Fireball E-Book

Tyler Keevil

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 445

Beschreibung

Winner of the Media Wales Readers' Prize 2011 shortlisted for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2011 Four friends. One intensely hot summer that will change their lives forever. When a group of hedonistic teenagers save a woman from drowning they become unlikely local heroes, but their celebrity becomes the focus for first envy, then harassment. Fireball takes us through their last summer together, and one that will come to define their future: a summer of sex, chemical experimentation, shifting loyalties and disillusionment.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageAbout Tyler KeevilDedicationFireballAcknowledgementsCopyright

Fireball

Tyler Keevil

Tyler Keevil was raised in Vancouver, Canada. He first cameto the UK in 1999 to study English and Lancaster University.

Since immigrating to Wales to marry his wife Naomi and livein Llanidloes, he has won several awards for his short fiction,and his work has appeared in a variety of magazines andanthologies. He recently started lecturing in Creative Writingat the University of Gloucestershire. Tyler enjoys wintersports, including ice-hockey and snowboarding, but sincecoming to Wales he has also discovered the wonders of hikingand camping – particularly along the Pembrokeshire coast.

for all the Cove kids

1

Chris knew it was coming to an end. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. I could just tell. We’d gone down to the beach at Cates Park to drink a few beers and throw away those stupid medals. That’s where it happened. They said I helped him, which is complete crap. Chris didn’t need my help. He could have done it blindfolded, with one hand. Of course, nobody wanted to believe that. Bates claimed we did it together, and that’s how the papers wrote it up. If it weren’t for my dad, I probably would have ended up in jail.

But basically, Chris did it alone.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Did you kill him?’

‘Beats me.’

We were standing on either side of him, looking down. His face was a mess. Drops of blood lay scattered all over the sand, like bright red bugs.

I leaned in closer, listening. ‘I think I can hear him breathing.’

It wasn’t much – just this gentle gurgling sound.

‘I guess he’s alive, then,’ Chris said. ‘Not that it matters either way.’

I didn’t know what he meant at the time.

After he stole the squad car, they tried to stop him by setting up this shitty little roadblock. For most people it might have worked. Not Chris. He just drove straight through it at a hundred miles an hour. Almost instantly, the car became this blazing fireball, bright as the sun. Even that didn’t stop him. He kept going, off a cliff and into the ocean. At first, it was impossible to tell what killed him: the impact or the fire or the water – or the guns. Apparently they shot him a bunch of times, too. Afterwards they handed the body over to some expert – this forensics expert in thick glasses and a huge turtleneck. When I saw him on the news, I flipped out and tried to kick over our television. No joke. My dad had to hold me back. I mean, Chris would have hated that guy.

He hated turtlenecks.

The sun glittered off the sand and scattered light across the bay. A sticky film of sweat coated my face. I couldn’t stop trembling. In that kind of situation, I’m pretty much useless. I just freeze up. But Chris knew exactly what to do. He crouched in the sand and patted Bates down. They said we stole his wallet, which was another lie. We threw his wallet in the ocean. The only thing we took was his keys. And his car, of course. That turned out to be a big deal, but at the time it just kind of happened.

‘Maybe we should get some help.’

That was me. I was shitting myself, for obvious reasons.

‘Whatever. Let’s just go.’

Chris walked over and opened the door. I picked up our bag of weed and followed, like always. From as far back as I can remember he’d been leading and I’d been following. That’s just how it was between us. He got behind the wheel, taking his time. He was still sucking wind from the fight but his face was calm, the calmest I’d seen it since we saved the old lady. He shut the door, then rolled down the window and adjusted the mirror. His knuckles were bloody and swollen, as if he’d been punching a brick wall.

He looked over at me.

‘You coming?’ he asked.

2

When I got to my new school, a lot of people freaked out. Everybody in Vancouver had heard about Chris by then, and as soon as the other kids discovered that I was the friend – the unnamed friend always referred to in the news reports – they totally wet the bed. Hardly any of them would talk to me, and the ones that did always acted way too friendly, as if they wanted to get on my good side just in case I had a hit list. The parents took it even worse. A few banded together and started this feeble protest. Seriously. Not that I cared. Nothing ever came of it, and once the uproar died down I was pretty much left alone – which was fine by me. These days, I’m not too stoked on people in general. The problem is that they’re always making assumptions, and I just can’t handle having to deal with that shit any more.

‘You knew that Chris guy, right?’

I was asked that by some kid at school – this little weirdo with a blue mohawk.

‘Yeah. So?’

‘So was he like, you know, a total nutcase?’

I just stared at him until he left.

That’s what everybody thinks, and it harsh pisses me off. They go around assuming he was a nutcase and they never even met him. They just heard about him, or read about him, or saw his picture on the news. And it’s the same with me. They all just assume I’m as tough as Chris because I knew him. I’m not, of course. I’m not half as tough as him. At my old school, people found it weird that we could even be friends. That’s pretty weak, though. I mean, it’s not like Chris was fighting constantly. He only fought when he had to. The rest of the time we just hung out. We went swimming, or got stoned, or watched movies. We watched pretty much every kind of movie you can imagine, but what we really liked was anything about a giant shark or mutant snake or radioactive spider. We couldn’t get enough of that stuff. Every other weekend we’d pile over to Julian’s and watch a creature feature on his dad’s widescreen TV. Of course, all that changed once she came along.

‘Do you think I’m too skinny?’

