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  They had both put on bulk and sinew during the summer. During a weekend away in Kitchener, where they’d stayed with Dewey’s cousin, Vanya, Jim had received his first tattoo. It had earned him a weeklong grounding, but his parents couldn’t watch him all the time.

  Furthermore, Jim thought, as he flexed his triceps in the bathroom mirror after his shower at night, it looked fucking cool.

  Behind their backs the other kids called Jim Dewey’s “shadow” and laughed about how they two of them shared one steroid-addled brain between them.

  Dewey was short and bull-necked, one of those boys who seemed to grow muscle as a birthright. He wore his hair cropped short and had worked all summer at the warehouse in Milton where his father was a foreman. It wasn’t legal to hire minors for that sort of work, but the owner of the warehouse trusted and admired Dewey’s father, and was content to turn a blind eye while Verbinski’s tough little fireplug of a son hauled boxes and was paid out of the petty cash so his father could teach him a work ethic.

  Dewey’s parents, Stash and Yalda, were old-country Polish Catholics who spoke very ungrammatical, heavily accented English. This was something that Dewey was more sensitive about than he ever admitted. At eleven he had beaten a boy named Johnny Treleaven so badly for parodying his father’s thick Slavic accent that Johnny had wound up in Milton District Hospital with a mild concussion and two broken ribs.

  When Johnny’s parents, Joan and Walter Treleaven, had insisted that charges be laid against Dewey, Johnny had become hysterical and begged them not to go to the police.

  Fearful for his life (literally, for Dewey had two large, barbarous older brothers), Johnny told his parents that he had started it, and that it wasn’t Dewey’s fault. When Joan insisted, Johnny had grown so frantic that the nurses in the hospital came running in and demanded that his mother leave. The subject was never raised again after that, and Johnny would eventually be transferred to a private school in nearby Oakville.

  Stash had forced Dewey to apologize to Johnny at the hospital. Johnny sat up stiffly with his back pressed against the headboard, as though trying to break through the rear wall to get away from Dewey, who mumbled that he was sorry. When Dewey extended his hand to Johnny, the boy flinched.

  “I think it’s time for my son to rest,” Joan Treleaven said with glacial courtesy. “Please take your son home, Mr. Verbinski. This sort of hooliganism may be commonplace where you people are from, but this is Canada”—she leaned forward, enunciating each syllable of the word as though speaking to someone who didn’t understand English at all—“and I assure you, in this country, it is not.”

  “My son Karol was born here, Mrs. Treleaven,” Stash said, stung. “I been here twenty years. I work hard, I teach my son. I’m sorry that he have done this. I ask you to forgive me.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Verbinski. My husband and I would prefer it if neither of you came back while my son is in this hospital. If you do, I will inform the police and ask them to see to it that . . . Karol stays away from Johnny. And we will press charges.”

  White-faced with shame, Stash Verbinski had backed out of the hospital, mumbling a litany of apologies in broken English while Joan Treleaven looked on impassively. He grabbed Dewey’s arm roughly and shoved him into the corridor. Later, at home, Stash punished Dewey with a savagery he had never before shown his son. While Yalda watched and wept, Stash pulled the eleven-year-old’s pants down and whipped him hard with a thick leather belt until Dewey was screaming in pain. Broad red welts rose on his legs and buttocks. The more Dewey pleaded that he had only beaten up Johnny Treleaven because he had mocked Stash’s accent, the angrier Stash became and the harder he whipped him. He stopped only when he broke the skin of Dewey’s upper thigh and saw his son’s blood.

  Privately, Stash wished he could be whipping Johnny Treleaven instead. He was deeply embarrassed by his bad English and hated the idea of being the object of Johnny Treleaven’s derision, but he had the immigrant’s fierce pride when it came to making a life in the new country. This included fitting in and getting along with his new countrymen.

  That said, though Stash would never admit it even to Yalda, his son’s capacity for rage and violence frightened him, and he was determined to rein it in with strict discipline. The irony of his methods didn’t occur to Stash, who was of another age and culture. Dewey never forgot the beating, and he never forgave his father for it. He also never forgave Johnny Treleaven, whom he blamed for the rift between himself and his father, whom he loved still.

