Maidenhead

‘No. She wasn’t there when he pissed on me.’

Lee finally passed me the joint, shrivelled and halved. I smoked and I thought.

Smoking was good for thinking. I had scrubbed my whole face for Elijah with chamomile soap. I still used toothpaste on the last little bumps on my cheek. Lee had never commented on either my cheek or my makeup. My father, who’d come up from his lair in the basement for takeout, had coughed in shock when he saw me without makeup. ‘I told your mother you had to go to the doctor about that,’ he said. ‘No one ever listens to me.’

‘I went to Bernhard twice,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t hurt anymore.’

Then my father the zombie surprised me. ‘Your friend Jen called here,’ he said. ‘She told me about some kind of disturbance outside your school. She said a man was with you, a man she didn’t know.’

‘God. I can’t believe she called you. She’s the disturbance.’

‘She was worried, Myra.’

My dad was drowning in his pyjama pants.

‘Myra, listen. Your friend was crying on the phone. She said that the man threatened her and Charlene. Who are they talking about?’

I started laughing. Like, all of a sudden I’m going to tell my dad things? Just because my mom’s not here he wants to have a relationship?

‘Next time Jen calls, you can tell her to mind her own fucking house.’ I wasn’t worried about swearing around him now.

My father stamped his foot on the carpet. It was the most alive I’d seen him in a while.

I tried to hold in my smoke like Lee, to control it like she did coming out, but I coughed and coughed and it all came out flat.

‘You know, I had this feeling that first time we met that you were going through something really heavy,’ Lee said. ‘Aaron did too. I mean, he’s really discerning. He’s an autodidact. He only likes girls with brains.’

I handed back the J to Lee. A dog barked somewhere far off.

‘This is what I think,’ Lee said. Then she waited for silence, until a buzzing sound stopped. ‘Girls are completely naturally receptive. Someone so receptive is easy to be silenced. I mean, our openness can get fucking crushed.’

‘You know what just occurred to me?’

‘What?’

‘Birds don’t chirp at night.’

‘Fuck, man. You’ve got to speak up with guys, Myra. It’s frustrating. You’re allowed to speak up, you know. Fucking give it to them.’

I wasn’t tough like Lee was. I wasn’t as blunt or succinct. Being stoned with her in the ravine made me feel shy but poetic, like I could light a match inside myself and see what it was that I even wanted to ask for.

‘I was willing in that motel room, you know. I was open like a book.’

‘Yeah?’ Lee seemed impressed for a moment. ‘Well, I think some of us are even more open than that.’

I knew what she was talking about. Lee and Wils were best friends and lovers. From the little I’d seen, their relationship seemed really open, like they could tell each other anything. It wasn’t like how I’d seen Jen be with her boyfriends, coy and always scheming. The problem for me was that I didn’t want Aaron. I wanted Elijah. I wanted to be pissed on. I wanted to enact all my porn.

I’d be more open than a book too. My spine would crack, I’d fall out in halves.

I wanted to say that to Lee, but the moment had passed.

§

I walked into Filmore’s Hotel, a four-storey brick building with a painted-black front. In the windows, oblong, hung thick orange curtains. There were seagulls yelling at the edge of the roof.

The reception was empty inside, enclosed in glass. An orange couch with an ashtray beside it was frayed at the bottom and cloud-shape stained.

Filmore’s was in the east end of the city, near the place where the streetcar tracks curved. A car had slowed down as I walked up to the hotel and a man rolled down his window on the passenger side: ‘You need a lift?’ The guy was older, with a beard, he looked like a dentist or something. I was wearing my shortest pink skirt, my white boots, my jean jacket.