People Change

You are perfectly comfortable knowing that you don't know everything. Today brings a breath of fresh air to your understanding, as an old illusion dries up and blows away, leaving more truth to ponder.

That's my horoscope for the day, I won't spend too much time thinking about it, but I enjoy what it says regardless.

WRITING!

At the tender age of twelve I went to Hark-Helms Academy which was supposed to be an exclusive school for the privelaged rather than the drudgery of high school. My old friends largely went to public school and soon passed from my memory. Helms was in the interior, which at the time seemed odd to me because while places like Whistler were posh, sending children further into the wilderness when they'd grown up with a cell phone in hand had seemed like some sort of torture. Nevertheless, mid-August 2002 I found myself in a car on my way to this private and expensive school where, my dad had sardonically joked, I would learn to be a lady.
The man in the driver's seat was not my father, that was one of the aides from my dad's office. While my dad was around, the aide was to be referred to as Mr. Ocean and only discussed in the third person, even if he were in the room. However, my father was rarely around, so Mr. Ocean became Charlie, and we had much more fun that way.
My mother was there too, but she sat in the back seat with me. Sitting in the front seemed weird since "Mr. Ocean is not my husband" she laughed and at one point I wondered if the two were having an affair. Such wild ideas weren't far fetched as many other aspects of my life I identified as plots from television shows. However my speculation missed the mark.
"I think you'll really enjoy Hark-Helms," She had said, as she sipped nervously from a Starbucks cup that seemed bottomless and stung my nose with a pungent aroma. "Your father insisted that he learned everything he ever needed to know there. And all his friends went there too!" She cooed, I'm not sure what she was trying to sell me on. It was an inevitable part of my life that one day, as surely as the sun rose, I would attend HH, meet business contacts, find love, get married, have kids, buy a house, and eventually graduate from HH.
So it was another thing on a long list of things that were part of My Destiny. In any case, I wasn't the arguementative type. That was my sister who had finished highschool and gone tree planting for the summer and refused to attend University until she 'found herself.' Arguements ensued, blood-pressure elevated, and my dad made himself less available, which hardly seemed possible.
"But today is about you, not your father." She continued, in hindsight I saw that she was doing this for her own benefit. In her mind she was losing a son, I would, afterall be buying a house soon and settling down.
"Mrs. English, the GPS says we'll be there in ten minutes more."
"Thank you Charles." She always called him Charles and he confessed to me that he hated it. Even now I saw him wriggle uncomfortably at the formality in her voice. It was too bad that he wouldn't be around anymore. I never really felt too bad that I wouldn't be seeing Charlie around anymore. He was like an older brother to me more than the aide turned nanny that he was actually. He told me cool stories when it was just the two of us. He was young, but he still had some really good ones, but for now I'll leave his convoluted characterisation and narrative for more of my own.
"Now, Ivan, when you get there I want you to make sure you listen to everything that the proctors say and treat all of your teachers with respect." This too was a spectre of my sister, who had numerous times raised hell at St. Theresa's Academy. "And remember hon, have fun! You'll be so popular here, all the other boys would love you."
This was the only time on the three hour trip that I sad anything, and it was only a whisper, "I wish..." The different levels of irony were lost on the occupants of the Land Rover at the time.
When we pulled up I saw the two academies, each was set at opposite ends of an oppulent lawn lined with tasteful flowers and well groomed hedges. Stone pathways to tranquil little spots broke up the monotony of the landscape which seemed so out of place in contrast to the tall evergreens. The buildings themselves were a fusion of old granite and ultra-modern. With grand flourishing masonry coupled with extensive new wings of steel and glass I felt as though I had never left Vancouver where this kind of building was tres chic. When the road forked, Charlie drove to the right where the flowers were remarkably the same shade of blue which blended perfectly with the "Welcome" sign hanging over the road. Lamp posts were outfitted with more of the same blue banners with some kind of animal and the school's crest on it.
"Okay honey, here we are, you're new home!" She squealed trying to feign delight while hiding her inevitable lonliness which she faced when she arrived home. The door opened and the sweltering heat of the area swept into the car despite the intense AC.
"I'm so sorry about the mix-up Mrs. DeBeau. Sincerely, the assistant secretary is new and she must've misread your daughters file." A slight, balding man trailed apologetically after a boisterous woman whose face matched her scarlet yoga tracksuit.
