Free Watcher by Valerie Sherrard Page A

been into something a lot stronger than weed, but these two never seem to think they’re high enough.
    We told them we didn’t and they left, making their way along the street in stumbles and lurches, which amused them to no end. I wondered, if it hadn’t been for Daniels, whether I’d be in the same shape they were. It wasn’t all that long ago that I made a regular habit of spending evenings floating along with that half-disembodied feeling.
    No denying it — the pull is still there at times. The old urge to disconnect. It had seemed like a kind of freedom, except that had turned out to be an illusion.
    I never saw it that way until I got probation — and Daniels. There were so many things that changed for me that year. It used to get to me, the way he seemed to see things. He was forever making casual observations, only they were almost always dead-on. It was as if he could see right into my brain.
    â€œYou think anything you’ve gone through is unique?” he asked once. “Like no one else has ever lain on their bed and fought for breath over the crushing weight on their chest? You think it’s anger or hurt or something else, but what it really is, is want . All the stuff that fate hasn’t given you. What swells up in a person that way is hardly ever what is , but what isn’t . We can deal with the garbage that gets dumped on us — we learn how to handle that. But we never learn to stop wanting the things that are missing.”
    â€œDid you feel that way when you were my age?” I asked, sure he’d tell me we weren’t there to talk about him.
    â€œYeah, sure,” he said, surprising me. “Like I said, you can get used to almost anything. So if your father comes in falling down drunk, roaring and breaking things in the middle of the night, you find ways to get through it. What’s harder to deal with — or forgive — are the things that just aren’t there. Someone to help you lace up your skates, shoot some hoops, teach you to skip rocks, go camping. All the everyday stuff.”
    Later on, when we’d moved past that and got to the place where we could really talk — and probably when I was more ready to hear him — then he seemed to mostly listen.
    He was different. When I first met him I’d thought he was just a lazy slacker who couldn’t be bothered to do his job. Truth was, he was tuned in enough to know what to say and when. Mostly, he heard more than any other adult I’ve ever known.
    In my experience, most of the time, no one’s listening or paying attention — not enough to hear any of the stuff that really matters. It’s like most people watcher won’t look too close in case they find out something they don’t like, because that might disturb the nice order of things.
    Like the year that Krystal Smithton OD’d on smack. She was with some friends, and word on the street was they took care of a few things before calling 911 — as if the emergency people were going to stop and search the place.
    There were a few stories about what happened, but whatever the truth was, Krystal didn’t make it. Maybe she would have if they’d called right away and maybe it was already too late for her by the time anyone noticed she wasn’t just spaced out.
    The really pathetic thing was how her parents blamed everyone else. Even after they’d been shown all the track marks, they refused to believe she’d been a druggie. They hung on to the idea that she’d been peer-pressured into using, and talked about her death like it was a murder.
    I hadn’t known Krystal, except from school, but I knew she’d been a stoner since around grade six — and that she’d moved up quickly from weed and had made her way to heroin the year before she died. Word was that she’d done whatever she had to do to make sure she could fix, and she’d been beaten up a couple