Deconstructing Dylan Page 4

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was Miles Vanderhague who started spreading the rumours that Robyn was gay. “She’s a lesbian,” he said to me in the hall. “What are you doing hanging out with a lesbian?”

  “She’s not a lesbian,” I said. “She kissed me.”

  “Disgusting,” he said. “Listen, I know for a fact that she had to leave her old school because she was hanging out with girls there who were, well, not normal. I’ve got friends there at Emerson. They just told me last night. They weren’t lying.”

  “I suppose you tested them with your scanner.”

  “I test everyone with it. I don’t go anywhere without it.”

  “Except school.”

  Miles lifted his shirt. The device was clipped to his belt. He’d be in big trouble if he got caught in school with it a second time. Miles smiled that nasty smile of his. “It’s your choice if you want to find out if you’re going out with a lesbian.”

  I thought about what he had said. I was a bit confused. I really liked Robyn a lot. Would this change the way I felt about her? I admitted to myself that it would. Miles was a blabbermouth and a bigot. Not only was he prejudiced against anybody who wasn’t white, he had a loud mouth and was cruel. His opinions would spread like wildfire and a lot of people would keep spreading the rumours.

  I cut math class and went looking for Robyn. I was pretty sure she would be in the second-floor chem lab. The bell was about to ring for class to start. I ran up the stairs and caught her just as she was about to go in. She looked really upset. “Skip class,” I said. “Walk with me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she snapped. She’d already taken some flak.

  I grabbed her arm, maybe held on a little too tight.

  “Let go.”

  “Please,” I said. “It’s important.”

  Mr. Lownder was looking at her and at me. The bell rang. Robyn let out a big sigh and started walking down the hall.

  She was mad at somebody and it probably wasn’t a good time to be around her but I wanted to talk. I wanted to know the truth.

  She went straight out the front door of the school and started walking down the street. I had to run to catch up to her and when I did I didn’t know what to say.

  “Miles Vanderhague is a cretin,” I said.

  “That’s probably a compliment. He’s a homo-phobic cretin with the IQ of a damp sponge. And remember that a Veriscan can only read a person’s pulse, temperature, skin moisture, and eye movement. It can only judge what someone believes to be true, not the truth itself.”

  “Was he right about why you had to leave your old school?”

  She stopped dead in her tracks. “Is this an interrogation?”

  “No, I just want to know.”

  “What? If I am gay?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought that, since I was starting to have these feelings about you, I just thought&hellips;”

  “Maybe I’m bi. Maybe that’s it. Could you handle that?”

  “Robyn, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can handle. This is all new to me. I hadn’t really thought about it. So give me a break.”

  “Sexual identity can be a pretty complicated business,” she said, still acting mad and suddenly a bit condescending. “How much have you thought about this subject?”

  “Not much, I admit. I mean, I just kind of know that I’m like &hellips; well, not gay &hellips; but aside from that, I don’t think I have much of an understanding. I’m not even sure I have a strong opinion one way or the other. I mean, I have a hard enough time just trying to figure out what I’m all about, I can’t imagine&hellips;” But I was blathering and not really helping the situation.

  “Dylan, you’re the victim of your immaturity. As are most of the boys in your school and back at Emerson. Girls aren’t much better. Why is everyone always so hung up on what is normal and what isn’t?”

  “I’m not normal,” I said on my own behalf.

  “That’s why I like you. No one should be normal. Everyone should be who they want to be, not what other people think they should be.”

  “I think I knew that.”

  “That’s because you’re not stupid.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “Yes.” She was easing up on the anger, lowering her voltage.

  We were in front of Tim Horton’s. “You want a coffee?” I asked.

  “I want a chai tea.”

  “I don’t think they have that in Tim’s but we can check.”

  “Sure.”

  We walked in and I asked the young woman in uniform, “Do you have any chai tea?”

  “Uh, yeah,” she said, gesturing towards the stack of tea boxes behind her. “Along with about a million other flavours.”

  I looked at Robyn, raised my shoulders.

  “Okay,” she said. “I want it with milk.”

  I turned back to the counter girl. “One chai tea with milk and a double-double for me.”

  We sat at a table by the window and watched the traffic go by. I was thinking it would be great to be able to drive, to have all that power and freedom.

  “So you’re probably, like, bi, right? Is that it?” I swallowed hard and considered that I may have to accept this fact if I still wanted her to be my friend.

  Robyn sipped her tea and said nothing.

  “Can I have a taste? I never had chai tea.”

  “Sure.”

  “Um,” I said. “Tastes like my lawn.”

  That drew a hint of a smile. I handed back the cup and took a stiff shot of my double-double.

  “Dylan, you might have noticed the colour of my skin.”

  “I have. It’s beautiful.”

  “How come you never asked me if I was black?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t important to me.”

  “Well, all my life people have been trying to label me as one thing or the other. My father is black and my mother is white.”

  I was staring into my cup just then and realized that the coffee was the colour of Robyn. It was a colour I found quite beautiful.