"CLEARLY. This is ridiculous! Come Jamie, let's go!" Trailing the bald man was a girl who looked quite bored as she stopped occasionally to peel paint off of the ornate wood panel which lined the staircase leading from the main entrance.
"I don't see what the big deal is." She muttered.
Her mother stopped short, grabbed her daughters arm, and proceeded to tell her to knock-off this butch act. It should have been a dead give away that Jamie was a budding butch. A true future friend of Sappho who probably fit in better at HH than she did at Saint's. In any case, they entered a Lexus parked a few meters in front of ours and drove off, mother still yelling and daughter still looking for more paint to peel.
"Tsk Tsk." My mother clucked her tongue at the display, "I do hope you steer clear of that girl, can you imagine?" I regarded her for a moment, still a beacon of good taste in her pink velour track suit and omni-full latte cup.
The man who had been trailing Mrs. Debeau saw us and composed himself with a genuinely fake smile. He ambled over to us as though her were the emporor wearing new clothes and with great flourishing gestures, he introduced himself as Proctor M. Adams-Weston to my mother who had exited the car. Head of the welcoming committee I muttered.
"And what a shiney head it is too." Charlie winked at me. I would miss him.
"Charles! Can you take Ivan's luggage to his room?" My mother yelled with as much composure as she could muster. Charlie winced noticeably and obliged with as much composure as he could muster. I don't think I would miss her.
At the time, I didn't really know much about our family finances. Yes, I was aware that most families weren't driven around by one of their father's subordinates in a $100k SUV, but I didn't really comprehend that my family was THAT wealthy. The only reason I ever thought of it was because I often wondered if my mother was a gold-digger who married my father for his money and poor health, but his longevity seemed to undermine this theory.
"Come Ivan, Mr. Adam West will show us around." My mother beckoned to the increasingly indignent Proctor Adams-Weston, who had no desire to be a tour-guide to another mother. However, it turned out that very few people were arriving that week so he had an abundance of time to show them around the campus. He showed us the school, grounds, dormitories, and cafeteria. The whole tour was rather dull, yet I found myself retaining the most useless information. The HH crest for instance, is, in fact NOT, the original crest and was adopted in the late 1970's in order to reflect a far more progressive view of the world. Or that the official colour of HH is International Klein Blue and NOT Sapphire or Royal or Midnight as these have such pedestrian accessability. I let my mind wander to better thoughts at times of trivia torture and my mother sipped on her latte which now was finally begining to run low.
I wondered, now that I would be surrounded by people my own age all the time, would they like me?
The answer to my question would come with resounding apathy. If a loser falls down in the halls, and no one is around, does anybody care? Apparently I had arrived a week before most other kids would, which meant that, rather than being around kids who disliked me, I was around Proctor Adam-Weston who really disliked me. I assumed it was because of my appearance here so early which meant that he had to be here rather than vacationing somewhere pleasant. I further speculated that my parents had coerced him into doing this because they wanted me out of their hair. In fact, in my mind, my mother had blackmailed AW with some scandelous details of their past.
It wasn't until I thought on it later that I realised that the soap-operas I had formulated was full of holes. Of course, when I say 'I thought' it was actually Jamie who had done the thinking. She too had been off-loaded at HH early. Instead of St. T's due to a clerical error where someone had mistaken her for a boy, which wasn't a stretch even in person, so we bonded quickly on the grounds that we were the only students on the grounds. Despite residing in St. T's, we had found each other almost instinctively when we realised that our peers were absent.
In the shade of one of the asian inspired gardens with a pond, a small pagoda, and an even smaller tree, we had our first conversation.
"Hey." I said, trying to be the gentleman.
"I hate it here." Jamie replied.
I'm sure I did a poor job disguising my shock at her brazen decleration, but it was the first of many shocks in our relationship.
"Me too..." I muttered conceding the confidence I had tried to assume in leading the conversation. Her negativity was, if nothing else, inspiring.
"I'm Jamie." She stated as she further asserted her dominance.
"Ivan." I said, extending my hand instinctively wondering if she would shake it or just rip it off. She regarded my hand, but she was thoroughly engrossed in tearing small strips of bark off the tree so she didn't shake it to my relief.
I wondered if I should continue to talk to her as she shredded the bark meticulously.
"Is this your first year too?" I tried to reopen hailing frequencies and it took a moment for her to respond.