That was exactly the kind of thing she liked to ask him. It wasn’t insecurity. She knew she wasn’t ‘too’ anything. She was perfect. She just wanted to draw attention to how perfect she was.

‘You’re okay.’

‘Just okay?’

‘Better than okay.’

Chris took a swig of beer. The three of us were sitting in Julian’s jacuzzi while he mixed drinks inside. She had her arms stretched above her head, examining her body like it belonged to somebody else. I could see the lines of her ribs pressing through her skin. She was pretty thin, actually. Not super thin. Not anorexic thin. Just slender.

‘How’s your hand?’ she asked.

Chris held it up. He’d broken a knuckle on some clown’s face at the Avalon. He tested it experimentally, clenching all five fingers before flexing them straight.

‘Getting better.’

‘That guy was such an asshole.’

‘Everybody’s an asshole. Except Razor.’

Her lips curled into a smile – this very ironic smile. Secretly she loved it when he talked like that. Hardly anybody can talk tough and get away with it. If I tried, I’d look like a treat. But Chris could do it, because with him it wasn’t an act. That’s just how he was.

‘Don’t be so negative,’ she said.

Beneath the water, beneath the cover of all that foam, she put her hand on his thigh and started stroking it like you might pet a puppy. I guess she thought I wouldn’t notice. Chris looked away, pretending to ignore her. The more he did that, though, the more she wanted him. That’s the way it works. He wanted her too, of course. We all did. You just had to look at her and you couldn’t help wanting her.

‘What’s up?’ she asked him.

Chris shrugged, took a sip of his beer. Totally casual.

The thing is, when it came to that kind of stuff, Chris wasn’t super experienced or anything. None of us were. I’d only ever made out with one chick before – in a closet, back in grade eight. After that I hit a pretty long dry spell. Jules claimed he’d gotten gummers from some girl at a West Van party, but he wouldn’t tell us her name and I’m pretty sure he was lying. Chris did a little better than either of us, for obvious reasons. He’d never hooked up with anybody like Karen, though. It wasn’t just the fact that she was super hot. It was in the way she acted, the way she carried herself. Before Chris, she’d only dated older guys.

We met her a few days after we got our medals. We were down at Cates Park, hacking a dart, when she came out of the water and walked right over – as if she’d spotted us from a long way off. Most of the chicks down there are bleached blonde, fake and bake clones. Not Karen. She had dark brown hair that hung down her back in wet little snarls, and as she crossed the sand her body glistened all over with saltwater. Totally cinematic. At the beach she always wore the same thing: this blue bikini, super skimpy, with tiny gems in the pattern of three waves on her hip. She didn’t look like any girl I’d ever seen. She looked more like some kind of mythical sea creature sent to seduce us.

‘You guys are the heroes, right?’

Julian said, ‘That’s us.’

‘I’m Karen.’ She showed us her teeth. ‘I saw your picture in the paper.’

We didn’t know what to say. We were still pretty messed up over the whole thing, and Chris hated talking about it. I was surprised he didn’t tell her to fuck off. Instead he made room for her in the sand. She stretched out next to us, her body burnt to butternut from weeks of tanning. Every time she moved – even if it was just to flick her hair or shield her eyes from the sun – we were aware of it. We lay like that, with all three of us feeling her presence, for about six or seven minutes.

‘What are you guys doing later?’ Karen asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Julian said. ‘Just hanging out.’

‘Can I come?’

Me and Julian kept quiet. It was up to Chris.

‘If you want,’ he said.

For the next few weeks, until everything fell apart, that’s what the four of us did: we hung out. We’d laze around the beach all day, then go find a runner to pick up some booze. We drank at Julian’s house, since his parents were always on vacation, or we went to the Avalon. Some nights we just cruised up and down Lonsdale in Julian’s car. Chris got in a few fights, a few more than usual, and Bates started causing us trouble. Other than that, there was nothing extraordinary about it. That’s what I tried to explain to the cops, and the press. But everybody just assumed we were out doing all kinds of crazy shit – beating people up and taking drugs and starting riots – and Chris was made out to look like the ringleader.

That’s another problem with people. They need things to be simple – especially in news articles. Hardly any of the papers mentioned our medals. If they did, it was in a super snide sort of way. The headline in theProvinceread:‘Hero’ Loses Control. The fact that they put ‘hero’ in quotation marks harsh pissed me off. It was like they were trying to say he’d never really been a hero at all. Not that he wanted to be one in the first place. He hated that crap. So did I. Julian was the only one who liked it. But basically, nobody wanted to hear about the decent things he’d done. That’s way too complicated. In their eyes, you’re either a good guy or a bad guy. Chris had beaten up a cop and stolen his car, so he had to be a bad guy. The fact that he’d saved an old lady’s life didn’t mean shit. The funny part is, he would have agreed. It didn’t mean anything. We shouldn’t have bothered to haul her out of there in the first place. We should have stood around like everybody else and watched her drown.

Maybe that way Chris would still be alive.

If it weren’t for my dad, I’d probably think all the adults in the world are insane. At least he knew Chris. He liked him, too. That’s why he saw through the bullshit. He didn’t believe the cops or the press – not for a second. He could see that they just made up a story – the usual kind of news story – that everybody wanted to hear. The worst part was how Julian went along with their version. So did Karen, actually. They rolled over together like a pair of well-trained poodles and let people tell them what happened. Not me. I know what happened. I was there for most of it and Chris told me some of it and the rest I can imagine.

However much they lie, they can’t change what I know.

3

‘I told her about the fireball.’

