Chapter 16: Chapter 15

Teddy hadn't seen C. J. since meeting her on the bus the previous week. He'd gone back to the big bulletin board to find the Robotics Club sign and checked the email address at the bottom of the sign, but it was for someone named A. Leung—clearly not C. J.—so he hadn't sent an email. She hadn't been on the bus, but he figured she must be staying at her mother's for the week, which was in the opposite direction from campus. He was starting to wonder if he'd ever cross paths with her again when she popped up right beside him in the hall one afternoon after his Comp Sci class.

"Teddy what?" she said.

"Huh?"

"Your last name? It's for the club. I added you but I need your last name. Should probably get your contact info too. For the club."

"Oh, uh, Aiken. A-I-K-E-N."

"Aiken, got it," she said, entering it into her phone contacts. "Here," she said, handing him her phone. "Your digits and email. I don't need your home address unless you want me to stalk you."

It was Friday afternoon and the volume of students at Songhees was thinning, many having started their weekends early. Did she mention stalking because she'd seen him walking past her house on that rainy day? He tapped his email address and phone number into C. J.'s phone. They came out of a corridor into the high-ceilinged atrium of Ogden Hall, the building that housed much of the Science Faculty at Songhees. There were six trees in the atrium in raised-up planters that made the air smell fresh and the benches around the planters were some of the better bad-weather lunch spots on campus.

"I haven't seen you on the bus," Teddy said.

"Cuz I've been driving here in my Bugatti," she said.

"Not because you've been staying at your mom's this week?"

"Whatever," said C. J. "So will you come out to our club meetings? They're pretty great and there's always a really awesome selection of junk food. There was supposed to be a meeting next week but three people can't make it so we'll have to wait until the following week. Are you free the following week? Well not, like, all the following week—I mean the Wednesday night? Can you wait that long to see me again? Probably not, right? Maybe you want to meet for a coffee or something before then so you don't miss me too much?"

"Uh.." said Teddy.

"I know. I can be a little overwhelming," she said. "Sorry."

"Um, I can probably make it on that Wednesday," said Teddy.

"Fantastico!" said C. J. "'K, I gotta go but I'll be in touch!"

Teddy gave her a wave as she dashed off. He tried not to grin like an idiot as he headed toward his last class of the day.

• • • •

"You should get these kale chips," I say to Neea. "They have kale in them."

"Look at the price," Neea says. "People are crazy to pay that much for kale chips when it's so easy to make your own!"

"Oh my god," I say, pushing the shopping cart behind her. "You've made kale chips."

"A few times. Teddy doesn't really like them."

"No surprise," I say.

Neea puts a jar of that heinous organic peanut butter into the cart, the kind with a nasty pool of oil on top that you're supposed to somehow mix into the petrified mass of ground up peanut below. I look longingly at the brand with the bears on the label and the tons of sugar and salt inside. Spread that on a cracker... as good as it gets if you ask me. And when you take a nice glump of the junky stuff and squash it between two crackers you get those little worms of peanut butter squirming up through the cracker holes. No way Neea's brand is gonna do that. I rest my case.

Neea hands me her list and I go off to find a few things. Some earth-friendly dish soap, a pound of butter, sour cream and a tub of Balkan-style yogurt. When I find her again and dump my stuff in the cart she's on her phone and she sounds a little concerned.

"It's OK," Neea's saying. "Do you mean just tonight, or...?"

I could see a look of disappointment on her face. "I understand," she said. "It was too much to ask of you anyway."

Neea's voice flutters a bit as if she's about to cry. "No, it was. And it's completely fine. You're right. You don't want to put your business at risk... OK... yes, OK... I'll talk to you later... Bye."

She turns to me. "Traci isn't going to come over and help anymore. Donnie said it was taking too much of her time and she needs to focus on her business."

"Her... dog pillow business," I say, doubtfully.

