Free The Best Thing for You by Annabel Lyon

saying if the victim’s ugly there’s noharassment, because who would be motivated to harass a dog?”
    “So how do you want to get at motive?” Jupiter asks. He’s not laughing. He’s interested. “Hate crimes, for instance.”
    “Like stalking isn’t a hate crime?” May says.
    “It’s a love crime,” Liam says.
    “That’s disgusting,” I tell him. “I was scared of you.”
    “I know,” he says, so only I will hear.
    May makes busy, stirring one of my curries. “I love being a nurse,” she says. I realize we’re embarrassing her. She’s a tidy package, May, in her black tights and black cord jumper and stretchy denim headband, with her smart talky husband, and I want her to be my friend.
    “Is anyone allergic to nuts?” I take a Tupperware container from the fridge and shake it. “I have coconut for the chicken.”
    “Stand back,” Liam says. “She’s gone hostess.”
    Abruptly, the music above our heads stops. I’m thinking it’s the hurricane eye between songs but the moment stretches until we’re all cringing.
    “See, my view,” Liam says, frowning, “and Kate and I have had cause to discuss this recently, is that motivation is basically opaque. What motivates a Stalin or a Charles Manson? Don’t know. What motivates my son to torture us with that noise? Don’t know.”
    “ ’No Fun,” ’ I say.
    They look at me.
    “That song,” I tell Liam. “That song I recognized, it was a cover of an Iggy Pop song called ‘No Fun.” ’
    “How old is your son?” Jupiter asks.
    We say, “Fourteen.”
    “That can be a difficult age,” May says. “That was the year I decided to give up the violin. My parents were very angry but I was so stubborn, eventually they had to give in. I was a brat.”
    “I was a ping-pong
champion
,” Jupiter says.
    May frowns at him. “I was good too,” she says, looking troubled.
    “May, Jupiter.” I touch the backs of a couple of chairs.
    At the stove, Liam is jerking rice onto five plates. The rice comes off the paddle in sticky shaped clumps. I transfer the curries from the stove to three toasted-looking cork pads on the table. May rearranges my settings to help make room. “Here,” she says, handing Jupiter a saucer of mint condiment, keen and pretty as poison. He studies it, head bobbing faintly like he’s revving up for something, until she takes it back and sets it in a new place. “Did you say your son was having trouble at school?”
    Liam and I glance at each other. “He’s also having trouble at school,” Liam says.
    “Just a fight,” I say. “He’s a boy. He’s never had a fight before, now he has. He’s just going through the monkey stages.”
    “What was the fight about?” Jupiter wants to know.
    Liam and I are doing the same thing, looking around the table to see what’s missing. “Basketball.”
    “Calvin plays basketball,” May says. “Plays or played. I think he used to be really good.”
    I say, “Here’s Ty.”
    Ty looks pretty good, looks not bad, in a button-down plaid shirt and jeans, skinny wrists and hips. The clothes seem a little big on him. The puff on his cheek, the boxer’s eye from school two days ago – the work of his new bad-boy friends – I’m almost used to. They make him look hardy, wry. I watch him shake hands with May, watch her hang on to him while she ducks her head automatically for a better view of the damage.
    “Mr. Chan, Ty,” Liam says.
    “Jupiter, please!” Jupiter says.
    “Okay, hi.” For the first time, probably because I’m trying to see him through the eyes of our guests, I notice a deeper note in Ty’s voice, the first light bow-strokes of a cello.
    Jupiter seems disappointed. “I was named after the planet,” he’s saying.
    “Is Borneo a country?” Ty takes a chair between Jupiter and me. “Homework,” he explains. This is the old Ty: little, affable, honour roll Ty.
    “First week of grade nine,” Liam says grimly. “Is that a rock and roll curriculum or