The Truth Commission by Susan Juby

Author:Susan Juby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2015-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Monday, October 15

High Drama Above the Tree Line

Prema Hardwick is G. P.’s token superstar athlete.85

Some readers may wonder why a jock would go to Green Pastures Academy. Why attend a school where you get zero love for your outlier muscle-twitch capacities, when you could go to the Churchill or Dover and get all the special treatment and team jackets your heart could desire?86 Surely, Prema Hardwick was smart enough to realize that the golden children at G. P. are the ones who get opinion pieces published in national news magazines and film shorts in festivals. (Our badminton team, three-legged racers, and hopscotch athletes aren’t about to get a stadium built for them, Friday Night Lights–style. Not even an ironic one.)

The answer to why Prema attends G. P. Academy is this: she takes fabric arts seriously. I’ve seen some of her quilts and yarn installations. She’s a real asset to our traditional arts program, and I mean that in all seriousness, even though it sounds condescending. I am an excellent stitcher, but less skilled with some of the other crafts. For instance, my weaving project was a tragic episode in my art career. Dusk confiscated what she called my “Lump ’n’ Threads” wall hanging for “crimes against eyes,” and took it out to the school sustainability patch to keep weeds down and vermin fearful.

As almost everyone knows, because of all the local newspaper articles and radio announcements and whatnot, Prema and two of her BC Ski Team compadres qualified for the national cross-country ski team. People say she’s destined to win an Olympic medal one day.

Flashback alert!

Dusk’s family has a cabin on Mount Washington (as far as I can tell this is pretty much a requirement for a two-doctor family in the mid-Island region), and last winter her parents invited Neil and me for a weekend. During that visit Dr. and Dr. Weintraub-Lee insisted that Dusk show me how to skate ski.87 They tried to make Neil learn, too, but he told them he was asthmatic, which he is not.

I borrowed Dusk’s eleven-year-old brother’s skate skis and followed her to the trails.

“Skate skiing is just like it sounds: half skating and half skiing. You know how to do both, right?” assumed Dusk.

She shoved off and demonstrated the basic technique. We ended up on a trail that led around the side of the mountain and opened up to reveal the mighty Pacific Ocean sprawling far below through broken cloud cover. At least, that’s what I should have seen. I couldn’t appreciate the view because I was dying. The vapor trail I left in my wake made it look like I was carrying a boiling kettle somewhere on my person.

I collapsed at about the three-quarter mark and lay atop the crust of snow, waiting for the end. It took a good ten minutes for my heart to stop jackhammering in a fatal-seeming way. Dusk finally noticed I was no longer behind her, and by the time she doubled back to check on me, I was past caring about small matters such as life and death.

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