comma of a mouth sagging open in distress, her eyes limp. He could kill this kid. What was his name? Furey. Max’s family heirloom absolutely decimated.
He will have to buy Joy chrysanthemums or a box of chocolate truffles. She sits at her desk, poking pens into a jar, her mouth melting into an upside-down U.
The smooth running of his high school disrupted, ruined— a hole punched in the walls he practically put up with his own hands.
He pulls out his chair and holds the phone number between his fingers. Fumbles his bifocals out of his pocket.
Because it might sound odd and he would never tell anyone else this— well, Walter perhaps— but a school is like a spaceship, just like on Sector Six, the best fictional example he knows of a well-run organization with a leader who is firm but personable, effective. And all the smaller parts have to work together to make the greater machine function. He is the captain of this ship, the crank in charge of the wheels and cogs. Colonel Shakira from Sector Six never has to buy Lieutenant Fong a box of chocolates to apologize for speaking too gruffly when she issues orders, but there you go.
Time for red alert.
The ringing of the crisis team’s phone burrs in his ear. He props the phone between his head and his shoulder, smooths and straightens his tie with both hands, jingles the keys in his pocket.
Tuesday he is still on the phone. He swears he never went home.
Ginger
Because people in school were spreading an inconceivable rumour.
Ginger bangs out the front doors of the school— he doesn’t care who sees him— and he slides over ice and hurdles over snowbanks all the way home. Just in case it’s true. Is it true?
— Home already? asks his grandfather, reading a Czech newspaper on the computer. His trifocals sliding off his nose. — Interesting, he says.
Ginger texts Furey. Then after five minutes he thumbs in the phone number. Language leaks from the phone and burns in his ear, not Furey’s moonlit voice but a man’s voice with too much breath between the letters in the words. — Yessss? Whooo? Were you a friend of his? asks the plastic chunk, the sun, the past tense, exploding in Ginger’s ear.
His grandfather clicks off the computer and tells Ginger that if he’s decided he’s home for the day, he can shovel the sidewalk. Snowed almost as deep as his knees last night, the mail deliverer will refuse to make it past the gate. Grampa might throw his back out again if he tries to shovel it himself so be a good boy and clear the walk, yes?
Because Furey told Ginger he loved him while they were doing it the last time, and what could Ginger do with that information? He had no idea what container to put those words in, how to hold them without them depositing their ooze all over. He just wanted to get away, he needed him and Furey to be done. He wishes he could push the words, all in a clump, back into Patrick’s mouth, that he could clump them into an icy snowball and whing them back.
Because his girlfriend Petra guessed the truth. And Ginger didn’t deny that he wasn’t sure he wasn’t sort of maybe in love with Furey, even though for sure he was still in love with her. But he had to tell Furey it was over anyway.
Petra is the gentlest soul on the planet— too gentle, he sometimes thinks as he listens to another song she’s written for him, this one about the first time she touched his penis, and plays for him on the cello or piano, and sometimes she sings too, she sang for him in front of his friends and he nearly folded from embarrassment. The kind of girl who whines ewwwww and points her toes around earthworms and spiders and slasher movies and sucks him off in her parents’ bedroom even when she knows her parents will be home any minute. But she has no gentle feelings around the dead boy.
Sleep no longer visits Ginger after his girlfriend scribbles u r a fag on the soon-to-be-dead boy’s locker, and then announces the graffiti to Ginger like it’s something to be proud of, the discovery of a wormhole, smiling so hard it looks like the dimples in her cheeks are touching in her mouth.
Because Monday morning, he texted Furey, asking for his grandmother’s locket back. It seemed the right thing to do. He would give the locket to Petra. The normal thing to do.
Ginger wonders, if he’d just let Furey keep the locket, sucked up the fact that he’d been weak and given Furey a present like Furey and he were a real-live couple, would Furey still be alive? Ginger wouldn’t have to see or feel that dead desk in the middle of his English class, know the absence of that subtle, muscled odour winding toward him from the other side of the classroom. The missing Furey like the missing tooth in his grandfather’s mouth. An empty hole, no smooth pink gum to grow over, what can grow over such space? He pictures Furey not slinking around, not sneezing, not cramming for departmental exams. (Not kissing him, fingers not undulating over every bump of Ginger’s spine.) Wonder blisters the roof of his mouth, what does Furey look like right now? This very instant? Would Furey still have lips and what do the lips feel like? Is there a suicide note? Is Ginger in it? He cups his nose with his hand. Smells the damp wrinkles in his palm.
His nose is running.
He wrestles the shovel out from the basement, knocks over a rake, the push-mower handle bangs against the wall. His teeth bang together.
— Aren’t you going to put on proper pants, Tomáš? his grandfather calls, wedging himself between the screen door and the door frame, his hands twisting the architecture of the newspaper. His grandfather yells something else, the sound ricocheting off the streetlight pole, but Ginger is already scraping the shovel hard against the concrete, clanging it against car tires submerged in snow, pinging it against chain-link fences, the shovel’s metal bowl clanking the sides of the steps, Zamboni-ing down the driveway, scooping, punishing the sidewalk. He heaves new snow, heaves grey honeycombed snow beneath a layer of dirt and gravel. His breath hurtles out. The slap of the cold clashes with his heat, his blood cells speeding past valves and sphincters. He whams and scrapes the shovel down the neighbours’ sidewalk: the woman with the refrigerator-white skin and red hair who growls at him in unison with her three pug-nosed dogs, the bus driver at the end of the block whose car got set on fire. The couple with the Trans Am and the dead Chevy sedan parked on their lawn. The two tiny kids cocooned in snowsuits who roll out of the house each morning shouting insults in Burmese. He bulldozes piles from the gutter and hurls the snow and dirt into the middle of the street, onto people’s lawns, over the fence into their backyards.
— Greetings, snow angel! shouts a woman with skin brown like an old-fashioned kitchen table, a woman he’s never seen before, his shovel having led him blocks past his house; he squints against the fluffy snow-white of her hat, scarf and mittens, the gleam of her teeth. She waves one of her mittens at him, her mouth shining with her smile; he scrapes and scoops so he won’t have to look at such awful happiness.
He pushes the shovel past raging Rottweilers, whining German shepherds. Pit bulls, Labradors and Heinz 57s; supercilious cats supervising from their windows, their tails snapped around their feet; an iguana on a windowsill lolling under a heat lamp. The more packed the snow the better, because he can hit at it with the shovel’s sharp edge and stab at the broken sheets of snow, peel it like scabs off the concrete, bash its edges, slice into its core.
— Don’t gouge my grass! barks a mottled pink-skinned man in a hat high as a bread loaf. — You’re digging up my grass.
— Cheers, mate! Ginger sobs as he shovels, his mouth stretched and gaping, his throat leaking the words.
The clouds burn and smoke in the setting sun. How many houses, businesses, city blocks? He shovels on, his shoulders and arms bursting off his torso, his back one long band of pumping blood. But better this, better splinters and calluses, liquefying shoulders and frozen cheeks, than sitting wedged into a desk, buzzing at a hole in the middle of the classroom floor, bonking his forehead against the windowpanes like a fly, not breaking anything at all.
He stumbles through