May 2017
No matter how devout you are, Sunday service is never fun.
Trust me, I’d been the pastor’s grandchild and the mayor’s daughter for long enough to know what I was talking about. I’d tried counting backward from one million, naming every important figure in the Bible in order of the gravity of their sins, conjugating French and Latin verbs until my eyes crossed. Anything, however tedious, was better than listening to my grandpa read yet another passage from the Bible.
I had tried for years to be pious, good and strong in the face of all the evils Christians believed to walk the earth and tempt the weak. I had tried and I had succeeded so well, I was a kind of paragon of virtue in Entrance, BC, an example that mothers used to teach their little girls how to grow up right, the ideal wife for young men who stayed true to the path of righteousness. Louise Lafayette was a pillar of the community just as her mother and father were, just as her grandparents had been.
All that goodness, all that trying so hard and how did God repay me?
With cancer. Again.
I’d lived through an entire two-year period in my childhood with it running hot and corrosive through my blood and yet, now that it was back, I still wasn’t used to the taint of it, how it blackened my vision both literally sometimes and metaphorically. It was hard to believe in the things I was supposed to believe in when I felt so miserable, so beyond the help of prayer.
They’d just diagnosed me as stage two and the possibility of chemotherapy loomed on the horizon.
I’d lose my hair again.
It was such a vain thing to be concerned about but even though my parents were Sunday churchgoers, they were human enough to practice pride and superficiality. Heck, they were the King and Queen of Entrance; they lived for those things. Mum had been more devastated than I when they said I’d lose the thick mass of pale blond hair I’d had since birth, hair that I’d inherited from her. She’d cried and clutched big handfuls of it in her fists, wiping her tears in the strands. I would have been grossed out if I weren’t devastated myself and trying so hard to hide it.
It was the end of my grade eleven year of high school, less than twelve months from graduation and all that entailed, including prom. And I was going to be bald for all of it.
Mum said they’d get me a really good wig but everyone would know it wasn’t my hair and that was somehow worse than rocking a naked scalp.
My friends were nice people so they wouldn’t make fun. They would just ignore it, as we all ignored the ugly things in life, and move on.
I was so tired of hiding the ugliness. It lived inside of me now. It was impossible to ignore its presence in everyday life.
Worst of all, I couldn’t tell Zeus about it.
I’d gotten through my first bout of cancer because of him and now that I was sick again, I couldn’t imagine doing it without him. Each letter I’d received written in his surprisingly cool graphic script had been a balm to my ragged soul. A little girl needed a champion, someone to believe in and someone to believe in her. He’d been right in saying that I’d grown up but he’d been wrong to assume that I no longer needed him. I’d learned that women needed a champion maybe even more than little girls did. Men forget to treat women with tender affection and platonic encouragement. Lust was no worthy substitute for pure care.
I wanted to send him a letter anyway because a part of me knew that he would come back if only he knew I was sick again. It was that exact reason that I left well enough alone. Did I really want a pity pen pal?
My mother reached over to quell my fidgeting hands. We were in the first right pew, front and center for everyone to look at. She didn’t want me to look bored or inelegant. So, I stopped twisting my fingers even though my body ached all over and it felt good to distract myself by tracing each digit. I smoothed my sweaty palms over the demure length of my pastel pink skirt and tucked my modestly heeled feet under the bench.
Mum patted my thigh.
Good girl, it meant.
I gritted my teeth.
Thankfully, the service wrapped up soon enough. Unhappily, the next half an hour would be dedicated to mingling, my least favourite part of the entire ordeal.
“Benjamin,” Tim Buckley boomed out in his loud, sport’s announcer voice as he ambled up to my father and did that shake all men did, the one with a hard clap on the back. “How is our mayor doing this fine Sunday morning? It was an excellent service, as per usual.”
“Thanks Tim, I’ll be sure to pass that along to Dad. Life is good, can’t complain about a thing,” my father said.
It wasn’t surprising that he didn’t complain about my illness. My parents may have informed everyone about what they liked to call “my condition” but they felt it was tacky to talk about it, to draw attention to the poor little sick girl.
