Cover
Advance Praise for The Indifference League :
“A Big Chill for Gen X & Gen Y, this love letter to the new Lost Generation is funny, sexy, uplifting, and refreshingly free of pretentiousness and cynicism. The Indifference League is a wild ride and a compelling treat that reveals the inner superhero in all of us.”
— Heather J. Wood,
author of Fortune Cookie
“The Indifference League is a perfect satiric cocktail: mix two parts hilarious send-up of pop culture with one part sharp observations about relationships, add a splash of sex and a twist of compassion. Don’t miss this book.”
— Susan Juby,
author of The Woefield Poultry Collective
“The Big Chill meets Marvel Comics in Richard Scarsbrook’s smart, funny take on Gen Y’s transition to adulthood. Who did we want to be and who did we become? are the hard questions at the heart of this coming-of-middle-age tale.”
— Allan Stratton,
author of The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish
“The Indifference League sizzles with energy
and humour as it romps through the reunion
weekend of quirky high school friends.”
— Patricia Westerhof,
author of The Dove in Bathurst Station
Dedication
This book is for
Bluebell
and
for all of my real-life
Super Friends
“To fight Injustice. To right that which is wrong.
And to serve all mankind!”
— Slogan from the TV series
Super Friends, 1973–1974
1
MR. NICE GUY
“Here I come to save the day!”
— Mighty Mouse, from the TV series
Mighty Mouse Playhouse, 1955–1966
Mr. Nice Guy is typing an email invitation to the other members of The Indifference League:
To: statistician; hippieavenger; missdemeanor69; thedrifter; theperfectpair
Subject: The Brat Signal™ is ON!!!!!!!!
Greetings, Lads and Lasses,
Given that our collective thirtieth birthdays are rapidly approaching, I am activating the Brat Signal™!!!!!
To commemorate this milestone year, all surviving members of The Indifference League ™ are hereby summoned to The Hall of Indifference™ for the upcoming holiday long weekend!
As so often happens these days, his mind drifts back nearly twelve years, to the night that they collectively became known as The Indifference League.
*
It is a warm, starry evening on the Sunday of the July long weekend, and Mr. Nice Guy and his friends are hanging out on the stony beach in front of his parents’ cottage.
(He is not yet known as Mr. Nice Guy; none of them have their alter-ego names yet. It will happen later this night.)
They are gathered around a campfire that has been fuelled to ridiculous roaring heights by Psycho Superstar, with gasoline siphoned from the lawn mower, kerosene drained from the antique lamps inside the cottage, and flammable flotsam and jetsam scavenged from the beach.
On the end of a straightened wire coat hanger, The Statistician is holding a bratwurst sausage in the flames. He swings the crackling, blackened meatsicle over in front of Hippie Avenger and says, “Want it? I swear it’s a veggie sausage.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Like, yuck.”
“Um, I’ll take it,” Mr. Nice Guy intervenes, sliding the bobbing sausage from the wire with an enriched-white Wonderbread hotdog bun. The bratwurst crunches as he bites into it, and he says, “Mmmmmmm … gasoliney-delicious!”
“Thankyouverrymuch,” says Psycho Superstar, in a voice approximating the already-dead Elvis Presley’s. He tosses a cupful of kerosene into the fire.
(None of them are actually known by their alter-ego nicknames at this point, but this is Mr. Nice Guy’s memory, and his mind can retroactively modify anything that it wants to. It’s possible that it wasn’t even Mr. Nice Guy who saved Hippie Avenger from that hot dog, but he remembers that it was.)
Hippie Avenger gazes up at the tiny lights blinking in the sky, and dreamily muses, “The pilots of those airplanes can, like, probably see this fire from up there.”
Psycho Superstar takes this as a compliment, and heaves a broken Styrofoam cooler onto the blaze, proclaiming, “I want this fire to be fuckin’ seen from space!”
SuperBarbie, from her perch on SuperKen’s lap atop an army-surplus Field Marshal’s chair, says, “That is not good for the environment.”
“Tell that to all the industries your dad owns stock in, huh?” Psycho Superstar counters, as the Styrofoam begins to distort and melt. “Though you might have to settle for wearing cheaper shoes, then.”
SuperKen’s deep voice resonates like a cannon blast. “The quality of the air we breathe is everyone’s responsibility.”
As the captain of the Varsity football, soccer, and hockey teams at Tom Thomson High, the president of the Student Council, the lead tenor in the school choir, and the co-chairperson of T.N.T. (the clever acronym for Teens Need Truth, the Christian prayer club at school), SuperKen is the uncontested alpha male of the group. Usually, none of the other guys would ever contradict him, at least not to his face, but Psycho Superstar won’t let it go this time.
“Remember your responsibility to the environment when you’re dropping fucking bombs on it, dude. One bomb is worse than a hundred bonfires.”
SuperKen is attending the Royal Military College in the fall. He has already been fitted for his dress uniform.
“He is correct,” The Statistician says, after a moment of hesitation. He is normally reluctant to embrace any position taken by Psycho Superstar, but The Statistician has harboured a grudge against SuperKen since the graduating class awards were announced a few weeks earlier. Sure, SuperKen deserved to win Male Athlete of the Year, and probably even the school spirit award, but The Statistician suspects that one of the coaches or some starstruck female teacher must have exaggerated a grade or two for SuperKen to have beaten him for the highest academic achievement award.
“The airborne gaseous and particulate contaminants released by the detonation of a single conventional firebomb,” The Statistician explains, “would indeed outweigh those created by a burning Styrofoam cooler, by a ratio of about ten thousand to one.”
The Statistician has no idea if his estimate is even close to correct, but who is going to argue with him? He was careful to use that lovely mathematician’s qualifier, about.
“Yeah,” adds Psycho Superstar, invigorated by The Statistician’s unexpected support, “and burning forests and buildings … and bodies