All the Shining People by Kathy Friedman

Author:Kathy Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2022-03-07T15:48:14+00:00

All the Shining People

THOMAS

We were eighteen boys stuffed into a portable, end of March with the heating busted. We’d been sitting in that long rectangle all afternoon. It was freezing. A fluorescent light kept fizzling out, then fluttering back to life. Toxic mould in the walls was probably hurting our lungs, with us more prone to getting sick because of the cold. I raised my hand to say something but Schroeder was so busy demonstrating “responsible sexual relations” with Barbie and Batman dolls, he didn’t notice. Head bent, his duologue punctuated by giggles, ours and his own, he spoke in a falsetto, then baritone, then falsetto:

BARBIE: Not without a condom, no way.

BATMAN: Aw, but it won’t feel as good.

BARBIE: No, Batman. You might have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Schroeder was everybody’s favourite. His smile was like a searchlight we hoped would find us with its beam. What he lacked in hair, he made up for with a tan, even in winter. White teeth, muscular calves, a voice as deep and liquid as the announcers on TV. He never picked on me, like the time he told Ben Slominsky to eat dirt from the student parking lot and the whole class laughed, but when Patarozzi put up his hand, Schroeder called on him right away.

“Mike P. What can I do you for, sir?”

“How come we have to learn all this crap? I thought only homos like Jordan got AIDS.”

Shaking his head, laughing, Schroeder promised to let us go after one more video.

It was the second day Jordan hadn’t been in class. Since he wasn’t there, I didn’t have to care if Patarozzi made cracks about him. Recently Jordan had started dressing in big yellow overalls, bracelets with sparkly plastic beads around his wrists, and Ring Pops on his fingers that he sucked during Health class. I’d noticed purple half-moons under his eyes and that his cheekbones jutted up under his skin and made caves underneath. Techno thumped from fat headphones looped around his neck. A month earlier, someone had broken into his locker and hung a used tampon from the coat hook. You didn’t think about girls doing stuff like that. I heard that Jordan handed in his geography homework that day with red stains on it, but I don’t know if that’s true.

At the start of Grade 9, even though we’d barely talked in years, he came up to my table in the caf clutching a tray. My buddy Wilson stepped in: “Trainspotting at my house tonight, Tommy, you seen it already?”

I saw Jordan out of the corner of my eye, shifting his weight from left to right. “I’ll be there, bro,” I said. “What time’re you thinking?”

“Right after school,” he said.

Was Jordan Loewenstern wearing eyeliner? “Sick,” I said. “But I have to be home before seven. My mom kinda flips if we don’t eat dinner together.”

I watched Jordan’s back as he found another table.

“Shit,” Wilson said. “You think he got the message?”

Schroeder’s class ended and Patarozzi asked me to go down to the ravine with him.

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