The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

  Tomorrow, I will delete the blog and it will exist only as an internet ghost that drifts through servers somewhere. Even so, in my head I compose a new blog entry about travelling back to when I was fourteen and living my whole life over, knowing what I know now, curating my life to resemble most Facebook timelines: a gallery of only good things. Or maybe I’ll bring a past version of myself to the present—to the future, even—and show her how everything turns out. A crazy thing happens to you when you’re fourteen, I’ll tell her, but you live a normal life. It’s just something that happened a long time ago, though it’s there permanently in your brain chemistry—a wrinkle in grey matter, a flaw in a synapse. It’s almost as if it happened to someone else.

  Sam was right about that Twilight Zone episode. I had forgotten the ending. Rod Serling’s matter-of-fact narration: “All of man’s little devices to stir up the air are now no longer luxuries. They happen to be pitiful and panicky keys to survival.” The twist is a classic. It was all a dream. The Earth isn’t headed towards the sun but away from it. The final scene, in grainy black and white: a woman wakes up shivering, in a world that is impossibly cold.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my editor, Anita Chong, for her care with every sentence, and for always knowing what questions to ask. To everyone at McClelland & Stewart, for the hard work and magic of turning a Word document into a book. To my agent, Stephanie Sinclair, for opening the doors, and for believing in this story when it was only a draft. To the editors at The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, The Puritan, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories for publishing new, unproven writing. To the Writers’ Trust of Canada, for their generous support. To the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, for time and space.

  To my friends, especially Jacqui Simmons, the only person who reads all of my stories. And to the friends who sat and wrote with me in busy cafés and empty classrooms, with our Pomodoro timer running.

  To Halifax, for its utter charm, and for forgiving my inaccuracies.

  To Mom and Dad and Jay, for their big hearts and open minds.

  Thank you to the exceptional teachers I’ve had, especially Professor Lydia Fakundiny, who taught me to read aloud, and who told me that writing wouldn’t be a pipe dream.

  * * *

  I have taken some creative liberties in adjusting timelines and real-world details to fit the story. These include descriptions of locations, high school grade levels and curricula, and dates related to book publication, TV broadcasts, exhibitions, and other events.

  * * *

  The epigraph by Sophocles appears in The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (fifth edition), edited by John Simpson and Jennifer Speake (Oxford University Press, 2008).

  The epigraph by Jim Henson appears in It’s Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider by Jim Henson, the Muppets, and friends, edited by Cheryl Henson (Hyperion Books, 2005).

  this page: The episode of Dateline described is from season 13, episode 3, Bethpage, Long Island. Aired November 11, 2004.

  this page and this page: The quotations from The Edge of Evil, including from Geraldo Rivera’s foreword, appear in The Edge of Evil: The Rise of Satanism in North America by Jerry Johnston (Word Publishing, 1989).

  this page: The Nabokov story described and quoted is “A Bad Day,” from The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

  this page: The episode of Fraggle Rock quoted is episode 104, “You Can’t Do That Without a Hat.” Aired January 31, 1983.

  this page: The episode of The Wire quoted is from season 1, episode 12, “Cleaning Up.” Aired September 1, 2002.

  this page: The list of proactive measures for teachers being bullied is paraphrased from the Study.com article “What You Can Do as a Teacher Who Is Bullied by Your Students” by Michele Vrouvas, posted December 2019, https://study.com/blog/what-you-can-do-as-a-teacher-who-is-bullied-by-your-students.html.

  this page: The Toastmasters’ roles, Table Topics, speech stages and objectives, and the “Four Ps” are taken from www.toastmasters.org as well as various Toastmasters newsletters.

  this page: The quotation from Aristotle is from Physics, translated by W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes. (Princeton University Press, 1984).

  this page: The episode of Full House described is from season 4, episode 8, “Shape Up.” Aired November 9, 1990.

  this page: The CBC article about the deer incident at Uncommon Grounds is “Deer smashes through Halifax café,” CBC.ca, June 20, 2011.

  this page and this page: The Twilight Zone episode described and quoted is from season 3, episode 10, “The Midnight Sun.” Aired November 17, 1961.

  this page: The definition of pollution is taken from the Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word

  /pollution.

  this page: The interview with Samantha Geimer quoted is “Samantha Geimer on Roman Polanski,” by Emma Brockes, The Guardian, September 18, 2013.