Annabel - Kathleen Winter [62]
Victoria Huskins licked her thumb and blew on the coffee filters to separate one, and said, “So you’re sick today, Wayne?”
He nodded.
“Stomach flu is going around.”
“It is,” Thomasina said.
“A couple of Gravol should keep you out of trouble till you get home. Have your parents been called?”
“We’re trying to get hold of them now.” Thomasina said nothing about driving Wayne to the hospital.
Miss Huskins got the coffee machine gurgling, then moved the pot aside and slipped her cup under the stream. Drips hissed on the hot plate. “Hopefully the whole class will not get it. Hopefully the entire school will not come down with projectile vomiting. Try to come back before you miss too many math classes. What are you doing in math right now, Miss?”
“Decahedrons.”
“Don’t forget to have his parents sign the P-47.” Miss Huskins went off with her mug that had a happy face on it from last year’s winter carnival.
Thomasina said, “I’ll take you in the truck.”
“Are we allowed?” Wayne liked the idea of escaping in the middle of a school day. But he did not know what his parents would think. “I can walk home. I can tell my mom you looked at my stomach in gym class and thought I should go see Dr. Lioukras and she can take me tomorrow.”
The coffee smell filled the staff room. Thomasina looked out the window at gold clouds. Everyone had such a small life it nearly drove her crazy. Perhaps it had driven her crazy.
“You told Miss Huskins I had the stomach flu?”
Thomasina looked at the floor and shoved her glasses up her nose. “I let her think it, didn’t I.”
Wayne thought Thomasina might stop the truck at his parents’ and tell them she was taking him to see Dr. Lioukras. He thought they might go get a couple of Teenburgers and a root beer at the A&W in Goose Bay. But Thomasina drove fast down the main road and did not stop. The main road was featureless. Wayne hated it. It had a dark green stretch that went on forever between Croydon Harbour and Goose Bay. Thomasina did not speak and he wondered if she was making a mistake. What would happen when Miss Huskins realized they had taken off in her pickup without his mother and father signing that form?
“What does P-47 stand for?”
“Bureaucracy. Victoria Huskins’s world. A world in which — do you know what a morgue is?”
“I saw one on TV.”
“Every corpse has a ticket.”
“Around its feet?”
“We’re in a world where every person, or plant, or animal, or any entity whatsoever, has an explanatory ticket on it. P-47s are part of that.”
“Do you think we should try to phone my mom again, when we get to the hospital?”
“Are you afraid of Miss Huskins?”
“She already freaked out about the poo.”
“Do you feel like I’m kidnapping you?”
“Kind of.”
“I guess it could seem like that.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be thirteen next March the seventh.”
“You know my birthday?”
“I do. So you’re twelve. I’d call twelve the age of reason. So would every major civilization since the dawn of humanity. Twelve is when you wake up and you look around and you understand things. You know if your parents died that night you could figure out how to live in this world. I remember that about being twelve.”
Thomasina had four vertical lines going down her face. Sometimes they were laugh lines and sometimes they weren’t. Wayne found them serious and good. They made him trust her even though she was taking him from school in her truck in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.
“I remember the clarity of being twelve. Do you feel it?” She put the radio on. With music in the cab, the road out of Croydon Harbour was not so lonely.
“I don’t know.” Wayne did not know whether he felt clarity or not, but he was glad Thomasina was addressing questions about his body, questions his clothes, his parents, his school had covered