“Okay, good point.” I had only been trying to make small talk, but, like Mrs. G, I was being tested. Human or otherwise, which would it be?
“Where are you headed to?”
“The washroom,” she said. “I have to pee.”
“Oh yeah. Me too.”
She stopped and gave me a look that announced her decision concerning which category I fell into. “This has been a truly intimate moment,” she said, stopping by the door to the girls’ lavatory.
I felt the put-down sting. She might as well have slapped me on the face. And it showed.
Then this really crazy thing happened. She let down her guard. Her face softened. She opened the door to the girls’ room. “Wait here,” she said.
I waited. When she came back out, she looked me in the eye this time. The fire was still there but it wasn’t anger. “What’s your favourite book?” she asked.
I swallowed and took a chance on telling her the truth. “ The Field Book of Insects by Frank E. Lutz,” I said and waited for her to laugh.
“Interesting choice. I haven’t read it but I bet it’s a real page-turner. You really into bugs?”
“Yes. Ever since I was a kid. I can identify a tiger beetle in its larval stage and tell you if it is going to be a male or a female.”
There was a hint of a smile. “You are so weird, you know.”
“I know.”
“But weird is good. Smart and weird is a good combination.”
I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. “Thanks,” I said. “What’s your favourite book?”
“The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” she said. “Ever read it?”
“No, but I’ve read lots of books about death and dying. It’s one of my favourite subjects. Is it in the library?”
“Here? I doubt it.”
“Well, in the public library?”
“Probably. But I’ll loan you my copy.”
“Cool.”
“If I loan it to you, you have to read it.”
“I will.”
“Are you afraid of dying?”
“A little.”
“I’m not,” she said with great certainty. “Life scares the shit out of me but not dying.”
Now she was scaring me. “You’re not like&hellips;?”
“Suicidal? Hell no. I’m not ready to die. You have to prepare yourself for that, like it says in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It takes a whole lifetime for most of us to be ready for the liberation from our bodies. It’s a lot of hard work. I’ve gotta suffer for a long time so I can prepare myself.”
I felt I had just met a kindred spirit or even my soul-mate. “School is a good place to suffer,” I said. “Can I suffer with you?”
“You already are, I think. But yeah. Sure. You’re cute. Weird, smart, and cute. And I want you to teach me some stuff about bugs.”
“I will.”
She stopped by a classroom and announced, “Chemistry. I took chemistry. Nothing sucks in school worse than chemistry. I took it, though, so I could learn to suffer well. I better get in there and go to it.”
“Robyn,” I said. “There’s something you should know about me.”
“And that is?”
“I’m different.”
“So?”
“There’s something about me that’s not quite right. I don’t mean like a bad heart or liver or anything. And I don’t mean like I’m crazy. It’s something else I can’t quite nail down but I need to figure out what it is.”
“Okay. That’s okay with me. I’ll help you if you like. It’ll be like a science project.”
CHAPTER FIVE
My parents were way too protective of me when I was growing up. They thought I would choke on popcorn. They thought I would be run over by a bus. They thought I would catch a deadly disease. They thought I would fall out of a tree.
I did fall out of a tree when I was thirteen. I fell from very high and I fell very fast. It was an oak tree, I remember. On the hard ground I was alone and I was unconscious. No one found me. I just woke up with a headache and a very sore shoulder. I was fascinated by the fact that I had gone away and come back. I don’t know where I went. I just know that it was blue and it was very beautiful. There was no real me there, just sky. I had become the sky somehow, and that was what I was looking at when I woke up — staring at the sky through the tree limbs.
My mother was home when I arrived and saw that I had been injured. She raced me to the hospital and they scanned every inch of me. Damaged but not dead was the result.
I often wished my parents were not as smart as they were. They subscribed to Scientific American and we had twelve science channels in the house. They were health nuts as well. I had to hide junk food in my room to get by. Both my mom and my dad were believers in the new genetic brands of food. Enriched this and enhanced that. If we were going to eat potatoes, those potatoes had to have a kind of pedigree. My mother did background checks over the WorldCom on the brand names of potatoes. A potato or even a turnip nearly needed a university degree before it was eaten in my house.
By the time I was sixteen I was trying to wrest some control over my life: what I ate, what tree I would fall out of, when I would cross the street, and what friends I would have. I was still a bit of a Loch Ness monster looking up at the surface of the water from very deep murky depths. I was not a disturbed person like Miles Vanderhague or anything. Miles was addicted to violent video games and said insulting things to people as often as he could get away with it. He accused people he did not like of smelling bad and of wearing the wrong brand names of clothing.
I was the opposite of Miles Vanderhague. I smiled a lot, a perfected goofy smile that made people think I was on some of those newer designer drugs. But, despite my father’s venue of employment, I was not a drug lover. I had my own little mysterious quest of trying to live life like I really meant it. I was trying really hard to get to the surface and all I could do was keep swimming for the sunlight.
Robyn was a fresh breeze in my life. She was oxygen in my lungs.
We’d walk to the mall and she would stare at the other students from school who were shopping there. Robyn said she never shopped for anything new. She’d only buy used clothing or things recycled. She was also studying astrophysics to see if there was any commonality with the ideas in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“Would you go to Tibet with me when we graduate?” she asked as we strode through the mall. Robyn glared at the other students who were buying what she referred to as “unimaginable crap.”
“My parents want me to go to university in Glasgow.”
“Why there?”
“They have this thing about Scotland. They think it is where I should go for school.”
“Then Tibet is not a possibility?”
“I didn’t say that. Let me think about it. I’m just getting to know you.” I was feeling a little uncertain about many things, so making a decision to go to Tibet while in the mall was something I was not prepared for.
“Sometimes you just have to leap. I’m a leaper,” Robyn said.
I was thinking about falling out of trees.
“A woman