My guess is that Neea feels the way I do about the prospects for Traci's business though she'd never say so. "Pillow-Pups by Traci" sells pillows with hand-painted pictures of dogs on them. Dog owners spend a ton of money on dog-related stuff, Traci assures us, though she seems to have a hard time selling her Pillow-Pups. The paintings are realistic enough—I sure as hell couldn't do them—but the pillows overall are a little horrifying. Though I've been known to carry on conversations with it, the one in Neea's basement isn't something most sane people would have in their houses. It's a squashed-nose, bug-eyed little grey and white guy who probably has nasal problems and drools all over the furniture. And I know this is really mean of me, but the fact that people don't buy Traci's ugly dog pillows kind of makes me feel better about humanity.

With Traci's mania for all things dog I assumed she had a fur buddy or two of her own, but no, Neea told me that Traci actually hasn't owned a dog since she was a kid. Apparently, she's super-allergic to dogs and being near them sends her into long, snotty, runny-eyed fits of sneezing. Supposedly even the hypoallergenic ones somehow set her off. She can't be around dogs long enough to take the photos she uses for her pillow paintings so instead she has her clients send the pics in an email. She does those dog paintings for money, yes, but it's mostly to satisfy her sad and unfulfilled need for canine companionship. It's so tragic!

But the pillow business is probably not the issue. Most likely Traci just doesn't want to put up with my meth-withdrawal bullshit any longer and I totally can't blame her for that. I've been awful to the poor woman. I feel like I'm coming out the other side of that phase, but that doesn't mean that I won't still be a little annoyed by Traci and her dog-centric views on the world. Probably just who I am, but I make a mental note to apologize to her at some point.

Whatever her reasons, Traci is definitely under no obligation to help out with my sorry situation, so it's no hard feelings from me but Neea, however, seems quite sad about it.

We stand there quietly while the dude rings up our groceries. Neea pays and we carry the bags out to the car. "You OK?" I ask her finally on the drive home.

"Yes," she says, then, after a pause, "No?... I don't know. I think it's fine, right? It should be fine."

I turn and look out the window at the row of small shops we're passing and I'm thinking about the people inside selling whatever they can, running their businesses to try and earn enough money to feed their kids, pay their rent and maybe save a little. You go, Traci. Sell those Pillow-Pups. Do what you have to do.

"Yeah," I say. "It'll be fine."

We stay quiet for the rest of the ride home. It isn't awkward, but it's a little unusual not to have the silence broken by Neea's usual cheerful chatter. When we pull up in front of the house and get out of the car, Mrs. Hammond comes down her front walk carrying a plate. Has she been standing by the door waiting for us to come back? Her overweight dog Bigley slowly follows as she crosses the street toward us.

"I baked too many ginger snaps," she says, holding the plate out with a smile. It's piled with sugary brown cookies. Bigley is looking up longingly at the plate.

"Oh, that's so nice of you, Mrs. Hammond," says Neea. "They look so good!"

Neea thanks Mrs. Hammond profusely and assures her we'll bring the plate back later. I'm holding the cookies in one hand and a couple bags of groceries in the other as Neea unlocks the front door and my nose fills with the thick smell of ginger and molasses. I'm a fan of ginger snaps and lately I've been having mad cravings for cookies and sweets, so right now old Mrs. Hammond is a goddess in my book.

"Let's make some tea to go with those," says Neea cheerfully. I plunk the cookies down on the table while Neea fills up the kettle.

"You seem better today," Neea says. "Don't you think?"

I just shrug. I mean, she's right, I am clearly better today than I have generally been, but I'm not better enough to admit to anyone that I'm better. One step at a time. Starting in on a nice snappy ginger snap I'm thinking that I really should enjoy this peaceful mood while it lasts. I can never tell when the next episode of irritability and anger will hit. When they really take hold, it's like firecrackers of barely-provoked frustration, one setting off others in an explosive chain. For a while I would just roll with those moods, not even realizing that I could do anything about them, but lately I'm at least trying to examine the causes, maybe understand what's going on in my agitated little brain so I can try to resist it.