  As the years passed, though Dewey wasn’t aware of it in any sentient way, his hatred for Johnny developed into a generalized, slow-simmering fury toward anyone he perceived as more vulnerable than he himself had felt under his father’s belt. Dewey never broke anyone else’s bones, or put anyone in the hospital, but he grew mean and sullen as his adolescence unfolded. Despising weakness in any form, Dewey built up his body with an old weight set his brother, Andrea, had picked up at a garage sale years before, and publicly proclaimed that the thing he hated more than anything else was “faggots.” In the clumsy, brutish argot of adolescent boys who had never met a homosexual, or even considered the concept of homosexuality, Dewey meant the word as a catchall for everything feminine and sensitive, and therefore undesirable, in a male.

  Though he had never contemplated whether Mikey Childress was indeed, specifically, a homosexual, he considered him a prime, grade-A example of faggotry in every sense of the word.

  While Mikey was terrified of Dewey, as were most of his peers with any survival instinct at all, at thirteen he harboured a secret, all-consuming crush on Jim Fields.

  Jim was a laconic jock, not too bright, with a slow, lazy smile. Girls had discovered him in the sixth grade, and the attention hadn’t let up. Jim was tall and lean, with broad shoulders and thick black hair. His eyes were antifreeze blue. To Mikey he looked like Joshua in The Ten Commandments, a movie his mother watched several times a year. Donna was always delighted when Mikey joined her in front of the VCR for “The Ten Cs,” as she called it. She saw it as a hopeful sign that the Lord was working inside her son, to turn his mind and soul toward more hopeful things. For his part, Mikey had memorized every scene that included a bare-chested Israelite slave or Egyptian soldier, and secretly imagined himself as Lilia, the water girl played by Debra Paget, with Jim Fields as John Derek’s Joshua.

  Mikey wrote love poetry about Jim in the privacy of his bedroom after school and drew hearts in the margins of his notebooks with J and M intertwined inside. He never saw a teenage couple holding hands in the hallway at school or strolling through the Milton Mall without a bitter awareness that he was alone. Every girl he saw was himself, every boy was Jim Fields. Occasionally Mikey wondered how he could envy them their happiness, and find them beautiful, while at the same time realizing that their happiness would never be his.

  [5]

  It was still the first week of high school when Mikey first met Wroxy, the same day his chief nightmare, Dewey Verbinski, tripped him in the lunch line at the Auburn High School cafeteria. Even as he felt the horrible lurch in his chest as his body arched in midair when his foot flew out from under him and he pitched toward the greasy floor of the lunchroom, he wasn’t shocked. The random, public cruelty of this particular act had become so much a part of his life that Mikey expected it. His knapsack fell off his shoulder, spilling out the contents. A well-worn copy of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld that Mikey had saved up for fell—pages out—into a filthy puddle of half-dried tapioca pudding and spilled milk. His new portable CD player went skidding across the laminated concrete floor toward the opposite wall until Jim Fields stopped it with a short kick. Mikey saw that he was wearing his scuffed black engineer boots, the ones with the square toe and the side buckle above the anklebone.

  Jim cocked his head to the side, the way a beautiful, intelligent dog might, and stared at Mikey benignly. His full mouth curled into a smile that seemed to Mikey almost loving. For a suspended
instant Mikey locked eyes with Jim, and he was sure that Jim would reach down in one graceful, gallant, athletic movement and hand Mikey the CD player, then help him up. Jim would explain that the tripping had been a mistake and apologize for his fucktard no-neck friend, Dewey.

  In the cluster of seconds it took for this glorious fantasy to ripple across the surface of Mikey’s imagination, Jim gracefully raised his booted foot and brought the heel down as hard as he could, smashing the CD player into shards of broken plastic and twisted wire.

  The sharp crack ricocheted off the walls like a gunshot, and the lunchroom exploded into terrible, dark laughter. They laughed and laughed, till the walls echoed, as though the sight of that pathetic loser, Mikey Childress, red-faced and crying—for by now, Mikey was sobbing, his heart as broken as the CD player—was the most hilarious thing they had ever seen. Whether anyone’s mirth was leavened with relief that, at least this time, they weren’t themselves on the receiving end of Dewey’s and Jim’s cruelty was something no one would admit, much less at that moment.