My younger sister, Beatrice, gently bumped her shoulder into me before her hand found mine and held it fast. We were used to the song and dance of Sunday service but neither of us liked it. The pageantry that was our lives had fused us together from an early age and even though Bea was three years younger and at an age when girls are pretty screwed up by hormones, boys and insecurity, we were still thick as thieves. The only time we argued was about who had it worse, her or me. Bea liked to argue that our parents didn’t care what she did. She was right, at least to a certain extent. As long as she performed well in school and kept her nose out of trouble, Mum and Dad were pretty oblivious to her as a human being.
I argued that being their super-star was harder. There wasn’t a moment of my day they didn’t want to plan, a nuance of my person that they didn’t want a hand in forming. Mum liked me because I was pretty, just like she felt she was. Dad liked me because I was brainy in a bookish kind of way but also charming, just like he felt he was. Their interest in me was relatively recent, as of puberty when my good looks descended and my intellect was noticed. They liked me because I was a useful tool to them.
Poor Bea had pretty bones but she hadn’t grown into them yet and she was smart but not in a showy way. She worked hard and was driven to succeed, which in my mind was even better than being naturally gifted. Plus, she was sweet as sugar pie and funny as all get out.
She was the only one who cared for me when I woke up from nightmares about death or when I was too run-down to get out of bed in the morning. Even then, she didn’t like to talk about why that was but she was there and that was good enough for me.
“I heard tell that your girl got into UBC, U of T and McGill. You must be proud of her,” Tim continued, his attention now on me.
His gaze was appreciative but in a way that wasn’t strictly about praising the intelligence of his good friend’s daughter. He liked my curves even though they were dressed down in the conservative shift and sweater set my mother made me wear.
“I never doubted her. She’s her father’s daughter,” my dad crowed, tugging me closer so that he could beam down at me, pretty as a picture.
I wanted to let Tim know that it was all for show, that at home neither he nor my mother had time for us, but I knew Tim wouldn’t really care so I kept my mouth shut.
My bones ached. I was tired of standing for two hours singing dumb hymns that didn’t mean anything because I didn’t think I believed in God anymore and I just wanted to go home.
“Of course, of course. Now, do you have a minute to come talk to James and me about the strip mall proposal?” Tim asked.
“All the time in the world for you, buddy,” he replied with a super charming smile.
I rolled my eyes at Bea who giggled behind her hand.
“Dad, you have to drive Bea to her dance lesson, remember?” I reminded him with a smile so that he wouldn’t see how frustrated I was with him for forgetting.
Normally, I would have just taken her myself but I was going to a youth cancer support group after service and, as much as I wanted to skip it, my oncologist had insisted to my parents that I attend. Something about how two bouts of cancer in ten years could lead to depression or something. I didn’t know about depression but I was sure as hell angry, and growing angrier by the day.
Dad frowned but extended his hand to Bea, flicking his fingers for her to follow behind him.
“You good?” Tim asked, having already started to move away.
“I’ve got to take Beatrice to ballet but she can be a bit late,” he said before following Tim to the other side of the church, already talking about his ideas for the project, Bea trailing behind dutifully like his shadow.
Benjamin Lafayette had been mayor of Entrance since I was eleven years old and he hadn’t lost his love of it. I was actually proud of him for the work he did for Entrance. I just wished he worked half as hard at being a good dad.
“Louise, darling, you look so well today,” Mamie Ross crowed as she swept up to my mother and me.
She pinched my chin to give me two smacking kisses on each cheek. I knew she left red lipstick on my skin but before I could wipe it off myself, she licked her thumb and rubbed it against the marks with a little giggle.
The woman wasn’t a day under fifty-five. She should not have been giggling.
A year ago, having such a spiteful thought would have made me sick to the pit of my stomach. Now, I was always sick to my stomach so I didn’t have as hard a time with the evil thinking.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Mum demurred, smoothing a hand down my hair. “A little too brown though, maybe.”
There was no maybe about it. She had almost blown a gasket when I’d come in from sun tanning the other day. Peasant brown, she’d called me. I had inherited her platinum hair but I had my dad’s golden skin. She didn’t mind when his tanned, which it did because he loved to golf and he loved to fish. She minded with me because I was supposed to be a little lady.
