***
Darren was right about Christmas being lean in my parents’ household that year. He wasn’t the only one who anticipated it either. A week before the high school’s winter holidays started, a package arrived at the Upton post office for me. It was from my long lost Heather – my best friend from my old life in our old city. Even though I didn’t need to wear her silver locket every day as protection anymore, I still missed her terribly.
I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen table, holding the gift-wrapped present she sent me. I pressed it right up to my face as if I was trying to absorb some of the mature, comfortable love of our friendship through the pretty gold paper.
“A Christmas gift travelling to us all the way from the east,” Dad smiled. “That’s fitting, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, HG is still awesome,” I beamed. My favourite Heather and I referred to each other in initials to avoid confusion among all the non-Heathers around us. “Well, I won’t open it now,” I decided aloud. “I’ll save it for Christmas morning. Then there’ll be one less present for you guys to feel like you have to buy for me.”
Mum made a pained face. “It’s not that I don’t love Christmas shopping for my big girl,” she said, “but that would actually be really helpful. Thanks, honey.”
Mum looked so sad. It made me want to keep talking.
“Sure. You really don’t need to worry too much about gifts for me this year,” I told my parents. “I’m way ahead of the game. Check out what I got in the gift exchange at work.”
Mum snatched at the wrist I waved in front of her. Her hand gripped the place where the gold bracelet was clasped. “Who gave you that?”
I hadn’t expected her to react so strongly. And I certainly hadn’t expected her to know to turn the thickest part of the closure over to where the number 14K was stamped into the soft metal. It wasn’t until then that I was suddenly struck with how strange and inappropriate it all must have seemed to my parents.
“Heather.” Mum’s voice was firm. “Are you dating someone?”
“No!” My protest was made in earnest. Darren might have been up to something but I hadn’t consented to any of it. “A friend of mine at work gave it to me after he wound up with my name in the gift exchange. He’s kind of like a brother to Crystal and I’ve got to know him fairly well lately. He knows a bit about how we’re broke right now and he felt sorry for me, I guess.”
Dad groaned.
Mum let go of my wrist. “With an investment like that the boy isn’t saying he feels sorry for you. He’s saying he wants to date you.”
“Mum—“
“Does he go to the same church as your Crystal?” Dad interjected.
I was confused. “What do you mean? Crystal doesn’t go to church.”
“Exactly,” Dad finished in a dry voice. “And when it comes to Crystal, that’s fine. You need to have some friends who don’t go to church. But with guys and dating – that’s different. That’s dangerous. It’s not smart, Heather.”
I sighed like I was disappointed that he was right – because I was disappointed that he was right. “Are you going to make me give the bracelet back to him?”
My parents both looked at me and then at each other, as if they were surprised. It was another one of those funny moments when I got the inkling that they were just inventing parenting as they went along.
“Do you want us to make you give it back?” Mum offered.
“I don’t think I do,” I replied, a little slowly.
“Fine,” Mum allowed. “We won’t ‘make’ you do anything. But don’t let that boy get carried away. You know you should never date someone you can’t marry, even if you’re just sixteen and marriage is nowhere in the picture yet.”
I don’t know why I did it but I started to argue with her. “Well, what about Aunt Tammy? She married Uncle Dave and he didn’t get baptised into the Church for years afterward – but he did get baptised.”
“Aunt Tammy?” Mum repeated with a scary slowness. She grabbed the phone and spun it around on the countertop so the keypad faced me. “You go ahead and call your Aunt Tammy and ask what that was like for her. Or maybe you can call your father’s cousin Lisa and ask her how many years she stuck it out going to church by herself before she just decided to spend her Sundays golfing with her husband. Or maybe –”
“Fine,” I blurted. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I’m sorry I brought it up. I honestly don’t plan on ever dating Bracelet Boy. It’s not an issue so we don’t need to torture all three of us by talk about it. I’m sorry. Can I please go now?”
Dad nodded. “Yes, you can go. But stop worrying so much about money,” he called after me. “By the time I get back from border security training school, in March, we should be fully back on our feet again.”
I stopped at the top of the stairs and turned back to look at the two of them standing in my grandparents’ kitchen. And it crashed over me again – all the sympathy for my dad that I carried around like a little tsunami in my heart. He was so optimistic and hard-working. I knew it hurt him every time he had to rely on Jeff and me to get the family’s bills paid. When their marriage started, Dad never expected Mum to have to bring money into the household, let alone his kids. But here we were with our duffle bags full of greasy uniforms and hardly any spare time to enjoy our teen years. I felt like my compassion for him might make me start to cry but instead I forced a smile.
“Yeah, I know we will be,” I said. Dad needed my confidence more than he needed my sympathy. And maybe I did believe him when he promised me it would all be over soon. But at age sixteen, three more months is a long, long time to wait.
It was awful for all of us when Dad left for border security school. Mum took him to the airport in the city while we were all at school. There was only one place in the entire country where new border guards could be trained and it was two thousand miles away from Upton. From that distance, he would be gone for three months straight without a single weekend visit. Mum tried to be chipper but it was a gloomy January for everyone. The one bright spot was the promise of report cards at the end of the long, dark month. Nothing cheered me up like a computer print-out showing in black and white dot matrices that I had a talent for schoolwork.