As we sip our Darjeeling and munch on cookies I notice that Neea is putting up her usual brave face while secretly feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. Now that she won't be getting help from Traci I'm pretty sure she's feeling like dealing with all this is just too much for her and it's only a matter of time before she starts bugging me again about going to a rehab centre. Actually, maybe she doesn't really care if I go to rehab or not, maybe she'd just prefer if I wasn't here. Maybe she's having second thoughts about it all. If I was her I would be. If I was her I definitely wouldn't want me here. It crosses my mind again how quickly I could be gone.

I ran away from home once. It was in sixth grade, just before we moved across the river from North Kamloops to Upper Sahali, a move that represented success for my parents, a major upgrade in the quality of not only our house but the people around us too as far as they were concerned. No more Hickory Road with its noisy pickup trucks, wheels as tall as me, and loose gatherings of unemployed men drinking beer all afternoon on their front lawns. We'd be living on scenic Valleyview Drive in a nearly-new, quality-built home on a quiet street where people had the decency to drink in their backyards, for god's sake.

For Geoffrey and Pat it was a dream come true but for me it meant leaving every one of my refuges, the secret places I'd disappear to whenever my mother got to be too much for me. One of those was the camper that Kerrilynn Hubner's family kept in their yard but never used. We weren't supposed to, but Kerrilynn and I would often sneak back there, getting the key from the magnetic box under the hitch then staying in the camper for hours, talking about how cool we were going to be when we got older. Kerrilynn was going to have her own magazine, called Flash, and I was going to be a lawyer helping people who'd been victimized.

So while my parents and brothers were distracted with packing boxes for the move, I snuck out of the house. My general plan was to live secretly in Kerrilynn's camper until I was old enough to go to law school. To see me through until then I brought two Series of Unfortunate Events books, a colouring book and a bunch of markers, some granola bars, part of a loaf of bread, two cans of tuna and a bag of sour gummy worms.

It turned out to be more than enough. I only managed to get through four chapters of The Ersatz Elevator and maybe a quarter of the bag of gummy worms when Mr. Hubner started pounding on the camper door like a complete maniac and yelling at me to open up. My parents had phoned the Hubners asking if I was there and when her dad questioned Kerrilynn, my accomplice had folded like the proverbial cheap tent.

But now Neea doesn't talk about going to a rehab centre. Instead, she talks about Thanksgiving.

"It's this weekend," she says. "It really snuck up on us this year with all that's going on. Would you normally go and spend it with your family in Kamloops?"

"Um, not sure what normal even is these days," I say. "But yeah, maybe. Probably Kevin and Danielle's place. My mother doesn't really do the big family dinners anymore, and even when she did, they just became horror shows."

"Kevin is your brother, yes?" says Neea.

"Yup, the middle kid. Mom's favourite."

"How were your family dinners horror shows?" Neea asks. I can tell she wants to understand how my mother's craziness contributed to making me the upstanding citizen I am today.

"Hm, OK," I say, a little reluctantly. How to explain it?

"You know all those moments you remember as a kid," I start off. "The ones that made you happiest, the ones that you think of when you think of 'home' and 'family'? Well, Pat tends to use those exact moments against you. It's a way to compensate for her own feelings of not being good enough, I guess. If she can knock you down then she can build herself up. She didn't do that with Kevin, cuz he was the Golden Child. If Kevin was awesome, that meant that Pat must be awesome because she created him, but for some reason the same logic never applied to Dan and me. Maybe we have too much of our dad in us. We had to be kept down so she could be the star. We could never please her. We were never good enough at anything, and everything we did was wrong. Still is.

"It's still true for Dan and, maybe cuz I'm a girl, even more so for me. She'd make me help her cook those dinners—never my brothers, just me—and then blame me for everything that didn't turn out. She wasn't a bad cook but big meals like that stressed her out so things didn't always go as planned. Whatever went wrong, though, was my fault. She'd say it in a way that didn't sound quite that bad, like, wink, 'Darwin helped with dinner', to explain how the turkey was dry or the gravy had too much salt.

"And, somehow, while I was helping her make dinner, I was also supposed to get myself dressed up. I had to look my best. Well, not my best. I had to look the way she wanted me to look, which was primped up like a prize chicken. Before I was finally old enough to say no, she'd have outfits picked out for me to wear and I'd have to do my hair up the way she wanted. I never did it right though, so she'd offhandedly mention how I'd bungled the hair-do and looked like a... I don't know, homeless kid..."

