

  Tucking her wounded finger into her palm, Sal waited as a drawn-faced Diane Kruisselbrink puffed past, then joined the line of girls twenty on down.

  After class she changed quickly, one eye fixed on the row of lockers by the shower door. Diane didn’t undress in front of everyone else, retreating instead to the privacy of a toilet stall, but when she returned, Sal watched her hang up her t-shirt and gym shorts, then drop one pair of used underwear into the bottom of her locker.

  Drawn by a magnet of guilt, Sal slid into the small slipstream Diane carried in her wake as she left the gym. The usual comments followed the girl as she headed down the hall: Hey Tubbo, wanna come talk dirty to my pet elephant? Why don’t you try out for the Saskatchewan Roughriders — you could be their practice field. Diane was a monument slipping through the masses, tall, silent, and obdurate as the Statue of Liberty. Turning into the north hall, she shuffled unsuspectingly toward her locker, her eyes lifting from the floor only as she encountered the packed throng of bodies around #772. As the crowd parted to let her through, Diane’s gaze didn’t rise above their knees — no doubt the faces around her were rarely worth looking into. Shifting her books to her left arm, she reached for her lock, her eyes finally settling on the stained panty crotch that dangled just above it.

  A ripple crossed her face, nothing more. Blinking twice she turned, stumbling over someone’s foot. The jeers began, the crowd fencing her in, Diane staring without expression at their vicious yapping mouths. She couldn’t hear them, Sal realized suddenly. Somewhere inside herself, Diane had found the switch that cut off the torment of sound entering her brain. The world had been disconnected, and the faces that surrounded her sneered and leered without meaning.

  Twice she lumbered forward and was pressed back. The third time her face lifted, but the only change in her expression was a slight corner tuck of the mouth as her arms shoved out. Bodies went flying. Diane stepped through the gap and made her slow painstaking way down the hall.

  “You’re a monster,” someone yelled after her silently retreating figure. “A genetic defect. They should exterminate fat cells like you.”

  Diane didn’t look back.

  Chapter Twelve

  Headed along the north corridor toward the bike racks, Sal kept her eyes down, counting feet. One, two, who are you? Three, four, think some more. As she passed each classroom she stiffened, her body braced against the possibility of Diane Kruisselbrink’s sudden emergence from an open doorway. Everything around her — the floor, walls, especially the doorways — radiated with the guilt that had been building through her last class. Five, six, you’re derelict. Seven, eight ...

  One open doorway from the end of the hall, Sal looked in and saw her. Alone in a classroom, Tauni Morrison sat with her back to Sal, facing the chalkboard. Books lay open on her desk. She’d obviously been kept in to catch up on her work. Instead, she was staring out of the classroom’s row of windows, watching the wind tear long streams of yellow from the trees.

  She was singing. As Sal huddled in the open doorway at the back of the room, low wordless notes unfolded in Tauni’s throat and floated from her mouth, directionless as the leaves that blew past the windows. Pressed against the doorframe, Sal listened open-mouthed to the sound drifting from the solitary girl — it was the voice that had come to her after her father’s death, the low blue voice of dreams and daydreams that had touched her when she’d reached the end of things, giving her what she needed to continue on.

  How could the same voice come to them both? Why did it sing so completely through Tauni Morrison and not through her? Creeping into a back-row desk, Sal hugged her clarinet case to her chest and watched the other girl sing. Tauni’s eyes were closed, her face and body shifted with each note like a gauze curtain on a breeze. Closing her own eyes, Sal entered the same beauty, the voice that knew everything — every small, hidden, twisted shame — the voice that knew, yet returned time and time again to bless with wonder, its slow deep waves of peace.

  Abruptly, Tauni stopped singing. The sound left her and she opened her eyes, staring around herself as if the classroom and its meaning were utterly incomprehensible. With a sigh, she laid her head on her arms and turned her face to the windows, taking no notice of the notebooks and pens, the copy of Nobody Nowhere she’d knocked to the floor. Huddled at the back of the room, Sal wondered if Tauni could still hear the blue voice in her head, or if it had just vanished into the silent depths as it did when it left her.

  She wanted to lean forward and ask, Did you hear me coming down the hall? Do you know what I did to Diane Kruisselbrink this afternoon, the stinking ugliness I carry inside? Were you singing for me?

  But Tauni Morrison freaked at the slightest sound or touch, and Sal’s v
oice, after such beauty, could only bring more ugliness into the world. Slipping from the room, Sal left the girl staring, silent and listless, at her own loneliness.