What my skin tone had to do with that, I’d never know except that her family had come from England and parts of British Columbia were still behind the Tweed Curtain.
“No, she looks lovely. And so thin! Have you been dieting?” Mamie continued.
Everyone in Entrance knew I had cancer. When my parents found out, they had put out an announcement in both the Entrance Herald and the parish newsletter. Still, no one out and out talked about it.
Which I found, increasingly, frustrating as hell.
What were they going to say when I lost my hair?
Oh darling, what a fashion-forward statement you’re making!
Such bullshit.
I smiled widely at Mamie. “No diet, just trying to stay healthy.”
She nodded sagely. “Wise girl. I yo-yo dieted for years and now my skin doesn’t fit quite right.”
“She’s sick, Mother. She isn’t on a fucking diet,” Reece Ross sneered at her as he stepped up to our little grouping.
He was wearing a suit, as was proper for Sunday service, but the tie was loose around his neck and the top three buttons were undone. He was one of the handsomest boys at Entrance High and in most of my classes. We didn’t talk much though, mostly because he was cool in a burgeoning bad boy way and I was a good girl.
So, I was surprised that he’d come to defend me.
Especially against his own mother.
I’d wanted to do that countless times with my own mother but never found the gumption. It made me look at Reece Ross, who was known around town as a hotshot basketball player and all-round player, with new respect.
Mamie’s mouth opened and closed uselessly.
My mother glared at Reece, disgusted by his lack of decorum.
“That said, you do look pretty great for a sick girl,” Reece added, his gaze roving languidly over my modest dress, the curves beneath it.
I’d been blessed when puberty hit with an abundance of breast and ass and a small waist that, with my blond hair, made me look almost like a Barbie. It was ironic and cruel given the family I was born into. I was a Lafayette and as such, I was to be defined by certain qualities such as piousness, generosity and grace. Not sexuality, wickedness and beauty.
Anger burned clean through the murkiness in my blood, purging me clean for one glorious second before I remembered myself and became boring again.
“Thank you,” I said, idiotically.
My mother smiled, as did Mamie.
Reece glowered at me.
The older women bent close, cutting us out of their heart to heart. Reece took the opportunity to step closer to me, his cologne strong in my nose.
“You dying?” he whispered harshly.
Anger again, a brief flare. “You care?”
“Do you?” he bit back. “I watch you live your pretty life, Louise, and it looks fucking dull. Worse than death, some might say. If you’re truly dying, don’t you think it’s time you lived a little?”
“Let me guess, you’re volunteering to show me how?”
His grin was a slim slice across his face. “Interested?”
“Why are you suddenly so into me? I don’t think we’ve spoken ten words to each other and I’ve known you all my life.”
Reece stepped back slightly, crossing his arms and affecting that teenage boy stance that spoke of artificial bravado and casualness. “I was hoping you’d be more interesting now. With the cancer and all.”
“Are you trying to be a massive asshole or does it come naturally to you?” I snapped.
My hand flew to my mouth to cover my gasp. It wasn’t that I never swore. I just never did it in public or even anywhere outside my head. I’d never said an ill word to anyone and yet at the slightest provocation, I was being absolutely vile.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be.” He lunged forward into my space again but not so close that the busybodies in the congregation would titter about it. “Doesn’t it feel good to be mean?”
“It shouldn’t matter if it feels good or not. Meanness is not something to aspire to,” I preached.
He rolled his eyes. “You’re so boring, I’m surprised you don’t put yourself to sleep with talk like that.” Suddenly, my hands were in his. “Look, let me help you here. You’re a seventeen-year-old girl with absolutely no life experience and you could die soon. Doesn’t that scare the pants off you?”
“You wish,” I muttered darkly before I could censor myself.
His eyes caught fire with humor and I realized just how pretty he was. “There, doesn’t that feel good? Saying what you really think.”
I swallowed because it did.
Triumphantly, he grinned into my face. “Listen, you can think about it, yeah? I’m not asking you to do a line a coke or anything. I’m just urging you to live a little while you got the chance.”
“Why do you care?” I asked again, this time softly because what he said was under my skin.
