Fruit Read online

  “My paper route pays pretty well,” I said and shrugged. I grabbed my bag and got out of there before Mr. Bernard could ask anything more.

  When I got back home, I went straight to my room with my Scotch tape. I took off my sweatshirt and made a Scotch tape “x” across each of my nipples. I put my shirt back on and stood in front of the fan. I thought it was very smart of me to fake wind.

  The Scotch tape isn’t too bad, although it makes my skin crinkle under it. It looks like I have many-pointed nipples now. They’re stars, which are better than cherries any day.

  When Mr. Mitchell assigned us our desks for the year, I kept my fingers crossed that wherever I ended up, I was a) as far as possible from Brian Cinder and b) as close to Andrew Sinclair as possible. Andrew is the most fashionable boy in grade 8 and I think we could be friends some day. But before I even think about asking him to be friends, I’ll have to lose a lot of weight, shave my legs, change my personality, and cure my nipples.

  As it turned out, I got stuck beside Michelle Appleby, the leader of the Slut Group at Clarkedale, and Jackie Myner, the ugliest girl in the whole school. Jackie is obsessed with Adrian Zmed. He’s a Hollywood actor who plays a cop on a television show. She collects photographs of Adrian and pastes them into her “Adrian Zmed” scrap-book. She even wrote out his name in thick black marker on the cover, but she started her letters off too big and by the time she got to the “e” and “d” in “Zmed,” she’d run out of room. So the cover says “Adrian Zm” with the “ed” on the inside cover.

  On the first day of school, Mr. Mitchell pulled out a copy of Christian Tales for Modern Youth and told us he’d be reading us a story every morning.

  “You may think that school is only about math and English and spelling,” he said, his eyes stopping on each of our faces. “But my job is also to equip you with the spiritual tools necessary to guide you throughout your lives. Think of this,” he said, rapping the cover of the book, “as God’s utility belt.”

  Then he opened up the book and read us a story about a kid who keeps the largest piece of pie for himself and later gets a visit from the Devil.

  My mom asked me what religion Mr. Mitchell is, but I don’t know.

  “His wife and daughters can’t cut their hair,” I said, “or wear pants. I know that much.” I’ve seen them, waiting for him in the parking lot after school. They creep me out a bit because they all look like zombies.

  My mom scrunched up her mouth. “Hmm,” she said, “Jehovahs aren’t hung up about hair, really.”

  My mom is afraid of Jehovah’s Witnesses. When I was younger, the Jehovahs would come to our neighbourhood on Saturday mornings, knocking on all the doors. When my dad was working, my mom would sit by the window and watch for them. When she spotted the Jehovahs making their way down the street, she would whisper/scream “Jehovahs!”

  Then she would close the drapes, turn the TV off, and make me and my sisters go into the kitchen and hide behind the counter.

  “It’s not like they’re going to break in if they know we’re here,” Christine would say.

  “SSSHHH!” my mom would whisper/scream.

  It’s good to know that Mr. Mitchell isn’t a Jehovah. But my mom thinks that he belongs to a cult.

  “There’s a group of them that meet out on Highway 7,” she said. “Under that big canopy tent. And I’d bet my bottom dollar there are snakes involved.”

  This morning, after we said The Lord’s Prayer and mouthed the words to “O Canada,” Mr. Mitchell pulled out his Christian Tales book and read us a story about a rich girl who gives a poor girl a new pair of patent leather shoes.

  “Who can tell me the message of this story?” he asked at the end. He looked at the Indian kids when he asked, like he was hoping they were listening. But the only answer he got was Eric Bird horking into a Kleenex.

  “Anyone?”

  Mr. Mitchell looked over at Margaret Stone. Her dad is the minister of St. Paul’s Church. I don’t think Margaret listens to the stories, either, but she must know them all by heart. Before she could say anything, Jackie Myner put up her hand. Mr. Mitchell pretended not to see her because Jackie stutters and it takes a very long time for her to say anything. But she kept waving her arm and twisting around in her seat and making these little grunting noises, so Mr. Mitchell didn’t have much of a choice.

