Pictures in a Yearbook
I. Ray of Light
There was a look of slight sadness on her face, as if the smile that was pasted on her face was not really a smile but a buried breakdown, a loud wail, a long droop, a tortured scream � the long crease in her forehead not withstanding. Page sixty-seven, freshmen, black and white, in the upper left corner. Her smile stayed pasted.
It was picture day. The photographer: Turn this way! Put your head up! Smile! Where�s your card? Thank you, next! Put your feet on the yellow line! Look at the red dot, look at my face, look into the great beyond�
In homeroom, he was waiting. She hadn�t arrived yet. That was alright, it was still two minutes till everyone should be there. From there, the class would head down to the auditorium, to the stage, where the professional school photographer was waiting to take endless pictures of the two thousand kids traipsing down the hall to her capable cameras. He sweated a little, his feet shook, his hands tapped. His knee spasmed. Someone walked in the room. Almost! But, no. He held back the rising bile in his throat and looked down at his hands. They were covered with a thin film of sweat.
On his, a visible frown. In his eyes, deep back there, one could see an animal cry of despair. No smile to cover this one. It was there, not only in his eyes, but the position of his head, the focus on nothing, the strand of hair on his face he didn�t bother to wipe away, the sweat on his cheek, that drop rolling down the incline toward�but one couldn�t see past that. Page 67, freshmen, top row, third from left. There was no smile.
She walked past his locker. She had already went to hers, dropped off her books and coat, and headed down the hall, past screaming girls coming out of the bathroom with that glazed look in their eyes, past the teacher juggling his coffee along with the forty test papers he had to return to his smallest class this morning, past the kid that always sat at his locker even though he was supposed to be elsewhere, past his locker. She stopped. She knew his combination. He had told her. As so far as she knew, he only trusted her with the number. After all, when things were stolen even with a lock on the door, you couldn�t be sure about anybody. There was nothing, really, to steal in his locker. Maybe the picture of the two of them, together, enjoying the peace and quiet of a park. It was there, in a frame, and right where one could see it even just glancing in. But who would steal that? She smiled at the thought. Maybe me, maybe me. She laughed.
The bell rang. She still hadn�t come. He quivered, and then got up, somewhat sick. He was strong, he was strong..no, no.
She swore loudly as the bell rang. She hadn�t made it to homeroom yet, and the teacher would be so..too late. Somebody pulled her arm, and then she disappeared into the large mass heading toward the auditorium.
He pushed past a couple people. He was in a rush, maybe because his legs felt like putty, because he couldn�t think straight, because he was on maximum adrenaline. They swore at him, but let him go. They weren�t in a rush. He stumbled over a bag that was lying by a locker, crashing into some others as he did so. A muttered apology and he rushed on. There, the bobbing head, the loose brown hair, the..
A week ago, he had told her she was his best friend. They held hands during tech ed, a decidedly unromantic places, but somehow the solder and wires made the atmosphere electrifying. It might have been the smell. Whatever the case, she had returned the favor. It was the same scene that they had played a couple weeks already, just switching roles and words, somewhat. It was cute, I guess. Even when they didn�t do the solder right because they weren�t paying attention didn�t bother me, as we eventually put together our little car. Everyone else in class just smiled and turned back to their work, invariably burning themselves from the lost second of concentration.
Almost there. Her laughing face, the warmth in her cheeks..somebody shoved past him. His view blocked, he continued the chase.
She had been one in a million, the girl sitting selling tickets by the bulldog sign on the wall when he went to the December dance. She had asked for his card and he gave it to her. Electricity, the smell of solder in the air. He had never seen her yet, not at the school store run by the business ed class, not in the packed cafeteria, not at any Monty Python meetings, not in the little room underneath the auditorium doors for drama, not at the gym, the upper wings, the library, the parking lot, but, now, here, before a dance, before he got lost in the black strobe-magnified mosh going on to some punk band. She laughed at something he said, then turned reluctantly to the next customer. He went in.
Down the stairway. The crowd milled. She could hear the lipstick being smashed on to faces, the rouge, the combs swishing, the mousse being sprayed, the shirt tucks, and all those things that make people look somewhat worse than what they looked like in the first place. She followed them. He waved, but she missed his hand by a second.
The next he saw her after that night was when the next semester had started. The blocks made four periods a day, and two or three times a week, depending what part of the 10-day schedule they were on, he was in tech ed. He walked in. There she was, sitting next to me already. Partners.
He pushed in with a last burst, and pulled her away from the crowd, against the flow of students milling about. She looked confused. He looked depressed.
�Now?,� she asked.
He nodded, before being pulled away by someone else. He looked back at her in a daze but made no effort to go back. She looked at his face as he was shuffled away. A broken look
The day before, he had told me. I knew. He was moving to the fresh air of Spokane, where the smell of solder wouldn�t follow him all day, where..where she no longer was. I felt his pain. She had been mine, first.
