Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (31 page)

Back at the hotel exhaustion made us go all normal. We talked in dull voices about painting my new apartment. We made a list
of the furniture I’d need. It was weird to be sharing a room with her – thrown together in these strange neutral surroundings
like we were exhibits in an alien zoo. I changed in the bathroom and made sure my shorts didn’t have holes in them.

Outside there were lights glimmering from tall buildings and houses, and the black water of the harbour beyond. I read for
a while. She watched TV. I got into one bed and she got into the other.

I lay in the dark sinking into starched white sheets. It was impossible to sleep. I could feel my mother tossing around in
the next bed, then weeping to herself in that almost soundless way she had. I thought
maybe I should pretend to be unconscious to give her some privacy. I couldn’t.

‘Hey. I’m gonna be okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.’

Her quavering voice coming back at me. ‘But you’re so miserable! I can’t leave you here like this.’

‘Mom, I was in love with him.’ I could say this with the lights off.

‘Oh, sweetheart.’

Her arm was reaching out whitely between the beds. I manoeuvred around so I could stretch my left hand to meet her. I brushed
her fingers with mine.

‘Do you want to watch TV?’ she said.

I did. We went zapping through all the channels from the States. Then they ran out of shows and we were down to infomercials.
The Psychic Friends Network. A miraculous food processor. She drifted off to sleep and so did I. We left the TV on, flickering and murmuring into the
night. We woke up to sunny American voices telling us good morning.

Three o’clock and already you could feel the sunset waiting. I was on a concrete platform at the train station in Halifax,
huddled into a black overcoat I’d bought second-hand. I thought it made me look older, sophisticated, maybe even French. My
friend Janine said the effect was more like a Semitic vampire. Janine was there with me, clinging to Eleanor MacBride, both
of them saying goodbye. It was Christmas and Eleanor and I were heading home – two weeks of winter boredom before our real
lives could start up again.

One more hug. Eleanor lifted Janine off the floor. I paced around with my hands in my pockets, thinking:
Oh, just kiss already and get it over with
. Behind us people were angling themselves and their suitcases full of Christmas presents up the steps and through the narrow
doors of the train.

I decided to give the girls a few minutes alone, waved goodbye to Janine over Eleanor’s shoulder and staggered after the Christmas
travellers, loaded down with my suitcase and Eleanor’s too. I was even
thinner than when I’d arrived here four months ago. Came from eating nothing but Mr Noodles and leftover pizza. I wasn’t great
at cooking and liked to save my grocery money for the important stuff – caffeine and cigarettes, alcohol, cover charges, clothes
from second-hand junk shops, books, prophylactics, weed.

I found a couple of seats in the smoking car and Eleanor joined me as we started pulling away from the station. We were packed
in close together; it was one of those very full holiday trains. Eleanor turned her face to the window for a while. The sun
was on the horizon when I realised she was talking. I pressed the stop button on my Walkman.

‘Stephen,’ Eleanor was saying, ‘how did it all change so fast?’

I didn’t know. It was a blur. But she was right. Everything was different now.

I remembered the first day of classes. How the chatter had died away as we filed into the lecture hall, everybody hushed and
excited like Christmas morning. What did Santa bring us? This wide, sunny room full of yellow wooden chairs. These windows
that stretched to the ceiling, twists of leathery ivy framing the September sky, edges of the leaves just starting to singe
with red.

I’d taken a seat behind a pillar. I was nervous thinking everybody was staring at me and also a little scared that nobody
was – dressed like a Riverside farm boy and looking like I’d lost a fight with a pig on my way to the slaughtering shed. I’d
breathed in perfume and hair gel and floor cleaner, and waited for the lecture to start. When it did, I’d realised I was screwed;
there was no way I could take notes with my left hand. My pen slid uselessly as words like ‘Gilgamesh’ and ‘Mesopotamia’ went
flying past. My binder bumped along towards the edge of my knees, getting ready to belly-flop onto the floor and embarrass
me.

Then somebody poked me in the shoulder. A girl, tall and oddly
regal looking, with short blonde hair and icy blue eyes, wearing a man’s undershirt, cut-off shorts and cowboy boots. She
said I could photocopy her notes after class. Her name was Janine. A few days later she was my best friend.

Well, Lana was in Toronto. Mark hated me. I needed a new one.

Friday night we sneaked into this long tavern downtown, all wooden tables with scummy surfaces, white walls darkened to nicotine
yellow, packed with college kids and a few rough-looking locals. A drunk girl careened into me while Janine was at the bar.
We went through the usual – where was I from, what school did I go to, what was my major and did I like it – then, of course,
the inevitable. ‘How’d you get the arm?’

I’d been telling everybody I was really wasted and fell in a river, which was more or less true, and it usually made people
laugh. So I got ready to churn out this story again, but something was jamming in my head and it wouldn’t come to me.

The girl took a sip from her beer and smiled. The noise of other people’s conversations surrounded us, waves of sound rising
and falling. There was a line of red lipstick on her teeth and I wondered if I should mention it.

