Chapter 11: Chapter 10

"Honestly, I don't really know. It's mostly a mystery to me too, even though I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff."

"I know you do."

Teddy and Jello were up in Teddy's room, Jello sprawled out on the bed and Teddy on the floor, leaning against his closet door. Byron wasn't with them, but if he were there, he'd be in the desk chair. These were their usual positions when they were at Teddy's.

"No. I mean a lot of time," Jello continued. "It's kind of an obsession."

"Kind of?"

Above Jello on the wall were two framed pictures, sketches that Neea had done of Teddy when he was nine or ten, roughly the age when he grew too impatient and self-conscious to pose for her anymore. Surrounding them was an assortment of posters and pictures and other odds and ends representing Teddy's taste for an intense industrial-sounding type of electronic music, certain very specific Japanese anime as well as a few games and movies he liked.

"But you know," Jello went on, "lately I think I'm starting to get a handle on it, starting to understand why I can talk to a girl and in ten minutes have her phone number..."

"Two minutes," Teddy corrected.

Jello grinned, "Yeah, that was pretty good. But, you know, why can I do that and you guys just flounder and fail pitifully?"

"Thanks a lot..."

"I know you guys have analyzed my technique trying to figure out if it's, you know, the way I look or my confidence or..."

"We never thought it was the way you look," interrupted Teddy.

"...my suaveness, the things I say or whatever. I really don't think you can understand it just by observing. I think the only way is for me to explain it to you in detail: what I do, how it works, all of it."

"Oh totally!" Teddy said, sitting up.

"You might not ever get to where I am, but you'd be so much further ahead."

"I know!"

"Uuuunfortunately, I can't do that."

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Yeah, sorry. In the wrong hands my methods could easily be used for nefarious purposes."

"Nefarious...? But I'm not... These are not the wrong hands!!"

"How can I be sure of that?"

"Uh, cuz you know me?"

"Hmm," Jello said warily, sitting back again. "If I tell you my method, you can do no harm with it. Understood?"

"Understood."

Jello narrowed his eyes and stared at Teddy for a few seconds before continuing. "OK, I'll tell you."

• • • •

Everyone's got their meth demons, you know?—facets of themselves that might stay well-hidden most of the time but come to the surface when they're geeking on meth. Jewels and P. L. argue, for instance. Bryn flirts—with guys, girls, passing motorists, dogs, you get the idea. Amiya is the only one among us who really wigs out. She gets paranoid. Such an imagination, that girl. We try to keep her calm, but it's also pretty funny sometimes.

Ty is more conventional. He talks. He lectures and pontificates. Ty thinks he's giving these brilliant speeches, like, the most amazing words anyone has ever spoken, and he doesn't even care if anyone listens. It's enough that the words have been uttered—their shimmering perfection will make them live on until the end of time. He doesn't seem to realize that it's just his meth mind that makes them sound like the words of a genius. To our meth minds it usually just sounds boring and obvious.

Kodi on meth is just even more Kodi. You wouldn't think it was possible because, in his unamped, normal state Kodi already seems more alive than everyone else, more wound up and angry, more wild and energized. He isn't about thinking, brooding, mulling things over like so many young guys. Kodi's all action and reaction, and a lot of it. When he's on meth though, multiply that by ten. It's kind of crazy. Whichever mood he's in, you get a storm of it. That can be exciting but it can also be pretty goddamn frightening at times. Being in a group of people who are calm compared to him helps to keep him from boiling over. Most of the time, anyway.

Me? What do I do? Do I freak out? Talk ninety miles an hour or get all sexy-like? No...

I draw on my shoes.

Yeah. I've been doodling for years. Since long before meth. My high school binders had more doodles in them than notes. But with meth I've taken it to a whole other level. It's just these little people drawn in blue and red ballpoint all over my shoes. Nothing fancy. I can't really draw worth a crap—they aren't much more than tiny stick figures—but do I manage to put my little shoe people into some interesting situations, doodle-wise. I can lose myself for hours and my shoes are pretty much completely covered.