"Yeah, do you think anyone else will actually show up?" She asked in a leading way, which I had learned from years of almost rhetorical questions from my parents, not to answer. She filled me in with her idea of what was really going on here. It was a kind of asylum or prison for her. Her parents had sent only two people to live here in order to keep an eye on her. One she would identify with while the other was supposed to intimidate her. Instead, she would teach the Proctor to fear her and I would be constantly lied to give false impressions of her progress.
Needless to say I was shocked again for the second time in the short while I had known her. At first I thought she was some kind of paranoid schizo, but then, if that were true who's to say that she wasn't right about this place being an asylum. The paradox made me worry for a moment, but then I laughed slightly. Very slightly, the whole situation seemed absurd.
"Our parents aren't smart enough for that kind of plan." I admitted, still sheepishly, but after a tense moment when she briefly stopped shredding the bark, she surprised me.
"I like you Ivan." She said laughing slightly.
The adoration was supposed to be light-hearted and fun, but when she had said it my mind assumed that she was hitting on me. Naturally, since I was fluent in the made up worlds of Dawson's Creek and the like, I assumed that we should kiss or something after a moment of gross tension. Fortunately, I was far too cowardly and the moment passed.
We spent that afternoon and most others in each other's company. She would dictate the place, not once repeating the setting for our meeting. I secretly thought that perhaps it was so that she could find something else to shred, peel, tap, or otherwise play with.
One day we were sitting in one of the emergency stairwells in St. T's talking. It was a Thursday I think, not that it matters, but it was important that I only thought it was that day because since I had arrived each day had seemed to melt into the next. Anyway, we were sitting in the utilitarian stairwell making small talk. Since we had arrived we'd exhausted a lot of natural talking points, where did you grow up, what do your parents do, etc., and naturally some weirder ones. We were currently in the midst of a would you rather gross out session, when Jamie stopped scraping her nail against a crack in the concrete and began to tap the ring on her pinky finger against the railing. It fascinated me that she would always find something to do that was just enough to grate your nerves.
"Why do you do that?" I asked amidst the tapping expecting to get an elaborate response back about the tapping being morse code to some unseen agent who was monitoring me.
"Do what?" She asked, apparently oblivious to the stacatto of metallic pings which echoed up and down the stairs.
"Tap your fingers on things."
"It's a free country." She justified and eluded. For whatever reason she still maintained this stand-offishness that she had initially shown to her mom the first day I had arrived at HH.
"I know, I wasn't saying stop it, I was just curious why you do it."
"I have OCD." She blurted out. "My hands always have to be doing something. And if you think that's annoying you should have seen me before they put me on medication. I would sit there counting everything, touching people's clothes to feel the texture, and pulling out huge sections of my hair without even realising it. My mom thought I retarded and my dad thought I was just being difficult so they sent me to a shrink to see what she could do for me. Nothing apparently, until they offered to put me on an experimental drug trial to control these minor symptoms. Rexatall it was called, and soon, everything was completely fine."
Her tale was partly fabricated I'm pretty sure, Rexatall was also the street that she had grown up on and her dad's company, but I didn't call her on it.
"And you're probably wondering why, if it worked so well, the OCD came back? Well, I had to lower my dosage of Rexatall when I went back on the pill."
'The pill?' I thought naively, unsuspecting the obvious colloquial meaning, what's that?
She must have seen my confusion.
"Birthcontrol I mean."
Now I was really confused as the whole conversation seemed to trickle in gradually. She went 'back on the pill'? Did that mean she'd had sex? She was younger than I was I think, but I didn't know for sure because again, there was always a story involved in her stories which had to be scrutinized for fabrication.
How could she be having sex? I knew that girls hit puberty sooner than boys usually, but she gave no real impression of 'maturity'. Then again, she also wore baggy clothes which would've hidden any budding bust she had going. Not that I was checking out her bust.
"HOLY SHIT!" She said so suddenly, but for once I didn't seem shocked by her urgency. "Cars!"
I followed her gaze with curiosity and found that, indeed, there were cars. Two actually had pulled up and were in various stages of unpacking.
"Looks like its not going to be just the two of us anymore." I said.
"Oh, don't sound upset. It just means that our affairs may include other people. Who knows, we may one day learn to enjoy their company too." She smiled at me oddly, but I didn't mind her odd mannerisms anymore. She'd grown on me.
"Here comes another one, its heading over to HH." She announced as a impractical grey sportscar drove up to the front steps. I wondered who would drive such a gaudy car out into the wilderness but couldn't make anyone out from across the grounds.
"Let's go check out the new inmates." She decided, and I went along with her to the main hall.
