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  There should really be a law against parents humiliating their children with weird names, though I realize that my own case pales against someone like Moon Unit Zappa or Lourdes Leon.

  I flipped onto my stomach, head turned away from them. This position only drew more attention to my biker’s thighs and chunky calves. (Why can’t I have long, slender legs like most dancers?) To make matters worse, my bathing suit was crawling up my bum. I kept pulling at the elastic, but it’s too small for me this year. Guys get to swim in their shorts; why do girls have to expose themselves like this? I’d just decided to sit up and wrap the towel around my waist when Kevin passed by on his way back inside. I swear he murmured something under his breath. It sounded like, “Wanna play doctor?”

  Did I hear him right?! After his contribution to the limerick, it certainly sounded like a come-on.

  I watched him lope back to the town house. His spine bisected his long, bare back and arched gently before it disappeared into the khaki shorts that hung loose from his hip bones. I forced myself to flip towards the other girls in case he looked back and caught me gawking.

  What is wrong with me? Kevin is off-limits! I don’t just mean his age—nineteen, a grown man—but what he did to Sasha. Two summers ago, when I was visiting my dad in Ontario, Sasha made friends with one of her neighbors, a girl named Gina. For a few weeks, they spent all their time together. Gina was trendy, confident, and older—somewhere in between Sasha’s age and Kevin’s. Sasha practically idolized her, as she let me know in the late-night e-mails she wrote after Gina had gone home.

  Then Gina ditched Sasha and began a hot affair with Kevin.

  According to Sasha, Kevin moved in on Gina specifically to spite his sister. He had fallen out with his own friends, and he couldn’t stand to see Sasha happy when he was lonely. He just had to steal her friend. Furious, Sasha refused to speak to either of them for the rest of the summer. After I got back from Toronto, she practically moved in with us. She didn’t even say good-bye when Gina’s family left the town house complex in the fall.

  Sasha has never forgiven Kevin for the Gina Incident. Since then, the slightest interaction between him and any of her friends upsets her. I don’t mention him at all in case she thinks I’m interested and plotting to betray her.

  I just hope he doesn’t hang around too much this summer. He is getting harder to ignore.

  Saturday, June 26th

  How I ended up at the public library’s annual book purge, I mean sale, on the first Saturday of summer vacation still baffles me. The last thing I remember, I was daydreaming about Kevin in the back seat of Mom’s green Volvo, otherwise known as Kermit. (I’d given up the front seat to Paige so I could tune out.) As Mom cranked the steering wheel, all I heard was, “—just stop in for a minute.”

  You might think that on the first day of her own vacation, a teacher would find something better to do than head for the public building that most resembles a school and surround herself with old, musty books. But you would be wrong. Table after table, both inside and out, overflowed with the dog-eared items. They’d traveled into beds, onto the backs of toilets, and under the edges of plates, to be water-marked and food-stained. Their plastic jackets were cracked and peeling, and their sides were stamped in red: Greater Victoria Public Library. Like tattooed convicts, they could leave the prison, but they would never really escape their past.

  Mom plundered each table with zest. She picked up a book, flipped it over to scan the back, opened the front cover to read the flap, then leafed through the middle. Sometimes she set the book back down, but with alarming regularity she tucked it under her arm instead. I found a bench by the outdoor tables and settled in with Monday Magazine to wait out Mom’s scavenger hunt. Once, when I glanced up, Mom was chatting with another woman and waving her free arm around. As if she sensed my eyes on her, she spun around and beelined for me.

  “Will you do me a favor and keep an eye on these books so I can keep looking?”

  I made sure I sighed loud enough for her to hear. “If I have to.”

  “Thanks. I won’t be long.” She fumbled in the pockets of her cardigan and pulled out a barrette. She smoothed her hair back and clipped it into place. “Does that look okay?”

  Her fuzzy hair did look better off her face. Tidier, anyway. “Sure.” I dropped my eyes to the paper again.

  “Natalie?”

  I snapped a page to turn it without looking up. “Mm?”