I realize how stupid this must be sounding. "I know, it sounds like I'm just whining. Every childhood has its ups and downs, right? I should just get over it..."

"No!" says Neea quickly. "That isn't normal. A parent always lets their children know they love and support them no matter what. You encourage them, not make them feel bad like that. What your mother did wasn't right, and you shouldn't be ashamed that it hurt you!"

I just frown and look at the tea in my cup. I feel tears coming on and I'd rather not cry. Neea reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, but she doesn't say anything more.

Would you think after I ran away to Kerrilynn Hubner's camper that my mother would ask me why I did it? Maybe try to find out what was bothering me? Not a chance. Instead, she was just pissed that I had embarrassed her yet again, and that I could be so ungrateful for everything she had given me.

Neea breaks the silence.

"Well, we'll be sure to avoid any horror shows this weekend then! Teddy's going to his dad's so it's just the two of us. We can ignore the whole thing, or we can have a nice quiet dinner here. Maybe we can invite Traci and Donnie!"

"Please tell me you're kidding," I say.

She laughs. "OK, maybe we should just go out for dinner. Just us. How would that be?"

I smile and nod. That sounds way better.

• • • •

Teddy gathered things for the weekend and put them on his bed next to the open suitcase: pair of jeans, hoodie, some t-shirts, dress pants and dress shirt for Thanksgiving dinner, underwear and socks, deodorant and toothbrush, power cable for laptop... what else? Headphones! God, he'd need those. He couldn't imagine going on a ferry, or even being at his dad's, without a way to block everything out and get lost in his music.

Neea came in. "How's the packing coming along?" she asked.

"Fine," he said quietly.

"Oh, don't be so sad about going. You'll have a good time," she said.

"Hmm," said Teddy, then added, "You're going to be okay here, right?"

"Of course! We'll be fine. Darwin is over the worst of it now, I think."

"Won't be much of a Thanksgiving for you," Teddy said.

"No, it'll be just a normal weekend for us," Neea said. "I couldn't have Thanksgiving without you! We can have a late Thanksgiving dinner when you get back, how would that be?"

"Sounds good," he said, and managed a smile as his mother left him to finish packing.

He'd been thinking about calling C. J. He really wanted to talk to her and maybe go out for coffee like she said, but he was worried about coming across as too eager. Plus, she said she'd be in touch so probably better to wait.

What was going to happen with her? It would be so good to start off college with a new girlfriend. His last girlfriend was Naomi and that ended more than a year ago. It had never been all that great with Naomi anyway. They didn't have much in common, disagreed about a lot of things and they only had sex a total of four times.

The first time with Naomi was Teddy's first time with anyone, and it was only her second. It happened at her house while her parents were out at a movie. Though his expectations were high, once they actually started his initial excitement wore off quickly and then it was just awkward and embarrassing because neither of them knew what they were doing. It was so bad that he was actually surprised to find that she was still interested in him afterward. Given a second chance, he'd been sure the next time would be better but it was just as bad. In fact, each time with Naomi was uncomfortable and weird. Teddy had started to wonder if that's just how it was, if sex was actually way less passionate and satisfying—way less sexy—than he'd imagined it would be.

When they broke up by text message halfway through their senior high school year it was the least awkward thing they'd ever done. Almost immediately Naomi started dating a college guy named Keaton who made electronic music and drove a scooter. Teddy didn't even care.

After a while though, he did care. It seemed like his mind began to twist and distort the truth and he found himself wondering what he could have done differently to have made Naomi like him more. He spent weeks anguishing over the little details of their time together, thinking about calling her a dozen times a day and writing texts that he never sent. Two months would pass before he snapped out of it, remembering that he had never really liked her much in the first place! How had he lost sight of that fact? Something about Naomi seemed to mess with his head.

Girls do that to you, he thought. He stuffed the last of his things into the suitcase and zipped it close.

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— D.B.