I stood by my locker on report card day, smiling down at what was undeniably a fabulous slate of grades. Even my math mark had come up from a C minus on that first review sheet to an A for a final mark of the semester. As I read over the soulless, computer generated teacher comments, something brushed against my back, tipping me slightly forward.
“Congratulations,” I heard Tawny Reynolds say as she passed.
I looked up, confused. She had gone by so quickly it was too late for me to call out any thanks or, more to the point, to ask her what she was talking about. Weren’t report cards kept confidential in Upton High School? How could she already know how well I’d done?
With my report card stashed in my school bag, I started for the exit at the front of the school. I was slowed down by the crowd gathering by the doors, hovering around the glass case where the names of the honour roll students were displayed. Over the heads of the other keeners I could see Ben Jones, tall and uncharacteristically slack-jawed, standing directly in front of the glass.
Someone clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, Dude. As if there was ever any doubt it would be you,” I heard someone tell Ben Jones.
Jeff was standing on the periphery of the crowd, uninterested, and lazily waiting for Ben Jones to snap out of his stupor.
“Do you have any idea what they’re doing over there?” I asked my brother as if the other students weren’t standing all around us.
“They’re checking the honour roll rankings,” he said. “It looks like Jones is going to be the class valedictorian this year – officially.”
“Well, we knew that was coming, right?” I asked. “Wasn’t he crowned valedictorian
of his class back in kindergarten? How come he looks so stunned?”
Jeff shrugged. “I guess he’s really not faking about being a modest person. And he was kind of afraid that, after all these years, the school would switch from purely academic criteria for valedictorian to something more well-rounded and, you know, give the award to the student body president, or something.”
I watched Ben Jones standing at the head of the honor roll crowd for a moment more. “He looks like he might need to sit down,” I said to Jeff. “Go get him.”
Jeff shook his head. “I’m not going near it. Help yourself,” he said, disengaging from everything as he cranked a pair of ear-buds into his head.
I stepped away from Jeff, pushing through the crowd toward Ben Jones.
“Oh, here she is,” I heard someone say as I slid sideways through the other students. I ignored it – because that’s what I always did – and took hold of Ben Jones’s arm. “Jones – Dude,” I called as I shook him.
His head jerked downward at the sound of my voice. “Heather,” he said. “We did it.”
“I heard,” I smiled. “You and Jeff – you studied hard enough to make you into the valedictorian. But I think you’re the only one here who’s surprised about it.”
He pulled his eyebrows together. “Jeff? No, you.” He seized both my arms and spun me around to face the glass cabinet. “Look.”
I glanced through the glass. “Yeah, I’m on the honour roll again. So is Jeff. So are lots of these people. I’m always on the honour roll. But you’re the valedictorian of your class. It’s awesome.”
“Right. But look,” he repeated, pointing at the glass. “You’re at the top of the eleventh grade honour roll – you. If it was your class was graduating this year instead of mine, you’d be their valedictorian.”
My own mouth fell open. I turned back to the cabinet and saw my name printed at the top of the sheet of paper listing the eleventh grade honour roll students. It appeared above all the other names – including Tawny Reynolds’ name.
“Being the top student in eleventh grade is seen as a really important benchmark here,” he explained. “And it’s an upset.”
“So – so the names – the list – it isn’t just printed in alphabetical order?” I asked him.
He laughed down at me. “How’s that for the smartest girl in the eleventh grade?”
A few more people slapped him on the back with their congratulations. Someone behind me pushed me toward him, mashing me into the side of Ben Jones’s arm. “You two should hug or something,” a voice suggested.
I glanced up at Ben Jones as the comment was spoken. Had he even heard it? Just then his younger brother was coming through the crowd, grinning and hopping, and Ben Jones looked much more inclined to hug him. I stepped back and stumbled out of the mass of people, looking down the long hallway for any sign of Tawny. The door of her dad’s classroom was still closed. She was probably inside with him – and I genuinely hoped she was all right.
“Melanie,” I called, grabbing her sleeve as she sped by me with her head down. “Is Tawny okay?”
She stopped and she almost smiled. “Tawny? Yeah, she’ll be fine. The second ranked student is supposed to give the class history at the graduation ceremony and – well, you just got here so you wouldn’t be the best choice for that, would you? It would be a disaster to have a new girl as a historian. Tawny will see it’s for the best – once it all sinks in.” Melanie started to move on.
“Wait,” I called, lunging to grab her arm again. “It’s not final yet. Tell her I’m sure she’ll get her grades ahead of mine by the end of twelfth grade. The valedictorian award is still hers, like it’s always been.”
Melanie looked at her shoes. “I don’t know. Tawny’s never studied harder than since you came to the school. Her marks are higher than ever – but yours are just higher. There’s probably nothing more she can do.” She shook her head. “Don’t feel bad, Heather. You didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone knows that.”
“That’s really nice of you to say,” I croaked. Maybe these girls had been inspired to be nice to me by formal goals they’d set. But why should that make any difference to me? Essentially, they tried to be my friends just because they’re good people – and I had failed to be gracious about it. And now, when it was time for them to be gracious, here was Melanie telling me to go ahead and be happy about my success.
“Tell Tawny,” I called after Melanie as she moved toward Mr. Reynolds’ closed classroom door. “Tell her I don’t play piano at all, and I sing awful, and I can’t make a three point shot, and – and I’m a total jerk.”