Sneaker Waves

MY morning starts with coffee. Kitty’s with Xanax. A storm has settled over town and she perches on the windowsill and tells me that this time of year animal shelters won’t adopt out black cats. They’re afraid they’ll be killed in Satanic rituals or by psycho teenagers. It’s an empty day, like the kind that led to Christmas or Thanksgiving when we were kids. Peaceful moments with water droplets smeared on the windows and headlights tipped towards the sea. This week’s project is indoor herbs. Real ones, to cook, not smoke. I’ve got five ceramic pots in a line on the kitchen counter and dirt grooved into the callouses of my palms. Indoor gardening is a passive activity, but I stare like the pot’s about to boil. Kitty has nodded off on the windowsill. Head drooped to her shoulder. “When will they sprout?” Her head rises slow and unsteady. “What?” “The plants.” I scratch at my morning stubble and try not to let irritation seep into my voice. Kitty is my best friend and roommate and is sometimes completely oblivious to what I try to do for her. “They need more light,” Kitty says. “It’s the wrong time of year.” I dig around the closet under the stairs until I find a musty box with my dad’s old photography lights. I bang around to attract Kitty and she disappears into the closet while I set up the lighting. When each pot glows in synthetic warmth, she reappears with some old acrylics and we paint small scenes of happiness onto the ceramic. “I’ve heard this is important,” she says. Kitty is the artist, but her fingers have numbed and her hand shakes. The thyme gets a rough barn with sheep blots in the distance. The basil she adorns with a messy forest. Her brow creases sharp waves across her forehead and she pushes it away, too hard, so the pot teeters at the edge of the counter. I call it impressionistic, Northwest Starry Night, and we both take meditation-deep breaths. “Did you get Scotty’s text?” I ask. She purses her lips and shrugs, eyes on terracotta. “About the party?” “Uh-huh.” I continue the collage of dogs on the bay—a Boston terrier, a poodle, a long-legged greyhound, and a border collie—while Kitty paints a sailboat set off in the deep blue Pacific on the oregano. She finishes while I wind a long green lizard around the girth of the rosemary. She gathers herself, fitting bones back into joints to stand. “I wonder if they like punk rock?” Kitty pauses. “You mean, like, if they’d grow faster?” We decide they would. • • • I have these dreams where my teeth fall out. Sometimes they spider web like glass and then sprinkle to the floor in some sick cartoon. Sometimes I bite into an apple and instead of the outlines of my teeth left behind there’s bloody ivory chunks. Once or twice someone has punched me in the jaw and out fly a couple molars. Somehow this disturbs me less. I will be mid-sentence and they drop like rotten flies. Or I pass myself in a mirror and realize I never had them to begin with. Every time I turn on the television a dentistry commercial appears. I stay away from hockey arenas. American tourists always try to tip me in U.S. currency. George Washington’s on every goddamn dollar bill and of course their public can’t get it together to switch over to coins like the rest of the civilized world. That whole wooden tooth story is a myth. Propaganda. I read somewhere that he wore dentures out of yanked slave teeth. Even yesterday, at a friend’s house, in between bong tokes he shows me the wisdom teeth the dentist pulled over the summer, roots still in tact. Long and alien. • • • The party is the party. As in: everyone I’ve ever loved will be there. Everyone else will be beautiful and talented and clothed in amusing Halloween costumes. I will walk in and my favourite song will switch on, Kitty on my arm in an incredible outfit and perfect hair. I will be welcomed back like a lost comrade and everyone can pretend like nothing ever changes. It goes like this: everyone I used to know is here, or will be soon. Everyone else is beautiful and ironically dressed and maybe if they were a little less fucked, they wouldn’t sound so stupid. My favourite song does not switch on but whatever. Kitty’s on my arm dressed as Wanda the Fairly Oddparent. Less delicate than imagined, due to an earlier bottle of