“I care because I’ve got half the crap you’ve got to deal with and I hate it.” He indicated his mother, who was still gabbing away with my own. My parents were King and Queen of Entrance society and Mamie Ross was firmly on the fringe despite years of trying to be otherwise. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d seen Reece dragged to the same boring events I was forced to attend.
“I’ll think about it,” I whispered, afraid to even have the words in the air.
The rebellion that was churning hot and slow under my skin had always been just a feeling, a rumbling heat that growled sometimes but never erupted into words or actions. I felt the release of my promise to Reece, felt the crack in the shell of my hardened exterior. It was both ominous and entirely beautiful.
I hadn’t felt so free since Zeus had stopped writing to me.
So, when my mother returned to my side and excused us by saying that we had an important meeting to get to instead of just saying that she had to take me to the Youth Cancer Support Group in Vancouver, I decided to dip my toe in independence.
“I’ll drive myself,” I said, firmly.
Mum hesitated as we crossed the parking lot, surprised by the iron in my voice. She’d molded me to be her ideal child and her ideal child was supposed to be a pushover.
“You’re so busy with all your charity work and there’s the dinner with the Anholt’s tonight so you have to make sure Chef isn’t serving anything with dairy because of Mrs. Anholt’s lactose intolerance… You have so much on your plate and I can easily drive myself down to Vancouver.”
I waited, holding my breath, for my mother’s response.
She took her time thinking about it and, by the time she answered, I was probably purple in the face. “Fine, but be home by dinner.”
“Will do,” I said behind a curtain of hair so that she wouldn’t see my enormous smile.
It was such a little thing, driving myself an hour both ways to Vancouver, but it felt like a massive triumph because my mother dictated almost every aspect of my life and I spent most of the time with her when I wasn’t in school.
“Use the slow lane and watch out for those idiot motorcyclists who think that road rules do not apply to them,” Mum said as she ducked into her sleek black BMW.
“Of course,” I said.
I watched her pull out of the parking lot before making my way over to the silver Mazda hatchback I’d named Optimus Prime. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was a zippy little machine and it was my very own. I absolutely adored it.
I was pulling open the door when I felt him behind me. I knew it was Reece before he said, “So, where are we going now that you got rid of mommy dearest?”
“The Youth Cancer Support Group in Vancouver,” I deadpanned, turning my head just slightly so that I could watch his expression fall out of the corner of my eye.
Strangely, he didn’t look disappointed. “Cool, let’s hit it.”
I watched him round my car and open the passenger door. “You’re actually going to go with me to group?”
He crossed his forearms over the roof of the car and leaned toward me. “If that’s where you want to go.”
I pursed my lips. I hated the support group. It was utterly depressing, especially given that of the nine kids in it, four were terminal and three had fought the good fight more than once to get to remission only to slide back into its clutches years later. Everyone there tried hard to be open and optimistic but the second came hard and struck a discordant note. They got something from the morbid camaraderie the group provided for them but I didn’t.
I was tired of pretending to be happy and group was just another stage for me to act out my false contentment.
“Not really,” I admitted. “Did you have something else in mind?”
“Yeah, friend of mine is having a kegger out in the boonies. You down for a party?”
I’d never been to a party before. My girlfriends hung out with a group of guys sometimes but we never partied. We hung out at Mary’s house mostly because her parents had an awesome home theatre bigger than most actual theatres, or at Joe’s because his family had an Olympic sized pool with a three-tiered diving board. None of us drank because we were all athletes and scholars. Well, I’d been an athlete, a dancer, before the cancer decimated my energy.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” I said.
The shift and sweater set weren’t exactly party clothes.
Reece cast a critical eye down my body and came to the same conclusion.
“Hudson has an older sister. She’s smaller than you but you could probably squeeze into something of hers.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered.
He laughed. “I meant in the chest region, Lila is a lot smaller than you.”
“Oh,” I said, less offended because that was a fair assumption.
“Lila is cool. You’ll like her.”
“Will she like me?” I couldn’t help but ask. Most of the kids at Entrance High thought I was a snob.
“They’ll like you,” he reassured me in a soft voice.
I wasn’t sure why he was being so nice but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I was too much of a coward to do any of this by myself so I was grateful for his bad influence.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I decided with a firm head nod, proud of my decision and my conviction.
