Do You Think This Is Strange? (5 page)

I never saw Saskia again.

A decade later, here she was, at lunch hour, sitting at the seventh table in the third row.
My
table.

That's when I noticed the others at the table. She wasn't alone. The metal shop boys with greasy fingernails and scuffed boots were there, clustered beside her. She was leaning slightly away from them. I don't think she welcomed their presence.

No one ever sat at this table except me, which was why I chose it in the first place. The door to the janitors' lunchroom was only a few feet away, always open, with janitors inside, having lunch, talking or playing cards. So no one sat here. I think people don't like to be this close because janitors are not people. Janitors should not have lunchrooms. Janitors are not supposed to eat lunches.

They are supposed to
mop
.

I approached my table, then stopped. There was Saskia. There also sat the three loud boys from shop class, and they laughed loudly, talked loudly, and threw Tater Tots at each other. Loudly.

One of the boys leaned over to look at Saskia's sketch pad. He was tall, with a wide frame and closely cropped red hair. “Whatcha drawing?” he asked and moved closer to her along the bench. She didn't acknowledge him. She didn't answer. She adjusted her headphones instead.

All the better to hear you with. Or not.

“Leave her alone, she's busy,” said the boy with a gold earring in his left ear and shoulder-length blond hair. I knew him. His name was Danny Hardwick, and we shared the same homeroom class. He bounced a Tater Tot at his friend; the chunk of potato hit Saskia in the shoulder and fell to her lap. All three boys laughed. Saskia did not.

“Whoops,” Danny said. “Sorry.”

I don't think he meant it.

Saskia wiped the Tater Tot to the floor. It rolled to the lip of the janitors' lunchroom. Inside, Mr. Earle and Mr. Bryce argued baseball, unconcerned with the Tater Tot. I was suddenly annoyed at them. They weren't supposed to be having lunch. Janitors are supposed to clean up floors and bathrooms; they are not supposed to eat. In particular, they shouldn't eat sandwiches, because they eat sandwiches with their hands. Although they
may
wash their hands, I can't be certain that they actually
do
. Not all of them. Not all of the time. By the law of averages, janitors periodically eat sandwiches with the same unwashed hands that just scrubbed a toilet.

A
toilet
.

—

Listen
: On December 18, 2010, I read a study by Dr. Charles Gerba that found that a flushing toilet sends a plume of aerosols into the air. These aerosols, contaminated with fecal matter, bacteria, and viruses, can dissipate about the room for hours, settling on everything exposed: doorknobs, sink fixtures, and any person who walks into the bathroom.

I told my father about the aerosols. It was the first thing at the top of my mental stack when he asked me to tell him something I had done that day.

“How was your day at school?” he asked.

“Good,” I replied, a mouth full of mashed potatoes.

“Tell me three things about your day,” he said.

I chewed slowly. He stared at me, expressionless. Waiting.

So I told him about the fecal aerosols. I was reluctant to do it: I expected he would want a discussion about proper hygiene. This had the hallmarks of an
opportunity to learn
. Instead, he laughed loudly, slapped the kitchen table with his palm, and called it a shitstorm.

“
That
should have been the title of the article,” he guffawed to himself.

—

These were the thoughts that stomped about my mind, like tenants looking for the super. When I surfaced, when I opened my eyes, all three boys were looking at me.

This happens far more frequently than is safe. Time skips on me. I become lost in thought; I'm pulled into a vortex of exploding ideas and questions. One pediatrician suggested that much of my behaviour could be attributed to sleep deprivation.

“He could be having microsleeps,” he told my father, as I stared blankly at the wall. “He's probably having one right now.”

“Jesus,” my father said. “That's just great.”

I wasn't microsleeping this time. I stared at the three boys with stains on their jeans, and they stared back at me with expressions mute, uncertain of who I was, what I was doing, why I was standing in the middle of the aisle, holding a lunch tray, staring back at them.

