First Spring Grass Fire Read online

  We pulled up to the curb, hopped over the fence, and walked into the graveyard. The ground was covered in snow. I looked all around me and realized there was no way I was going to figure out where Jack’s headstone was. I started to feel weightless at the thought of not finding him. Tears welled up in my eyes. Then I felt a snowball hit my chest. It was Ben. “I bet the babies here never had a snowball fight!” he said. I grinned and filled my hands with snow. We ran around throwing snowballs at each other and laughing until we were out of breath. I had been carrying around two plastic dinosaurs in my pocket on and off since I was six. I felt them in the palm of my hand, scanned the graveyard, and said, “These are for you.” I threw them as hard as I could, and then we walked back to the car and drove away.

  Voyageur Girls

  A LOT OF GIRLS JOIN the Brownies when they are young. Some of them are in it for the cookies and others like the outfits. My club, the Voyageur Girls, had one up on Brownies because it was endorsed by Jesus Christ and he was Lord of everything, including cookies.

  I was nine when I joined. We would meet upstairs in our church on Tuesday nights. We started each session by sitting in a circle singing Christian songs, led by the wife of a heart surgeon who played acoustic guitar. Her daughters were too old for Voyageur Girls and her son was my age, but not allowed in. The theme song for the group was a biblical quote about how Jesus would guide us through life: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. When I feel afraid and feel I’ve lost my way, you are there right beside me.”

  Singing with the other Voyageur Girls pulled me out of my aloneness. I didn’t have many friends at school, and it was one of the rare group activities that I participated in where I wasn’t mortified by the attention of others. At school, I was known to freeze up right before I was supposed to perform a jump or something in gym class if I sensed that someone was watching me.

  After singing came craft time. We braided plastic bracelets, baked Fimo beads, and puffy-painted sweatshirts. I would covertly choose boy colours like blue and green and avoid the pinks and purples. Sometimes we coloured pictures of Jesus doing all sorts of things like making a lot of food out of a little bit, or raising people from the dead. We were made to believe that He was white, so the peach crayons always wore out before the others, as did the blue ones for His eyes. I didn’t mind making crafts. I could keep my head down and work uninterrupted.

  We would earn badges that we would then display on the blue sashes that we wore across our chests. The badges were earned mostly for domestic activities like cleaning and sewing, things girls needed to be good at. These gave me a sense of foreboding, and I started to wish that I would never grow up to become a woman and that I would stay a child forever. I knew that I was a girl, but I didn’t feel like a girl. I had heard the term “sex change,” but I ducked low on the playground and let it sail over me. It was a sin and an insult, after all. Voyageur Girls really blew my cover, though. In the absence of boys, I seemed even more boyish. The other girls could sense that I was different. They tried to be nice to me, just like we all never made fun of the girl named Gaylene. It wouldn’t have been very Christian. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t say her name to ourselves quietly and giggle. I’m sure they giggled at the thought of me.

  The last part of each Voyageur Girl meeting, though, was where I could truly shine, when we would read the Bible together. Anything that involved reading built my confidence. Week after week, I would proudly recite to the group leader a verse or chapter that I had memorized. In fact, I memorized so much that I got a special gold pin for it. None of the other girls had this pin. I displayed it proudly at the top of my sash.

  At the end of my first year of Voyageur Girls I was managing to fly under the radar, unlike at school, where people would pick fights with me by calling me a tomboy. That is, until it was time for us to go to Voyageur Girls camp. Camp was an entire weekend of sharing bunk beds and bathrooms together in the woods. Though I protested, my parents made me go. They probably hoped that being around the other girls would rub off on me and that I would come home begging to wear dresses and clean the house.