I looked at him. He’d never told anybody about the fireball, except me. I was a little bit annoyed, actually. The two of us were sitting by Julian’s pool, cutting up a garden hose. For a long time we’d been trying to figure out a way to breathe underwater. It was like an ongoing, fairly casual hobby of ours.

‘Why did you do that?’

He shrugged. ‘She asked me about the trippiest thing I’d ever seen.’

‘And you said the fireball?’

‘Pretty much.’

Apparently they were at the lookout on Mount Seymour, in the back of her dad’s Jeep. I’ve been up there tons of times, and even during the summer the air is thin and cool. At night they would have been able to see rows of shaggy pines dropping down towards the Cove, and the city lights glittering like stars that had crashed to earth. And off to the side, if it’s clear, you get a wicked view of Burrard Inlet. The whole situation must have been pretty romantic. I guess, under those circumstances,I could forgive him for telling her about the fireball. Besides, it didn’t change the fact that he’d told me first.

After it happened, he called me as soon as he got home – in the middle of the night.

‘I was biking along Fairway – the bit just off the Parkway. It was totally dark. Then the sky lit up and on the horizon I saw this ball of fire. Fucking huge. Orange and purple and red – every colour you can imagine. Falling from the sky. It lasted for five or six seconds.’

‘Holy shit,’ I said. I knew right away that this was serious. ‘Were you baked?’

‘Not even, man. A little bit drunk, but not baked.’

‘Maybe it was the Northern Lights again.’

‘It wasn’t anything like the Northern Lights.’

He knew exactly what the Northern Lights looked like because we’d both seen them when we were super stoned on nutmeg this one time.

‘I guess you could have imagined it. Like an acid flashback.’

‘No. I know what I saw.’

He was still breathing pretty heavy. From biking home, I guess.

‘What was it, Razor?’

I felt like I had to give him an answer. Chris trusted me when it came to explaining that kind of thing – even when there was no real explanation.

‘It could have been a meteor. An extremely large meteor.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Don’t worry. I’ll look into it.’

The next day I phoned all the papers and weather stations, but nobody had reported seeing a fireball. That didn’t mean anything, though. If Chris said he’d seen it, he’d seen it.

‘What did she say when you told her?’

Chris had shoved the hose over the top of his snorkel, and was tightening a little metal clamp to hold it in place. He was super good at putting weird shit like that together.

He shrugged. ‘She sort of laughed.’

‘She laughed?’

‘I don’t think she really believed me. Come on. Let’s try this thing.’

We’d attached the other end of the hose to a foot pump – the kind you use to inflate airbeds. Chris put the snorkel in his mouth and went underwater while I pumped air down to him. It worked, too. For a while. Then he started to get a bit of backwash and felt dizzy, so he came up. I was still thinking about it.

‘I can’t believe she laughed at your fireball.’

‘Whatever. She probably thought I was talking shit to impress her.’

That was one thing she didn’t understand about Chris. He never lied or talked shit to make himself look good. Most guys do – including me – but Chris didn’t have it in him.

4

Up until all of this started, our summer vacation had been fairly casual. Mostly we went cliff jumping at Pool 99. We’d take Julian’s car, or a bus to Riverside Drive, then hike in past the ‘No Trespassing’ sign and follow a trail down to this stony, sun-baked beach by Seymour River. Technically, we weren’t supposed to be there. Pool 99 isn’t as sketchy as Lynn Canyon, but over the years a bunch of kids have still died there. They died hitting bottom, or landing wrong in the water, or being held under by currents. They died all sorts of ways, but none of them had been worth anything. Then a kid died who was rich and smart and played tennis, and it became this huge tragedy. The papers wrote it up and his parents tried to sue, so the district put this shitty wooden fence around the area and closed it down.

That never kept us away, or anybody else, either. Come summer, Pool 99 is always overrun by about eight hundred sweaty, noisy teenagers. If we got there early, before the crowds, it was all right. Otherwise there could be problems. Chris and crowds didn’t mix. If you put him in a group of people, a little pocket would immediately form around him. Like on those soap commercials – when all the grease sort of moves away from the detergent.

If he felt like it, Chris could huck huge gainers and front flips and suicides. He was stoked on cliff jumping, but he couldn’t stand being around all those treats, talking shit to each other and showing off for their girlfriends. So when it was packed, he never jumped. He just chilled. The three of us had our own spot, near the base of the cliffs, that people knew to leave for us. We’d throw down our towels and spark up a bowl and check out the girls through our sunglasses. Julian always wore this pricey Hawaiian shirt that he’d bought at a store in Park Royal, just in case any chicks came over to talk to us. Sometimes they did, too. He thought it was because of the shirt, but I’m pretty sure it was because of Chris.

‘What do you think? Should we jump one of those mothers?’

‘Fuck off, Jules.’

Julian loved talking about cliff jumping, but he hardly ever did it. Heights terrified him. Also, he didn’t like taking off his shirt. Not because he was fat – he had huge muscles from all the protein powder he gobbled – but because of his birthmark. He had this weird, fist-sized birthmark in the middle of his chest, right over his heart. It was bizarre. It freaked people out, including me, and Jules knew it. He kept that birthmark under wraps.

‘Come on. It’ll be sweet.’

I said, ‘Go ahead, man.’

