I was tired of pretending to be happy and group was just another stage for me to act out my false contentment.
“Not really,” I admitted. “Did you have something else in mind?”
“Yeah, friend of mine is having a kegger out in the boonies. You down for a party?”
I’d never been to a party before. My girlfriends hung out with a group of guys sometimes but we never partied. We hung out at Mary’s house mostly because her parents had an awesome home theatre bigger than most actual theatres, or at Joe’s because his family had an Olympic sized pool with a three-tiered diving board. None of us drank because we were all athletes and scholars. Well, I’d been an athlete, a dancer, before the cancer decimated my energy.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” I said.
The shift and sweater set weren’t exactly party clothes.
Reece cast a critical eye down my body and came to the same conclusion.
“Hudson has an older sister. She’s smaller than you but you could probably squeeze into something of hers.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered.
He laughed. “I meant in the chest region, Lila is a lot smaller than you.”
“Oh,” I said, less offended because that was a fair assumption.
“Lila is cool. You’ll like her.”
“Will she like me?” I couldn’t help but ask. Most of the kids at Entrance High thought I was a snob.
“They’ll like you,” he reassured me in a soft voice.
I wasn’t sure why he was being so nice but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I was too much of a coward to do any of this by myself so I was grateful for his bad influence.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I decided with a firm head nod, proud of my decision and my conviction.
“Cool,” Reece said before ducking into the car.
“Cool,” I echoed softly, a little deflated at his lack of enthusiasm, and then followed him into Optimus.
“So,” he began after we pulled out of the parking lot. “Let’s go over the basics, yeah?”
“Okay?”
I saw him grin in my periphery.
“Have you ever done drugs?”
“No!”
“Not even blazed?”
“What?”
“Blazed.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.
There was a short, stunned silence.
“You mean to tell me, you were born and raised in BC and you don’t know what blazing means? What about taking a bong toke, getting high, greening out, doing dope, smoking grass, hot-boxing a car, rolling a joint?”
“Are you talking about marijuana?” I guessed.
I knew it was the leading albeit underground industry in British Columbia but that didn’t mean I knew anything else about it. Most people in high school smoked marijuana but I wasn’t most people and it kind of annoyed me that Reece was being condescending when he knew that. I was a paradigm of virtue. A paradigm of virtue did not know drug slang and they certainly did not do drugs.
“Yeah, Louise, I’m talking about Mary Jane,” he said, again, like I was a moron.
I figured Mary Jane was another slang term.
“You can’t even call yourself a British Columbian if you don’t know a thing about BC bud. Our weed is the best in the world.”
I shrugged.
“Fuck, you really are a good girl,” he said, echoing my thoughts.
“Yes,” I said, with a proud chin tilt.
Then I realized that being a good girl kind of sucked. I had friends, sure. A group of girls that called themselves the angels of Entrance High because they all came from established and, mostly, good Christian families, but more so because they were pretty, wealthy and they knew it. They weren’t bullies to the rest of the kids but there was a lot of in-fighting about who was prettier, brighter and better liked. Ironically, the angels did not support one another’s successes. Instead, they used guilt, manipulation and lies to hold each other back. I knew this because they had been my friends since birth just as our mothers had been. Old stock, I had come to learn, did not mean good stock.
I got good grades because I was, thank God, born smart and even if I didn’t try hard, which I did because I was a good girl, I would have done well.
I volunteered at the Autism Centre. It started out as an obligation because my mother made me pick a charity organization to patronize when I hit twelve years old, but now, I loved it, and I wished that I had more time to dedicate to both it and other charitable organizations. I loved the kids at the center even though some of them were really hard to love because they didn’t have the cognitive ability to discern social cues. One such kid, an adorable ginger-haired boy named Sammy, was one of my best friends. I still remembered the day that he informed me of our best-friends-for-life status. He’d written me a letter and asked me to sign it, officially making us bffs. I’d burst into tears.