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Featured Writing

Everything Was Good-bye

by G K Basran

The furnace hummed over the sounds of the house settling into itself amid a spring storm. I unfolded my body from bed, pulled the blinds up and cleaned the window of its weary view. The sun was duly absent; the sky, a morose canvas of smudged graphite and charcoal. Streams of water trickled down the glass, puddling along the window sill before settling into the veins of cracked paint. My reflection floated on top of the condensation and I wiped it away.

I didn’t mind walking to school in the rain. It suited my mood. I hated carrying umbrellas or wearing hats and submitted to the steady stream of rain trying to drown in the day. I pulled my Walkman from my coat pocket, put the headphones on and trudged through the puddles and potholes. I was listening to Joy Division, Love will Tear us Apart. I had hit an alternative phase and was listening to the pioneers of post punk; it was real music, not like the superficial sound bites from the pseudo rising rap stars that were all MC/DJ somebody.

By the time I arrived at school I was soaked and my long black hair that I had taken so much care to straighten fell in waves around my face. As I shuffled down the hallway towards my locker, my shoes squeaking against the shiny linoleum floors, the janitor shot me a disapproving look. I curled my shoulders into my chest trying to stop myself from shivering a passive apology.

After I hung my backpack in my locker, I shook my hair behind me and combed the knots out with my fingers, watching the parade of warm, dry, white kids who had been driven to school by their parents. Girls with syrupy laughs and cotton candy skin recounted their weekends in giggles that dropped into an accusatory laughter as their eyes pierced mine.

“What are you looking at, Hindu?”

“Not much.” I turned away, my anger resigned into well schooled self-inflicted shame. In grade two a group of boys had been taunting Harpreet Dosangh, calling him names, telling him what he was. “Paki! Hindu! Turban twister!” Harpreet was new and didn’t speak English; he didn’t understand and smiled at their insults. He didn’t know enough to be angry but I did. I had seen my mother’s anger every night when a car squealed by our house, voices yelling “Paki, go home!” followed by eggs hitting the windows. We always ducked even though we knew they were probably just eggs.

One night, when my mother’s brother, my mamajee, was over visiting they called out, their voices shattering us. “Hindu!”

This time not eggs. A firecracker, rolling towards me past shards of broken glass. I sat stunned; it looked like a sparkler. Mamajee, leapt forwards, picked it up and hurled it back out the window from the direction it came. It howled down the street, nipping at the heels of black figures among shadows. Mamajee called to my mother to get the baseball bat that sat by the front door and together they ran into the night chasing smoke. I wanted to watch from the window but Serena had shut the drapes and wouldn’t let us look out. She tucked us into my mother’s bed, assuring us that nothing had ever been thrown at that window. When they came back late that night, their voices choked by defeated silence, Mamajee asked my mother why she did not teach the salah cootah gora a lesson when she had the chance. My mother told him that she did teach the boys a lesson, one in compassion. When a dozen eggs hit the window the next night, I knew she wished she’d taught them a lesson in retribution.

Once I’d tried to protect Harpreet from the boys and yelled at them to leave him alone. “You gonna’ make me?” The tall boy said, pushing me down to the ground before walking away. I picked up a handful of rocks and stood up slowly, my knees stinging from a scrape that was raw but wouldn’t bleed. The boy screeched like a firecracker as I whipped stones at him. My vindication was followed by a swift punishment; the principal sentenced me to a detention for throwing stones and for the remainder of the school year the boy’s presence silenced me.

I waved across the hall to Carrie, hopeful that she would rescue me from my own obscurity. She was with Todd; he was good looking in a Miami Vice, Crocket kind of way. We had been best friends since grade eight but weren’t best friends anymore. She had traded me for the fame that came with being the runner up in the Miss Teen Canada pageant. I envied her new found popularity and adopted a new group of friends to replace her: the Smart Ethnics. They weren’t FOBS or fresh off the boat as we referred to the immigrants who smelled like onions and had body odor that was thicker than their accents, nor were they DIP’s– the dumb Indian punjabs who clustered together like jalibees, driving around after school in their Firebird Transams. They were the ethnics that took all the advanced classes in algebra, thinking this would somehow help them in life just like the French immersion kids thought that their piss-poor French would land them a dream job.

My locker was next to my least favorite Smart Ethnic, Tina. I hadn’t figured out precisely what it was about her that irritated me so much but I thought it could be her incessant cheeriness or her bullshit stories that made her life seem too interesting for her age. In P.E she had brought in an autographed picture of Arthur Ashe; her dad had played tennis with him. In History she brought in pictures of Idi Amin; they lived next door to him in Uganda and in Law she did a presentation on Clifford Olson; he was a family friend before he was a serial killer.