  So I got on the bus with the other Voyageur Girls on Friday afternoon and we arrived at the camp that night. I chose the top bunk because it gave me a vista. But I always had trouble with nightmares. Sometimes I would dream that my father’s moustache was chasing me. That night I had another nightmare. In it my mother told me that I had to grow up and be a woman and get married in only ten minutes. I rolled right off of my bunk bed onto the floor. I woke up dazed and in the middle of yelling, “I won’t wear a wedding dress!” Next thing I knew I was in the arms of one of the camp counselors. She had the same name as my mom. I was so embarrassed that it ached more than the bruises from the fall. By the morning, the story of my accident was all over camp.

  At breakfast, I tried to hide behind my hair, but it didn’t work as well as it usually did. I could feel eyes burning my face. I barely ate and then retreated alone to the corner of the room. For free time, some of the other girls gathered around the piano and played “Heart and Soul” over and over and over as I watched. The melody repeated along with the following thought: I’m not one of them. Now they know.

  And then I did the only thing I’d ever learned to do when I was feeling bad. I bolted, running breathlessly out the door and toward the forest, ignoring my fear of the woods. I looked desperately for a low branch on a tree that I could climb up, but there were only scraggly pines. Back home in the suburbs, I had spent many an afternoon hiding from being a girl in a tree.

  Deeper inside the bush, I found a clearing. I decided to build a shelter. I began gathering branches, both large and small, and leaned the largest ones against each other so they balanced. Then I took the smaller branches and weaved them in between until my shelter looked like the lopsided back of a turtle. I knelt down and tore thick pieces of moss off the forest floor, which I used to plug up the spaces between the branches. The wood-and-moss dome I created was just big enough for my body. Once inside, I laid down on the cold ground. It was silent, like forests are. Only the sounds of birds and wind.

  A while later I heard footsteps. It was the Voyageur camp leader who played the acoustic guitar. She had a big smile on her face. “What is this?” she asked.

  “My fort,” I whispered.

  “What are you doing in there?” she asked.

  “Hiding,” I said.

  She paused and knelt beside me. I laid my head down on the moss.

  “You know that song we sing at Voyageur Girls? It means that God is always with you. So whatever you’re hiding from, He can help you face it.” I said nothing.

  “It’s almost lunch time,” she said. “You should come back to the camp.” Then I heard her steps recede as she walked away.

  Why would God make me like this? I thought. And where can I hide from growing up?

  Sasquatch in My Shower

  THE FIRST MOVIE I EVER remember seeing was at a drive-in cinema on the outskirts of Penticton. I was about four at the time. I can determine that because my brothers hadn’t been born yet, so it was just me and my sister and my parents in our silver Datsun. My uncle and his family were parked next to us, and our cousins ran back and forth between the two cars.

  We covered our laps with a grey camping blanket and listened to the audio crackling on the car radio. The movie was called Harry and the Hendersons. It starts with the Henderson family driving down a road flanked by trees. An animal runs out in front of their car and they hit it with a sickening thud. In the silence that follows, they approach it but are shocked to find that it has huge human hands. They think it’s dead, but don’t want to leave it there, so they hoist it onto the roof rack of their station wagon and continue driving. Just as things seem to calm down, the animal comes back to life. It leans over the roof rack, sticks its face in the windshield, and lets out a roar. Even though Harry, who turns out to be a Sasquatch, eventually becomes a charming addition to the Henderson
family, it’s the sound of that roar that has stayed with me.

  As a result, I developed a lifelong case of Sosantoglitaphobia, the fear of Sasquatch. Even though I camped a lot as a child, the woods are something I am most comfortable seeing on TV or out the window of a vehicle. Otherwise, there are too many things to worry about. Like getting grabbed by a mythical creature, for example.

