The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

Mr. Rees approaches us and takes us aside.

  * * *

  By noon, Amy, Corrine, and I are on a flight back to Halifax, sitting in separate rows because those were the only seats available. Absurdly, we’re still in our uniforms. Our parents will have to pay the flight change fees. I don’t know exactly what my parents will say to me, but I know they will worry and worry and pray, and that their disappointment will coat me like a layer of soot. Behaviour that is detrimental to the effectiveness of the band or to its reputation is grounds for dismissal, Mr. Rees reminded us back at the hotel, though when he said it, he seemed sad. Besides the Rules of Conduct, the school has a zero-tolerance drug policy. We’re lucky not to have been expelled.

  If I lean into the aisle, I can see the back of Amy’s head as she rifles through the seat pocket, a dozen rows away. While flight attendants mime safety procedures, I hook the headphones of my Walkman around my skull and sink into my seat. I’m listening to a recording of us from last month’s Spring Serenade; to the part of the First Suite in E-flat where everything coheres, where the notes are as clear and confident as pain. I’m pretending that the Walkman is a time machine and that I have returned to April. I’m not sitting in economy class, next to a businessman I don’t know, but next to Amy onstage with the band, turning the clean edges of sheet music. When the concert ends, we click off our stand lights in the dark auditorium, like the swift wink of a city losing electricity. The applause fills the air like static. On Mr. Rees’s cue, we exit in disciplined single file. We practised this so many times. I follow the green shoulders of the clarinetist ahead of me, careful not to rattle the rows of music stands as our line of musicians curves out the door.

  I want to forget that without the band I’m just me. That nothing will ever again be that good.

  Earning Disapproval

  AMY AND I HOP OFF Halifax transit at the bus stop by the school, the same as we’ve been doing for two years, but this time the driver doesn’t respond when I say thank you. It’s the first day of Grade 11, and we’re dressed in fishnet stockings, black dollar-store lipstick, and thrifted boots too hot for September. We rented The Craft last week, and ever since, we’ve been emulating Fairuza Balk. At one point in the movie, a bus driver warns her character and her friends to watch out for weirdos, and she lowers her blood red sunglasses and purrs: “We are the weirdos, Mister.”

  We split up to search for our homerooms, and people in the hallway stare. Arrive with a new look at the start of the school year, and people speculate about your summer evolution. Maybe she’s dating someone older. Maybe her parents got divorced. Maybe she spent the summer in Toronto. I reach out one hand, lifting my fingertips, and a string of locker doors opens and recoils, spilling binders and backpacks, lunches and love notes—no, that doesn’t happen. I imagine it, though.

  I pass by the band room; I have no reason to be there anymore. A trumpet player smirks at me from the doorway, like he knows my fishnets are left over from my Grade 9 Halloween costume.

  * * *

  My mom took a picture of me before I left the house this morning. She started laughing and grabbed her camera as soon as I came down the stairs. She told me she’s going to mail this photo, along with my horoscope, to all my prospective husbands. When I protested that I’m only fifteen, she said it’s never too early to start looking. One weekend this past summer, she invited an aunty (not an actual relative) with a son my age over to our house. The boy small-talked with me as I watched Saved by the Bell reruns, hovering by my shoulder because I was too rude to get up off the couch.

  “This is one of my favourite shows,” he said.

  “Oh, mine too,” I responded, eyes still on the TV. “It was totally genius of those studio execs to retool Good Morning, Miss Bliss. I can’t imagine Zack Morris reaching the height of his powers in Indianapolis. Why set a show anywhere other than California?”

  The boy looked at me blankly and then escaped to the kitchen, where my mom was brewing cardamom tea. Boys like him have only a surface awareness of pop culture. A short while later, he and I and our moms gulped the tea from stainless-steel cups in the living room and made insipid conversation about our studies and future plans, while my dad hid in the basement fixing the computer. It was too hot to be drinking tea. And I was annoyed to miss the part of the episode where Zack Morris gives an impassioned speech to the school board after the oil spill in the school duck pond.