And why my shoes? Um, cuz I don't have much else to draw on, and the only shoes I ever wear are white high-top Chucks—in other words, blank canvas. I get new ones pretty rarely, but every few months I'll wash them at Yvonne's place with some bleach so I can clear the way for the next generation of stick people.

Everyone teases me about it cuz it's pretty much textbook tweaking behaviour but whatever. It's my thing.

"You gacked, Ty?" Kodi asks.

"Gacked and twacked, Kode," answers Ty.

"Props to Switch. That's some epic shit," says P. L.

• • • •

Jello paused and took a deep breath. Teddy could easily imagine him like Gandalf, taking a long puff on a pipe and then letting the smoke out slowly, possibly throwing in some perfectly-formed smoke rings. Finally he spoke.

"Women... are not like us."

Teddy nodded. "So true."

"And understanding the difference, that's my mission in life."

With that, Jello began a detailed but rambling lecture on his theories about women—what they think, what they want, their secret fears and desires. It was pretty deep, and Teddy was impressed, astounded and a little horrified. It was easy to see why Jello, as smart as he was, could only pull average grades in school. He was obviously spending all his time thinking about girls!

Every time Teddy politely interrupted for clarification Jello cut him short, saying, "I'm getting to that," or, "that isn't important," or, worse, just holding up his hand as if to say "stop". Teddy listened carefully, genuinely hoping to learn something that would help him raise his game, but Jello was talking about psychology, suppressed memories from childhood, body language, sexual stereotypes, gender roles, introversion and extroversion, emotional triggers, and more.

How did he know all this stuff? It was an impressive amount of knowledge and insight, but Jello's ideas were so complicated, and he headed off on so many tangents to explain them, that Teddy felt more confused than ever. He was hoping for something he could actually use, one new trick or two, some foolproof techniques or killer icebreakers to make a girl instantly like him, but nada. Here he was finally being entrusted with the Secret Knowledge, imparted by the Master himself and, so far, he'd gotten nothing out of it!

Well, maybe not nothing. At one point Jello talked about how everyone has a certain amount of shyness, even if they seem confident. One of Jello's key techniques involved intentionally provoking this inner shyness in a girl—which, he said, goes hand-in-hand with the modesty that traditional society imposes on them—and then giving her what he called "a way out", a path around the shyness that would lead her to feel more empowered and at the same time more comfortable with him and his advances. His whole M.O. seemed to include this aspect of almost daring a girl to go out with him, and/or daring her not to, as if not giving him her phone number would mean caving in to both societal pressure and self-doubt. It might have been brilliant and, if that's what Jello was actually doing, it seemed to work extremely well, but Teddy still had no idea how he was supposed to put it to use.

And there was always the possibility that Jello was full of shit! Maybe he was way over-thinking things, getting all philosophical about this stuff when in reality girls just liked him cuz he had confidence and made them laugh. Could it be as simple as that? At about the 45-minute mark Teddy was thinking this was getting to be a lot like sitting through his Monday morning Stats class.

"She may want to forget something bad that happened," Jello was saying, now talking about suppressed memories. "The memory of it can disappear, but the emotions are still there, floating around in her subconscious, you know?"

Teddy nodded but he didn't really know. Or at least he didn't see what that could possibly have to do with making a girl like you.

"I'm not saying use those memories to toy with her emotions, I'm saying actually try to help. You probably don't know her past, and even if you did, you couldn't fix it. But you help her by giving her the hope that maybe you can make her future better, you know? Make her think that you could be a hero in her life."

"Wow."

"I know, right? Powerful stuff. And the beauty of it is that it works even if she doesn't have any painful memories. Girls still want a hero."

"But..." Teddy still had way too many questions about the practicalities of Jello's secret technique.

"But what? Oh, you're wondering about the follow-up. How do you actually be the hero for her? That's easy. You just have to be awesome, which is what you were gonna do anyway, right? I mean, there's no point to any of this if you don't follow through. Treat her like she's the most perfect woman who ever walked the earth, because she is, damn it."

"Who is?"

"Whoever she is, bro! Come on, stay with me!"

"No, I get it! I just thought you were talking about someone in particular..."

