The Journey Prize Stories 24 Read Free Page B

conversation window to the side of my screen, and all of a sudden he typed, “Are your parents home? Can I call you? What’s your phone number?” all three questions in a single row. I pictured him on a sofa, his laptop on his lap, sinking back into the cushions as he waited for my reply. And maybe due to all my unreturned love and daydreams for Mr. Sears, I started imagining what would happen if I fell in love with Ronald the pedophile. He lives in the next town over, so it wouldn’t be a long-distance relationship. Instead of Internet dates, we could go on actual dates to local hotspots and events like Heritage Village Day. We could climb each of the 144 flights of stairs to the top of the CN Tower in Toronto, something I have always wanted to do, but Amy refuses to go with me. “Would you climb the CN Tower with me?” I typed, and Ronald said, “Yes,” with a winking emoticon, and so then I typed my phone number in one swoop of momentum, with no spaces or dashes.
    He dialled the numbers just as quickly. I let the telephone ring four times, fanning myself madly with my copy of
Beowulf
, the mesh face fluttering forwards and backwards as I wondered whether to answer the phone. But then I realized if I didn’t answer, the call would go to voicemail. Ronald would leave a message accessible to anybody in my family, because this was our landline and not my cell phone since my parents for some reason won’t get me a cell phone. Also, my parents were not out at work or at the store or at a baseball game or wherever it is parents go when strangers call the house. While a weird man preyed on their child, my parents prayed in the basement, singing light religious tunes in their atonal voices and clanging finger cymbals that clashed with the ringing phone. My parents might put down their photocopied Sanskrit mantras at any time and unfold their piously curled bodies to get up and answer it. I wondered if Ronald would pretend to be a salesman, and then I thought, if my parents pick up the phone, Ronald will probably never speak to me again. So I answered it.
    There was no pause at all, and I heard a soft, wheedling voice say, “You didn’t think I’d call, did you?” And then the door to my bedroom opened, and I saw a man standing there, peering around the doorframe at me and grinning this slow grin and saying, “What do you want for dinner?” because the man was my father, so then I immediately hung up the phone and told my dad rice was fine as always for dinner, and when he asked what I’d been doing the past hour, I said (very convincingly, I think) that I’d been researching the incarnations of all the various Hindu gods.
    In English class, third period, Amy has disengaged herself from me and moved to sit with this new boyfriend of hers. His nameisn’t even worth mentioning, but he was in my fourth grade class and he used to try to join conversations but everybody hated him and ignored him so then he would just give up and stare at the wall. But then one day, he started talking to the wall, and telling it things and asking it questions,
why won’t they talk to me?, all I have is you
, and so on, and I wonder if he and Amy have similar conversations now.
    Before Amy started dating him, and before I had fully fallen for Mr. Sears, we would spend all of class laughing silently behind our open notebooks. The first book we read in this class was
Washington Square
, and we both hated it, so we left Post-It notes throughout the pages of our copies, to warn future readers. Our notes said things like, “I hate this book,” and “Don’t read any further,” and “Aunt Penniman is a flat character,” but now I regret writing those Post-Its and wonder if I should retrieve my copy from the library and remove them. I won’t though, because that would be like erasing our history when already I can feel Amy slipping away, and it’s different from that time she bleached her hair orange and became cool for a week and sat