Instead I heard myself telling her about my friend who’d broken my nose and then kicked the shit out of me on a riverbank
as the sun came up, all because I was in love with him and he couldn’t handle it. ‘Sucks, huh?’ I finished. The girl stared
at me. I went to rub the red stain off her tooth and she jerked backwards, then stammered out some neutral reaction and pushed
herself through the crowd. She found a friend.
Shock and laughter, quick glances in my direction. I pretended I saw somebody I knew on the other side of the room so I’d
have an excuse to turn my back.

Janine was standing behind me. I could tell by her face that she’d heard everything.

She handed me a beer. Big, clunky mug of amber liquid with a scud of dishwater foam on the top. I took a long drink and tried
to figure out what to say.

Janine leaned in close. The strap of her top looped off one bare shoulder and I sensed tiny head movements as the guys milling
around us all zeroed in on it. She asked me if what I’d said to the girl was true. I said it was. Then she asked me if it
was a secret. I surprised myself.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Course not. Tell whoever you want. Tell everybody.’ I gulped down mouthfuls of terrible beer. I felt like I’d
just escaped from an exam room. Realised I was smiling. So was Janine. Then she was hugging me. Beer swilled over the side
of her mug and splashed the back of my neck.

‘I just don’t know why you didn’t tell me sooner,’ she said. ‘We’re friends, right?’

Then it was a low, grey Tuesday afternoon in the second week of classes, and I was alone in my apartment with a boy who’d
walked me home from the meeting.

What meeting? Campus gay and lesbian society. Janine had made me go, even marched in there and sat beside me holding my hand
to make sure I wouldn’t chicken out and leave. I don’t know why I’d been so nervous. It was just a bunch of nice kids making
plans for social
events. Or something. I couldn’t take much in because I was busy watching this guy Christopher. Very beautiful, just about
angelic, with soft brown hair that curled around his ears and blue eyes he kept half shut behind little John Lennon glasses.
So I stared. I looked away and blushed. I realised he was staring back. I grinned at the floor and didn’t know what to do.

Later he was in my blue box of an apartment listening to me trying to hold a normal conversation, stammering and tripping
over my words and mixing up details about my own life until it must have seemed like I was lying or insane. I decided I’d
try to make us tea. He kissed me in my kitchenette as I fumbled in cupboards looking for spoons. I tasted vending-machine
coffee from the Student Union Building on his tongue, felt my arm getting nudged out of its sling and thumping against the
counter, and I wanted to touch him so much but could only swipe clumsily with my left hand – half a bound-up plaster mummy
in his arms. He laughed and said I should calm down. He wasn’t going anywhere.

That’s when I realised we were probably going to end up doing it. For real this time, not just messing around in a hayloft.
I wished I’d done more research.

Christopher eased my shirt off and it hung in a heap around my broken arm and I was just about shaking.

‘Holy cow,’ he said softly, when he saw the bruises left over from Mark.

We met up again the next day, and the day after, and on and off and on again through the fall. I missed three lectures on
The Iliad
, but it was worth it.

Late September with Janine, lying stretched on a sunny patch of grass in the quad, two sets of headphones plugged into her
Walkman. Working our way through readings for the next lecture or going over scenes from
The Duchess of Malfi
. I’d auditioned on a dare and got the part, so until December I was Antonio, Janine’s steward and secret husband.

I hung out with actors now, and with guys and girls from the meetings, and sometimes the serious kids in class, who were all
demanding to know why I kept getting
As
on my papers when I skipped so many lectures. (By working like mad, of course, though this was a secret. It took a lot more
effort to be smart here than it did in Riverside.) On Fridays we’d go to the campus pub and jump up and down in the little
sweaty dance area to New Order and REM, the whole group leaning into each other and yelling the words to ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’
in a drunken slur.

My mother phoned almost every day. Lana would call too on weekends, and even Adam checked in once in a while. I’d run into
him just before he moved to Toronto and he was actually really nice to me – seemed sorry about how mangled I looked and brought
me an ivy plant he’d stolen from his mother.

And there were times when the phone would ring and there’d be nothing but silence on the other end, and I’d have to hang up.
Was it a wrong number? A burglar hoping to break in and steal my mould-encrusted dishes? Someone who wanted to talk, but didn’t
know what the hell to say? Mark?

It couldn’t be.

October rolled around. The plaster cast and most of the bruises were gone. I started wearing black and getting a reputation
for sarcasm.

One Thursday afternoon, I was at the head of a table in the tavern, telling my Mark story, playing it for laughs. Mark was
dumber than a brick in this version, a cross-eyed redneck Neanderthal who spoke mostly in grunts, and I was a lovesick little
twerp who just had to keep saying exactly the wrong thing. When I got to the part where he punched me and I threw up on his
shoes, the whole table went nuts. (Except Christopher, who was drawing on a beer mat and handing it to someone farther down
the table. He’d heard this one before.)

I kept my eyes moving from face to face. Wanted to make sure I had the right reactions, laughs at the right lines. And I found
my attention constantly going back to a bizarre-looking guy at the outer edge of the group. He had dry, frizzy, red hair,
light-coloured eyes and a beaky nose, a beat-up trench coat like Columbo. Staring at everybody, at me, unsettling and intense.