Annabel - Kathleen Winter [59]
“I guess it is strange. Four hundred pounds floating over Croydon Harbour. I hope none of us is ever down on the road if you decide to fall. Do you ever fall?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Do you weigh four hundred pounds?”
“The nurse measures us in kilograms. We’re on a reduced carbohydrate diet. We have to have gall bladder surgery.”
“So my interpretation of your flying dream is this. Which one are you again? Are you Tweedledum?
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll say you are. You’re alone. You’re weightless. You’ve had your gall bladder surgery but one of you has died. It must be the other one. It must be Tweedledee. When are you supposed to have the surgery?”
“Next August,” Agatha said, near tears.
“Stop it,” Wally Michelin said. “Give it up, Donna. Agatha, don’t worry about it. Donna Palliser can’t tell the future just because she’s wearing a stupid bathing suit wrap around her head and looking at a fishing ball. Donna Palliser is an idiot.”
“We’ll reserve judgement on the death. Maybe there isn’t going to be a death. I never said it was for sure. Let’s do Wayne’s dream.”
Wayne knew Donna Palliser could not see into the glass ball. He knew she was in the business, tonight, of being cruel. He did not like to see Agatha Groves made fun of and did not mind giving Donna Palliser a change of topic. “I dreamed I was a girl,” he said. “I could see my sweater. It was a green sweater with glimmery buttons, like light changing underwater. I looked at my sandals and they were white. I was walking by a river. I tried to see my face in the river but I couldn’t. No one was with me. I tried to run with the river. I picked one peak of water and ran beside it and I thought it was the same peak. But then I wasn’t sure. I didn’t realize I was a girl in the dream until I woke up. While I was waking up I remembered I’m a boy, and I was surprised for a minute, until I remembered that’s what I always am when I’m awake.”
Donna Palliser rubbed the glass ball and her mouth twisted. She rubbed it until Wally Michelin kicked it and shattered it against the wall. Donna picked a handful of shards off the carpet and flung them back at Wally, and one of the shards flew in Wally’s mouth and stuck in her throat, and there was blood coming out from between her lips and it dripped on her blouse, and she was terrified. She could breathe but she couldn’t talk, and the only sound she made was loud, constricted panting through her nose. Even Donna Palliser knew she had to call a grown-up.
Donna ran upstairs and brought her mother down and they called an ambulance, and Wally Michelin went to Goose Bay and a doctor took the glass out of her throat, but it had lacerated one of her vocal cords. There was a lot of parental interrogating, and a policewoman even came in from Goose Bay and asked everyone separately and in groups to explain what had happened. In the end all the grown-ups wanted to believe this was a tragic outcome where no one was to be singled out for blame. The grown-ups wanted to avoid blame at all costs, and agreed this could have happened in any group of young people. It was unfortunate and terrible and everyone had had a part to play, and they would hopefully never find themselves in such a situation again, and they could at least take comfort in the fact no one had been blinded, or killed.
Wally came back to school a week later. Wayne wanted someone to tell him she would still be able to sing, to study the “Cantique de Jean Racine” if someone could find it for her, to go away to Vienna and become an opera singer like Lydia Coombs. But no one mentioned Wally’s singing, and Wayne had to think hard to remember if anyone but he had known of her singing plans, and he realized he might be the only one Wally had told. He couldn’t catch her eye, and she did not wait for him in the hall at recess or lunch. He got the idea he was the only one who remembered about her singing, and he got the idea she somehow hated him for this, and would hate him forever until he forgot what he knew about her.
This was all in