  “Can you keep an eye on your sister, as well?”

  I rolled my eyes, and Mom dove back into the fray. In a bright orange baseball cap, Paige was easy to keep track of. She was browsing in the children’s section. At the age of ten, she still looks up to Mom and tries to copy her. I couldn’t help thinking that she was going to find this experience a little more disappointing than most, but pretty soon she came over to stash her finds with me, like Mom had.

  “Look at this one about girls in sports.”

  The oversized encyclopedia featured a hockey goalie on the front, completely hidden behind face cage and body padding. The only way you could tell it was a girl was by the ponytail.

  “Don’t you think it’s cool?”

  “I guess so.”

  My lack of enthusiasm didn’t escape my sister.

  “You’re a spoilsport. Ha, spoil sport, get it?”

  I mock punched her and she sparred in front of me, bouncing from one foot to the other, her arms tucked in, fists below her chin. Every so often she tilted her body horizontally and shot out her leg. I jumped up and mirrored her moves.

  Paige shouted. “Look out!”

  It was too late. An old lady had walked up behind me and my foot made contact with her ribs. I barely grazed her, but she dropped her books, shrieked, and stood there trembling. Mom heard the racket and rushed over just as a library clerk arrived to guide the shell-shocked woman to the bench I’d been sitting on. I picked up the lady’s books and apologized, but the clerk waved us back. Mom and Paige gathered their books and headed for the cashier. I waited at a distance from my victim, hoping she would recover and forgive me. I didn’t dare to approach again.

  “I’m sure it’s not serious,” someone said.

  I started. It was the woman Mom had been talking to. “I saw the whole thing happen. You just gave her a scare.” Broad shouldered, she had the solid, reassuring air of a police officer, or a nurse. Her collared shirt could have been a uniform—except for the multicolored circles and lines that decorated it. “You must be Denise’s daughter.”

  I nodded. “Natalie.”

  “I’m Marine. I met your mom at a creativity workshop for teachers.”

  “Oh.”

  I looked past her. Mom and Paige were returning from the cash register. They headed for the lady on the bench.

  “Your Mom has a lot of hidden talent.”

  I wrenched my attention back to this woman who seemed bent on conversation. Her name did sound kind of familiar. “Were you leading the workshop?”

  “Yes, that was me.”

  The details clicked. Mom had raved about Marine’s workshop on freeing the artist within. She’d inspired the teachers to finger-paint like kindergartners. “So you teach art?” Or should I say, Flakiness 101?

  “That’s right.”

  Mom and Paige had stopped at the bench and were speaking to the lady I’d kicked. She lifted up her hands as if she was about to play the piano and shook her head. As soon as Mom came within earshot, I asked, “Is she all right?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Mom said. “Marine …” Her voice turned kind of syrupy to disguise how upset she was with me. “You’ve met Natalie?”

  “Yes. I was just saying I could tell it wasn’t serious, right from the get-go.”

  “Right from the get-go, huh?” Mom chuckled. She herself is always using dorky, old-f
ashioned expressions like “get-go.” Maybe she and Marine speak the same language. “This is my younger daughter, Paige.”

  “I found an encyclopedia of girls in sports,” Paige said.

  “How wonderful!” Marine said.

  Paige shot me a look to say, I told you so.

  “I’m doing a softball camp this summer,” Paige added.

  Hands in her shorts pockets, Marine rocked back on her heels. “I love softball!”

  “You should come see me play!” Paige said. “Can she, Mom?”

  Mom put her hand on Paige’s shoulder and tucked her chin to her neck in embarrassment.

  Marine said, “I’d love to!” just as Mom said, “We’ll have to see about that.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “We’d better get going,” Mom said. She dropped her hand from Paige’s shoulder.

  “Sure,” Marine said. “Nice to see you.”

  Mom watched as Marine headed back to the book tables. Mom could barely tear herself away from the sale, even though her purchases were already weighing her down. When we finally started for the car, she blurted, “Honestly, Nat, I know you wanted to leave, but that was ridiculous.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “You were kickboxing in a library!”

