“Sugar corrodes your bones. Your teeth turn brown and fall out. Your muscles get weak, your brain stops working, and your skin begins to sag. The human race is becoming stupid because of all that unnatural junk.”
I considered an ancient man with a walker, his bald head speckled and seamed like a nut, and then another guy whose hands were crabbed up beneath his chin as he stepped awkwardly, with the plodding motion of an injured insect.
Back at home she made us drink the beery milk from her goats. My brother and I cramped our fingers around the glasses and chugged the frothy white sauce. We spoke of the end of goat milk season the way we did about the beginning of summer vacation.
“I can’t wait for cow milk,” he said.
“Me too,” I agreed, though I knew that goat milk might be my salvation.
✴
EVEN IF I missed holes when I buttoned my shirt and didn’t notice if my shoelaces came untied, I managed to draw a small following at school. We met beyond the playground, on the blustery slope where our teachers weren’t likely to catch us speaking English, and I told them about the powers of the mind, telepathy, and telekinesis.
On TV, I’d seen Marco Polo spy on a Buddhist monk who was levitating, and my mother had confirmed that peaceful men in faraway places could float and even speak with their minds. So I began practicing. Lying in bed, I let myself become as light as air, attempting to rise from the thin foam mattress. When this didn’t work, I tried with something small. I lay a sheet of paper on my dresser and stared at it. I put it on the floor and squinted over it with rage. I propped it against the wall and tried to help it slide down, which eventually it did, though I wasn’t sure how much of this was my doing.
“You just have to focus,” I told the other children, feeling inspired by my own words. “You let your eyes close halfway. You look at the paper, and it will start to float. You can even do it with yourself. In bed. You can levitate.”
A scrappy boy named Matthieu stared, his mouth agape. He had a scar like an operated cleft lip, though he insisted a kid had thrown a stone, and he’d beaten him up.
“You did that?” he asked. “You floated?”
I shrugged. “Only by accident. I was sleeping. I fell down when I woke up.”
Testing myself as a budding cult leader was risky. I was far from popular, bad at sports, and a pet for the girls who took turns tying my shoes. I often forgot to zip my fly, and after school, when I climbed into my mother’s van, the first thing she did was realign the buttons on my shirt and tuck the untucked side in or pull the tucked-in side out.
“You have to try,” I told them.
“Why?” asked Guillaume, big and awkward and freckled, with a blushing face the mean kids called la tomate.
“Because the world is going to change. We have to be ready.”
The children nodded. There was a hardy evangelical community near the school, and my classmates had heard talk like mine before. A few gave their own testimonials. One thought he’d floated ever so slightly in bed because he’d heard the plastic rustling beneath his sheet. Guillaume had also caused a paper propped against the wall to slide to the floor. Everyone was impressed.
Back in class, Mme Hans jabbered, making us do grammar exercises. As I conjugated the verbs in a story about sugar cabins and ice skating in Quebec, I couldn’t imagine why my father had left a place where everyone ate sugar and skated around all day, even if sugar was deadly and French Canadians did fight a lot—fairly important facts that the story didn’t mention. But Mme Hans cared only about verbs. She had short gray hair and was as stout as a sailor, and she was probably a good fighter too. Staring at her, I thought of a barrel wearing women’s clothing. I pictured it going over Niagara Falls. As she repeated, “j’étais, tu étais, il était, nous étions,” I closed my eyes and felt my body growing light. Soon, I’d no longer need grammar. I’d rise, passing through my desk unseen, and slip through the wall into the fresh air outside. Then I’d run like hell.
“Réveille-toi! Wake up!” Mme Hans slapped the back of my head.
This was her warning. It was why I referred to her—to the other students—as “Mrs. Hand,” which seemed funnier because I was breaking the rule against speaking English.
During reading time, I asked to go to the library. But when the librarian saw me, he made himself busy, ducking into his office and fussing about. I’d been hounding him to find me books on ESP and psychic powers.
I pulled out a chair and sat and slumped. The elbows of my red checkered shirt had holes that my mother would patch as soon as she noticed. The tabletop felt cold through them.
In a few days, school would let out for Christmas, and I needed enough to read. My parents rarely spoke, and the mystery of my father’s simmering rage and my mother’s muted fear dug at me. Whenever my father left, my mother went through papers or made phone calls in the hushed voice of a TV villain. I’d definitely need a lot of books to get through the break. I couldn’t sit still without one.
I went to the shelves and stood the way I did before the open refrigerator. I’d planned on giving up reading about fish, so maybe I could take the novel about mutant telepathic children living after a great war. I’d already read it once and had drawn on it for my recess sermons.
But there was also a volume I loved on prehistoric fish, so I walked to the section of fish books. It was empty, and I realized that I’d checked them all out, and they were at home.
✴
JUST BEFORE DARK, my father’s truck crunched into the driveway, and my brother went out to say hi. I sat in the kitchen, reading about the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish thought to have gone extinct 66 million years ago, until a fisherman caught one off the coast of South Africa in 1938. This made me wonder what ancient fish might accidentally be in my father’s stores. Outside, the pulse of my brother’s words sounded light and quick next to the slow, somewhat gravelly voice of my father.
My mother was helping my sister with something in her room, so I got up from the table, went outside and stood on the back porch. The gray sky sagged into the valley, promising cold rain and not the snow I was hoping for.
“Sh,” my brother whispered. He was peeking from behind the shed, the bangs of his brown bowl cut in his eyes. “Hurry up!”
I hustled behind the wall. My father was there, grinning through his beard, and seeing him, I knew that we’d do something bad and very fun.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “You promise?”
I nodded as he took a long, curvy bottle of Pepsi from his jacket. He popped the cap and it hissed. My brother lifted his shoulders and dropped them, sighing nervously.
“Just a little drink,” my father said. “It’s going to burn.”
My brother held the bottle in both hands and tipped it back. He swallowed and shook his head, clearly as worried as I was, though we both tried to smile.
“Good, huh?” My father passed the bottle to me. I hid my fear and took a swig. The cold liquid fizzed on my tongue, burning gas rising into my sinuses. Permeating sweetness followed, chemical in its intensity, and I gave the Pepsi back. I could feel my bones corroding just beneath my skin.
“You’ll learn to like it,” he told us and raised the bottle, draining most of it in a few gulps. It was a miracle he was still alive. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and told us to promise again. Even as he smiled, his eyes became still and menacing. We promised. Then he sent us back inside.
My mother was standing at the stove.
“Have you done your homework?”
“I’m almost finished,” my brother told her, but I just took my backpack to the living room, dumped it, and then crouched as if I’d come upon strange droppings. Sometimes