“Hi, Meena,” she said, putting her pink lipstick on. She smacked her lips together and smiled at herself in the tiny locker mirror. She always wore blue eye shadow and frosted Revlon lipstick caked over her chapped lips. By the end of the day the lipstick would have settled into cracks and adhered to flakes of dry skin, her mouth, a pout of pink scales that she would pick at when no one was looking. She pulled at her leopard print leggings and adjusted her leather anti-Apartheid medallion that hung between her ample breasts, a display of social outrage despite her name brand polo shirt. I wondered who she thought she was kidding. This display of ethnicity was all purchased from the Out of Africa store in the mall where everything was made in Hong Kong. There was nothing authentic about her. She was part melting pot, part multicultural, and part privileged, the kind of person who would get exactly what she wanted from life with very little effort, not realizing that it wouldn’t be so easy for the rest of us.

“Hey,” I mumbled back, wishing that she would stop being so nice to me so I wouldn’t feel so bad about hating her. “See you in class.” I grabbed my text book, shut the locker door and headed for first period.

All the students rushed to sit in their predetermined seats. Conversations faltered into whispers and note passing back and forth. I wondered what the notes said and wished that one would pass my way. Carrie and I used to pass notes, and when we weren’t in each other’s classes we would write long letters to each other so we would have something to read. Her letters were always entertaining, full of inside jokes that made me laugh out loud until I saw that everyone was looking at me wondering what was so funny. The teacher would then say, “Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?” To which I would reply, “No,” and slip the note in my textbook until she wasn’t looking.

I kept all the notes that Carrie and I had ever written each other. I re-read them last summer and was embarrassed that I’d preserved my adolescence in folded sheets of loose leaf paper. I’d worried that someone would find them and burned them all except for the one that said: James totally wants to jump your bones. He’s invited us over after school. I didn’t want to forget that someone had wanted me; I wasn’t the type of girl that boys were interested in. I wasn’t unattractive, but I wasn’t beautiful like the white girls whose hair smelled like green apples. I had features that on their own were not pretty; my lips were thin, my nose was long and my brown eyes belonged on a fawn not a girl. I was the “could be pretty girl”; with some make-up and a great haircut, one day I could be pretty.

James was Carrie’s cousin. He came to our Valentine’s Day dance in grade ten with his best friend, Carrie’s then boyfriend—Brian. When he walked into the gymnasium everyone stopped and stared. Sensing his discomfort, I told him that there weren’t any black kids in Delta and maybe they expected him to do the moonwalk or something. He laughed, saying that they should be able to tell from his acid wash jeans that he was only half black and not at all the Michael Jackson type.

After Carrie lost her virginity to Brian, it seemed only logical, in a sixteen year old way, that I should lose mine to James. So that day after school, on the way to his house, Carrie explained that the sex would hurt and would probably only last about five minutes but the kissing after was nice. I nodded like I knew this, like the one time she’d had sex with Brian made her an expert.

When we got there, Carrie sat on the couch watching Oprah and James and I made out on the loveseat across from her. I felt funny that we were kissing in front of her and kept opening my eyes to make sure she wasn’t watching. After half an hour, we went to his room, which was the entire unfinished basement of his house, lay on his king-sized waterbed and kissed. His hands moved under clothes, undid zippers, buttons and clasps. I’d wished I was wearing a nicer bra, but the truth was that I didn’t have anything but plain white cotton Smart soft cup bras. I was wondering why a brand of bras would be named Smart, when James slipped mine off, and lay on top of me. I sank into the bed beneath him; every time he moved the water beneath us shifted and I struggled to regain the balance of our buoyant bodies. I realized I hadn’t seen him naked. I had felt his nakedness but wondered if I should look. I wondered if it would be rude or maybe even a little perverted to look, so I didn’t. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that we were on a yacht and that this moment was romantic, like the ocean itself. That the rise and fall of our bodies was due to a turbulent sea not a water-filled polyurethane mattress. But each time I opened my eyes, the partially framed basement walls, cement floors and single light bulb dangling from the ceiling assured me that this was not romantic. James did all the things that my sister’s Glamour magazine said he should but I wasn’t responding the way they said I would. All I could think was, I am in James’ bed and we are going to have sex. I am going to have sex with a boy who doesn’t even know when my birthday is, or who my favorite band is. I stopped his hands as they slid between my legs, told him I couldn’t do this, that I wasn’t ready. He got up and pulled on his pants.

When Carrie and I left she asked me how it was. When I told her we didn’t do it, she seemed disappointed, like I didn’t keep my end of a weird bargain or something.