“What are you looking at, sport?” Danny Hardwick said, and the air in the room seemed to disappear. I tried to reply: What was I looking at? I was looking at
them
. My throat constricted and I felt my chest tighten. “What are you looking at, sport?” and I was thinking something I hadn't thought for a long time.

I walked into the next room of my mind.

—

Years before, I wasn't sure when, I had heard those same words. Now the threads howled at me to connect it to the moment. But I couldn't make the bridge, which was a problem. I don't have difficulty connecting to older memories. I don't forget things. To know someone had said
What are you looking at, sport?
but not know
who
said it was highly unusual. It was even concerning.

It was distressing.

In my mind, a picture rose before me, a fragment of a memory. This is what I saw: low clouds reflecting the light of a darkening day straight above me, rain falling on my face. A light shining in my eye.

What are you looking at, sport?
said the voice behind the light.

But the voice was buried down in my mind.

Here, now, the hubbub of the cafeteria all around me, I stood, digging back to connect the voice to a face. I heard Danny Hardwick snicker, then his friends did the same. He started to say something but stopped. He reached into his pants pocket and took out his vibrating phone.

“Dave just got home,” he said to his friends. “He's got some stuff.”

“Let's go then,” said the boy with the red hair, and they all stood up.

As they walked by me, Danny Hardwick gave me a light slap on the cheek.

“Take it easy, Silent Sam,” he said, and his friends laughed.

I didn't say anything. My throat was too dry.

What are you looking at, sport?

Listen
: Someone said that to me before. Someone looked at me and said,
What are you looking at, sport?
and they didn't really care what I was looking at.

When Danny Hardwick said it to me, I felt a surge of adrenalin, a spike of fear exploding below my lungs. My pulse quickened, my breathing became ragged, and I turned inward, chasing the thread. In a flicker, I was lost to the moment.

Who
said
that?

My mind jumped back in time. I think the principal of Templeton College said it. He said it to me as I stared out the window.

But that's not right. He said,
What are you looking at, Mr. Wyland?
And then he expelled me.

I think Chad Kennedy said it. Outside my locker at Templeton College, he pushed me, I pushed him, and it was all because he said,
What are you looking at, sport?

But that's not right. He said,
What are you looking at, you dick?
and I didn't know how to reply. It's always safest to repeat the same sentence back if you don't know how to reply.

What are
you
looking at?
I said, and he pushed me.

I couldn't remember who called me “sport.” Now a thread fixed firmly in my mind, an unanswered question to which I would have to return until it was resolved.

For now, I
niced
the thought, sent it to the bottom of the stack. The threads didn't complain.

What is Saskia Stiles doing here?
they asked me.

Saskia remained at my table, no change in posture or expression, as if the three boys had never been crowding her. She continued to write in her journal. I hoped it was a poem.

Ten years ago, the last time I said goodbye to Saskia Stiles, she was writing a poem. The last words I said to her were “Goodbye, Saskia,” and I waved. “I'll see you later.”

She put down her pencil. “GoodBYE, Freddy!” she shouted, infused with an excitement reserved for the vessels of seven-year-olds. She shouted, “I forgive you!” Then she went back to her poem. “ONCE upon a very merry time,” she said loudly as she wrote the words. “Once. Once upon a VERY! MERRY! TIME!” and she wrote some more.

A poem now, a poem then. Poetry bookended her absence from my life.

I put my tray down on the table. She didn't notice, or at least didn't acknowledge me. She scribbled furiously. The words came in short sprints, bursting from her, pulsing out like blood from a ruptured artery. Once it was complete, she tore whatever she wrote from her notebook, crumpled it, and tossed it aside.

In between poems, she ate carrot sticks and stared at the table, ignoring the random hubble and bubble of everyone else in the cafeteria. Blond hair hung around her face. She rocked back and forth in time to her music.

She didn't look up at me, and gave no indication she knew who I was. So I ate my lunch. In the lunchroom to my right, the janitors ate sandwiches and disagreed with each other's insights. I tried not to think about their hands. I had no success.

