Getting Better
Aleesa Prins had no armpit hair. She told me once—or did Tyler tell me? Not even a little peach fuzz. At the time I felt it made her seem more evolved, like she had total power over her body. Also more infantile. For the entire year we shared a room, every time I’d shave my own prickly pits in the shower before running to class with wet hair, I’d blame her for the stinging red dots.
I never pretended I wasn’t envious of Aleesa Prins. It wasn’t painful because I didn’t lie to myself about it. I would have told her to her face, if she ever cared to ask. She and Tyler would fool around after band practice under her pink comforter with hand-stenciled peace signs all over it—nothing too serious, he said. We’re all too young to get serious. You would think she’d hardly be able to play the triangle, but some guy with Sun-In highlights and torn jeans had met her at a mixer in the first month of school and offered to teach her to play his bass guitar. Even half-wasted, she got pretty good after one night of practice. He lent her the bass for the year, and she would play it unplugged in the afternoon, its soft and tinny sound quivering through the air between. Tyler met me at our dorm one Saturday morning to go yard-sale-ing for vintage action figures, like we did in Talbot. But when he heard Aleesa playing bass he went back to his dorm and grabbed his guitar and by the time the afternoon rolled around she was the new and only girl in his band. There wasn’t much she would say no to. It was her idea to call the band the Ne’er-Do-Wells. I went to every one of their gigs that year, as I had had for all of his coffee houses in high school, and he had for all of my plays. The two of them hooking up didn’t bother me because he and I had always just been friends, and because it was mostly happening in his room.During Cancer Awareness Month in Grade 9, Tyler’s mom took us to the Salvation Army to buy afghans, and then taught us to unravel them and crochet the yarn into hats for chemo patients. We spent the month turning blankets into balls of string, then resurrecting the wool into berets or toques. At the assembly at the end of the month, the student body gave us a standing ovation for our generous work. I felt like we were changing the world. Tyler lost interest in crocheting, but I kept it up, making the trip every few months with his mom to the hospital. When I moved to university, I found the nearest hospital and walked down every few months with two grocery bags full of hats. I attached little notes in sparkly ink with ribbons to each one: “Thinking of you,” they said. “It’s beautiful,” Aleesa said one evening while I was sitting at our table, procrastinating on a paper by making a red tam. She was feeling sick and resisted all the invitations to hang out she had that evening. “The way your hands move when you do that. It’s like they’re fluttering, or dancing.” I blushed. I hated how her words made me feel warm. “I could teach you,” I said. “Oh no—I wouldn’t be any good.” I knew she could, but couldn’t be bothered to be around me for the length of time it would take to learn. “I don’t have the patience for finicky things.” “You’ve got patience. You’re pretty good at getting your school work done.” “Yeah, well, I’ve got to keep my scholarships or I can’t afford to be here. I’m the first in the family to go to university, so. It means a lot to them I guess. To do things differently.” “Than who?” “Well, than they did. You know how it is—your parents want you to have things better than they did, but they don’t know how to get you there.” I didn’t really know how it was. I just nodded. “I just wanted a good excuse to move out, really. You know—small towns, nowhere to grow. So backwards.” This time I did know; coming from small towns was about the only thing we had in common. But I liked Talbot. I liked being with people I had known my whole life. I didn’t know what to do in this new space, how to find these things to do to connect you to other people. “You picked bass up pretty quick. I guess it helps having a hot teacher.” She smirked. “Bass is easy, straight-forward.” “Guys think girl bass players are hot.” “That’s not why I learned it.” “I know.” “No you don’t.” I didn’t look up from my crocheting, the twisting hook mesmerizing us both as it grabbed loops and linked them together. “It really is beautiful,” she said. “It’s beautiful that you can use your talent to help people.” “It’s not really helping them. Doesn’t change the fact that they’re sick.” She got up and walked over to her corner and started plucking at her bass. The rhythm was too irregular, and I kept dropping the yarn. Aleesa was late for practice and sound check before The Ne’er-Do-Wells’ first gig. It was an 8:00 show on a Tuesday night at a bar with a grimy disco ball hanging above the green platform beside the bar. They were only allowed to do covers. I drove Tyler and Aleesa’s bass. She had a paper to finish and was taking the bus. “So she’s still borrowing this thing from James, eh?” Tyler said as he tuned her bass. He sat on the peeling green platform. “Sun-In Guy? Ya,” I said. He chuckled. Did he find Aleesa funny too? “Does she usually take a while to finish her homework?” “She usually stays up all night before it’s due.” “I guess she’s pretty smart.” “Well, book smart.” “What does that mean?” I paused. “It’s been awhile since I’ve heard you play.” “She’s picked it up pretty quickly, this bass thing. Is she practicing on her own, or with James, or …?” “He’s over a lot.” He nodded slowly, twisting a tuning peg. “It’s too bad you can’t do your own songs here,” I said. “They always let you in Talbot.” “In Talbot people know you. But there’s no point if no one knows the songs,” he said. It didn’t really make sense to me, but I didn’t think he was trying to communicate anyway. Aleesa’s heels clicked into the room, long boots clinging to her solid calves. She said hi, dragging it out with her head to the side. Her big eyes were pinched in apology. Tyler jogged over and hugged her. The stage smelled like vomit and cheap soap. I tried to look out of the window and watch the people walking along the street while blonde wisps of Aleesa’s hair kept flicking in the reflection.