  After my brother Jack died when I was seven, I started having a series of recurring nightmares about a Sasquatch, but then one day he sneakily slipped from my subconscious and into my waking hours. My sister and I used to share a bedroom in the basement of a bungalow in Whitehorn, the third house we lived in. The room was at the bottom of the stairs down a hallway that went past the basement bathroom. I started to see the outline of what I thought was a Sasquatch behind the fogged glass of the shower whenever I walked past the bathroom. Because the basement was always dark, there was never a moment where I felt safe enough to venture into the bathroom and dispel my fears by opening the door. So the ominous image persisted. I could feel it watching me whenever I passed. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t scared, so I developed an evasive technique: I would fly from my room down the hall, past the bathroom, and then purposely run into the wall, so that I wouldn’t have to slow down to turn before dashing up the stairs. I never told my mother about the Sasquatch in the shower. However, I remember her asking me once about the repeated thumps of my exit routine. I was a secretive child and didn’t tell her why, but I think it led her to figure out that we were too young to live in the basement. My sister and I were moved upstairs into the room that used to be my brother Jack’s. It was light in there all the time.

  My parents decided to fill the empty room in the basement by inviting a pregnant teenager to live with us. They were avid prolifers and had found an organization that placed pregnant teens in Christian homes to encourage them to carry their babies to term. Only a few months after losing her own baby, my mother presumably wanted to feel like she was helping to keep babies alive.

  So Stacey moved in. She was nineteen, mild mannered, and five months pregnant. I remember her eating dinner with us and helping my mother to cook, clean, and do laundry. I didn’t understand why she had to live with us if she was so grown up. She slept a lot and made jokes about how her belly was making an indentation in the hide-a-bed in her room. My mother made her drink a lot of milk and seemed more relaxed than before. Then one night while I was sleeping, Stacey went into labour; soon after, she gave birth at the hospital. After that, she moved out and I never saw her again.

  The second girl who came to live with us was named Rachel. She was fifteen, had bright red hair, and was two months pregnant. We picked her up at a group home downtown. My parents told me that she had been doing drugs and sex work. They said our home was a place for her to hide from her pimp who was angry she had left him and wanted to hurt her. I really liked Rachel. She acid-washed her jeans in our laundry room and tried to make handprints on them by pouring bleach over her hands. I thought she was cool. My parents weren’t as impressed. Unlike Stacey, she refused to go to church with us the first Sunday morning she was there, and when we returned we noticed that the speakers in our stereo were blown out. That night when my father tried to talk to her about doing chores, she picked up a coffee table and threw it at him. The one time she came with us to church, she wore long dangling earrings and her acid-wash jeans, and sat slouched down in the pew.

  The month that Rachel lived with us was full of outbursts. She didn’t respond well to being coerced into polite Christian compliance. When we went to the mall, she took off when my mother wasn’t looking. We finally found her hanging out with a group of men we didn’t know. My parents pulled her away and then we all left for home. That afternoon there was a different commotion. My father walked Rachel out of the house doubled over. When they came back from the hospital, she was grey. My mother said, “Rachel had a miscarriage, but it was God’s will and probably for the best.” Rachel slept for a few days and then we took her back to the group home.

  In the frenzy, I forgot all about the Sasquatch. When the house was quiet again, the form in the basement bathroom didn’t return. My fears had moved out of the basement shower and into my chest. The death of my brother and now Rachel’s miscarriage was too much for me. When I looked at our beige carpet in the living room or put a hand on our pink couch, I couldn’t connect to them. Why did I feel completely alone if Jesus was in my heart? I would curl up and tell myself that I wasn’t from here, that this couldn’t be my world, and that I would be taken away to my real life soon.

  While I waited, I threw myself into books, sometimes reading most of my waking hours. All I had to do was scan my eyes over the words and let them fill my mind. I would be transported somewhere else. In every other aspect of life, though, I felt like I was just going through the motions. I was a secret agent and infiltrator, but no one else knew. A few years later, I started writing stories. Each one felt like a small piece of the world I was building that I was eventually going to move into, one where babies didn’t get taken away, and Sasquatches didn’t exist.