  “Whoops,” Jim said mildly, his smile broadening as Mikey’s face twisted in pain. “You shouldn’t leave your shit lying around, faggot. It can break.”

  More laughter. Jim was rewarded for his loyalty with a backslap from Dewey as Mikey fled the lunchroom. The last thing he saw as he dared a half-turn toward the hot-food counter was Jim and Dewey collapsed against each other, laughing till tears streamed from their eyes. Even in a moment of such abject wretchedness, Mikey remembered to walk, not run, as though there was any dignity left to salvage, lest he seem so beaten as to invite further derision or, even more monstrously, a reprimand from one of the staff for running in the halls.

  Escaping into the bright September sunshine, Mikey, weeping, sat down on a bench near the far side of the playground and wondered how to kill himself with the least amount of pain. He discounted hanging. He could swim, so drowning himself in the waters of the Glen Eden gorge was out of the question. Likewise, he didn’t have a gun, and his mother didn’t use sleeping pills.

  Mikey heard the doors at the entrance to the school slam open. He looked up and saw a girl dressed all in black coming toward him, scuffing along with a curiously defiant gait. She wore burgundy Doc Martens, and her hair was cut in a Mohawk. As she came closer, Mikey saw a nose ring glint gold in the sun against her pallid skin. She carried a large black velvet bag that seemed packed full of books—mostly horror novels, Mikey noted, spotting the new Anne Rice hardcover and a couple of paperbacks by Stephen King and Douglas Clegg—and CDs. The sight of the horror novels in her bag, all of which he owned and had read more than once, surprised him. He was usually derided by his peers and teachers for reading what they called “trash,” and his mother, who had more or less given up on trying to turn him into anything like a “normal” boy, in her words, never shied away from her view that his infatuation with horror fiction wasn’t healthy and would eventually lead him over to “the dark side,” away from God.

  As the girl walked toward Mikey he looked up into her face. He had noticed her sitting at the back of his class earlier in the day, head down. She’d spoken to no one that he could tell, but Mikey, as usual, had been more interested in not attracting attention to himself than in noticing new arrivals. He’d heard some of the girls a couple of desks ahead of him whispering that she was some dirty slut who had just moved to Auburn from “the city,” that euphemism for everything Babylonian and foreign from the uncharted region down Highway 401, past the safe borders of Milton, Auburn, and Campbellville. And now here she was, walking toward him. Her head wasn’t down anymore.

  She looked him straight in the eye and said neutrally, “You’d better stop that crying. If you don’t, that shit will never stop with those assholes. You have to get tougher.” She paused and cocked her head in a way that wasn’t dissimilar from the way Jim Fields had done moments before he’d smashed Mikey’s CD player. In the girl’s face, however, Mikey saw only compassion and genuine concern. “Trust me, I know. Are you okay, dude?”

  Mikey, who had never been called dude in his life, gaped up at her and said, “Yeah, I guess so. How about you?”

  “Me?” The girl laughed. “I didn’t just get kicked onto the ground by a no-neck jock and his butt-buddy who broke my CD player. Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay. It’s you I’m worried about, dude.”

  She extended her hand. Mikey saw that the nails were short and painted black. He took her hand and shook it.

  “I’m Wroxy—that’s with a w,” she said. “I’ve just moved to this shitty little redneck town from Vancouver. My parents just split up and my whore of a mother decided to move back to her hometown with me. My father didn’t seem to care too much, so here I am in fucking Auburn.” She spit on the ground. “Not even Toronto, which would have been bad enough, but here I am with Bill and Mary Six-Pack and their inbred hairyback children in the middle of fucking nowhere.” Wroxy let loose another string of stunning profanity.

  Mikey smiled in spite of himself, then began to laugh. Accustomed as he was to being made to feel like the freak at the bottom of every social pyramid since grade school, he found the notion intoxicating that this absurd-looking but impossibly sophisticated girl from Vancouver was deriding those he had been taught to think of as his betters.