The shutter snapped. Next!, the photographer called. She walked away from the lights with that drugged pasted smile on her face. I took her arm.
My face. A look of happiness, a ray of light shining out my eyes, transforming the black ink of the page into a bright, radiant color. Page 67, freshmen, second from left...between him, and her. Smile for the camera.
II. Savior
Page 87, sophomore, bottom right corner. A savage grin from his mouth. A shadow from the slight bullet-grazed scar at the top of his forehead covers his narrow nose. Behind his eyes, an animality, a fire that no amount of meth or fairy dust can put out. Savior.
Not pictured: Kid.
�You just can�t do that sort of thing here! Where you are now, what you do now, that�s all that matters. Not all this shit you got from some damn neighborhood wherever the hell you came from. This ain�t no bobo house we got runnin� here, or some merit-fuckin-o-cracy. Hell, most of us ain�t going to graduate! You go pushin your bitch-slacker-hating, no, people-hating attitude, you gonna wind up with a bullet. Where it hurts.�
Back away, no, can�t do that. People everywhere. Gym class, teacher watching exits like a hawk, the Kid is leering still with his give-me-all-the-crap-you-got look on his face and what am I gonna do I don�t know I don�t know.
�Don�t be shovin your nose where it ain�t supposed to be, mind you. This guy, he ain�t shit. He don�t know what�s going on half the time, just pretends he�s one of Us, but he ain�t nothing but some motherfucker who sells his crack cheap and thinks he�s all that.
Still no idea. But there it was, out of nowhere, the voice of a Savior. Peace of mind. Whispered, to me, so I could hear, and so he could hear, only. No one else. Then, turning away..the Kid speaks.
�Hey man, what you got coming here for? He�s my problem, I deal with it. No need to get a rat up your ass about it. I leave you alone, you leave me alone.�
Savior.
�What the fuck you saying to me, lousy shit? You think you can go shove that crap about getting shot to anybody you want? Hell, no! He did nothing wrong. Just not used to it.�
Just not used to it. Epithet for me. Stupid. No more achiever class. Do or die.
�OK man. I get you. Just tell that goddamn hoe that if he tries something like that again, he�s gonna pay. And you too, cocksucker..�
Punch. Savior wins this match. Blood dripping, gym floor. Kid runs.
�You OK?�
Savior. Dark eyes, menacing but kindly. Yeah, I tell him. I think so.
�Stay with me, you got everything coming for you. Otherwise..�
Great news. Change my mind. I wasn�t going to push my non-conformist role, not until..until..
�..I got my backup. Stay out of trouble now. I�ll look out for you, bud.�
Thanks. I had my backup too, now.
Time rolls on. Life happens. Fights happen. Shit happens. The bags are found. Kid is out, I am away. Far away, while Kid is on the street, some inner city falling apart not just at the seams but everywhere sort of place. I win this round. Kid loses.
Slow motion. Money moving, a touch, a pass, a bang. The dust flies, whitening the air. Kid dies. Game, match point. Savior, in chains, to a dusky ten years in a jail with the ravaged low-brow clientele and dealers like Kid and himself.
All Savior says is: �Just not used to it.�
III. They Talk in Dull Tones
A Saturday morning, looking out at the dense jungle behind the building, feels like looking into a world slowed down. That is, until the woman and her dog appear, jauntily enjoying the clean, fresh air. Looking up, she sees a kid, wild-eyed from a restless and late night, dreaming of cardinal sins and rape and pillage and murder and hacked limbs and mindless torture and evil, all from movies someone else had rented and left in the VCR for anyone to watch. And go to bed with dark thoughts afterward. His hair is unkempt, his shirt wrinkled. His boxers are scrunched up and he�s flailing for the alarm clock and the shades at the same time, because the clock starts ringing again and the world, so slowed down in his sleepy mind was not snail-paced but like the real world just outside his room door. The poster of Big Pun is still grinning at him from the other side of the room; his roommate has a shrine to overly large rap gods. Biggie is there too, an almost moronic grin on his black-and-white photocopied face. But nobody would say that, on risk of getting shot. Because Biggie did. Or, like the kid, to the wall and the empty made bed just under the poster, where his roommate would usually sit, singing loudly to Bone Thugz or EPMD or some other group blasting through his tinny Walkman speakers. Outside, in other rooms, other kids lie sleeping, still. Not many, because most are at their own houses dreaming of wet things to come. Their parents only get rid of them here on weekdays so they can clean the sheets finally. It�s quiet. The woman finally walks away when her dog gets bored of looking and tugs at her feet, barking an annoying yip yip yip..
