Nik gives a silent toast to modern dance in Jennifer’s memory. To rapid choreography, he thinks. And its unpaintability.
He takes a sip from the bottle. He hangs up his leather jacket. The hook is a blackened old door handle he found once in the recycling and stuck into the wall. He lights a couple of Jennifer’s candles — the red one still jammed into the old wine bottle and a squat, round white one in an old jar. He watches candle flames flicker in glass, closes his eyes, sees Jennifer. Then, ritual complete, he’s ready to paint. He picks up a tube of red ochre and begins rubbing it on the wall with his fingers, adding a red teardrop earring to the ear mural. Red smears appear on his faded black T-shirt beside old dollops of aquamarine. Nik can’t seem to keep any of his clothes clean.
“I gather you saw the rat,” says Ilana. She’s leaning on the doorframe, an enormous paper cup of coffee in her small hands.
“Revolting.” Nik shakes his head, but doesn’t allow himself to glance away from his painting. “I never know what I’m going to come back to here.”
Ilana sits down cross-legged on the floor at his feet, letting her short black skirt twist up to her hips. She shifts her knee so it grazes Nik’s calf. He finally looks at her. Ilana’s intentionally ripped tights reveal glimpses of freckled skin. Her eyes are puffy and red, but she always looks like she’s been crying, so he doesn’t mention it.
He doesn’t understand the things Ilana always talks about to Kendall. Something is always wrong. Everything wrong is dramatic. She receives frequent, upsetting phone calls. Nik thinks she should stop answering her cellphone and go to class. Nik doesn’t know what she studies. Ilana never seems to do homework, but she has a student card. He saw it once, after Aaron dumped the contents of Ilana’s purse out onto the living room floor and emptied her wallet of cash. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Nik remembers thinking that was a lot of money and wondering where she got it. He remembers Ilana shrieking first, then smirking. Ilana’s reactions never make much sense. Nik doesn’t trust her. He watches her absently pick at her chipped and bitten burgundy fingernails. He turns back to his mural.
“I like your room.” Ilana’s boots clatter and clunk against the floor. “It’s better than mine. Stinks like paint, but I could always open a window.” Nik tries to find the perfect angle with his brush to add more shading. He wonders what angle Ilana is working on him.
“Hey, what’s this?” Ilana says, arching towards the bottle of Crème de Cacao Nik left at the foot of his easel.
Nik tries grabbing the bottle out of Ilana’s reach, but she’s too fast. She grips it with both hands, tips her head back and chugs it. Nik snatches the bottle back and she sputters, coughing liqueur spittle down the front of her torn black sweater.
“That’s mine,” Nik says, wiping the rim with his shirt. “Don’t tell Aaron I have it. It’s for drinking slowly.”
“Of course, Nikky,” Ilana says. “I do keep secrets from my boyfriend, you know.”
For a moment Ilana is silent. She picks up her coffee cup and cradles it close to her chest. Nik sighs, daubs paint onto the mural, and then stops. He wants another colour, but doesn’t trust Ilana with the hiding place. He feels rigid when Ilana watches him paint. He can’t think of what to say to make her leave. It bothers him that she is calling him Nikky. Like Jennifer did. He stares at the canvas, raises his paintbrush to it, stops again.
Ilana sneaks up behind him and licks his elbow. The surprise warm wet dries instantly. He tries not to respond, thinking ignoring it will make her stop, but she reaches up under his shirt and scratches her nails up his back.
Nik shivers, then starts to sweat in confusion. Ilana is barely over five feet tall with protruding bones and a flat chest. Childlike and tiny enough to break. And she’s Aaron’s girl. Her arms encircle Nik’s waist. Her hands press onto the front of his pants.
“Come on, you know you want me.” Ilana’s voice is breathy. “I like this kind of secret.” Nik spins around to face her. Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes aren’t. Her hands seize on his belt to unbuckle it. He pushes them away. She leers and grabs at the wallet tucked into his back pocket, but it’s attached to a chain connected to his belt loop. Nik has no words. Ilana is directing one of her dramas. He doesn’t want to be in it. He pushes at her again, this time with a force halfway between hard and gentle. Like his father would do. Ilana wobbles and takes a step back. Nik steps back too, establishing what he hopes is a safer distance. He turns to the canvas, breathes its wet-paint smell. Ilana gasps. There’s a clatter and thunk as Ilana fake-falls to the floor. He doesn’t see her slam her hand down on the hardwood and adjust her hair around her face as she lays her head down on it. He looks, startled, thinking she hit her head. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open, her body still. But her eyeballs are still fluttering under her closed eyelids, her long, fake lashes twitching like trapped spiders. Nik sees she is waiting for him to react, for rescue, and for her scene to play out. But he doesn’t feel it. He can’t do it. Instead there’s a familiar lurch. Anxiety like a black wave.
Nik coughs. He doesn’t want to be like his father. He thinks finding Jennifer will make him different. Heroic. He leaves Ilana there, grabs his sketchbook from his milk-crate nightstand and begins sketching the lines of her tall black leather, high-heeled boots. They look like the ones Jennifer used to wear. Nik thinks Ilana must have stolen them.
Nik glances down at Ilana’s face. She has sharp features: her nose is slightly crooked, he notices, and she has a cut on her lower lip. Ilana opens her eyes and sits up, her elbows turning awkwardly backwards as she rests on them.
“You’re sketching me?” she says. “God, Nik, you’re sick.” She stands up and skulks out of the room. Nik looks at his sketch. It’s not quite right. Jennifer’s dancer’s calves curved more underneath the leather. He scrapes a fierce X over the drawing with the flat edge of his pencil. He shuts his door quietly and wedges a wooden chair against the knob. Then he sits down on the floor and pretends he’s talking to Aaron, who used to be his best friend.
“What the hell was that?” Nik whispers.
“She’s crazy,” the old Aaron would have said. “She’ll be outta here soon though, so don’t worry about it.”
Nik misses Old Aaron, who had a lot more sense than Aaron has now. When Nik moved to Vancouver from the island, Aaron’s was the only ad that caught his eye on the student housing website. It read: RAMSHACKLE ROOM! CHEAP AND UGLY. It meant Nik didn’t have to worry about wrecking the place with paint. Not like his mom’s house, where Katya, his mom’s new girlfriend, now runs the place with hotel-quality precision. White towels. The end of the toilet paper roll folded into a point. Nik always remembers his promise to keep Katya a secret from the rest of the family. Something to do with support payments from his dad. He always goes along with his mom’s lies. But he’s still relegated to the basement when he visits, like his mom’s dogs to their kennel. When his mom and his dad lived together his mom put up with a lot more disorganization. Nik has fond memories of his messy childhood home. There were so many places to hide when his parents fought. Nik used to disappear like a magic trick and lose himself in epic drawings. His adventures in vanishing make the raggedy apartment seem tiny now in comparison. Nik looks around his room. He feels like a rabbit in a hat. The Jennifer mural and paintings are growing, squeezing the walls closer and crowding him.
When Nik moved into the Rumble Shack, it was completely empty. It felt spacious that way. He and Aaron scavenged furniture from the curb, garage sales and thrift stores. They hauled it all home on their skinny shoulders. The older the furniture, the heavier it was. Aaron helped Nik mod his leather jacket with spikes and stitch punk patches to his pants. They did screen-printing in the living room, creating irreverent