The Worm in Every Heart

Name after name after name, a whole limping alphabet of them—the roster of her “peers.” She watched Wang’s chin wag through the remaining call-and-response, counting freckles: Two faint ones near the corner of his mouth, one closer to the centre—a lopsided, tri-eyed face. From upside-down, it almost looked like he was smiling.

Mr. Wang paused, apparently out of breath; sweat rose off him in every direction—a stinky heat haze, like asphalt in summer. He wore the same pale blue pin-striped shirts every day, and you could usually mark what time it was by how far the matching yellow circle at either armpit had spread. Whenever he gestured, waves of cologne and old grease spread in the direction of his ire. She was vaguely aware of having spent the last few minutes experimenting with his voice, even as her conscious mind turned lightly to thoughts of suicide—turning it up, turning it down, letting the words stretch sideways like notes of music. Shrinking it to a breath, a hum . . .

“ . . . Heather?”

Aware of his attention, finally, she looked up, met his eyes. And: “Yes,” she replied, reflexively—knowing that usually worked, even though she hadn’t been listening well enough to really know what she was agreeing to.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes—Mr. Wang?”

An audible giggle, two desks to the right: Jenny Diamond, self-elected Queen of Normal, Ontario. They’d been friends, once upon a time—or maybe Jenny had just tolerated her, letting her run to keep up with the rest of the clique while simultaneously making sure she stayed pathetically unaware how precarious her status as token Jenny wannabe really was. The last to know, as ever.

“I said, you’re up. Yesterday’s journal entry?” Another pause. “Sometime this week might be nice, especially for the rest of the class.”

Oh, I’m sure. Especially for them.

The particularly funny thing being, of course, that she actually had done the work in question (for once.) Poem, any subject, any length. She could just see the corner of it poking from her binder, if she strained—an uneven totem-pole of assonant paragraphs, neat black pen rows on pale blue-lined sheets, whose first lines went like so:

Always a shut door between us

Yet I clung fast

out here on the volcano’s rim

For five more years or a hundred,

Whichever came last;

How tall this pain has grown.

wavering, taking root

At the split mouth of bone.

Your love like lava, sealing my throat.

Words, piling up like bones . . .

“Well, Heather? You know the drill. Stand up . . . ”

. . . and let’s get started.

Students normally stood to read, displaying themselves in front of everybody else. The class listened, kept the snickers to a minimum, clapped when you were done. Big flourish. Good mark. Centre of attention, all that—

But. But, but, but.

Staring down at her own lap, caught short like some idiot fish half-hooked through the cornea. Staring at her poem, the binder’s edge, one blue-jeaned leg, the other. The edge of her peasant shirt, only barely hiding the area between, where well-worn fabric slid first to blue, then pale, then white along the seam. Normally, that is.

Tomato-red flower blooming at the juncture now, spreading pinky-gross back along the track of her hidden zipper, her crotch’s bleached denim ridge. Evidence that she had yet once more left the house at that particular time of the month unsupplied, probably because her mind was frankly elsewhere: Choking on the thought of how unexpectedly soon Doug might return home from his latest “buying trip,” maybe. Spitting it out like an unchewed cud of cereal into her napkin . . .

And: “8:30,” said Janice, grabbing her bowl; the chair, pulled out from under her, shrieked protest. “Up and at ’em, pie.”

Muttered: “Whatever.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”