  After that, my mom set her sights on Nishant as the current candidate for my future husband. His family has known mine for over a decade, and often we’re the only teens at our parents’ weekly gatherings with the temple gang. (Not an actual gang.) A couple of weeks ago, we killed time at one of these get-togethers by dialling up the internet on the basement computer and making fake Shaadi.com dating profiles. I liked that he went along with this idea, which was mine. His profile was from the point of view of a robot. Mine featured quotes from the Wu-Tang Clan, falsely attributed to Greek philosophers.

  When he had crafted his ideal robot introduction, he turned to me and gave a sudden grin, and I liked its lack of symmetry. I can’t imagine kissing him, exactly. Honestly, something about the idea feels yucky, but maybe it’s just his brotherly energy and the fact that we’ve never touched. I can imagine dating him, though. His skin tone is perfect. And I think he’d be up for Lego Night at the Library. We’d build a Lego robot together and then leave it behind in the library’s Lego bin for a lucky child to discover.

  As I was trying to select a photo for my profile, Nishant scrolled through Indian women aged nineteen to twenty-five for ideas.

  “So much teeth,” I said. The women smiled from Himalayan mountaintops. They smiled from desk jobs. They smiled from yoga poses, literally bent over backwards.

  “There are no eligible women in Halifax,” he said. “Especially Indian women. And especially women who aren’t dressed like sluts.”

  “I wouldn’t say they’re dressed like sluts,” I said. I evaluated how much cleavage was visible, how much panty line. How much was too much? I tried to upload the Cookie Monster as my photo, but the site sent an all-caps message chastising me for misrepresenting my identity, so I deleted the account. Afterwards, it occurred to me I should have “expressed interest” in Nishant’s profile, to see if he would have “accepted interest,” and then we would be connected in this simulated and tenuous way. It certainly would have made my mom happy.

  Nishant and my parents come from the same box of animal crackers. They might even be the same animal. He’s fluent in two languages besides English. He volunteers at temple functions, takes the coats of aunties and uncles at dinner parties while greeting each one by name, sprinkles chutney pudi on his toast in the morning, and explains to me why Napster is the doorway to moral decrepitude. One time, there was a Carnatic musical performance scheduled at the temple, but the mridangam player got sick so they called in Nishant as a sub, and temple gossip says he did a better job than the actual mridangam player. He’s also a hybrid. He understands references to The Simpsons. His family moved to Halifax when he was four, so he’s as much of a Haligonian as I am. He puts donair sauce on everything. I once heard him refer to Halifax as “the Big City.” I’ve never seen him tuck in his shirt.

  * * *

  During lunch, Amy and I sign out The Edge of Evil from the school library. We read it aloud to each other while perched on a concrete block the size of a shipping container outside the school’s east exit. We’ve mused about the purpose of the concrete block: it contains electrical equipment or exam answer keys or the corpses of retired vice principals. We share the concrete block with a handful of other students, one of whom leans over his guitar, pressing the hard chords of a Green Day song. “The Rise of Satanism in North America,” reads Amy. The guitar guy shifts his eyes to her and then back to his guitar.

  She continues, reading from the intro written by Geraldo Rivera. “Satanism is more than a hodgepodge of mysticism and fan
tasy…It’s a violent impulse that preys on the emotionally vulnerable, especially teenagers, who are often lonely and lost.”

  “Harsh but true,” I say. I wonder what teenage Satanists have perused this book before us, and which librarian decided to order this book for the school library.

  “It attracts the angry and the powerless, who often sink into secret lives—possessed by an obsessive fascination with sex, drugs, and heavy metal rock-and-roll.”

  “Heavy metal, specifically?”