Saskia wrote aggressively, as if she were late for a bus. She didn't look at me, and she neither nodded nor said hi, hello, or how are you. But she was excited about something. After a minute, she put down her pencil and lifted her hands in the air, like she was being robbed. She rapidly opened and closed—open and
clenched
—her hands. She picked up her poem, looked at it, put it down, and froze, staring at it for a moment. Then she began writing again. A minute later, she ripped the paper from her pad, crushed it into a ball, and let it fall to the table.

Then she squeaked.

I'd never heard anyone squeak before. I had heard people make sounds that were intended to mimic a squeak, but those were not squeaks. Squeaks are shrill piercing sounds emitted by small animals with tiny voice boxes. Humans can't squeak.

Nevertheless, Saskia Stiles
squeaked
.

After a few minutes, in which I ignored Saskia and she ignored me, she stopped writing altogether, and her hands dropped, relaxed. She opened her backpack and pulled out an iPhone. After turning it over in her hands a few times, she began typing in bursts, replacing pen with keyboard.

Perhaps she was nervous or intimidated. I understand that ignoring one another is a standard ritual between teenage boys and girls. I'm not sure of its purpose, but I'm good at it. I've never had a girlfriend, yet I've still mastered the art of ignoring other people. It's been hard work.

As I ate, I stared at the wall in front of me. It was blank, except for a poster in the far right corner—an image of a chimpanzee holding both its hands in the air in the appearance of victory. The poster read:
YOU CAN DO IT!
It offered no clue as to what
it
actually was. I think
it
may have been bananas. That would interest a chimp.

On the table, equidistant between us, her balled-up poem lay. I saw a single word, peeking out.

hello.

Her pen rolled off the table and she bent under the table to pick it up. I reached out, took the crumpled scrap of paper, and put it in my pocket. She straightened back up, and we continued our silence together.

While I ate, I stared at the wall, and a red digital clock counted the time. My mind kept returning to the ball of paper in my pocket.

Why did you take it?
the threads asked.

I don't know, I replied.

What is it?

I don't know.

—

I only glanced at Saskia twice. Enough to remember a girl from ten years ago, hold a snapshot of the past firmly in my mind's eye, then map it over a picture of the girl in front of me. She was the same, she was different.

She had more freckles. Her hair was longer. She was thinner. She was older. Taller.

Prettier.

She was the same. She wore a white wool cap like the one she wore then. She was different. She wore grey Bose headphones overtop of the cap. Her jacket was pink, which was her favourite colour then. But her shirt was white with red polka dots; she never wore polka dots at group therapy. Ten years ago, she didn't have a journal. Now, she leaned over one and made quick short drawings and wrote patches of words.

The Saskia of today wasn't smiling. The Saskia Stiles of my memory smiled. Although the Saskia before me seemed so much like the Saskia in my memory, she was also strikingly different.

At once, a new thread began in my mind:
Why? Why is she different? Why isn't she smiling?

Why do these questions seem so important?

I sat, silently, and absorbed her. She was the same, she was different.

She wore no makeup, no jewellery.

Her eyes were—

She hadn't looked at me, but I didn't have to look at her to know how blue her eyes were. I remembered their colour from the last time I said goodbye to Saskia Stiles. Back then, she looked up at me from the table where she was writing a poem. Back then, she looked up at me and smiled, and I saw her eyes. The colour of blue ice, shed from a glacier and spilled into the bay.

I've never forgotten.

I don't forget
anything
. I'm not supposed to.

I finished eating and stood up.

This is what I said to Saskia, the first words I said to her in ten years, the same words I said to her the last time I saw her: I said, “Goodbye, Saskia, I'll see you later.”

She didn't reply. I saw the barest flicker of her eyes, the slightest lifting of her head. Like a flash of lightning, I saw the blue, then it was gone, and she was looking at her phone again.

Outside the cafeteria, I took out the balled-up piece of paper and unwrapped it.