  “We were outside! Paige started it!”

  “Natalie kicked an old lady, Natalie kicked an old lady,” Paige sang.

  “Paige, that’s enough,” Mom said.

  Paige fell behind Mom and continued to lip-sync the taunt at me. I stuck out my tongue. The problem with having a ten-year-old sister is that sometimes you act like you’re ten. “Anyway, it serves you right for forcing me to go to that stupid book sale.”

  Mom halted, her recycled plastic bags full of books swinging at her sides. “I beg your pardon?”

  I looked at the ground and pursed my lips. I didn’t want to take it back. I tried to keep walking.

  “Natalie, I’m waiting.”

  I waited too. A couple of people passed by and Mom didn’t start up again until they were out of earshot.

  “If you’re sick of tagging along on shopping trips with me, we can go right back to the mall and return those clothes I just paid for. And if you want to be so independent, you’re welcome to get a summer job. I’m sure your father can get a refund for the dance intensive.”

  Her words made me blush. “I’m sorry.” No reaction. “I’m sorry, okay?”

  We loaded into Kermit in silence. If this keeps up, it’s going to be a very long summer.

  Sunday, June 27th

  “Forgot” to call Dad today. My excuse: Paige went to a birthday party, which disrupted our joint-call routine. The truth: I wanted to know if he would call me. Was there really any doubt? Of course he didn’t. What else would you expect from a man who has never said “I love you” to his own daughters?

  When Dad moved away, he had this image of himself as a heroic warrior going off on a solo quest or some crap like that. Paige and I were like, “Hellooo! We’re your offspring, remember us?” That’s when Mom dove into gender studies. She started quoting fun facts like, “Men are genetically programmed to ‘sow their seed’ and move on.” Not much of what she said was any help.

  The truth was, our family never really stood a chance. Mom grew up on the Island, in Courtenay, and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Dad moved to BC only for university. He hadn’t planned to stay. He dreamed of developing software in Toronto; instead, he married Mom and worked as a computer tech. No wonder he decided the marriage was holding him back, that he had to leave to pursue his “bliss.” An idea he got from a book by Joseph Campbell. (How ironic that Mom gave it to him in the first place.) I’ve hated the word bliss ever since.

  I used to send handwritten letters to Dad when he first moved back to Ontario. I would cut out comics from the newspaper and stuff them into the envelope. Once, Paige followed my example by cutting out a snowman from her favorite picture book. It must have made her think of Dad in the Ontario snow. She mailed it to him and kept the whole thing a secret until the next time I read her the book. When I turned a page, I found the snowman-shaped hole and asked what had happened to him. As she told me, I traced the hole with my finger and willed myself not to cry.

  Dad almost never wrote back. After a while I stopped sending him letters and cut-outs, but I still wrote to him in my head.

  Dear Dad,

  I don’t like my teacher. He throws chalk at people when they talk in class. The boy behind me talks all the time. Today I got hit by the chalk. It’s so unfair. I bet the teachers in Toronto aren’t so mean.

  It didn’t matter that these imaginary conversations were one-way. Later, I would tell my friends, “My dad says teachers aren’t allowed to throw chalk at kids in Ontario. My dad says Mr. Howe would get fired.” Sometimes Dad really would give me useful information, but most of the time, My dad says and In Ontario were openings that let me reinvent the world.

  During our real-life conversations every Sunday, I stood in the kitchen with the phone to my ear. It wasn’t cordless. Sometimes I wanted a pair of socks, or a drink, but I wouldn’t have set down the phone if a hurricane hit.

  Monday, June 28th

  Sasha and I spent the afternoon at Willows Beach. We sunbathed, sipped iced tea, scoped guys, skimmed magazines, watched volleyball, and generally tried to impersonate California beach bunnies. Finally, Sasha said, “Kill me now, before I die of boredom.”

  “To hell with this! Let’s ride a log like we used to do.”