white. An Adderall too, I’d guess, from her three-hour monologue on the way here. Rain drips off her eyelashes and some girl says, “Wow, shit, it’s really pouring,” so Kitty scampers off to the bathroom and after one long minute alone I follow like a lost dog. I sit on the toilet and watch her adjust the bobby pins in her spray- dyed pink hair. We left our coats safe in the car and my white button down clings to my shoulders. “Mother fucking rain.” “Shit, Kitten, it doesn’t matter. Pass me my whisky.” She slides the bottle from her purse, takes a sip, and hands it over. It tastes like poison, but there are bills to pay and also who cares. I check myself in my mirror and see that the green spray dye that designates me as Cosmo the Fairly Oddparent has begun to bleed into the paper crown pinned to my head. Kitty buzzes around with black tubes and pale cream and red lipstick and in two point five seconds her makeup is perfect and her hands still jitter. I watch that the hands don’t find their way to something sinister. Kitty could pop a pill in front of a nun and not even God would notice. “Jesus Christ Jack, you can’t hide in here forever.” She grabs my wrist and yanks me out the door. Outside, a million people scream drunken sound bites over a superb playlist—I gotta admit—and Kitty, hand still on mine, tangles her way through the crowd into the kitchen. She digs a glass out of a cupboard, locates ice hidden in the back of the freezer, and pours the cheap whisky over it like fine scotch. Or at least her idea of how people drink fine scotch. Like we know. She pours herself a glass, too and I say nothing. A high-pitched scream to the left and another stick-thin, red-lipsticked girl dressed as Twiggy catapults herself onto Kitty and that’s it, we’re off. The party begins. Kitty’s swept away by the tide and I don’t even have to think of conversation because everyone wants to know the same thing. “Holy shit, if it isn’t the long lost brother,” or “Jack, where the hell have you been?” Here’s my cue to kick back the dregs of my second, third, fifth, and sixth drinks, respectively. This is followed by: “Where you living these days?” or “Good call dipping out early.” Sometimes: “Where’s the girl, the other half? You guys finally fuck or what?” And I say: “Oh, back on the island. For sure, yeah you guys come across anytime, we’ll have a beach fire,” and “Well you know what Kerouac said about college, bourgeois bullshit.” Sometimes: “Oh Kitty. Nah, but we got that pact. We’re not married by thirty-five and we’ll stop fucking around and tie the knot.” I’m roped into beer pong, and then outside to pass a thin joint and everyone’s drunk enough that I finally lose the spotlight. It’s easier than you’d think to slip into who you used to be. The rain still comes down hard so once the weed is roached all the who-evers go back inside and I’m left with my three old friends: Dan, Chris, and Scotty. This is their house. It’d be mine too, if Kitty and I hadn’t decided to move home. They’re dressed as slightly masculinized Powder Puff girls and we all congratulate each other on our clever cartoon costumes. Scotty digs around his pocket and pulls out a pack of smokes. “You want one?” He holds it out to me. “No, I quit.” “Cool, man.” None of us know what to say and underneath the rain, I hear our old friendship turn stale until I’m alone and soaked with three guys I used to know. “It’s fucking cold out here,” Chris says, and we go inside. Kitty is nowhere. Her old friends, Maddie, Emily maybe, are dancing in the living room and shrug towards the bathroom but when I shove past the line-up, no Kitty. No Kitty in the kitchen, or upstairs. I go out to the car parked down the street, but it’s empty. I call her cell for the fifteenth time as I walk up the front steps and hear a familiar ringtone from the bushes. “Kitten?” I follow the song behind a shadowed pine tree. A recently trimmed branch lies in the grass and there Kitty perches, the hem of her black skirt soaked in wet grass, rain stringing her hair, the pink all but disappeared. “What are you doing back there?” “Cop drove by earlier. Didn’t want him to see me.” “Are you okay?” As I step closer, she kicks leaves over a puddle of vomit.

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