  The inside cover has a 1-800 number for moms and dads of Satanists. (Is your son or daughter evidencing signs of ritualistic deviate behavior?) Nearly every case study in the book features a casual mention of animal mutilation. There’s a chart of occult symbols just ahead of the index. We copy them into my notebook after tearing out the first few pages of algebra problems. On the cover, Amy draws an inverted pentagram in thick black Sharpie.

  “Shall we skip fifth?” she asks, blinking her augmented lashes at me, so I tell my fifth-period teacher I have a gynecological appointment and Amy tells hers she’s volunteered to tidy the school’s Japanese rock garden.

  We take the bus to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up snacks. I’m walking behind Amy through the aisles, watching her white-blonde hair. It’s like a sheet of ice, spanning the space between her scalp and shoulders. When we met in Grade 6 I wondered if it was bleached, but it wasn’t. She descends from Vikings. Amy’s mom has the same hair, except she curls it into shapes that remind me of the snow formations that pile up on the eavestroughs of our house. A month or so after her mom left this past summer, Amy found her hair products under the master bathroom sink—sprays and pomades and serums and clips that she’d abandoned. Her mother had taken everything else. Amy tried to give me the hair stuff that was still usable, bringing a box of it over to my house.

  “Don’t you want to keep it for yourself?” I asked, but that turned out to be the wrong thing to say.

  She studied the box in her arms. “I was just trying to help you. Do you even brush your hair?” She took the box back with her.

  “If you dyed your hair black, you’d look like an evil queen,” I tell her now.

  “Let’s do it.”

  She buys the cheapest box of colour, then we smoke a joint behind the building and journey over to Value Village. Amy tackles tops while I browse dresses, evaluating each pre-worn item for price, fit, and shock value. She holds up a soft black T-shirt that says Don’t Touch across the chest. I give her a thumbs-up and she adds it to the pile I’m carrying. Wearing black all the time is harder and more expensive than I expected. It already feels like too much effort. When the other kids in our grade skip class, they go eat honey crullers and make out in the Tim Hortons parking lot.

  Waiting in line, we discuss the case study from The Edge of Evil where a woman walks in on her granddaughter slitting her cat’s throat. “The beloved family pet,” I say. “The Satanist’s blade.”

  Amy nods vigorously. “Efficient and clean. Too bad her grandmother walked in.”

  We’re only having this conversation to scare the woman ahead of us in line. She doesn’t react, just empties a tangle of costume jewellery from her basket onto the counter. Our arms overflow with clothes that smell of other people’s perfume.

  * * *

  I have this idea that goths should smell like nature. When I mention this to my mother as she’s making dinner, she chases me around the house with curry leaves and rubs them into my hair. It is hard to run with your black stockinged feet slipping everywhere, chased by an agile mother who never stops reminding you of the triple jump competitions she used to win at your age while living in a country where competitions had fifty times the number of competitors they do here. Then she tells me she read about track and field tryouts in the school newsletter.

  “Triple jumping will not help me to achieve my eventual life goals,” I tell her.

  “A boy whose name starts with N might be impressed by a champion triple jumper,” she says.

  “No comment,” I answer. But later I picture myself leaping across a sandpit in black athletic wear, a cheering Nishant on the sidelines. Afterwards, he carries my trophy for me. I try to imagine us embracing in the parking lot of Tim Hortons, but it doesn’t feel right. I revise the image so we are holding hands instead, sharing a box of Timbits. Then I figure we probably wouldn’t hold hands while eating donuts. He eats the ones with the raisins and I eat all the others. This seems like the kind of relationship I could tolerate in the long term.

  * * *

  I have nightmares—or, more accurately, horrifying scenarios that I conjure up when I’m awake—where I’m in an arranged marriage to a man from India who’s in need of an immigration visa. He has a medical degree but works nights as a security guard while trying to get a licence to practise in Canada, which is like heaving a rock up a mountain—except instead of a mountain, it’s a Slip ’N Slide, and instead of a rock, it’s your dreams. When he comes home to our ugly mushroom-coloured high-rise in the city outskirts, I put on the rice cooker and massage his scalp while he drinks whatever the cheapest label of Johnnie Walker is and laments this country’s unfairness. Weekends are spent at the temple in futile prayer.