  “All my life, I’ve had people judging me by the colour of my skin and the way I look. There were a few white teachers who I know tried to make things easier on me — because I was black. And I hated that. Then there was one who was just outright racist. And I hated that, too, but at least I knew where he stood. If there were black students who didn’t think I acted enough like them, they’d label me as a wannabe white. Do you have any idea how difficult that makes your life?

  “Anyway, there was a girl at Emerson named Carla and she was gay. She was like militant gay. She believed strongly in defending the rights of gay kids at Emerson, even the ones who didn’t want to publicly own up to being gay. She pissed everybody off.”

  “I can see that she might do that.”

  “Well, she was my best friend. I liked her gutsy approach to changing the system. Almost everyone else thought she was a freak, but not me. The principal hated her, not necessarily because she was gay but because she was in his office all the time protesting about one thing or another. After she was suspended and he found the front seat of his car piled high with doggy doo, well, she was booted out of there.”

  “She was inventive, I can see that.”

  “And vindictive. But she was my friend. And everyone assumed I was gay as well.”

  “But you’re not?”

  She looked straight into my eyes and said nothing. I started to get nervous and blurted out, “If you are, it’s okay. We’ll be friends.” I was speaking rather loudly. Two truckers from a couple of tables over were staring at us now.

  She took a sip of her lawn tea and let her shoulders drop. “I think I wanted to believe I was for a while there. But I’m not. I’m attracted to you. Maybe it’s the peach fuzz growing in on your head. Or the fact that you are so cute and weird at the same time.”

  “There you go again with the sweet talk.”

  “Dylan, you are uniqu
e. Confused but unique. The thing I admired so much about Carla was that she knew exactly who she was. She had her identity nailed down cold and she lived it. I’m still trying to figure mine out.”

  “Join the club.”

  “I can’t. I founded the club. Knowing who you are is everything. And I’ve only scratched the surface.”

  “What happened to Carla?”

  “She ran away. Called me once, just to say she was gone. Said she’d always remember me but that I’d probably never see her again.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “It broke my heart.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  After Robyn had continued to get flak from both teachers and students at Emerson, she asked her parents to transfer her to Brevard High.

  And now she was going to get hassled by kids here, too. She would not come out and say she was straight. She would not give the losers like Vanderhague the satisfaction. She said the only good thing about homo-phobes is that they usually came right out and said what they felt. “The same isn’t true with racists,” she said. “And I know that from experience.”

  “I’ve decided that I’ll go to Tibet with you whenever you are ready.” I think I meant it.

  We were walking back in the front door of the school. The security guard stopped us this time. She didn’t say anything but did a quick once-over with her wand to see if we had any weapons or out-of-bounds electronic devices on us. I don’t know how Miles was able to smuggle his Veriscan in but I guess he had ways.

  “You’re clean,” she said after a sweep of Robyn and then me.

  I had one of those funny flashbacks of entering a school, an older school where there were no detection devices at all. You just walked in through an open door. There was no scan arch, no hand-helds, nothing. You just walked in and went to class. I guess I had a quizzical look on my face just then.

  “What’s that about?” Robyn asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s get to Gillis’s class before the bell rings.

  Mercifully, Mrs. G did not call on Robyn or me to answer her questions about poetic devices. At the end of class, Robyn passed me a note. On the note was a quote she had written down by someone with the crazy name of Teilhard de Chardin who said, “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, gravity&hellips; we shall harness&hellips;. the energies of love. Then for the second time in the world, man will have discovered fire.”

  A visual image of that very fire haunted me for the rest of the day as we went our separate ways. I couldn’t find her at the end of the school day but I knew that she was weaving her way into the fabric of my life and I would not lose track of her. Was I willing to find myself being labelled gay or even “lesbian lover” by continuing my relationship with her? I decided I could handle it. I had a powerful feeling this beautiful dark girl had some very potent wisdom to teach me and I was going to be an A student if she was the teacher.

  On the news that night, I was appalled to hear a self-satisfied British so-called expert posing before some kind of a boat declaring the non-existence of the Loch Ness monster. “This finally puts to rest several centuries of hogwash that has been foisted on the public by charlatans,” he said. “We’ve mapped every inch of the loch and there is no monster.”

  “Then what is it that people claim to have seen down through the centuries?” the sexy news lady asked.

  The expert held up a hand-held vidscreen with a fuzzy image on it — a dark blob, nothing more. “Here’s your Loch Ness monster, I’m sorry to say.” But he was not sorry about anything. He was smug. “It’s a mass of vegetation, a tangle of roots and leafy material that forms in these waters. Gases form within, creating almost sealed pockets. At intervals the entire mass rises to the surface and then as the gases are released — and from our analysis, you would not want to be around to smell this event — the mass sinks again to the bottom. Sometimes this happens slowly, sometimes quickly.”

  He pointed again to his vidscreen image that proved nothing to me. “There’s your Loch Ness monster,” he repeated.

  I switched the TV off. My gut instinct told me he was wrong. I knew I was not alone with my beliefs. Here was just another conceited asshole who wanted to rob the world of something wonderful. I was not convinced.

