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| Leslie at The Reading List's launch on 14-02-12 at the Japan Foundation, Toronto |
My long walks around the city grew more
aimless and desperate each day. The
August humidity was baking my skin. But
I didn’t care. I just wanted to keep
walking, an endless concrete river.
Anything to keep my mind off my dismal
prospects.
One day I found myself across the street
from my old high school at Yonge and Eglinton. What had once been a dingy mall had been renovated into a gleaming
shopping complex, with a hulking Silver City movie theatre and Chapters Indigo
bookstore out front. Most of my old
haunts had been swept away, but at least Timothy’s Coffee was still there. I ordered an Irish Cream and splashed in
plenty of milk and sugar, wanting to recapture that taste of so many years ago,
that taste of the world being sweet and creamy and full of possibilities.
North Toronto Collegiate looked shabbier
than I remembered. I’d read in the paper
that the school was slated to be rebuilt as part of an innovative mixed-use
development, featuring a massive condo on top.
The whole thing made me sad. As I
walked down the alley alongside the parking lot, where all the cool kids used
to hang out smoking, skipping class, I could almost see their faces, the bright
knit toques and dreadlocked hair and loose Guatemalan clothing that flapped in
the wind as they kicked around a hacky sack.
Not that I’d ever been part of that
crowd. I’d be kidding myself to think I
was ever immersed in the thick of their smoke and drunken laughter.
No, I was always watching from the corner
of my eye as I whizzed straight ahead, clasping my clarinet case, heading down
to a carrel in the basement library. Why
was I so scared to loosen up and have fun?
But I was shy and awkward and militantly perfectionist about everything
from my A-double-pluses to the origami-sharp collars of my shirts, even though,
by that point, I had begun to experiment by cultivating friendships with girls
who went to other schools or hardly even went to school anymore. Girls who wore leather jackets and had fake
ID and drug-dealer boyfriends. Girls who
had abusive fathers and nutcase mothers and used to cut themselves just for
fun. For some reason, I gravitated to
these sweet screw-ups and we bonded instantly, without explanation, catching a
scent of each other’s drugstore perfume mixed with sweat.
It must have been the smell of each
other’s desperation. My old friend,
Natalie, had been fascinated by the scar across my torso. “That is the coolest thing ever,” she said.
I peered through the chalk-streaked
windows of the school into the basement classrooms, where my physics and
chemistry classes used to be taught. It
was like glimpsing my past and seeing my future superimposed on the same
frightening image of the lecture podium, floating high above the rows of desks,
the air chalky and hot, all eyes on the instructor. I recalled the running jokes about Mr.
Carlisle’s fat ass and Miss Jamison’s green eye shadow, and when one of the
guys at the back started the ball rolling – usually Dan Schmidt, with his
baseball cap backwards – the class would laugh and enjoy the feeling of
ascending a roller coaster, sure to peak with the teacher shouting and turning
red.
It left me nauseous thinking about how
callous those kids had been. That was me
now, the one they were laughing at.
Twittering about, mocking on Facebook.
I couldn’t bear the thought of going back.
Reprinted
with the permission of Variety Crossing Press.
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