The chips are decaying in the bag, the toothpaste lies untouched for the second week in a row, the mouthwash is all gone, and the shower has grime buildup. The kid decides to change his routine. He brushes his teeth, grooms himself carefully, wipes the shower grease and hairs from the drain and flushes it down the toilet. The temptation is there to steal some candy from the shelves in the other room connected to this same bathroom, so he closes that door. What he can�t see, he can�t take. He puts on some clean clothes. Freshened, he opens the door to the hallway. No one in sight. The rec room is empty, except for the trash there from last night�s revelry. The pool balls are on the table, scattered, from an interrupted game. The kid takes out his lucky cue, grinds the chalk on its tip, then finishes the game. He wins. Yes, it�s a silent morning. The housemaster didn�t show up on Saturdays, so he was free to do anything he wanted. As long as he showed up to school on Monday morning. Outside the large rec room windows, dew drips off a leaf on a large tree. He turns, goes back to his room, and takes out his bag. He packs for a short trip. To where? Nowhere in particular. He likes it that way.
Walking down the stairs, he pauses to look at a funny-looking kid in the class pictures. MacMillan House, �76, �77. Wearing the trademark striped uniforms, on the field, ready to beat the other houses at a friendly game of rugby. The mud smears their faces as the photographer catches their friendly battle. Bottom floor.
It seems unusually quiet at the entrance to the boarding house. It�s too quiet. Kind of like the time he went up to the elementary school attic. In times past, the elementary school had been a convent, and the attic a place where a nun had supposedly committed suicide, staining the statue she died on with an irremovable spot. Up there, the eerie silence reminded him of the nun�s ghost, still roaming the place. It was true. The junior graders still saw her. In the attic, there had been a giant teddy bear. Not there for any good reason, he thought, but probably to get kids out of the attic. Its eyes traveled with whoever was fool enough to go looking through the junk up there. An old bike, a canoe. A nun�s statue, maybe the one she died on. He was scared, suddenly, by the lack of any noise, not even the cars or the rain outside, so, he made his way at top speed down the rickety stairs to the bottom floor, fully modernized and sanitized.
He walks out of the boarding house doors, across the basketball courts, to the sidewalk. This was the exact place he had first stepped on to, visiting the school. He remembered thinking of all the opportunity he had to spend at the sister school of this notoriously stuffy private boys institution. He was wrong. The other schools only visited when a co-ed dance was held. And even then, he found himself dancing in the dark with some cute redhead he�d never see again. It was tragic.
He swept away the memory and headed up the sidewalk to the main street. The Mac�s across the street had served him sell, supplying his sugar and salt needs, supplementing the mush diet he was served in the school cafeteria. The caf� there had good food, but expensive. Breakfast, he thought, could be skipped today. He didn�t feel like candy or blowing money on a small club sub. He crosses over to the public library and to the bus stop in front. The bus came. From here, he had a million places to go. He just didn�t feel like going to any of them.
He stays with the bus all the way to the end. It was by a mall. The wind blows his hair up and looking up to see where the wind blew, he blinds himself for a second. On his way to his Damascus, he learns the true way. He heads to the mall, past the Rainforest Caf�, by the Eaton�s, by the Express, by the International Clothiers, by the theatres, to a seat in front of the Tim Horton�s. He waits, alone, until she shows up.
�There you are.�
�Here I am.�
�I knew you�d come.�
�I didn�t.�
�I miss you.�
Page 68, freshmen, bottom, second from left. Malicious grin. Messy hair, the joker in the pack, the wild card. Addict to for-the-moment pleasure, i.e. intense, sensual eyes.
He didn�t really believe her.
�Where you going, where have you been?�
�Walking dark roads, miles till I sleep.�
�No. You haven�t.�
�Okay then. One kiss, and I�ll go.�
He gives her what she wants, then he leaves. He doesn�t look back. Upstairs, above the bus terminal, he gets on the SkyTrain. Looking out the window, he sees the city flash by. It gives rise to a small town, to a larger town, and finally, to another city. Destination.
The Russian section of town blends with the others. He heads for a small store on the corner.
Page 66, freshmen, middle, third from left. Confused eyes. Lazy curl to his smile, a babyish set on his total features. Consistent foolishness.
�Hey.�
�Where you been?�
�Boarding.�
�Oh, there. With those people.�
�Yeah. I almost wish I wasn�t.�
�I get you.�
They watch a movie together. The Russian is silent. Characteristic.
�Bye.�
�K..I�ll see you.�
�Da.�
He goes the long route back to the boarding house, depressed. Time flies faster. The sky darkens past the bright orange to the pitch black and when he gets in to the building, everyone is up and about.
�How was your day?�
He answers them.
�Lousy.�
He settles into a chair, and the movie starts. Time slows down again, nodding off to an almost imperceptible movement of the second hand on the wall clock. The memories disappear. Before he realizes, it becomes Sunday morning. The cycle begins again.
He looks in the mirror. I smile in return.