  “Yes, Jackie?”

  “C-c-c-can I g-g-go to the bathroom? I th-think I’m g-g-g-going to throw up.”

  Mr. Mitchell rolled his eyes and said yes, she could, but to hurry up. Jackie ran out of her seat and out the door.

  The more I think about it, the more I realize that I have deformed nipples because of my subconscious. I know about that because my sister Christine told me about it. The subconscious is a very tricky thing, Christine said. She told me that when bad things happen to people, it’s because their subconscious secretly wants the bad things to happen.

  “Do you honestly think Mom fell off that porch by accident?” she asked me. A few months back, my mom got her first job selling Mary Kay cosmetics. She said it was her idea, but it was really my dad who got after her.

  “If you’re bored, why don’t you get out of the house and find something to do, Beth?” He wasn’t angry, but he did sound very tired.

  “Well I don’t know what to do, Henry. I’ve been raising three kids for the past eighteen years but I can’t put that on a resumé. Can I?”

  Then my mom got invited to a Mary Kay party and came home with new lipstick and a new attitude.

  “This is it!” she said. “I’ve found what I’m looking for.”

  We all tried to sound happy for her, but everyone remembered my mom had said the same thing when she got hired to enumerate. She only lasted a day before she quit.

  “I just felt I was invading people’s privacy,” she told my dad.

  Anyways, when my mom was leaving her very first Mary Kay house party, she slipped off the woman’s porch and twisted her ankle.

  “Her subconscious made her fall,” Christine said. “She did it because she didn’t make her quota at the party. And you know what she’s like. If at first you don’t succeed, might as well just give up.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. I mean, my mom was crying because she said her ankle hurt so bad.

  “How could she make herself fall?” I asked. “How could her unconscious mind make her do something stupid like that? And if she really didn’t want to work, why wouldn’t she just quit?”

  “That’s sub-conscious, not unconscious, you moron,” Christine said. “And never underestimate the power of psychological persuasion. Look at me. Do you know how many girls would kill for the chance to work for Peoples? But I believed in myself enough to make it happen.”

  Then Christine went back to filing her nails.

  I ignored Christine, the way I always do when she starts talking about her brain or how much she loves her job at Peoples Jewellers. But now, I’m wondering if she’s right. What if my mom didn’t fall off that porch by accident? Maybe we do make bad things happen to ourselves because we think we deserve them. Maybe we need to be punished for thinking things we shouldn’t.

  The more I think about it, the more I realize I’m being punished for the Bedtime Movies. I started having them a couple of years ago. No one knows about them. The Bedtime Movies play over and over in my head until I fall asleep at night. Even though they make me feel bad, I can’t stop them from coming into my head. They have a mind of their own.

  BEDTIME MOVIE #1

  I’m Brooke Shields. I’m wearing a shiny pink dress. The hem of my dress is very high. I’m wearing spice-coloured nylons over my shapely legs. I’m also wearing white high-heeled shoes.

  My car has broken down in front of Mr. Hanlan’s house.

  I’m Brooke Shields in a shiny pink dress and why can’t I start this icky car? Jeez! I hit the steering wheel. Mr. Hanlan is watching me from his living room window. He thinks I’ve got great hair and comes out to help me. He�
��s wearing a red Speedo.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Hanlan can’t start my car.

  “There’s not much we can do about it,” he says and slams the car hood down. “She’s a goner.”

  “What am I going to do?” I ask him. I think I’m going to cry. “Now I’m going to be late for my photo shoot.”

  “Would you like to come in for a hot chocolate?” Mr. Hanlan asks me.

  “I don’t think your wife would like that,” I say. My eyes want to look at his chest, his red Speedo. But I’m stronger than that.

  “My wife’s dead,” Mr. Hanlan says. “She was killed last week in a car accident.”

  “That’s terrible!” I say.