Afterwards, the five of us gathered around the table where I had sat alone during their set. There were about ten other people in the bar. The guys stared at her intently while Aleesa told us a story about her high school ski trip. “My Armenian friend’s mom bought her some cookies for the trip and left them in a paper bag on the counter, only she grabbed the wrong bag, so when we got to the hotel, she left the bag on the counter and I opened it, and it was full of all these chicken feet—little claws sticking out everywhere. So at one in the morning we jumped the fence to the pool area and swam through the indoor-outdoor pool after it was closed and dumped the feet in the hot tub. In the morning, we went down, and the whole place smelled like chicken soup. There was foam all over the top of the water and the kids were all reaching in to grab the chicken claws and throwing them at each other. So awesome.” The guys laughed too long, and too hard. “Where’d you get the money to go on the trip?” I asked. Aleesa’s plump lips went slack. “My English teacher helped me out a bit. I had a big crush on him, actually. He was the one who encouraged me to come here—” “Were you sleeping with him?” I asked. Tyler’s eyes narrowed. “Hey,” he said softly. I waited for him to say my name, to touch me chidingly, but he didn’t. “Hey,” he said again. “There’s nothing wrong with it if you did. I mean, your choice. It’s cool. I was just wondering.” She looked at me with a soft smile, and sort of shook her head. It seemed like disgust; it might have been pity. I didn’t deserve an answer. My cheeks were burning. I wanted to take off my sweater, but left it on and pretended my neck wasn’t turning red. “So what other crazy things did you do in high school?” Tyler asked. “Well, our biology teacher told us once that if you didn’t sleep four nights in a row you would go crazy, and we wanted to see if he was right,” she started. She must have slept with that teacher.
I wasn’t sure if Aleesa started skipping band practice because she was forgetting about them or just didn’t give a damn. It wasn’t bothering Tyler enough for him to say anything. Sun-In was over more often as well, standing behind her, arms wrapped around her and the shiny guitar. A couple months later she missed a gig entirely. “You guys are so together, you couldn’t even tell you were missing a bass,” I said as I drove Tyler back to campus. He didn’t say anything. When we got back, he asked if he could come up to our room “just to check if she’s there.” As we walked through the yellow stairwell, I tried to think of a time he had been confrontational, with me or with anyone. Nothing came to mind. I felt my hands get clammy imagining him telling her off, his face getting red, saying I was a more reliable member of the group than she was. She was asleep and had left a note on the fridge under a plastic manatee magnet. “Sorry I couldn’t make it to the Ne’er-Do-Wells’ gig. Turns out I’m pregnant. If you see him, tell Tyler I’ll explain everything tomorrow. Love, Aleesa.” She had emphasized her name by underlining it with a curlicue. I knew she would explain nothing to Tyler or to me. Tyler stood beside me and read the note, then leaned his head against the buzzing fridge. I wasn’t sure if I should hug him, if I should wait for him to hug me. He pulled his head away finally and said, “Figures. Figured it had to be this important for her to miss.” “I can walk you to your dorm,” I said, but he had already closed the door.
She lost ten pounds in the first trimester, which made the boys pay even more attention to her. Everyone was so impressed that she was still able to get to half of her classes despite the morning sickness. Girls came over and talked with her and then held her hair and stroked her back while she threw up in our bathroom. It constantly smelled like vomit. Tyler was sure the baby was his, and never asked her. Sun-In Bass Player didn’t seem to mind that Tyler was claiming it. No one else seemed to care whose it was, including Aleesa. It seemed everyone else thought she was creating the thing all by herself. For the next three months she kept saying she was keeping it. She wasn’t getting drunk at parties, but she still captivated everyone as she talked about the benefits of breast-feeding, about how the fetus was the size of a grape, or a plum or a grapefruit. The bigger she got the less she talked about whether or not to do sleep-training, and the fewer books on motherhood she took out from the library. By early spring, she stopped talking about keeping up with school by dropping a course each semester, stopped making plans with the girls who wanted to live with her next year—how they would try to find a place with enough rooms for her to have a nursery, how they would watch the baby while she was at class, how they would find ducky wall decals for the bathroom.
