Only the Good Die Young

Chapter 4.1

"Come on, Rebecca," says a voice. "It's six-thirty. If you don't get up now you'll be up all night."

I'm face-down on the sofa. I don't have to open my eyes to know it's Mom. Apparently what was supposed to be a fifteen minute nap stretched into two hours.

"Ten minutes," I say, rolling to my back.

I stuff an emerald throw pillow under my head with one hand and pull a lilac cotton blanket up to my neck with the other. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was praying that I'd wake up in Toronto. But instead of hearing the multiple languages of pedestrians and tourists taking in the sights of Yonge Street, I hear the spatter of Pacific rain against the balcony window. Apparently God isn't listening.

"I heard from some of your teachers," Mom says. I hear her slip off her shoes. "They said you were very quiet. I know the first day of school can be difficult, but if you want to make friends, you need to speak up more."

My eyes roll beneath closed lids. Like she knows. She only went to two schools her whole life. Well, three, if you count university. Grades one to six at St. Joseph's Elementary School in Kelowna, seven to twelve in Vancouver at a Catholic high school called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, then her degree in education at the University of Toronto. Queen Elizabeth is my second high school. When Mom was my age, there were fifty kids in her entire school, and they grew up together. The girl who sat next to her while she wrote CAT in giant letters with a pencil sat next to her in Grade Six as she wrote Dewey Decimal System with her first pen. My graduating class alone has six hundred students and if we want to search the library we click a mouse.

"I'll get right on that," I mumble into the pillow, so she can't hear me. I feel a wet patch against my cheek and flip the pillow over. God, I still drool when I'm asleep. I better grow out of it.

"What are the kids like?" she says. The closet door creaks open and Mom takes a hanger off the rod. "Are they nice? How's the cafeteria?"

"Yeah, they're nice," I say.

What I want to say: "They have friends to hang out with. I spent lunch in the hallway with my back against my locker, alone in a school of thousands."

"That's good. Just give it time, dear." She musses my hair affectionately. "I'll order pizza. But you really need to get up."

"Five minutes," I say. I stare at the white stippled ceiling. I don't want to make new friends. I want my old friends. I'm tired of having to be "on." Having to be all smiles and cheery and pretending I give a damn about Vancouver. But if I were Mom, I would have moved, too.

Well, maybe.

Mom walks to my bedroom. The speakers of my digital piano pop faintly as she pushes the power button.

I hate it when she does this.

The sound of a C major scale comes from my bedroom. It's the only thing she knows, and she picks it out with one finger, cautiously. I plug my ears but it doesn't help. Mom plays C, D, E, F, G, A, B...

I wait for the final high C, but it doesn't come. The speakers pop a second time as the power is cut.

Mom walks out of the room and winks at me. I grit my teeth. She intentionally omits the last note because leaving the scale unresolved drives me nuts. It's like spending hours on a jigsaw puzzle only to find a single piece missing, right in the middle.

I'm not going to give in. I lie on the sofa, humming all eight notes of the scale, but it doesn't help. Beethoven's father did the same thing to get his son out of bed. I'm not saying I'm anything like Beethoven, but it's annoying as hell.

My eyes are still blurry with sleep as I sit up. I navigate my way through unopened U-Haul cardboard boxes to my bedroom, turn on my keyboard and loudly jam the final C.

"Never fails," calls Mom from the kitchen.

"Try learning something new," I mumble. I leave my room and rub my eyes. They unblur and focus on my new "home."

You'd think from the soft lilac walls of my room and scent of lavender wafting from my purple seashell air freshener that it would be spotless and elegant, but it looks like a tornado disaster zone. Cardboard boxes are stacked randomly, their flaps tagged with tape. Instead of properly unpacking I just root through them like a beaver because I refuse to accept Vancouver as my new home. Clothes are on the floor, bras hang on my closet door (I wear a different one every day, so it seems kind of pointless to put them away), and my bed is a zoo of teddy bears. Mom respects my privacy and always ensures the door is closed. Really, I think she can't stand the mess. The one thing she does nag me about is the bed. It's not my fault, though. By the time I get up there's never enough time to make it.

I've covered corkboard on the wall with a collage of photographs of my best friend Beth. We scream as the wind whips our hair as we ride the Vortex at Canada's Wonderland, huddle soaking wet in blue rain slickers as the Maid of the Mist sails within a hundred feet of the bottom of Niagara Falls. I read somewhere that people only take photos when they're happy or celebrating. My camera's in one of these cardboard boxes.

Next to the photographs are my certificates from the Toronto Conservatory of Music. There's a certificate for every piano exam I've ever taken and they're framed in black except for Grade Eight, which is framed in gold. There isn't a single one that doesn't read "First Class Honours."

My room's too small for a vanity, so I have a full length mirror against one wall with a shoebox under it for my makeup, lipstick, deodorant, and hairspray. I bought the air freshener to try to counter the terrible aerosol "straight from the can" smell of hairspray, but instead the air smells like metallic flowers.

I leave my room and enter the hallway. No apartment in the world can escape the Catherine Bradshaw touch. Bric-a-brac is everywhere: glass figurines of animals, antique clocks (Mom abhors digital displays), wingback chairs (to shield people from drafts in old Victorian houses), black and white photographs of her parents and sepia-toned photographs of old family friends. There are pastels of flowers on the wall that she painted by hand. She can't afford real antiques, so most of the furniture and decorations are imitation, but you'd never know by looking at them. There's even a reproduction of an antique Marconi radio. I love this thing. It's the cool curved wooden one you see in World War II movies that families in England would hunch around, listening to reports of the war from the BBC. If it only had a crystal chandelier, the apartment would feel just like an old hotel lobby. There's a place for everything and everything is in its place.

On a small table in the corner of the room rests the one antique that isn't an imitation: a brown wooden box about the size of a laptop computer, only three inches tall. An ornate pearl inlay on the top offsets lacquered mahogany. The box opens at an angle to reveal a leather-covered writing surface and a few drawers. It belonged to my grandmother, and Mom is extremely protective of it.

To someone who isn't familiar with antiques, the box appears empty. Mom would die if she knew I discovered the secret it houses.