He didn’t, of course. None of us did. We just sat there. Chris lit a smoke. The sun coated the canyon with a thick yellow glare and the rocks beneath our towels felt hot as a grill. Above usand to the right, clumps of people had gathered on the cliffs, waiting their turn. They went in one by one, like lemmings, and after each jump there was always a lot of hooting and cheeringand applause. Some were jumping Superfly. That’s nothing. Even Julian had jumped Superfly. A few others werejumping Logs. It’s twice as high and pretty sketchy, but not too bad. I never go higher than Logs. Actually, hardly anybody goes higher than Logs. To jump Cooks, you have to climb onto this stump and leap blind through all these tree branches. Then you still have sixty feet to go before you hitwater. Even if you land perfectly, you always touch bottom jumping Cooks. That’s what Chris told me, anyway. And if you land wrong, you just straight up die – which is how it got its name. People started calling it Cooks because that was the name of this kid who got killed doing it. Not the rich kid. Some other kid.

That afternoon, a couple of guys were jumping Cooks.

‘Look at these clowns,’ Julian said.

They were older than us and had those fake, doughy muscles that the guys from West Van develop by pumping tons of weights without actually doing anything else. One wore a pair of shiny Diesel swim trunks that probably cost about five hundred bucks. The other had on this raunchy little Speedo, so tight you could practically see his balls popping out the sides. I glanced over at Chris, just to see what he thought. He sat and watched them, the smoke dangling from his lips, his face totally blank.

In the shallows across from us these Barbie-doll blondes were cheering them on.

‘That’s wicked, guys!’

‘Come on, just one more!’

It wouldn’t have been so bad, except you could tell they were only shouting to get everybody else’s attention. So their boyfriends were jumping Cooks. So fucking what? It wasn’t like they were the first people to ever jump it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the girls pulled a camcorder out of their beach bag, to record this great event. Every time the guys swaggered out of the water following a jump, they’d give each other a high-five and say something stupid into the camera, something like, ‘How about another one, babe?’ It was like watching two guys masturbate in public. Seriously. There was no stopping them.

Finally, Chris decided to put an end to it.

He stood up. He didn’t look like those guys at all. He was almost scrawny, his skin pulled tight over hard knots of muscle. Without saying anything, he flicked his smoke in the water and made his way up the cliffs. Everybody was already looking that way. Now the audience was all his. The steroid monkeys and their girlfriends stopped goofing around to watch. When he reached Cooks, he climbed up onto the stump. There was a moment – this moment when everybody sensed that something insane was going to happen – and then it did.

‘Holy shit!’

He jumped stomach first, his arms and legs spreadeagled like a skydiver. He hung in that position as he dropped through the air. At the last possible second, he bent at the waist and pulled his arms and legs in, pointing them straight down at the water. That was how he hit: jacknifing through the surface without making any splash at all. When he surfaced, there was no hooting or cheering or applauding. The canyon suddenly went all quiet, like a funeral parlour – just the way Chris liked it. He’d pulled a suicide off Cooks. Nobody did that. Superfly, sure. Logs, maybe. But Cooks? You’d have to be insane to try it. That’s what all those people were thinking as they watched Chris slosh over to the bank. The thing is, Chris didn’t give a shit about impressing them. Like I said, he hated show-offs almost as much as he hated turtlenecks. He was just sick of those guys and their screeching girlfriends.

One of them said, ‘That was pretty slick, man.’

Chris looked at him, in that way of his, and the guy shut up.

After that they put their camera away.

The rest of the afternoon was perfect. By ‘perfect’ I mean that nothing spectacular happened at all. We burned a fat one and joked around – totally mellow. A couple of girls came over, wanting to get high. They were pretty cute, actually, but they turned out to be harsh gnats. Eventually we gave up talking to them and just made fun of them until they left. Then we munched out on this giant bag of nachos. Also, I think we went to get some pop from the gas station on the way home. I don’t really know. But basically, that’s the last time I can remember feeling normal. The next day we went down to the beach at Cates Park instead of the river. We did that sometimes, for a change. Now I wish we hadn’t, of course.

But there’s no use thinking like that.

5

After everything that had happened to us, there was no way Chris was going to let Bates arrest him. Fuck that. It all seems sort of inevitable now, but it wasn’t like we planned it or anything. We didn’t know Bates was going to turn up at the beach – and we definitely weren’t looking for him. We’d spent most of our summer trying to avoid him. Nobody believed that, of course. All the articles said that we jumped him, and people just assumed it was true. The thing is, Vancouver really only has two newspapers. There’s a few other little papers, but theSunand theProvinceare the main ones – and they’re both equally shitty. TheSundescribed Chris as ‘a cruel adolescent with a penchant for violence’. Whoever wrote that is a total fucking idiot. Cruel? Cruel is about the last word I’d use to describe Chris.

Take that camp trip. We went on this camp trip with all the kids in our grade. The first night, some dickheads managed to snare a raccoon that had been digging in the food bin. Everybody heard the commotion and came out to watch. The guys strung the thing from a tree and started spearing it with sticks. It was pretty sickening. The campsite was lit up with tiki torches, and the circle of flickering faces reminded me of that film we’d watched in English class – the one about kids killing pigs on a desert island. Their spears punched in and out of the raccoon’s belly, making these wet, meaty sounds. You could smell the blood. It was everywhere: all over the raccoon, all over the forest floor. That was bad enough, but the screaming was even worse. I’d never heard an animal scream before. It was fucked. After a while, the guys wore themselves out. They stood around, holding their spears and talking about how tough they all were. Meanwhile, the animal just hung there, mewling like a kitten.

‘You better kill it,’ Chris told them.

‘Huh?’

‘You can’t leave it like that. Finish it.’

