she doesn't live here anymore, pt. four

Rabbit Season

That night, so still, and the clouds became whisper wisps, rising up and out of this horizon; they blended with the sky, blurred our vision. Walking home our voices fell harsh against the deserted landscape and I began to understand the meaning of 'breaking the silence'; you see, it was a solid thing.

The streets unfolded for Jen and I just like a pop-up book, each turn of the corner a surprise. Oakville was a too smooth fairytale, almost a movie set with each car and lamp post appearing unreal to us, too sharp, colours unnaturally bright for suburbia. I kept stealing glances at Jen in her white hoodie, marvelling at how it gleamed stark bright, like her teeth, like my hair. I swear in that moment we might have been perfect.

We rounded the corner as I check my cellphone- no missed calls. 12:17 and I gave my parents another fourteen minutes before they dialed my number, the looming uproar over barely missed curfews already stinging my years. Fourteen minutes. We could make it. But still, I quickened my step, an action unconciously copied by Jen. Mirror mirror, we had known each other too long. I mimicked her movements back, obvious enough to let her know I was in on it, I knew how to play.

Jen spoke and I realized just how easily my mind stretched time; thirty seconds of silence and it felt like I'd been lost in my head for an hour.

"Don't you just get the feeling that we're the only two people on the Earth right now?"

"Yeah!" I agreed, feeling it for real. "It's like the day after a zombie attack, or a nitrogen bomb. Ghost town."

I closed my arms around me now, vice grip in the sudden chill. The wind was picking up, or maybe my goosebumps were self inflicted, a product of my mind. Goosebumps; interesting. Like I was covered in one hundred colourless pimples.

"That's like, almost two weeks that we've stuck to 'the pattern'" Jen mused dreamily, her voice sounding so unlike her usual crisp, matter of fact speech and I thanked her silently for derailing my disturbing train of thought.

It was true. The summer, only a few weeks old, had already settled into a comfortable pattern. Days by my pool, out for lunch, wasting our money. Mornings passed by hazy, conversations lost in air thick like wool, the sun bright enough to whiten my hair to a truly impressive level. After some time spent at home (or more often than not in Erin's case, at my home) an hour or two to let our parents remember wht we looked like, we drew together as the sun dipped low. We'd meet at the school, linger by a dip in the grass deemed 'chill hill', hoping to run into someone we deemed interesting enough to spark a conversation with.

Val and Sam, who has separate friends of their own, wouldn't joinn us every night but we all knew what the arrival of Sam's pixie cut, light freckles and Val, small and curly haired meant. We'd smoked weed before-- after a disasterous introduction the summer before we'd gotten high a handful of times in our grade ten year but by that summer we could truly call ourselves 'stoners', and we did often, loving how delicious and dangerous it sounded on our lips.

We'd fallen into an accidental pattern, it came so naturally that it was awhile before we realized that we were getting high exactly every other day. Jen and I loved this discovery, relished in it, eventually sucking Heather, a self proclaimed hippie, into our enthusiasm. We'd smoke ourselves into the dim non-light of summer nights, Sam's little blue pipe a constant, anticipated precense. Darkness set us wandering aimlessly around Oakville, a single entity clounded by laughter and the nervous energy that radiated from girls who knew the world was finally theirs, but didn't know yet what to do with it.

Every once in a while our wandering delivered us to intruiging people; older boys with bottles of beer for us, Sam and Val's druggie friends who I could tell excited and repulsed my girls at the same time (me, I looked to them as icons almost, what I could become, if I dared) Those nights stood solitary, revered, a reason to go out when our couches and computers beckoned to us. Bush parties at Windrush Park, car rides so fast we could feel our souls lifting up out of us. Most nights though, we ended up at Kari's: eating, drinking on the rare occasion we were brave enough to steal some alcohol, being girls.

It was a year of rabbits, who fucked in some secluded space and produced the bunny babies who popped up on sidewalks, always surprising us, breaking the too-perfect movie set landscape on our walks home. It was an anomaly, this sudden surge in rabbit population, and a marker of the time we found ourselves in. Our season. Too strange and too perfect to last, we knew it, but walking home every night, surrounded by our rabbits, we just laughed and made plans for the next day.

Jen and I were skipping now, an odd step jump step dance that brought us home faster and sent the bunnies scrrying back to their suburban wilderness. If we'd been a different kind of girls we would've linked arms; instead we spread them out, spun until the colours blurred. At 12:28 we waved goodbye and I walked in the door, perfectly on time. I still didn't dare break the curfew set for me at the beginning of the summer and I sensed that this nod to obedience was what tethered me to my girls, to the clean pristine image I'd cultivated so carefully since grade school. Not forever though. In little snips and hair cracks I was severing my bungee cord.

Free fall.