  That evening she sat on her bed, cigarette papers wrapped over her bottom front teeth, descending note by note into the clarinet’s sound. She’d been practicing for over an hour, had gone over the basic scales and warm-up drills, then plodded through most of her Concert Band pieces, but it had been nothing more than going through the motions, obediently following a line of black specks across a page. Scales just didn’t do it for her and neither did the third clarinet’s part to Chopin’s Étude — no inner doors of wonder opened, she was left floating at the surface of herself like a scrap of driftwood. Now she was trying to do what Tauni Morrison had done, sending herself into sound note by note, making small slides and climbing minor intervals, calling to the deep blue voice with her miserable squawking melodies, the only sound she had.

  But it wasn’t happening. Sal’s head ached, white static filled her brain, and Diane Kruisselbrink’s face kept flashing in front of her — the complete lack of expression like a no-man’s-land and then those arms lashing out, solid with determination and strength. Diane had fought back, had pushed her way through a wall of contempt and walked away. She might have been targeted, but she wasn’t a victim. Anyone who thought Shadow Council had won that afternoon’s encounter at locker #772 was an utter fool.

  It probably didn’t look that way to Diane though. Sure, she’d experienced a moment of bitter triumph, but what about tomorrow? The janitors would remove the offending underwear, but no one could eliminate the smirks and sneers in a school full of eyes. Diane would never live this one down, not if she lost a hundred pounds, and Sal had been the one who’d done it to her — she’d taken the handful of salt Shadow Council had given her and rubbed it directly into Diane’s gaping wound. She was now an inextricable part of Shadow, a direct accomplice to their malice and filth. No wonder the blue voice didn’t touch her the way it touched Tauni Morrison — she was contaminated. The voice had far more deserving souls to visit.

  Moaning, Sal bent forward on the bed. This time she could feel it coming — the swerving darkness, the arcing headlights, the screaming. And she also knew what would follow next. It was so awful, why didn’t someone stop it for her, why didn’t the blue voice sing it all away? Dropping the clarinet onto the bed, Sal raced into the hall and down the stairs to the first floor, her mother’s closed office door an eyeblink, there and gone.

  “Sal!”

  She ignored Dusty’s call as she stumbled down the basement stairs, gripping the bannister to keep herself from going into a swerve — that was where the memory began, where it caught and locked her in. Flicking on the lava lamp, she headed for the stereo. What she needed was headphones, The Wall Live pumped to catastrophic glory, bigger than anything that could come at her. Volume jammed to full, she dived into the oblivion of crashing guitar chords. The headphones vibrated against her head, kicking noticeably with the bass line. This was good, waves of sound were flattening her brain, nothing would be able to get through. But there it came again, the sound of screaming, the eight-year-old girl’s voice. Shaking, Sal reached for the stereo. Pump up The Wall Live, pump it up. But it was already on full and the eight-year-old’s voice was growing stronger, the scream shaping itself into words: I hate you, I hate you.

  No, thought Sal, pushing helplessly against the volume control. No.

  A hand came down on hers, flicking off the stereo. For a moment, a chasm of silence engulfed her brain. Then she felt Dusty’s hands take her face, his voice saying, “Sal, look at me. Can you hear me? It’s Dusty.”

  She couldn’t pull out of it, the process was inevitable, nothing could change history. As the room darkened into memory and the car went into its swerve, Sal knew she couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to watch her father’s head hit the windshield yet again. What she needed was a bigger force to dull the impact and absorb the shock. She needed The Wall Live to smash, crush and annihilate memory, but there was Dusty standing between her and the stereo, holding the headphones. Desperation sent her lunging at him, shoving the way Diane Kruisselbrink had shoved her tormenters that afternoon in the school corridor. Ditching the headphones, Dusty tackled her and the two of them went down on the floor, Sal kicking and screaming as memory went off in her head with nothing to block it, nothing to prevent the full horror from opening up, that long-ago moment when her world had shattered to absolute smithereens.

  She went limp, Dusty rolled off her and they lay on their backs, gasping at the orange shag ceiling.

  “What’s wrong?” Dusty panted miserably. “Sally-Sis, just tell me what’s wrong.”

  But she couldn’t. He wasn’t the blue voice, he wouldn’t love her when he heard what she’d done. Besides, he already knew that she’d been in the front seat when their father had crashed the family car into the tree. He’d seen the closed coffin at the funeral and read the coroner’s report.

  “Fuck off,” she said, struggling to her feet. “Just fuck the hell off and leave me alone.”