"Never mind. I can see that I've filled your little brain with as much as it can handle for one day. Before I tell you more, you have to go out there and put some of this into practice. Report back and we'll see if you're ready for the next level."

"I'm ready now! I can..."

"Class dismissed!"

• • • •

We've wandered back from the print shop to The Couch, which is one of our hangouts. It's down by the harbour, in behind an abandoned building. Even though it's right smack downtown, people never come back here. It faces the water, away from the street, so it's pretty private. We have to crawl under a fence to get to it, but that's fine. Oh, and it's called The Couch because someone dumped an old couch there, of course.

I'm not sitting on the couch itself, which always feels a little damp and gross even though it's generally protected from the rain by this rusty steel awning hanging above. I'm on a piece of cardboard next to the couch and I'm feverishly working on a slightly evil playground for some of my younger shoe beings that has evolved on my right inside ankle area. The twisty slide and the fiendishly complicated monkey bars are giving some of the shoe kids real problems—there may be casualties—but most of them are just happy as hell to have a slide and monkey bars to play on. The shoe folk have simple needs.

As I draw, Jewels and P. L. have started in. They think they're having a deep conversation but, to my ears, it's just their usual mindless arguing. They generally argue about things that no one who isn't tripping would ever care about for more than half a second, or they argue about interesting things, but in a totally uninteresting way. Today the subject is time travel and the rest of us are feeling like we've gone back in time because they've covered this same ground a lot, in excruciating detail.

"How can you go back to stuff that already happened? It doesn't even make sense!" says Jewels.

P. L. barely lets him finish, "Cuz the fact that it so-called 'already happened' is only because you see it that way. It's only humans that think of everything happening in this, like, weird, specific order."

P. L. employed actual air quotes when he said "already happened," but it doesn't help what seems to me like a pretty weak argument.

"What?" Jewels says. "Plants! Plants start out small, get bigger and die, so does every animal. It isn't just humans, duh. It's everything! You don't know what you're talking about! And what about the seasons, huh? Or the Sun going around the Earth..."

This time it's Jewels working against his own cause—a solid argument largely erased by a factual error.

"The Sun going around the Earth?" says P. L. "That's how much you know..."

"Shut up. I meant the Sun going around the Earth..." Jewels attempts to correct himself. "Are you saying those things only happen in that order cuz that's how it looks to humans? What about the entire goddamn Universe, huh? Heard of the Big Bang? That had to happen first, genius."

"Maybe it didn't! Maybe the Universe is really shrinking and the Big Bang is really in the future and it's actually going to be, like, the Big Smash?"

Jewels laughs and so do a few more of us. At least the guys are entertaining.

P. L.—it stands for "Punk Lives" which is tattooed on his right forearm—is seventeen and from Lethbridge, in Alberta. He's been on the street for a couple of years but he's managed to educate himself fairly well, always having an answer whenever anyone poses a Google-type question, and a surprising amount of the time he's right. He's also been known to steal science magazines and then actually read them, which means Jewels is probably a little overmatched right now.

Jewels looks a bit like a young Mick Jagger—well, a young Mick crossed with a frightened lemur. He's American, born in eastern Washington, in Spokane, the last syllable of which rhymes with "ran" and not "rain". He will ridicule you no end if you get this wrong. Jewels is twenty and kinda has a crush on me. He'd never do anything about it cuz he idolizes Kodi, but yeah, he does.

I look over at Kodi and he's just kicking back on the couch, smiling at the guys' conversation and ignoring Bryn, who's moving closer to him and probably about to start in with her cat-in-heat routine.

"The Big Smash!" says Jewels. "That's so stupid. How can an explosion happen in reverse, dumbass? It's impossible."

"It's not impossible. It's called IMplosion, fucktard. Look it up," says P. L.

"Inplosion? You're serious? That's like UNfarting or something, like your butt sucking in a fart."

"No it isn't! It's a real thing. You're such an idiot."

"OK then," says Jewels. "It's like shoving shit up your ass and then your stomach making it into a sandwich."

Everyone laughs at that one except P. L. Yes, even me. I'm not proud.

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