The guys looked at the raccoon, twisting and turning on the rope. They shuffled their feet and glanced at each other, hoping somebody else would want to do it. Nobody did.

Chris pulled out his pocket knife, the one his dad had given him, and walked over to the animal. Holding it behind the head he pointed its nose towards the sky. Then he slashed it across the throat. Blood spurted out, black and shiny in the torchlight, and coated his hand. The raccoon stopped moving and didn’t make a sound. Of course, after that everybody in the grade was talking about how Chris had killed a raccoon.

When his old man died, Chris lived with us for a while. His mom had always been a bit of a booze-hound and it only got worse after that. She was too messed up to look after him so he stayed at our house. My dad was cool about it. He rented us restricted movies, played street hockey with us in the driveway, and even took us paintballing a few times. I mean, my dad’s not actually cool, but he at least tried to think of cool stuff for us to do. Eventually things settled down at Chris’s house and he went home. For a few months, though, it had been like my dad was a dad to the both of us.

Chris’s death hit him pretty hard, too.

‘I don’t know how he could just punch a cop like that.’

‘It didn’t happen like they say.’

But he knew that – I’d told him already.

‘Did he punch the cop?’

‘Sure, a bunch of times.’

We were sitting in the living room. My dad was holding theProvinceup close to his face, staring at the article as if it was written in some kind of secret code. He had a tall-boy of German beer in one hand. I’m pretty sure he was hammered. He hardly ever gets hammered in front of me but the day after Chris’s death was an exception.

‘You can’t just hit a cop.’

‘Bates started it.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘As soon as you do that, you’re crossing a line.’

It really bothered him. He couldn’t get over it. The way he talked, you’d think knocking out a cop had killed Chris – not driving into a blockade at a hundred miles an hour. I guess it’s because my dad’s got this enormous respect for the law. He’s a lawyer, after all. I know what most people think about that. They think it means we’re rich, and that my dad’s an asshole. But here’s what they don’t understand. He’s not a typical lawyer. To be a typical lawyer you need to join a firm and work in a giant skyscraper downtown, on the top floor so your clients have to climb about thirty flights of stairs to reach your office. And then, when they finally make it up there, you charge them a grand just for saying hello. But my dad couldn’t do that. He tried it and he hated it. He hated all the otherlawyers in the firm, too. So he rented an office above a bakery and started a private practice way the hell out in Ladner, where he does commercial work and land claims for the Natives. He cuts his clients pretty sweet deals, and in exchange they givehim tons of smoked cod and sockeye salmon. I’m not complaining – it’s great salmon. But basically, my dad isn’t an asshole. He can act like a bit of an asshole sometimes, but that’s different from being one. And we’re not rich. I mean, we get by. I can’t deny that. But we’re not rich like people in West Van are rich, or like Julian’s family is rich. Jules is crazy rich. His dad’s a sports agent and his mom’s into some kind of pyramid scheme and every time I turn around they’ve got a new car – a Porsche or a Beamer or a Lexus. It’s like they’re planning on starting an auto mall in their garage.

Occasionally, my dad’s obsession with the law can be a pain – like when he made me turn myself in. I understand now, of course. Doing that was probably the only thing that saved me from going to jail, or juvie, or whatever. I mean, Bates knew us both. We’d been arrested together earlier that week. It was only a matter of time before they came looking for me. When it happened, though, I felt like my dad was selling me out. He’d turned me over to the enemy.

‘Officer Bates claims you attacked him together.’

‘What?’

‘Did you hit Officer Bates?’

I shook my head.

Two cops took me into this room with metal chairs and a metal desk, and kept me there. Totally alone. My dad warned me ahead of time about what to expect, but all their questions still caught me off guard. I felt like Alice when she comes face to face with those two fat guys. You know – the ones in the bow ties and beanie hats. Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

‘Are you saying Officer Bates is lying?’

‘Is that what you’re saying?’

I can’t pretend I wasn’t scared. The two of them stood on either side of my chair, looming over me. I kept my arms crossed and my head down. It was obvious how much they hated me. I couldn’t stop shaking – as if I’d suddenly come down with hypothermia.

‘I… didn’t… hit him.’

‘Don’t bullshit us, bud.’

I gritted my teeth. Their faces blurred in front of me, and I had to sort of wipe at my eyes to keep from crying. I tried to think of what Chris would do. He wouldn’t let these cops push him around. Fuck that. He’d stare them down and tell it to them straight up.

‘Bates made a grab for Chris,’ I said. ‘Chris hit him. He kept hitting him and Bates went down. That’s what happened. I don’t care if you believe me or not.’

It would have been awesome, but my voice cracked a little when I said, ‘or not’. Still, those cops were surprised. They drew back, blinking like I’d shined a flashlight in their eyes. Up until then they’d been putting words in my mouth, coaxing my story out of me – like they did with Karen and Julian. Now I knew how to handle them. After that, I stuck to my story.

They can only push you around if you don’t push back.

6

The cop stood there, shouting to us from shore.

‘Break a window! See if you can break one of the windows!’

We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. It was like trying to stop a boat from sinking. Except, in this case, the boat was a big black Cadillac with an old lady inside. And we weren’t really trying to stop it from sinking – we were trying to get her out of there.

In other words, it was nuts.

