Coincidence - Alan May [12]
“I am Pierre,” he said, smiling at her.
“Melissa,” she had the presence of mind to reply, while thinking, “Oh my God, the plane must have crashed. I must have died and gone straight to heaven.”
Who knows how long they might have stood there in the baggage-claim area just gazing at each other had not a second tall and good-looking fellow come bounding in. This one was a bit older—about thirty, Melissa guessed. His blue shirt marked him as a Blue Water Academy teacher.
“Dave Cameron,” the man said, trying to catch his breath. “I had to leave the van in a no-parking spot about a mile away. All the luggage accounted for, Pierre?”
Pierre Rouleau realized he had not made the first move to help the other students with their bags, or even to welcome them to San Diego. No matter, they had retrieved them on their own and everyone was soon bundled into the van and heading toward the harbor. Pierre was glad a seat was open beside Melissa.
He had arrived the day before, he told Melissa as they bounced along. His eagerness to tell her everything about himself helped him overcome his self-consciousness in speaking English.
He was eighteen, he said, and lived with his mother and younger sister in Québec City. His older brother was away at McGill University. His parents, both chartered accountants, had divorced five years before, and his father had moved to the Montréal office of their accounting firm after the split.
Applying to the Blue Water Academy program was his mother’s idea, he said. He hadn’t been enthusiastic about the prospect at the time. But he was a pretty sure why his mother had enrolled him.
Hélène Rouleau had not been happy about the direction her middle child’s life was taking. At thirteen Pierre had begun hanging out with a group of kids whose idea of ultimate cool was to wear their hair long and their pants baggy, with big gangster-style metal chains attached to their wallets. All of which Hélène could have put up with as an adolescent fashion statement—after all, hadn’t she looked pretty silly herself as a teenager? Hadn’t most people? The swearing and smoking that were part of the group’s image, however, were another matter.
And although the kids spent their days skateboarding—or snowboarding in the winter—Pierre’s mom was afraid their activities might not be so innocuous when they got just a bit older. There had been a lot of talk among the parents about an underground culture that was springing up among skateboarders, a culture that involved not just the performance of risky feats of daring on their boards but drugs as well.
That’s why she packed Pierre off to the Caneff School for Boys in northern Ontario. Caneff had a reputation for working with wayward kids, keeping them in line through exhausting physical activity and rigorous discipline. Pierre had to be in top shape every morning, prepared for whatever was going to be thrown at him during the day—and that could be almost anything. The boys were united in their hatred of the place. However, they knew voicing even just one complaint wasn’t worth the consequences.
When Hélène saw how miserable Pierre was at Caneff, she began to think it was too high a price for a child who had never been in any serious trouble. Besides, some of the Caneff boys were far rougher than his friends in Québec, so perhaps it was not the best environment if she hoped to protect Pierre from unsavory influences. She hated having him so far away yet was reluctant to bring him home. One of his skateboarding friends—a cherub of a boy struggling desperately, at age thirteen, to look like a tough guy, cigarette dangling from his lips—had recently spent twenty-four hours in jail following a night of drunken brawls.
Then she heard one of her office partners talking about her daughter’s experience with Blue Water Academy. That, Hélène thought, might be exactly what Pierre needed. It would be a year of hard work and rigorous study, and discipline, too, bien sûr, but in an atmosphere of adventure and camaraderie