  “Not really,” Mr. Hanlan says. He’s staring at my long, red nails. “I didn’t really love her, anyway. I only married her because she forced me to. Besides, the accident was her fault. She ran a red light. Lucky there was no one else hurt.”

  Mr. Hanlan tells me he’s lonely.

  “Every day, I just sit in the house with no one to talk to. Sure could use some company, though. I guess I can’t change your mind about that hot chocolate, can I?”

  “If you insist,” I sigh and look down at my wristwatch. “It’s the least I can do. But I can’t stay for very long. I have a photo shoot, remember.”

  Mr. Hanlan tells me not to worry, that he won’t take up too much of my time. He knows that I’m Brooke Shields and that I’m very busy.

  “Besides, you’re not going anywhere with a broken-down car,” he says and smiles. “When you’re done your hot chocolate, I’ll drive you where you have to go.”

  I sit at Mr. Hanlan’s kitchen table while he makes the hot chocolate. He asks me questions about myself, but I’m vague and check my hair for split ends.

  Although I don’t say it, it’s warm and comforting and exciting in Mr. Hanlan’s kitchen. It’s also a little scary, because then I realize that Mr. Hanlan is wearing a Speedo, his wife is dead, and there’s no one else home.

  Mr. Hanlan turns to me and winks. “Would you like big or small marshmallows in your hot chocolate?”

  Then I fall asleep.

  two

  My mom is turning forty-nine next week. My dad is nervous because he doesn’t know how she’ll be on her birthday.

  “She’s either going to spend the day crying in bed or laughing her head off or screaming at everyone,” he said. “Does anyone feel like placing bets?”

  I suggested that he make dinner reservations at the Conch Shell, one of the fancier restaurants in Sarnia. It’s by the Blue Water Bridge, which takes you over to Port Huron, Michigan. Uncle Ed calls it “Port Urine” but I don’t think he says that on purpose.

  “You think that’ll do the trick?” my dad asked me.

  I nodded, reminding myself to order the escargot. I’ve never had them, but you have to start sometime.

  “Okay,” my dad said. “I’ll make the reservations. Tell your sisters and keep your fingers crossed.”

  I watched my dad walk out of the living room. Sometimes, I feel sorry for him. Not only because he has someone like me for a son, but because he has all of us for his family. Plus, he works in Chemical Valley, which can’t be very exciting. Every day, he puts on a beige work shirt with matching beige pants and packs his lunch or dinner in a grey lunch box and drives into the Valley for a twelve-hour shift. Sarnia is famous for Chemical Valley and there’s even a picture of it on the back of the ten-dollar bill. It stinks pretty bad most days and isn’t very nice to look at, even though at Christmas, they put coloured lights on all the smokestacks. But I heard once that if there ever was a war, Sarnia would be one of the top three places in the world to get bombed. That scared me, but it made me kind of proud, too.

  My dad grew up in the prairies, pooping in an out-house and using the Eaton’s catalogue as toilet paper. Every other summer, we all have to drive out west to visit his family. Most of them are strangers to me so I just watch TV on my grandmother’s sofa while everyone goes around being fake-nice.

  The truth of the matter is that sometimes, I can’t help but think my dad is embarrassed of me. I mean, he isn’t fat and none of his relatives are, so how come I am? I catch them looking at me and I know what they’re thinking:

  “That’s not Henry’s son.”

  I bet they think my mom had an affair with a fat man while my dad was at work. That makes me feel dirty.

  I don’t think my mom ever had an affair, but she’s done some pretty stupid things in her life. Last year, she got into an accident in the Sears parking lot. She meant to back out of her spot, but put the car in drive instead. She said it wasn’t really her fault because her eyesight is bad. My dad says it’s not her eyes, it’s her dirty glasses.

  “You’d be surprised how much your eyes will improve without having to see through six layers of fingerprints,” he said once.

  My mom felt very bad about the accident, though, since the car she hit belonged to Mrs. Clarke, a woman from our church. So for the next few weeks, she cleaned her glasses twice a day. But after a while, she forgot to do it and now they’re back to their dirty old selves again.