  “What’s your name, dude?”

  “Mikey,” he said. “Mikey Childress.”

  “Well, Mikey Childress,” Wroxy said, fishing inside her enormous velvet bag, “this is your lucky day.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, it is.” She withdrew a brand-new Sony Sports Discman from her bag. It was bright yellow with a hard plastic shell. In her hand it looked as incongruous as a canary coming from the black velvet folds. She handed him the Discman. “Here,” she said. “Take it. My dad gave it to me before I left Vancouver. Can you believe the colour? Fucking yellow. Uh, not me. As if my father even thought before he bought it.”

  Mikey gaped. “For me?” He reached for it, then hesitated. She couldn’t possibly mean that she was giving it to him. “You’re giving me your Discman?”

  Wroxy said wryly, “Well, it isn’t as if you have one currently. This one won’t break the next time that hunchback trips you, or if that fucking Ken doll with the black hair steps on it. Who were those two anyway, and why do they hate you?”

  “You can’t give me this. You don’t even know me.” He guiltily ignored her pointed question about Dewey and Jim. It seemed to him as though this stranger’s act of kindness might have been extended under a misapprehension on her part, and might be withdrawn if she realized how pathetic he was. “Besides, what will you use? You can’t just give this to me.”

  She said sweetly, “Oh, I have another one at home. A black one. Much more me. I got it at a stereo shop in Toronto last weekend.” Wroxy smiled slyly and winked. “Five-finger discount, dontcha know.

  “You stole it?” Mikey was indignant. “You stole it from a store?” He had never stolen anything.

  Wroxy shrugged, looking bored. She handed him the brilliant yellow Discman. “You want this one, dude? No strings, no bullshit. I didn’t steal this one. It’s from my dad, honest. And if you want it, it’s yours. You seem like you’ve had a pretty shitty morning. Seriously,” she said softly. “I know what it’s like.”

  Mikey looked earnestly into Wroxy’s face as wordless communication passed between them.

  When he was convinced that there was no malicious punch line waiting, no hidden laughing chorus, no barbed guile, Mikey took the CD player from Wroxy. It was still warm from her touch. Their fingers brushed lightly as she handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That’s really nice of you.”

  Wroxy drawled, “Whatever.” She looked sideways at Mikey and half-smiled. “I have a question for you. It might be kind of a weird one, so please bear with me, okay?”

  “What?” Mikey turned the Discman over in his hands, marvelling at the bright singing yellow of it, an
d how pretty it was.

  “What about the witches in this town? Ever heard of them?”

  Mikey looked up. Backlit, her face was briefly in shadow, her brilliant black crescent of a Mohawk like a noonday eclipse. He squinted into the sunlight.

  “The witches?” he said dumbly. “How do you know about the witches? You’re not even from here.”

  “Oh, please,” Wroxy said, sounding bored. “Anyone who knows about this supernatural shit has heard about your mysterious coven of witches out here in Auburn. It makes sense, with all your fucking churches on every corner, that there would be something to counterbalance it. The universe is like that,” she added loftily. “Do you know what that means?”

  “I may be a loser but I’m not stupid,” Mikey said. “I know what counterbalance is. You know,” he said testily, “just because you’re from Vancouver doesn’t make you better than the people who live here.” Even as he said it, Mikey wondered why he was defending the Auburnites who had given him nothing but grief and pain for as long as he could remember.

  “Actually, it does,” Wroxy said. “Small-minded hicks are the worst kind of people on the planet. They tend to be bigots, they never travel, they think everyone else is like them, and they’re obsessed with religion. There are, like, four churches in Auburn. Do you know how many bars there are here? One. There’s one bar and four churches. Fucking hicks, I’m telling you.”

  “I’m surprised you’re willing to talk to me then. Me being a hick and all.”

  “I didn’t say you were a hick. I said the people who live here are hicks.”

  “I live here,” he snapped. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t live here if you didn’t have to, though, right?”

  Mikey was silent. She had him on that one, that’s for sure.

  “Now, what about those witches? Have you ever seen them?”