  I tell my mom about this as we’re sitting on the rug in front of the living room coffee table, folding brochures to hand out at a temple event this weekend. We have Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge playing on the TV, because my mom insisted it was her turn to choose what we watch. My hilarious Shah Rukh Khan impression is what prompted this whole conversation.

  “Nina, that is racist,” she says. “You are racist against your own race.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far…” I press a sheet of paper down on the coffee table and run my thumb over it to get an even crease. I have my technique down. It’s the same one I use when we mail out the temple’s monthly newsletter, though that also involves envelopes, sponge bottles, and stamps.

  My mom stops folding. “Have you ever seen your dad drinking Johnnie Walker?”

  (I haven’t.)

  “Have you ever seen me massage your dad’s scalp?”

  (I haven’t.)

  “That’s right,” she says. She picks up a stack of brochures, stands it on its side, and thumps it on the table twice, then wraps an elastic band around it. “Your dad is the one giving massages around here.”

  “Ha ha ha,” says my dad, who we thought was snoozing on the couch this whole time. “Keep dreaming.”

  * * *

  My parents bring me along with them when they visit new immigrant families. They and the temple gang volunteer with Immigrant Services, finding new homes for old couches and acquainting the families with Nova Scotian rituals like eating fiddleheads and apologizing. The last time I went with them, the husband asked my dad where the rest of the Indians in Halifax were. “Oh, they’ll be here soon,” said my dad.

  On Saturday, we bring a couch donated by Nishant’s family to an apartment in Dartmouth that has no furniture at all except for three mismatched chairs and an Arborite table like the ones at fifties-style diners. The only thing on the wall is a tacked-up illustration of Ganesha. My dad and the uncle load the sofa—mustard yellow and floral and sagging from the weight of decades’ worth of rear ends—into the elevator. They angle it this way and that to get it through the door. By the time they’re done, they’ve scratched half the paint off the door frame.

  My mom is in the kitchen heating milk for tea, while the aunty brings out a plate of digestive biscuits. We sit on the sofa and put the plate on one of the chairs, because they don’t have a coffee table yet. The men are in the bedroom, filling out government paperwork.

  “How is school?” the aunty asks me. When I examine her face more closely I realize that, though I’ve been told to refer to her as aunty, she must be no more than five years older than me.

  “It’s okay,” I say. I chew my digestive bisc
uit. “Umm…how do you like living in Halifax?”

  “It’s okay.” She chews her digestive biscuit. We digest.

  After tea, I excuse myself to wash my hands. When I turn on the washroom light, there are tiny roaches shimmying around the corners of the sink and along the baseboards. One heaves its body into the toothbrush holder.

  I turn off the light and walk back out into the living room, where my mother is holding the aunty’s thin shoulders. The woman cries, wiping her nose on the edge of the cotton sari she’s wearing. In a scatter of sobs, she tells my mother about the home in India she left to come live here, about her parents and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins who live together in a marble and terracotta house by the sea. She’s been trying to learn English by watching As the World Turns.

  “I want to go back home!” she says, beginning to hyperventilate. “I want to go home! Please. Please.”

  I wait against the wall. My mom catches my eye, then looks away.

  * * *

  The next day, Nishant and I accompany my parents to a temple event. We’re in charge of handing out the newly folded brochures at the door. The event provides networking opportunities for new immigrants from different countries. A handful of guest speakers deliver mortifying tips, like advising people to wear deodorant.

  Nishant smells comforting and boyish, like Irish Spring soap, but I don’t tell him that. I’m playing the long game, the kind that ends in a wedding attended by six hundred.

  He points at my large pentagram necklace, which I found on sale at a booth at the Halifax Shopping Centre. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asks, sounding confused.