  Nerd Pride

  THERE’S A PICTURE IN MY junior high yearbook that shows me in the middle of a line of kids holding onto a rope in a tug of war. I have a mushroom haircut and big glasses, and I’m smiling with new adult teeth I had yet to grow into. I am wearing a sweatshirt and light blue jeans that were pulled up as high as they could go, and a fanny pack cinched around my waist instead of a belt. I am pulling the rope earnestly as if I have no clue that I am not making much of a difference. This was the first day of junior high, the place where I found out that I was a nerd.

  In my first homeroom I remember girls comparing their Doc Martens and hooded flannel vests that had become popular over the summer. I wondered why everyone wanted to wear the same thing as everyone else. My wardrobe came from my mother. I rarely tried to push for specific items, except for my covert attempts at wearing as close to boys’ clothes as I could get away with. By then, the closest I had gotten to my own style was the year I dressed like Ernest P. Warrell, the character from TV and movies. I thought he was funny and hoped that by dressing like him, I would become funny too. I would wear a denim vest, jeans, a grey shirt, and a tan hat every day, and do my Ernest impression for my friend Kenny while we folded up pieces of paper into Vs to shoot with elastic bands at recess. He seemed to think that I was funny. But junior high was different. Those girls in homeroom never talked to me. I kept my distance, sitting with the other kids who were in band in the corner of the class. It was clear what we were going to be for the next three years.

  During lunch hours I would eat with the band kids or walk around the schoolyard alone. I would wear my fanny pack full of stationery supplies, because I used to worry that I would need an eraser or something and not have one at my disposal. Sometimes I would eat my lunch and then pace around the halls watching the other kids talking to each other, never looking at them long enough to be noticed. I was trying to figure things out. They seemed to just find each other. How did they find each other?

  At the first gym class I was horrified when I realized that we were going to have to change our clothes in a locker room. The other girls congregated next to the rows of beige lockers and talked about shaving their legs. I dodged into a bathroom stall. I could hear them all singing this song as I hid, pulling my T-shirt over my head. I think it went something like “I Will Always Love You.” My Pentecostal parents had only ever let me listen to Christian music. How did they all know that song?

  In gymnastics that day, I was on the parallel bars trying to keep myself up when I felt a hot, ripping pain in my chest. My arms gave out. I started crying, crumpled up on the floor. The gym teacher came over and said, “You’re okay, you’re not hurt,” and pulled me to my feet. I could feel my face turn red. One of the other girls approached me with a big smile and said, “Hey, it’s okay. I used to want to be a boy too.” I felt the floor giving way underneath me. That was the
second time she’d gone out of her way to point out that I was bad at being a girl. She was onto me.

  A week later, we began the dance aerobics portion of gym class. The boys were outside playing rugby, which looked violent, but not as horrible as trying to move around gracefully to music. I had never been allowed to dance in my life. My parents thought it was sinful. The pumping beat of “Rhythm is a Dancer” came on and the gym teacher started to call out moves and demonstrate them. “Grapevine!” I could feel my body resisting as I urged it to move to the music like a limp scarecrow. I knew that if I didn’t dance I would be in trouble with the teacher, but if I did, I might go to hell. I thought I saw the gym teacher raise an eyebrow at me as I shimmied, feeling conflicted behind all the other girls who seemed to be having a genuinely good time. At the end of the class, the teacher said, “Good job, girls! Tomorrow you are going break up into groups and come up with your own routines.”

  That night when I was in the bath, I looked at my mom’s pink razor. I grabbed it and turned it over in my hand. I could still hear the girls talking about their new bras in the locker room that day. I had to do something. I dragged the razor up my leg, shaving off the tiny blond hairs. But then I slipped and cut my knee. Blood dripped into the bath water. Can’t stop now, I thought. I bit my lip and continued. Afterwards my mother saw my legs covered in cuts and said, “What happened to you?”

  I hung my head. “I shaved my legs.”

  “But you’re only twelve,” she said. “You don’t need to.”