Julian hung off the driver’s door, yanking on the handle like a wild man. It wouldn’t budge. I’d scrambled onto the roof. The shiny paint felt hot and slippery beneath my knees. I tried bashing the windscreen with my fists, but from that angle I didn’t have the strength to break it. My eyes stung with salt and sweat and my vision was blurred to shit. When I looked at the shore, all I could see was this mass of bodies in bathing suits, with a cop standing at the front. There was a lot of yelling and screaming going on. None of it meant anything to me. We were all alone out there. Shielding my eyes, I leaned forward and peered through the windscreen. I could see the driver slumped against the steering wheel, half-submerged in water. There wasn’t much time. Actually, there was no time. If it wasn’t for Chris, we would have lost her for sure. While Jules and I struggled away, he dove down to the bottom and came up with that rock. It glittered in the glare of the sun, jagged and covered with barnacles and twice as big as his fist.

‘Give me some room, man.’

Jules backed off as Chris paddled around to the driver’s side. Grabbing the handle for leverage, he smashed the rock through the window. It didn’t shatter like regular glass. It cracked into all these tiny pieces, like diamonds. Chris cleared the leftovers away with his hand. I think that was when he must have cut himself. It wasn’t a little cut, either. There was a gash on his wrist and streaks of blood all along his forearm. Chris didn’t even notice. He just reached through, unlocked the door, and yanked it open. As soon as he did, water rushed in and the car started sinking faster.

‘Come on!’

I slid off the hood and splashed over to him. He propped the driver up, getting her head above water. At the time, we didn’t pay much attention to her. I mean, we were too busy saving her to notice much about her. I only remember seeing the white ringlets of hair plastered to her scalp, and the way her pink dress billowed up in the water like a parachute.

Chris struggled among all that fabric.

‘This goddamn seatbelt’s stuck!’

Most of the cab had gone under. Julian and I moved in to help. The two of us wrenched on the belt while Chris ducked beneath the surface to work the buckle. It was jammed, all right. Maybe from the water, maybe from the crash. I don’t know. But we pried it loose.

Somebody shouted: ‘Get her out of there!’

It was that cop again. He was full of great advice.

Chris took her by the shoulders, Julian got hold of an arm, andI grabbed fistfuls of pink dress. We tugged and pulled. Somehow, we managed to drag her free of the car. This cry went up on shore. People were cheering for us. But she was a dead weight, limp and lifeless in our arms. It took all three of us to swim her back. As we drew close, the cop waded out to meet us, full of encouragement. We didn’t know him then, but it was Bates.

‘Great job, guys – now bring her up here.’

According to theSun, we ‘helped Officer Bates perform a water rescue’. I laughed pretty hard when I read that.

7

People think I’m exaggerating when I talk about his fights. I mean, he wasn’t even fully grown. How tough can a sixteen year old be, right? They only say that because they never saw it happen. Chris didn’t swing and flail and throw haymakers like all those treats you see in internet videos. His punches sort of exploded out of him – these little bombs that blew up right in your face. Also, it was almost impossible to knock him out. I guess his skull was extra hard or something, because he could take tons of punishment without going down. It was like a special ability or a super power. Even when he should have lost, he usually won.

‘Hey Razor – what’s up?’

‘Not much, Kristofferson.’

He’d called me from Lonsdale. We biked over there once in a while, to play games at the Hippo Club Arcade – back before it burned down.

‘You want to come meet me?’ he asked.

‘I’ll come and beat you, all right.’

‘The old beat and greet, huh?’

On the other end of the line, I heard somebody swearing. The voice sounded tinny but clear, as if they were shouting at him from nearby.

Chris said, ‘Can you hold on a minute?’

‘Yeah. Who’s that?’

But he was already gone. I heard more shouting, then some scuffling and this cracking sound, like a broom handle being smacked against concrete.

Chris’s voice came to me faintly: ‘Are we done? Huh?’

A moment later he was back on the line, panting.

‘So,’ he said, as if it was nothing, ‘where should we meet?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Some guy just lipped me off.’

That kind of thing happened all the time. Fighting was as natural to him as eating, sleeping and breathing. And dying, I guess.

He never started fights. He didn’t have to. Fights found him. The thing about Chris was that he didn’t look tough. He wasn’t super built or anything, and he had a young face – smooth and almost pretty. It was the kind of face other guys wanted to hit. Only he hit back. Harder. He didn’t train. He never took boxing or martial arts or anything. I did. I got it into my head that I wanted to be tough like him, so I enrolled in kung fu classes for about three years. I worked pretty hard at it, too. Twice a week I would go down there, learning these moves and training with a bunch of other wimps. They taught us how to kick and punch and block. Eventually I even got a brown belt. I learned some stuff, I guess, but the thing about kung fu is that it doesn’t make you tough. Toughness is just something you’re born with.

Or without, in my case.

I didn’t try to hide it, at least. You know – I wasn’t one of those guys who pretends to be super tough. I guess that’s why Chris started calling me Razor. He nicknamed me after this wrestler, this tough-as-shit Mexican who always had a toothpick in his mouth and talked a lot of trash to his opponents.Basically, he was the exact opposite of me. Whenever Chris sawme walking in the halls, he would start singing Razor’s theme song – one of those super lame wrestling themes – and I’d raise my arms over my head as if I’d just won a big match.

He’d say something like, ‘Who’d you scrap yesterday, Razor?’

And I’d say, ‘Oh, six or seven guys.’

‘At once?’

‘You know it.’

