“You’re still teetotaling.” He gives me a once-over that alights on the coffee cup I’m clutching in both hands.
“Yeah.”
I don’t tell him about my break from teetotaling, a break that lasted for two years while I worked at the restaurant and then the lounge bar—the break that’s basically the reason I’m not going back to bartending or even waiting tables. In high school, I didn’t drink, which for anyone else might have been social suicide. But by then, I was not just the hot girl, I was BFFs with Cath and girlfriend of Luc Bergmann, so I could get away with turning down the red plastic cups at parties. The truth was that I never gave a crap about harm to my health or frying my brain cells or potentially getting caught. It wasn’t much of a threat anyway, not when your boyfriend is the local cop’s son. My only motivation was to avoid turning into Laura. And when I started to drink at university while working evenings at the restaurant, I got the appeal immediately, at first sip. That should have frightened me more than it did. And it wasn’t about numbing myself to reality or any such AA cliché. I realized it was simply to make time pass. I showed up at work after a day filled with classes, with my head buzzing and my brain tired, and I had to spend the next seven hours rushing from one table to another in mid heels and a too-tight black skirt, chirping and smiling at the customers. The shots snuck behind the bar with the bartender and the rest of the staff made the hours go by faster and feel blurrier come the next day, so that I could do it all over again.
Once I quit that job, I wondered if Laura also drank to pass the time. But I was merely coping with a job I hated deep down. I lived in the future, lived for the moment I might leave this part of life behind. What did Laura want so desperately to leave behind? Here she was now, having drunk away her whole life, and still in the same place with nothing to look forward to.
So, in high school, I resisted the ubiquitous peer pressure. Nobody felt like keeping me company in my sobriety. Both Luc and Cath drank like fishes, as did almost everyone else. I got to hang back and watch them stumble and slur their words and occasionally throw up in the bushes behind somebody’s house. Mostly I got to watch them act like idiots only to remember none of it the next day.
That night, the night of the graduation ball, that was exactly what went down. At least it was Luc’s excuse when I confronted him. I was so wasted, I wasn’t thinking straight.
There was, of course, no alcohol served at the school dance. But just like many times before, it stopped nobody. People brought their booze in creatively hidden flasks and added it to their innocent soda and fruit punch from the fountain. I won’t say no one was the wiser—it was something like an open secret, but the chaperones didn’t intervene as long as everyone was acting more or less civilized. We were the graduating class, after all. Some of us were even over eighteen, the legal drinking age. And the overwhelming majority of us wouldn’t be continuing our studies at college or anywhere else. This would be it, the last stop before taking over the family farm. No need to break up our fun over a few harmless drinks.
That night, Cath brought Jack Daniel’s in a bottle that fit neatly into her sequined purse. Luc had a friend who smuggled in an entire forty-ounce bottle of cheap vodka. And while the chaperones let us all go about our business undisturbed, it didn’t mean we got to booze it up in the open, out of a sort of mutual respect. So everyone snuck off to the bathrooms or outside to serve themselves from their stash.
That’s what I thought Luc was doing when he said he’d be right back. But five minutes went by, then ten, and did I mention how slowly time goes when you’re stone-cold sober? Sober and standing awkwardly alone at the school dance? So after more time passed and Luc didn’t come back, I went looking for him.
I caught them in the bathroom, both his hands under Cath’s slutty low-cut dress. Of course I freaked out, and Luc—Luc looked like he’d just snapped awake from hypnosis. He was absolutely shit-faced. I hadn’t realized how much he’d had to drink, but even then, it seemed weird that he got so wasted so fast. He started to apologize, babbling semicoherently, but it was what Cath did in that moment that set me off. Cath laughed. She laughed like a hyena, standing there, up against the dirty tile wall with her skirt hiked up.
I know I sound kind of pathetic, but the cliché holds true. I’d watched her do all this crazy borderline sociopathic stuff over the years, and I, too, found it hilarious. I just never expected to become the target of it one day, yet here we were. She’d saved the best for last, for the very last day of school and one of the last days of us being together in Marly. I looked at her, and this realization hit me like a freight train. I wondered how long she’d been looking forward to this moment.