  We packed up our bags and stuffed them into a coin-operated locker near the washroom. I spotted a good-sized log not too far from the water’s edge, and we ran to claim it. It was too flat to roll easily, but fortunately not very heavy, so we flipped it over and over until it was floating in the shallow water. Sasha held the “canoe” while I searched for two sticks to serve as paddles or poles. We straddled the log and cast off.

  Staying upright took a lot of effort, and every so often, we lost our balance and rolled into bone-piercing cold. Our screeches drew some attention from the guys we had been ogling earlier. But we ignored their hollers, determined to make it to the end of the beach. We docked at the rock islands and picked our way across them into shallower water and then to shore. Below the waist, we’d gone numb, and bits of kelly green seaweed clung to our legs. Sasha walked stiffly, arms stretched out like Frankenstein, and joked that she was Greta the Sea Monster returned from the deep. I copied her walk and pretended to chase her, running on straight legs. We buckled over laughing and raced each other back to the lockers.

  As we retrieved our bags, Sasha’s stomach growled.

  I laughed. “Fish and chips?”

  “You’re a mind reader.”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  Sasha rifled in her bag and passed me her cell. Mom didn’t pick up, but I left a message telling her not to expect me for dinner. When I handed the phone back to Sasha, she flipped it shut and pocketed it.

  “Aren’t you going to call home?”

  She shrugged. “What for?” She unlocked her bike and sped away. I had to pedal hard to catch up.

  We ate a greasy, delicious dinner at an outdoor table lit by reddish, horizontal evening light. Our silhouettes stretched all the way across the street. We butted giant heads and lifted shadow fries with massive hands.

  Afterwards, we rode towards Sasha’s place. She said something over her shoulder that I couldn’t hear, then pulled over. “Why are you coming this way?” Her bluntness rattled me.

  “I thought I would go with you as far as your place, and carry on from there. It’s really not out of my way.”

  She resumed pedaling at high speed, as if trying to lose me. At her driveway, she stepped off her bike. “So long, then.”

  My
bladder was bursting. I had to ask if I could use the washroom.

  “Why didn’t you go at the fish and chips shop?” She sighed. “Just let yourself in and use the downstairs one. I’ll wait here with your bike.”

  I shucked off my pack and hurried into the town house.

  In the bathroom mirror, I didn’t quite recognize myself. My skin tone had deepened, and my hair gleamed with new blonde highlights. I was wearing a bikini bathing suit top, and, in the cool evening air, the outline of my nipples poked through it. My cut-offs, still damp, hugged my hips. Two muscle lines defined my abdomen. Since my legs didn’t show in the mirror, I actually looked all right. Even sexy.

  A deep male voice rumbled upstairs. I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was angry. It must have been Mr. Varkosky. A high-pitched voice responded. I heard, “None of your business! … ”—“the last time” … —“you always say.” A chair was scraped back and a few banging noises followed. I decided not to flush the toilet and slipped into the hallway. Footsteps pounded down the stairs, and Kevin swung around the banister to face me. He stilled himself instantly. His eyes flicked up and down my body a couple of times, then locked on mine. I couldn’t look away. After a few seconds, he brought his finger to his lips in a “Shh” sign, winked, and passed me.

  My legs trembled and for a second I thought my knees were going to give out. I took a deep breath and rushed back outside.

  “What took you so long?” Sasha thrust handlebars at me. “Did anything happen?”

  “No.” I grabbed my T-shirt out of my pack and pulled it on. “I didn’t even flush, for Pete’s sake. Chill out.”

  I pumped my legs to build up speed for the ride home. As I cycled out of the neighborhood, the scene at the Varkoskys’ looped in my head. The raised voices upstairs reminded me of our house in the weeks before Dad moved out, when the tension gave me a chronic stomachache. A steep incline forced me to rise from my seat and drive down on the pedals. I crested the hill, breathing hard.

  As I coasted down the other side, I replayed the moment with Kevin in the hallway. Just thinking of it made me blush. It took a rush of evening air to cool my cheeks.