Eventually the nickname got around and everybody started calling me that. It was the kind of thing Julian would never have put up with – not even as a joke. It would have harsh offended him. Jules had this image of himself in his head, and he didn’t like anything getting in the way of that image. One time he even told me that he thought he could take Chris in a fight. I didn’t say anything. I was too shocked to say anything. Jules? He had about as much chance against Chris as a cow fighting a panther. He wasn’t just bragging, either. He was dead serious. He’d actually tricked himself into believing he was tougher than Chris.

Julian had a few issues, I guess.

‘Looks like we got a couple of high rollers, here.’

Me and Chris were on our way out of the Avalon – this raunchy bar right on the border of North and West Van – when some treat said that to us.

‘Don’t worry about it, man,’ Chris told him. ‘It’s casual.’

‘What’s casual?’

‘Your turtleneck. It’s totally fucking casual.’

When I said Chris never started fights, what I meant was that he hardly ever started fights. He might have started a fight if, say, somebody made the mistake of lipping him off. Especially if the guy was wearing a turtleneck that threatened to swallow his head.

‘Oh, a tough guy, huh?’

We’d already walked ten yards past him. Chris stopped and turned around.

‘Yeah, I’m a fucking tough guy, buddy.’

He went back to meet him. The guy had a fake tan and dark, well-oiled hair that matched his stupid shirt. Chris grabbed him by his turtleneck and shouted in his face.

‘You want to go? Huh? You and your fucking turtleneck?’

The guy started shoving him back, but he had three friends with him who stepped in. They held the turtleneck while I grabbed Chris. One of them was a monster. He had huge pipes and those weird shoulder muscles you only see on roid monkeys. He stood between Chris and the turtleneck and spread out his palms, playing up his role as this big pacifier.

‘Take it easy, pal, or I’ll have to pop you one.’

He thought he had the right to say that, since he outweighed Chris by at least fifty pounds. In his mind, it wasn’t even a contest. That’s because he didn’t know Chris. I had an arm over his shoulder, but he was tearing at it like a horse against a harness.

‘Take it easy? Fuck you, man. Fuck you. Your buddy’s wearing a fucking turtleneck and I’m going to fucking kill you.’

It was such a bizarre thing to say that they didn’t know what to do. The four of them started blinking at the same time, like a herd of deer about to get ploughed by a truck. I think they’d realised he was ready to take them all on together. He would have, too, if I hadn’t been there to hold him back. He was still ranting as the guys got into their car.

‘I bet that’s the last time you wear a fucking turtleneck, buddy!’

There wasn’t much they could say to that – for obvious reasons.

After the crash, the press interviewed all these people – all these nobodies – and every single one seemed to have some idiotic story to tell about Chris getting in a fight. Half of them weren’t even true, but that didn’t matter. They printed them anyways and tried to convince everybody that he was super volatile. That’s the word they used: volatile. Fuck that. I mean, sure, he had a bit of an issue with turtlenecks, but that’s not the same as being volatile. It was just another one of their stupid assumptions. Like they assumed his temper had to do with what happened to his dad. Maybe it did, too. But none of them understood how much the whole thing with Mrs Reever had messed him up. She was the old lady we saved. I would have explained all that to the press, if anybody had bothered to listen. They didn’t, though.

They never listened.

‘I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry.’

We were on the bus, heading home from the Avalon that night. Usually we made Julian drive us around, but I think he was at tennis practice, or maybe a family dinner. I can’t really remember. Either way, we had to take the bus. For most of the ride, Chris sat hunched forward, staring at the floor, with his hair hanging in his eyes. He had brown hair – sort of sandy – that he didn’t really bother to comb or cut properly.

‘It was nothing,’ I told him. I meant it, too. I was used to his fights. What I wasn’t used to was him getting all distraught like this. ‘Those guys were clowns, anyway.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, as if he hadn’t even heard me. Chris hardly ever apologised for anything. ‘I just can’t stop thinking about it. It’s fucked.’

‘I know.’

‘I see her face, sometimes.’

I waited.

‘I dream about it, too.’

‘What kind of dreams?’

‘Weird dreams.’ He looked up, finally. ‘It trips me out, you know?’

I knew. He’d always been kind of angry and shit, but after she died it kept getting worse. It was like there was an elastic band inside him, winding itself tighter and tighter and tighter.

8

They went on and on about his home life. Since he beat up a cop they just assumed his house was filled with gas-huffing junkies. That’s not the truth at all. Nobody huffed gas in Chris’s house. There was a shitload of drinking, and some funny business that one time, but no gas huffing. And no abuse, either. His dad never laid a hand on him. Neither did his mom. That didn’t stop the reporters, though. They ran lame little headlines like:Violent Teen’s Troubled Background. They used that term all the time. Troubled. Don’t ask me why. As far as I can tell, ‘troubled’ is just another one of those words – those meaningless words – that people throw around to explain things they don’t understand. It’s like ‘volatile’. Chris was volatile and his home life was troubled. So what? He didn’t care about that shit so I don’t see why anybody else should, either.

‘Give me another,’ Chris said.

‘That’s it. We’re bone-dry.’

‘Dry as a couple of boners, huh?’

‘Drier than Sonny Bono.’

We’d polished off an eight-pack of Wildcat, just the two of us. It was a Friday night, I think. Or maybe a Saturday. I don’t really know. This was a few years ago, back when we’d first started drinking. We were in the Cove – the row of tourist shops and food joints by the marina. During the day, it can get pretty annoying down there. People come from all over the place to eat ice cream and go kayaking and act like complete idiots. There’s always tons of super ignorant American tourists, too. You know – like entire families that think Canada is just another state. But at night all the idiots go home. That’s when it became ours again. The only thing that stays open late is the pizza place. The guys who work there are pretty awesome, actually. They don’t mind if you hang around, so long as you buy a piece of pizza. Sometimes you don’t even have to buy it – you can just trade them a joint or a pinch of weed and they’ll hook you up with any slice you want.