“Look at you,” Cath choked out between bouts of hilarity. “Your face.”
That’s when another realization struck me. Somehow, for some reason, it was even worse than the betrayal I had right here before my eyes. “It was you,” I said. It became so clear to me that it was surprising I didn’t figure it out sooner. “You gave my acceptance letter to Laura.”
In retrospect, of course she had. She knew where I had hidden it, and she knew my locker combination. Only Cath could have done it. And now she doubled over with laughter.
“You cunt,” I said. I wished later I’d yelled it out, sounding more menacing, but it came out just kind of flat. And Cath didn’t react at all. My words couldn’t touch her, my anger was meaningless to her. Cath wasn’t one to care about consequences.
Well, she was about to learn. My gaze ping-ponged all over the place—Luc, shamefaced, Cath, laughing, the stalls, the floor, the sink.
The sink. On the edge, Cath’s purse sat, twinkling with its sequins, looking inoffensive enough. I grabbed for it not because I actually had thought it through or had a clear plan of action. I grabbed it because it was the only thing within reach. Later I told myself I’d forgotten that there was the bottle of JD inside. Maybe I had. I can’t say I was thinking clearly, but I also can’t say for sure that I wasn’t. I just picked up her purse and swung it at her face.
It caught her on the cheekbone, and the thunk of it was ominous and loud. Then everything descended into madness. I remember Cath howling and cold water running from the tap and Luc dancing awkwardly around the scene, slurring something unintelligible.
Cath wasn’t laughing now. She was screaming at me, I’ll get you for this, you dumb bitch, my dad will get you, and you’ll get thrown in jail. I turned around and walked out of the bathroom. The crowd had frozen. Everyone seemed to be watching me. I simply walked past them, across the vast gymnasium that still bore the Fortier last name on a plaque on the wall, to the door that led outside, and out onto the dark soccer field.
A moment later, Luc caught up with me. In the moonlight, his face looked pale and sweaty. “She’s right,” he said. “Her dad will have you thrown in jail.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
I went straight home. I grabbed a duffel with only the essentials, my toothbrush and some socks and underwear. And the money, the money for the bus tickets to Montreal. Laura was sleeping, and she didn’t even wake up, which was just as well.
From there, I walked to the bus stop. Halfway through, I had to take off my high-heeled shoes because my feet were killing me, and so I made it the rest of the way to the terminal barefoot. By then, the sky was starting to lighten.
An hour later, I was leaving town on the first bus of the morning, still wearing my purple satin prom dress.
I look at Luc, who takes a sip of his beer nonchalantly across from me.
“Yeah,” I say, “still a teetotaler.”
We eat our respective meals in a sort of weird limbo, aware of each other and of being observed.
“I went to see Tony earlier,” I tell him when the small talk becomes difficult to keep up.
Luc pauses halfway through his mouthful. “The usual” turns out to be a hot chicken, a diner specialty provincewide, a concoction made up of two toasted bread slices containing shredded chicken breast, smothered in a pool of gravy and topped with canned green peas. I don’t recall Luc liking this dish. Or ever eating it at all. It’s a stark reminder of all the time that’s passed. To me, it feels like it’s only been five minutes; I haven’t changed that much, or at all, and here he is, and in the meantime, he’s developed an affinity for hot chicken.
“Tony?” he asks. For a second, there’s a blank look on his face like he truly has no idea I’m talking about his uncle. “Oh. Tony. What for?”
“He started rambling,” I say, eschewing the question.
“And what else is new?”
“About Michelle.” I lower my voice instinctively—enough people are staring at us as it is. “He said some pretty weird stuff.”
“Well, that’s Tony for you.” He seems dismissive. It’s not that surprising, when you think about it—his relationship to Tony Bergmann isn’t really something Luc wants to linger on. But I can’t help but wonder if Luc has ever asked himself whether there might be something lurking in his genes, some kind of madness.
“Do you know what happened to him?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” Luc seems genuinely confused.
“His head injury, when he was young.”
“Geez, Steph. That was years ago.”
Thirty-eight years to be exact, if you believe the waitress.
