Fall 1995

First day of school. Roll call in astronomy-for-arts-dummies class. I am the only person with an English nom. Everyone files out to smoke on the break but me. I have no idea how.

I wear an ivory hippie dress I’ve shortened to a shirt. Embroidered. Yellowing. My dad’s old bell-bottoms circa sixties newshound. Eight-dollar Chinese shoes.

My mother has pneumonia.

I bring my textbook to study at the Queen Elizabeth. Got an astronomy exam the next day. I am going to flunk it. It is three in the morning. The man beside me vomits ravioli-looking phlegm if ravioli was skin and mucus if chunks of ravioli had been folded in his throat in secret. He chucks ravioli phlegm into a plastic kidney-shaped bowl. My mother wheezes. She slumps. She squeezes. She clutches her chest. I stare at the cover of my astronomy book. Hours + ravioli = hours.

It is my half-Lebanese half-siblings’ second referendum.

It is a time of pen pals. I write to Sarah to Jeff to others I have since forgotten. They write me.

Who would write to you, my mother asks.

Letters back and forth SWAK and back from the prairies from the Maritimes the Yukon. They say they are gay in New Brunswick they say they are vegan in Alberta they send me mermaid poems to put into my mermaid journal and bookmarks for my mermaid books. I write their mermaid poems on my walls with markers.

Why would another family adopt you? My mother asks.

It is a lit project. We are assigned a group for us to make group work. We have to create something. A response. We make a film. It is the group’s first time in Saint Henri. It is such a trip, they say. It is such an industrial wasteland, they say. We put a half-dozen Barbies in the bathtub for our film and this is somehow related to a book we read in school. We get hungry. I make the group instant chicken noodle soup because it is dinner time. Maman says, How dare you feed these strangers my food. The Lipton soup burns on the burner. My mother in her pioneer nightgown wheezing the group converging and breaking and converging and they leave ducking their heads as they slink out the hobbit-height doors built for Quebs back when they were malnourished and slight.

Mornings I make myself omelettes with dandelion leaves from the yard before school. Always almost late. I count the seconds. The metro doors stay open 16 seconds. Two minutes between stations. I try to steady my nerves about being late but I am always late. It is cool that I am late I am not that late. If I am that late I can just skip and go to the mmmuffins. I can just skip and call my dad from the pay phone. I am not that late I will not have to skip. I see some sun earrings on the ninth floor and even though it will make me more late to buy them I buy them. I do not think I can afford them but they are suns and suns are Earth. I hate what I am wearing. I look foolish. I do not know how to look otherwise. I envy Mary Jane Docs with wool socks yellow slickers dreadlocks nose rings without the bead in the ring. I want to look healthy like that and pretty and careless and show that I know how to camp because I do. I envy the grunge hippie hipsters’ easy sexuality. Boys with mops of curly brown hair round wire glasses roll their own cigarettes cross-legged on the grass. They play hacky sack in the subsidised housing lots across from the Cégep. I neither smoke nor hacky. I pretend to read and watch them play act their adulthood from mmmuffins.

I go to mmmuffins to study Queb lit. I go to mmmuffins to study French lit. I call my dad from the pay phone across from the mmmuffins. I leave my Cirque du Soleil umbrella in the phone booth.

I get followed all the way to the metro after astronomy. A school of sovereignists yells at me about my ancestors and the Plains of Abraham. My Irish ancestors had not left Ireland in the Plains of Abraham. My French ancestors came with Champlain way pre and total franco Plains. Still I am an anglo, a tête carré a motherfucker a public enemy that ought to be ousted I have to Go Home Anglos. I am their first opportunity to test out their righteous indignation and they slingshot it at me and I take their blows. It is a time before talking like I do now and I take their blows like rain like rocks like hail and I envy their certain credulity I envy their clean lineage their pure laine their whitewashed super blue blood. My name is a mark. It is not a forgettable name. It does not even sound Irish.

Why would another family want you to live with them, my mother says.

You do not take good care of me, she wheezes.

I am dying, she gasps.

I march in the pro Canada rally (pro) but do not tell my franco fam (con). My birthday is October 31. I turn 18 the day after the referendum I am spared any official deliberation.

The last week of October I call Iris tattoo on Ontario Est. They are open one more hour. I have been reading Seventeen magazine and the model Niki Taylor has the same tattoo it seems like a better idea than a mermaid tattoo or a whale tattoo I really think the dolphin is a good call so I hustle over and the tattoo artist who is skinny and all in Guess jeans looks me over sceptically. Are you sure you are ready for this. I tell her I am ready but I flinch as she gets close. See it is a clean needle she says, elaborately unwrapping the plastic from the needle and she sees what a coward I am and she rolls up my plaid pyjama pants pants past my calf and starts in on the buzzing cutting my skin with her needle. Back and forth like an X-ACTO knife licking my ankle.

I know I will live with my new family with the real family I deserve and that I will come to them branded with my dolphin tattoo as a sign of my good intentions. I will buy a raincoat and I will be a good person. I know when they adopt me and I move to Vancouver everything will be green and ocean and the best version of myself maybe vegan maybe gay maybe SWAK. The tattoo looks like a stamp and I am disappointed by this and I am the same person but I flaunt the word tattoo at the pharmacy as I buy Polysporin.

It looks like a bat, my mother says.

My father signs forms to give up his guardianship.

I get followed to the metro. Maudite anglaise. I do not say that I am not. I am not.

The ethnics the money the close call I drop out of Cégep. I flounder I read mermaids. The plane to Vancouver the screaming baby beside me on the plane. A movie with whales.

Boxing Day in Vancouver. I have cast myself to another family. I have three daughters, my new mother says at the Northern Reflections as she buys me a raincoat. It is purple. It is nice of her to say but it is forced and I can tell by day 2 she already regrets the offer to adopt but she is bearing up to her responsibilities and my job is to be thank you. We leave the mini mall for our mini car and accompanying mini burb.

I wanted a yellow raincoat.