  Overall, my mom is a pretty crappy driver. She didn’t get her driver’s licence until she was in her thirties and only when my dad made her. She drives around the city now, but she’s afraid to take the busy streets, even though there aren’t any in Sarnia. Instead, she gets out her map and plans her route before leaving.

  “I could take Lansdowne and then go right onto Mayfair. No, that won’t do because then I’d have to turn left onto London Road.”

  My mom won’t make left-hand turns. Ever. She won’t park beside poles in underground parking garages, either. And she never drives on the highway. She says the trucks scare her.

  “It’s all mind over matter, Beth,” my dad told her once.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t grow up on a farm with chickens and goats, Henry!” my mom yelled.

  “What does that have to do with you driving on the highway?”

  “Don’t act stupid, Henry. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  My dad looked confused but he backed off pretty quickly. I bet he sometimes wishes he’d married a simple prairie girl.

  I think my mom is on to me and my nipples. Yesterday, when I came home for lunch, there was a big plate of sloppy joes and French fries waiting for me so I knew something was up.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about?” she asked me just before I bit into my first fry.

  “What do you mean?” I squirted some ketchup on the side of my plate and kept my eyes down, thinking that Nancy must’ve said something to her.

  “You seem a little preoccupied lately. Anything going on that I should know about?”

  My cheeks were burning and underneath my sweatshirt, my taped star-nipples started to itch. My mom has ways of finding things out. That’s because she’s very nosy. She snoops through my room when I’m at school. I know this because I set out traps. I take a couple of hairs from Christine’s brush, stretch one between two of my dresser drawers and tape it into place. That way, I know that if the hair is broken, my mom opened my drawers. And sure enough, when I get home from school, there are broken hairs about fifty percent of the time.

  I get pretty hot under the collar about that because I never feel like I have any privacy. Sometimes, I think about telling my mom I know she’s been snooping. But I can’t tell her about my traps or else she’d just untape the hair and put it back in its place. Then I’d never know if she was snooping or not, so I just keep my mouth shut.

  Every morning, if I have time, I tape more hairs to my dresser. Lately, though, none of them have been broken, so I wonder if my mom has found the trap. She can be pretty smart when she wants to be. So now, I’ve put notes in my dresser drawers.

  In my top drawer, the note says, “What are you looking for?” The second drawer note reads, “Do unto others as you want them to do unto you.” The third drawer note says, “Don’t you feel guilty for do
ing this?” The fourth drawer note says, “Respect people’s privacy!” and the last drawer note says, “Drugs are fun!”

  I don’t know if my mom has found the notes or not. She’d never say it if she did, because then she’d have to admit to snooping in the first place.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said and reached for the mustard jar.

  “Are you sure, Peter?” She grabbed my hand. I hate when she does that. “Sometimes, I feel like we don’t talk anymore. At least, not like we used to.”

  Her eyes started to get misty and she reached for the Kleenex box. I had no idea what my mom was talking about, but then, that’s nothing new, especially since she started going through The Change. It’s been very difficult for everyone in my family.

  “You’re going to have to be extra-patient with her,” my dad told me a while ago. He had just gotten back from the Big V with a big pink box of Kotex pads under his arm. My mom was in the bathroom, yelling at everyone to please give her some privacy, even though no one had even walked by the bathroom door.

  “Your Mom is going through something right now, Peter,” my dad said. “Some very bizarre female . . . thing. I don’t know what it is, or when it started. I just hope it ends pretty soon.”

  “Get away from me!” my mom yelled from behind the bathroom door.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” I said to my mom. “Everything is fine.”

  “Are you enjoying school this year?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Making lots of new friends?”

  “Yes.” Another lie.

  “Everyone likes my Peter.”

  Sometimes, I think my mom is the dumbest person in Sarnia.

  What my mom doesn’t know is that every day for the past three weeks, I’ve had to tie Brian Cinder’s shoelaces. He cornered me after school one day.

  “Don’t you think you better tie this for me?” he asked and pointed to his shoe.