Annabel - Kathleen Winter [57]
The Pallisers’ rec room had a dartboard and a hockey table, the kind where you shift handles to make the players dart around. There was a shelf with a copper Aladdin’s lamp on it, a set of ruby shot glasses, and a scrimshaw hunting horn. The ceiling was stucco with silver flecks. The Pallisers had a beagle, and the beagle blocked the bottom stair leading up to the kitchen. It had an orange rubber ball in its mouth, slimy and bitten to show rubber the colour of the Vienna sausages.
Brent Shiwack and the other boys took turns smoking Rothmans and sticking them out the window. The girls gathered around the punch bowl. Donna had put rum in it. The bar had Tia Maria, Baileys Irish Cream, crème de menthe, and some almond liqueur no one had ever opened, that Donna said was made by monks. Donna had floated a tub of pink ice cream in the punch. The boys argued about who was better: Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix or CCR. Wayne was on Pink Floyd’s side, but that was not what he listened to at home. He listened to “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, and “Song Without Words” by Tchaikovsky, and late-night radio.
There was a downstairs toilet, a tiny cubicle with a bolt on its door, and that was where you went for spin the bottle if the bottle pointed at you or if you had spun it. Donna announced it was time for Casey Kasem’s top forty, and “The Tide Is High” came on, and all the girls sang in falsetto with Donna doing the harmony. Carol Rich went in the cubicle with Archie Broomfield and they came out in fifteen seconds. Bruce McLean went in with Donna, and Mark Thevenet started counting on his second hand.
“Whoa,” he said as they came out. Donna’s hair was all over her face and their heads dipped as if ducking a shower of confetti. “You guys took six minutes!”
The bottle was an old wine bottle with Hungarian writing on it, and it knew where to point. It put Chad White in the cubicle with Ashley Chalk, and it pointed at couples as if it had intelligence. It did not put a popular girl with an unpopular boy, and it never put a popular boy with a girl who wasn’t pretty. It did not point at Wayne or the Groves twins or Wally Michelin or Gracie Watts at all for a long time. Gracie had new clothes on tonight, a pair of pants no one had seen. They were elephant pants like the popular girls wore, but Gracie did not look like a popular girl in them. She looked like an unpopular girl in a popular girl’s pants. She looked as if she didn’t own them. The rest of her was the same as usual: bony wrists and a nylon cardigan and a ten-karat gold signet ring. The other girls wore lip gloss and scarves and earrings. Ashley Chalk had a new silk headband every day; Gracie Watts wore elastic bands that broke her hair. Wayne suddenly knew this was who the bottle would choose for him, and it did. Donna Palliser might have planned something for him and the Groves twins, but the bottle had Gracie Watts in mind. The bottle cared about no one’s plan but its own. Wayne was prepared to go in the cubicle with Gracie Watts if he had to. He did not have to kiss her.
But in the cubicle she stood waiting. “I’ve kissed lots of people.”
Had kissing been going on among his classmates all the time? Was he the only one who had no clue? Had people been kissing each other behind the school Dumpster where they smoked? But Gracie Watts didn’t smoke. She got eighties and nineties.
“Lots?”
“I’ve been kissing since I was four.”
“Four?”
“I kissed Duncan McQueen in his father’s garage when I was four, and I kissed Brent Shiwack in the woods when I was only seven.”
“Brent Shiwack?”
“I kissed Kevin Stacey in his backyard tent hundreds of times, when I was eleven.”
“I haven’t kissed that many people.”
“Have you kissed anyone?”
“I don’t want to