“Cool,” Reece said before ducking into the car.
“Cool,” I echoed softly, a little deflated at his lack of enthusiasm, and then followed him into Optimus.
“So,” he began after we pulled out of the parking lot. “Let’s go over the basics, yeah?”
“Okay?”
I saw him grin in my periphery.
“Have you ever done drugs?”
“No!”
“Not even blazed?”
“What?”
“Blazed.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.
There was a short, stunned silence.
“You mean to tell me, you were born and raised in BC and you don’t know what blazing means? What about taking a bong toke, getting high, greening out, doing dope, smoking grass, hot-boxing a car, rolling a joint?”
“Are you talking about marijuana?” I guessed.
I knew it was the leading albeit underground industry in British Columbia but that didn’t mean I knew anything else about it. Most people in high school smoked marijuana but I wasn’t most people and it kind of annoyed me that Reece was being condescending when he knew that. I was a paradigm of virtue. A paradigm of virtue did not know drug slang and they certainly did not do drugs.
“Yeah, Louise, I’m talking about Mary Jane,” he said, again, like I was a moron.
I figured Mary Jane was another slang term.
“You can’t even call yourself a British Columbian if you don’t know a thing about BC bud. Our weed is the best in the world.”
I shrugged.
“Fuck, you really are a good girl,” he said, echoing my thoughts.
“Yes,” I said, with a proud chin tilt.
Then I realized that being a good girl kind of sucked. I had friends, sure. A group of girls that called themselves the angels of Entrance High because they all came from established and, mostly, good Christian families, but more so because they were pretty, wealthy and they knew it. They weren’t bullies to the rest of the kids but there was a lot of in-fighting about who was prettier, brighter and better liked. Ironically, the angels did not support one another’s successes. Instead, they used guilt, manipulation and lies to hold each other back. I knew this because they had been my friends since birth just as our mothers had been. Old stock, I had come to learn, did not mean good stock.
I got good grades because I was, thank God, born smart and even if I didn’t try hard, which I did because I was a good girl, I would have done well.
I volunteered at the Autism Centre. It started out as an obligation because my mother made me pick a charity organization to patronize when I hit twelve years old, but now, I loved it, and I wished that I had more time to dedicate to both it and other charitable organizations. I loved the kids at the center even though some of them were really hard to love because they didn’t have the cognitive ability to discern social cues. One such kid, an adorable ginger-haired boy named Sammy, was one of my best friends. I still remembered the day that he informed me of our best-friends-for-life status. He’d written me a letter and asked me to sign it, officially making us bffs. I’d burst into tears.
So the volunteering was great, it made being a good girl worthwhile.
But the part where my parents showed me off like a prized pony and pretended that my illness didn’t exist because it didn’t fit in with their ideal life was beginning to consume me. I was fed up and repressed in a way that made me sick of spirit as well as of body.
I was seventeen years old. I was basically an adult; a fully formed human being. And I had no idea who I was outside of my parents expectations, outside of the mirror Entrance society held in front of me, more a painting of their own making than a true representation of myself.
“I don’t even know who I am. How cliché is that?” I whispered.
“Pretty fucking cliché,” Reece agreed easily.
We were silent as I chewed over my suitably teenage brooding thoughts and Reece stared out the window thinking about whatever Reece thought about.
“You know what else is cliché? Rebelling against your parents,” he finally said, leaning over the console so that he spoke right into my ear.
I shivered but my thoughts had led me down the same path. “Yeah.”
He grinned at me. “It’s going to be fun, Louise. You’ll like normal teenage life and all the bad decisions you get to make when you don’t give a fuck who you’ll disappoint.”
I frowned because that didn’t sound like fun. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. In truth, I was angry with them for a variety of reasons and all of them had to do with their response—or lack of one—to my cancer.
I didn’t want to let myself down by making stupid decisions that could harm me or someone else.
Reece put a warm hand over mine on the gearshift, his voice gentle when he said, “I’ll watch out for you. I want you to have fun, get into just enough trouble to taste life, not end up dead in a gutter somewhere.”
“Okay,” I agreed, as if I wasn’t terrified.
“Okay,” he repeated.