We chose our vantage point and looked down the stairs to the girls who were filing in. We had done our best to look non-chalant as they entered, but this was difficult when we were the only other students in the building at the moment. Later I assumed that they thought that we were some kind of social retarded pair watching as they wandered in. However, the 'they' in question didn't do much noticing at all.
There were three of them, two brunettes and a red head, all garbed in horrendous shades of day-glo hues. Their new setting didn't seem to phase them as they walked up the stairs flanked by parents or servants carrying their stuff. The girls looked popular to be sure, and carried themselves in a manner fitting of their upper-caste. That is, they climbed the stairs in unison arms linked, giggling and gossiping as they went, right past us. We were invisible.
Actually, it turns out I was invisible to them, and Jamie had apparently turned invisible to me.
"Jamie?" I asked, looking around for her.
Across the small foyer, I saw her hiding in a nook peering out with more fear in her eyes than, up until this point, I had thought possible.
"Jamie what's wrong?" She looked pale and I wondered if she was in fact as crazy as her stories suggested.
"They're here." She mumbled, but then her speaking seemed to rouse her from her stupor.
Her eyes narrowed and her demeanor changed in her characteristic manner. "Alright, this doesn't change anything, they're cunts, but this doesn't change anything."
I was hoping for some explanation, or a definition of cunts, but she was in her own world. She looked like she was plotting, which would've worried me earlier in the week but by now was nothing new.
She was fidgeting more than usual though, and looked as though she was going to tear her shirt.
"I'm going to go back to HH to see who's arriving on my side." I said glancing over my shoulder to where a truck had pulled up behind the gaudy sportscar.
Jamie had disappeared in that moment.
"Fair enough." I said to myself as I descended the main flight of stairs leading outside. More cars were arriving and porters were there greeting and escorting the girls into the school.
I had hoped that the bulk of my classmates wouldn't arrive for a few more days, so that I could cement my place in Jamie's social life. Besides, I liked the eerie quiet of the halls as I wandered around HH by myself.
Now I realised that it would be like the first day of college. Frat boys would start playing Ultimate and Lacrosse on the lawn between the schools. The bathroom would always be dirty and the showers would be occupied. Worst of all, no one would be my friend.
Sure I would have a roomate, but he was probably going to be really cool, too cool in fact. His name would be Chad, I always liked that name, and he would be smart without showing off. He would get a girlfriend the first week and she would always be over. Surely, this roomate of mine would be the son that my parents wanted me to be.
However, as I approached HH I realised that the people who were arriving weren't like the people on TV. They were my height, had no distinguishing outgoing appearences, nor exuded any appreciable quantity of coolness.
Well, most of them anyway, there was the odd person who looked as though they were from older grades. I watched one person climb from out of a Escalade with, I was assuming, his little brother in tow.
The pair looked almost identical except that the obviously older one was a foot taller. Both blonde with faint traces of freckles on their cheeks and forearms which were probably the product of fun in the sun during the summer. They were probably not from a particularly wealthy family, but managed to get into HH from an athletic scholarship. They were carrying their own luggage in and I assumed that they had grown up somewhere rural where they worked on farms and the like.
"Hey Coop!"
The older brother looked to another upperclassman who was dressed quite stylishly.
"Sup fag." They shook hands, but not like businessmen, they did it like black people.
"Fag yourself man, how was your summer?"
"Oh man it was da bomb!"
I cringed, no farmer's son would be so crass and colloquial. 'Coop's little brother looked impatiently around taking it all in. I tried not to stare too intently at him, but I was just casually watching him when he looked in my direction and made eye contact. Definate eye-contact. The kind which was incriminating, so I looked away, probably a little too abruptly, which was also suspicious. So I looked back, and now it was as though I was doing a double take of recognition for him. He was still looking at me, but only for a moment. He was bored of our little, very little, game of cat and mouse. Still, the brief contact made me wonder if his eyes were indifferent and jaded, or, more interestingly, sad.
I stopped snooping on their conversation and heard the odd porter showing the students to the dorms. I filed in behind a large boy who I had at first thought was a porter. Instead the baby-faced boy was just a little, portly. I hurried past him to see if my roomate had shown up.
I went to the door of my room and half expected to find the quixotic Chad already unpacking his stuff. However, his side of the room was still vacant. My possessions, the ones I had chosen to bring anyway, were now spread around my half of the room. It wasn't much though, just some books and my computer. Nothing of real value though, any personal mementos were back in Vancouver at my parents house.
*Knock Knock*