  She woke to a tumultuous rain, wind sweeping the house, the roof a drenched, pounded shell. Beyond her bedroom window, Tuesday morning was a smear of colors, one ache dribbling into the next. She was cold. Why hadn’t her mother turned up the heat last night? Muttering her way to her closet, Sal pulled on her housecoat and shuffled grumpily down the hall.

  “Good, you’re up,” said her mother, coming out of the washroom. “If you’re ready in twenty minutes, I can give you a ride to school.”

  “For eight o’clock?”

  “It’s Tuesday. Don’t you have band practice?”

  “Oh yeah.” Too many aches had run together, she was beginning to lose track of the basics.

  “I’ll pack you a breakfast to eat in the car,” said her mother. “C’mon now — skedaddle.”

  She skedaddled through her hair and face, avoiding her eyes in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. It was with her constantly now, a pale sick feeling that clung like a half-peeled skin. Washing didn’t do anything, and getting her sugar high or flying the streets on her bike was nothing but a temporary fix. The sick feeling had attached to her like a phantom understanding, the kind that told her things about people she didn’t want to know.

  “For Pete’s sake, go back into the house and get an umbrella!” hollered Ms. Hanson as Sal ducked, soaked to the skin, into the passenger seat.

  “I’m already wet.” Sal set her clarinet case on the floor and accepted the muffin her mother handed her.

  “But you have to walk home.”

  “This isn’t Noah and the ark, Mom. I’ll survive.”

  With a long involved sigh, her mother put the car into gear and backed down the driveway. The hood thrummed with rain. Everywhere Sal looked, water poured in long, blurred streams, the outside world putting in a brief appearance with each swipe of the windshield wipers. Settling into the damp give of her clothes, Sal worked her way through the oatmeal muffin, tunneling her tongue into the coarse grainy texture, chasing the sweet burst of each raisin. For the moment she was safe and out of reach, the car a blurred cave of sound, her whole being focused on the smaller cave of her mouth. Thank god her mother leapt out of bed at the crack of dawn and always remembered to feed her morning-challenged offspring.

  “Don’t forget your orange juice,” said her mother.

  “Thanks.” After the muffin, the juice went down in sharp bitter gulps. Suddenly Sal cried out, doubling over as pain engulfed her stomach.

  “What’s the matter?” her mother gasped.

  “It hurts,” Sal whimpered, clutching her stomach. “When I eat.”

  “Did the muffin hurt?”

  “Not as much.”

  “You could be getting an ulcer,” said her mother grimly. “It’s because of all that junk food you eat. I’m booking you an appointment with Dr. Rajani.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll stop drinking orange juice.” Hugging her st
omach, Sal slouched lower in her seat. She hated doctors — they had an unnatural fetish for orifices, always wanting to poke around where no one else wanted to go.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” snapped her mother. “You need your Vitamin C.”

  “Or my teeth will fall out and I’ll get scurvy,” finished Sal. “Isn’t that what happened to Vasco de Gama?”

  “Before my time,” said her mother.

  “Scurvy finished him,” Sal said bleakly, watching water funnel down the side window.

  Her mother chuckled. “Well, scurvy isn’t finishing you off. I can probably get you in to see Dr. Rajani after school. I’ll leave a message with the school office.”

  “He won’t want to check my gall bladder or give me a hysterectomy, will he?”

  “He’ll probably prescribe something for you to drink,” her mother said comfortingly. “Here’s another muffin.” Pulling over to the curb, she set a paper bag in Sal’s lap. “And take my umbrella — the forecast is predicting rain all day.”

  “But what about you? You’re wearing makeup.” Sal stared stupidly at the umbrella her mother was holding out to her. “And you curled your hair.”

  “Take the umbrella,” repeated her mother, tapping the wheel. “You’re already sniffing. I don’t want you home missing school because you’re sick.”

  Hurt flared, a whiplash burn. “Of course,” Sal snapped, grabbing the umbrella and her clarinet case. “We can’t have S.C.’s best student missing a single day of school, can we?”

  Closed umbrella in hand, she plunged into the downpour and slammed the door. Just ahead of her mother’s car idled a van, its side door open. A woman stood on the curb holding an umbrella, waiting to hand it to the boy who was swinging himself from the van’s back seat into a wheelchair.

  “Sally Hanson!” cried Ms. Wallace. “Is that you or a drowned rat?”

  Brydan appeared in the van doorway, panic trapping his face as he caught sight of Sal.