During exam week at the end of second semester she woke me up at three in the morning. “I thought you weren’t due for another month and a half.” “So did I. Should I call 911?” “No, don’t bother—I’ll drive you.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I pulled on a black sweater with the iron-on band logo Tyler had designed for the Ne’er-Do-Wells—a moose with antlers made of fingers—and left my pyjama pants on. I noticed in the car that Aleesa was wearing the same sweater I was, though her moose seemed more alive over her plump breasts. She had straightened her hair and put on makeup. She must have been up for hours before bothering to wake me. “I’m the first in at least three generations to not have a baby at sixteen,” she told me between deep breaths. “At least I waited ’til nineteen.” She tried to laugh at herself but it sounded like a cough. “I’m the first to give the baby up.” She reached over and squeezed the steering wheel tightly, just below my hand. “So we’re getting better,” she said in a forced whisper. I nodded though I knew her eyes were clamped shut. “I didn’t sleep with my teacher, by the way,” she said. “I know.” “No you don’t. That’s why I’m telling you.”
When we pulled into the parking lot of the hospital I asked her if she wanted me to call her mother. “No thank you,” she said. I drove up the crescent along the entrance, parked the car, and watched her wobble through the automatic glass doors as they gracefully parted for her. I idled there for a minute, and then drove over to visitor parking. I asked at the information desk about Aleesa. “Are you family?” the woman asked. I looked at her scalp, the dark grey shoots of roots popping up below orange-blond hair. I had thought she would recognize me from the time months ago to ask where the chemo ward was. “That’s a lovely thing you’re doing,” she had said to my bag of crocheted hats in a cooing voice. “It’s so important, young people like you thinking about other people like this. Now she didn’t remember. “She doesn’t have any family here,” I said. “Did she ask you to join her?” “I’m her roommate.” The woman told me to take a seat and then made some calls in a hushed voice. I stretched out across two vinyl seats, legs pulled tightly into my stomach, head propped on a few copies of Chatelaine. When I woke up, a magazine cover was stuck to my face. I walked by the desk, asked for the room number again and took the stairs. It felt odd to be at the hospital when everything was so still. I stopped by the chemo ward on my way to Aleesa’s room. The doors were closed and the lights were off. I noticed something red in the garbage pail as I left the hall. I was convinced without looking that it was my hat. I didn’t bother to stop to confirm, knowing if I did, the tension in my stomach would climb up my throat and I’d be a mess by the time I reached Aleesa’s room.
She didn’t look at me when I walked in. Two round nurses were busy smiling around her, telling her what a great job she was doing, that she was so strong,. “So you found me.” “It feels weird to be here so early,” I said. “Yeah, I’m sure you know this place pretty well. You’re a saint.” I couldn’t read her tone. “You don’t have to be here.” “I know.” She took my hand and squeezed my knuckles against each other. When she was done, I carefully reached between her fingers with my other hand and pulled off my mood ring. “Can I see that?” she asked. She held her other hand open above her breasts and I pressed it into her palm. It was black. When she was done squeezing through the next contraction, she lifted the mood ring. It had turned a bright greenish-blue, a colour I’d never seen before. When the baby came out, she didn’t want to see him, but asked me to go look while the nurses cleaned him up. I stared from behind their chubby arms at his blotched and screaming face. “Is he cute?” she asked. “Of course,” I lied. The nurses beamed. She went to sleep. I sat beside her bed and flipped through some magazines until a woman came by to do some paperwork. I gave Aleesa’s shoulder a little shake and the woman told her she been a real trooper, just a real rock star and it was really wonderful that she could bring so much joy to someone else through all this. Aleesa sighed and said she wanted to make sure it was the type of thing where she wouldn’t have to talk to the baby’s parents, but if he wanted to find her when he was old enough, that was fine. It was three in the afternoon when I got home, and I decided that sleeping was more important than cramming before my exam that evening. I woke up an hour later to a steady knocking at the door. Tyler stood there red-eyed. “Why didn’t you—” he stopped for a moment and stared at the finger-antlers on my shirt. I tried not to breath. “Why the hell didn’t you call?” “Call?” “When it happened!” “I … I didn’t think about it. She didn’t want anyone.” “Right.” He stared for a bit at the plastic ridge along the threshold before walking away. He didn’t come to visit for the rest of the semester. She stayed at her parents’ place for the next month and was given permission to write her exams in July. Tyler helped me pack up the day after exams and I drove us back to Talbot. We hung out most days that summer.
Throughout the rest of university she and I shared no more than passing waves in the hall. She got her degree, and even though we didn’t invite her to the wedding, she’s been sending Tyler and me Christmas cards since she got married to the lawyer. I used to keep them on the fridge for a week, but now I just put them in a drawer right away with the others from years past. She’s a music teacher, the first teacher in her family. She and the lawyer had two blond daughters, and they’re both in pink in the pictures she’s sent me. In the most recent card, it’s just her and the girls. “Chad and I split up,” she wrote, “but it’s amicable.” “Figures,” said Tyler when I told him. She sings jazz standards on Thursday nights at a local restaurant, and asked in her most recent card if we wanted to come out sometime, but I’ve never gotten around to replying.