But basically, we were in the Cove. Also, we were out of beer.

‘Shit,’ Chris said. ‘I guess we’ll have to hit up my house.’

That was the only reason we ever went over to his place: to steal liquor. His mom had stockpiles of booze, crammed in cupboards and cabinets and closets and drawers. Mostly she drank vodka or wine, but she had tons of other stuff, too – whiskey, beer, rum, whatever. Their condo was like a giant liquor store without a cash register or security guard. We stole from her constantly – not that she ever noticed. She had so much booze lying around that she could barely keep track of what she drank, let alone what we drank.

When we got there, Chris asked, ‘What do you want?’

‘I don’t know. White wine?’

‘White wine tastes like piss, man.’

‘I like the taste of piss.’

‘You little piss-pot.’

After he said that, we couldn’t stop giggling. Stealing liquor usually made us a bit giddy. We’d done it so much we were practically professionals. Our plan was always the same. I’d run interference on his mom while Chris grabbed what we wanted.

‘Forget the piss,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the good stuff.’

‘Yeah. The good stuff sounds good.’

He opened the door. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

Chris lived in this housing complex just off the Parkway. There were three floors, but each floor only had one or two tiny rooms. The basement, where you came in, was used for storage. A lot of his dad’s things were still down there: old leg traps, a lobster cage, fishing nets, pieces of driftwood. His mom never cleared them out. Come to think of it, she didn’t go down there much. Mostly she stayed on the second floor, in the kitchen. That was where we went to find her: sitting and sipping and smoking at their dinner table.

‘Hey Mom.’

‘Why, hello there.’

At one time, his mom had been hot. You could tell by the way she held herself. She sort of sprawled in her chair, slinky and sultry as a cat. A very drunk cat. One strap of her dress had fallen off her shoulder. She didn’t bother to push it back up or anything, either.

‘How are my favourite boys?’

‘We’re good, Mom,’ Chris said. ‘We just came in to warm up for a minute.’

‘Is it cold out?’

‘Pretty cold, I guess.’ Chris yawned. ‘Anyways, I got to take a leak.’

That was my cue. He left and I stayed with her in the kitchen. I walked across to the sink, then rested my elbows on the counter and leaned back. Totally casual. I was still pretty plastered from the Wildcat, which made me act all cocky. She watched me, smiling in this shrewd sort of way. When she smiled, she still looked half-decent. I guess that was because she had nice teeth – just like Chris. The booze had ruined her face but not her teeth.

‘So what are you boys up to this evening?’ she asked.

‘Not much. Just hanging out.’

‘Sounds like trouble.’

I laughed, a little too loudly. I thought I could hear Chris opening the hall closet.

‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

She held up her glass. ‘Trying to relax.’

Tipping her head back, she downed the rest in one gulp. Afterwards she got up and oozed over to the fridge next to me, then yanked open the freezer door. That’s where she kept her Smirnoff. As she poured herself a refill, a bit of vodka spilled onto the counter.

She asked, ‘What about girls? Any girls on the agenda for tonight?’

‘Uh, no. Not really.’

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you two. Don’t you like girls?’

‘Sure.’ I edged away, because her face was hovering too close to mine. ‘Now that you mention it, we’ll probably be seeing some girls later on. I think so, anyways.’

‘You can’t avoid them forever. You’ve got to learn sometime.’

I laughed again. ‘Oh yeah?’

That was when it happened. She took my hand and held it against her tit – her left tit – then sort of made me squeeze. I stood there, frozen, with my hand on her tit and this stupid smile on my face, like one of those psychotic dummies that ventriloquists use.

‘I could teach you a thing or two,’ she said.

I jerked my hand away as if I’d burned it. Then I sort of stammered and babbled and tried to laugh it off. I think I said something like, ‘Come on, now. That’s enough of that.’

‘Relax, honey.’ She patted my cheek, acting all motherly. ‘I was only joking.’

Maybe she was. How should I know? I just knew I didn’t want her to make me feel her left tit again. A second later Chris came back, grinning. He gave me the thumbs up.

‘We better get going, man.’

‘You boys be good, now.’

He left. I rushed after him like the kitchen was on fire. Once we were outside I asked, ‘Did you get any?’

‘Yeah. I got some Wiser’s.’

‘Give it here.’

I took the bottle and slammed it back. I couldn’t shake the feeling of her tit beneath my hand. I was freaked out, but also a little turned on. I mean, his mom wasn’t totally butt or anything. But she was still his mom, and that made me feel kind of ill – like when you’re looking at porn on the internet and accidentally stumble across one of those messed up websites. You know – the kind that show people doing weird shit to each other.

‘What’s up, man?’ Chris asked.

I couldn’t lie to him. I never lied to him.

‘Your mom made me touch her tit.’

We sort of looked at each other.

‘Which one?’

‘The left one. She said she was only joking, though.’

‘Oh.’ He took the bottle and drank. ‘Don’t mind her. She’s just a drunk bitch.’

‘Sure man. It’s casual.’

Neither of us knew how to react. I almost felt like apologising, even though I knew it didn’t make any sense. But then, me touching his mom’s tit didn’t make much sense, either.

Anyways, we didn’t see his mom very often.

We didn’t see his dad very often, either.