  Nessie, or Nessiteras rhombopteryx, was first officially reported in 1880 but folklore suggests it goes further back. In 1934, a doctor from London even produced a credible photograph. Although many Nessie trashers called it a hoax, others have argued it is the genuine article of a real creature. Other photo ops followed for the beast. I’ve seen the results of them all and some are fuzzy, but several are quite convincing and seem to have stood up under contemporary scrutiny as the real thing. I discounted the idea that it was a giant eel but preferred the theory that it was a leftover coelacanth somehow isolated in the loch after some dramatic change of geography, perhaps when the sea levels dropped and the loch was no longer attached to the nearby Moray Firth.

  I never accepted the story that Nessie had climbed up out of the water in 1933 and was seen snatching a lamb from the hillside where he feasted on it before trundling back into the water. My Loch Ness monster was no meat-eating carnivore.

  My Loch Ness monster was as real to me as the blue jay sitting in the tree outside my window in the morning. He was a gentle lost being, a survivor against all odds and a reminder to all those who put too much faith in science and reason that extraordinary things happen and are not easy to explain. That egotistical scientist on TV would not take that away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My father was still out of town and I came home to find my mother slightly inebriated. “I’m going through a difficult phase,” she said. “It’s probably my age. Something hormonal, nothing more. That’s my guess.”

  “Is it something between you and Dad?”

  “Your father is wrapped up in his work right now. He doesn’t have time for me. We’ve always been quite independent but right now — I just don’t know about these feelings I have — like I want to cry all the time. Come here. Give me a hug.”

  I hugged her and she hugged me tightly. She sobbed but did not cry. This was entirely unlike my scientist mother. Always reasonable and cool. I would make a point of looking up menopause on the net and see if I could help out. “Everything will be all right,” I said, not knowing what I was talking about. I just knew it was what she would say if I was feeling really down.

  “You were the world’s most beautiful baby,” she said.

  “Just what a boy of sixteen wants to hear.”

  “But you were. Look.”

  She got up and went for her purse, came back and flipped her wallet open to a photograph: me, not long after I had come into this flawed world. “See.”

  “I see,” I said, staring at the picture. I turned the wallet sideways and looked at another photo of me as a baby. Face perfectly the same. But the photographic style was different and it was faded. As if this other one had been left out in the sun. And then there was this feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  My mother reached over and closed the wallet, put it back in her purse, dabbed at her tears, and then stood up. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”

  “I’ll do anything I can to help if you need me.”

  “I’ll be fine. Your father will be back in a few days. Maybe we can go to Lawrencetown, to the beach. Something about being by the sea makes me feel better.”

  In my bedroom, I pondered this reversal of roles. Me, worrying about my mother, taking care of her. While my classmates were out smoking dope, drinking to excess, or having carefree unprotected sex, I was home in my bedroom worrying about my mother’s psychological health. From the net I learned that menopause occurs in women between the ages of forty-six and fifty-four. The woman ceases ovulation. There is a decline in the production of estrogen. The psychological effects vary dramatically. Some women have little or no mental change. Others go through what the site referred to as “significant turmoil.
” I reckoned my mom fell into the latter category. I would definitely have to keep an eye on her.

  The site pointed out that most all species retained their reproductive capacity through their entire lives. Humans were the exception. “Might there be an evolutionary explanation for menopause?” it queried.

  No answer was provided, leaving me to ponder why evolution had singled out humans for this. But then we were an oddity. My research into menopause took me on a side trip, typical of my net searches, into the area of what was referred to as “reproductive rights.” The author on this net site, sexhistory.com, pointed out how bizarre it was that Western men and women for centuries had been searching for the perfect means of birth control, and almost at the exact point in history when such birth control was widely available, researchers and drug companies were shifting their focus to fertility. There were millions to be made in helping couples figure out how to have kids instead of selling them contraceptives that prevented children.

  It was kind of bizarre if you thought about it. Of course, there was a lot about the adult world that did not make sense to me. Much about human nature that seemed incredibly odd. In some ways, I preferred the study of bugs. I flicked off the net and turned back to my favourite text, Frank Lutz’s Field Book of Insects. “Young insects may be said to grow by leaps and bounds, not gradually. A soft shell-like skin that will not stretch largely covers them. All the flesh is inside of this shell, and when the quantity of this flesh gets too large, the shell splits, the insect emerges, swells out, and its new skin in turn hardens. The process is repeated several times before adult life is reached.” Now that makes perfectly good sense to me. It’s a shame that we humans were cheated out of this ability.

  This got me thinking that it would be kind of cool if kids did go through such a process. It would make school much more interesting if, say, in the middle of third period calculus Miles Vanderhague began to moult as his inner “quantity of flesh” became too great. You’d be sitting there and hear this crack and, whoops, here comes the new Miles, possibly an improved version now looking entirely different with a better personality and more compassion for people who were a bit off the norm. Evolution had truly cheated us of such opportunity.